Growing up as a hospital grows old

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.