The Soloist (Movie Tie-In)

by Steve Lopez

  Yes, it is exhausting work, Mollie concedes one day when we sit in her backyard, several miles from Skid Row. But, she assures me, there are rewards. “There’s some equality in the relationship. A lot of people think social work is just giving, giving, giving, but it’s not. There’s far more getting. The simple appreciation people had for the smallest things we did for them always amazed me.”

  People are all around, hectoring, cajoling, arguing with one another and getting a little too close for Nathaniel’s comfort, just as he feared. When no one is looking, he sneaks his cello back into its case and makes for the door. A Lamp staffer catches him as he steps clear of the door, moments from a clean break, and pulls him back inside. Nathaniel resists at first but finally gives in, hands back the cello and walks away. Like a pouting child, he stops halfway down the street, angrily removes a tennis ball and a Christmas stocking from his shopping cart, and bounces the ball against the wall, catching it with the stocking.

  He stays away from Lamp for three long days, and I wonder if he’s done with the place, as well as with me and my rules. On the day of his return he makes music again in the courtyard, but with a different ending this time. This time, he sneaks off with his new instruments. In my effort to help him, I have succeeded only in further complicating his life. He’s out there now with two violins and a cello, inviting a mugging. He, of course, is the challenged one, but in a contest of wit and will, he’s winning. It isn’t even much of a contest.

  6

  While Nathaniel was at Juilliard, the rare black student in the elite world of conservatory music, I was at a junior college in the San Francisco Bay Area, where white suburban kids who couldn’t crack four-year schools were killing time while avoiding the draft. When a counselor told me San Jose State had a good journalism school, I transferred and graduated two years later, beginning a sportswriting career that didn’t last two years.

  It quickly occurred to me that ballplayers didn’t much care for sportswriters and that I didn’t much care for ballplayers. They were coddled and pampered and, worst of all, they were jocks like me and tended to be ignorant of the world. I preferred watching ball games from a distance, where it was easier to suffer illusions about the poetry and grandeur of competition, so I gave up the sports beat and became a news reporter at the Oakland Tribune. Every assignment there—murder, mayhem, ribbon cuttings, courtroom drama, meetings and more mayhem—was an education. That was when I became mesmerized by the work of columnists Mike Royko and Jimmy Breslin, admiring them from afar. They were watchdogs, detectives, champions, poets and gods, free to roam Chicago and New York looking for someone to speak up for or to poke in the eye with a stick. They were suspicious of power and pretense, just like my blue-collar parents had always been, and they delighted in cutting phonies down to size. It was the late Bob Maynard, then editor of the Oakland Tribune, who turned me loose to give it a whirl. I struggled with my first columns there, just as I did after moving on to the San Jose Mercury News and Philadelphia Inquirer. It was in Philadelphia in the mid-1980s that I had an epiphany. The challenge isn’t to figure out how to write, I realized, but why. Without a mission and a sense of whom you write for, you aren’t worth reading.

  In March 2005, not long after I met Nathaniel, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times was fired. John Puerner called his departure “self-imposed,” but I wasn’t alone in thinking it looked like one of those deals where you have two options—walk away quietly, or be pushed out a window. His chief crime had been to buck his bosses at the Chicago Tribune, who kept pushing for staff reductions to keep the profit margins in the 20 percent range and higher. Puerner had argued that although newspapers were struggling through a revolution, with readers dying off or switching to the Internet, only a fool would think you could cut your way to higher profits. But we were at the mercy of Wall Street, and to that breed, all that matters is cash flow. If today’s is a penny less than yesterday’s, there’s panic in pinstripes, and blowback in newsrooms.

  In the Times office, I joke with media writer Jim Rainey that instead of having tour groups visit the lobby museum, they should be brought up to the editorial offices to watch us fossilize at our keyboards. We revel in our collective misery, but I also worry about whether my job will exist as long as I need it to. I’ve got to get a two-year-old from Huggies to high school, and if the rumors can be believed, the editor who hired me could be the next to go. John Carroll is a Southern gentleman whose integrity and high standards have become liabilities. Though he is only sixty-three, he won’t hang around if ordered to keep shredding the staff he has built, and I’m asking myself if I’ll want to continue working for a company that has no place for John Carroll. I probably owe Nathaniel my gratitude for becoming such a distraction that there’s less time to grouse and fret. For all the trouble he’s giving me, Nathaniel is still a good story, and a chance for me to prove why the work that we do matters. But if I’m going to try to navigate the mental health system, I’d better find myself a good guide.

  We meet at Canter’s Deli, a landmark in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles. I know little about Richard Van Horn, an affable cherub with a bald pate, except that he had been an Episcopal priest who segued into mental health more than two decades ago. A Times reporter named Jeanne Merl told me Van Horn works in Long Beach, where he is president of the National Mental Health Association of Greater Los Angeles. Maybe, Merl suggested, he can help me figure out what to do about Nathaniel.

  For our first get-together, Van Horn brings along his wife, Kay, a former congressional aide equally steeped in mental health policy. They both know Nathaniel from my column, and by that, I don’t mean they know of him. They know him, and countless others just like him, intimately. The Van Horns are caught up in the drama of his struggle, and in my struggle to help him, and they say there’s already been a breakthrough. After decades of inadequate services and lack of awareness or compassion, Nathaniel has put a human face on the suffering of thousands and on the work of those, like the Van Horns, whose mission is to help them.

  Nathaniel may indeed be a godsend, but I wasn’t fishing for compliments. I confess to the Van Horns that I honestly don’t know what else I can do to help Nathaniel. I wonder if I’ve already erred in leading him to Lamp, where the loose structure doesn’t appear to be working very well in his case.

  Slow down, the Van Horns tell me. I couldn’t have done much better than Lamp. It’s set up like the Village in Long Beach, where Van Horn makes his office. The Village was one of the models for the Mental Health Services Act, approved by California voters in late 2004, which puts a small tax on the wealthiest Californians. Van Horn says there’s now a chance to pay penance for the sin of shutting the state mental hospitals decades earlier and never following up on the promise of community programs to pick up the slack. Skid Row is no accident, he says. We created it. But there will now be more money for, among other things, the very thing I’m attempting to do with Nathaniel—gradually luring people in off the streets and housing them in places with all the necessary supportive services, like counseling and job training.

  Hearing this makes me feel a little better, and maybe even more hopeful. But then Van Horn tells me what I don’t want to hear. This work isn’t easy or quick. It requires the patience of Job, which means, of course, that I’m the wrong man for the assignment. But if I stick with it, Van Horn says, I can make a meaningful difference in Nathaniel’s life. And if I need some inspiration or guidance, he knows someone I should pay a visit to.

  The Village is a three-story red brick building on the corner of Fourth and Elm, a couple of miles from the sprawling port of Long Beach and the Queen Mary. I’m directed to a waiting room, where a man sits on a chair with his head tilted back, staring up as if he expects the ceiling to fall. He’s munching an apple and wearing what is either a lamp shade or an unusually large straw hat. I walk past him and into a low-ceilinged room with several desks and subterranean windows that look up onto the street. Dr. Mark Ragins is beh
ind his desk in a corner, talking on the phone. He’s practically all hair from the neck up, a Deadhead character with a voice that comes up from his chest. He finishes the call and asks what exactly I’ve come to talk about.

  When I tell him I’m trying to figure out what to do about Nathaniel, he asks how long I can wait because a walk-in patient has just arrived. Would Ragins let me sit in on their session? I ask. He thinks it over for a moment and says sure, and it’s an early signal that Ragins has decided to forget everything he learned in medical school.

  The walk-in patient turns out to be the man with the lamp shade. He’s wearing baggy gym shorts and black boots, and around his neck he has tied a black shirt, a white towel and a red kerchief, the kind of neck gear Nathaniel often wears. He keeps his head tilted back when he sits down, and I realize it might be to keep his dark shades in place, because the earpieces are gone.

  Ragins asks his name.

  David.

  “You have a very strange appearance,” Ragins says.

  David doesn’t appear to be insulted.

  “I do what I can,” he says.

  “Well,” Ragins says, “how can we be of help to you?”

  I’m dying for a diagnosis. Is this guy schizophrenic? Does he have what Nathaniel’s got? But a diagnosis isn’t of much interest to Ragins. Diagnosis, prescription. That’s the history of mental health treatment, and Ragins believes it has been a colossal failure. As he sees it, we’re not even really sure what labels like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder mean, nor do we have very strong evidence that medication is the best response. That doesn’t mean that in the case of someone who is acutely psychotic, and a threat to himself or someone else, Ragins would argue against meds and hospital care. But he’s seen far too many people like David avoid seeking help for fear of being thrown into a loony bin against their will. To him, the first order of business is to establish the makings of a relationship that extends beyond the illness. It starts with making a person comfortable to come in on his own, rather than in a straitjacket. David is here today because a Village employee has already made several contacts with him, building up enough trust to finally get him through the door.

  David tells Ragins he’s been staying at a Skid Row hotel he absolutely hates. It’s too hot and swarming with drug dealers, pigeons and insects. He has to wear this hat for protection. And by the way, his foot hurts, he can’t hold a job and he needs to figure out how to find another place to live.

  “I’ve had, like, schizophrenia,” he says without being asked, telling Ragins he has been on antipsychotic medication in the past, including while living in San Francisco.

  “Do you find reasons to move all the time?” Ragins asks.

  No, David says. He left San Francisco because his girlfriend was a heroin addict.

  “I was with her for way too long.”

  “Were you in love with her?” Ragins asks.

  “I think that’s what they call it,” David says. “I was stupid.”

  “Maybe being stupid and being in love are the same thing,” Ragins says.

  “You tell me, doctor.”

  Having loosened him up, Ragins does a little digging now, finding that David has sought help in the past and is in a tailspin of late.

  “I’m very depressed,” he says, and he thought about killing himself while living in San Francisco. “I’ve been to the bridge, but never jumped.”

  Ragins asks why not.

  “I’d still like to live.”

  In less than thirty minutes, Ragins has steered him into talking about a set of goals. The doctor asks about his interests, hobbies, desires, establishing in concrete ways that David has a life worth living. David says he’s been studying Chinese because it “opens my mind,” and he’d like to find a job and a girlfriend.

  I suggest that he kill two birds with one stone by finding himself a Chinese girlfriend, and David kind of likes the idea.

  “Do you think the way you dress will scare off women?” Ragins asks.

  “Maybe the gold diggers,” David quips.

  Ragins tells David he can get him into a nearby hotel room that will be covered by his disability check. He also gives him a referral to a foot doctor and asks David if he needs medication for depression or the voices he hears. David says he’s okay for now, but he’d like to return soon for another chat.

  When David leaves I tell Ragins everything I know about Nathaniel and wonder if it sounds like the same kind of schizophrenia David has. Ragins gets a chuckle out of the question. I’m the student who has missed the whole point of the lesson. Making a diagnosis isn’t as important as making a connection, Ragins says. If Nathaniel is going to get better, it won’t be because of a correct diagnosis and textbook treatment program, but because he develops enough trust in me and others to pursue his own recovery.

  There’s a reason Ragins’s book A Road to Recovery isn’t called A Road to a Cure. There is no cure. But he believes David and Nathaniel can rebuild their lives in a setting like the one at the Village and at Lamp, where they can develop a sense of belonging and learn how to manage the disease. My involvement in Nathaniel’s life can make a huge difference for him, Ragins says. He tells me the challenge for doctors, mental health workers and advocates is to treat the person and not the disease.

  Before I leave the Village, I ask Ragins if several people who sit near him are also doctors, and the answer is a surprise. No, he says, they’re outreach workers who spend much of the day on the street, trying to talk the Davids and Nathaniels in. And they do bring one big advantage to that line of work. All of them once sat in the same chair as David.

  7

  Every time the phone rings at night, my stomach does a flip. I’m always sure it’s the police, calling to say Nathaniel is hanging on by a thread after a mugging, and nice going, Mr. Columnist. Along with giving him two brand-new instruments, why didn’t I paint a bull’s-eye on his back? When I let Nathaniel know how worried I am about his safety, he tells me to relax, assuring me he has jettisoned enough of his belongings to make room for the new violin and cello on his buggy and keep them covered. “You can’t tell what’s under all the blankets and other junk,” he says.

  I argue again that he’s broken our agreement to leave them at Lamp, but he says it’s just not necessary and insists the instruments will be less secure in someone else’s custody. I don’t worry about it so much by day, when he plays in relatively safe areas. But I don’t know what it’s like for him when he retires to Skid Row, and I have my doubts about his ability to safely conceal a three-piece string section.

  “Nathaniel,” I say to him one afternoon near the tunnel at Second and Hill, “I think I might come spend the night with you one of these evenings.”

  This gets his attention. He looks at me like I’m the crazy one.

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Why not? I’d just like to see where you stay and what it’s like out there.”

  He still doesn’t understand it, but says if I insist, he’s been bedding down on Los Angeles Street near Winston.

  “It’s in the Toy District,” he says, meaning an area where dozens of merchants sell wholesale toys that arrive by ship from across the Pacific. At night, the corrugated doors of those shops are rolled down and padlocked, and the huddled masses take up residence on sidewalks. “Los Angeles is a Beethoven city, but you have Walt Disney, Colonel Sanders, LAPD, the blacks, all the Yo-Yo Ma people, Jews, like JEW-liard, homosexuals. They’ve got one, two, three homosexual bars down there. The Toy District. That’s where all the children get their nourishment. You look up and see the banners that say ‘Toy District,’ with all the children flying over rooftops.”

  The longer I’m with him, the more I hear a preoccupation with race, ethnicity and sexual preference. This is not uncommon, a Lamp staffer has told me. With schizophrenia, there’s often bigotry or hyper-religiosity, or both. I wonder if Nathaniel’s take on race has something to do with having left an all-black neighborhood in
Cleveland and ending up in an elite New York school where blacks were scarce. His social development essentially stalled with his breakdown, which came at a time when race in America was a raw, divisive subject. At Second and Hill, I’ve seen him draw swastikas on the pavement and call fellow African-Americans niggers. He has told me he’s brown, not black, pointing to his skin as if the color should be obvious to me.

  “I’ll be out there tonight,” I tell him.

  “You don’t want to go out there,” he says.

  Does he have something to hide? Or is it a matter of pride, with him not wanting me to see him sleep on the sidewalk?

  “I’ll see you in the Toy District when it gets dark,” I say.

  He nods suspiciously. As I walk away from the Little Walt Disney Concert Hall, he’s playing “It’s a Small World After All.”

  A modest renaissance is under way, with long-abandoned buildings coming to life, but much of the east side of downtown is still a job center by day and a shadowy memory by night. At Fourth and Main I hit the border of civilization. Pete’s Cafe is there, along with a few gentrified apartment buildings, the homes of artists and young urban pioneers. There’s a whiff of order and hope. But take one step north, south or east, and the deal is off. At Fourth and Los Angeles, a man lurks in a doorway with product for sale, and he’s got his antenna up to make me as customer or cop. I haven’t shaved and I’m wearing jeans, sneakers and a ball cap, a getup I think might help me blend in, but in truth I stand out like a tourist in Amish Country. You can’t look at anyone here. It’s a giveaway. You light the crack pipe, hire the hooker or get out of Dodge. I’m fooling no one, and suspicious eyes track my every step. On the corner, a dumpster reeks of rotten food and dead flesh. The daytime bustle of Toy District commerce disappears as darkness and indifference grow. The last drafts of sunbaked urine rise off of stained asphalt and concrete. All systems are down and the place smells of doom.