To read Part 1, click here. The read part 2, click here.
If the Westside is the forsaken domain of rail service (although there are plenty of buses), then the wasteland south of Ventura Boulevard, between Studio City and Encino, is the place that buses forgot.
There are bus lines that cruise down the Cahuenga Pass into Hollywood and a few that link the Westside to the Valley through the Sepulveda Pass, but in the vast expanse between these two passes, there is one, and only one, bus line that dares to slink through the mountains. That’s right, mountains. Nothing makes the geological formations we affectionately call “The Hills” seem more like what they really are, the eastern tail of the Santa Monica Mountain Range, than trying to cross them without using your car. That lone bus line is the 218, but its official and hilarious word title, as designated by its final destination, is “Cedars Sinai.”
The author, at the intersection of Mullholland Drive and Beverly Glen.
Relying on this infrequent bus to get into town on a Saturday night is tough enough, but to count on it to get to the city’s marquee hospital is to give up on living. For one thing, it stops running at 8 P.M. Apparently people don’t need hospitals after dark. Second, as the day progresses, the schedule of the runs shrinks to once every fifty minutes–hardly a frequency worth planning a trip around.
Normally, I drive my car or take the Rapid Bus down Ventura Blvd. to the Universal City Red Line Station, exit the train at Hollywood and Highland, and walk twenty minutes to Santa Monica Blvd, where the Rapid Buses roll more often than they do on Sunset. It’s a bit of a hassle, but walking briskly allows me to justify it as my workout. If I’m lazy, I just drive to Universal, park my car in the free lot (One of Metro’s best features. Let’s see how long it lasts), but that means I still have a short drive waiting for me at the end of the night or, if I’m really hammered, cabbing home and taking the bus back to get my car in the morning. This onerous task has got to be the eco-friendly, 21st Century version of the Walk of Shame.
In all my daring bus and rail adventures of late, a journey on the 218 is one I had been finding every excuse to avoid. In truth, it is the most direct Metro route between Sherman Oaks, where I live, and West Hollywood, where I’ve been told I drink. Something just told me that a bus and a winding canyon road was a bad combination. And a look at the arrival times at the Metro website confirmed that it was not a speedy journey–about an hour from Studio City to the end of the line at Cedars. But one night I bit the bullet, mainly for the purposes of being thorough for this story. Jumping off a perfectly good Rapid Bus at Laurel Canyon in order to sit on a bench outside the Walgreens to catch the day’s last 218 was like giving up a guaranteed seat on an airline flight for the chance to ride stand-by on a plane that gets me home an hour sooner–it could work out splendidly or all go horribly wrong. The result was somewhere in between.
As I stood on the corner, anxiously peering into the encroaching night for the familiar orange and grey paint job, I was hit with a realization. In all my years in Los Angeles, though countless car rides over that particular hill as a delivery driver, out-of-work actor, seething screenwriter and semi-comatose passenger, I could not once recall ever seeing one of LA’s lumbering buses negotiating the turns and sudden stops of Laurel Canyon Boulevard’s twisting mountain stretch. When a vehicle with the familiar MTA paint job and the numbers 218 illuminated about the driver’s window make a jerky left off of Ventura and stopped in front of me, I understood why. It’s not a bus at all. It’s a van–the large, people-moving kind that an airport Sheraton might’ve used to haul hardened business travelers to and from LAX for a decade until the squealing brakes, rattling windows and worn out seat cushions dictated that it was time to sell the thing for scrap metal, or dump it off the Redondo Beach Pier, or better yet, sell it to the MTA.
I took a seat in the row along the back. My two fellow riders plopped down on the seats running along the side windows. Turns out they knew more than I did, because four feet in front of me, with nothing like a seat belt, a handstrap to hang onto, or the slightest bit of padding to protect me, was a pair of chrome bars which encaged the spot where a wheelchair would be anchored. One bar ran floor to roof. The other was horizontal, about three feet off the ground. As we twisted up the canyon and started our descent into West Hollywood, I fought off visions every time the driver touched the brake of my flying forward and the horizontal bar catching my teeth so perfectly as to knock them out cleanly and permanently. Meanwhile the vertical bar seemed to be perfectly placed to catch me squarely in the balls. I finally changed seats somewhere near the Country Market, about two miles after I should have.
I haven’t been back on the 218 since. But the Red Line and I are still friends, in fact something romantic has even developed. Standing on the platform at Universal City, there’s a moment, about a minute before the lights of the approaching train peek from around the bend, when the train announces her arrival in a whisper of wind. The whisper is quickly a warm embrace and then blasting kiss over every inch of your body. The shot of air is the train telling you she’s almost there. If you’re on the stairs still coming into the station, and the wind is bellowing up from the platform, then you’d better hurry. She’s almost there and she won’t wait for long.
Posted by Aaron Black at 2:21 PM