The Soloist (Movie Tie-In)

by Steve Lopez

  With the approach of spring, the morning sun rises out of East L.A. and angles down hard on the concrete alcove at the mouth of the tunnel, where Nathaniel has taken to propping up two cardboard signs announcing his current musical interests.

  “Bach and Brahms,” says one.

  “Beethoven’s Eighth,” says the other.

  He has painted them with black hair dye. Nearby, he sets a Japanese magazine on the ground, saying it’s a tribute to Little Tokyo, a pint-sized commercial neighborhood just a few blocks to the east. Everyone there looks like Yo-Yo Ma, he tells me.

  “Did you get the cello yet?” he asks more than once with childlike anticipation. “The cello and the violins?”

  Not yet, Nathaniel. Any day now.

  Trust me.

  He nods, unable to mask disappointment or doubt.

  If he’s got bugs in his pants, he tells me. If he’s just dug a hole in the ivy bed to bury human feces from tunnel dwellers who didn’t have the decency to use proper facilities, he tells me. Nathaniel is refreshingly uninhibited and without pretense, uttering whatever pops into his head. There are no filters, and no wall between the real and imagined. A simple question about his love of Beethoven sends him on a flight through unhinged thoughts that float through his mind like wind-driven clouds.

  “Cleveland doesn’t have the Beethoven statue. That’s a military-oriented city, occupied, preoccupied, with all the military figures of American history, the great soldiers and generals, but you don’t see the musicians on parade, although you do have Severance Hall, Cleveland Music School Settlement, Ohio University Bobcats, Buckeyes of Ohio State. All the great soldiers are there from the United States military, World War Two, Korean War, whereas in Los Angeles you have the LAPD, Los Angeles County Jail, Los Angeles Times, Mr. Steve Lopez. That’s an army, right? The L.A. Times? Los Angeles is sloped downward like a valley, Santa Monica Mountains, downtown Los Angeles, Honolulu. I haven’t seen the ocean in Los Angeles. There’s supposed to be an ocean, the Pacific, but this is not ocean terrain in the downtown area. You don’t see the military statues like you have in Cleveland, where those are the leaders of the city and they have their army all over town with lots of horses. Cleveland Browns, Los Angeles Rams, those are armies, too, military regimentation, experimentation, with Mr. Roman Gabriel as quarterback, Roman, Romans, Roman Empire, Colonel Sanders, Mr. Roman Gabriel designing a play in his dreams. Look. There go all the wide receivers down the street. This little guy here is the quarterback of the orchestra, this violin which I purchased some years back at Motter’s Music in Cleveland, Ohio. A cello can back this guy up with the same moves, but the cello is not the concert-master. It’s this youngster here that leads the way. Itzhak Perlman, Jascha Heifetz, they’re like gods to me. I wish I had that talent, but if I practiced for the next ten thousand years I could never be that good. In Cleveland you cannot play music in winter because of the snow and ice, and that’s why I prefer Los Angeles, the Beethoven city, where you have this sunshine and if it rains you can go into the tunnel and play to your heart’s content. I am absolutely flabbergasted by that statue. It knocks me out that someone as great as Beethoven is the leader of Los Angeles. Do you have any idea who put him there?”

  Good Lord. What have I gotten myself into?

  Nathaniel delivers this and other broken streams of consciousness with the enthusiasm and charm of a smooth conversationalist, emphasis here, a smile or hand gesture there, and no earthly awareness of the scrambled nature of the offering. Sometimes I come upon him in full conversation with someone who isn’t there, a fluid, animated back-and-forth with the wall or with a tree or with nothing at all. I don’t know if he’s answering voices or simply uttering his every thought. I know little about his illness, how it works, what to do or whom to ask.

  In other words, I’ve got a problem. Several instruments are in transit to my office, and I haven’t given any thought to what I might do with them when they arrive. Nathaniel would need to attach a U-Haul trailer to his orange buggy to haul them around. I suppose I’ll bring him the cello and maybe one of the new violins and hold on to the rest of them in my office. But there’s another little problem I’ve never considered, and it’s now filling me with dread. A man who lives outdoors and sleeps in a dangerous, crime-infested netherworld of prowling addicts and thieves will be a nice fat target for a mugging. It’s not as if he can conceal instruments on the buggy. I consider keeping all the instruments at my office and having him come by when he wants to play one, but it’s out of the question. I’m not there half the time, and when I am, I’ve got no time to play music-room monitor.

  I’ve set a trap for myself without knowing it, and readers aren’t letting me forget it. The responses still pour in, with well-wishers wondering how Nathaniel is doing and when they’ll get to read an update. A column is a personal take, and as such, it’s less dispassionate than a straight news story. But in telling Nathaniel’s story, I have unwittingly taken on some responsibility for his welfare, a job I am clearly, demonstrably and undeniably unqualified for. Sure, I intend to update the story. But I have no intention of adopting a homeless, middle-aged, mentally ill man. I’ve got a wife, Alison, and a two-year-old daughter, Caroline, and I don’t get to spend as much time with them as I’d like, thanks to a schedule that often gets me home after Caroline is down for the night.

  I mention my predicament to a colleague named Tom Curwen, who has been the Times’ assistant book editor and later became editor of the Outdoors section. He tells me another of our colleagues recognized one of the many panhandlers outside the Times Building as a former classmate and called Lamp Community, a downtown Los Angeles agency that works with mentally ill homeless people. The panhandler is now doing quite well in treatment.

  I’m vaguely familiar with Lamp, having once met the ex-director, Mollie Lowery, a former nun. But I don’t know much about the program and have never met the two Lamp employees who answer my call for help and arrive at Second and Hill to have a look at Nathaniel. He’s too focused on his music to notice the arrival of Shannon Murray, the assistant director, and Patricia Lopez, a program manager. The three of us stand several feet away, taking in the concert, and when he takes a break I introduce everyone. Nathaniel is gracious and charming. He repeats Murray’s and Lopez’s names several times, committing them to memory. He seems to be under the impression that Patricia Lopez is my wife.

  I tell Nathaniel I boasted about his talent, and that Murray and Lopez have schlepped about ten city blocks to come see for themselves. He gives a shy shrug, then tucks the violin under his chin, blocks out the roar of traffic and leaves the known world. He scratches around a bit, chasing after ideas that aren’t quite coming together, but then, as always, he finds a passage that works like a drug and the music pushes him free of all distraction. Eyes closed, head tilted to the heavens, he’s gone.

  So, I whisper to the two visitors, do you think you can help him?

  Murray pauses before answering. She’s watching Nathaniel intently, as if studying a Cubist painting. I’m curious to know her every thought, her diagnosis, her prognosis, her prescription. She’s young, maybe not yet forty, but has twenty years of experience with cases like this.

  You know, she says, Lamp tries to accomplish two things, among many others. It tries to help its clients make social connections in a supportive setting, and also to come up with a mission or a goal, along with a plan to realize it. Nathaniel, it seems, already has an advocate and trusted acquaintance, namely me. And he has a mission—his music—that is nothing less than a consuming passion. In some ways, Murray says, Nathaniel would be considered a success story at Lamp.

  Except, of course, that he is more than a little bit crazy by popular definition. There has to be something they can do for him. Isn’t there?

  Murray and Lopez compliment Nathaniel when he’s done playing, and he responds with an Aw, shucks, clearly reveling in the glory of his growing fan club. But when they tell him to stop by Lamp if he ever
needs anything, he winces, saying he doesn’t think that’s going to happen.

  I wince, too, wondering, Why not?

  Murray and Lopez tell Nathaniel to keep the option in mind as they begin to leave.

  Wait a minute. That’s it?

  I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it was something more concrete than a casual suggestion that Nathaniel stop by Lamp if he happens to be in the neighborhood. I suppose I imagined them whisking him off to a place where he’d be on some kind of medication and sleeping under a roof as he transitioned to a new, more productive life. Of course, I know that’s not an overnight process, but isn’t that all the more reason to get things going as soon as possible?

  Murray and Lopez tell me they’ll have someone drop by on occasion to try to bring Nathaniel around to the idea of coming in for help. But if it has taken several visits for Nathaniel to get comfortable with me, how long will it take someone else?

  When the Lamp emissaries depart, I feel abandoned and alone, and Nathaniel is doing nothing to lift my spirits.

  “I am not going over there,” he says with finality and defiance.

  “But they’re just trying to help,” I tell him.

  “Yeah, I understand that, but I don’t need help.”

  “It’s just a place to get a sandwich and take a shower. Shannon and Patricia seemed nice enough, didn’t they?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t need the hassles I’d have to deal with going all the way over there with all of that nonsense. This isn’t Cleveland, Ohio. It’s a Beethoven town that doesn’t have all of that snow and ice. Los Angeles Times. Roman Gabriel. Jackie Robinson. I like it right here in the tunnels, where I can play all day and nobody’s going to bother me.”

  In all my years of columnizing, never have I run into unintended consequences of this magnitude. I’m on a street corner arguing with a paranoid schizophrenic, and because I don’t know what to say next, I say good-bye.

  “Um, Mr. Lopez?” Nathaniel calls after me. “You think the cello and violins are still coming?”

  A newspaper column is the perfect job for an impatient man with a short attention span. There’s little time to mull things over. You take on one subject and boom, you’re on to the next like a hit-and-run driver. But Nathaniel has lured me into a cul-de-sac. Impatience, fortunately, is not my only flaw. I’m stubborn, too. So he thinks he’s going to blow off Lamp after Murray and Lopez were kind enough to come offer him help? We’ll see about that.

  I call Patricia Lopez when I get back to my office and ask if she’ll go in with me on my devious little plan. When the instruments arrive, I’m going to tell Nathaniel they’re all his, but they’re going to have to be stored at Lamp. I’ll say the donors and I want to make sure that both the instruments and Nathaniel are safe. I’m thinking he’ll do whatever it takes to get his hands on the new instruments, and his visits to Lamp will eventually open him to the idea of joining their treatment and housing programs.

  Patricia Lopez is on board. She says they’ll find a place to lock up the instruments for him, and he’ll be free to play on Lamp property but not beyond.

  It’s simple. It’s subversive. It’s ingenious.

  4

  The instruments arrive. First one violin—which the owner has enclosed in a Sears chain-saw box—then another and another, and then comes the shipment from Mr. Rich of the Pearl River Piano Group. The cello is in a box roughly my height, and I tear it open to find the handsome new instrument encased in a dark blue nylon sock. Mr. Rich said it wasn’t a high-quality cello, but to my untrained eye it’s a masterful work of art, with sensual curves and dark robust wood with a warm honey finish that’s smooth to the touch. I wish I knew how to get music out of it, and I find myself anticipating Nathaniel’s reaction and envying his talent.

  Learning how to play an instrument has always been near the top of my to-do list, but what are the chances now? There’s little downtime with a column and a two-year-old, and after reading Goldilocks and the Three Bears and going through half a bottle of wine with dinner on an average evening, imagining a day when I join Nathaniel on the Elgar Cello Concerto is not a vision but a hallucination. I’m at the point where the things on your to-do list get transferred to a should-have-done list, and one reason I write a column is for the privilege of vicariously sampling other worlds, dropping in with my passport, my notebook and my curiosity. I may carp about feeling cornered by Nathaniel, as is my right as a curmudgeonly columnist, but there’s nothing boring about the adventure I’m on. I am the inadequately educated grandson of grocery store owners who arrived in California in the 1920s from Spain on my father’s side and Italy on my mother’s side, learning something about survival and fine music from a schizophrenic African-American man who grew up in East Cleveland.

  New cello in one hand, new violin in the other, I stride through the newsroom, out the back door of the Times and up Second Street to Hill. My thinking is that if I take the instruments straight to Lamp without his seeing them first, Nathaniel may never go there on a blind date. But if he gets to first see the instruments and feel them in his hands, he’ll go where love takes him. I stop for the light on the corner by the Kawada Hotel and see him up by the tunnel. It’s mid-morning and he has been playing for two hours, but he stops when he spots me. He’s a child at Christmas, his expression half delight and half relief. I’ve done it. I’ve come through for him, just as I said I would. I’m golden now, an angel in khakis and Rockports.

  “I saw you flying around,” Nathaniel says, “giving gifts.”

  I hand him Alfred Rich’s business card. He studies it, one more detail tossed into the whirl and committed to memory for life. Then he places the card atop the blue tarp draped over his shopping cart. On one knee, he peeks inside the violin case and speaks of “the little rascal” asleep in there. He’s smitten, and here’s my chance.

  “Mr. Rich wants you to know these are your instruments to play as often and as long as you please,” I tell him, surprised by how easily the white lie comes. “But he wants you to keep them at Lamp and so do I. We don’t want you to get mugged out here.”

  Nathaniel’s eyes are incapable of hiding any emotion. They bulge from deep sockets, wildly expressive, and it’s clear my proviso has not set well with him.

  “I can handle myself out here. It’s not like I haven’t been mugged before,” he argues, adding that he will “fight to the death to defend these instruments.”

  Terrific. I might as well just whack him myself and get it over with. That would be better than lying awake at night waiting for the call informing me that Nathaniel is laid up in a hospital, beaten senseless for the instruments I personally delivered to him.

  “That’s the deal,” I say firmly, seeing no alternative but to stand my ground. “Why don’t you test out the instruments for a little while and then I’ll drive them over to Lamp, where they’ll always be yours and no one else’s.”

  He doesn’t answer. He’s discovered the cello.

  “Oh my gosh,” he gasps, carefully lifting and cradling the instrument as if it were a newborn child.

  “It’s beautiful,” I agree.

  Nathaniel immediately goes about assembling the cello, stationing the bridge just so and carefully drawing the strings up over virgin bones. I notice a spider-sized gold pin on his shirt—a pin of an angel playing violin. Flies buzz over the adjacent bed of ivy and around the buckets that dangle from his shopping cart, and traffic is a broken roar, whoosh, whoosh, rumble. Nathaniel tightens the strings, alternating between C, G, D and A, gradually pulling the stretch out of them. He takes an amber bulb of resin and dusts his new bow as he goes through a list of master cellists. Pablo Casals. Yo-Yo Ma. Jacqueline du Pré.

  “And then there’s the coolest, calmest cucumber of all time, Janos Starker,” Nathaniel says of the Hungarian-born musician.

  He’s almost giddy, yammering as he often does but in a brighter mood and with greater control than usual, bubbling with images that are simultaneously da
ffy and brilliant.

  “Putting resin on your bow,” he says as he dusts away, “is like feeding your parakeet. A bow needs resin in the same way a police car needs prisoners.”

  And in the same way a columnist needs material. I scribble Nathaniel’s musings in my spiral notebook, trying to keep up with a running soliloquy that is somewhat reminiscent of Joseph Mitchell’s Professor Sea Gull character. In Mitchell’s famed discoveries for The New Yorker magazine, Joe Gould, aka Jonathan Sea Gull, was a Bowery bohemian, urban philosopher, historian and unpublished writer twenty-six years into An Oral History of Our Time, a tattered manuscript he carried around while talking to pigeons and otherwise annoying those who dismissed him as a bum and a loon, in part for his occasional impersonation of a sea gull. But e. e. cummings had befriended Professor Sea Gull and William Saroyan had written that “no writer except Joe Gould seemed to have imagination enough to understand that if the worst came to the worst you didn’t need to have any form at all. You didn’t need to put what you had to say into a poem, an essay, a story, or a novel. All you had to do was say it.”

  Or, in Nathaniel’s case, play it.

  The cello is inspected, strung and ready for its maiden voyage. Nathaniel pulls out the webbed orange Driftwood Dairy crate he keeps on the bottom shelf of his shopping cart. He spreads a tarp before him to keep the end pin of the cello from making contact with the ground, saying he is determined to let no harm come to his new instrument. He’s ready now, riding the dairy crate and straddling the instrument, but just as he begins to play, a woman who lives in the tunnel stands before him with something to say.