Maybe it’d be simpler to just sum up this 3-day saga into chewable little bits – portions ripe for consumption. Well, the truth is, I can’t – or rather – won’t do that. Fuck that. Life doesn’t spill out its narrative at that pace, no matter how much this all-encompassing ‘postmodern’ framework tries to convince us otherwise. It’s an epic, sprawling clusterfuck of success and failure, of sheer brilliance and utter stupidity, pain and joy, and when all is said and done in a particular episode, there usually isn’t a charming little wrap-up. It just unceremoniously blends into the next chapter. So, with that in mind, here’s a leviathan tale about a 3-day life-binge we embarked on a few weeks ago. It’s not for the A.D.D. set.

I’ve been in Los Angeles for 3 months now, and while I’ll admit it’s a noticeable improvement over my last digs, it’s also not the bastion of inspiration I might’ve hoped for. LA is in some sense, totally overwhelming. Everything is moving around you constantly. This city will not exist at your pace. You sink or swim, and the city doesn’t give it a second thought. At times, it can be exhausting, and considering all the solutions for modern living I’ve surrounded myself with here, I don’t really have a necessity to venture out into the abyss on a constant basis. As a result, I’ve found myself bored off my ass more often than I’d like to admit. And it’s my own damn fault. You create your own environments, and you manufacture your own opportunities. Anyone who argues against that is really just a cynical little kitten in a world full of snarling wolves. So when Misfit called me up and brought up the idea of urban exploration, I jumped at the chance to do something – anything – to shrug off the stench of complacency.

Through a vast maze of cobwebs and neuron mass-graves, I pulled a little gem out of the depths of my psyche. I’d vaguely remembered reading something years ago about how Los Angeles had an extensive subway system in operation during the first half of the 1900s, and that it’d been quickly and quietly shut down under mysterious circumstances. I wasn’t even sure if I’d even read it, or just imagined the whole thing, but I offered this as a viable option regardless. I even upped the ante with the promise of corporate corruption and huge, entombed relics of humanity’s technical achievements of the 20th century.

It didn’t take much else to get him on board. We also enlisted the help of Nicole, my typical partner in crime and a key cohort in the mania that comprised this three day assault on monotony. Initially, this was to be a one-to-two day gig. A simple in-n-out type deal. But when I get worked up about the possibilities of certain ideas, I have been known to bite off more than I can chew – and I can be fairly convincing during the prep phase. Anyway, as it happens, on this particular Friday night we ended up jumping in Nicole’s nazi sled and jamming down to San Diego for a night of ice cream and bible stories. Oh wait, did I say ice cream and bible stories? What I really meant was massive amounts of alcohol and Mexican mafia gang fights.

After a fairly arduous trek down the well-worn fissures of the southern California interstates, we arrived at Misfit’s and immediately dove headlong into a one-off bottle of killer vodka. Within a few minutes, we were already knee-deep in rotting deer footage and a heavy (albeit booze-fueled) analysis of the current human condition, which was an obvious signal that we needed to get out on street and make some noise. We headed for the Zombie Lounge, which still held fond memories from few weekends previous when we’d stumbled into an intergalactic robot-lobster battle there.  Regrettably, after a few drinks, including the BarfFuel^TM I ordered for Nicole (commonly known as Long Island Ice Tea),  we determined that the Zombie Lounge on that particular night was not the proper venue for our ilk. So we headed out into the night again, and after Misfit made his traditional steel-belted signature on the Poncho Villa parking lot, we hauled ass down to Scolari’s in North Park for rock ‘n roll and additional sauce. But, by the time we’d gotten to the south end of our first beers, the band was done and the bouncers were already subtly nudging the drunks out into the streets with soft words of encouragement like “Finish your drinks and get the fuck out!”

So ‘get out’ we did. And, by this time of night, we demanded sustenance. With Guitar Wolf’s Fujiyama Attack screaming out of the speakers, we floored it to Saguaro’s taco stand for some carné. What we ended up with was a helluva lot more than some tacos.

While details of the events here are still a matter of question to all parties involved, I will relay this much. While we were in the drive-thru, there was a resounding crunch from the back of the truck, and within three minutes of this exchange between Misfit and myself, I found the following statements to be amusingly ironic:

Me: “Uhh… what the fuck?”
Misfit: “Hahahah.”
Me: “So… everyone’s just over it then?”
Misfit: “One thing you gotta know about dudes in San Diego – they no care.”

Well, it looks like these assholes were from out of town.

I’d just ordered a carne asada burrito when suddenly Misfit’s F150 was surrounded by a truckload of pissed off vatos brandishing ice picks, beatdown sticks, rolled-up newspapers – whatever they could get their hands on to look threatening, apparently. Maybe the vodka had afforded me an extra ounce or two of courage, but all the studded hardcore-wear in Hot Topic couldn’t make these dudes convincing, which became painfully obvious when we got out of car to calm these jerkoffs down. After an hour of nonsense with the SDPD and these equally insipid cultural rejects, we were back at the safehouse to tell the insurance types about how we’d narrowly escaped certain doom at the hands of these bloodthirsty “ruffians.” Oh, and that place has damn good carne asada burritos.

Saturday: we each somehow emerge ostensibly free from hangovers, and proceed to make a beeline for USS Midway, a retired aircraft carrier which was converted into a gigantic floating museum. If this aircraft carrier isn’t a monument to modern technology, I don’t know what is. It’s basically a floating city. There’s something incredibly American about that, and if I’ve interpreted current trends accurately, that’s probably something I should feel a tinge of guilt about, but I don’t. This anti-American sentiment that’s become so fashionable lately is fucking repulsive. People were all about America when they got nothing but sunshine pumped up their asses about how great the economy was, during times when the media portrayed a relative world peace, and so on. Well, the world is a place of constant change, and people have to fuckin’ adapt. When things turn ugly and suddenly we’re not entirely the shit that we once were, it’s “fuck this place, I’m moving to Prague!.” Not only is that a fundamentally bullshit statement, it’s born of the brand of narrow-minded ignorance and half-baked thinking that those people are supposed to be so adamantly opposed to. I mean, it’s easy to complain about the government and other faceless entities that you have no real connection with. It’s easy because nobody gives a damn about what you have to say, largely because you aren’t really saying anything. So, if you’re gonna bitch, have a fuckin’ solution. Otherwise you’re just a parrot amongst a vast sea of parrots all saying the same cliché bullshit that has no foundation, no plan of action, and ultimately isn’t all that different from the merit-less rhetoric from the other side of the spectrum. And if you’ve got no solution, well, then the people that do have you by the balls. That’s why we are… where we are. Additionally… character, integrity, soul – what happened to this stuff? The “American dream” has nothing to do with contribution and ideas anymore. It’s about getting yours before anyone else gets theirs. The measure of your worth really has nothing to do with substance at this point – it’s all just in the numbers now, and this is the real decline of western civilization.

Anyway, I’m getting off topic here.

Since Misfit was the resident military expert on this excursion, he filled us in on all the particulars about the helicopters, planes, guidance apparatus and such. Nicole and I did what we could to add supplemental data where applicable:

Misfit: “The blue flag with the white X means everyone on board has herpes.”
Brad: “This must be where they launch the jet skis…”
Misfit: “Yep, and in the winter, they freeze the whole deck and you can ice skate off of there.”
Nicole: “This one doubles as a quad detailer.”
Misfit: “That over there is where they cook the giant pizzas, and these fans are to cool them off.”

Maybe we dodged the hangovers because we were still drunk? Anyway, it looks like the USS Midway must’ve been a pretty cool place to work in its all terrain vehicle waxing, extreme sporting, pizza gorging heyday. Afterward, since we were in such close proximity, we headed over to North Island Naval Air Station, which is just across the bay from the USS Midway, to check out the sorts of hardware they don’t have in museums. Unfortunately, the trade-off here is that you don’t get to take pictures of the good stuff. Later on, we got some chinese food at this place called the Rice King. It should have been an ominous sign when we walked in and the place was virtually silent. Any restaurant you walk into that doesn’t have some type of white noise going at all times is sort of a deal-breaker for me. Rubs me the wrong way – I don’t want to hear you slurpin’ down your food, and I doubt you want to hear me doing the same. That sort of hushed-environment feeling makes it seem like I’m at the DMV or something. The poor bastard behind the counter seemed to be losing a piece of his soul with each begrudging shovel into the grease troughs. But truthfully, these were the least of the problems at the Rice King. I’ll spare you the graphic detail, but safe to say this place has been crossed off the list. That’s cool – it just means another excuse to hit up Saguaro’s next time.

So at this point we’ve come to grips with our fate. We must gather our gear up and roll out of this hospitable beach city, and venture back into dingy urban jungle of Los Angeles. None of us were really looking forward to sluggishly drifting through the vast network of southern California’s interstates, always having to stay alert for the next asshole who’s gonna cut you off in their never-ending pursuit of that mythical über lane – you know, that lane at the end of the rainbow that’s going 90 miles an hour while the rest of us are crawling along at 15. Those motherfuckers need to just accept their fate and put up with it like the rest of us. It’s jackasses like them that cause shitty traffic in the first place. Anyway, we bite the bullet and dive in. Two hours later we’re at our Hollywood HQ, back in the midst of the piss-stained bums and trash. Meanwhile, half a mile west of here, some celeb is probably lighting a cigar with my last paycheck. Even though it’s a disgusting notion, I’ve somehow managed to find this bizarre dichotomy fascinating – almost endearing, in a way.

After regrouping, the next step, of course, was to get rock out and get loaded. After jamming out a dual-guitar assault with Nicole on the skins, we made our way out to the Cha Cha Lounge in Silverlake, a town just east of Hollywood proper that seems to consist of about 96% hipsters and 4% everything else, which is actually not as lame as it may seem, because it’s a town that actually caters to rock ‘n roll. In this day and age, that’s pretty rare, considering the cash cow hip hop has turned out to be. I think we’ve discovered the Cha Cha at just the right time in its history. It’s still a somewhat unsung scene, and as a result, it’s got a crowd, but you can still actually get from one side of the bar to the other in less than 20 minutes, and the bartenders actually pour the drinks with some balls. As an example, that night, Misfit ordered two double vodka redbulls. The bartender takes a look at him, pours two tall glasses FULL of vodka, then hands him an unopened redbull, and says “just in case you need it.” Now that is a fuckin’ bartender. Needless to say, the rest of the night is pretty much a blur. Two instances that stand out are the tamale guy (give that dude every last nickel you have – you won’t regret it) and the “is it the Buzzcocks or the Undertones” debate. Speaking of which, Misfit – you still owe me a shot.

Sunday: the day of the main event. We wake up at the crack of 11:30, and this time, the drinking is catching up with us. We persevere, load up on energy drinks, beef jerky and flashlight batteries, and embark on a day that exceeded all expectations.

Before I get into it, here’s a little background on the Pacific Electric Railway:

“The Pasadena and Pacific railroad was an 1895 merger between the Pasadena and Los Angeles and the Los Angeles and Pacific. It boosted tourism by living up to its motto “from the mountains to the sea.”

During this time, the Pacific Electric Railway was established by railroad and real estate tycoon Henry Huntington in 1901. Henry’s uncle, Collis P. Huntington, was one of the founders of the Southern Pacific Railroad and had bequeathed Henry a huge fortune upon his death. Only a few years after the company’s formation, most of Pacific Electric’s stock was purchased by the Southern Pacific Railroad, which Henry Huntington had tried and failed to gain control of a decade earlier. In 1911, Southern Pacific bought out Huntington completely and also purchased several other passenger railway operators in the Los Angeles area including Pasadena and Pacific, resulting in the “Great Merger” of 1911. At this point the Pacific Electric became the largest operator of interurban electric railway passenger service in the world, with over 1,000 miles of track. The Pacific Electric also ran frequent freight trains under electric power throughout its service area, including one of the few electrically-powered Railway Post Office routes in the country. The PE was also responsible for an innovation in grade crossing safety that was quickly adopted by other railroads, a fully automatic electromechanical grade crossing signal nicknamed the “wigwag.”

Pacific Electric passenger service was sold off in 1953 to a company known as Metropolitan Coach Lines, whose intention was to convert all rail service to bus service as quickly as possible. Many of the Pacific Electric passenger lines were shut down in 1954, but the California state government would not allow the most popular lines to be discontinued. In 1958, Metropolitan Coach Lines relinquished control of the remaining rail lines to a government agency, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which also took over the remaining streetcar lines of the successor of the Los Angeles Railway, the Los Angeles Transit Lines. Only a handful of electric train lines remained operating at that time and the conventional wisdom held that their days were numbered. The last passenger line of the Pacific Electric, the line from Los Angeles to Long Beach, continued until April 9, 1961.”

So far so good. Not only did it exist, it was the largest urban railway system in the world in its day. I didn’t even fabricate the part about corporate conspiracies:
“The end of the Red Cars has been tied by some to the alleged General Motors streetcar conspiracy, in which a consortium of General Motors, Standard Oil, and others formed a front company, National City Lines, in order to buy streetcar lines, shut them down, and replace them with buses. While the overwhelming body of evidence shows that National City Lines did perform such actions, other factors also contributed to the decline of electric traction in the United States.”

I think it’s safe to say this is a pretty significant part of Los Angeles’ history. The city once known for having the largest urban railway system on the planet is now the city with the world’s largest network of virtual parking lots, all because GM wanted to line their pockets a little more? Whether or not that’s entirely to blame, it’s still a pretty weak move on GM’s part. Then again, Pontiac, a GM company, also introduced the GTO in 1964, in effect creating the first of the American muscle cars, of which I am an unabashed fanboy, so who am I to point any fingers.
Before setting out on this expedition, we did a little research and found that there was still an open tunnel entrance in downtown LA; we could simply walk in and check it out, take some pictures, and bail. Well, the entrance was supposed to look like this:

Instead, it actually looked like this:

This presented us with a problem. Every time I look at this picture, I’m reminded of something I used to say to people when I wanted to cause trouble, “Do you want to tell people the story about how you did something awesome, or do you want to tell people the story about how you almost did something awesome?”

We were at a crossroads. Our simple plan had been revoked, and the stakes had been raised. While we were sitting on this mount of dirt, pissed about how this lame obstacle was the only thing between us and adventure, Misfit smacked the side of the wall with a beatdown stick. What’s significant about this is that instead of the wall responding with a short, solid “thud,” it instead made a hollow, reverberating “thump.” We all suddenly realized in unison that we were having a “Goonies moment.”

One of the reasons this entrance was filled with dirt is because the area surrounding it is now a full scale construction site. They were laying the foundation for an apartment building, or a parking garage, or whatever, about 100 yards from the entrance. While we were trying to figure out how to get down there, it occurred to us that this was probably the last chance we (or anyone else) would have to get in, because this tunnel is about to become a completely buried and forgotten relic of LA’s past, an entombed document of technological accomplishment and corporate gluttony of the 20th century.

With a newfound sense of urgency, we hatched our plan:

Using some rope and a piece of rebar from the construction site, we repelled into the abandoned Pacific Electric Railway system.

With absolutely no idea what awaited us on the ground in this pitch black, long-abandoned subway tunnel, we each lowered ourselves down into the truly unknown. Once our feet touched the semi-solid ground, the sense of accomplishment was overwhelming.

Even though the system had been gutted of most of the machinery and fixtures long ago, there was no shortage of attractions along the way, the most obvious of which was the elaborate graffiti along the walls of the first few hundred yards of the tunnel. As we ventured further into the tunnel, and the opening we’d come through became more and more distant, our only source of natural light became completely nullified, and our flashlights became our primary instruments for navigation, which also served to ratchet up the creep-factor.

Nothing was alive down here, at least in any form we were familiar with. No bugs, no rats, no nothing – except for an unidentifiable throbbing bio-mass we discovered along the way. If there was ever a subterranean lair for zombies, man-eating spiders, and other flavors demon spawn, this was it. The tunnel spanned about three quarters of a mile, at which point we reached another blockade, and this one a bit more fortified than the entrance.  We decided to get trigger-happy with the spray paint and cameras.

Once we’d finished making our marks, we headed back to the entrance and pulled ourselves back out into the (comparatively) fresh air. On the ride home, while I was watching the people of Los Angeles go about their lives, I had this weird sensation, like we’d temporarily broken this hypnotic spell that gripped the entire populace. Life is so full of these frivolous idiosyncrasies we have deal with and conform to on such a constant basis that eventually you just forget what it’s like to live.

We made our way back to the house and got cleaned up. Afterwards, the three of us decided to rock out a bit more, and this time we managed to capture it on the home studio setup.  Once we’d exercised those demons, we met up with Misfit’s sister Lauren for some Roscoe’s Chicken ‘n Waffles. That place never disappoints. Somewhere along the course of the day we’d realized that The Cramps were playing the Sunset Junction festival in Silverlake that same night. After feasting on the finest southern fried chicken money can buy, we hauled ass back to the pad, pounded some vodka crans, and jumped in the mobile.

Misfit: “What time do The Cramps play at?”
Nicole: “9′o clock. What time is it now?”
Brad: “9:15… HAUL ASS!”

After a few minutes of tearing down Sunset Blvd singing along to Motorhead, we get to the festival and somehow manage to snag free parking less than a block from the entrance. This is ridiculously good luck – people are paying 15 bucks for parking four blocks down the road. We walk up and there’s no one manning the ticket booth, so we just cruise in right as The Cramps are getting into full swing. After about forty minutes of rockin’ the hell out with Lux and Poison Ivy (who is still hot by the way) and spraying silly string on mohawks, the set is suddenly cut short when the show’s promoter comes out and announces the cops are shutting them down because it’s after 10 on a Sunday night.

Suddenly a ghetto bird comes up overhead and starts shining its light down on the crowd in some sort of gesture of dominance. It’s that spell again, and it commands us to slowly file out of the venue and into whatever DUI trap the cops have set up for us outside. We linger in front of a toy shop just outside the entrance for a while, people watching.

We took off when we noticed the flatfoots were moving in on our dangerous, loitering persons, and headed over to the Short Stop to get a few beers and unwind. It’d been a long weekend, and full-tilt nature of it was finally starting to catch up with us, but there was no doubt that we’d made every minute of it count.

Ultimately, what more could you ask for?

Rail Passenger Lines of Pacific Electric Railway in Los Angeles County

I recommend listening to this song while reading the chart

[missing persons - walking in L.A.]

Popularity: 4% [?]

Related posts:

1. Kitchen of the Future
2. The Big Disconnect – by Brad I.
3. Subway
4. The Grande Ballroom – by Brad I.
5. The White Plank