The Wilshire Visa

By Abby Kirk Ramsey

What constitutes a community?

Greater Los Angeles has been known for decades for its iconic freeway gridlock, two-car families and high-rise buildings atop massive parking structures.

In 1990 the author, a single mother with a daughter at college on the East Coast, was boarding a transit bus at 4:35 AM in downtown L.A., five mornings a week. The joy of living had become only a distant memory in this darkest winter of her life, but she was always at the bus stop on time, determinedly headed for work in Santa Monica: Head down, always carrying a book (what, after all, could you do but read, sleep, or maybe knit for that hour on the bus?)

Within a month or two - and almost against her will - she had discovered a living, breathing community of people on the No. 20 westbound. Her life was changed that season - by her fellow passengers, and by a uniquely gifted driver with an understanding of The City and its people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jul 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481760911

Abby Kirk Ramsey

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© 2013 by Abby Kirk Ramsey. All rights reserved.

Cover photograph was taken by Fran Chasen of Santa Monica, California. Thanks, old friend.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 12/14/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-6090-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-6091-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013910399

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Author’s Note

January 1990

February 1990

March 1990

April 1990

May 1990

Epilogue: November 2011

Dedicated to

RTD Driver No. 2815, with deepest

respect, gratitude, and affection—

and to passengers and drivers alike,

on public transit everywhere.

Author’s Note

This is a true account of a season in Los Angeles several years ago, though a few names have been changed. There is, to my knowledge, no hotel known as The Brigadoon in Los Angeles (if a Brigadoon Hotel has sprung up in Los Angeles within the last several years, I am unaware of it and am not referring to it in this true story).

Tina, a central character to the story, actually has a different surname than the one I have given her here. A few street intersections along the Wilshire corridor have been given new street names by me as well. For good reasons I have not used the actual name of RTD Driver No. 2815.

All of that having been said, this remains a work of nonfiction. The first five months of 1990, with its pre-dawn trip along Wilshire Boulevard five days a week, are still sharply etched in my memory. If any of my fellow passengers on that No. 20 bus happen to read this book and recognize themselves, they should accept my greetings—and my apologies that I did not learn each of their names.

We were all fortunate, that winter and spring, to be passengers on a bus whose driver definitely knew what he was doing.

January 1990

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It was a far simpler time for many of us, that first half of 1990 in Los Angeles. In that year, the Metro/MTA was still known as the RTD. There was a lot of digging in progress, underground, for what was going to someday be the long-awaited subway system—or so we were told.

No evocative Oriental structure arced grandly over the intersection bordering Chinatown, and there was still no Cesar Chavez Boulevard. Rodney King was not a household name. The Big One had not yet brought its grievous upheavals to our people and their homes. Mark Fuhrman was only a cop—not yet an author—and O. J. Simpson was known mostly for sports, orange juice, and a third-rate acting career.

We lived with only the amount of wariness that befitted our immediate circumstances. Residents of one of the world’s largest metropolitan conglomerates, we knew we should not be surprised that many made-for-TV movies had already exploited the worst possible disaster themes in our city, and we’d learned to limit our anxieties regarding these. We went about living our lives with as much good-humored confidence in our environment as we could individually muster.

Most of us, seat-belted, protected ourselves with one-quarter ton or more of heavy metal, four wheels beneath us, and a steering wheel in front. But others of us chose an alternative.

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It never occur to you, inquires the driver on the No. 20 bus this morning, that you and me the only ones on this bus not carrying a knife or a gun?

Now, that is a thought worth pondering.

Unfortunately, I am about to get off the bus at the very next stop, so there’s hardly time to discuss the matter with him.

What has prompted this memorable query, though, is the fact that apparently a knife fight took place within arm’s reach of me this morning. Engrossed in Milton Viorst’s The Sands of Sorrow, I’d had my head down, so to speak, and was therefore not paying much attention when those two guys shuffled off the bus at Alvarado. On the 4:35 No. 20 out of downtown LA, guys are forever shuffling or lurching on and off the bus in the first twenty or thirty blocks. I always figured a lot of people are barely awake at that hour, either on their way to work without having had the chance to grab that first cup of coffee or coming off the night shift and dog-tired. So, assuming that the hour itself is not all that civilized for most of the population and that people are not at their best when half-asleep, I’ve never paid much attention to the lurches, muttered curses, and postural aberrations that mark the social panorama each morning on the 4:35. (I did look up once, several weeks ago, to note that I was the only female on a bus with about twenty passengers on board, but then a woman got on at the Hospital of the Good Samaritan, and after that I never gave it much thought.)

But the bus driver has, as I stand in front of the bus about to disembark in Santa Monica, managed to advise me (by the expedient means of simply not opening the door for me until he is finished talking) that (1) those particular two guys who lurched off the bus right at my elbow this morning at Alvarado were not simply shuffling but going at each other with fists and a knife in the slow-motion style of hard-core junkies ("Now, really—you tryin’ to tell me you didn’t even see that blood back there down the aisle of the bus?") and that (2) in case I have never noticed it before, some of the guys who get on the bus in downtown LA—that’s right, not far from where I board each morning—get off at Alvarado, and there is usually only one thing on their minds: scoring some dope from a sidewalk vendor or the MacArthur Park regulars there. It is therefore not uncommon to see them surreptitiously lifting items of presumed value off sleeping passengers on the bus, sometimes even brazenly and viciously yanking gold chains or earrings right off the wide-awake passengers, too—the better to score