Partying Is Hard Work: Part Three

For the last two days, I have been telling of being a background actor in a friend's short film. Yesterday, I spoke of the filming itself and the leadup thereto. Where I left off, I was formulating a plan to get home in a timely fashion without a ride.

I walked a mile and a half to get to the light rail station. I had some concern that I was too late even for that. The consequences of failing to catch that train were as unappealing as they were useless to contemplate at such a premature time. At such times, I put everything out of my mind but hustling to get there and forestall the undesirable outcome. It was tough going, as most of the road I walked did not take pedestrians into account. In the absence of a sidewalk, I trooped along where only gardeners were meant to tread. Sweating and out of breath, I reached the station, and was relieved to see a train on the platform. I rushed to get on, and it pulled away minutes later. In fact, there were more trains to come, but catching that one was essential to my overall plan.

Regrettably, I missed the second link anyway. A not terribly sympathetic security guard corrected my faulty notion that the subway would still be running. This jarred me, I'll confess that. Even so, I was not done. I hadn't formulated a backup plan except that I felt sure I'd be alright so long as I reached downtown. As I walked to the other end of the train station where the bus plaza lay, I worked furiously on my phone to work out what I could do. I came up with a very good substitute, which would get me as far as the train would have, but would take twice as much time. You take what you can get. I conducted a phone conversation as I made my way out to the stop served by the first bus of my new plan. It would be late, and this was where things really got colorful.

This bus went out to the coastal area of Santa Monica, passing through Hollywood. The latter is where I was to get off and change buses. Before that, though, there would be an encounter with a cart-pushing crazy old lady of a kind found nowhere but here. As I said, the bus was late to begin with, and the driver was not suffering any foot-draggers. Along came this lady with a cart she didn't have the muscle to push, drag or lift into the bus and to the back. She struggled along, eventually ensnaring a noble young man who got her the rest of the way for perhaps no other reason than to get the bus going. It was the same story when her stop came along, with the added delay of praising the driver at length. A couple of young guys derided her when she got off, and I decided there was nothing special about them to prevent the same fate that befell the woman.

The same bus contained an angry, possibly deranged woman with her own story to tell. She proceed to tell it loudly to no one in particular, employing no more than a couple of phrased repeated ad nauseam at various volumes and with different patterns of inflection. The gist of it seemed to be that she resented having her looks compared with another woman. This was apparently all the more galling since the woman in question had been fired, and didn't look like her in any case. I was glad to get off, and since I was getting off in the heart of Hollywood in the middle of the night, that's saying something.

I didn't have to wait there long, and that's good. Unsavory characters run rampant in Hollywood, and a fresh emergency draws the attention of first responders a few times every hour at that time. I got on the bus gladly, and found it to be not terribly eventful except for the nearby presence of a couple of edgy-looking but seemingly good natured guys. One counseled the other on what to do with his life to be happy and make his parents proud. This seemed to entail going back to school. As late night bus riders go, they were about as good as one can hope for. As they exited a bit before I did, I offered them advice on getting a cab, as I had heard them plan to do. I don't often volunteer help like that.

When I got off, there was still one last bit of footwork left. I call the stretch of Lankershim between the south end of the Arts district and my home "the Road to Jericho", after a passage from the bible referenced by Martin Luther King. It seems apt to me when I walk it so late. This was one time when doing so brought me no trouble, and I entered my home with aching feet unharmed and grateful that I made it back just as I always had managed to do in the past. So ended the night.

Tomorrow: Something else!