Strangers Give Each Other a Lift in Midst of a Bus Strike

The Nissan Nanny Wagon cut through the morning dew in Boyle Heights, trolling for cargo. I was trying to do my part to keep the city’s economy clicking.

There’s no telling how many children are unkempt, or how many antiques are growing dust, because domestics can’t get to work during the MTA strike. One limo company told me a Hollywood client had called to have a nanny picked up and delivered to his home in the hills, a service I am willing to perform for free.

Several people on the street, including the woman who crushes oranges and makes fresh juice on the corner of Soto Street and Cesar Chavez Avenue, tried to help me find passengers.

“Necesita transportacion?” she would ask passersby.

But although thousands of people were left stranded by this strike, some of them seemed leery about getting into a car with a gray-bearded stranger.

Then along came Juan Carlos Garcia.

On his daily trek to work, Garcia takes the No. 68 bus to the 260. On Thursday, he was pushing a child’s Mongoose bicycle east along Cesar Chavez, the front wheel loose and wobbly. He was accompanied by the woman of his dreams and the mother of his 1-year-old daughter, Stacy -- the lovely Margarita Castillo.

Garcia, 27, and Castillo, 21, make a handsome couple. She wants to be a nurse, and was on her way to Roosevelt Community Adult School. Garcia was on his way to the Cesar Chavez Library in Maywood, where he works the counter, checking books in and out.

Instead of being suspicious of me, Garcia wondered why I wasn’t worried about having strangers in my car. What’s to be worried about? Maybe the only good thing to come out of this strike is that a fractured city is coming together a bit with chance encounters like this one.

We squeezed the Mongoose into the trunk of the Nissan. I tied the lid down with my shoestring and we were on our way.

“I got a ride from a neighbor yesterday,” Garcia said. “But another neighbor wanted to charge me $15 today to drive me to my job. Fifteen dollars! That’s too much.”

And yet he had no malice in him, despite being inconvenienced by striking MTA employees whose hourly pay is nearly three times what he makes.

We dropped off Castillo at the Roosevelt school on Saratoga Street and then headed southeast toward Maywood, a course that usually takes Garcia 90 minutes by bus.

It would be a long way to travel on a wobbly, undersized bike, I said. That was when I got my first clue that despite having made some mistakes, Juan Carlos Garcia does not live his life in waiting. He looks at the past not as a low point, but as the beginning of his arc.

“I can’t not go to work,” he said, no matter how long the strike goes on. “You’ve got something in life to face every day, and I’m going to keep moving.”

The work ethic comes from his mother. Garcia’s father died of cancer when he was 4, and his mother hustled jobs while feeding and clothing Garcia and his little brother and wiping their noses, too.

“It was a miracle, how she did it,” Garcia said proudly, telling me she worked as a housekeeper. “One time she got off a bus and hurt her ankle. She broke it in three places. But she’s a strong woman.”

We drove east on 3rd Street and passed a house I visited last year to interview grieving parents. It was the home of an 18-year-old security guard who was shot dead while trying to stop a teenager who was spraying graffiti on an apartment building.

I started to mention this to Garcia, but stopped myself. He was riding that arc, and I didn’t want to get in the way.

“The weird thing is, I never liked being at a library,” he said. “Now it makes me realize what I missed. I read all the time -- fiction, nonfiction. I like stories of adventure.”

Garcia went to Salesian High School on a scholarship, but made the mistake of his life and dropped out to go to work.

“I was trying to be a man,” he said. “I wanted to help my mother.”

His mother knew better. She tried to talk him out of it, but Garcia had a problem he’s still trying to lick.

“I’m stubborn,” he said. “Back then, I thought working was going to be it. I just didn’t face reality because of how stubborn I was. I worked at McDonald’s, in a grocery store, at a warehouse.

“Now I know I have to be educated better -- it’s No. 1 for me to take care of my family. That’s why I’m still going to school while I work.”

We turned right on Atlantic Boulevard, getting closer now to the job where Garcia makes $9 an hour after four years. With his salary, he helps pay the rent for the mother who always took care of him no matter what. And he pays $100 a month to rent the living room at the home of Castillo’s parents.

He’s going to marry Castillo, he said, but not until he finishes school, gets a better job, and is able to pay for a proper place of their own.

“I want to get my pride up,” he said.

“It’s been a rough life, and at times I would cry. But you can’t just complain. You have to look for your opportunity and take it.”

We turned right on Slauson Avenue and pulled up to the library, next door to Maywood City Hall.

“If I had stayed in school,” Garcia told me, “I would have been successful. I think I still could be.”

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday.