The Young, the Poor, and the Drunk

I lived in LA from 1980 to 1984, and then again from 1988 through 1989, but tonight, in one single evening, I rode public transportation more than I did that entire time.

I wasn’t in a hurry to get anywhere, and I very much felt a need for some sort of counterpoint to the earlier part of my day, which was spent in hotel ballrooms with (mostly) middle-aged white folks talking about and listening to ideas that may or may not make any difference in the long run to how people live their lives and go about making their important (and even unimportant) choices as parents, children, and citizens in what is at least allegedly a representative democracy in the early years of the 21st century.

I caught the LA Metro in Pasadena and rode it to Chinatown where I got off and had a drink at a restaurant with an incredibly surly bartender. Afterwards, I walked back to the station, took the train downtown, and transferred to the Red Line, which I took to Hollywood for a beer at a bar whose name escapes me now. But what I do recall is thinking how all the people I saw around me on the subway were either young, poor, or drunk, or some combination of the three. Oddly enough, I felt much more at home among them than with the gray-haired academics I was surrounded by earlier in the day.

Eventually, I hung out at an old haunt, the Frolic Room for a couple of beers and then took the bus back to my hotel in Pasadena. Both the wait and the ride were much longer than I expected them to be, but it hardly mattered—I had no other place I needed to be and as long as I was doing something I never had before, it all seemed quite entertaining for a fellow who is neither young nor poor and only a little drunk.