Los Angeles CityBeat, which let me be senior staff writer through 2005 and which published some of my most experimental non-fiction, shut down operations yesterday.

Bummer. Not just ‘cuz CityBeat was the sort of unpredictable shaggy dog that publishers simply won’t make no more. It also bums me out that the weekly went down owing dough to your very favorite homey: I’d just written an impressionistic essay on 7th and Metro Station for New Angeles, which was set to become an periodic insert. Wanna read my last Southland Publishing missive in its unedited form?

Here ’tis, with just a few ironic links:

In London they call the city’s subway The Underground. (Or The Tube, the mention of which hardly ever fails to elicit the question, “What do you want from life? To get cable TV and watch it every night?”) The Underground, unlike the T in Boston or The Bay Area’s BART is the most apt of train names because the essence of a city’s life lies in its underground. Beneath urban ground’s surface lies the most compelling bustle, secret in its arrivals and departures and dramas and crises. Dope people tend to emerge from there. The mundane confront unexpected chaos, regularly.

In LA, we’ve merely that stilted system called MTA. Color-coded and cut off at its natural extremities. (Thanks again, Henry Waxman!) Our transit underground remains the most obscure of secrets. Superficial exploration of it reveals next to nada.

Say you’re a Blue Line — Downtown to Long Beach — regular. Say you’re a Staples Center denizen who exits street life at 7th Street and Figueroa and boards for a stop, after a bite at CPK. Or you’re that commuter to Long Beach who hops on at rush hour, following your shift behind the B of A’s protective glass. You, mon frere, don’t know the glory of Julian Dixon Station. All you know is the Middle-South LA crowd that tends toward the rugged and raw: Kids who are rowdy and casually chatting at volume 10; grown folks either headed home from back-breaking workaday gigs or shambling up to begin them — setting the table for Los Angeles. Maybe you’re hip to the cyclists schlepping their velos and miscreants peddling candy or sunglasses, kamikaze style. But you don’t know what’s hot about the stop. You are not underground enough.

Naw. You ain’t hip, not yet.

(A quick word about Dixon, who died nine years ago: Many have forgotten the U.S. Representative who chaired the House Ethics Committee, then the Congressional Black Caucus. It’s very underground that one of Dixon’s final contributions was co-sponsorship of the Permanent Partners Immigration Act of 2000, which was re-introduced last month as the Uniting American Families Act of 2009. An important component in the struggles of same-sex, bi-national couples, the act, if voted into law, would designate “permanent partner” status upon all adult immigrants who arrive in committed relationships. Dixon’s role in this legislation is made all the more poetic because his Congressional successor David Dreier has been outed by everyone from Larry Flynt to L.A. Weekly, yet is a dependable anti-gay vote.)

Our most offhandedly intrepid take one of the pee-scented lifts down to Platform 1, where the first sharp left leads to the core of what covertly makes LA a first-class city: Here, where Red (Hollywood) and Purple (Koreatown) Lines feed into the Blue, are our dizzying, unmarked crossroads. The Inland Empire commuter jumped in at relatively straight-forward Union Station ushers forth her flavor with the same certainty as that Echo Park wastrel. First comes supplement, the augmentation.

Enriching revelation might arrive in the form of a comely Southeast Asian lass who has thrown back her head in laughter, responding — you suppose — to one of her girlfriend cohorts’ mysterious jokes. Or it might be those Mexican punks in Affliction t-shirts and cheap leather. Is an all-ages show in Hollywood or a Pasadena house party their ultimate destination?

Unless you’re a bilingual stalker, the answers you cannot discern, because 7th and Metro/Julian Dixon Station — named for the late Congressman and mass transit enthusiast — pours free-flowing humanity in ways that calls to mind dam bursts. Here, two tiers beneath Fig the particles that make up our town are exploding every which way. From the X-ray tech headed home to 103rd and Central to the North Hollywood husband creeping to his housekeeper hook-up, the sense of what could really be going on in LA astounds. There’s no auto make and model that might give you a shortcut to summation of what a man or woman’s ultimately into.

And we’ve still got a whole floor to go.

I mentioned The Tube early on and, antiquated Fee Waybill reference aside, there was a point to that. The underground trains in London features off-track tunnels that fill most hours of the day with so many travelers as to overwhelm with micro-narratives — boarding and de-training, every day all day. No such thorough interwoven mystery in LA. (Union Station’s much too orderly.) We’ve just got the bottom of 7th and Metro Station to coalesce the city’s diffuse elements.

Our epicenter is what’s poppin’ here in the soft lighting of Platform 1, two levels down from the street, one up from trains headed west. Just one station away, on either side of Julian Dixon, the feeling dissipates. Pershing Square, just east, feels garden-variety diverse. On the other side, MacArthur Park is straight-up Latino, with a dominant family strand. These crucibles are nothing like the object of this ode, where the bottom platform’s sight of a sho nuff gangsta helping a befuddled (Ed: Please leave this non-trad spelling) Yurpean traveler decipher an intractable MTA map may very well restore your faith in humanity. (Or at least lead you to re-rent Stacey Peralta’s under-appreciated documentary Crips and Bloods: Made in America.) Where you might become nicer to the one you curl up with at night upon glimpsing a small and tattered brown couple chase a train down slick escalator stairs, fingers entwined all the journey, ‘cuz — if they hurry — a desperately needed day on the town will begin sooner.

There’s a tiny girl tapping her grimy, food-flecked fingers on your nice new jacket, and you don’t move. You do not ask that she stop. This is what happens when placed in the true throbbing heart of Los Angeles, crotch to ass with The People.

Let’s fess up: Riding the train can be scary, especially if MTA’s cops have boarded the train, demanding to see pass and once again you’ve violated the honor system. And your name is in their computer… But the our transit system is not frightening the way it can be in Oakland at 2 a.m. or Brownsville, Brooklyn at, well, any time. Generally, the subway in L.A. is scary in that it’s underutilized, often lonely and the sound of your own problems draw you toward the path of an oncoming train.

Shit ain’t lonely at 7th and Metro, just quiet enough on a Sunday morning for you to watch that late-phase Flava Flav manqué come at a stranger’s child with such delicacy and in such earnest. You see that trani — and, God, but there are tranis on trains, enveloped at dawn in, say, in the arms of brawny, mustachioed cats — or this mendicant and decide that maybe it’s the absence of California sun that habitually bathes our issues in a light that lies, that maybe no one here is hopeless or lost. That, underground, all we need is the right outcast to show us the way.

Did that suck? I’m too close to it to tell. One thing I do know is that my town is a lesser burg for not having an outlets for such unmannered writing. I’ll miss CityBeat even though Southland Publishing — for whom I worked as New Angeles EIC, too — is the cheapest fucking publisher ever to employ this nigga. Runaway titlist. No company has come close.

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