The Soloist (Movie Tie-In)

by Steve Lopez

  “It’s always so relaxing to hear you play,” she says.

  Nathaniel takes the compliment well, even when it appears that the woman might be hustling him.

  “I’m starving,” she says, calling herself Estella. “I need a ninety-nine -cent hamburger, and a spider bit me. Look at this.”

  Nathaniel, who collects an occasional quarter or dollar bill tossed his way by a passerby, offers her a buck. But he’s concerned about the bite on her leg, and carefully sets his cello aside to have a closer look. He offers Estella his dairy crate as a seat and leans in to examine an infected, nasty-looking wound. Her shin has grown a lump the size of a golf ball.

  “I’ve got bugs that bite me inside my trousers,” Nathaniel says while another homeless man emerges from the tunnel to speculate on the type of spider that has inflicted the damage, postulating that the wound suggests the work of a brown spider. Brown spiders, the stranger says, are on the prowl, the nasty buggers. These bites have to be taken care of, he advises, because a festering, untreated wound will soon be crawling with maggots.

  Before too much longer, the Tortilla Flat confab breaks up with the woman on her way to get that ninety-nine-cent hamburger and Nathaniel back to the business at hand, settling again onto the Driftwood Dairy crate with his legs wrapped around the cello. His first offering is a Beethoven cello sonata, and this drab concrete corner of downtown Los Angeles, with its nearby settlement of bug-bitten denizens and moving clouds of noxious vehicle exhaust, is transformed into a place of lilting repose. The cello lets forth a deeper cry than the violin did, and it’s better equipped to compete with the sound of wheels turning. It’s been years since Nathaniel has held a cello in his hands, and he never had more than a few lessons after letting go of the double bass, so he stumbles at times and doubles back to rework phrases. But he looks natural and rather pleased with this first effort. I tell him it sounds terrific even though I can hear as many misses as hits, with the new strings losing their tune as they go slack.

  Next comes Ernest Bloch’s Rhapsody for Cello, which begins as a slow, poetic lament. Nathaniel’s bow is a fluid and obedient slave, his fingers dancing ballet on the fresh-varnished neck, and the music cuts him off from noise, worry, fear, illness. I could watch for hours, but I’ve got work to do back at the office. This is when I’m supposed to play the bad guy and take the instrument away, but I can’t do it. He’s in such a state of ecstasy, I can’t bring myself to break the mood. I tell him he can play a little while longer and then I’ll be back to drive the instruments over to Lamp. At the moment he’s too engrossed to argue the point.

  At my computer, I do a little research on Ernest Bloch. “The cello represents a meditative voice, tragically alone,” Bloch wrote of the rhapsody Nathaniel was just playing. I’m discovering, though, that Nathaniel isn’t alone. Music is an anchor, a connection to great artists, to history and to himself. His head is filled with mixed signals, a frightening jumble of fractured meaning, but in music there is balance and permanence. The notes of Rhapsody sit on the staff as they did ninety years ago, precisely where Bloch left them. The work of Nathaniel’s beloved Beethoven has endured through parts of three centuries and will last beyond our time. Music is a meditation, a reverie, a respite from madness. It is his way to be alone without fear.

  After a few hours of work back at my office, I find Nathaniel as I left him, plopped on the dairy crate and in the embrace of music. He won’t like what I’m about to do, but I don’t see an alternative. It’s possible he’s already been scoped out by someone intent on grabbing the new cello.

  I haven’t given any consideration to what I might do if he resists, but I know the terms of the relationship are changing here and now. I am no longer a benign presence, the affable new guy in his life who brings casual conversation and occasional gifts, asking nothing in return. I can see that on some level he, too, senses this shift. He pulls the cello close to his body and looks at me with pleading eyes, as if I have arrived on the scene to kidnap his firstborn.

  “I haven’t really heard the instrument yet,” he protests. “I’m just getting to know it.”

  “You can keep playing over at Lamp,” I say, and I try convincing him it makes more sense to be in a quiet place.

  “This is the perfect music environment,” he insists, motioning toward the mouth of the tunnel as if it were the stage of the Hollywood Bowl. He knows Lamp is on Skid Row, where people will be swarming, standing in front of him while he tries to play and tossing cigarette butts at his feet.

  I fall back on suggesting it’s time for a break. He’s been playing since the crack of dawn.

  “Eight hours seems like two minutes when you’re having fun,” Nathaniel says. “Mr. Rich has given me a new lease on life.”

  Okay, the negotiations have ended. I tell Nathaniel this is the deal he’s agreed to as I reach for the violin. He isn’t happy, but he’s done battling. I load the instruments into the trunk of my car and Nathaniel watches as if he might never see them again. I tell him to start pushing his cart across downtown to Skid Row and I’ll wait for him at Lamp, so he can see exactly where his instruments are going to be kept.

  Downtown Los Angeles disintegrates rapidly as you head east. In just a few blocks, business suits and corporate towers give way to a ten-block grid of streets littered with rejects and discards. Near Lamp, people by the hundreds roam trashed streets without purpose, camp in tents and boxes, or lie sprawled on the pavement as if they’re dead. Some of them are filthy and insane, some are junkies or merely destitute, and still others are defending turf and trolling for trouble. It’s chaos and collapse everywhere I look, with dead rats splattered flat on asphalt and the air spiked with drafts of decaying food, urine, vomit and misery. None of this is new to me, but I’m seeing it with fresh eyes now that I’ve got a personal investment here.

  I stop my car and imagine Nathaniel pushing his cart through the squalor with a head full of beautiful music. Police are making an arrest at Sixth and San Julian, with a young black man in handcuffs against a wall. A woman sits in the middle of the street screaming. A siren wails as paramedics pull out of Station 9. Near the entrance to Lamp, two men argue about nothing, on the verge of flying fists. I walk through a courtyard and up to the second floor, where Patricia Lopez has found a place to keep Nathaniel’s new cello and violin.

  Lamp has thirty beds upstairs for chronically mentally ill people who are ready to come in and work with counselors and therapists to plot the next step. Might this one day be Nathaniel’s new home? I’m getting ahead of myself. I tell Patricia Lopez I don’t know whether Nathaniel will show.

  It takes time, she tells me.

  How much time?

  Days, weeks, sometimes months.

  Weeks or months?

  I’m a newspaper columnist. We solve problems and move on. We’ve got deadlines.

  5

  A month goes by. The instruments are still in storage, untouched. I’m in my office one day, adding and subtracting columns from the list on the yellow pad, when my phone rings.

  “I have some good news,” says Shannon Murray. “Nathaniel is in the courtyard, playing his cello.”

  Though I’d nearly given up hope, a month doesn’t seem so long now that I’m hurrying across Skid Row to catch the show. The concert is still in full swing when I get there, and I stand motionless for a moment, trying to restrain the urge to run up and pat Nathaniel on the back. He’s wrapped around the cello, coaxing all the sound he can get out of his new instrument. He acknowledges my presence and I nod approvingly but choose not to interrupt him. He has an audience of about a dozen people, not that everyone is riveted, or even awake.

  The courtyard is about forty feet square, with terraced benches on one side, a couple of picnic tables, and a steady flow of people moving in and out of the adjacent building or coming in off the street in search of food, bathrooms and company. Nathaniel’s soothing music is a nice touch at so busy an asylum, and it’s appropriately schizophre
nic, too, lovely at times and lost at others.

  “He can’t play,” one man sniffs, shaking his head.

  I’m hoping this kind of thing doesn’t drive Nathaniel away. It’s not that I’m certain this is the right program for him, and to be honest, I can understand why anyone would want to avoid coming here. I just need to get on with my life and have some assurance that he’s in a place where he can get help. But as he predicted with scorn, people are smoking and flicking cigarettes here and there, and hard-boiled arguments can be heard from the homeless encampment on the street just a few feet beyond the courtyard doors. The courtyard itself is a hall of horrors, with every manner of biological disturbance and human breakdown on display, even though most people appear docile, if not sedated. There’s incessant muttering and squawks from bedraggled souls, there are angry stare-downs that tip toward violence and there is a stunning array of Halloween-like getups, one woman dressed as a flapper, another in white-face, a man with a pair of pants a good eight inches too short.

  “Yeah, like this family can EVER have a SENSible converSATION, ” one young man barks to his imaginary relatives as a Lamp employee emerges from the lobby of the building to announce the start of a class inside:

  “Anger management! Anybody here want to go to anger management? ”

  I wait for relative calm and then dial Nathaniel’s sister Jennifer in Atlanta. I’ve been keeping her abreast of my efforts to help her brother and waiting for just the right moment to have them chat by phone for the first time in several years. Jennifer squeals with delight when I tell her where her brother is and what he’s doing. Yes, she says, of course she’d like to speak to him. I hand Nathaniel the phone and he looks at it with puzzlement. At fifty-four, it might be the first time he’s ever used a cell phone.

  “I’m very fond of you, too,” he tells his little sister after a short conversation, and then he’s back to his music.

  A white-haired woman named Carol seems to be one of Nathaniel’s more appreciative fans, taking in the concert from a bench against one wall. She has read about him in my column and was surprised to find him playing at Lamp, where she has lived for several years. She says she told Nathaniel about her plan to save the world with a Skid Row salvage company, and Nathaniel filled her in on the importance of music in his life.

  “My favorite piece is Beethoven’s Sixth,” says Carol, who, at first glance, looks like she got lost on the way to high tea and ended up on Skid Row. She’s neatly dressed and coiffed, a white woman in her mid-seventies in a population dominated by young black males.

  “The Pastorale,” Nathaniel says, breaking from his music to eavesdrop. Then he raises his right hand to conduct the Sixth.

  At the moment, I’m more interested in Carol than in Nathaniel. What’s her story, and what can it tell me about a disease I know so little about? Carol is happy to oblige. Forty years ago, she was a homemaker in the Highland Park neighborhood north of downtown Los Angeles. She and her husband, a floral designer, had two children, and all was good until Carol began feeling an uncontrollable, feral urge to run through the streets at night. She slept in neighbors’ yards and on the street while her husband searched hysterically for her, often with the two children riding lookout in the family car. He would find her, take her back home, and she’d run again, eventually landing in a mental hospital, where she picked a fight with the first person she saw.

  “I’m different,” Carol tells me. “I’ll admit to a lot of anger in me. And paranoia, too. It’s not so much fear as it is suspicion.”

  She says she thought her husband was trying to poison her and that there was something sinister about the television set in their home.

  “I was getting messages from the TV,” she says.

  What kind of messages?

  Carol levels her eyes at me and arches her brow.

  “That’s personal, Steve,” she says sternly.

  I back off, apologizing, but Carol proceeds, moving from the conspiracy of TV transmissions to the voices that fill her head. It’s not clear why she’s offended by a question about the TV but comfortable describing the ghosts who trespass at will, but I’m happy to take what I can get.

  “It’s never anything like, ‘Go kill yourself.’ It’s just someone calling my name. I don’t know who it is, but it’s happened four times in the last six months.”

  I ask her if she thinks medication might help quell those voices. Last time she tried meds, Carol tells me, her legs turned to jelly and she was in a fog for days. There’s nothing she loves more than cracking open a good book, but the drugs make it impossible.

  When she’s not reading, Carol says, she’s gathering up bottles and cans across Skid Row and taking them to a redemption center. The world wastes too much, and she has been called upon to one day operate a recycling operation of unprecedented size. I wonder if she thinks she might be limited by age or the fact that she’s living at a mental health shelter.

  “I’ve got to dream,” she says.

  Mollie Lowery, who established Lamp in 1985, retired at about the time I met Nathaniel. Though I didn’t know her well, it was comforting to have her offer occasional words of encouragement as she followed Nathaniel’s story in the newspaper. Lowery is a lanky native Angeleno with a saint’s heart and an activist’s soul, who moved from one cause to another as a young woman, looking for something important to devote herself to. In the 1970s, while working with homeless people at the Ocean Park Community Center in West Los Angeles, she noticed a sudden explosion of mentally ill people wandering the streets. The state hospitals had been closed and patients were told to go home, but many of them had no homes to return to. As for the limited mental health services that did exist, there was one problem. Untreated mentally ill people do not by nature rise and shine each morning and go queue up at the nearest county health office. The people in the greatest need of help, Lowery realized, were not about to fill out forms, keep appointments or trust anyone remotely associated with a mental health service, particularly since many of them had endured mind-boggling bureaucracy or had been force-fed medication that made them feel like slugs.

  Lowery, on a fact-finding mission, traveled fifteen miles east, from beach to skyscrapers, to see if the Skid Row missions and other service centers had figured out what to do about any of this. What she found was that if Santa Monica had a growing problem, Skid Row had a full-blown epidemic. Mentally ill people by the hundreds were roaming the streets, and by night they became part of a box city asylum, with cardboard from the toy, flower and garment districts serving as sidewalk homes. It was the ground zero of failed public policy. Only one place, the Downtown Women’s Center, seemed to have any idea what to do about the problem. It offered basic services like food and shelter before trying to impose treatment, and the loose structure appeared to be drawing women in from the cold.

  Lowery became convinced that was the way to go—to build a welcoming place without judgment, a place where clients could be themselves in a setting without expectation or rigid rules. In her search for a way to create such a shelter, she met a man named Frank Rice, whose politics could not have been more unlike hers. He was a chamber of commerce conservative and vice president of Bullock’s department store, but Rice was no less compassionate than Lowery and at least as determined to serve the needy and clean up downtown in the process. Rice suggested Lowery open a center for men, since there was no place for them at the Downtown Women’s Center, and he had the muscle to get city officials moving and cash flowing. The result was the Los Angeles Men’s Project.

  I wasn’t living in Los Angeles at the time and knew nothing of Lowery’s work. I was living in Philadelphia, where, by chance, Sister Mary Scullion was doing the same thing. Whereas politicians and public policy designers had failed, and while most of us were inclined to do little more than grumble about the unsightly presence of panhandlers and bums, Scullion took her vow of humility into the streets on the most bitter nights of many a Philadelphia winter, determined to reel in t
hose who had been cut loose. I heard about Scullion from a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter named Vernon Loeb, who had a suggestion one year when I asked if he had any ideas for an upbeat Thanksgiving Day column.

  “Go see Sister Mary,” Loeb said.

  “What’s she do?” I asked.

  “She goes out on the street and talks to mentally ill homeless women.”

  “And that’s an upbeat Thanksgiving story?”

  “She gets them to come live in some old abandoned school,” Loeb said. “Go check it out. If you don’t feel inspired by the hope in there, I’ll buy you lunch.”

  He never bought that lunch.

  Scullion had taken the name of her order, Sisters of Mercy, to heart. A couple of dozen women were living at her shelter, and she introduced me to them as if they were members of her family. They were sick and hobbled and showed the scars and strain of too many years outside, but in the eyes of each, there were the signs of recovered confidence, dignity and hope. They were trying to find some balance, hooking up with long-lost relatives and getting used to the idea of pitching in to make this new place their home.

  While Scullion focused first on women and later branched out to include men, Lowery was doing it in reverse out west. Both were being recognized as pioneers, and neither was very comfortable taking bows. They were quick to tell their admirers that the real heroes were the thousands of desperate, addled, courageous souls who had graced and enriched their lives.

  “When you look in Mollie’s face, you can see that she has absorbed the grief of the people she treats,” an admirer once said of Lowery. “In the business she’s in, you can either put up a shield so the unhappiness doesn’t touch you, or you can be open to it and absorb it yourself. What makes Mollie so interesting is that she has absorbed it, and—how can I say this?—she has grown strong from it.”