Stranded Riders: Tired, Late, Lost and Angry

This is the way it was on Day 3 of the MTA transit strike for April Nicholson.

The 33-year-old single mother started out from her Elden Avenue home in Pico-Union at 7:45 a.m., hoping to drop her two children at day care and still make her 9:30 a.m. photography class at Santa Monica College.

Normally, she would push her 18-month-old daughter Raven to her baby-sitter’s near MacArthur Park in a stroller. But the stroller was broken so she grasped Raven’s hand and off they went. With her free hand, Nicholson tried unsuccessfully to keep her 4-year-old son Dustin within arm’s reach. Within 20 minutes, Nicholson was sweating noticeably. Dustin was hungry.

Raven arrived at the baby-sitter’s an hour late. Even though she and Dustin managed to catch a DASH bus to help with part of the trip to her son’s day care near Los Angeles’ skid row, the mother and child were two hours late.

The boy was turned away because he was tardy.

Nicholson got a lecture for being late. Getting to her class in Santa Monica was out of the question.

Nicholson’s was just one of the quietly desperate dramas unfolding in Los Angeles as transit-dependent riders struggled to come to grips with life without MTA buses and trains.

The strike has people walking, begging for rides, catching local municipal buses here and there or sitting it out at home.

For April Nicholson, Francisco Jacabo, and the family of Luis and Ana Maria Martinez, Monday was a day of agonizing decisions, immense frustration and anger.

They worried about being stranded miles from their children. Or losing jobs. And they had sometimes bitter words for the powerful elected officials and unions that had turned their lives inside-out.

For others, like bicycle riding Lenin Barahona, 30, there was even time to find a little silver lining.

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Francisco Jacabo’s home in Boyle Heights is two transfers away from his job cleaning an office building in Compton.

It is an 11-mile, 90-minute journey when all buses are running and Jacabo didn’t know how he would make it.

On Sunday night, he agonized over how he could reach work by 8 a.m.

“They don’t like me to miss many days,” Jacabo said inside his weather-beaten rental on Pecan Street. If he is just a little late, he draws harsh, scolding looks when he arrives at his minimum-wage job.

“I don’t know what I am going to do,” he said, fearing that tardiness might cost him his job. “I can call a taxi, but that will cost me a whole day’s pay. I’d be working just to take the taxi to and from my job.”

Just before sunup, he got a call. A friend offered to drive him. But he knew it was just a one-day reprieve.

After he left, Jacabo’s wife, Adriana Flores, expressed relief.

But her worries would continue as long as the strike lasts and she was bitter toward those who are unable to resolve the labor dispute.

“They don’t think of us,” Adriana Flores said. “They just think of their own well-being.”

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About the same time Jacabo was leaving for his job, Ana Maria Martinez rolled out of bed at her home on 54th Street in South-Central Los Angeles. It was 5:30 a.m., and still dark outside. A heavy fog rested like a white blanket over their house.

Martinez wasn’t expected at her housekeeping job in La Cienega Park for three hours. Her husband, Luis, didn’t start his job as a cook in Beverly Hills until 9 a.m.

Both got up early to catch a ride with Ana’s brother, Benjamin Palomares, that would take them part of the way to their jobs.

Their ride got them to Olympic and La Cienega boulevards, close to Ana Maria’s housekeeping job, but a long walk to Beverly Hills for her husband.

With time to kill before her job started, Martinez waited on the street, which gave her time to think about her son, Danny.

Normally, she drops her son off at Angeles Mesa School before she catches her bus. But because she had to leave so early, 10-year-old Danny was left to walk down 54th Street alone.

“Poor Danny,” the worried mother said as she boarded her brother’s van. “I had to wake him up at 6:30 when we left and just told him to be careful crossing the streets,” she said.

A 13-year-old cousin, Jesus, who lives with the family and attends school in Hollywood, was left stranded and missed school Monday.

Just two months ago, the Martinezes were faced with a difficult choice.

They had enough money for only one big purchase. They needed a car, but what they wanted more than anything was a home.

“I always dreamed of owning my own house,” said the mother, who emigrated from Nogales, Mexico, in 1984. “I preferred buying the house because I always figured we’d have the bus.”

They bought the home.

They didn’t regret their decision until Monday.

The strike angers Martinez.

“My husband works more than 12 hours every day and no one pays him overtime,” she said. “I get sick and I don’t have health care. Then when we hear the bus drivers demanding more money, we think, ‘What about us?’ They don’t care about us, they’re just thinking about themselves.”

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While watching a fleet of yellow taxis and gypsy cabs troll by Santa Monica Boulevard and Vermont Avenue at 3 a.m. Monday, Lenin Barahona, 30, said he was one of the few commuters who didn’t mind the strike.

He sat on an old 10-speed bicycle, wearing a blue janitor’s uniform beneath his yellow jacket, ready to pedal five miles to his job at USC.

Normally, the routine predawn trip on Line 204 down Vermont Avenue would take Barahona 15 minutes, during which he could chat with other Central American laborers who usually boarded at the same time.

Starting from his apartment on a dark strip of Hoover Street in east Hollywood, the former Nicaraguan Sandinista soldier figured he could make the trip in 45 minutes, with the wind at his back.

“Los Angeles actually looks more tranquil without all the buses,” Barahona said, pedaling slowly past a few homeless men who had converted a neighborhood bus stop into a bed.

While running short errands on his bike, “I’m sometimes behind a bus and am forced to breathe in all that dirty diesel smoke. Today, we can breathe easier.”

Barahona said he sympathizes with the bus drivers’ call for better working conditions.

“We all want better lives,” he said. “We all want to advance ourselves.”

Saying that he has been studying the developing negotiations in the news, Barahona predicted that the strike will last until Wednesday.

“That’s how long it should take for the city to really feel the impact,” Barahona said. “We can suffer a little to help them.”

With that, he sped downhill on Vermont, disappearing in the morning fog.

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At times of crisis, the MTA starts up a “lifeline” service. The transit agency may have had someone like April Nicholson in mind in coming up with the term to describe the need some have for buses.

To get her children to day care and arrive on time at school, Nicholson rides three MTA buses, sometimes a train and two of Santa Monica’s Big Blue Buses.

“And I do that every day,” she said.

Two years ago, she was pregnant and living on skid row. After a lot of counseling, Nicholson landed on her feet.

On Monday, she walked those same trash-strewn skid row streets to get to her son’s day-care center. As they made their way, many of the homeless folks greeted her and Dustin by name.

They were two hours late at the government-funded Para Los Ninos center. Nicholson hoped her son’s teacher would make an exception because of the transit strike.

They didn’t.

“You’re going to have to make arrangements to get him here on time,” one of the center teachers told her.

Later, a spokeswoman told a Times reporter who had accompanied Nicholson on her trek that the teachers who turned her away misunderstood her situation. Dustin would be allowed back today regardless of strike-related tardiness.

Nicholson said she would have taken her son with her to Santa Monica College, but her teachers had already admonished her for bringing him to class.

Besides, Dustin was complaining about being hungry and thirsty. Nicholson was tired, sweaty and angry. It was time to turn around and head back home.

She criticized the bus drivers.

“They’re really messing up people’s lives,” she said.

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Times staff writers Antonio Olivo and Douglas P. Shuit contributed to this story.