Homeless in Vancouver: Play about Banksy’s elephant man looks a bit insulting

“The elephant in the room” is a phrase that refers to a thing so obvious it goes without saying.

In a new play about British street artist Banksy and how he made an American street person that much more homeless…the thing that goes without saying in the play is its real-life homeless central character.

And that, it seems to me, just adds insult to the original injury.

The play, called The Room in the Elephant, by playwright Tom Wainwright, fictionalizes the true story of how Tachowa Covington, an American street artist in Santa Monica, built a life for himself on the margins of society.

The heart of the story is how, in the comparative blink of an eye, he lost his comfortable make-shift home of seven years: a derelict water tank the length of a school bus, after Banksy tagged it.

For his part,  the internationally famous street artist apparently had no idea someone was living in the water tank.

He came. He saw. He tagged.

It was February 2011. Banksy was in Los Angeles, California, to promote his documentary film Exit Through the Gift Shop. Along the way, in Santa Monica, in Los Angeles County, he happened to see the old, abandoned water tank—a long white, cylinder supported on six tall stilts and with a large right-angled hose-pipe protruding from one end. He couldn’t resist.

In big stenciled black letters on the side of a derelict water tank he declared: “THIS LOOKS A BIT LIKE AN ELEPHANT”.

Banksy posted a photo on his website and multitudes of people saw it, laughed, and agreed with him. Others found their way up the Pacific Coast Highway to see the original for themselves. One small group saw an investment opportunity.

Under the name Mint Currency they reportedly bought the water tank from Calex, a landscaping company. Calex was unaware the water tank had become anything more than the piece of junk it had all but abandoned seven years earlier. The price paid by Mint Currency was described as a pittance.

Mint Currency bought the object in hopes of turning around and selling it for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

On March 3, 2011, the two principals of Mint Currency, aided by two friends and a lot of rented heavy equipment, severed the pricey artwork from its foundations and moved it to a warehouse close to the San Fernando valley.

It was journalists writing for the Independent newspaper who pieced together the most complete story of the water tank. A March 19, 2011, piece by Guy Adams first revealed the details of the tank’s sale and disposition and a July 29, 2013, piece by Tim Walker filled out much of the story of Tachowa Covington.

The man in the elephant

There’s a real story here and Tachowa Covington should be the central character—he really is a character.

“Most of my life I’ve been a performer,” Covington says. “I never had a real job.”

Covington once explained that he saw himself as self-sufficient rather than homeless.

When, back in 2004, he took residence in the water tank, it was not exactly in stereotypical street-guy fashion.

He cleaned out the rust, painted the interior, hauled in plywood, and put in a proper floor. He knocked down furniture to get it in and reassembled it to make a comfortable home—like assembling a ship in a bottle. He even ended up with a generator and a big screen TV.

Early in his residency he took to parading around the area in a golden crown, declaring himself the “King” of Portrero Canyon.

When the police came to clear homeless people off the hillside, they greeted him not like royalty but certainly like a resident, which he was—the U.S. Postal Service even delivered mail to his exclusive address: 15145 Pacific Coast Highway.

Because he was anything but reclusive some people have questioned whether Banksy really was unaware the water tank was occupied.

Playing with the facts

Covington’s story is fascinating as is, but Wainright’s play instead wraps its telling up in an unreal story, one that never happened.

Covington, played by actor Gary Beadle, breaks into the warehouse where his former home is being stored and videotapes his version of events, which he plans to upload to YouTube.

Nothing like that actually happened. Once again, Covington is being marginalized.

Banksy fictionalized Covington’s water tank and turned it into art so it should come as no surprise to see another artist, a playwright, fictionalize Covington and turn him into a work of art.

The water tank-as-art ended up safely stored in a warehouse. Covington ended up living first in the woods, and then in a cheap motel.

It’s almost—though nothing so deliberate—as though society is slapping down the mere idea of a homeless person with property.

Let’s not forget the part played by the greedhead speculators who physically expropriated the water tank and yanked it out from under Covington, who may have still been living in it at the time—details are fuzzy.

So when I refer to “society” I probably mean money. It sounds like the voice of money that is speaking from the beginning to the end of this spectacle.

I haven’t seen the play. I may never. But I have seen clips from the real-life documentary-in-progress that photographer Hal Samples was making on the life of Covington when he was so rudely interrupted by Banksy.

In May of 2011 Samples turned unsuccessfully to Kickstarter to raise funding to finish the documentary. Only (U.S.)$5,400 of the required (U.S.)$30.000 was raised.

Samples has a YouTube channel with excerpts from his documentary about Covington called Something for Nothing.