Today we went to get our first oral Covid-19 test at a free clinic set up near Van Nuys High School along Kittridge St.
When we drove up the street, a little before 9am, there was already a parking lot in the high school set up with masked attendants, and tented booths marked #1, #2, and #3. There was an ENTER sign to drive up. A woman held up two fingers and we drove up to the second tent.
Another woman asked us our first question, “Chocolate or vanilla milk?”
It was strange because we had been instructed to not eat or drink 20 minutes prior to the test. “We are here for Covid tests,” we said.
“No, no. This is for free meals for students and their families,” she said.
That cracked us up. We left that area and drove around the block looking for parking.
There was another large line of people behind St. Elisabeth’s Church. Could that be the Covid testing site? No, no. This was a food bank pantry and they were distributing groceries.
We went up to Vanowen, and then back down and we parked along Kittridge and saw a CBS-TV van filming another line of people outside of a tent. Was this the Covid-19 test line?
No, no. This was free flu shots given by USC.
Then we saw the Covid tent, and the sign, and the RV parked along the sidewalk where you went and signed in.
After we signed in, another line. Six feet apart waiting.
A tent. We were ushered in, one at a time. A masked fire department man, standing six or more feet away, instructed how to cough into your elbow, how to unzip the plastic Ziploc, how to take out the long plastic wrapped swab, how to swish it around your mouth, under your tongue, on the roof of your mouth, and then insert it into a chemical container and break off the swab so it would fit into the tube. You then disposed of the litter, dropped your sealed plastic bag into another container, fixed your mask back onto your face to cover your mouth and nose, and then you walked over to the area where they were giving free flu shots.
Before you could get your anti-flu injection, you had to scan a QR code, which created a webpage which you had to fill out, with your hands, and your poor eyesight, and your mask; fill out the form which asked you to scan your insurance card, asked for your mother’s first name, asked for your email, your home address, your allergies, your date of birth, your telephone number.
The assistants were nice, helpful. Their boss was too, after she had been interviewed by CBS news. Then you were done with the fill in the information on your smartphone and you sat down in a tent, and took off your sweater, your sweatshirt, all the layers you wore on this blustery day, and then you got your flu shot.
But the best part of the day was laughing about driving into the wrong area and being asked before anything else if you wanted vanilla or chocolate.
Yesterday, Sunday, there were no evident calamities around us. Tragedy took a day off. The air was clear from fire smoke, some blue showed in the sky, and we went for an air-cooled drive around our San Fernando Valley behind tinted windows and masked faces.
We passed Woodley Park, once a bird sanctuary, now just a burned-out bunch of fields with blackened pieces of wood and broken fences, shopping carts of trash and an air of war, desolation and defeat.
There was the farm stand at Tapia Brothers and we stopped to buy tomatoes, Anaheim peppers, carrots and peaches, standing six feet away from other masked shoppers. Pulling out of the dusty lot there were two choices: drive somewhere else or go home. We chose the former.
We went for a drive west along Ventura Boulevard through Encino and Tarzana, past those billboarded and plastic signed points of shlock and tackiness beloved by many, demoralizing in a good year, demoralizing in a bad one.
At Newcastle, groups of Jews in masks, yarmulkes, and tallit, walked with prayer books, dressed in their Rosh Hashana suits and dresses. A mentally ill Black man, without a shirt, danced obliviously in front of the liquor store as the faithful passed by him pushing baby carriages, on their walk home.
Further west, a homeless woman emerged from a tent parked along a concrete channel behind the prow shaped Encino/Tarzana library, temporarily closed. A blue sign hung along the fence on Ventura, “NO DUMPING: This Drains to Ocean.”
We drove all the way to Shoup Avenue in Woodland Hills, a district of Los Angeles where people once moved to get away from everything bad in the city. Under the 101, dozens of men and women were set up in a trash camp, living under tarps, in tents, the public sidewalk their front lawn.
At Woodland Hills Park, where Uncle Paul, Aunt Frances, Cousins Barry, Helene, Julie, Jason, Delaney and Courtney, spent many days of the past half century in the world of juvenile baseball and softball, homeless RVs parked. I wonder what flowered apron and blue rubber gloved Aunt Frances, who died in 2012, would say. She kept a spotless house, even telling me she would not eat dark raisins because they reminded her of little bugs.
“Oh, Andy you’re so funny,” she would often say.
We turned down Erwin Street just to look at the corner ranch Aunt Frances and Uncle Paul bought for $63,000 in 1973. Uncle Paul is 99, a widower, still living there. The stucco is faded pink, there are bars on the windows, and Zillow estimates the house could fetch close to a million. Property taxes are about $800 a year, eternally fixed at the purchase price, a good deal for the retired soldier who fought at Iwo Jima and Leyte Island.
We didn’t go in but I thought of the inside I first saw in July 1974.
The Barcalounger, the brown carpet, the brown paneling, the yellow wallpaper, the cottage cheese ceilings, the dining room with the glass shelved cabinets full of Lladros and ceramic poodles and carved children with fishing poles, a room nobody ate in; the other dark rooms with the Roman shades or pleated drapes always pulled down against the sun, the bathrooms with wall-to-wall carpeting and mylar wallpaper, the rooms full of family photographs, the 1,762 square feet of living space without one book; the air-conditioning that ran year round, and the garage housing the Buick LeSabre, full of power tools and Leslie Pool Equipment, the refrigerator packed with Costco frozen foods, bottles of cold water and diet sodas, the TV always on for baseball and Fox News, these are the moments one cannot easily forget.
Then we turned around and drove east along Victory Blvd. passing the empty weed infested parking lot at temporarily closed Pierce College. We drove down Winnetka to get to the 101 and again passed another encampment under the freeway, more men and women living outdoors without housing in Los Angeles.
When I go out these days, leave my house for a drive, I am in another nation, not my own, a scarred and withered place of broken people, angry and exhausted, in a city unclean and unjust. And ominously, seemingly, frightfully just about ready for a violent revolution.
With the pandemic locking the world down until a cure is found, Los Angeles is again leading the way to find out how to do business and stay safe.
Here are some new innovations which are startling in their modernity and imaginativeness:
To keep patrons safe, many restaurants are now offering service directly to your vehicle by servers who are now called “carhops.”
To keep customers safe at home, many companies are now delivering food and beverages directly to homes.
The virus is less likely to be spread outdoors than in confined, indoor spaces. With that in mind, many buses in Los Angeles now offer open windows and open air transportation to riders.
No mask for Johnny. He is safe because he stays six feet away from every other child.
The danger of pumping gas, of putting your hands on a surface touched by hundreds of strangers, is one reason why service station attendants have again been added at many locations. With unemployment rising, pumping gas has eagerly become one of the most sought after careers in Los Angeles in the Covid Era.
And lastly, instead of cramming into a closed store with hundreds of other contaminated people, why not put the produce out on the sidewalk where there is less chance of standing near a sneezer or cougher? Sunlight is a natural purifier of the virus too.
In 1931, two years into the Great Depression, Frederick Lewis Allen published his history of the 1920s, “Only Yesterday” covering the period from the end of WWI until the market crash, in October 1929, that plunged the world into poverty. The American economy would not revive until war and destruction obliterated Europe and engulfed Asia, and after the suffering and the debacle of that period, enlightened leaders vowed to never allow world war again.
So, here we are, now.
We seem, again, to be living in the most exciting of times, a moment of collapse when people are without money, in fear of their health, and watching the world outside collapse. Families and friends are unwittingly jammed up inside, fearful of intimacy, terrified of shopping, petrified about their money, unable to sleep at night, and looking for some savior vaccine to end this nightmare.
An incurable contagion devastates the lungs, drowns us, and we die alone. Please, somebody, do something.
We look up high to the presidential podium for answers.
But we hear the cries from the asylum.
Every aspect of normal human life is now that moment in the horror movie when The Lone Girl goes downstairs into the dark basement after she hears a noise.
7.5 billion are now The Lone Girl.
We are home with children or aged parents, or quite alone, with nobody. We are sitting at computers, trying to work or forget; obsessed over disabled relatives in group homes; monitoring children playing in the yard when the wind is blowing.
We can’t go to the gym, to the mall, to the coffee bar, to the park. We do push-ups if we can, and we lay on the couch all day until we try and sleep but we can’t.
We are on guard receiving a package at the door, opening a letter, putting hands on a steering wheel, touching a doorknob, wiping down a mobile phone, cleaning a countertop, eating a banana with unwashed hands. We dare not open a window to let in a virus or forget to sanitize a salt shaker.
A text message, “Call Me”, is alarming.
Everything is terror.
We are told, now, too late, to wear masks when we leave the house. Before they were of no use, now they are essential. We are told to use hand sanitizer, but what if someone behind us, at the grocery store, unmasked, sneezes or coughs?
Drew Morlett, 6/27/15, Venice, CA.
In the midst of this darkness, I learned, strangely and horrifically, that one of my friends from MacLeod Ale, Drew Morlett, 37, had been stabbed to death last Sunday, by a woman, during a fistfight with a man, at a party given by a nurse (Drew’s girlfriend?) who unwittingly invited the murderer over to her apartment on Kester Street.
To attend a party during a pandemic is foolish, but just being foolish is not reason enough to justify murder. In poetic justice, all the fools at the party would catch the virus, their punishment for violating what we all know we must not do.
Though I knew Drew for five or six years, I hardly knew him at all.
We had met at MacLeod Ale, and then we’d hang out, always by coincidence, never by intention.
From what I knew, he lived walking distance from MacLeod, with his family, near Hazeltine and Oxnard. He had a raspy voice, with a sound almost frail and hoarse, so I nicknamed him “The Raspy.” He was a townie, like many at MacLeod, adults raised in Van Nuys who never leave Van Nuys. MacLeod was his parish.
Drew Morlett Served by Drew Murphy, Whole Foods, Venice, CA. 2015
On Saturday, June 27, 2015, The Raspy and I went to Venice, this time by intention, to take photographs and drink beer at Whole Foods, beer served by bartender Drew Murphy, an amateur expert on beer, who used to casually serve us oysters, shrimp tacos and other good foods that somehow never ended up on the tab.
That bar at Whole Foods on Lincoln had become a place I went to often, especially in the year 2014 when my mother was laid up in bed in Marina Del Rey, dying of lung cancer, and I’d go down and see her, and then stop off at Whole Foods and self-medicate, and drive home slowly in the night air, always careful to let the beer burn off before I drove, sometimes going up Beverly Glen, the long way, windows open, as Jo Stafford or Frank Sinatra played, and the profusely growing night jasmine floated in.
The Raspy worked in computers, or fixing computers, or something like that, I never knew. He was gentle, and short, and thin, and a twin, with a twin brother. He had olive skin and wore olive t-shirts. I felt like I could have been his best friend, but we never talked about anything, really.
Others at MacLeod, people who drank nightly, or played darts, knew him better. I was not one who played darts or drank nightly, and last year I only spent some $800 dollars at MacLeod, for all of 2019, and I would guess Drew spent considerably more, though I don’t know, and to speculate is to lie, so I can’t say.
One time I saw Drew Morlett and he said he was laid off and looking for work. Another time he said he was living with his girlfriend on Kester. One late night he called me and invited me out, and it was after 11pm and I didn’t go. He was known at other bars, other dart places, and in other drinking establishments, and it seemed he was out and about and all around the city, going out and about and all around the city.
Until he died last weekend.
Now he is dead, dead in the way Van Nuys kills you: in obscurity, senselessly, ridiculously. That weekend, two days before he was stabbed, another man, a homeless man, Dante Tremain Anderson, 35, was killed the same way, by knife, not far away, on Burbank Boulevard in the Sepulveda Basin.
Before I learned about the identity of the second victim, Drew Morlett, I knew about the first and second murders. And in my mind, they were indistinguishable. Just anonymous and tragic and forgotten.
Now one of the dead I had really known, and hugged, and laughed, and drank with. He had siblings, parents, friends, and they all mourn his death. I cannot feel the grief his family carries, and they have my deepest condolences.
On June 21, 2015, a year after MacLeod Ale opened, that brewery held a big party.
Drew Morlett was there, and so were hundreds of other people. They lined up to buy tickets, to sample brews from guest taps, to listen to lectures by brewers discussing brewing, to meet other enthusiasts and lovers of craft beer.
MacLeod, One Year Anniversary Party, 2015.
I took many photographs that day, and now they look remarkably dated.
It is not only that we are presently, legally restricted from gathering, but that we are older. We are now incarcerated by grave and ominous fears and worries, and to drink beer in a crowd and listen to music and get drunk, that is our fondest hope for what we might do again.
We hope, not only to be well, but to live, to be in this world, not banished from it, and to return to happiness and blithe ridiculousness, and even carelessness and stupidity. We should not have to die for our love of each other, we should not have to die because we partied, or touched our face, or went to a movie, or shopped for food, or cared for a sick person in hospital. Somewhere there is a profound lesson in all this, but I can’t quite fathom it.
Later in the year, if we are feeling better, or if we are alive, we may look back on March 11, 2020 as one of a number of dark days in a time of never-ending calamities.
Today, as the Coronavirus was declared a pandemic, and the stock market crashed yet again, and the slow-motion, fast spreading virus appeared aimed for me and my nation, I walked past this gruesome, burned-out building at 7101 Sepulveda Blvd. It caught fire on November 24, 2019.
A 5-story office building that caught fire months ago, and is structurally unsound and unsafe, is the setting for a community of homeless owners. Where is LADBS? Where is Nury? Where is God?
I didn’t photograph the community of perhaps 40 or 50 men and women who make their homes just north of 7101. They are, of course, there illegally, but why the hell not? I dared not disturb their encampment, a satellite skid row in a community, Van Nuys, that until this century, was tacky, but spotless.
In 1967, at 7101 Sepulveda Bl., the building, the parking lot and a motel court, was photographed by Ed Ruscha, our famed artist, for a book he compiled called “Thirty-Four Parking Lots in Los Angeles.”
The photograph is in the collection of the Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. And the LACMA.
Like his other works, “Twenty-Six Gas Stations” and “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” Mr. Ruscha used documentary photography unbeautifully to state unequivocally what we honestly are in our built forms.
Ah, the Sixties, when we laughed at the bad designs of roadside architecture, parking lot covered suburbia, and those husbands and wives who only wanted to live in a $30,000 ranch house and barbecue steaks. We thought anyone over 30 ridiculous, an old prejudice recently renewed.
The children of the 1960s and 70s are among the ones living in the tents with the rats and the needles and the trash.
We have fallen further than anyone could have imagined in 1967. We have only to look baldly at the evidence in front of our own eyes. We don’t need Twitter to tell us things are rotten in the states of reality and mind.
Here in Van Nuys 
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