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Beloved Philadelphia Museum of Art security guard’s smile hides the pain of a familial curse

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As Angel Gonzalez greeted visitors to the Philadelphia Art Museum the other day a quote played in my head:

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“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

Behind Gonzalez’ smile, as bright as the gilded goddess on the grand stairway behind him, is the burden carried by a man caring for several family members who battle a rare and genetic condition.

Camera iconTom Gralish / Staff Photographer

Angel Gonzalez is photographed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art July 25, 2018 where he is a beloved security guard. Behind his smile is the stress and pain of several family members battling Von Hipple-Lindau disease, a genetic disease that generates cancerous tumors on organs.

Called Von Hippel-Lindau disease, or VHL, it strikes only one in 36,000 people in the U.S. and riddles the body with fast-growing tumors and cysts, sometimes cancerous. Four of Gonzalez’ family members carry the gene:

His stepchildren, ages 33 and 32, raised as his own since they were children. And their children, his grandchildren, ages 11 and 7.

In 1996, his step-children’s biological father died of the disease. His sudden passing at age 28 made no sense to the family.

Gonzalez’ wife, Jackie Perez, vaguely recalls a doctor mentioning something about having their children tested. But that wouldn’t sink in for years.

Around 2015, the hard to pronounce, harder to understand disease made another appearance in the family’s life, this time uttered by a doctor talking about Jackie’s daughter, Nitza Neco.

Nitza had been in a car accident. During a scan to make sure she wasn’t more seriously injured, spots were found on her liver and then, over the next few years,  tumors, in her head, behind her eyes. A tumor on her liver was malignant. After the removal of most of her left kidney, she’s now cancer-free.

Often, her older brother, Angel Neco, would ask her, “What do you feel?”

He was concerned, of course. But he also suspected he too had VHL. He suffered through the same pains, the bloody noses that made the bathroom look like a crime scene.

“I knew.” he said.  “I just didn’t want to admit it.”

After a car accident of his own, doctors returned the diagnosis for him too. A tumor on his kidney was cancer, so was one on his nose. It seems to have spread into his lung, he’s getting more tests soon.

For a month, Gonzalez, 50, drove his stepson to the hospital for radiation. Every morning, he’d drop him off, work a full day, and then pick him up before heading home, only to do it all again the next day.

The disease is a ticking time bomb, in charge of everyone’s life, even when they try as hard as they can to reclaim some control. A family vacation to Virginia ended early in an emergency room visit for Nitza Neco. The other day, his daughter started bleeding from her nose.

On break from his post the other day, his hands trembling, Gonzalez showed me a photo that his wife sent to him of their granddaughter, Mia, with the nosebleed. For his family, it could be the new beginning of the disease that has marked their lives.

“Day by day, tumor by tumor,” Nitza said as we talked around their dining room table.

Camera iconJESSICA GRIFFIN / Staff Photographer.

Angel Gonzales and his wife, Jackie Perez

She and her brother have had to stop working, with the constant doctor appointments and tests making it impossible to hold down steady jobs. They’ve applied for disability, but were denied. They are reapplying.

So, much of the financial toll falls to  Gonzalez, who has worked for the museum for nearly 20 years, and his wife, who does housekeeping for the Marriott Courtyard in Center City. Like her husband, at work she tries to push away what’s happening at home. She concedes that her husband is better at it.

Nitza and her daughter live with them. Angel has his own place close by. But he spends a lot of his time there. At some point, he might have to move in with them, too.

Gonzalez doesn’t mind; he only wishes they had a bigger house so that they could all fit comfortably. But looking around their rented place in Hunting Park, it’s hard to imagine a cozier home, one filled with more love.

He is lucky, he says. His bosses and colleagues at the museum have been supportive, always checking in, quick to offer a break when his smile falters, or time off or flexible hours so that he can get everyone to their appointments. A colleague, Ariel Schwartz, started a fund-raising effort for him on GoFundMe.

“Truly, he is such a wonderful, funny and caring person, and he is bearing this ordeal with amazing grace,” he said. “I don’t know how he’s able to hold up.”

The museum. “My spot,” Gonzalez says, is a big reason why.

His post, at the entrance at the top of the Rocky steps is his dream job, and now more than ever, his salvation.

Many tough days have been made better by the sweeping view of the city, and by greeting visitors often fulfilling their own dreams of climbing up the steps into the museum where nearly every day they are greeted by Gonzalez. Always smiling, always kind.

Amid Philly’s heroin crisis, is it crazy to stage a play at Kensington and Allegheny?

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Part of an occasional series on the Kensington Storefront, an art-based intervention on the front lines of Philadelphia’s opioid epidemic.

As the setting sun did what it could to enchant the litter-strewn landscape of Allegheny Avenue, Darlene Ramage, 55, found her mark on the gas-station-parking-lot-turned-stage, kicked a Pepsi can out of the way, and raised her voice above the din of street traffic.

“When you see me, you see one version of me, but I’m so much more,” she began her monologue. “I’m a lion. A lion is strong, loud, and truthful. I take no crap from nobody anymore. It’s called boundaries.”

Ramage was in final rehearsals for (Kensington) Streetplay, a new theater work developed by the Renegade Company that draws its cast, subject matter, and scenery from a neighborhood that has come to serve as a shorthand for the opioid crisis that claimed 1,217 lives in Philadelphia last year. This blunt call for close-looking — an opportunity to examine a struggling, complicated neighborhood as you would an artist’s masterpiece — opens Thursday, Sept. 6,  as part of the Fringe Festival.

The aim, said artistic director Mike Durkin, is to help residents reclaim their own narrative, beyond the bleak portrayals of Kensington seen in media like The Dr. Oz Show. Sure, the play will address familiar themes — open-air drug markets, crime, prostitution, homelessness, poverty — but it will also probe the joyous and playful moments in between.

“The goal of this project is to show all those different perspectives,” he said. “I’m asking people to come to Kensington with open minds and open hearts.”

That’s essential, given the unpredictable nature of the performance. Most of the cast members have no acting experience, and many have struggled with addiction or homelessness. Some still do. And, as far as stage sets go, the corner of Kensington and Allegheny falls somewhere between challenging and hostile, what with the roar of the El above and spent syringes crunching underfoot.

“These people out there are so doped up, they don’t know where their mind is,” warned Eddie Ramage, 50, Darlene’s brother, during rehearsals one weekend. “That’s my main concern. They can just come at you.”

Durkin assured him that he had the security issue in hand. After all, he’s been making his way up and down Allegheny Avenue for two years now, getting to know the businesses, the regulars, trying to build trust in this neighborhood.

Streetplay developed out of workshops Durkin’s been running for the past year at the Kensington Storefront, a Mural Arts Philadelphia hub that embraces the concept of harm reduction. In that time, he’s grown used to starting late, adjusting on the fly, navigating past bumps, and creating flexibility within his work to accommodate a fluid cast. Some of the performers in the show have been working with him for a year, others for just a few weeks. “There were folks early on who were involved for a couple months, then overdosed and passed away,” he said.

Dani Bryant, a drama therapist who’s working on the show, said the trick was finding a balance between therapy and theater: “It’s about sharing with the audience, without it ever feeling unsafe or uncomfortable.”

The evolving, interactive work is a mix of poetry, storytelling, improvisation, and visual art. One day, a man who busks around Jefferson Station showed up with a guitar and offered to contribute a musical number. Even a few weeks before the premiere, Durkin said, “It’s hard to articulate what it will actually look like, because it’s all dependent on who’s there in the moment.”

ELIZABETH ROBERTSON / Staff Photographer

Mike Durkin from Renegade Theater Co.(right), helps folks to tell the story of the Kensington neighborhood as they see it through storytelling, music and drama.

The structure, however, is set: It’s a deeply personal walking tour that begins at K&A and rambles toward Port Richmond’s leafy Campbell Square, where performers will man a series of stations exploring universal themes like home, kids, or food. (Eddie Ramage, for example, may wax ecstatic over his Top Ramen Special, a concoction that involves barbecue chips, melted cheese, banana peppers and summer sausage. “Don’t knock it till you tried it,” he told critics at a recent rehearsal.) The set changes are subtle: vacant lots and overgrown trestles, graceful old churches and humble rowhouses. The soundtrack is provided by wheezing trucks and shrieking dirt bikes, the shouts of wheelie kids and the how-you-doing-beautifuls of bored men sitting on stoops.

On a recent afternoon, Dennis Payne, 57, was working with Logan Schulman, the dramaturge, on his talking points.

“Kensington has a very racist past,” Payne said. It’s multicultural now, he said: “We’ve been over-invaded.” He’s not proud of the history, but he feels in many ways the neighborhood was better off back then. The way he remembers it, there was just one homeless man when he was a kid. Payne would sneak him cigarettes.

Schulman pushed back: “It’s very easy to be positive about the past as nostalgia sets in.”

In some ways, the play is designed for the neighborhood itself. The actors passed out fliers in McPherson Square, and invited area residents to attend the preview performances and provide feedback.

But it’s also intended for a wider audience — as a plea for understanding, not exploitation.

“Kensington is full of crumbling beauty: buildings, people, me,” Kathryn Wylde, 40, said in her monologue. “What we need is your support. Kensington doesn’t want your lofts.”