Can I detect if an arbitrary CSS transition has started

In my close function I want to do all my DOM clean-up stuff after css transitions have finished running. But there might not be any transitions running/might be multi-stage ones - (maintaining the stylesheets is out of my hands).

How would I go about writing a function something like the following

function close () {
  myEl.removeClass('open');
  if (animation is running/about to be run) {
    // wait for transition to end, then recursively check to see if another 
    // one has started, wait for that ...
    // then
    cleanUpDOM(); 
  } else {
    cleanUpDOM(); 
  }
}

My thoughts so far are to wrap the initial check in a timeout/requestAnimationFrame in order to give the animation a chance to start then checking to see if it's running. Unfortunately, without a transitionstart event I have no idea how to check if a transition has begun.

edit Answers recommending jquery are irrelevant as jquery animations are javascript animations, not CSS transitions