Houston H. Haynes

It’s not like I walk around with blinders on – I see the bruskers and pan-handlers every day. Like everyone else that lives in this town (and walks a distance longer than a city block) I get accosted for the odd quarter/dime/dollar by those that look [and smell] like they’ve not bathed in a week, and seem to be solely focused on getting their next fix. But when I saw the used glass pipe at my Metro stop, I took specific notice.

One reason is that my little “leg” of the Metro is clean. It’s a segment of the Read Line [between Universal City and Hollwood/Vine] that’s heavily traveled by tourists, and for that reason alone I think they’re particularly well-kept. Just the other day I saw a pair of Metro employees cleaning the underside of an escalator to a near-mirror finish. Holy crap – the *under*side of an escalator! In my years of riding the Metro in DC, I never saw that – ever. And that might be the reason why I’ve never seen drug paraphernalia dumped on the Metro platform before. Most likely anything of that sort would have been swept up by the time I showed up for daily commute.

But this was a late run home after a long day at work. It was on the edge of the platform like it had been dropped right as someone was stepping on or off a train. I entered the platform area behind a small group of people – and it was pretty obvious who was the local and who was the tourist. The locals walked right by the artifact without a second glance, and the tourists stopped and gawked for a moment – before becoming self-conscious of even being near such a thing – with the the wife pulling the husband and kids away to wait for the next train. For that first moment, their unguarded expressions showed all of the fascination of aliens visiting from another planet. It was pretty obvious that the closest they’d been to anything like that was watching “Traffic” on HBO.

Another thing that made this particularly poignant was the recent arrest of Lief Garrett for drug possession at a Metrolink stop. When I saw that pipe I immediately thought of that arrest – and perhaps the staring tourists had done the same. I’m not one for Schadenfreude, but it goes to the pervasiveness of the drug problem. From the latest pill-popping pop-star on the skids to the most anonymous addict, this stuff is everywhere. I blog about the latest cool, nifty thing I’ve discovered living here in LA LA Land and I thought it only fair to show a bit of its underbelly, too.

So, I took a quick picture of the pipe as an exhibit for this blog, and then went to pick it up and toss it into the garbage. I didn’t want to leave it there for someone to step on and possibly cut their foot – and I also didn’t feel right about just kicking it down into the rail area. I had been fighting off a respiratory infection and had a package of Hall’s cough drops in the laptop bag that goes with me back and forth to work. So I emptied it of the last few cough drops and used the plastic zip-lock bag as a “glove” to pick up the pipe and place it in the garbage. Again, I caught the tourists staring – this time at me as I stepped away from the trash bin and back to the edge of the train platform. I’m sure there’s one thing we were both thinking at that moment – it’s hard to know how to feel about something like this when it’s this up-close-and-personal.