Renovations

A Bout with COVID-19, a stroll along empire’s Crumble

THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART IS FALLING DOWN FALLING DOWN FALLING DOWN

It was calculated destruction. A shattered terminus meticulously considered, precisely measured, and completely beyond prediction. COVID was the great leveller. A demolishing force.

“No, I need you to get to the hospital right now.” I had only asked the doctor if I could sleep. Embrace that velvet specter of disintegrating consciousness. “Why don’t I see if I feel better in the morning?” The teledoc was in Arizona. Or Arkansas. Or Akron, Ohio. There’s a saying in Tennessee, or in Texas. Fool me once. Shame on me. Fool me--

“It’s important we get someone to check you out.” He told me over the phone.

“Do I need to call an ambulance?”

“You don’t have a car or anyone to drive you?”

I walked to Cedars Sinai Hospital in a grayed out haze along afterdark streets. Abandoned path. The Battle of Bosworth Field from Melvyn and his guests blasted horns of war in my ears. Welcome to the In Our Time podcast. Thanks for listening. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art passed to my left in the light pocked shadows. A rubbled phantom of miserable glory. An economy under construction. A building under advisement. A health system under taken.

Ahead on the path an impending trolley cart pimpled the pavement in cardboard detritus. The repetitive landmark of homeless belonging. Owned yet ownerless. These are my possessions, this is my value. Without these things that define me, I would be forced to carry this weight that I push. This broken shell. This promise of what I will become. Spanning Wilshire Boulevard. Look upon me and despair.

I could not see the trolley cart’s steward. Could not even smell them: COVID had taken that from me. Air beyond scent. Affluence beyond taste. Possessions beyond touch. Possessions that the eyes averted. Possessions that fouled the mind by mere inspection. Fractured rags, cardboard fabric, tent cloth and sweat marks. Look away. Do not consider the reduction. The graceful fall. I was once that child that capered and cantered. I was once that child that made my mother laugh. But do not look at me. Do not offer me sustenance.

Block the nose. Clog the heart. Walk past. Walk past. Build me again. Build me wider. Build me over Wilshire Boulevard.

The steel girders folded like paper. Luxury stones and splendid claddings. Pack your possessions as you flee this place. Into the dumpster goes this decay. A tremendous shuddering crash. Marble into metal. Glass into steel. Bang smash this wall that was a tower. Rodin’s Balzac stood here. “I once scandalized the Champ de Mars and all of Paris, but these influencers will not consider me.” Lonely bronze subjugated by a thicket of electricity. Streetlights over stars. This is the new age. New walls for a new age. New indifferent walls.

My breath came in cavernous gasps. Wide open chest. But the air was not reaching the brain. Trumpets over Bosworth Field. A black stillness across the tar pits. Glug glug glug. Not even sulphur could reach my nose now, as I slouched towards Cedars Sinai.

I turned up Fairfax.

In the weeks to come, when my senses recovered, I would taste tear gas here. A foul acrid tang. Notes of adrenaline. Dental anaesthetic and cinnamon. But that night it was silent. A city enfolded in fear. Wrapped in aversion. Filthy blankets and Garcetti’s lockdown.

Like oil that fear would bubble up in this very place. All of that rage and impotence. For human kin whose life was suffocated. Whose breath was arrested. A jackboot knee pinioned to the world.

Roving homeless meandered in ones and twos. Lone cars rushed by like capsules. Swallow quickly, blink away the tears. The shops were closed but in weeks they would be boarded up. Graffiti over plywood. Cracked glass and pleading signs. Melvyn and his guests were talking to my ears. But their words were silence. Their meaning homeless. Furtive glances across and behind. Survive this night in all of its shuffling steps.

Along Third Street the hospital beckoned. Fluorescent light with no subtlety. At last to a warzone hospital in a carpark. Tents and hazmat. But first your insurance card. First your value. “Do you have insurance?” “Thank goodness.”

Goodness thanked. “I’m sorry we don’t have any COVID tests to give you.” A lung x-ray, blood pressure, pulse, and a chat. $4,989.04.

The total budget for the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art is $650,000,000.00. It will stretch over Wilshire Boulevard. “The construction cost is approximately $1,400.00 per square foot, which is toward the low end of the range for new museum construction”. Infected with COVID I could afford 3.6 feet of health care.

In cowardice I took an Uber home. Thinking the whole time of the plague I was drowning the driver’s family in. “Wear your mask and don’t touch anything” the doctor told me. Kindly. The Uber cost $7.22. I gave a $3.00 tip.

On Wilshire Boulevard, three days before I fled LA - as a coward - I walked into the sunset in the full blood of the evening’s decay. Opposite the tar pit a huddled specter cast a long shadow towards me. A crouching form planted in the pavement. My phone clicked in the dappled light. Palm trees over the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the background. Concrete in the foreground. Raw misery in focus. Aesthetic glory fantasized from fragility and monument. Humanity and its greater.

Only as I walked past him did I realize it was a child. Coloring pencils in the failing light. A homeless, dirty child. I did not offer him a bed. Nor food. THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART IS FALLING DOWN FALLING DOWN FALLING DOWN.

[Editors’ Notes: In April 2020, demolition began of four of the main and original buildings of LACMA, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art. These buildings are to be replaced by a single-story structure designed by starchitect Peter Zumthor. The controversial new building (controversial because it will shrink the floor space of LACMA from 120,000 feet to 110,000 feet) will be elevated across Wilshire Boulevard, the main arterial street between Beverly Hills and Downtown LA. Before the pandemic the new museum was scheduled to open in 2024. LACMA and its surrounding tar pits are bordered by Fairfax Avenue and are adjacent to the Fairfax district - the central flashpoint of the May 30th protests and riots that were sparked by the killing and alleged murder of George Floyd by police. Rodin’s Monument to Balzac (1898) was one of the most controversial sculptures of its time, and was not publicly displayed until 22 years after the artist’s death. Until April, a cast of it stood - almost completely ignored - next to Chris Burden’s Urban Light (2008), a cluster of street lamps that is LACMA’s Instagram and dating app darling.]

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