A Saturday night riding the D.C. Metro with the Guardian Angels

"No waaaaayyy!" Cynthia Wallace yelled, her voice echoing in the cavernous underground tunnel. "The Guardian [bleeping] Angels?!"

She high-fived and fist-bumped and took a ton of photos of the two men in red berets and paramilitary pants, the whoosh of memories bringing the 61-year-old back to hard days in New York, back to being a teenager and being scared.

"All we wanted to do was skip school and eat ice cream and all these gangsters kept coming around, telling us we gotta join a gang," Wallace said. "The Guardian Angels, those dudes came and walked me to school every day. I was safe until 12th grade."

But this is 2023, in a clean and low-key Metro station in D.C. No gangster graffiti — not even a rat — in sight. Are things bad enough to bring them back?

Riding the rails with the Guardian Angels on a Saturday night here was a little like traveling with Salt-N-Pepa on a retro mixtape tour. There is a lot of nostalgia out there for the group that marked the danger of New York City subways and juiced America with their hint of vigilante justice.

"Does that come out? Like a knife?" John Ayala asked, as he did a pre-patrol pat-down of one of his volunteer Angels, yanking at the giant, metal carabiner clipped to the man's belt loop.

The man nodded.

"Then that's gotta go," Ayala told him, before moving on to frisk the next Angel. "No weapons!"

Ayala, 53, was one of the original Angels, joining the New York crew when he was 16 and ripped. The Angels looked as tough as the gangbangers they confronted, and they clashed with elected officials and cops.

"Back in the days of the crack cocaine wars, we did patrols around drug areas," Ayala said, as he watched his red berets stride through the crowds at the busy L’Enfant Plaza Metro station downtown. "We scared off users. Sometimes we grabbed the dealers’ drugs and stomped on them. That made them mad."

He was once stabbed in the back with an ice pick. He circled his shoulders and squared his back. "Nah," he said. "It's not hurting anymore."

It's easy to recall the Angels’ vigilante flavor and history of citizen arrests as New York reckons with the death last week of Jordan Neely, a subway passenger who was reportedly annoying other riders when a 24-year-old Marine veteran took him down in a fatal chokehold. The New York subways have been filled with protesters all week, demanding that the Marine be charged with murder.

D.C. feels like it's in a crime crisis. It was unsurprising when a 12-year-old was charged last week with nine carjackings, assaults and robberies. While overall crime is down compared with last year, homicides, car thefts and robberies are up. Plus, the year began with the killing of Metro transit worker Robert Cunningham, who died trying to protect a woman during a shooting rampage at the Potomac Avenue Metro station.

That's what made Ayala decide to revive his transit patrols. But he also knows that crime spikes can inspire vigilantes, and he cautions against that at the start of each patrol.

"We don't do that," Ayala said. "We don't grab ’em, slam ’em and have them suck on the concrete," he said, reminding me of the frisking he did before the patrol. "We’re not judge, jury and executioner. We’re a crime deterrent."

At the turn of the century, after D.C. crime rates improved, the Metro and street patrols went dormant. Ayala, who also worked with Guardian Angels patrols across the country and the world ("Tokyo was wild!"), kept a small group in D.C. going that visited schools and gave out backpacks of school supplies.

"It was more public relations, positive influences on youth," he said.

His new patrol has a couple of guys who are the weekend warrior types — a store manager, an events staff guy. There's a longtime community activist, a mother of five, a few security guards Ayala recruited at the school he runs for special police officers.

The Saturday patrol was buzzing with some of the biggest action they’ve seen since Ayala revived the train patrols.

"There was an officer over there, all alone," Ayala said, pointing to the platform at L’Enfant Plaza on the other side of the tracks. "We saw he was surrounded by these rowdy kids."

So the angels moved, riding down, then up the escalator, eventually circling the teens surrounding the officer.

"And the officer was like, ‘Where the hell did y’all come from?’" he said. The Angels helped escort the teens out of the station, defusing the situation.

"One of them even smiled at me," said Samone Corely, 26, one of Ayala's recruits. "He was like, ‘Y’all are real!’"

Corely began her Saturday patrol with a mess in the back of car 3146 on the Green Line.

There was the cart guy ("We know him, he's harmless") struggling to get a little red wagon loaded with junk out of the half-closed door. A woman in a spandex body suit blazed up a little pipe. The guy next to her was wrestling a rental bike; he and the pipe lady split a nasal Narcan dose.

To Corley's right was a guy balancing a stack of trays filled with New York strip steaks. The next guy over was bleeding and drooling, occasionally putting a wad of gauze to his wound. And then a guy got on board and chewed his hospital bracelet off while staring me down.

"Thanks for being here, lady," the spandex-clad lady said to Corely, after putting her pipe back in her bag.

Corely, who works full-time as a security guard at a government building, smiled and kept an eye on the crew. Eventually, each of them got off at different stops.

They crisscrossed the city that night, standing in the middle of each car in a parade rest, one hand behind the back, the other one holding a pole, scanning the car. At each stop, they poked their heads out — eight red berets looking left and right across the platform, making as much eye contact with passengers as possible.

It was the first night out as an Angel for Danielle Jones, 26, who works as a special police officer in government buildings.

"I don't get as much interaction with people in that job," she said. "I like that here."

She is a tall, imposing Angel with gold cuffs on each biceps, thick lashes and more gold in her forehead and nose piercings.

"And I like the way people look at me. With respect," she said.

"See, when I was a little girl, I was so scared of the trains," she said. "I was jumped when I was 14. They took everything. My shoes. My coat. It was winter."

As the train stopped, she poked out her head and scanned the platform. A passenger leaned over and said, "thank you for being here," before getting off the train.

"Step back," the Metro recording said. And Jones resumed her stance in the center of the car.

"So I wanna be here for her," she said. "For that little girl. Who's scared to be alone on the train."