Many people who have worked at the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center can tell tales about the countless souls plucked, Lazarus-like, from death. A veteran security guard can recall a man who leaped from a ledge of the building in a suicide attempt and crashed through a skylight, only to land on a gurney in the emergency room, where doctors saved him.
My stories are different. I can talk about the potted kumquat trees that used to bloom outside the residents' housing, about lacing up my synthetic leather "Pro Wings" high tops and shooting hoops on an asphalt court beneath the young doctors' inelegantly retro apartments. I can summon memories of the ill-tempered homeless man who floated between the hospital and the surrounding neighborhood and who, according to local legend, had a brother who was a famous Hollywood actor.
I can tell a relatively blood-free tale about how an institution is sometimes more than the sum of what it does.
Today the doctors and nurses, the technicians and other occupants of the 1930s Art Deco structure will begin to move across a courtyard to the gleaming new County-USC Medical Center. The old building will be used for office space.
As a boy, then a teenager and then a young adult, I grew up in Boyle Heights near that hulking old building, with its underground tunnels and nooks and various pathways. People were busy living and dying in that place, but for me it was also part of the neighborhood, a playground.
I was reminded of this as I stood at the back of a Ventura County church on a Sunday in September, two days after the doomed Metrolink 111 collided with a Union Pacific freight train. A parishioner had been on that commuter train; he had been taken to County-USC with massive head injuries and died there the next day.
Toward the end of his sermon, the pastor tried to take his flock into the county hospital by way of description.
"If you've ever been to County-USC, it's almost like downtown Detroit," he said, eliciting chuckles even among the mourners. "There's a police officer in every corner inside the hospital. You have to go through a metal detector to get in."
I cracked a smile because I could envision the scene he described. But I also had the momentary feeling that my neighborhood had just been dissed. I've never been in the hospital as a patient. But County-USC is part of you -- if you grew up where I did.
For the first seven years of my life, my family lived on Cummings Street across the street from the hospital. That hilly stretch of Cummings no longer exists; the houses were torn down to make room for the new hospital. Our next home, where my parents still live, was on Pomeroy Avenue, just a block from the State Street entrance to County-USC.
I came from a family of six kids, but my older brother and sister were the only ones treated at the facility that was once known as General Hospital. My parents paid the medical bills in installments, the way they might for a refrigerator.
Later, my father made decent money as a machinist and we were insured. That meant that, unless it was a life-or-death situation, we didn't have to go to County-USC as patients, which is just as well, because it seemed as if you could finish a Russian novel before you saw a doctor. On the other hand, County-USC really excelled in those life-or-death situations.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, Los Angeles was cementing its reputation as the gang capital of the United States. Shootings were at an all-time high, and I can recall the steady whine of ambulances going up and down State Street day and night.
But most of my memories had nothing to do with trauma; they spring from the seemingly endless stories (and the characters that inspired them) associated with a large public hospital.
One window high in the building was dimmer than the rest, and one day a friend and I traveled to that floor by elevator and found amid the gloom a mounted glass display with preserved body parts (or excellent fakes). Other times, I would look out a window and see my mother sweeping the neighbors' sidewalk.
Gloria Mungaray, a longtime neighbor, remembers taking the elevators to the top of the hospital one night, and crawling with friends to an outdoor ledge to get a view. A solitary chair awaited Mungaray and her friends. Downtown L.A. twinkled and the lights of cars blinked from the East L.A. interchange.
"I was scared, but it was gorgeous," she recalled.
The hospital and the neighborhood seemed to attract a large population of the homeless and mentally ill, including a man whom everyone called "Bronson." The rumor was that he was the brother of actor Charles Bronson, the walnut-faced star of "Death Wish." "Bronson" had a serious drinking problem, and a Los Angeles Police Department officer told my father that the actor would have "his brother" picked up to dry out from time to time.
