by Steve Lopez
This is where Nathaniel lives, and I need to ask him why. It would be safer to spend his nights where he spends his days. I keep moving and see a prostitute young enough to still be in high school. She’s blond and petite, a little angel of a crack whore, swinging along between blow jobs and hits on the pipe.
“Hey, baby,” calls a man in a cardboard box.
“How you doing tonight, honey?” she sings back.
The streets are trashed. Drunks are down and out, like fallen soldiers. Nathaniel has been telling me about a beating victim here, and I don’t know if he’s talking about the unsolved murder I heard about, a case so fresh the body’s still in the morgue. Should have seen the guy’s face, he said. “I don’t know why you beat a person like that.”
An unpaid debt. A psychotic blitz. A random blow. Out here, it could have been anything.
I make my way up Winston toward Main and feel as though I could be next. A guy is coming toward me with purpose. I toss a glance over my shoulder to see if he’s got company for an ambush. Am I being too paranoid? I’d make an easy mark for a quick mugging. But there’s nothing behind me except my shadow. Still, my flesh rises as the man slides by like a shark. A dealer, I guess. Just checking me out and sending a signal that no browsing is allowed. If I’m not buying, it’s time to leave the store.
Back on Los Angeles Street, a San Fernando Valley ministry arrives with a van and a truck and sets up a sidewalk food line, the missionaries chattering in Spanish as they hand out plates of chicken and beans to a growing line of takers. The hungry dropouts dig in, cleaning bones to a shine and wiping their mouths with the backs of grimy hands. One stumbling Latino drunk begins blubbering after his meal and the missionaries gather around him as he kneels on the pavement. They reach for my hand and take me into the prayer circle. The group leader lays hands on the kneeling drunk, whose tears splatter the pavement, and they all begin to pray in Spanish.
This is the second largest city in the United States. I am three blocks from the Times Building, four blocks from City Hall, out of sight and beyond the collective consciousness. Nothing here exists. The brilliant night skyline, a profit-chart etching, reaches the stars. A woman in distress zigzags toward me. She looks like she might be sixty-five but as she gets closer she’s fifty-five, now forty-five, now in her thirties. A young face is cracked, sunburned and coked out. Her hands are filthy, her sweatpants stained in the seat. She circles, wobbles and stumbles to a pay phone and dials. Not two minutes later a siren cuts toward us in surround sound, the piercing wail bouncing off buildings as the four-man engine crew responds to another call in the 911 drama that plays all night every night.
“It’s my heart,” the woman tells the rescue crew, and they load her up and shuttle her off to County-USC Medical Center as a firefighter/paramedic tells me it never stops. ODs. Beatings. Heart attacks. Bodies laid out in tents and behind dumpsters. War veterans fallen from wheelchairs and into the fetid streets.
I walk up Winston but turn back when I find myself isolated one more time with a man emerging from shadows. He’s probably just another dealer looking for a sale, but the sound of the siren and the memory of Nathaniel’s story of a beating victim are too fresh, so I turn back and linger at the corner, where a bearded man of about sixty is setting down his sidewalk bedding. I ask if he’s familiar with the guy who lugs a shopping cart to this street and sleeps here every night.
“Lots of shopping carts out here,” he says.
I’m trying to talk him into a bed at Lamp, I tell the guy.
“If he’s got a cart,” he tells me, sharing a bit of street wisdom that seems obvious now that he mentions it, “that’s not the type that’s ready to come in.”
And why isn’t this guy ready to come in? I wonder. He’s got no cart. Maybe he’s one of the many who can’t tolerate the rules and close quarters of the shelters. That’s part of what Nathaniel is avoiding, too, I’m sure. But I’m not trying to get him to a shelter, where hundreds of people sack out on cots. If he gets housing through Lamp, it’ll be his own place. And if all he wants to do is play music, wouldn’t it be easier if he had a safe and quiet home to call his own?
Finally, around nine o’clock, I see the familiar image at the top of Winston, a shadowy figure with a cart in tow. Nathaniel has arrived. He stops under an apartment building with the sonic blast of a rock band pouring through the windows.
“You like the music?” I ask.
“You call that music?” he quips.
He seems happy to see me, given his recommendation that I stay away. He tells me he stopped and bought a chicken dinner at one of the divey little eateries nearby. When he doesn’t take his meals at one of the missions, he always has a few bucks in his violin or cello case at the end of a day, even though he doesn’t ask for money. The way he lives, it doesn’t take much.
He’s exhausted, eyes half-mast, body sagging. The cart must feel like it weighs half a ton, and getting it up and down curbs is both a physical workout and a mental strain. Two dead palm fronds rise from the front corners of his cart, as if he’s landscaped his mobile home. Two sticks, four feet in length, are crisscrossed at the other end of the basket and wedged through the slots in a Ford hubcap. With a black marker he has written Brahms on one stick, and on the other, Beethoven. He lugs this heap up one last curb and onto the sidewalk, dragging it to his resting place in front of a locked-down storefront. This is where the woman with the soiled pants called 911, and where the missionaries served chicken. A wing bone and a leg are in the gutter and there’s a lingering hint of grease in the air.
Why this spot? I ask.
“I know these guys,” Nathaniel says of the colony of fellow travelers, none of whom return his glance.
He points toward LAPD headquarters four blocks away. If a fight breaks out and things get nasty, he says, he knows who to count on, who to avoid and where to run. But if he’s hemmed in, he has a sawed-off wooden leg of a chair concealed under the sweatshirt tied around his waist. The club is fastened to his belt with a hook fashioned from wire. And, he tells me, he’s got the hubcap as a shield. I feel like I’m interviewing a Roman gladiator.
Nathaniel lashes his cart to a padlock on the storefront shutter and begins unpacking for the night. As I watch, I wonder how best to steer us into a conversation about the advantages of sleeping indoors, and that’s when I notice the lighted rooms of nearby flop-houses and cheapo apartments.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to have one of those places up there?” I ask. “It has to be much more comfortable to have a place of your own.”
Not interested, Nathaniel says. This is his turf, and he’s not leaving.
“I’d rather die where I know my way around. I’m out here breathing fresh air, and I’m not trapped in some apartment, cooped up and unheard of.”
Okay, where’s Dr. Ragins when I need him? I’d like to hear him respond. But as always with Nathaniel, I’m pretty much on my own. He’s a very smart guy, I tell myself, so let’s try logic.
“Do you think it makes any sense to stay here if you’re trying to get back in shape as a musician?” I ask, thinking I’ve surely stumped him. “You’d have much more time to practice if you didn’t have to pack and unpack your things every day.”
He’s got an answer. Always an answer.
“My vision—I hate to admit it—but I’m going to have to do what Mozart did, and die. My vision is to stay in good with God and not worry about far-off stuff, just get across the street safely and be thankful. Honor thy mother and father, don’t be disrespectful to people, be good and maybe the music will take care of itself.”
Journalism school, several thousand columns and a pretty good street education have not prepared me for this. I never expected to be intellectually challenged at every turn, but the guy’s living by his wits and I don’t have an answer for him. He’s got a philosophical take that actually makes sense in a daffy and delusional way, and it’s almost as if he’s stolen my questions beforehand and is now toyi
ng with me.
Since he brought up God, I ask what that means to him. Maybe I can turn it around and suggest that God wouldn’t want him to waste all his talent.
“My god doesn’t have a name,” he says. “Beethoven could be my god.”
Okay, I give up for now.
Nathaniel dips into his cart for a list of sheet music. He says he spent some time at the Central Library earlier in the day but couldn’t find the desired Brahms double concerto, Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme, Mendelssohn’s Third and Fourth Symphonies, Sibelius’s Symphony No. 2, and Strauss’s Don Quixote. He did, however, dig up and copy Camille Saint-Saëns’s Concerto for Violoncello. “There’s something like eighteen or nineteen notes in a single pickup,” he says. “It’s very pleasing that Saint-Saëns had all those ideas and was fast enough to get this all down.”
Nathaniel goes digging for a whisk broom from his cart and knows exactly where to find it. Dr. Ragins explained that a schizophrenic’s mind is cluttered, with images and thoughts strewn everywhere. You can’t organize your mind, but you can organize your shopping cart. So you do.
Nathaniel sweeps the sidewalk with maniacal diligence, flicking dead cockroaches and cigarette butts into the gutter to clear a space for his bedding.
“Have to get all this nasty business out of here,” he says good-naturedly before turning to me when the job is done.
“Welcome to my humble abode,” he says.
There’s not much gibberish tonight. No stream of non sequiturs and jangled prose. But that only makes me more confused and frustrated by the mysteries of mental illness. If he can hold it together like this, coming across as a nimble conversationalist, why can’t he see the madness of bedding down with cockroaches?
He sets a layer of cardboard on the sidewalk, and on top of that a soiled blanket, a sweater, a canvas sheet and then a sleeping bag. From the bowels of the cart he brings up a can of Shasta Tiki Punch soda and offers it to me.
“Care for a drink?”
Hanging off the cart is a broken clock. He has rubber-banded a plastic fork and spoon onto the clock as hands, with the time set at 3 P.M., and he has written my name in the center of the clock.
Just out of curiosity, I ask, what is my name doing on the clock?
“You work for the Times,” he says, “and this is a timepiece.”
To my relief, he wasn’t kidding about the way he manages to hide the instruments. I bought him a hard case for the cello, and it’s wrapped in blankets on the bottom shelf of the cart. But when he pulls it out and opens the case, it’s empty.
“What happened to the cello?” I ask, thinking it’s already been stolen.
Nathaniel is smiling as he pulls a blue nylon bag out of the cart. The cello is inside, and the hard case is a decoy.
Nathaniel throws a glance up and down the street. Two dozen people are setting up camp, but no one seems to be looking our way. A man just ten feet away is slumped against the wall, lighting a crack pipe. Nathaniel sets the cello on the sidewalk against the wall, then puts one of his encased violins on top of it before covering both with several layers of blankets and a blue tarp.
“Gotta protect those guys,” he says, shaping the covers so that all anyone can see is what looks like a mound of rags.
His original violin, the one from Motter’s Music House in Cleveland, goes on the ground next to the shopping cart.
“I use it as my pillow,” he says, so there’s no way anyone can grab it without his knowing it.
Nathaniel lowers himself onto his sleeping bag and reaches for the Brahms and Beethoven sticks. I assume they’re to poke at anyone who comes snooping around, but he says no.
“When the rodents come,” he says, pointing the Beethoven stick at the sewer grate, “this guy takes care of them.”
Does he beat the rats with the sticks?
“No. You tap it on the ground like this.” Tap, tap, tap. “It scares them away.”
He’s a classical musician who has taken a great fall and now finds himself fending off sewer rats, but when I look into his eyes, I find no hint of regret, no recognition of this nightly collision between beautiful thoughts and ugly reality. He is but a man surviving another night by whatever means necessary, without lament. Humbled and exasperated, I ask how he expects to be able to chase rats away with Brahms and Beethoven sticks while he’s dead asleep, but he doesn’t answer. His miraculous and mixed-up mind is traveling back through time, wrapped around a memory of his brief acting career in high school. He steps up, stands at the edge of the sidewalk like an actor at center stage, and recites Hamlet in a Shakespearean accent.
“To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep,
No more, and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. ’Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep;
To sleep—perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.”
He takes a modest bow before unappreciative Skid Row Theater audience members, most of whom, like Nathaniel, are in their own worlds. A human howl rises in the invisible distance, one of the mad cries that crack the silence now and then on Skid Row. A barefoot and crazed man shakes and shimmies nearby, his skin crawling with bugs. Two salvagers stride by, jangling their sacks of aluminum cans. Nathaniel bows his head and recites the Lord’s Prayer—“deliver us from evil”—then opens his eyes to see two prostitutes trespassing on his prayers.
“I think these children of God are going to be okay,” he says. “They’re going to sleep and dream, like human beings do.”
He slides into his sleeping bag and, as if on cue, a rat comes up from the storm drain and scurries toward us. Nathaniel reaches for the Beethoven stick, taps, and the rat retreats.
“Do you think of writers often?” Nathaniel asks. “Do you think of writers the way I think of musicians?”
Yes, I say. I think about great writers and the source of their creative inspiration. Does it spring from knowledge, experience, love, loss?
Nathaniel looks into lighted windows and says he can almost see the masters at work.
“I love to think about musicians,” he says. “I can imagine Mozart or Beethoven sitting in a room up there with the light on. They hunger and thirst like we do. It’s angelic.”
It’s after midnight. Nathaniel offers me his dairy crate and a blanket, suggesting that I recline against his mound of possessions and close my eyes.
“I hope you rest well, Mr. Lopez,” he says. “I hope the whole world rests well.”
I try to sleep but can’t. I’m thinking about the rat that came up from the drain. Then, when finally I begin to doze, I hear a siren, or footsteps, or a hacking cough. I spy the pavement for cockroaches. Restless, I walk Skid Row for ninety minutes, past hundreds of campers. They’re in doorways and boxes, slumped over in wheelchairs. I’m angry about billions spent in Iraq while bomb-rattled vets live like animals on Skid Row. I’m ashamed that in a region of unprecedented wealth, the destitute and the sick have been shoved into this human corral. I’m frustrated by my inability to do more for Nathaniel. If I can’t help him, how can I help any of the others?
When I get back to Nathaniel, he’s snoring. I try to join him, but now I’m even more wired. I walk to a hotel and check in, fall onto a bed in my clothes and stare at the ceiling. Nathaniel has gotten to me. In thirty years of rummaging through cities for characters, I’ve never met one as beguiling or maddening. No, Mr. Ayers, the world is not resting well. I get up, throw col
d water on my face and check out of the hotel two hours after arriving. Nathaniel hasn’t moved. I tour Skid Row again and it’s as spooky as before, and I wonder how to put this into words.
8
Joseph Russo grew up in the upper-middle-class bedroom community of Manhasset on the north shore of Long Island, the son of a school district administrator and a first-grade schoolteacher. His father was an amateur jazz pianist, so Russo’s ear was tuned from an early age, but it wasn’t until he got both the measles and the mumps simultaneously, in third grade, that he discovered classical music.
“I was out of school for a month, and my teacher sent home some Beethoven albums and a bust of Beethoven, and she said maybe I’d like listening to this while I was recuperating.”
Russo fell in love. He decided, while under the weather and still in pajamas, that he would one day play classical music. And so began the piano lessons, which continued until he attended Manhasset High School, whose orchestra didn’t have a piano. The teacher asked Russo to pick another instrument, and he chose violin. But the following week, when instruments were handed out, the teacher assigned him a bass.
“We’ve got plenty of violin players, but no bass player,” said his teacher, and Russo never regretted it.
He progressed so quickly, the teacher advised him to take private lessons from a student of the acclaimed Homer Mensch, who was living in Flushing, New York, at the time. Russo again progressed so quickly that his teacher handed him over to Mensch himself, who told Russo he ought to apply to Juilliard.
“Juilliard?” Russo asked. He was looking at Oberlin and Indiana University, but didn’t consider himself good enough to break into Juilliard. Mensch convinced him to audition, though, and Russo was more than adequate. Juilliard gave him a partial scholarship, and he began commuting by train in the fall of 1971.
Like many new students, Russo was initially overwhelmed by the intense atmosphere, the demands on students and the talent of the competition. Juilliard was a full-time challenge from eight in the morning until eight at night, when he went back to Penn Station and took the train home, only to practice until bedtime. On the fourth floor at Juilliard, Russo was intimidated by the quality of the music emanating from the little pressure cookers where students practiced between classes. He wondered, still, if he belonged at Juilliard.