The Soloist (Movie Tie-In)

by Steve Lopez

  When we get back to the station, I walk over and tell the twenty-five-year-old woman’s friends the news, figuring no one else will. They gasp and shudder, but it’s not clear if that’s because she meant something to them or because they know they’re on the same journey. I walk across the street to look for Nathaniel, but he’s long gone, out there somewhere with his shopping cart and his instruments in a downtown of dark, bottomless depths.

  A couple of nights later and just up the street, a half block from where the twenty-five-year-old woman was loaded into the ambulance for her last ride, T.J. is weeping. When you’re a prostitute in an outhouse, there are no good days. But this one has been worse than most. She says a man died in the outhouse a few hours earlier and was taken away by paramedics. It was a friend and she doesn’t know what happened. When the door of the outhouse opens just enough, I can see clothes on hangers draped along the sides, and a radio, and some toiletries. T.J. doesn’t just work in the outhouse. She lives in it.

  It’s an open secret on Skid Row that some Porta Potties are not being put to their intended purpose. Drugs, sex, housing. Anything goes. T.J. insists her outhouse is only an occasional residence, reserved for when she works too late to get home to Inglewood. She shows me where she stores her shoes and fishnet stockings and fancy hats, and she demonstrates how she covers the toilet bench at night and curls up on top of it to sleep. This is the outhouse where her friend died earlier in the day, on the street that has claimed two victims in the last forty-eight hours.

  While I’m talking to her a rat comes up from the sewers. It runs past a discarded brassiere, a tossed apple core and an empty Fritos bag. The rats are a common sight in and around the Porta Potties, which do on occasion get put to their intended use, as an overpowering stench suggests. But there are those who refuse to enter the stalls and instead squeeze between and behind them to do their business. This explains the hot rivers of urine on the pavement.

  The mayor of Los Angeles is on the phone. He’s been reading my page-one series on Skid Row, finds the details unsurprising but shocking nonetheless, and wants to know if he can come join me as I make my rounds. My first instinct is to politely decline. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has rock-star status. He turns heads and he travels with a police detail. I don’t need any of that while trying to discreetly approach subjects on Skid Row and get them to open up to me. Then again, this is precisely the kind of attention I’d hoped Nathaniel’s story would attract. There’s probably no one who could make more of a difference here than the mayor. Villaraigosa tells me he’s on the road, but he’s going to go home and get rid of his suit, so he’ll blend in a little better.

  Villaraigosa has a weakness that could work to the benefit of Nathaniel and hundreds like him. The mayor can’t help but want to save the world. He wants to take over the school district, end poverty, build affordable housing, hire thousands more police officers, bust up gangs. Despite his inhuman energy, he can’t do all of that any more than he can annex Santa Barbara, but I can’t imagine the mayor seeing what’s out here in all its disturbing detail and turning a cold shoulder. I suspect he takes personally the fact that so lawless and sorrowful a place as Skid Row exists just a few blocks from his City Hall office. Like mayors before him, he’s aware of the problems, but there’s been little political advantage in doing something about them because they haven’t been spread across page one of the newspaper in quite this way, an indictment of indifference and a call to conscience. New York City answered the call several years earlier, investing in housing and services that cleared the streets. San Francisco is well ahead of Los Angeles, too, and Villaraigosa doesn’t suffer negative comparisons well.

  A slow, steady drizzle is falling when the mayor arrives in jeans and hooded jacket. Few people recognize him under the hood, so he’s able to get a close and anonymous look at the two hundred people huddled outside the Midnight Mission. This is the overflow crowd, the ones who won’t get a cot inside. The luckier ones have wedged in under the overhang, where they can at least keep their blankets and bagged belongings dry. The mayor talks to a woman in her sixties who says she was put out of a hotel when a housing voucher ran out. She’s in a wheelchair pushed by her husband, a Vietnam vet, and says they’ve got to wait a month for another ticket to sleep indoors. After hearing their story the mayor goes inside, where he meets with a young woman and her two children, all of them getting settled on cots in a room with a hundred others. She’s got an abusive husband and nowhere else to go, she says as the kids curl up and try to sleep in this room full of strangers.

  Later in the evening I’m at the corner of Seventh and San Julian, across the street from Dave Chavez’s fire station. I’m talking to several men in wheelchairs when I feel a presence over my shoulder. Chavez told me there was once a knife fight, at this very location, in which one of the combatants was stabbed, walked slowly across the street for help and collapsed at the door of the fire station. I’m on one knee with my notepad out, an easy target for someone who’s deranged or high or angry that a stranger is here asking personal questions. I turn just enough to see if I’m safe, and realize it’s the mayor. While he stands watching, one of the men, squatting on the pavement next to a man in a wheelchair, takes a syringe and jabs it into the crease of his own left arm. His body goes slack and his eyes roll as the heroin races through his veins. The mayor watches in stony silence on a rainy night.

  Within days the outhouses at Sixth and San Julian are gone, carted away by city workers. By week’s end, the mayor adds Skid Row to his fix-it list.

  “I am going to take on the challenge,” he says. “I mean, that almost looked like Bombay or something, except with more violence. There is no place [in the city] where the chaos and degradation are as pronounced. You see a complete breakdown of society.”

  The mayor pledges to shift an additional $50 million into housing and other services on Skid Row and beyond. Two City Council members pile on, announcing their own plan to end homelessness. For the first time in years, the calamity on Skid Row is front and center, due in no small part to Nathaniel, whose story made it impossible to ignore. But pledges are cheap, and New York City’s annual budget for housing and services is three times that of Los Angeles, even if the mayor comes through on his $50 million promise. What will any of this mean for Nathaniel?

  14

  Casey Horan, the director of Lamp, isn’t always easy to read. But Shannon Murray can’t hide what she’s thinking. She’s quietly seething, ticked off at something I’ve just said. The three of us are on a bus with Darrell Steinberg and other members of the state commission whose job it is to figure out how to best spend more than $1 billion a year in California on expanded mental health services. The bus is pulling away from Lamp on a tour of various programs, and Steinberg is talking about the success of places like Lamp and the Village, suggesting that more funding will translate to more people being lured off the streets and into housing with supportive services that help them rebuild their lives.

  Don’t be so sure of it, I’m telling him. Nathaniel continues to resist help despite months of effort by me and Lamp employees. He’s as delusional as he was on the day I met him, and his latest hallucination is that an L.A. Times guard poured water into one of his violins and ruined it while we were at Disney Hall. Nathaniel insists it’s proof that no one on this earth can be trusted and he’ll never be able to return to Disney Hall. I’m coming around to the conclusion that if Nathaniel’s ever going to have a chance of getting better, he’s going to have to be forcibly treated.

  Murray, with straight reddish hair and a look of weary disdain, glares at me. Together, she and Horan have decades of experience. They’ve improved the lives of hundreds of people with mental illness and I’ve just stumbled into the game, parading my talented musician across the pages of the Los Angeles Times and trying to pass myself off as an authority to Darrell Steinberg, the godfather of the landmark proposition that created the windfall for mental health funding. Murray elbows her wa
y into the conversation to say that I’ve got it all wrong.

  “We’re so close,” she says, noting that on the day she and Patricia Lopez answered my call and met Nathaniel near the tunnel, he wanted no part of Lamp. Now, she says, he’s there practically every day and is often the first one at the door in the morning. “That’s a huge step for someone who’s been out on his own for so many years,” she argues. “You just have to be more patient.”

  Rushing things, Horan chimes in, would be disastrous. Tall and thin, with short, sandy-colored hair, she’s more diplomatic than Murray but no less intense. When she speaks, she appears to be summoning all her strength to keep from lashing out.

  “You’ve built up all this trust with him,” she says, telling me that if I were to now force him to do something against his will, I could drive him away for good, and he’s likely to get worse. “Being restrained and having a stranger take control over you is a terrifying, terrifying experience.” For people who are violently ill, there’s no alternative. “But this is Nathaniel,” she says, reminding me of his humility and the gentle soul that hides behind a sometimes ornery twin. “He’s coming around in his own way, and it has to be that way. With us supporting him and earning his trust. Otherwise you could lose him forever.”

  Patience, they say. October is gone and we’re halfway through November. Before much longer a year will have gone by, and the questions and answers are still the same. Has he moved inside? Is he on his meds?

  Horan and Murray are still convinced Nathaniel is close to trading his tunnel for an apartment, so much so that they’re holding on to one that has just become available in a residential complex that abuts the back side of the Lamp property. If he takes the room, he’ll be able to wake up in the morning and walk through a back breezeway to breakfast. Then he can play music in the courtyard, and maybe—it could take a while, of course—he’ll decide one day that he’d like to start meeting with Dr. Prchal.

  It all makes for a lovely picture, except that Nathaniel is as militantly opposed as ever. “I have no interest in putting my possessions in a room where the biggest thieves in the world can come and steal everything I own. It is not going to happen. Not now and not ever, and I don’t care if I have to appeal my case to the president of the United States or Stevie Wonder, but I’ll do whatever it takes to keep people from messing with me and my things,” he insists.

  My counterarguments accomplish nothing other than to add a few more gray hairs to my balding head. Why does he have to be bothered with any of this, Nathaniel asks, when he keeps insisting he prefers to live outside and sleep in the tunnel? Beethoven is out there, isn’t he? “I’m not leaving him out there alone.”

  The high of our trip to Disney Hall has begun to fade and Nathaniel is wearing me out. I’m still wired by training to work toward resolution, but every time I think I’ve tied a pretty bow on this story, it unravels. Though I care more about Nathaniel now than ever, I’m beginning to resent the demands he puts on me, as well as the constant fear that he’s going to get mugged for the instruments. He often needs a new string, or bridge repair, or sheet music, and of course I’m the one he calls. I juggle my schedule to pick up a broken instrument, juggle again to retrieve it from the repair shop and lose a good chunk of another day tracking him down and returning the goods. I’m stealing time from writing columns and I’m stealing time from my family, and although Alison is being more patient than I would be in her shoes, I’m beginning to feel as though something’s got to give. And I know it can’t be my job or my time with family.

  As the winter of my discontent settles in, Nathaniel goes about his days and nights with little awareness of my angst, and there’s no visible sign that colder weather is going to change his mind about shelter. I drive through the tunnel in the morning and see him playing at Second and Hill as if he hasn’t a care in the world. If he hasn’t eaten breakfast at Lamp, he’ll go to a free breakfast line in the Toy District or use one of the donations from his fans to buy a packet of sandwich cookies and a cup of coffee. For him, the toughest decision in a day is figuring out whether to play his original violin, the new one or the cello. To shake things up, he’ll push his cart over to the Central Library, pay someone to guard it and lug all three of his instruments inside to copy sheet music.

  At Second and Hill, he’s gotten creative with the drab, nondescript slab where he kills so many hours each day. He uses tape and string to post Asian-language newspapers or travel magazine photos to the trunks of palm trees. I half expect to see him out there one day in a Hawaiian shirt, swinging on a hammock while he fans himself with palm fronds or strums a ukulele. In the evening, I drive by and see him at the other end of the tunnel, taping U.S. flags to signposts or impersonating a conductor. He routinely carries on animated conversations without a partner present, which I suppose has its advantages. I drive home, wrung out after another deadline-crashing day, mouth dry, traffic miserable. And he’s in the tunnel, blissfully fiddling his way through the Elgar Cello Concerto.

  Not that I would ever diminish or romanticize a dreadful illness, but anticipating the possibility that this will forever be his life, and looking for an excuse to leave him to his ways, I find myself asking what might sound like a strange question.

  Is he happy?

  Clearly music makes him happy, and how many musicians in the world have as much time to play as he does, entirely free of expectation? For him, it isn’t work. Sure, he gets down on himself occasionally, frustrated by his limitations. But he doesn’t have to worry about training for an audition, like he did when he was younger, and he doesn’t need to earn a living at it. For Nathaniel, music is freedom. Now that the Little Pedro’s Blue Bongo gig is a thing of the past, if he makes mistakes or finds himself stuck in a rut, he has to answer only to himself and the Beethoven statue.

  Nathaniel will probably never be happy on my terms or by my definition, but maybe that’s my problem rather than his. Does he have a big fat mortgage hanging over his head, with twenty-seven years to go on the first and twenty-five on the home equity line of credit, which is set at prime plus one and constantly spiking? I make good money for a newspaper guy and we live very nicely, but the crazy California real estate market eats a big chunk of my take-home, and Alison has cut back on her work to enjoy Caroline’s early years. At the rate the newspaper staff is shrinking, we’re fast approaching a time when I’m the only one left to serve as editor, and my first order from Chicago would probably be to lay myself off.

  Nathaniel doesn’t have to worry about a daughter who will be just fifteen when he hits retirement age. His computer doesn’t crash. He doesn’t have to call his HMO six hundred times to scream about a doctor bill it refuses to cover. He doesn’t have to call a bank and threaten to strangle someone over a “thorough investigation” that has determined I was lying when I reported a case of identity theft and the loss of $3,000. Nathaniel is 100 percent off the books. No Social Security card, no driver’s license, no address, no living will, no job, no lawn to mow, no phone call to return, no retirement to plan for and no rules except his own.

  The day of the Beethoven rehearsal, we walked one block down from Disney Hall and he told me he had to go to the bathroom.

  “Just hold on,” I said. “My office is only a block away and you can go there.”

  “Mr. Lopez,” he said, looking at me like a six-year-old, “I can’t wait.”

  “Well, why didn’t you go back at Disney Hall?” I asked.

  “I didn’t think of it,” he said. “But I really have to go bad.”

  Across the street was the Los Angeles County Courthouse. In the garden was a tree. Nathaniel made a dash for it, returning a minute later with a look of great relief.

  How can I ever reel him back to the world of rules and regulations, of protocol and privies? He is tied to nothing but his passion and the world it delivers him into, a world in which the city is his orchestra and the conductor is a statue. He sees a swaying palm and hears violins. A bus roars by a
nd gives him a bass line. He hears footsteps and imagines Beethoven and Brahms out for a stroll.

  “I can’t survive,” he once told me of his refusal to come indoors, “if I can’t hear the orchestra the way I like to hear it.”

  15

  Patience is no doubt a wonderful virtue, but mendacity has its advantages as well. If Nathaniel wouldn’t move into the apartment Lamp reserved for him, maybe he would at least consider using it as a music studio. And to seduce him into giving it a try, I now have the perfect bait. Peter Snyder, the Los Angeles Philharmonic cellist who shook Nathaniel’s hand at Disney Hall, has e-mailed me with an offer.

  “After I met Nathaniel, it left me with such a hole or void in the center of my chest that I started to think about how lucky I’ve been with my life in general. It so moved me that I simply have to do something to change what the future Nathaniels out there have to face. . . . Perhaps if he knew that I wanted to help him, he might be more inclined to seek a more permanent solution. What do you think?”

  When I call, Snyder says he’s willing to give Nathaniel free lessons, orchestra schedule permitting. This is where I get the bold idea to bring him in on a white lie. I tell Snyder about the apartment Nathaniel refuses to move into and ask if he’s willing to give him lessons there. We can tell Nathaniel lessons aren’t allowed at Disney Hall, there’s nowhere to do it at the L.A. Times and there’s no quiet space at Lamp. Snyder likes the idea and agrees to play along.

  “Nathaniel, I’ve got some terrific news,” I tell him at Second and Hill. “Do you remember Mr. Snyder from the orchestra?”

  “Peter Snyder,” he says. “Yeah, he looked like János Starker.”

  “Well, guess what. János Starker wants to give you lessons.”

  His eyes brighten.