Memorial

XXI.Joan

SHE was late, as usual. On the way to her appointment she must have passed 3 roadside tributes. They were all over LA now, commemorating places where pedestrians had been struck down, or fatal car crashes and robberies had occurred, and thus far the city had benevolently let them be. Some vanished within weeks, while others were maintained for years, carefully tended and refurbished by loved ones. (The mems lasting the longest were usually for kids who’d been run over near schools.) She was always dumbfounded by their simple eloquence — suddenly revolted by her own pimp-ride, high-end vanity project. She’d never be able to speak in the demotic language of the people; there would always be the arcanely contaminative architectural babel injecting itself like syntactic bacterium into what should have been simplicity itself. There was even a new crop of art photographers who tried to make a name for themselves by documenting the funeral venues, as if those sites were quaintly worthy of pretentious scholarship. It was exploitational, not Egglestonian, a bloodless catalogue of macabre, trivializing juvenilia. Meet the Folkers.

Joan was lunching with a group at Architects Without Borders, a nonprofit that built shelters for victims of the “Boxing Day Tsunami,” now redeploying its efforts to New Orleans. Average White Band (which Barbet insisted calling them) had joined together with a slew of organizations — Shelter for Life, Relief International, Architecture for Humanity — to put up cement-block homes in Sri Lanka, a thousand or so for around 15-hundred dollars each. The gang had experience building in places like Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iran (earthquake-stricken Bam, which Barbet said should now have an exclamation point after it, like a Lichtenstein). Ever since ARK lost a competition to design transitional housing in Kosovo to Gans & Jelacic, Barbet had chilled on altruism, sending Joan out as emissary — it was good for networking. Katrina itself had spawned a cottage (shack) industry of moveable “Southern venacular” crib prototypes from a pair who called themselves HELP (Housing Every Last Person). Barf.

Even Mayne and Libeskind (and MVRDV, Huff + Gooden, Hargreaves, UN Studio, ad nauseam) were getting into the act. “What a surprise,” said Barbet. Shigeru Ban talked about making digs out of cardboard tubes and plastic beer crates, modeled after homes that sprang up after the Kobe quake; “durable prefabs” and “flat pack” Future Shacks were on the boards. Someone even dared to mention Prouvé’s aluminum/steel Tropical House; Joan was ready to kill. She knew it was mostly PR talk and no action — starchitects and borefucks were good at that. The New Urbanists would prevail. Sketching out Sub-Saharan HIV clinic thumbprints or collapsible origami-like bungalows (anything but blue tarp tents or Fleetwood-trailered FEMA Village agglomerations) was a way for Joan to distract herself from the demands of the Freiberg Mem, and do something beneficial in the process.

SHE met him in his bungalow at the Bel-Air.

Joan was a little nervous and had already played out the scenario of him wanting to fuck. She ran the loop in her head as if preparing for a court trial or presidential debate. She was pretty sure she’d be able to resist.

Lew was genteel, having slipped off the alpha E-ring he wore around groups. After cordial smalltalk, he asked her to watch something on television: an amateurish CNN-style montage of what the tsunami had wrought. The famous hotel pool getting flooded. A pasty-skinned old man clinging tenuously to a railing as the fatal waters rose. Crowded buses rocketing like skateboards into floating taxicabs. Assorted indistinguishable riverroar flotsam. Then, the iconic image of that body outside the Astrodome: incongrously spliced in, rank and spookily clownish.

A soundtrack, courtesy of Bobby Darin, accompanied the watery parade:

First the tide rushes in…plants a kiss on the shore—

“My son put that together. I guess it’s his way of dealing — with whatever. It didn’t make me happy.”

“How old is he?”

“14.”

“It’s just that age. Teen angst.”

“Yeah, well, I’m my age.” He sighed. “It’s creative, anyway. I think he got the clips from MTV. Burned them on his PowerBook. Or whatever they do.”

“Was he close to his uncle?”

“Very.” He ejected the disc. “Mr Darin: nice touch. Or maybe it was Kevin Spacey.”

Joan changed tack, deciding to be heretical.

“I know this is a weird segue but it’s something I wanted to ask. Architects are funny. Sometimes we work in a vacuum, and that’s good. Depends on the client. We like vacuums; we like to fill them up. (Oops. Wrong metaphor.) But sometimes we ignore the obvious, and that’s not good. Is there anything you envision for the Memorial, Lew? We’ve talked a lot, but is there anything that’s persistently in your head? When you wake up in the middle of the night. Or when you’re brushing your teeth.”

He appeared to be musing. Then:

“Not really. Something…simple — elegant. Not too much bullshit.” His mouth tensed at the word, before softening to a smile. “Big help, huh?”

“Yeah,” she said, without irony. “It actually is.”

He led her to the dining area. She sat at the table and he brought over wine. The fuck-loop streamed through her brain — she flashed on that hotel pool flood — before quickly shutting off.

“Joan — I see all these…Holocaust memorials, and…the thousand slabs. The thousand crosses in Berlin. Oklahoma: the 168 Chairs, the 168 Seconds of Silence. I hate that—literal shit. One of the WTC things was only going to be open to the public from the exact minute the 1st plane hit to the exact minute the 2nd tower fell. Another of the…proposals had these lights—I don’t know how many — but it was the number of people in the towers that couldn’t be identified by DNA! The 92 trees native to New York planted in the soil of the 92 nations the victims came from, the wall with 92 Messages of Hope.”

“I know,” said Joan, simpatico. “Paul Murdoch. He’s here in LA. Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. A 93-foot-tower with 40 wind chimes inside. One for each passenger and crew member. 40 groves of mixed maple trees the closer you get to the site. Then, 40 rows of—”

“The 1,776-foot tower. Make me wanna holler!” (The last, he shouted like Eddie Cantor.) “And that’s not even going to remotely happen. That’s why I like Andy — Goldsworthy. Cause he’ll do something outside the box. Something natural. I’d like to do Goldsworthy and someone…something else, more permanent, or permanent-looking. Andy can do his cairns or his water and stones and snakes — I think he’s going to use water, which I don’t object to. We’ve got 400 acres and the actual Mem is gonna be a pretty small ‘footprint,’ as they like to say. But I want it churchy. Like stumbling across the ruins of a church. Now, whether that’s at the end of a grove, or an allée, or up on a hill — fuck, I don’t know, Joan. I just don’t want to wind up with something honoring a quarter of a million dead people! You can’t do that shit with any kind of literality. Is that a word? I mean, how? Did you know that a hundred thousand people died in Sumatra in 15 minutes? One of my guys said the quake was so strong, it actually affected the earth’s rotation. How do you memorialize that? You know what I’m saying, honey? What happened to my brother and his wife, and their kids, and to me and my family—is personal. And for that very reason, the scale should be intimate. For any fuckin reason. A prayer. Let the world fucking carp. The world is always going to carp and piss and moan. The world wants Trump and Disney — America wants to sell tram-tickets to cemeteries with bling. Hallowed ground don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing! Do you know how many calls we still get about Katrina? To help with that shit? Where is George fucking Bush? My brother didn’t die in St Bernard Parish, he died on the coast of India. I mean, is that OK? Does that not meet with everyone’s approval? It’s obscene. Do I know what it means to miss New Orleans? Maybe. But sorry! Samuel’s in Elysian Fields — and his Fields ain’t got a Looziana zip. Wanna hear a Katrina joke? My pilot told it to me — man, he’s dark! A drowned horse walks into a Texas bar. Bartender says, ‘Why the long, bloated, maggoty face?’ Oh, you don’t get it! Hey Joan, know how many people died over there? 230,000. There’s another 50,000 missing. And those are only guesstimates. Know how many died in Pakistan? 80 thou. Know how many people swallowed water in Louisiana? What was it, 900? Losing the city itself was the fundamental…that’s what’s tragic. And everybody knows it. That makes sense. The money poured into the tsunami? They don’t even know how to disperse it! There’s such a surplus, they’ve been asking people to divert to other causes. That’s how fucked up and confused everyone is. The relief agencies and the schmucks who run em are bankrupt, spiritually, morally, and every other kinda which way. A guy lost his entire family of 37 in Ban Bang Sak — send computers, Bono! You know, I have zero interest in donating PCs to all the little Sambos before they rape and burn each other. They will be raped and burned. I don’t want to save rifle-toting black children! Let Bono knock himself out! Does that make me a bad guy? I employ people. Right? Thousands of fucking people. Families. I don’t renege on healthcare or pension promises. Right? And I want to honor my brother and his wife and in so doing, honor those who died. You know what, Joan? I don’t believe ‘We All Have AIDS.’ I don’t — not so far as my doctor’s told me. Sharon Stone can suck my 5,000,000,000 dollar cock and write a song from the coal mines of menopause and go talk about it on GMA. I do have a foundation, but it’s not about relief, it’s about cancer research. My mother, Mamie, had leukemia. When she died, that was worse than 200,000 people getting swept away, OK? Can you understand? I mean, how do you…represent that? This isn’t ‘We Are the World,’ this is she was my world. And now it’s about He Was My Brother. Samuel Freiberg, RIP. Someone said I should put a plaque up for whatever we wind up doing. Joan, do we need a fucking plaque?”

“No, Lew. You don’t need a plaque.”

“FEMA can’t even figure out what to do with the money Congress gave them. It’s so radically fucked up that Congress is now asking for money back. Anyway, I got an email from one of my Inner Circle people at Guerdon — a sweet guy.” He riffled some papers on the table, then quoted. “ ‘I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me. I am weary of my crying…rescue me from the mire, and do not let me sink.’ I mean, sentimental bibleshit, right? So, I’m just gonna do my thing — with a little help from my friends. I think any other way would be arrogant. My thing. People will have their ‘fuck that rich asshole’ moment — they’ve been having it! ‘He’s only honoring 2 people!’ The public won’t be allowed to stroll around and drop their trash…poor babies. No iPod commentaries! No gift shop! They’ll just have to sweat it out. Jerk off to the Iraqi civil war or the latest Amber Alert. Or see a Korean horror film instead. Cause all anyone wants is a gore fix. I sound like Howard Beale, huh? Great movie, Network. So get your tragedy fix, but not from me. I ain’t no dealer! I’m not a healer either. But why isn’t Lew Freiberg helping to build new levees? Because Ted Turner will take care of it. Leave it to the Three Stooges: Carter, Clinton, and funk-breathed HW! Leave it to Halliburton! You know what? My foundation sends money, but I funnel it to Humane Society International. They’re the folks — a lot are Buddhists, by the way, like Esther was — who deal with animals. You know, animals saved a mess of people in the tsunami and wound up shit’s creek, literally. People can help each other but animals can’t. Animals are ‘sentient beings’ too, right? That’s the big Buddhist phrase. My sister-in-law was a pretty serious practitioner of Zen-whatever. We had our moments, but Esther was all right. Helped stabilize my brother. So that’s where I choose to send my money. To HSI! And if folks’re gonna cry, fuck em. People will cry, that’s what they do. That’s what they’re good at. But at the end of the day we got 400 acres. You’ve seen it, Joan. At the end of the day, long after we’re dead and gone, there’ll still be 400 acres and ‘the ruined church.’ What I’m calling the Ruined Church. And it’s going to be a sacred space. Esther loved that phrase. ‘Sacred space.’ And that sacred space will speak volumes for all the suffering of people and animals. You know what else disgusts me?”

“Tell me, Lew.”

“Newsvultures standing on some tsunami beach — those Big Wave anniversary reports are just nice excuses get some Phuket R & R — saying—intoning—‘No one can explain why some areas have received bounty and others have slipped through the net.’ Right. Right. Well, that’s just the way it is. Same as it ever was. Always was, always will be. That’s ‘duality.’ Buddhism 101. No one can fucking explain. Or splain, as Ricky Ricardo used to say. And guess what? No one should even try.”

He stood.

“Here’s what I think.”

“Tell me what you think,” she said, girlishly.

“Let’s get this party started.”