The Soloist (Movie Tie-In)

by Steve Lopez

  Crane marches confidently toward us, no sign of any qualms about meeting a man with mental illness. He greets Nathaniel as if he were a dignitary. I know the publicist played cello for years but chose not to go the conservatory route, and I get the sense he’s impressed by Nathaniel not just for his story of survival, but because of his success as a musician, as far as it went.

  “Would you like a tour?” Crane asks, handing Nathaniel a souvenir copy of Frank Gehry’s book on Disney Hall. He offers to carry it for him, but Nathaniel has already tucked it under his arm and doesn’t want to let go of it.

  Crane reminds Nathaniel that the orchestra will be rehearsing Beethoven’s Third.

  “The Eroica,” Nathaniel says. “Are they rehearsing each movement? ”

  Indeed they are, Crane assures him. But there’s just enough time for a VIP tour before we enter the hall.

  “When’s the last time you were in a concert hall?” I ask Nathaniel.

  “I haven’t been in a concert hall in four billion years,” he says. He’s relaxed and in good spirits. The smile is back, broad and gracious, and he speaks with a self-assured tone of formality. A continental in sweatpants.

  Crane marches us into elevators and stairwells, passionately delivering the history of the construction and the little quirks of the place. The floral design on the carpet, for instance, was a tribute to Mrs. Lillian Disney and her love of flowers. On the sixth floor, we exit a semi-secret doorway to an outdoor landing.

  “This is one of my favorite places in Disney Hall,” Crane says, leading us along a narrow path with the muted stainless steel panels of the roof rising above us. It’s like sneaking around in the folds of a lily.

  Crane checks his watch and herds us back into an elevator.

  “We’re right behind the stage right now,” he says as we enter a room with a sloped ceiling, the terraced rows of seats above us in the hall.

  “It’s like a dream,” Nathaniel says. “I don’t know if this is a dream or purgatory.”

  And I don’t know how he means that. Maybe just as it sounds. It’s a place just short of where he so badly wanted to be.

  We enter a long hallway near the musicians’ locker rooms and a voice comes over the PA system, startling Nathaniel.

  “That sounds like the voice from Cleveland psychiatric,” he says and in a way, yes, it does seem that Disney Hall may be his new hospital.

  He asks Crane if he knows Yo-Yo Ma, and if so, is he a likable guy?

  Quite, says Crane, but before he can say much more Nathaniel has switched subjects. He and Crane are sharing thoughts on conductors James Conlon, Lorin Maazel and Herbert von Karajan. I don’t have anything to add to that conversation, so I ask Nathaniel if he’s aware that Mr. Crane is a cellist.

  “Do you know Dvořák’s Cello Concerto?” Nathaniel asks.

  “It’s one of my favorites,” says Crane, telling Nathaniel he owns a Czechoslovakian cello made in 1875.

  “I don’t want to mess with it,” Nathaniel says jocularly. “I don’t even want to look at it.”

  I don’t know if he’s slyly fishing for an invitation to give it a try, but if so, it works.

  Crane takes us to his office and brings out the cello.

  “May I?” Nathaniel asks.

  “Please. Go ahead.”

  It takes him a few minutes to tune up, and then he begins playing pizzicato, plucking strings with his bandaged right hand. Crane and I share a glance and a smile. Nathaniel is playing Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1: Prelude, and eventually picks up the bow to give that a go. As he plays, orchestra staffers wander out of their offices to the sound of the Pied Piper. They stand outside the glass-walled office, looking in at the strange sight of a homeless man making beautiful music. Nathaniel seems oblivious, though I wouldn’t be surprised if I was wrong.

  “He’s got it,” Crane whispers.

  It’s reassuring to get this assessment from a musician. Although I hear some of his more obvious mistakes, I also know Nathaniel’s sound is the baring of his soul, and that when he closes his eyes, as he’s doing now, it’s as if he’s come to a clearing in a forest and found relief under an open sky.

  Nathaniel deflects the compliments from staffers as we make our way toward the hall, stopping at an entryway marked “Stage Level Door 1.”

  “Are you ready?” asks Crane.

  We push through and into the warm yellow light of the wood-paneled hall Gehry has described as a living room for the city of Los Angeles. The massive pipe organ looks like a Disney-inspired explosion of sound, with six thousand flutes of Norwegian pine and Douglas fir teetering over the stage. The bowl itself is more intimate than the flamboyant exterior would suggest, and it feels like we’re in the belly of a violin or cello, with two thousand seats clinging to the sides of the sound box. Nathaniel gives the hall a cursory look, but his gaze is fixed on the stage, with the musicians filing back in from the dressing room. One of them sees us and comes bounding toward Nathaniel.

  “I’m Pete Snyder,” says the cellist, a thirty-three-year member of the orchestra. Snyder shakes Nathaniel’s hand and says he’s read all about him.

  “János Starker,” Nathaniel says, noting a resemblance to the bald, Hungarian-born cellist. Nathaniel says he’s more than a little impressed by the mustachioed Snyder’s thirty-three-year stint with a great orchestra. Hands clasped in front of him, suavely collegial, Nathaniel tells Snyder that his mentor, Mr. Harry Barnoff, put in forty-six years with the Cleveland Orchestra.

  “I want to compliment you as well,” Snyder says, telling Nathaniel he has his own accomplishment of note—namely his survival on the streets just down the hill.

  “I just want to play,” Nathaniel says. “I’ll live underneath a rock.”

  We take a seat in the center of the hall, alone but for a few staffers. It’s like having a private concert.

  “They look so happy,” Nathaniel says as the musicians tune their instruments and the conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, strides onto the stage under a bob of blond hair. “I would be happy, too, if I was going to play the Third Symphony, especially with good players. You look over at the next player and say, ‘Wow.’”

  Napoleon Bonaparte was the original inspiration for Beethoven’s Third Symphony, but as legend has it, the composer’s opinion of the man changed when he saw the liberator become a tyrant. He called his symphony Eroica, which means heroic, and intended it as a tribute to courage rather than to a single man. This is information I’ve gotten from Nathaniel, a patient teacher who seems to enjoy being able to offer me the gift of his knowledge. The Eroica begins with two short blasts that blow you back into your seat. Then, having gotten your attention, Beethoven gets the string sections going with a conversation that swoons and swells. There’s romance and suspense in the piece, the anticipation of a bold and defining statement. But for me, the best part of the show is Nathaniel, who is on the edge of his seat, following along on the sheet music in his head. Slack-jawed, mesmerized, emancipated, he pulls out an imaginary baton, giggles and sways. The Third was once described as a composition in which dark clouds dissolve into sunshine. I wonder if this is what makes Beethoven Nathaniel’s god of creation. The second movement tiptoes into the hall like a rumor of death, and Nathaniel brings a shoulder into me and cups his hand to my ear.

  “He’s in the room,” he says. “If his spirit was in the room, it would be somewhere around there. Do you see the conductor? That’s Beethoven. He will interpret Beethoven. He is Beethoven.”

  I don’t know if he means it literally or figuratively, but any distinction fades into meaninglessness. Beethoven’s music is a portrait of Nathaniel’s imagination. There’s high drama and contradiction, a collision of opposing forces, lyrical respites. Each note is as true today as it will always be, and for Nathaniel the music is both medicine and muse, no less an inspiration now than it was before his fall.

  “They are flawless, flawless, flawless players,” he whispers. “Every single note is there. There�
��s not any nonsense. Of course, this is a world-renowned orchestra.”

  For which, at the end of Beethoven’s emotional endurance test, he has one word.

  “Bravo!”

  Crane hurries us backstage to meet Esa-Pekka Salonen. The conductor accepts Nathaniel’s compliments with bashful grace, and Nathaniel walks away still trying to pronounce his name. He meets next with Ben Hong, a close friend of Crane’s and assistant principal cellist. Hong, born in Taiwan, was a Juilliard student, too, and Nathaniel feels compelled to admit he didn’t make it all the way through. What is it like, Nathaniel wants to know, to hear an audience respond appreciatively to the music you create? Feels good, Hong tells him, and next Nathaniel wants to know about the challenges of Beethoven’s Third. “It’s emotionally and physically exhausting,” Hong says, and the two of them kibitz about conductors, composers and the genius of Beethoven.

  I step back when the conversation goes over my head and enjoy the sight of Nathaniel handling himself so smoothly. He seems back in his element and almost a student again, chatting up a classmate in the hall during a break. He lives in two distant constellations, this man who fends off rats on Skid Row and holds forth at Disney Hall, mingling easily with members of the orchestra. I suffer no illusions, because I know he’s a very sick man, even though Adam Crane, Pete Snyder and Ben Hong probably don’t realize the full extent of it. Maybe he’ll be motivated to keep their acquaintance, and if so, I can use it to advance his recovery as much as that’s possible. If he moves indoors, cleans up and gets stabilized, it will make more visits to Disney Hall possible and put him closer to the music he lives for. He considers me his friend, after all. How can I not keep trying, given the distance we’ve traveled in a single day?

  We say good-bye to Ben Hong and head down toward the stage on the way to the exits. I notice again that Nathaniel has been carrying his violin all this time and I assume it was to prove his membership in the brotherhood. But I see something else in his eyes as he climbs into the seats behind the stage, just beneath the pipe organ, and opens his violin case. Nathaniel lifts the instrument to the crease between shoulder and chin. Disney Hall is empty when he begins playing, although in Nathaniel’s mind, Beethoven might still be lingering in the shadows.

  Part Two

  13

  Just up the street from Nathaniel’s courtyard hangout at Lamp, I watch two prostitutes work the corner of Sixth and San Julian on a warm October evening. It seems fairly obvious that the short heavy one is the madam and the tall skinny one with a severe limp is one of her girls. The former calls herself T.J., for Thick and Juicy, and the other is T.T., for Tall and Tiny. Business is booming, as one john after another approaches. There’s nothing remarkable about prostitution in a big city, but this operation has two features that make it noteworthy. First, there’s a police station one block away. Second, the prostitutes do their business in outhouses.

  For me, there’s no more telling illustration of Skid Row as a rock-bottom depository. It’s been written off, shoved beyond public consciousness and left to wallow in its own lawlessness and despair. A Vietnam or World War II amputee can fall out of his wheelchair in the middle of the street, a filthy colostomy bag next to him, and people will walk by as if he isn’t there. An insane man walks naked through the rubble and few people take notice. Heroin addicts pump needles into their arms without a glance toward the Central District police headquarters. A barefoot woman with her top falling off runs down San Julian screaming hysterically, batting away ghosts.

  This is where Nathaniel sleeps. He may be paranoid, but when he rails against lawlessness and disorder, and when he tells me drug dealers and thieves are out to take everything he’s got, is he being crazy or observant?

  Skid Row is an old story. It’s so old no one has cared to revisit it for years, but my Times colleagues Cara Mia DiMassa and Richard Winton are beginning to hit it hard. There’s a new twist this time—the collision of opposing forces. One feature of the downtown renaissance is the conversion of dilapidated buildings into swanky lofts, boutique shops and upscale restaurants. Development and decay are becoming neighbors on Skid Row, and money is competing with misery.

  There’s a lot I can’t do for Nathaniel. I can’t cure him. I can’t make him see a doctor. I can’t take him home to Cleveland or get him into an orchestra. But now that he’s a character in the life of the city, a man people have come to care about, maybe there’s a service in reminding people what we do with those among us who are too sick to care for themselves. Don’t sweeten it, my editor, Sue Horton, tells me. Serve it up for breakfast raw and unfiltered. Tell people what Nathaniel is up against, and shake a fist at City Hall.

  It’s 11:18 in the morning when the call comes in. Possible overdose. Firefighter-paramedic Dave Chavez, forty-two, grabs a blank incident report and marches toward his Rescue 9 ambulance with partner Juan Penuelas. At 11:20, they pull out of the station. From the back of the ambulance, Chavez is taking in the devastation through the windows. People stumble and rant, they lie in filth. Nothing surprises Chavez, who has spent ten years at what has long been one of the busiest stations in the United States. Fires are an old-fashioned rarity for Chavez and his colleagues. But thirty, forty, fifty times a shift, they get called out on cases just like this one. We travel only half a block, to where a woman is sprawled on the pavement. Her friends close in when Chavez steps out of the ambulance, and some of them don’t look much better than she. They’re skeletal, faces full of shadows, skin pocked and ulcerated by needles. They tell Chavez the woman is about twenty-five and shot up about ten hours ago right here in this very spot. The street has its own social order. Crack addicts line the west side and heroin addicts the east. In the middle of the block is Lamp.

  Once again I wonder if I’m the one, not Nathaniel, who needs to have his head examined. I’m trying desperately to cajole him into leaving the area around the tunnel and spending his nights here at Lamp, which sits in the middle of one of the saddest blocks in the entire city of four million people. LAPD chief William Bratton has called this area “the worst situation in America.” And yet it’s the only place near downtown where Nathaniel can get the kind of help Lamp provides. I once suggested that Nathaniel let me take him to Long Beach, which has problems but not the teeming madness of Skid Row. There, I might be able to steer him in to see Dr. Ragins. Forget it, Nathaniel said. He’s a creature of habit, and he feels more comfortable in the company of the devil he knows.

  While Chavez checks the fallen woman, I quickstep across the street to see if Nathaniel is in. Although he’s still sleeping at the tunnel, more and more of his days are spent in the courtyard.

  “Oh, Mr. Lopez,” he says.

  “You doing okay?” I ask.

  “Yes, sir. I’m fine.”

  “Just wanted to say hello, but I’ve got to go. I’m hanging out with these paramedics out here.”

  He comes to the doorway with his violin. It’s gotten to where he won’t let me leave without a half dozen attempts to keep the conversation going, raising his voice over mine as I say I’ve got to go. I point to the back of the ambulance, where Chavez and his partner are lifting the fallen woman up on a gurney. Nathaniel, who hears sirens day and night and has seen this very scene played out dozens of times, is disgusted.

  “These drugs are killing everybody,” he says.

  Chavez is having trouble getting a blood pressure reading or an EKG. The woman is jerking around, squirming, wailing. Chavez sees that her tongue is dry and caked and that worries him. “I think she might have some other things on board besides heroin,” he says. He wants to tap a vein and run an IV line in case she takes a turn for the worse on the short ride to County-USC Medical Center, but her arms and neck are covered with tracks. Her angular face, with strong cheekbones and spooky dark eyes, is a display of pain and panic, mostly the latter. She’s too weak—or maybe too drugged out—to do anything but moan in a husky voice short of breath.

  This is the drill for Chavez one
shift after another, as he and his colleagues deal with the human wreckage caused by a thousand different failures. The housing market is obscene, health care is a luxury, addiction rehab is in short supply, the schools have shameful dropout rates, the service economy doesn’t pay a living wage, the notorious L.A. gangs are selling drugs outside twelve-step programs, the psychiatric emergency room is jammed and mental health services like the ones at Lamp are few and far between. Chavez gets through the day by not giving a thought to any of the things that are out of his control, by passing judgment on no one and by not letting any of the clients get to him, whether he saves their lives or watches them die.

  “I try to treat everyone the way I’d want to be treated,” he tells me. “You meet some of the nicest, most interesting people out here.”

  The woman without a name begins to fade as we approach the hospital. She looks up with eyes wide and filled with fear, but they quickly go milky and then blank.

  “She’s circling,” Chavez yells to his driver, which means to hit the gas because she’s going down the drain.

  The two of them muscle her out of the ambulance and push the gurney toward the building, exploding through the doors and into the emergency room, where a team of ten doctors and attendants work on her.

  “Clear,” says a doctor, delivering a jolt that lifts her off the gurney.

  She’s on her back, eyes still open but empty. A few feet away, another OD victim is unconscious, and next to him is a man who has taken a fall and is being examined for a possible broken back and neck.

  “Three hundred. Clear. Three-sixty. Clear.”

  Chavez watches from ten feet away, pulling for her. They get a rhythm briefly, then lose it.

  “She’s gone,” Chavez says, and moments later they wrap her in a white plastic sheet with her eyes still open, clearing the way for another overdose case and a teenage stabbing victim, covered in blood, who will be dead in minutes.