by Steve Lopez
One day, while walking to a class on the third floor, he heard a gorgeous and familiar sound from behind the door of a classroom. Having spent years under Homer Mensch’s wing, he recognized the sound as that of his mentor, and he decided to steal just a minute or two to peek in and watch the master at work.
“But when I opened the door, it wasn’t Mr. Mensch. It was Nathaniel.”
Russo was in awe of his classmate, so much so that he was willing to overlook what at times was an abrasive personality. It was September 1971, after all. The riots at Attica State Prison in upstate New York served as a potent and deadly reminder of racial divisions that ran deep and wide in American culture. An all-white guard unit had boasted of bashing inmates with batons they called nigger sticks. So Nathaniel had an attitude? Russo, for one, wasn’t surprised. Nathaniel was a young black man trying to prove himself in a mostly white world. And besides, who at Juilliard didn’t have problems with the intense pressure from teachers and competition from classmates? Emotional instability was common. Some turned to drugs, retreating to the not-so-secret lair called Stairway E, which spiraled through the center of campus and was often filled with clouds of reefer. All you had to do was open the stairwell door on the third floor, and without leaving the building, you could get a contact high. It was the early seventies, and drugs were everywhere. Nathaniel was no addict, but like others, he wasn’t about to wave off whatever was passed down the line when students sneaked into the stairwell. With a quick tug on a joint, self-confidence won a round in the endless battle with self-doubt. For a brief instant, the mind-fuck disappeared into a yellow cloud, and students emerged with glassy-eyed smiles, better equipped to handle the pressure and politics, the swollen egos and even grander insecurities.
Russo walked into the cafeteria one day and into the middle of a conversation about a stunningly good violinist.
“Hey, you hear what happened to Rabin?”
No, what happened?
“He killed himself.”
That was Juilliard. The pressure could shore up your belief in yourself. Or, says Russo, “It could destroy you.”
His first year at Juilliard, Russo invited some classmates home to Manhasset for a Christmas party. By then, Nathaniel was closer to Russo than anyone else. He appreciated Russo’s low-key manner and quick humor, and Russo was struck by Nathaniel’s talent and intelligence. They caught a train at Penn Station and rolled out to the burbs with other pals, and as the party got going, several of them gathered around the piano to watch a classmate play. The Juilliard pressure was gone, the spirit was light, the mood festive. And when the pianist finished his piece, Russo turned to Nathaniel.
“Boy,” he said, “doesn’t that sound beautiful?”
Nathaniel glared back at Russo and the party sounds gave way to silence.
“What do you mean by saying ‘boy’?” he demanded.
Russo was dumbstruck at first, then frightened by the change that had come over his friend. It was as if another person had crawled into his skin. Russo had seen sudden mood changes in Nathaniel, but nothing quite like this. He stammered a clarification, saying he hadn’t called him a boy. Didn’t Nathaniel understand that?
“Are you a racist?” Nathaniel insisted, stopping the party dead. It was a moment so awkward and thick, no one knew what to say or do. Russo was hurt by the accusation. Hadn’t he stuck with Nathaniel while others dismissed him as an angry flake? Hadn’t he invited Nathaniel into his home to share the holiday with his family? Russo wondered, for the first time, if there might be something seriously wrong with his friend. Finally, someone had the sense to break the tension by starting another piece on the piano. The party resumed, and Nathaniel quickly swung back to normal, drifting with the music and carrying on as if nothing had happened.
9
Although I feel closer to Nathaniel since the night on Skid Row and more determined to help him, it’s not clear to either of us what my role is in his life, and I don’t know if I’ve earned the right to tell him he needs psychiatric help. I do know from his sister Jennifer that medication is a sore subject, not just because he insists he doesn’t need it, but because he recoils at the mere suggestion of something or someone controlling him. Besides, I assume he’d cleverly deflect the subject, same as he did when I suggested it would make more sense for him to live indoors. But when he seems to be in good spirits one day on Skid Row, I ask if he recalls anything about the treatment he had in Cleveland.
“Woodruff is the first time I’d ever seen shock treatment,” he volunteers, referring to a mental hospital his mother had taken him to after he left Juilliard.
Why’d they do it? I ask.
“I guess they don’t like quitters.”
“Quitters? You got sick.”
“I’d quit Juilliard, so they gave me shock treatment,” he says. “They give you sodium pentathol. I remember they strap you down so when you come to you don’t fall off the table. I would go into a stupor, I guess. I could not understand what was going on in New York at Juilliard. Too many cigarettes. Russians, English, Argentinians, Puerto Ricans. You name it, they were there. I was in the same orchestra as Yo-Yo Ma. I couldn’t understand what the constant attack from people was all about.”
“What do you mean by that? Who was attacking you?”
“Everybody. A person smoking a cigarette right in front of you. Then I had the pressure of my lessons—to get things prepared. I was all alone, no family, none of my people.”
“Which people?”
“The black people.”
At times, he says, the medication seemed to help. Thorazine, Haldol, Prolixin, Stelazine. He took all those and more while being treated in Cleveland.
“Any psychotropic drugs will calm you down. Schizophrenia is a disorder in which you don’t seem to be able to function as well as you can. My mind would not strive to do all that it could do to keep me lean and interested in staying healthy. My mind would not strive to be the best citizen I could be. My mind would not strive to do what’s best for Nathaniel. You have no idea what’s going on with God, country, yourself. Your relationship with your family erodes, you have no friends, no human desire. You get into fights.”
And you hear voices?
“I don’t know if I hear voices or not. I don’t know if what I’m hearing is abnormal or not. I think there’s an incredible amount of subconscious energy. It emits itself through the brain and into your nervous system.”
So would he consider medication again?
Maybe, he says. One day.
A few days later I hand Nathaniel a notepad and ask him to write down some thoughts on his first awareness that something was wrong, and what it was like to be treated for schizophrenia. No rush, I say. Take as much time as you like. A week later he hands back the notepad.
As a youngster it was very untogether to be labeled mentally ill because of a underlying cigarette habit. That was the root of all evil. I quit and now I feel well enough.
Drug—Abuse
Resistance—Education
D.A.R .E.
The treatments for mentally ill persons is from horrible to okay. Overall the idea of deprivation was very effective—making users of drugs realize that there is a real war against drugs being fought every day in LA—LAPD—DARE 911.
Los Angeles, California. Recently there was a stabbing incident near the doorway at Lamp 627 San Julian Street. Black man. Mr. Nathaniel McDowell. Los Angeles Times Steve Lopez LAPD 911 Vice Homicide Narcotics. USMC. USN. USA. USAF. USCG. George W. Bush. Command N. Chief of United States Armed Forces.
L.A. Psychiatric. Psychiatrist Dr. Eduardo D. Vasquez, MD.
In the state of California—murder = a crime of a much more serious nature than that of a misdemeanor. The penalty for murder is death. Death by injection. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. House Representative Senate Representative.
The Cleveland Browns Art Modell Owner Bernie Kozar Quarterback #19.
The Denver Bronc
os Jerry Boland Owner. John Elway Quarterback #7.
It goes on like that for two more pages, ending with this:
Pens from Steve Lopez
Many thanks.
Paper from Steve Lopez.
Many thanks.
Cello & Violins from Steve Lopez
Many thanks
Among my many new pen pals is Stella March, the mother of a son with schizophrenia, who is roughly Nathaniel’s age. Few people in California have done more than she to enlighten the public and prod lawmakers into reforming a mental health system that had been a national embarrassment for years. And she’s done almost all of it on a volunteer basis.
March writes me encouraging notes about Nathaniel and my efforts on his behalf, but seldom offers specific advice, although she is the one who has taught me Nathaniel is not a mentally ill musician, as I’ve been referring to him, but a musician with mental illness. It’s a subtle but significant difference, recognizing the person before the condition. I’ve been meaning to go talk to her, and for two reasons, now is the time. First, I find myself haunted by Nathaniel’s long and rambling scribbles, and wonder if she can put them in perspective and suggest strategies I might try. And second, March is the one person in Los Angeles who can best answer the absurd comments about mental illness that have just been made by actor Tom Cruise, of all people.
We meet at a coffee shop in Westwood, near the University of California at Los Angeles. March, a white-haired widow who would have to stand on the Los Angeles phone book to reach five feet, has spent decades trying to undo stereotypes about mental illness, and Cruise has created a stir with his unsolicited comments on the subject. Specifically, Cruise said actress Brooke Shields didn’t need medication for postpartum depression. In his opinion, she needed vitamins. There’s no such thing as a chemical imbalance, Dr. Cruise argued, appearing on Access Hollywood and the Today show, basing his expertise on interventions with fellow Scientologists.
“I’ve never agreed with psychiatry, ever,” Cruise told Today show host Matt Lauer. “Before I was a Scientologist I never agreed with psychiatry, and when I started studying the history of psychiatry, I understood more and more why I didn’t believe in psychology.”
March rolls her eyes. Cruise’s comments would be laughable, she says, except that he’s liable to be believed by many people. I know I’d love to think that with a monthly supply of One-A-DAY vitamins, Nathaniel will be performing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic by mid-June. But I have my doubts, and March assures me there’s overwhelming evidence and general agreement among doctors and researchers that mental illness results from a chemical imbalance. In the case of schizophrenia, research points to a biological brain disorder involving any number of abnormalities—including irregular function of a neurotransmitter called dopamine—that could create hallucinations and distort reality.
March is the force behind "StigmaBusters,” an ever-vigilant service of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. She gathers examples of stereotypes, slights and ill-informed rants to try to educate the offenders and the public. Her plan now is to contact the producers of Cruise’s new movie, War of the Worlds, and threaten to organize a boycott if there’s not an apology.
Cruise has brilliantly bolstered all the primitive thinking about mental illness, making it out to be a choice born of moral and spiritual weakness. Stigma, March says, keeps families from accepting a loved one’s illness and seeking treatment for them, and it also marginalizes those who are afflicted. Why else, she asks me, would it be socially acceptable for them to sleep on filthy and dangerous streets? Would anyone tolerate an outdoor dumping ground for victims of cancer, ALS and Parkinson’s?
As we sip coffee, I tell March I’d like to give Cruise a tour of Skid Row and see if he thinks a vitamin deficiency explains the mad scene there. I feel like I’m talking to a kindred spirit in March, and our shared experience—though hers has lasted much longer and involves her own flesh and blood—is a source of comfort. I feel so at ease, I decide to tell March I’ve been thinking lately about two suicides, years ago, in my family.
My aunt Mary’s was the first. I remember coming home from school one day in 1963, when I was ten, and being startled to find so many relatives in our living room. My dad’s sister, who was married with a daughter in college and a son in high school, had driven down to the river in our small suburb of San Francisco and jumped in. A year later, my dad’s brother Manuel, a handsome gent who had a wife and son and enjoyed kidding around with his nieces and nephews, shot himself in the head.
I don’t recall the word “suicide” being used in either case. They were sick. That’s what I was told. It was a time when depression was often thought of as the blues rather than a treatable medical condition, and in my family, it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to get help for the blues, especially from a shrink.
The suicides were but a distant memory—and seldom talked about in my family—until I met Nathaniel and learned more about mental illness. It tends to run in families, and I worry what that means, if anything, for my two sons and daughter. Not that there’s anything to do but be vigilant and take any warning signs seriously. I’ve been unable to find any evidence of mental illness in the history of Nathaniel’s family, and March tells me there was none in hers, either, unless it was there but undiagnosed, as might have been the case with my aunt and uncle. Her son was nineteen when it hit. He was a UCLA history major on the dean’s list. One day, without warning, he collapsed on the steps of a campus building.
“They took him to the ER and then the psychiatric emergency ward. After that, it’s too . . . it’s just been a terrible journey. He was at Camarillo State Hospital, which at that time was just horrible—the most horrible place in the world. It was like a zoo. They gave him thorazine, which I think has had a lot to do with his lack of recovery. That was what they believed in back then, and my husband had gone to all the medical libraries to find out what they knew about how to treat mental illness, and very little was known at the time.”
Doing something about it has become her life’s work. Today March’s son lives in a board and care home, meets regularly with a psychiatrist and takes medication to control his condition. March knows there’s still a long way to go for him and for the cause she’s still committed to, but she’s encouraged by improvements in awareness—Tom Cruise’s outburst notwithstanding—and a breakthrough in brain scan technology that could one day allow doctors to diagnose schizophrenia in its early stages.
Maybe that won’t do her son much good, March tells me, or Nathaniel, either, for that matter. I do worry, I admit, that Nathaniel might be too far gone to have a breakthrough now, having become so set in his ways after decades without treatment.
March touches my hand and looks me in the eye. She points out that he didn’t have a friend before me, and he didn’t go to Lamp at all, and no one can predict where it will lead from here. Yes, he’s still very sick, she says, but there were times when she didn’t think her son would be doing as well as he is.
I appreciate the way she chooses her words. She promises nothing and doesn’t try to simplify matters, but she makes me feel as though no matter what happens, I can call her and she’ll understand.
10
Alexis Rivera is riding his bicycle to Little Pedro’s Blue Bongo from his home in Echo Park when he comes upon a captivating image and hits the brakes. A middle-aged man stands alone at the mouth of the Second Street tunnel playing violin as if he’s onstage at Carnegie Hall. This must be the guy he’s read about.
Rivera decides to take in the concert. This is an odd place to play, given the constant roar of passing vehicles, but to Rivera that only makes the image all the edgier and more interesting. A helicopter goes by, Disney Hall is just up the hill. For Rivera, something about the scene captures the energy of the city.
Should he introduce himself?
No, Rivera decides. This is real and honest. Just let it be.
But why not? Doesn’t this musician de
serve to be seen and heard?
Rivera keeps watching, imagining the violinist performing at the Blue Bongo a mile away on First Street, where Rivera is one of the managers. Rivera is intrigued by the idea, but another voice tells him not to exploit the situation. He doesn’t want to promote some kind of freak show featuring a homeless violinist who is mentally ill.
But he can’t help it. Rivera walks over and introduces himself.
“That sounded great,” he says.
Nathaniel isn’t one to kick aside a compliment. He’s genuinely flattered when people tell him they enjoy his music, and he’s clever enough to get his adoring fans to repeat their praise.
Yes, Rivera assures him. It was terrific. Would he consider coming by his club one evening to play a set? There wouldn’t be much money in it, maybe ten or twenty bucks plus tips. But his music ought to be heard.
“What?” Nathaniel asks.
Rivera tells him he’s not kidding.
“Nobody has asked me to do that in thirty years,” Nathaniel says.
He tells Rivera he isn’t sharp enough for a gig, and he won’t be able to do much about his appearance. Who’d want to go to a club and see some bum walk in off the streets, nappy-haired and raggedy? Besides, he doesn’t go anywhere without his shopping cart, and he can’t very well wheel it up onstage.
Rivera says that’s not a problem.
“How about Tuesday nights?” He tells Nathaniel he’ll go on right before Mickey Champion, a blues singer turned public school cafeteria worker whose career Rivera is trying to revive, even though she’s old enough to be his grandmother. If Nathaniel gets to the club early enough, Rivera says, he can have dinner on the house.