When he wakes up in the middle of the afternoon, Erick Hernandez dreams of escaping Los Angeles.

Born and raised an Angeleno, at 37, the security guard and heavy metal enthusiast has soured on city life.

“To me, cities define people who are always in a rush, people are always cranky, 

they're always pissed off. Me, I'm the opposite,” says Hernandez. “If I could, I'd like to give everyone a hug, but here in L.A., if you do that, you're asking for trouble.”

Erick Hernandez (Anne Branigin/Neon Tommy)

Hernandez commutes regularly from his home in Pasadena, where he lives with his wife and two children, to his job in downtown L.A., where he works the graveyard shift at Wells Fargo. This means that when many commuters are on their way to work, Hernandez is heading home.

While taking the train certainly beats the traffic, it’s also confirmed Hernandez’ negative view of L.A.

“There's a lot of angry, agitated ... mentally disturbed people, always causing problems,” says Hernandez. 

“One guy always loves to show his genitals to young kids, to anyone who's there. He'll rub it, calls himself Geronimo. You get a lot of strange individuals.”

To keep himself awake and energized, Hernandez listens to heavy metal on his commute. Today, he’s carrying Slash’s autobiography in his gym bag. And, when asked if there is anything he likes about L.A., he quotes a lyric from Guns’ N Roses “Paradise City.”

“Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty,” he says, staring off past the train tracks. “But even the women here [have] kind of an attitude.”

When Hernandez fantasizes about leaving L.A., he imagines living “the rock-star’s life,” taking just a few pants and t-shirts, putting it into his Adidas gym bag and taking off to somewhere down South, where the spaces are wider and the people are nicer.

“I don’t want to take all my belongings with me because that’s just delaying the process. So if I just take very few essentials and [then I’d] just deal with it when I can when I get to my destination. And somehow survive,” says Hernandez.

Hernandez on train. (Anne Branigin/Neon Tommy)

And yet, when Hernandez thinks about how his perfect day would begin, it’s not animals roaming wide open spaces, or beautiful women, or the slow and gentle pace of Southern life that comes to mind. It’s his daughter.

“You would never know the feeling until you have kids of your own. It’s like, ‘I have to go to work.’ I have a new reason, a new purpose in life,” says Hernandez.

So for now, the South and its promise of the laid-back life to which Hernandez feels suited will have to take a back seat to his family.  

“Every time I go to work I think, no, I just can’t do it,”  says Hernandez. “But I have to.”

(Lamarco McLendon/Neon Tommy)

Contact Staff Reporter Anne Branigin here, and follow her on Twitter here.