Home, where grass is greener
Where honeybees sing melodies
And orange trees scent the breeze
I wanna be a home sweet homer!
There I’ll settle down
Beneath the palms, in someone’s arms
In Pasadena town!
It’s kind of funny I can even remember that. When I was forced to learn it for the first-grade End-of-the-Year Sing, I angrily told my music teacher I would have a locked jaw for the entirety of the performance. I really didn’t like living in Pasadena — or California, really — as a kid.
It was only when I was about twelve that I realized I couldn’t really say I was from Maine anymore. I’d spent the bulk of my life — seven years — in California, and was used to its vistas, its climate, and its people. Finally. I came to this realization gazing out over the Valley from Henninger Flats.
This all comes up because this trip has been a real education in how long I’ve been away from Pasadena. I write this from one of the tables in the Pasadena Public Library, which, while its doorways and arches seem smaller than they did when I was six and busily maxing out my library card, is still every bit as grand. (Its interior is very similar in style to the Columbia University Butler library, an odd mismatch to its Mediterranean exterior.)
Realizing my laptop was entirely out of juice after three days of disuse and a failure to plug it in, I went searching around for a plug. A tremendous number of folks are in the main hall using laptops, which was promising, and it appeared some of them were plugged in near the tables in the middle of the hall. This came as kind of a surprise; you’d expect an old public library to have ignored the trends and still be a mess of cords stretched across the floor and an uncomfortable passle of patrons sitting on the floor near the walls. But no. This is PasaDEEEEEna. (Pa-SAH-dina, in Steve Martin’s mouth.) Gotta look out for the maintenance of class privileges, at whatever cost. The tables themselves are wired, and there was a free outlet for me. I marveled at this for a moment — they retrofitted these antique-looking glass-topped tables for laptops?! — and then realized it was likely the tables had always been wired, for the stately amber-shaded lamps in their centers.
Wireless is password-protected here, linked to your library card. I apologetically approached a librarian (who in the midst of this land of polo shirts appears to be affecting a Dragonball Z look, with shocked-up hair and a super-long banded goatee, bless his librariany heart) and explained I no longer had a library card, as I’d probably gotten mine when I was five years old. He looked me up in the system. While my original card was probably lost to the mists of time, my records were still in the library database! He sent me off with a flashy new purple card, recoded so that my address listed me as living in New York and not at my mom’s former place on Chester Ave.
At which point I realized why any of this seemed noteworthy. I haven’t lived a significant amount of time in Pasadena since the advent of the Internet. Well, sure, a summer or so at a pop. Certainly I hadn’t lived here more than a few weeks at a go since wireless became widespread.
It’s been ten years since I moved out of Pasadena. I was eighteen, and now I’m twenty-eight. Real estate prices here have skyrocketed to the extent that my sisters and I can hardly hope to live in town. Now that my dad and mom have both moved away, it’s going to be increasingly more difficult to spend much time here. Dad recently sold his house for twice what he bought it for. Ironically, among the lizards profiting from my inability to move home are my former classmates, stuffed and glassy-looking at my last reunion.
With my grandmother unwilling to drive at night and everyone else in town busy with jobs or preparing for the family reunion, I decided that I was going to get to Pasadena from LAX by way of the Metro when I came in. The family protested. People on the plane told me it simply couldn’t be done; there were no lines that went to the airport. But I was adamant. Los Angeles has a rail system now, and by gum, I was gonna use it.
I caught a bus to the blue line around 10 pm.
Neither ticket machine at the station worked, so I bought my day pass off someone hawking it at the station for $2 more than the machine price. I didn’t even know what a valid ticket looked like, so I worried I’d get the $250 fine for travelling without a ticket. But there wasn’t a single Metro employee around to ask, so I was basically stranded without it.
I waited some twelve minutes for the train. Meanwhile, I acquainted myself with the train map, which let me know there would be three transfers to make before I got to Pasadena. The trip would take me across each of the system’s main lines — blue, green, red, and gold.
My first thought on stepping onto the train was, “Oh, I remember why they thought I shouldn’t take the train. Public transit in Los Angeles is for POOR PEOPLE.” While a late-night train in New York would carry a number of overworked-looking immigrant folks and perhaps a few drunken hipsters, this train bore nothing but profoundly destitute-looking homeless people.
And it smelled more powerfully of pee than the Paris Metro.
And despite the repeated audio, poster, and digital reminders in Spanish and English that there was to be no food consumed on the train, there was food garbage everywhere.
Twenty more minutes to wait for the second train.
Which, like the first, was only as long as a jointed bus. Also smelled of pee.
By the third train, the stations were getting significantly nicer-looking, though they were still nearly deserted. An exhausted looking woman with an Ernst and Young bag sat across from me when we got to Downtown, the tops of her hose showing plainly below her exposed knees.
I noticed there were no ads to speak of on the trains, aside from the in-house Metro ones. No local podiatrists, no personal-injury lawyers, no Dr. Zizmor and his wife with her ridiculous hats; not even any advertisements for social-service programs. In fact, there weren’t even any frames to put ads in. Completely astounding myself, I began to scream at the system’s managers inside my head. How the hell do you expect to support a mass-transit system without advertising?! Do you really care about this damned system at all?! I mean, I knew the system was a public joke, but I hadn’t realized how cruel it was.
The fourth train, to Pasadena, was very clean, and full of college students. But on not a single one of these trains was I EVER approached for my ticket. In fact, I didn’t see a single Metro employee at all.
Joan Didion was right; you can’t go home again. I could, up til now, but my hopes of coming back to Los Angeles to live as an adult — without a car, without a house, without pervasive racism and classism — have been completely dashed. Expect to hear a little less yearning from me, and a little less frustration with New York; deep down, I know I can’t justify it anymore.
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