Staying Ahead of the Pack With a Professional Passenger
The plan was to beat the traffic. The plan is always to beat the traffic. But I was running late Thursday, and there was no way to make it from east Hollywood to Lynwood and back in time for an appointment.
Not in morning rush hour.
But a thought occurred as I approached the Home Depot on Sunset and saw the usual loose knots of day laborers.
A colleague of mine, Peter Hong, had told me he once considered hiring someone to ride with him east from Monrovia on the Foothill Freeway, so he could zip along in the carpool lane. Perfect.
I pulled into the Home Depot and my car was swarmed, and out of the crowd I picked David Ramos, 40.
Ramos, a drywall specialist, wanted $25 for two hours. They all want $25 for two hours, but you can cut a deal for half that. Ramos had a kind face, though, so I said OK.
Somewhere in the gulf between my Spanish and his English, Ramos got the idea he’d been hired to trim trees. As we turned onto the Hollywood Freeway headed south, and then the Harbor, he realized I had hired him to do nothing but sit there.
By his expression, my Guatemala-born passenger seemed to be thinking: What a country. Once we hit the diamond lane and breezed past an endless trail of unfortunate laggards, Ramos seemed to be settling comfortably into the job.
A little music wouldn’t be a bad idea, he said, and he sang along with the ballad on the radio as this great land of opportunity breezed by.
“Suave trabajo,” Ramos said as we warped into the carpool lane on the 105 east.
Smooth work indeed. We pulled into Lynwood in record time, I completed my errand, and we rocketed back like we’d just robbed a bank. You hit that elevated flyway on the northbound Harbor Freeway and you’re skywalking over the palms, like something out of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”
All you can do from on high is pity the gas-guzzlers growing ulcers down there in the backup, one poor fool per car.
“Bye-bye,” Ramos said, very much into the spirit of things now. As we turboed toward the downtown skyline, he wondered if I might need him again later in the week.
And that was when the light went on.
Sure I could use him. Thousands of people could use him.
We’ve got the worst traffic in the nation and you’d think there were land mines in the HOV lanes the way people avoid carpools. Meanwhile, an estimated 25,000 desperate men gather each morning on roughly 125 corners in Southern California to beg for work.
We could save the ozone layer, ease traffic, and redistribute wealth with one stroke.
Now is the time to get it going, if you ask me. Another 3 million people will pour into L.A. County over the next 25 years, and by the most optimistic projections, roughly 14 of them will carpool.
Ramos said I’d find no shortage of day laborers who’d gladly take $6 or $7 an hour as professional passengers. “I’ll do it all day for $60, if you want me for eight hours,” he said.
By the hour or by the day, Ramos is onto something about the commuter psyche. People would rather hire a passenger than endure the inconvenience of making carpool arrangements with a neighbor or office mate.
I haven’t even mentioned the cultural exchange component.
The round-trip between Hollywood and Lynwood, which I feared would be two hours of hell, was a stress-free 45 minutes. With nothing but time on my hands, I offered to take Ramos to the restaurant of his choice for breakfast.
So there we were at Carl’s Jr. on Sunset, and Ramos filled me in on his life story. He and his wife came up from Guatemala five years ago, leaving their three children with his parents.
His wife is a Beverly Hills live-in maid and makes about $250 a week. Ramos makes roughly the same, sometimes more, and they send half of everything home to support the family.
It’s a hard life, but people like the Ramoses head north because people here will pay for anything.
They’ve got someone to walk their dogs, dress their children, trim their hedges, make their beds, wax their legs, clip their toenails and pick up their groceries. Professional passengers could catch on in a big way. I even see Hollywood do-gooders pulling up to the Academy Awards with immigrants in tow.
One world, one people.
Suave trabajo.
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Steve Lopez’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. You can reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com.
