All Gone to Look for America (39 page)

But kick-off is not until 7:00 p.m. according to my ticket so there’s most of a day to kill. Under the circumstances I do what any British football fan in LA for the day would probably do: Universal Studios. I’d like to tell you it was an extraordinary, culturally captivating insight into the secrets of Hollywood moviemaking. Unfortunately it wasn’t. Apart from a couple of modestly
interesting
short shows about special effects, Universal is basically a theme park like any other. True, there is the ‘studio tour’ but it’s basically a bus ride around the back lots of sealed-off sound stages where the real action goes on. There are a couple of outdoor sets, most notably the pond that doubled for the oceanfront in
Jaws
, complete with the hilariously unrealistic-looking but allegedly original rubber shark (somehow not the same when you’re expecting its appearance any moment, rather than a blinding flash out of the dark on a cinema screen). Other than that – and the fact that the rides are named after Universal
blockbusters
:
Jurassic Park, The Mummy
etc. – its main concern is that of any other theme park: churning the punters and selling hot dogs and souvenirs.

By early afternoon I’m ready for something different. Like the part of LA where most of my British friends said I should have been staying: Santa Monica beach. As the name implies, it’s not really Los Angeles, but then nor is most of what is generally called Los Angeles, any more than most of what is called London is actually the original Roman square mile city. Santa Monica is merely the bit by the beach, at the end of – logically enough – the Santa Monica Boulevard. And as a Sheryl Crow fan from way back I know I ought to hang out there until the sun goes down. But I have to be gone a bit earlier or I’ll miss the start of the game.

The most fascinating thing about the Santa Monica Boulevard – apart from its musical fame and, as I’m about to discover, its length – is that it more or less passes directly over the La Brea tar pits. This may sound less than interesting until you know, as I had just learned, that America could make a significant dent in its reliance on imported oil if they only drilled there. It is the supreme irony of a great city whose prime problem in growing to the size it is today was
initially the shortage of water wells – see Jack Nicholson in
Chinatown
– they ended up unwittingly building it over one of the country’s largest onshore oil deposits. The only reason La Brea hasn’t been turned into an oilfield is that it lies underneath some of the most expensive real estate in America. And the inhabitants of Beverly Hills are amongst the few Americans who wouldn’t think it was worth drilling into a guaranteed oil well in their back garden. Whatever would Jed Clampett have thunk?

A rare Angelino public transport fan later that night, would tell me: ‘Effectively, the whole of Los Angeles is sitting on an oil well. A federal bill was enacted to ban pushing the line west in case it exploded a giant methane bubble more or less underneath Beverley Hills. Since then the ban has been rescinded – in theory, and with obvious conditions – but no one has found a way of extending the line that would cost less than billions.

The bus ride down to Santa Monica takes longer than I imagine, quite a bit longer in fact, so that it’s nearly 4:00 p.m. by the time I’m strolling along the Pacific seafront and down the pier with seagulls wheeling in the salty air above me and a bottle blonde in a bikini doing an interview on the sand to a guy with a sound boom and a very long lens. I do a double take for a moment, in case it’s Pamela Anderson. But it isn’t. At least I don’t think so. But then I once stood next to Noel Gallagher at the bar of a London club for an hour without
recognising
him. Celebrity status isn’t absolute. And nor is my eyesight these days.

Santa Monica is nice, as nice as my friends had said it was: a bit like Brighton, but with a better beach. And sunshine. I could have stayed there longer – though if I’d booked in there I doubt if I’d ever have seen anything more of LA – but football beckoned and the admittedly uninspiring Home Depot Stadium, home to LA’s own ‘galacticos’ was in the southern part of the city, and starting to look a lot further away as I came to work out the scale on the map I was looking at. I had no idea. Simply no idea.

The only obvious route by public transport – and I’m beginning to realise that a taxi ride might be a lot longer and a lot more expensive that I had
considered
– seemed to be to take the express bus back to the ‘light rail’ network which would whisk me across downtown to the ‘South Central’ area and the stop I had worked out to be closest to the stadium. When a bus reassuringly rolls up within a minute or two, this plan seems to be working fine. Until it stops again about five minutes later, still – as far as I can tell, there being no break in the urban continuum – well within Santa Monica.

The reason it has stopped is traffic, which is a good reason, because there is a lot of it. In fact, it is not a good reason at all because there is a hell of a lot
of it. And none of it moving, other than – very occasionally – between one red light and another. And there are a lot of red lights too. Before I know it the sun is indeed going down on the Santa Monica Boulevard. And unless I do something, and quick, it’ll also be going down on my chances of getting to the game for kick-off.

With the bus sitting there stationary, I decide to take a little advice and edge up front to ask the driver how long it’ll take us to get to the junction with the rail line. ‘Oh, I dunno,’ he says with that air bus drivers seem to be born with, ‘at this time of day… could be 40 minutes, could be an hour and 40 minutes.’ Which sends me into a blind panic as that means they’ll be booting the ball downfield before I’m even on the right tracks. Clearly touched by this odd
foreigner’s
predicament – or deciding I’m a bit touched and better off his bus – the driver does something wonderful and almost unimaginable in
health-and-safety-obsessed
London: he opens the door for me between stops and says, ‘You can get off if you think you can get there faster.’

All I know is that I can hardly get there much more slowly. I take him up on it, and indeed before long am a good hundred yards in front of the bus, not that this is much good because the rail line is maybe four or five miles away – I told you it was long, that old boulevard. The only answer is a cab, and to hell with the cost: a driver who knows his way and can cut the corner across town, taking the backbearings, the ‘rat runs’ as we’d say in London. The only trouble is: there isn’t one. And even if there was it wouldn’t be any good, not on a grid system. A London cabbie would be ducking and diving down. Showing off the secrets of ‘the Knowledge’ and making the route up as he went along, playing a great maze game to beat the jam just for the hell of it. But not here. I examine the cross-streets hopefully but in vain. The cross-streets only funnel more cars out of them into the main road; it’s like watching arteriosclerosis in real time.

There is a James Joyce short story in
Dubliners
which is one of the best things he ever wrote, certainly one of the most comprehensible. It is called ‘Araby’ and is the brief story of a boy determined all day to get down to a bazaar to buy something and when he gets there it is too late, and the moment that he realises that fact, in a closing market, with the stalls shut and dusk falling all around him, is a life-defining bittersweet realisation of the poignancy of the human condition.

Well, that’s what I feel like right now, with the sunset faded into an eerie purple neon-and traffic-lit dusk, and here I am stranded on the endless Santa Monica Boulevard of life, with the street numbers somewhere in the low
thousands with an infinite number ahead and behind, having hopped back on the bus when it catches up with me, then off again in fresh despair, with no escape down side streets leading nowhere, and the creeping insurmountable certainty that the game I had arguably travelled 6,000 miles to see would be started – and at the current rate possibly even finished – before I got there.

It’s not that in the great scheme of things it matters all that much. But what hurts is the conspiracy of the universe to trample mindlessly on even our most modest aspirations and remind us of our own essential insignificance. Nothing hurts more than being told simply, ‘You don’t matter’. And absolutely nothing hurts more than being told it by a series of traffic lights.

In the end it was past a quarter to seven when the 720 pulled up at a stop near a junction where a building opposite displayed the world ‘Wiltern’ and something made me ask the driver if we were near the Metro Rail.

‘Sure, just over there,’ he indicated, and I realised with a feeling of almost nausea that ‘Wiltern’ was another of those ‘cool’ contractions – Wilshire and Western – that Americans seem to love so much in the absence of proper place names. I jumped out, only to realise that I then had to stand while my bus and another wave of unthinking traffic ploughed past – one day American
transport
planners will realise it makes sense to put underground rail entrances on both sides of the road, won’t they?

Wilshire/Western is the end of the line. It would have improved Los Angeles’s public transportation no end – not to mention made my journey that evening almost tolerable – to have pushed the line out west, ideally as far as Santa Monica. But that would have brought us back to those La Brea tarpits.

At least the train is ready to depart within seconds of my boarding it. I look at my watch. The trouble is that I have no real idea how long the trip will take. At least being on the metro line frees me from the tyranny of the traffic but there’s no way I’m going to catch the start of the match.

By the time I’m changing at 7th Street/Transit Center just four stops later I realise they’re probably already kicking off. The Blue Line south is right there in front of me, irresistibly tempting even though I know that on the overlaid map, the striped beige ‘transitway’ route comes closer to the stadium. The trouble is I don’t really know what the transitway is or how to get on it. I do the obvious thing: I ask a man in Metro Rail uniform. He seems amused by my question, or at least the accent in which I ask it and replies in heavily
Spanish-accented
American: ‘Is not here.’

‘The transitway?’

Quizzical look. ‘The bus.’

‘No, this,’ I said, pointing to a map with the stripy beige line, ‘transitway. Is it a tram,’ then remembering my vocabulary, ‘a light rail.’

‘
Si
, this,’ he indicated the train at the platform. ‘Train. Metro Rail. Blue Line. Very quick.’

‘But to Artesia Transit Center, the other tram. Does it go from near here?’ I had noticed that the beige line said that from 37th Street it was at street level, before, I assumed, descending underground.

‘Is on the other side of the square. A long walk. I think they should put it here, but is on the other side. The bus.’

But I’m not talking about the bus, I want to scream, or am I, I start to wonder? The truth is I haven’t really got a clue what I’m talking about here, in any language. Then the horn sounds to close the door on the Blue Line and I jump on board, just in case. ‘Very quick,’ the metro man tells me, so I sit down and seal my fate. Opposite me a Hispanic-looking girl sitting reading a book looks friendly and intelligent.

‘Excuse me,’ I start to explain, ‘do you know the Home Depot Soccer Stadium?’ She smiles encouragingly, but not optimistically. ‘Near Artesia,’ I add, hopefully helpfully.

‘This train goes to Artesia,’ she says in perfectly comprehensible American English.

‘To the Home Depot Soccer Stadium?’

‘I don’t know where that is.’

‘I think it’s nearer to here,’ I say, pointing to the end of the beige ‘transitway’ line.

‘Oh,’ she says, ‘then you need to get out here,’ – points to Imperial/
Wilmington
– ‘take the Green Line and then the bus.’

‘Right,’ I smile dubiously and sit back to wait, as the train suddenly surfaces and turns out to be a tram, trundling along the streets next to the cars and, like them, stopping at red lights. I grit my teeth, not quite audibly: my companions in the compartment by now include four pudgy but tough-looking white guys in their early thirties who are discussing whether the tattoos they just had on their forearms in order to get a free T-shirt might be some sort of advertising gimmick. Yeah right. Apart from them there are two middle-aged women telling a not terribly bright-looking 20-something bloke, ‘And he financed the Nazis.’

‘Who, the president?’ says the young guy, unwilling to believe this, even of George W. Bush.

‘Naw, not him. Nor his daddy. His granddaddy, they bankrolled them Nazis in the Second World War.’

This is news to me too, and I wonder if they are possibly confusing the Bush dynasty with the Kennedy dynasty, but right now I am more concerned with the ticking clock which shows I’ve already missed the first quarter hour of play. The list of stations shows eight more to go, and the view from the window is increasingly of unlit streets, broken-down trucks, and low-rise dwellings with broken windows and beat-up cars outside. The one thing signally lacking is pedestrians of any kind. Or taxis. This is not the sort of area I’m keen to jump out in.

Eventually, almost 25 minutes into the first half by my reckoning – but to give up now would make a mockery of the whole day – we pull into
Imperial
/Wilmington, and the friendly girl opposite says: ‘You want to get that bus,’ (meaning ‘if’), ‘you need to get out here.’

So I do. Uncertainly. Particularly as when I reach the platform above there is another blockade of metro ticket inspectors, backed up by armed police already detaining serious numbers of my fellow passengers, though happily not the friendly girl, who waves as she points me towards the Green Line and disappears into a night that looks less than welcoming.

My ticket is fine, but I am torn now between jumping on the Green Line for two stops to catch an unspecified bus to Artesia Transit or getting back on the Blue for another stop to where the ground appears to be further but at least in a straight line west. This is a straight-line city, I’m thinking. The Blue Line arrives first deciding the matter for me.