Danger!

My morning began in a time zone in another place. Five p.m., L.A. time, I found myself a lone passenger on a bus heading north, cutting through left-over desert littered with metallic trash jutting out of the sand like some recently-forgotten, half-buried treasure. The sun shone on those barren scrap-fields, and they sparkled like a stage of fallen stars.

So much luminous waste can make you start seeing things. I could have sworn that dinosaurs (real live versions of those in the La Brea tar pits) were advancing in a state of frozen motion. I blinked. Turned out it was only the sun setting on cranes at rest.

"Where you from?" the bus driver, a guy in his late fifties with a belly which boasted years of taking in the beer, asked. He hadn't spoken before so it took me a moment to come out of myself and respond to him.

"Paris," I finally said, my voice dropping low so he wouldn't get the idea of striking up a conversation with me just because he was bored. Hell, I was tired. What, after a twelve-, thirteen-hour trip?

"What's it like in Paris? Guess it's a real culture shock going there, huh? Guess there's a lot of parley-vous français and wine-drinking going on in that city. I hear they drink a hell of a lot over there. Don't take baths either from what I've been told. Must be one funky place!"

Going to Paris had never produced a shock to my system. Not even the first time. Villages connected by tunnels serviced by reliable trains (when they aren't on strike). Paris, like many of its inhabitants, is thoroughly modern, utterly sophisticated, and hopelessly provincial. What's so shocking about that?

I told the driver that all his guesses were better than any of mine, chuckling so he wouldn't take offense. After all, I was back in America where a chortle or a smile might mean everything. But knowing I couldn't keep up pretenses, I stuck a pair of lightweight headphones in my ears, and plugged into a Walkman playing Gilberto Gil, from which audio-vantage point I viewed my entry into L.A. as though it were no more than a film of my own making. The bus, meanwhile, moved on, stopping frequently (picking up passengers, letting them off), which broke its momentum the instant it seemed to gain some.

I tried to visualize the end of the road; imagine the moment when I would get off, greet the friend at whose home I would be staying. Settle in for the night. But every time the bus covered some small, obscure distance, a length of road seemed to open up to one of two possibilities: either the trip would go on forever, or I'd never get where I was going alive.

Around 6:15 I found myself a lone passenger again. But only for a moment. The bus stopped. Five boys got on wearing colors which signified they belonged, if only to each other. Not one of them paid.

It occurred to me that the driver might comment on their little oversight, le genre: "Back in my day when people got on the bus, they paid their fare. Fare was fair. Know what I mean? Nowadays folks don't believe in nothing but a free ride. People just be assuming that without paying a price they can get somewhere. Now ain't that a hell-of-a-way to look at life!"

But the driver's tongue must have sat thick and stiff in his mouth. He didn't say a word as four of the free-riders swaggered to the rear of the bus, as if by silent command. Silence (I was listening carefully) also commanded that I belonged to the leader, a 17- or 18-year-old baby with droopy pants and rotten teeth overlaid in gold, who stood looking down at me like a whip-snapping young overseer.

The boy flashed a smile that glimmered like those metal scrap-fields that had deluded me into seeing things that are not. But this was no time to abandon myself to a space in my head where dinosaurs danced with figments of my imagination.

I stared up at this man-child, to whom life had promised so little. Glowing like luminous waste, violence lay low in his eyes, hiding behind the gold-decked smile. I wanted to smile back but my face got stuck, so I averted my eyes.

"Look at him!" I told myself, "and remember where you are for Christ's sake!" You're not in Paris where flirting doesn't necessarily lead to fucking; where titillation is not a prelude to mutilation; where a man might follow you up the subway stairs (walking a careful distance behind you to get a good look up your dress), invite you for coffee when you've both reached the air, then tell you on the way to a café that he's a cameraman and you're like light to his eyes. This is not Paris where, if a man or two do decide to take you on, you can tell them to make their move as long as they are fully aware that one, two, or all three of you are going to end up dead in a struggle over your body. "This is L.A.," I screamed to give myself a good, hard mental pinch. "You could get shot in the face for looking at that boy the wrong way!

"So look at him the right way," I whispered inaudibly, "or close your eyes and pray, if you remember how."

So many women have met their deaths kneeling. I looked that boy in the eyes. I looked beyond his eyes. Recognized him. I reached out to touch his hand, knowing, explicitly, that gesture might save my life. Besides, with his arm extended, an open palm approaching my lap, the boy's hand was already mine for the taking.

I grasped it firmly. And when I did, the boy's fingers wrapped around my knuckles like a steel coil. Locked in his grip, I heard laughter in the back of the bus, bottles crashing to the floor. I no longer felt the bus moving. The bus driver had turned zombie on me. I was on my own, and had played one empty hand. Now the boy would play his.

"What's your name?"

I heard a slurred voice sing out: I wanna know your name? A chorus swooned in the background, gurgling and laughter fizzled in my ears. I wanted my hand back. But I waited. I've waited before. I waited for Christmas when I was little. I waited small eternities for RTD buses (L.A.'s rapid transit bus system) once upon a time when I lived in this tropical, edge-city, sprawl. I've waited hours to be picked up from airports by family who'd forgotten I had come to town. I've waited for phone calls from lovers, for their on-line names to light up my screen.

I waited for my hand. While I did so I told the boy my name. Three times I repeated it because, like most Americans, he couldn't get it in one go.

"Janine."

"Janey."

"No. Janine"

"Jeannie."

"Ja. Say Ja." He said Ja. "Neene. Like mean. That's what my little brother called me when he was a baby."

He said Neene, then put the two syllables together. Smiling, he began to rub his stomach with the satisfaction of a man who's just wolfed down a feast. I wasn't complaining. With both hands on his belly, I had my hand back! I shoved it between my legs, though on hindsight, that wasn't the safest place to keep it.

"My name's Capone," the boy told me.

I swallowed hard to stop myself asking this child if that was the name his mother had given him at birth or some label he'd branded himself with in a violent rite of passage. I made sure the only thing he saw me do was shake my head gently in acknowledgment of what he said, the name falling quietly from my lips.

"Janine, where you stay at? I stay over by the Coliseum."

"I live in Paris."

I will never understand the boy's reaction to this piece of information. He left me, walking tall to the back of the bus, his pants riding the tail-end of his narrow butt. I should have kept my head still, which might have signaled that I considered our encounter a thing of a not so distant past. But when someone whets your curiosity it's hard to close anything, even when fear is fuming in your stomach.

My head turned, and I watched as the boy told his friends, "She stay in Paris." He said it with pride. They sat silent for a moment, as if awe-struck, then watched respectfully as Capone made his way back to me like the Lone Ranger staking out a claim.

There his hand was again, this time reaching for my face. I grabbed it, like I might take hold of a baby's foot, before it could connect with my skin.

"You got some pretty eyes. Anybody ever tell you that?"

He started grinning and teasing me.

"Come on now, they tell you that all the time, don't they?"

I laughed and told him the truth: "Not all the time."

After a moment of silence (he was thinking, rubbing his chin) he asked: "You wanna go with me?"

Now when boys and men tag after you on busy sidewalks speaking nonsense to you and every other female between the ages of 8 and 50, ridiculous things like, Baby can I come?, you usually laugh, shake your head (as if in pity) and continue on your way. Or you might ask them in play, "I don't know, can you?" But this boy wasn't playing. His proposition was about as serious as the heart attack I could have had that very moment.

What in the world, I wondered, did this boy see in my face that would have him believe that I would even consider accompanying him and four other drunken boys to some place unknown to me, near the Coliseum? It should have been a joke. He wasn't laughing. Surely this was one of those moments I had to stop and consider who I might be from the world's point of view.

The boy stood there looking down at me, patient. He didn't seem to mind my silent deliberation. He even dropped my hand, as if to say, "Here, take as much of yourself as you need while you make up your mind."

My mind wasn't the problem. You've got to be careful how you say "no" to a man, even one you think you know. How many times had I had to learn that lesson?

I decided that I couldn't. I couldn't tell Capone no.

"I'm thirty-three years old," I told Capone, thinking that might dissuade him. Tell a 40-year old man you're 33 and the fantasy he fancied will evaporate like a late morning dream. But it turns out there's all the difference in the world between a man who needs to suck the youth from a young woman to bolster his own flagging mast and a man-child who's still strong enough to suck and be sucked all on his own juice. Capone all but laughed in my face.

"Thirty-three! Baby, that ain't nothing but a number to me!"

Good thing I have a sense of humor. Our moment of mutual joy bought me some time. A few moments later I served him another line, a true one for what it's worth.

"I can't go with you Capone. I'm going to have an operation the day after tomorrow. That's why I've returned to L.A."

I don't know what I expected Capone's reaction to be. For all I knew he had banged a few bodies deathside in his time. Why should the state of my health mean anything to him?

The grin dropped out of Capone's face. His eyes lost a layer of glaze, making him actually appear sober for a second or so. He extended his arm, reaching neither for my lap nor my face. Touching me lightly on the shoulder he said, as though speaking to a distant cousin (which I may well be) "You take care of yourself, you hear?" A twinge of something southern softened his voice. Probably came from Texas, as a little boy; his family in search of a better life.

"Thanks," I said.

I stared into the boy's face for the last time. Some doors don't shut on their own. You have to help them along, gently. I had to recognize him once more, let him know I did indeed catch sight of him behind Capone's golden grin. I sought to speak to the ghost-writer before the boy named Capone changed his mind.

"Thank you."

Capone made his way to the rear, his strut deliberately slow, lazy, and crooked. (Odd how a person can gain strength from pretending to be a cripple). I knew he had to be grinning. Capone had resumed his role. Man has a tendency to survive.

About fifteen minutes later I got off the bus, still kicking it, as Capone might have said. Heading down an isolated sidewalk, which ran alongside an abandoned tract, I felt that bus in my back, standing there, the doors probably wide open, like the gates to heaven. Only when I heard the bus pull away did I feel my legs come back to me, as I stumbled around in that lamp-lit dusk breathing that gorgeous, polluted, L.A. air.

And while echoes of drunken laughter and clanging bottles rang in my ears I couldn't help but wonder: Here, in this City of Angels, how many invisible souls remain locked inside the bodies of boys with names like "Capone" merely as a means of staying alive?