The Soloist (Movie Tie-In)
Page 12
“At Disney Hall?” he asks.
“He says he can’t do it there. He wants to do it in your apartment.”
Nathaniel squirms.
“Why can’t we do it at Disney Hall? It’s the Beethoven hall, the home of Beethoven, the Los Angeles Philharmonic.”
“They’ve got lots of activities up there and they don’t have a room where he could meet with you regularly.”
“Then we could do it here,” Nathaniel says.
Here? We can barely hear each other speak over the traffic, and the tunnel acts like a megaphone.
“I just don’t think Mr. Snyder would go for it,” I say, raising my voice a bit louder than necessary to accentuate the noise factor Mr. Snyder would be up against. “I’d suggest my office, but there’s not a place there where you could have any privacy. And the Lamp courtyard wouldn’t work, with people coming and going all the time.”
He agrees those options are no good, but I don’t quite have him snookered yet.
“Your apartment is the only place we could think of. Mr. Snyder said he’ll need a quiet place or it’s just not going to be worth his time or yours.”
“It’s not my apartment,” he insists, copping an attitude. “I don’t have an apartment and I don’t need an apartment. I don’t want to have anything to do with it. It is not my apartment.”
It feels as if we’ve been here too many times before. Should I beg? Should I throw my hands up and walk away? Such a waste. Is he too sick to have any idea how rare an opportunity this is?
“I don’t want to see you blow this chance,” I tell him. “How many years have you been playing music without the benefit of someone who could help you get better? Hasn’t it been thirty years? Now you’ve got a cellist from one of the great orchestras of the world volunteering to give you lessons. For free! This is a lucky break, Nathaniel. I don’t want to waste Mr. Snyder’s time and I know you don’t, either. So why don’t we just try it in the apartment one time, and if you don’t want to continue with it, we’ll call the whole thing off?”
It’s the latest do-or-die moment for us. I’m sorry, but Mollie Lowery and Mary Scullion were nuns, and I don’t have their fortitude. Nathaniel, fortunately, is a very bright man. I’d say he’s probably in on the lie. But he picks up on something in my voice or sees something in my body language that tells him what’s at stake here.
“All right,” he finally says.
I don’t know what he wants more—the lesson, or to hold on to our friendship.
It seems I should try to make Nathaniel comfortable with the apartment before I bring Snyder around, so I call Stuart Robinson at Lamp and he arranges to let me in. By now, I feel awkward about calling Robinson or anyone else at Lamp. They have dozens of Nathaniels, and while they appreciate my relationship with him, I know I’m putting them in a bind. Would they hold an apartment open for several weeks for someone who isn’t written about regularly in the paper? Probably not, and they have to wrestle with the morality of keeping a bed reserved for him while turning away people who need help just as much as he does. They also have to deal with the public exposure of their private work with a man who is mentally ill. At times, Nathaniel is one of their more difficult clients. He endlessly chastises fellow clients, lets loose bigoted tirades and maligns Robinson for offering safe harbor to those who cuss, smoke or otherwise violate his sense of civility. In other words, Nathaniel is a burden, bringing with him the added pressure for Lamp employees of proving their effectiveness. And yet the mild-mannered Robinson politely returns my calls and is slowly building his own relationship with Nathaniel, and he goes along with the idea of using lessons from Pete Snyder as an enticement to get Nathaniel into the apartment.
Nathaniel is in a front corner of the courtyard when I drop by, talking to himself next to his packed and ready-to-go cart. Okay, so we’re off to a decent start. Nathaniel is tapping on his tarp-covered heap with a pair of sticks, and he tells me this is his first love. He’s a drummer, not a man of strings. Therefore, he doesn’t need Snyder and we can forget the lessons in the apartment.
Good Lord. I don’t have time for this.
Mr. Snyder’s not here today, I tell him firmly. It’s just the two of us, and we’re going to the apartment.
“I’m sure he’s a fabulous player, Mr. Snyder, like Harry Barnoff, Jim Brown, Mickey Mantle, all fabulous players. Colonel Sanders, Johnny Carson. Why not statues of those characters? Why do they have the military statues in Cleveland and not in Los Angeles, where someone had the inspiration to put the Beethoven statue in Pershing Square? I’m sure Mr. Snyder is excellent. I know he’s an excellent player, a magnificently accomplished professional musician, because I saw him playing Beethoven’s Third Symphony. He’s a professional, all right. He’s almost Yo-Yo Ma. Do you think Yo-Yo Ma is a nice man? Because Adam Crane said he’s a really good guy, but I don’t know. I haven’t seen the youngster since Juilliard, and he wouldn’t remember me.”
Each time I interrupt, he cuts me off. I finally get his attention long enough to say it’s time to go check out the apartment. Robinson will take the shortcut through the back, but Nathaniel’s cart won’t fit through the hall at Lamp, so we’re going to walk around the corner and meet Robinson on the other side.
There’s still a cluster of flowers in the spot where the twenty-five -year-old woman spent the last hours of her life, and there’s no sign that the crack trade has slowed on the opposite side of the street. A man with only one shoe is lighting a crack pipe, and a dealer shoots us a what-are-you-looking-at glance. Nathaniel returns a cold stare. At Sixth Street, the corner is naked without the Porta Potties, but a dozen people are still milling about or lying flat on the ground. With his hubcap as a shield and violin bow as a sword, Nathaniel is a bit like Don Quixote, holding to a strict moral and artistic code while everyone around him has fallen. I feel like Sancho Panza, defending the honor of a man who knows so little of his own frailty. As we cut left on the almost satirically named Wall Street, Nathaniel holds up the procession to grab a dustpan and broom from his cart so he can clear the cigarette butts, syringes and empty cans. He tosses the mess into one of his five-gallon saddlebags and we continue along a street that’s a far nicer sight than San Julian. Trees make the difference. Trees, and the fact that no one has fallen face-first into rotting trash.
“This looks really nice,” I say in a most encouraging tone. “Clean, quiet.”
Nathaniel picks up another soda can and a potato-chip wrapper, which I find encouraging. He’s already taking over the sanitation contract on this street.
The Ballington, a plum-colored two-story apartment building, has a wheelchair entrance that’s perfect for a shopping cart. Everything is falling into place, or so I’d like to think. Nathaniel pushes up the ramp and at the top, the automatic doors slide open, as if his arrival has been anticipated.
Stuart Robinson meets us in the foyer and leads us through another set of doors into the garden, where it seems as though we’ve left Skid Row altogether. The patio is an oasis of trees and benches, a manicured lawn and bougainvillea cascading over a wooden arbor. For the first time I can recall on Skid Row, birds are singing.
“Do you see that sign?” I ask Nathaniel as we stroll over to the arbor.
“No Smoking,” he says enthusiastically.
This couldn’t be more perfect. The few people who traipse through the garden are clients who live here in recovery from a combination of mental illness and drug or alcohol addiction. They carry themselves as if they’re on the way up, with places to go, things to do. Lamp leases several apartments here and assigns a monitor to its residents, who have access to all of Lamp’s services, from job training to psychiatric counseling and basic life management.
Judging by Nathaniel’s reaction, he’s not quite as jazzed as I am. He’s still holding back, and I’m reluctant to push the matter by suggesting that we go see the room. I spot an empty bench and tell him it looks like a nice place to serenade passersby.
Back in the garden, he has a small audience. I look up to see a woman in a second-floor apartment slide her window open so she can hear the concert, and she smiles down at me.
“Nathaniel, that sounded great. Would you like to take a break now and see the apartment?”
“I’m not interested in that.”
“That’s fine. But Mr. Snyder is probably going to want to check it out.” I’m struggling for something else to use on him and find my answer in a cloudy sky. “Besides, it could rain on the day of your lesson and you’ll have no choice but to go inside.”
He agrees to have a look, but only after reloading his cart, which takes another fifteen minutes. Down the hall we go, him pushing the buggy, me worrying it’s not going to fit through the door. That would be the end of it.
He begins wedging and angling the cart.
“How about if I—”
“No, no,” he says. “Let me get all of that.”
He unhooks the buckets, a boot, a giant squirt gun and a few other scraps that hang over the side. He pivots, grunts and pushes, and by divine intervention, the cart squeezes into the room. I celebrate silently. And Nathaniel? He drops to the floor to inspect the cigarette burns in the carpet.
“Looks like someone might have dropped a candle there,” I say. Lying has become frightfully easy.
“I don’t like it in here,” he says.
“That’s because it’s too dark and stuffy,” I answer, opening the blinds and cracking the window. An oleander scratches at the screen.
“Look at that,” I say. “Plenty of light. It’s like being in the garden.”
He wonders why he can’t take lessons at Disney Hall, or better yet, the tunnel.
“People will come in through that door and steal everything you’ve got,” he says, looking as though he might cry. “I’m not ever going to be in here again, and I don’t care about that Snyder thing, János Starker, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Donald Duck, Fantasia. I don’t need any of that.”
It’s his nature to resist, to always do things his way. I wonder, though, if the issue isn’t lack of desire but fear of change. I walk over to the window and sniff the flowers outside. One of the twin beds is on its side against a wall, and I tell him that leaves a convenient space for his shopping cart.
“The place has a nice feel,” I say. “I wonder what the acoustics are like in here.”
Nathaniel reaches for his cello. Slowly. Reluctantly. He sits on the edge of the bed and plays Schubert’s Arpeggione. The music surrounds us, and he closes his eyes.
16
The kids stood weeping at the airport window in Cleveland as the plane pulled away from the gate. Their father waved from his window seat, and Nathaniel remained silent as the plane taxied away and took off for California.
It was 1962. He was eleven years old and didn’t understand any of it.
“Why can’t I go?” he asked.
There had been signs of trouble. His father smashing a phone down on the floor the night his mother said she had to work at a fashion show. The Sunday ride to church when Jennifer got bumped to the backseat to make room for her father’s lady friend. But Nathaniel was too young to give meaning to any of that. Through the eyes of an eleven-year-old, things could not have been better.
His dad worked at the Willard battery company and his mother ran Floria’s Beauty Lounge on St. Clair, primping the women whose husbands worked in the factories that had fed the city’s children for decades. The salon was a short walk from the two-story family home at East Ninety-fifth and Seminole, and Nathaniel darted in and out of his mother’s shop, did homework there and was happy to charm her customers with his wide-eyed chatter and proper manners. Flo’s boy had character and poise, and he easily fell under the spell of the music his mother played on an old RCA radio. Whether it was jazz standards, classical or pop, the mellow sounds that filled the shop would sometimes put the youngster in a trance.
Mr. and Mrs. Ayers were never flush with cash, but they did just fine and believed a proper upbringing should include exposure to the arts, especially in a city that could boast one of the great orchestras of the world and a grand performance hall situated on nearby University Circle. The Ayers family bought an upright piano for their living room and arranged for Del and Nathaniel to have lessons with a Mrs. Lockhart, and it became apparent, as Nathaniel worked through the John Thompson piano course books, that their son seemed to have a good ear and nimble fingers.
But Nathaniel was too busy to get very good at it. When the hard Cleveland winters would thaw and the gray city came back to life, Nathaniel ran over to his uncle Howard and aunt Willa’s house on East 111th because they lived across the street from a park. Nathaniel played football with neighborhood kids and chipped golf balls with Uncle Howard, who topped six feet and seemed a giant to Nathaniel. If there was nothing doing in the park, Nathaniel scooted over to the lake to gaze at the steaming tankers, check out the activity on the docks or chuck stones into the lapping surf. When he charged along the shore he was Jim Brown of the Cleveland Browns. When he cocked his arm and let a stone fly across Lake Erie, he was Mudcat Grant of the Indians. He listened to ball games on his transistor radio and read about them the next day in the Plain Dealer. How could his parents not be happy together when life was so full and there was so much fun to be had in Cleveland? How could his father be moving out, and who would ever take him to an Indians game?
Nathaniel was silent all the way home from the airport. When they got back to the house, he talked to no one and refused to play with Jennifer. He couldn’t understand how his father could abandon the family, or why he had gone to a place so far away. Los Angeles? How could that be better than Cleveland?
Nathaniel became fixated on California, wanted to visit his father and was polite but indifferent toward the men who came calling on his mother about a year after the split. One in particular seemed to be coming around a lot, which didn’t sit well with Nathaniel. Was he going to lose his mother now, too?
Get your things together, Floria Ayers told her children one day. They were moving a few miles away, into the home of her new husband. Nathaniel hadn’t begun to digest the thought of leaving his house, his bedroom or his neighborhood when an even worse surprise was sprung on him. Alexander Mangrum, his new stepfather, had four children. Overnight, the Ayers kids went from being masters of their own home to sharing space with a house full of strangers who weren’t exactly pleased to have them squeeze in. The house, at 10923 Churchill Avenue, was a two-story walk-up with a nice porch and good-size backyard, but Nathaniel’s friends were too far away now, and so were the park and the lake. It felt as though his mother was gone now, too, because he had to fight for her attention. Why couldn’t he go live with his father in Los Angeles? Here, he was a stepchild, and so were Del and Jennifer. They had to do something, Nathaniel insisted in a discreet huddle with his sisters.
But what?
“Let’s run away,” Nathaniel said. He’d always heard about kids running away from home but never understood why anyone would. Until now. His new stepbrothers didn’t like him and he didn’t much care for them, either.
Del was not unsympathetic. She was having just as hard a time adjusting as Nathaniel was. As the eldest, at fifteen, she had been very close to her mother and devastated by the upheaval of the past two years. But she was plainspoken and adultlike in her sense of responsibility, and she asked Nathaniel a question that had not occurred to him.
“Where are we going to go?”
Nathaniel had to think about it for a while, but he finally came up with a plan
. They should grab their things in the dark of night, sneak down the stairs and high-tail it to Uncle Howard and Aunt Willa’s house.
“And you don’t think they’re going to call our mother the minute we get there?” Delsinia asked.
Nathaniel hadn’t thought of that. His big sister was right. They were stuck, and Nathaniel’s confidence and outgoing personality slowly began to fade. He broke down and cried, humiliated, when his stepbrothers got the best of him in a backyard push-up contest, and his sisters saw him sink even deeper after a much-anticipated trip to California. His father’s new wife and stepchildren were as foreign to him as the crowd in the house on Churchill Street, and Nathaniel felt there was no room for him in his father’s life. The young man returned to Cleveland more sullen, more broken and yet more grown-up, it seemed. His despair gradually evolved into the source of his resolve, and as the boy became the young man, he noticed that his stepsisters were suddenly showing more interest in him. Nathaniel began impeccably grooming himself before setting foot outside the house, and the stepsisters cooed as he worked the mirror, and them. The hair just so. The sweater snug over the shoulders, emphasizing the biceps. He was cute and smart, and the personality was coming back. Maybe things wouldn’t be so bad, after all, in this new life on Churchill Street. One advantage, he was about to discover, was that just down the street, a junior high teacher and longtime musician was rebuilding the school band program and looking for talent.
William Moon had been handpicked by the principal of Harry E. Davis Jr. High School. The principal knew Moon as a good teacher and bona fide musician who had played trombone in Cleveland’s lauded all-black Navy band, an association that came into being because of segregation, so he lured Moon from another public school. This was a time when music was considered essential in the education of an American child, and that was particularly so in Cleveland, where the fortunes amassed by the barons of industry had built Severance Hall and other great music institutions.
Moon, who lived on the east side with his wife and three children, not far from Nathaniel’s uncle Howard and aunt Willa, was a patient man. How else would he survive each day among adolescents, many of whom had never held an instrument in their hands and were hearing classical tunes for the first time? Moon taught beginning basics, encouraged students to grab any instrument that struck their fancy and gradually pushed them toward learning the scales. His love of music got him through such trials, and so did the fact that there were one or two students who had both a knack and a desire.