Los Angeles Got Cold: Two Strangers on a Train

At Westlake/MacArthur Park Metro Station, I trudged down the steps feeling the depressing de ja vu of routine. I take this route every day, and usually enjoy it, but today it felt like a weight. I wanted to be at home. I didn't want to face the every-day drudgery of my commute.

Just when I was writing this down ("I'm discouraged by the routine drudgery..."), a man with a croaky voice asked me which train it was that had just come by. I answered, and my accent forced him into a double-take moment, turning his platform-roving eyes back to mine in interest. He walked on by, and I turned back to my notebook and stared at it numbly. Whatever thought I was trying to capture, had lost it's import and it's moment.

Then, he came back.

"You're not from L.A, are you?" he said.

"No," I replied tentatively, having learnt that, on the subway, anyone you respond to may engage you in a long-winded, slightly insane rant that could potentially last the entire length of the awkward journey. With people I can understand, this is fine and interesting. With people who are really just talking to themselves, or to "demons," this is exhausting.

As it turns out, this young man was beyond interesting - he was engaging, and had a story of his own. Standing face-to-face with him I realized why my inital reaction had been one of uncertainty... his face was prematurely aged, lined with wrinkles that gave it the appearance of leather. But his eyes were young and shiny - deep wells of something not-quite-said but understood. We talked our way onto the train.

He was from Chicago and was feeling as blue about LA as I was. "I arrived by Greyhound," he told me. "They dropped me off at skidrow. That whole place is like a giant toilet that needs to be flushed."

I asked him what he thought the main difference was between here and his hometown in Chicago. "The people," he said. "They're so much nicer in Chicago. Here, everyone is mean. They're assholes."

I had to agree on that point - to an extent. "They don't seem to care very much about other people," I replied, just as a man disembarking the train bumped forcefully into me and sent me tripping off-balance. "Case in point," the Chicago man laughed.

We stood, holding onto the railings and swaying precariously with the unsteady and lurching movement of the train. "Do you want to hear a joke?" he asked me without a smile. "How does an Angeleno say 'Fuck you'?" ... "Trust me."

I only half got it, but it made me sadder still - especially coming from this old-looking young man without so much as a smile in his eyes, let alone his face.

This seemed to be a man who had suffered in his life. I didn't know how - but he had the face of someone marked by weakness and woe. The pain in his eyes betrayed to me that this man had seen more than anyone of his age would care to see.

The train pulled into another station. We sat down in a freshly-emptied seat. I was closer to his face now, and watching his eyes as he talked. Like many people who have suffered hardship in their lives, this man was afflicted by "the sadness cycle" - as I call it. People who have been through tough times - homelessness, addiction, abuse - have a hard time letting go of that sadness. They take it upon themselves to correct it by going into a field that requires them to face it everyday. They go into professions that cause them fresh pain, but give them the satisfaction of knowing that their own suffering was not in vain - because now they are helping to make the world right again. From suffering stems great compassion, and although that compassion is a great gift, it also causes endless pain. As the author Milan Kundera once wrote:

"There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes."

I know of people close to me, perhaps even including myself, whose personal sadness has born a great mission to right the wrongs of their own past through the rest of the world. This is not a bad thing for humanity - in fact, compassion is a wonderful and rare power - but it is nevertheless an unending cycle for the bearer, who feels the pain of others as if it were their own and takes every sad act of the world as a personal tragedy. These are the people who change the world without the attonement of medals or honor, but by treasuring their own humanity and nurturing the humanity of others. These are the people who change the sheets when things get messy, who change the light bulb when times get dark, and who listen to the lonely when no one else cares. For the old, the mentally disturbed, the emotionally-laden... these compassionate people are often the only people in their isolated lives.

The man from Chicago with the old face is starting school again next week, where he will study drug and alcohol rehabilitation. Soon, he will be the one person in many suffering people's lives. "I'm 29," he tells me. "I know I don't look it."

29? He looks like he has lived half that again, maybe more.

"Are you married?" he aks me, gestering at the ring on my left hand.
"Soon," I tell him.
"I just got divorced. A Year and a half ago." He shares his life with me freely, but not casually. I think he trusts me.
"I'm sorry," I say, and be honest; "I hope that won't happen to me."
"We had only been together 4 months. She got pregnant pretty quickly."
"It's amazing how life can change so quickly. From one minute to the next - everything is different." I am reminded of Joan Didion's book The Year of Magical Thinking, which is a memoir in which she explains how the death of her husband affected her. "Life changes in an instant," she repeatedly writes. It seems to offer comfort to her, and I took it upon myself to be comforted by it too. Life changes quickly, chaotically. Life isn't really in the hands of the beholder. Sometimes you have to let go and just run with it - and that can be quite a freeing thing sometimes. It can be a wonderful thing sometimes. Babies are born, couples are united, opportunities are grasped... all essential moments in life that over-thinking, or trying to "manage" would kill.

"One minute I'm partying at ASU...the next thing I'm a family guy," he says.

When we get to my stop, I'm sad to leave. I'll probably never see this man again, and therefore never be able to offer him comfort beyond the few minutes we shared, connected by our position as strangers, both lost in a lost city.

Outside the station, everything looked grey and dilapidated, like a movie that has been set in the Depression era. I shivered my way home, feeling a strange mixture of contentment and grief. L.A had gotten cold, but there was warmth to be found in places other than home.