Seven months ago, if you told me I would be bumming a cigarette from Sean Penn in a parking lot repurposed from Dodger Stadium for emergency use during a viral pandemic, the two of us surrounded by hundreds of cars full of nervous people afraid their bodies harbored an invisible predator that had attacked over seven million of their fellow Americans and killed almost a quarter million of them, all while the same contagion swept the world, shuttered countries, blew up the global economy—I would have said, Oh fuck, yeah, because clearly I'd be on set for a big-budget disaster film starring the two-time Oscar winner, perhaps directed by him, in any case, amazing, beautiful, sounds like 2020 is going to be pretty spectacular.
“Seven months ago” feels a lot longer and bigger than seven months ago.
Seven months ago, zoom was a verb, my wife wasn’t my barber, and I’d never heard my father sobbing on the other end of the phone. In that world, I also didn’t spend my Saturdays volunteering at what may be the United States’ largest testing center for a novel coronavirus—but now I do. I look forward to it all week. Oddly enough, standing in a Dodger Stadium parking lot with Sean Penn barely ranks on the list of weird shit occurring in my life at this moment.
Unlike many famous people, Penn is exactly as tall as you expect him to be. Forthright, friendly, more measured than I would have thought, also present almost in a pained way—which suited the environment. Around us were hundreds of possibly sick people. Several dozen more in gloves and masks and face shields were there to help. I mentioned to Penn the esprit de corps I’d noticed among the staff, that I often felt myself as a volunteer. “It’s even opened my eyes, the way people connect to participating,” he said quietly. “It’s really taken some of the layers of cynicism away. In an incredibly cynical time.”
During a pandemic, time feels elastic, but some things are certain. Winter is coming. Signs indicate a third wave of the coronavirus is about to whack the United States. The absence of government leadership on COVID-19 continues to shock, if not awe—and Hollywood celebrities haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory. At the same time, since March, Los Angeles has been a leader in the fight—and Penn has emerged as an unlikely figure in that success. Thanks to CORE, a nonprofit he cofounded with international aid expert Ann Young Lee a decade ago, in collaboration with the city and the Los Angeles Fire Department and their local testing partner, Curative, anyone can visit the baseball stadium or one of several other fixed and mobile testing sites across L.A. and get a COVID test for free—regardless of symptoms, citizenship, health insurance, or local address—with highly accurate results in under 48 hours. Dodger Stadium handles up to 7,500 patients a day. Los Angeles County can process 20,000. And thanks in part to a $30 million grant from Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, CORE has been able to set up similar programs across the country, focused on vulnerable and underserved communities—37 sites in total, from Navajo Nation to New Orleans to New York City—in what appears to be, based on my research, one of the United States’ largest coronavirus testing programs, if not the largest.
All because a couple years ago at Coachella, Sean Penn walked onstage and asked a crowd if anybody wanted a ride in his bus. And what happened afterward, weirdly enough, offers both ideas and solid hope for how we’ll get through whatever is coming next.
Los Angeles is a disaster that doesn’t wait to happen. Earthquake, fire, flood. The face of America’s homelessness crisis, a poster child for American hunger, a research experiment into income inequality gone horribly wrong. To put it mildly, before 2020, an epidemic wasn’t among the most pressing things the city needed to address. “We had some preparation for it,” Mayor Eric Garcetti told me, describing L.A.’s standard emergency planning. “But a virus, not just for Los Angeles but for America—we literally had no muscle memory. Nobody ever imagined something that would grind the world as we knew it to a halt.”
In mid-March, under Garcetti’s orders, Los Angeles locked down fast, and the mayor began appearing daily on our screens. The city’s testing program launched on March 20. Soon, Los Angeles would become the first big city in the United States to offer a free test to anybody, with or without symptoms. Which is odd, considering how bizarre governance is here. Greater Los Angeles, a.k.a. El Lay, a.k.a. the Southland, includes 88 cities and over 10 million people. L.A. doesn’t even have a health department (the county does). In many ways, Los Angeles is a nation unto itself much like the United States, a vast region of people bound less by common identity than by a confused sense of having wound up living next to one another. One big difference: Last winter, while the White House stalled and lied, failing to face the nation’s greatest crisis in living memory, Los Angeles jumped in. “It's a classic case of ask forgiveness rather than permission,” Garcetti told me. “Certainly, in the vacuum of federal leadership, it was clear nobody was going to do this if we didn't do it for ourselves.”
Which brings us to Coachella (a common phrase in Los Angeles). Back in 2008, Sean Penn, to some surprise, went onstage at the music festival, right before My Morning Jacket, and told the kids he had a couple biodiesel buses parked out back, if anybody wanted to join him for a ride to New Orleans. It was Ken Kesey meets Jimmy Carter, a mission to go do aid work in a city still recovering from Katrina. A hundred-plus people joined him, “whether they had shoes on or not,” Penn recalled.
New Orleans holds a special place for Penn. During Katrina, in 2005, he snuck in and flung himself into the rescue effort, if only because someone needed to do it. “You kept thinking, like you did watching television, any minute now the cavalry’s coming,” Penn has said before. About three years later, after the Coachella kids did their service in New Orleans, a group of 20 or so stayed behind to continue the work. Cut to a year and a half after that, January 2010, when an earthquake demolished Haiti. More than a hundred thousand people were killed, up to a million displaced. Penn rounded up half a dozen doctors, some people with experience in disaster response, plus the New Orleans kids—“these are people whose cars remained parked at Coachella all this time,” he said, laughing—and flew down to see if he could be of help.
Penn’s father, an actor and director, served in World War II as a bombardier, a tail gunner staring down the enemy. Penn, likewise, will meet a moment head-on, but occasionally in ways seen by some, in the heat of the moment, as unsavory, if not unbridled. Visiting Iraq in 2002 to protest Bush’s folly. Covering the Iranian elections in 2005 from Tehran for the San Francisco Chronicle. In 2008, Penn spent seven hours interviewing Raúl Castro. He met with Mexican drug lord El Chapo in 2015. It fucks with public understanding, the tesseract that society has constructed around famous people, the four dimensions of civilian-celebrity relations: They’re just like us, they’re nothing like us, we desire to be them, we’d hate to be them. To put it another way, we approve when stars pose for pictures with starving children, not Hugo Chávez. Over time, Penn has faced accusations in the media of White Savior Complex, of Celebrity Grand Gestures Disease. He seems not to care much what people think, especially cynical pundits—from Haiti, he told CBS News’ Lara Logan, “Do I hope that those people die screaming of rectal cancer? Yeah, but I'm not going to spend a lot of energy on it.” Unless they’re the people he’s trying to help, whom he cares about deeply. “When I first got some notoriety as an actor, you get asked to visit kids in a children’s hospital. I can’t do it,” Penn told me. “I can’t make small talk with a kid with cancer, or a kid without cancer. I’m not good at it. I think of myself as a facilitator. I know how to knock doors down and get the humanitarians in. That’s been my strength.”
In Haiti, Penn’s organization, J/P HRO, later renamed CORE, would not only manage an enormous camp in Port au Prince for people displaced by the earthquake—60,000 residents living in rickety tents on a former golf course—but also empty it, helping to rebuild neighborhoods so people could go home. I asked if his celebrity ever got in the way of doing relief work. “I think once I spent nine months in a tent in Haiti, I started to get some credibility,” he said, laughing. “The ‘Sean Penn’ of it is really to get a governor on the phone.”
Penn is the first to explain that a lot of his credibility hinges on the moment he met Ann Young Lee in 2010. Currently the CEO of CORE, Lee at the time had over a decade of experience managing aid work for the U.N. and other groups, doing work in the Congo, Kosovo, the Philippines. When she met Penn, Lee was already several years into doing development work in Haiti. The earthquake’s destruction was mind-bending, she said, but sometimes so were the relief efforts. “I was pretty down on the whole system,” Lee said. “Like, this is not fucking working.” When Penn arrived, she didn’t take him seriously; she wasn’t sure he was committed to sticking around. His approach, though, in interacting with aid groups, echoed some of her own frustrations. “Sean came in, this outsider, asking questions that hadn’t been asked before. ‘Why do we have to do it this way?’ At the time, it was annoying. Quickly, I realized the stuff I’d been fed up with—why humanitarian assistance and development weren’t working—is because we’re stuck in the way we’ve been thinking about it.”
They soon teamed up. Since then, under Lee’s guidance, CORE has managed emergency relief efforts across the Caribbean, trained teenagers in Gulf states in disaster relief, and rebuilt communities in Haiti. The organization prides itself on fast action, improvisation, and a healthy disrespect for barriers. “Not having a big legal team helps a lot,” Lee said, chuckling.
While we talked under a pop-up tent, six lanes of cars slowly inched their way behind us around the massive Dodger Stadium parking lot, making their way through the testing process: confirming their appointment; receiving the test; swabbing their mouth while CORE workers supervised. Meanwhile, just north of the ballpark, the Bobcat Fire continued to blaze. Both Lee and Penn are Los Angeles natives. Watching the pandemic burn its way around the country, never mind through their hometown, had been surreal, they both said. “For me, it was like, we have to do something now,” Lee recalled. “The first inclination is, ‘We’re in the United States, we have systems, we have these incredible emergency response institutions, they’ll reach out to us.’ But I don’t think that’s in our nature.”
“We both had enough experience,” Penn said, staring off darkly. “The cavalry’s not coming.”
“We thought, ‘We need to figure something out,’ ” Lee said.
L.A.’s first drive-through testing site was initially staffed by the fire department. “I’ve been with the department for a while,” LAFD Chief Ellsworth Fortman told me. “This was a curveball.” The city knew it needed to escalate rapidly, but to do so would take hundreds of firefighters out of the field. When CORE reached out, the city was ready to partner. “They had a great track record in Haiti and other places,” Garcetti said. I asked if he’d been concerned about working with an NGO that relied on volunteers; testing seemed like the sort of work FEMA should be doing, I suggested, or the American Red Cross. “I wondered how deep they wanted to go, quite frankly,” he said. “It quickly became clear that the scale of their ambition was as large as ours—to get to as many people as possible.”
These days, a typical Saturday at the Stadium is around 3,500 patients. The test is self-administered, a simple oral-swab test people perform inside their cars. Volunteers stand in PPE, watching over it all, absorbing heat from the pavement, the sun, several hundred running motors. The staff are film editors, bartenders, actors, nursing students. Plenty of them lost jobs to COVID. One woman managed tours for metal bands. One guy was nominated for an Emmy this year. Anecdotes go around on water breaks, like the one about the people, perhaps inspired by the president, who attempt to drink the chemicals in the vial that stores the swab (this happens not infrequently). Or the person who pulled down their pants and swabbed their butthole (this happened once).
The truth is, we know what’s happening in the majority of cars. People arrive scared. They’re nervous. A parent is sick, or maybe a roommate; maybe they recently lost a loved one or several. You see so much strain. It could be from illness, financial ruin, hunger. Everyone working there is highly aware of the moment’s gravity, that our ability to be there is a privilege. About half the staff are volunteers; many, after volunteering for a while, become full-time employees. When I asked why, people said it’s the friends they’ve made on-site, the chance to play a part, a feeling of simply having purpose during a time of chaos. “I’m an atheist 23 hours a day,” Penn told me, “but I can connect to this idea of what we’re supposed to be doing here—because otherwise, to quote a poem by Mark Rylance, you’re just wandering around, no purpose, might as well not be there.”
“Horrible in itself, disaster is sometimes a door back into paradise,” Rebecca Solnit writes in A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. “The paradise at least in which we are who we hope to be, do the work we desire, and are each our sister’s and brother’s keeper.” How long all of this will last is unclear. CORE’s testing sites around Los Angeles, almost entirely fueled by private funds and donations, have the cash to last through December. Recently, to raise money, stars like Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt, and Julia Roberts put on “Fast Times Live,” a Zoom performance of the script for Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Shia LaBeouf played Jeff Spicoli, the pothead surfer Penn made famous in 1982, and went full method: sunglasses, tank top, what appeared to be a joint burning between his fingers. “Sensational,” Penn said, laughing, when I asked for his review of LaBeouf’s Spicoli. “Crazy and sensational.” But he was quick to turn the conversation back to what mattered most. Globally, over a million people have died from COVID. One in five was American. In the United States, incompetence reigns, and getting your mouth swabbed or nose probed with quick results—one of the basic things we need to reach this pandemic’s other shore—remains anything but straightforward in most places. At the same time, according to Curative, CORE recently completed its 1,500,000th coronavirus test in Los Angeles.
In Citizen Penn, a forthcoming documentary about Penn and CORE, Penn describes initially working in Haiti: “We were an airplane that built itself after takeoff. And that’s a perilous ride.” The metaphor is apt for the moment. None of us has done this before; we all need as much mutual aid as we can find. Nationally, rapid tests are coming soon, including paper-strip tests that are less accurate but much cheaper; Garcetti said Los Angeles already has a pilot program going. In partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation, an interstate testing compact is bringing rapid tests to places like Maryland and Arkansas. In New England, the Assurance Testing Alliance is working to develop low-cost testing networks. And CORE’s programs nationwide continue to expand and adapt. “We’re a learning-based organization,” Lee said. “We listen, we learn, and we act.”
As a disaster unfolds, it feels natural to question human nature. Also, it hasn’t been difficult, these past seven months, to feel feelings from the dark side of the moon. Fear, rage, despair. Apprehensive, gaslit, besieged. We have contagion in our bodies, contagion in the White House. The same week the president tested positive, our Saturday numbers at Dodger Stadium shot up, and we all wondered if it was a “Trump bump”—a surge in testing from people who perhaps hadn’t taken the virus seriously before. Not that I’m shaming anyone (besides Trump). For me, it still hits, working at the stadium, that the setup really does look like something out of a disaster movie—because we’re living through a disaster.
All of us, like the health of our towns and cities, are fragile at the moment. Everyone I know, myself included, is holding too much. And yet, on Saturday afternoon, I return home feeling better, lighter, more hopeful than I did all week. One of the young volunteers told me during an interview, “The thing I ask my friends: What are you going to say in a couple years about the part you played when shit went down? What did you do to make it better?”
Rosecrans Baldwin is a frequent contributor to GQ. His next book, Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, is forthcoming in June 2021.