Just Another Art Lover
It had been a dismal, cloud-enveloped, wondering-how-in-the-hell-things-would-work-out day that left me slogging along, counting the hours until sleep, broken and unsettled as it would be, it was a brief respite from reality. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art was therapy on these days. I’d been befriended by a sympathetic older woman who worked at the entrance, and she usually let me in for free, which was handy, since I was broke. LACMA afforded me the opportunity to pretend for a time that my circumstances were not quite so dire. I would sit on a bench in a quiet gallery with my journal, gathering my thoughts and hopes and fears on the graph paper within the forest green cover.
As much as I loved looking at art, I really loved looking at the people who looked at art. I would conjure stories about them and scribble them in my journal. I imagined entire lives for them, exciting scenarios in which life took beautiful, unexpected turns and brought them delight. My own life, you see, was so bleak and purposeless, that it helped me to make up stories about others. Stories where families cared about one another, where mothers didn’t die, and fathers protected, and siblings grew up with funny stories and inside jokes.
I could say that I loved LACMA because I loved art. The truth was, yes- I did appreciate the art. But more than that, I craved a quiet place where I felt safe. Where no one would bother me. Where it didn’t matter what my story was…for those few hours I was just another art lover.
That afternoon, emerging from the building, I was squinting in the sun, and feeling lighter. My time with the Masters had done the trick… the day seemed brighter, my heart less burdened. I emerged onto Wilshire boulevard, walked to the corner, turned right on Fairfax, another block up and a left on Orange to where I always parked. About half a block up my heart started to pound. I looked to where I had parked, then turned around and scanned the street behind me.
I felt tears welling and panic rising. It can’t be, I thought. It can’t. But it was. The awful truth was that my crappy, filthy, dented and barely running Datsun B210 had been stolen.
Some asshole had stolen my home.