The Soloist (Movie Tie-In)

by Steve Lopez

  Wait a minute.

  Did he move to the tunnel to be closer to me?

  The very next day someone at Juilliard calls to say there’s been an oversight. Yes, it turns out, there indeed once was a student at Juilliard by the name of Nathaniel Anthony Ayers. No additional information is readily available, not even the years he attended. But he is listed as an alum.

  I hang up the phone and stand at my desk, looking for someone to share the news with. The guy went to Juilliard, I tell the nearest reporter, Jim Rainey. I met this guy playing a crummy, gunked-up violin with smudges and graffiti all over it, he tells me he went to Juilliard and it checks out. Can you believe it? He’s over there now, chalking the names of his classmates onto the pavement.

  “That sounds like it’s got some possibilities,” says Rainey, a master of deadpan.

  I decide the story is too good to rush, so over the next couple of weeks I jam a few easier columns into print while digging up more details on Nathaniel’s life. After I meet with him a few more times, he no longer jumps back when I approach. He’s a little warmer each time. “Oh, Mr. Lopez,” he says. “How are you today?” I learn that there’s one nonnegotiable rule with Nathaniel. While performing, he is an artist at work and does not appreciate being interrupted, a misstep that always draws a look of scorn. Sometimes, while waiting for him to pause, I take stock of the items crammed into his shopping cart. It’s nothing less than a work of art and clever engineering, with an astounding number of items arranged in a precise manner. Blankets, a sleeping bag, clothing, two yard-long sticks, a blue tarp, a water gun the size of a small cannon, a hubcap, a single black boot. Five-gallon buckets dangle off the cart like saddlebags and artificial flowers are fastened to the top of the heap for a home-sweet-home effect. In his open violin case, which Nathaniel rests atop the cart while playing, I see a small, empty white paper bag that bears the name Studio City Music.

  “Black man?” Hans Benning, the owner of Studio City Music, asks when I call. “We do have a guy who plays with a badly beaten-up fiddle. He comes here every so often. He’s very kind, very gentle and very proper. He’s a delight. . . . He talks about Beethoven sonatas and then slips back into another world.”

  Yeah, that’s my guy.

  Whatever Nathaniel is playing at Second and Hill, it sounds brilliant at times and awful at others. Then again, he’s missing two strings. I’ve got a good ear for pitch, but I’m no musician, and several years of guitar lessons many years ago didn’t get me far. I wish now that I knew something about classical music so I could be a better judge of Nathaniel’s work. But the music I love, and know a little bit about, is jazz. So I can only nod dumbly but appreciatively when he answers one of my questions.

  “That was an idea I got from Ernest Bloch,” he tells me. "B-L-O-C-H. Swiss-born composer who served as director of the Cleveland Institute of Music.”

  When I tell him how impressed I am that he studied at Juilliard, he’s all modesty.

  “I was there for a couple of years.”

  But only a tiny percentage of the world’s greatest violinists could ever hope to get into Juilliard, I tell him, so he had to be a major talent.

  “Oh, I didn’t play violin,” he says. “I played double bass.”

  “Then where’d you learn how to play violin?”

  “I don’t know how to play violin,” he says. “I’ve been trying to teach myself, but it’s difficult to transpose the music from bass to violin. It would help if I had some sheet music, but I don’t know how to get my hands on any.”

  He tried the cello briefly after leaving Juilliard and loved it, he tells me, but the violin was easier to lug around in a shopping cart. There’s no way to keep playing a big upright string bass, he says, while living on the streets. But he still has Saint-Saëns, Mozart, Brahms, Dvořák, Haydn and Beethoven in his head, so he tries to make something of their compositions on the two-string violin he claims to have bought at Motter’s Music House in Cleveland many years ago.

  I call Motter’s, and Ron Guzzo, one of the managers, recalls the purchase. The violin was one of many instruments Nathaniel bought from him over a span of nearly twenty years, Guzzo tells me. He kept buying new ones because others were stolen from him on the streets of Cleveland. Nathaniel would get a job shoveling snow, Guzzo says, or working at a Wendy’s, until he had saved enough to buy another instrument.

  “As I understand it, he was at Juilliard and got sick, so he came back home,” Guzzo says of Nathaniel, whom he knew by Anthony—his middle name—or Tony. The staff at Motter’s was always amazed at how nimbly Nathaniel switched from one instrument to another. “He’d sit out in our parking lot on a nice day playing the cello, and we’d wonder where the heck that was coming from. It was Tony.”

  Getting sick at Juilliard was a subject I didn’t know how to bring up with Nathaniel, nor did I know whether I should. Is it too personal? Will it upset him? Can I trust the answer of a man who has mental problems? I need to know more for my column, though, so I ask if it was true he left Juilliard before finishing his studies.

  “Oh, yeah, I bombed out of there,” he says.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t even remember, it’s so far back now.”

  I ask if he has any relatives I could speak to, and Nathaniel recites the memorized phone number of his uncle Howard and aunt Willa in Cleveland. They refer me to Nathaniel’s younger sister Jennifer, a social worker in Atlanta, and there’s relief in her voice when I tell her I’ve met her brother.

  “Is he okay?” she asks in a trembling voice, saying he hasn’t been heard from in years.

  It was the fall semester of 1972, his third year at Juilliard, and Nathaniel had been tormented by months of confusion, anxiety and hallucinations. One night, at the Upper East Side apartment of a Juilliard classmate and his fiancée, Nathaniel began shedding his clothes for no apparent reason. The classmate and his fiancée, alarmed by the bizarre behavior, couldn’t get Nathaniel to stop disrobing. He wasn’t angry or aggressive, but he seemed to be under a dark spell, and as he grew more distant, his friends became all the more frightened and concerned. His classmate didn’t know what else to do but call the police, and Nathaniel, twenty-one years old, was wheeled away to the psychiatric emergency room at Bellevue Hospital. The diagnosis was paranoid schizophrenia, and his life, as he had lived it until then, was over. So, too, were his hopes of a career in music.

  Jennifer watched helplessly as her big brother, the smart and smooth-talking man of the arts, drifted in and out of treatment for years back in Cleveland, trying medication, counseling and shock therapy, none of which helped for long. The fastidious dresser became a disheveled wreck who wandered the streets with musical instruments, slept in the woods and carved names into trees. He was incoherent, angry and prone to violent outbursts that broke their mother’s heart a thousand times over. Floria, who was busy running a Cleveland beauty salon, would cook for him, clean for him, shower him with love and keep giving him yet another chance, only to have Nathaniel trash the furniture, smash lamps and mutilate the walls with nonsensical drawings. And yet for all the abuse, Nathaniel adored his mother and felt utterly lost when she died in 2000 after a lengthy illness.

  And so he headed west, looking for the father who had abandoned the family when Nathaniel was just nine or ten. They’d been out of touch for so many years, though, that Nathaniel didn’t know that his father, a retired Los Angeles trash truck driver, had already resettled in a retirement community in Las Vegas. Nathaniel stayed briefly in the garage of his father’s daughter from a second marriage, then decided he wanted to be on his own in downtown Los Angeles. He had been wandering the streets for several years when, on that day in Pershing Square, our paths crossed for the first time.

  A jet flies over downtown Los Angeles, making the big swing before looping back around on its descent to LAX. Nathaniel gazes up, childlike, then turns to me, one eyebrow arched, and asks if I’m flying the plane.

  It’s a
chilling moment that offers a glimmer of the delusion he lives with. I wonder if I should respond, but I don’t. I wonder if I should be scared, but I’m not. I’m too curious to be scared, and I’d like to know more about how a black kid growing up in the sixties—when the civil rights movement and Vietnam War divided the country and cities like Cleveland were on fire—beat the odds and ended up in Juilliard’s classical music program. Was he a child prodigy? Were his mother and father musicians or aficionados who filled the house with the sounds of Beethoven and Ernest Bloch, B-L-O-C-H? If not for the breakdown, would Nathaniel be up the hill in a tuxedo, playing with the L.A. Philharmonic, instead of scratching away down here at his Little Walt Disney Concert Hall?

  I can’t help but think of the heartbreak for his family, and I wonder if there were clues earlier in his life that something might not be right. Or does the madness come up in a person randomly and without warning? Maybe it’s all too much to expect to be able to pry out of him. Who am I, after all, to make his story mine?

  Someone with deadlines, I remind myself. Someone who knows a good story when he sees one. Someone who imagines a reader pausing over the story of Nathaniel’s descent from lofty aspiration and saying, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”

  Well, Nathaniel tells me, there was Joseph Russo. He was a good friend. And Joseph Bongiorno was another bass player at Juillard. B-O-N-G-I-O-R-N-O. I ask if he knows whether they or any other classmates stuck with music.

  He’s been out of touch and doesn’t know where everyone ended up, he says. But “a kid named Yo-Yo Ma” has done pretty well for himself.

  “You knew Yo-Yo Ma?”

  Not really, Nathaniel says. The cellist was in a different league even back then.

  “But we played in the same orchestra,” Nathaniel says. “I was in awe of the youngster.”

  He tells me his bass teacher was Homer M-E-N-S-C-H, who, in his nineties, was still teaching at Juilliard.

  “He had the talent, that was for sure,” Mensch says of Nathaniel, asking how things have turned out for the kid from Cleveland. I tell him Nathaniel lives on Skid Row and plays a violin that’s missing two strings, and the line goes quiet.

  “Give him my very best,” says Mensch. “I would certainly like to hear from him.”

  If I want to talk to the man who knows him best, Nathaniel tells me, I should call Harry Barnoff. In Cleveland. That’s B-A-R-N-O-F-F.

  “I’ll try to find a number,” I tell Nathaniel.

  With his index finger, he writes out the ten-digit number on his imaginary blackboard.

  “Do you call him often?” I ask.

  “I haven’t spoken to him in years.”

  I dial the number from my office and a woman answers.

  “Is this the Harry Barnoff residence?” I ask.

  “Yes,” she says. “This is his daughter.”

  Harry Barnoff recently retired after playing double bass in the Cleveland Orchestra for forty-six years. Nathaniel had been referred to him as a young teenager, and Barnoff was his teacher and friend for many years. When I describe Nathaniel’s current situation, Barnoff is so distraught he begins to weep.

  “Please,” the musician pleads, relieved to hear that Nathaniel is alive, if not entirely well, “you have got to tell him how much I think of him and that I still remember what a wonderful musician he was.”

  He was not always the best student, recalls Barnoff, who tutored Nathaniel at the Cleveland Music School Settlement, a nonprofit in the University Circle neighborhood of Cleveland. Nathaniel blew off assignments and had trouble focusing, according to Barnoff, who wonders if Nathaniel was too talented for his own good. Barnoff had never seen a student go months without practice, as Nathaniel sometimes did, then pick up an instrument and get such a great sound out of it.

  “You’ve really got something here,” he told Nathaniel, pleading with him to respect and nurture his gift.

  That combination of flattery and faith got Nathaniel’s attention. In his late teens, Nathaniel announced with equal parts arrogance and admiration that he wanted to be like Mr. Barnoff and play in a major orchestra. Barnoff was reluctant to set him up for disappointment. Sure, he told Nathaniel, you’ve got talent, but it takes more than that. “You’ve got to make music your life. You’ve got to practice, practice, practice.” In his own case, Barnoff told Nathaniel, he had worked hard enough to make it to this fancy New York school called Juilliard.

  “I want to go to Juilliard, too,” Nathaniel told Barnoff.

  Barnoff recalls that while Cleveland was rupturing, with police in riot gear dragging away protesters, fires raging and cars being overturned, Nathaniel was often in his cocoon at the Settlement school. A change had come over the young man. He was more mature and less restless, and after high school, he won a scholarship to the music school at Ohio University. Barnoff was thrilled for his protégé, but Nathaniel was still after a bigger prize. Halfway through his freshman year at Ohio U., he flew to Juilliard for an audition.

  “Next thing I knew,” Barnoff says, his voice breaking, “he got a scholarship.”

  I bring him two new violin strings from Studio City Music and Nathaniel breaks them in on Mendelssohn, Brahms and Beethoven. “I can’t thank you enough,” he says. “It’s an absolute dream here, and I notice that everyone is smiling. The sun is out all day, and the nights are cool and serene.”

  I watch patiently as he strings the violin and jabbers on good-naturedly, keyed up about playing a properly equipped instrument. Just up the hill, Disney Hall is a great landed ship with mercury sails, a gleaming hallucination on the skyline. Down here, cars streak through the Second Street tunnel, trucks rumble, sirens blare, and Nathaniel begins to play, slicing through the madness. His eyes are closed, and in his shuttered world there is order, logic, sanity, sweet relief. If only for a while.

  3

  The Sunday paper slaps my driveway with a thud that opens one eye, pays the mortgage and puts thirty years of work on the line. Last week’s columns are nonexistent, zapped by a constant, white-hot beam of news and information that blurs history. You’re only as good or bad as your latest attempt to make some connection with the world, and Nathaniel’s story hits like nothing I’ve written before. In the time it takes to read an e-mail, two more arrive, an endless stream that snakes through lunch and then dinner and spills into the next day. I know it’s a compelling story, and the pitch-perfect headline, written by copy editor Saji Mathai, has helped draw attention to it:

  HE’S GOT THE WORLD ON TWO STRINGS

  But the response exceeds my expectations and has me wondering what it is about the story that I’ve underestimated. The answer is in the responses. Readers see the tale of a man, stunned by a blow thirty years earlier, who carries on with courage and dignity, spirit intact. It’s as simple as that, with one wrinkle. My serendipitous meeting with Nathaniel is seen as his second chance. Am I aware of this program or that? Do I know about the new generation of antipsychotic medication that could change his life? Would I please print my address so people can send strings and unused instruments dug out of dusty attics? Forgotten for years, Nathaniel now has a rooting section. Four readers offer to pack up and ship violins. A violin maker offers to build one from scratch. And a man named Al Rich sends this:

  Steve,

  I’m the CEO of the Pearl River Piano Group America, Ltd. We are the western world arm of the Guanghou Pearl River Piano Group, the largest piano builder and second largest musical instrument builder in the world. Our American office is in Ontario, California. This morning I read your article about the street violinist in L.A. and of course was moved by your story.

  Rich says he’s sending a student-model cello and violin by express mail, and when I’ve read through all these offers, I rush out to Second and Hill to deliver the news.

  “He’s going to send a cello?” Nathaniel asks of the Pearl River CEO, his face pinched with doubt. He hasn’t read the column, and he’s having trouble making sense of his sudden t
urn of fortune.

  “A cello and a violin,” I tell him, “and several other people say they’re sending violins.”

  Nathaniel seems to be studying me for signs that I’m real, and not some cruel illusion.

  “People are awfully generous,” he says, but shadows of doubt fill his eyes, and something is troubling him. “I can’t cover that,” he says, shaking his head.

  “You don’t have to pay them anything,” I say. “These are people who read my story about you in the paper and think you sound like a decent guy. They don’t want anything but the pleasure of knowing they helped a fellow musician.”

  This seems to bring him around to the idea. If they’re musicians, they’re part of a brotherhood, and Nathaniel is obliged to respect their sensibilities.

  “How are they going to send them to me?” he asks, very much aware that he is cut off from ordinary connections, living without an address or P.O. box.

  “They’re sending them to me and I’ll bring them to you. It should happen in the next week or so.”

  He nods his approval, but I can tell he doesn’t trust me. And why should he? A gray-bearded, balding columnist has suddenly parachuted into his life, promising enough free instruments for him to start his own chamber orchestra. Suspicion, if not paranoia, is a perfectly logical response.

  In the days that follow, Nathaniel sets up near the tunnel every morning by eight or nine, meticulously unloading his shopping cart on the patio-sized slab that serves as his stage. But the first order of business is for him to compulsively pick up every speck of dirt, debris and tobacco by hand. He lectures against foul language and the scourge of drugs, but cigarette butts are an obsession, a pox, a menace, and he plucks them off the pavement with pinched fingers and disgustedly dumps them in trash cans, as if it has been left to him alone to save the world from the spreading plague. On occasion he drops everything to dart into the street for a fresh butt tossed from a moving vehicle, his flat face wrinkled into a scowl as he denounces the nicotine junkies whose weakness rots the underpinnings of civil society. His mad dash between cars is a spectacle, not just for the inherent danger, but because he sometimes scrambles about in a full-length velvet burgundy-colored robe, looking like some kind of fantastical wizard. Other times he wears a black trash bag safety-pinned over his back and around his neck, the caped, clean-streets crusader of downtown Los Angeles.