Jay and I were visiting Carlos, Keith, and Keia in Korea Town, which is an incredibly alliterative thing to do. We took the train.
DISCLAIMER: There is indeed public transportation in LA; it just blows. The buses are slow and terrifying, and incredibly unreliable. We constantly see signs posted about bus routes being changed or closed, and the one person I met who has taken the bus describes it as a nightmare.
The train is called The Metro, and whereas it seems foolhardy to ride a subway in the Land of Earthquakes, (helloooo, they base theme park attractions off of it) it is cheap and somewhat reasonable in terms of navigation and reliability.
Unlike real cities, where there are multiple Subway trains that run frequently, LA has a sorta-system. Even on a Saturday night at 9:40PM, there was a 20-minute gap in between trains at every station. It took us an hour and a half to get home from what would've been a 15 minute drive. (The difference is paying to park in Korea Town, and again in Hollywood when we got home.) It sucks but it's a good alternative if you hate spending $30 to park. Which I totally hate.
I also hate the Subway, because it's noisy and dirty and the seats are stinky like B.O. and I hate being underground and crowds make me nervous and the first time I rode it, a homeless guy stumbled off the car without pants or underwear. Some awesome good Samaritans held him upright while another kind-hearted soul tried to tie his pants up for him. All this while "Security" did a routine safety check of the car and mopped up most of the ejaculate.
But enough about ejaculate- this is a story about The Spaceman.
We'd just missed the train, so Jay and I sat on a large marble slab and prepared to wait 20 minutes for the next one. Other Metro-ers joined us, each with varying degrees of hygiene and consciousness of the concept of personal space. There was half of a seat left on the marble tuffet, next to Jay, when the Spaceman approached.
He was a Korean man, with short-cropped (science lab) hair, wearing a green flightsuit. His flightsuit bore no insignia; there was no name patch or squadron assignment. It was G.I., but not Government-Issued-to-him. He had loosely tied black combat boots on his feet, and carried a plastic bag containing a 6-pack of Korean purple soda (maybe?) in glass bottles.
The first odd thing about the Spaceman is that when he sat down next to Jay, he swung the bag with the bottles in a weird, jerky fashion, and in my mind I had a crystal clear vision of the bag of bottles slamming into Jay's face. The image was so fast and vivid that I reacted on instinct and thrust my arm out to try and protect Jay's face, but the bag merely followed its peaceful gravitational arc and landed harmlessly against the ground. Somehow, the image was beamed into my head, and it made me extremely uncomfortable. I lowered my arm with a sick feeling in my stomach.
The next thing I noticed about the Spaceman was that he was sweating. A LOT. Big, bulbous, cloudy-milky sweatdrops were formed and hovering on his face, neck, and hands. Any part of him I could see was... oozing....
And then we heard the noise:
"ehhhhhhhhhhhhhh... (pause)... ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhh... (pause) ...ehhhhhhhhhhhhhh"
Some sort of electronic space-croaking sound was coming from this man, but he wasn't moving or opening his mouth. He was right next to Jay, practically on his lap, but we couldn't tell how he was making this sound- it seemed to be coming from his chest cavity.
That's when we noticed that he was pulsing.
His chest (or "thorax") was ever-so-subtly gently pulsing in and out, like a balloon being inflated and deflated with air.
Convinced that at any moment, his Alien Host would pop out of his chest and eat us all, we high-tailed it for the train, which, Thank God, appeared at just that instant.
We never saw the Korea Town Spaceman again after that, but I am convinced that he was some sort of space traveller in human form with an Alien Host who enjoys grape soda and implanting violent thoughts in people's heads.
And I'ma ginnit! I won't tolerate Spacemen, their weird noises, their electro-pulsing or their evil brain neuro-trickery.
So I will take my car from now on.
Screw you, environment.
Spacemen.
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