The Soloist (Movie Tie-In)

by Steve Lopez

  Karr said the administration blew off his suggestion that Nathaniel had a mental condition, suggesting instead that his problem was racially motivated attitude.

  “Since I’m not a specialist on mental disorders, they refused to acknowledge my recommendations that he seek psychiatric help. Instead of dealing with his personal problem, he seemed to be lumped into the category of a typically angry African-American, although I didn’t see it that way. In Nathaniel’s case, I knew that something was dreadfully wrong.”

  “Do you know this?” Snyder asks, playing his own cello to show Nathaniel the way.

  “Bach Bourrée in C major,” says Nathaniel.

  Snyder nods and continues playing, and I realize for the first time how far Nathaniel has to go. Snyder’s playing is polished and complete, with none of the tangled thoughts and lost threads I’ve become accustomed to in Nathaniel’s music. Snyder is the instrument’s master rather than the reverse. The biggest difference is the pitch and pace of the music, and Nathaniel sits in a trance, his mouth open as he watches. He’s particularly focused on the fingering, leaning in for closer study, then falls back and I can’t tell whether he’s inspired or destroyed. But when Snyder asks if he’d like to take a pass at the Bouree, Nathaniel doesn’t hesitate.

  He stops and starts, apologizes, gives it another try and keeps on. His sound is harsher than Snyder’s, with too much vibration and the occasional squeal. It’s impossible for me to know whether this is because of an inferior instrument or because Nathaniel was trained on bass rather than cello. Or whether his illness limits his ability. But he begins to smooth things out as he continues, even if his motion appears more labored after Snyder’s fluid strokes. His sound mellows in time, with Snyder encouraging him to lengthen his strokes and keep up the rhythm. He plays with more confidence now and becomes more animated, working the vibrato with a flourish.

  I look to Snyder for an assessment.

  “I’m amazed,” he says.

  I feel like a parent whose child has just aced his audition.

  “I know many talented people who don’t have as pretty a sound,” Snyder says.

  Gary Karr said the same. If you put your very existence into it, your sensitivity and humanity, it makes for a sound distinctly yours, Karr told me. Nathaniel plays music that silences the voices in his head. It’s proof his illness hasn’t touched his soul.

  Snyder leans into me as Nathaniel plays on.

  “He might be a musical genius. It’s not unusual to find someone with his aptitude. What is unbelievable is to see someone without recent training play so well.”

  Snyder tells Nathaniel this is a great start, and if he’s willing to work at it, this could be the first of many lessons in this room.

  That’s all it takes, one sour note, and the other Nathaniel resurfaces.

  “It’s not my room,” he says in a smart tone. “I’m not going to be living in here.”

  But why not? Snyder asks. It makes perfect sense to have a quiet place to practice.

  “You have a gift, and you need to respect it and be grateful to God for granting it,” Snyder says, adding that he can build his spiritual strength through music.

  Nathaniel nods but is obviously annoyed. He hadn’t expected the lesson to include a sermon. He tells Snyder he’s more comfortable in the tunnel or out by the Beethoven statue.

  “Every criminal in Los Angeles will be coming through that door right there and they will steal everything I’ve got. That’s how the drug addict operates. He will steal and steal and steal to support his habit, and I am not going to be in here with all my things so they can just come in here and take whatever they want.”

  He hasn’t completely lost it yet, but he’s headed in that direction. I’m about to step in before it escalates, but Snyder responds before I do.

  “How about making this deal,” he says. “You come here as often as you can, so maybe we can have another lesson.”

  Nathaniel is back to his mantra. There’s no one to deal with in the tunnel, no one to bother him. And the sound is better there, too. In the tunnel, he hears the city all around and doesn’t feel cut off from it like he does inside these four walls.

  Snyder isn’t giving any ground. He leans in close and says: “Think of this as a clean, quiet tunnel.”

  Nathaniel is at least giving it some consideration.

  “I wouldn’t have thought of it,” he says. “Yeah. This is a brand-new tunnel.”

  18

  The Country Club Apartments for Seniors is a modern two-story affair near Charleston and Valley View Road in Las Vegas, a few miles northwest of the famous Strip. The elder Nathaniel Ayers lives there in retirement from his job as a trash truck driver in Los Angeles. He fills his days with Bible readings and trips to Mountaintop Faith, his house of worship. Mr. Ayers’s son never speaks ill of him, despite the long years that go by without contact. I’ve come to Las Vegas not because I want to get to know Mr. Ayers, but because I’m trying to better understand his son.

  Mr. Ayers’s stepdaughter has agreed to make an introduction, telling me he’s hard of hearing and doesn’t pick up the phone. But when I land in Las Vegas and drive to the apartments, she doesn’t answer my call. I try several times and finally get her. She’s forgotten about my visit and is in Palm Springs for a quick getaway.

  I’ve come too far to give up that easily, so I walk into the apartment house lobby to see if anyone can tell me where to find Mr. Ayers. Several people are watching the clubhouse TV or reading, but they’ve never heard of any Mr. Ayers. In the office I find a clerk who says she’s new and doesn’t know many of the residents. My last hope is the pool area, where several folks are taking some sun. On my way there, I see a Bible on a coffee table, and a name is written on the edge of it.

  “Nathaniel Ayers.”

  I scoop up the Miracle Breakthrough Bible and open it to the ribbon marker, which is at Chronicles 2. I find no address in the book, so I go back to the office to announce that Mr. Ayers seems to have forgotten his Bible in the clubhouse and would probably like to have it back. If there’s any way she could do a little snooping and dig up his apartment number, I’ll personally deliver the Bible to him as a friend of his son, so he doesn’t have to be without. This gets me through the gates.

  Mr. Ayers has a first-floor unit not far from the pool, and as I walk to it I hear Jennifer’s voice in my head, bristling at how little her father did to make his children feel welcome in his new life. She’s particularly angry about the way he ignored his troubled son. Jennifer’s mother married twice more after Mr. Ayers left her for California, and the third one was the charm. He was more of a father to Nathaniel than his biological father had been, but Nathaniel didn’t necessarily look at it that way. His real father was the one whose affection he most coveted.

  I stand at the door and peer through the screen. Mr. Ayers is asleep on a chair in the living room, sitting no more than four feet from a television with the volume blasting. I call out and bang on the screen door, but he doesn’t stir. I bang louder and he finally picks himself up and stiff-legs his way to the door, bent over by a bad back.

  There’s no doubt this is Nathaniel’s father. His skin is lighter, but the features are the same. Flat nose, hooded eyes, shiny white teeth built into a slightly protuberant mouth. Like his son, the elder Ayers has a long thin trunk built atop a body that’s broader from the waist down.

  I hold up his Bible and announce myself, then again, and again, louder each time, until every resident of the Country Club Apartments knows that Steve Lopez, his son’s friend from Los Angeles, has arrived to interview him for a book about Nathaniel.

  Finally he catches on. He’s heard about me but wasn’t expecting me.

  Mr. Ayers invites me in and lowers himself back into his armchair. He’s frail and so hard of hearing he has no idea the television is loud enough to shake quarters out of the slots on the Strip. I point to the TV and to my ear. He gets the message and turns it down. I hand him his Bi
ble and as he takes hold of it I see Nathaniel’s fingers, slender and elegant. No, Mr. Ayers says, he never picked up an instrument.

  “After I came out of the army, he was born,” Mr. Ayers says of Nathaniel. “And the two sisters. And then we broke up.”

  That’s always tough on everyone, I say.

  “She put me out,” he says.

  Why?

  “I guess I’m a bad fella.”

  Really?

  “Nah, I’m just tellin’ you that.”

  Jennifer tells a different story. She says he wanted an old-fashioned woman, not a successful and gregarious entrepreneur like her mother, Flo. Jennifer recalls a night when her mother announced she had to work at a beauty show and Mr. Ayers told her she had more important work at home. They stared each other down until Mrs. Ayers grabbed her coat and hat and stomped off to work. Jennifer also tells a story about their trips to church on Sunday. She would ride up front because their mother wasn’t churchgoing, and they’d stop along the way to pick up a neighbor lady. Jennifer remembers vividly the day they stopped at the neighbor’s house and her father ordered her into the backseat so the lady could sit up front. That was the lady he later married, and they moved to California.

  I’m sure Mr. Ayers might have a different take on the particulars, but I haven’t come to delve further into any of that. I tell him about my friendship with his son and my efforts to help him build a better life for himself.

  Mr. Ayers sniffs at the suggestion.

  “I think he likes doing just what he’s doing,” he says flatly. “Being around unfortunate people.”

  I swallow back my anger. It’s such a harsh and uninformed comment, I don’t even know how to begin to respond. His own father has written Nathaniel off as a man who has chosen the life he lives. Not that Jennifer didn’t warn me. Her father never was understanding or sensitive on this issue, she said.

  I ask Mr. Ayers, as kindly as I can, if he is aware that his son is mentally ill. I have to shout this more than once. The father who walked out on a son who lives for music has been robbed of his hearing, and there has to be a Sunday sermon in that.

  “The first I knew of it he was in school in New York City. Juilliard. I don’t know. He played bass and somebody may have slipped something into his drink. He knew all the police officers in Cleveland, so they wouldn’t lock him up.”

  Maybe I have no business asking the next question, but I can’t help myself.

  “Do I miss him?” Mr. Ayers repeats. “Well, I haven’t had too much time to miss him. What bothered me most was we didn’t get along too good, you know? He sometimes, I think he’d just do things to aggravate me. So many things have happened that’s beyond my comprehension. I can’t understand it. He fell out with his mother because she divorced me. I honestly believe that he gave her a hard time in the last years of her life.”

  I don’t know why I continue. Maybe just because I’ve gone to the trouble of flying to Las Vegas to meet the man Nathaniel still calls “my father” and still occasionally expresses an interest in seeing. But his father is a man who doesn’t know him.

  “One Christmas, it was eighty degrees. He came to see me in California and turned around and went back early, after I had paid for him to come. He said it was too warm. He came other times, too. Sometimes he was all right, but he’s kind of mixed up. I think he cared for me, but he had a funny way of showing it. He was on prescription drugs. They tried to keep his nerves down with drugs and I don’t believe in that. That’s what messed him up the most. Prescription drugs.”

  I’m nodding agreeably at this point. It’s obvious there’s no point in my responding.

  “I think about him all the time,” Mr. Ayers says. “I’ll never forget him. I’m praying for him night and day, every time I think about it. I remember having a picture of him. I don’t remember where it is.”

  He’s a talented man, I say, telling Mr. Ayers that winning a scholarship to Juilliard is rare. Had Mr. Ayers ever heard his son play? I ask.

  “One Christmas we had a little party and he played ‘Silent Night,’” he says. “I don’t remember the other songs he played.”

  It’s a shame, Mr. Ayers says, that his son has thrown away his talent and his life.

  “I got to where I felt he understood what he was doing and didn’t have to do it. What’s wrong with him? I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t think nothing’s wrong with his brain. It’s the prescription drugs mostly.”

  Is Mr. Ayers completely unaware that his son was diagnosed with a very specific disease?

  “He mentioned something to me about schizophrenia, I think they call it. I don’t know nothing much about that kind of thing. The way it happened, I didn’t get a chance to feel bad about it because everything worked out well for my children.”

  It’s clear now that it’s time for me to go. I’m not sure why I do it, but I tell Mr. Ayers his son misses him and I ask if he has anything he’d like me to pass along to Nathaniel or Jennifer and Del.

  “Tell him I miss all of them. I’m proud of all of them. There couldn’t be no prouder a man than me of all his children.”

  Marjorie Moon was right all those many years ago about the young man who was trying so hard to win his teacher’s attention. Nathaniel saw a proud glow on Mr. Moon’s face the day Marjorie visited his class to play the bass, and he longed for a relationship with someone, particularly a man, who would feel the same way about him. For many years, Harry Barnoff was the man Nathaniel tried so hard to impress. It was Barnoff he called when he was in trouble, and it was Barnoff whose phone number he still had committed to memory more than twenty years after the last time he dialed it.

  I’m the one he calls now, the one who, when it comes to music, is student rather than teacher. He calls me at work, calls me at home, calls me on my cell phone. Sometimes it’s something specific he’s after. He needs rosin or a new string, or he wonders if I can find a particular piece of sheet music for him. Other times it seems as though he calls just to know that I’m there. “Hello, Mr. Lopez,” he always begins, asking about every member of my family.

  After Las Vegas, I wonder if Nathaniel’s success as a young musician was at least in part a cry for his father’s notice, or perhaps a defiant message that Dad’s abandonment had only made him stronger. A little of both, perhaps.

  “I was in Las Vegas over the weekend,” I tell Nathaniel two days after my return. “I met your father.”

  “How is he?” he asks, a little hurt that I didn’t take him with me. We had talked about Nathaniel visiting him at some point, but I wasn’t sure the time was right yet.

  “He’s fine, but getting old.”

  I tell Nathaniel I filled his father in on how he’s doing. He asks what his father said in response.

  “He told me he misses you,” I say. “And he couldn’t be any prouder.”

  19

  Stuart Robinson got into the wrong business after college. He assembled parts for military aircraft, which paid well but didn’t do much for his soul, so getting laid off during a slowdown was a blessing. Robinson, who had studied psychology in college, took a job as a mental health counselor. Assembling lives felt more rewarding than his old job, and Robinson liked his new line of work well enough to go after an even bigger challenge. The Los Angeles Men’s Project, which had a reputation for taking on the toughest cases, had an opening at its San Julian site, and Robinson got the job.

  I’ve seen him escort screaming troublemakers off the premises, talk police out of arresting a client for jaywalking, talk down a man threatening suicide, give aid to a stabbing victim and calmly tell a certain musician to stop flipping out every time he sees someone smoking cigarettes. It’s common, in fact, for all of that and more to be going on at the same time. It helps, for the sake of intimidation, that Robinson is the size of an NFL lineman. He also has a surprisingly soft voice for such a hulking presence, which makes for a calming counterbalance to the three-ring madness that surrounds him. Madness that i
s now frequently set to music, thanks to Nathaniel.

  In a courtyard full of characters, Nathaniel is second to none. If he’s not trying to figure out the Bach Unaccompanied Cello Suites, he’s drawing on the pavement with a rock, writing the name of whatever piece he’s playing, the name of the composer, Peter Snyder, Adam Crane, Governor Schwarzenegger, the names of me and everyone in my family or whatever else pops into his head. He has also taken it upon himself to expand his janitorial services beyond the retrieval of cigarette butts. Now he often sweeps, mops, takes out the trash and seems to be in competition with the actual janitor.

  “He does want to give back,” Robinson says, and it’s no small development. Nathaniel’s desire to pitch in is a sign of his growing comfort with Lamp and with Robinson. He sees himself as part of a community now, and because he values what’s being done for him, he wants to show his appreciation and sense of responsibility.

  I know I’m not supposed to keep asking, especially since the question has no answer. But I need to know if Robinson thinks we’re getting close.

  “We could be,” he says. “But he’s still got a few things to work out.”

  “Like what?”

  Robinson pauses to think about it.

  Sometimes, he says, it’s not that clients don’t want to move inside. It’s that they don’t trust their own ability to hold on to a place of their own, or they fear that something or someone will force them out. The advantage to life on the street, Robinson says, is that you have nothing to lose.

  A week after the lesson with Pete Snyder, Nathaniel approaches Robinson with a question. Can he please park his buggy in the apartment while he goes to look for some sheet music at the library?

  Robinson calls me, excited about the news. To him, a little thing like this isn’t such a little thing. It’s a promising breakthrough. Nathaniel is confronting his fears and thinking more rationally. Yes, it’s actually true that someone might break into his room and steal everything he owns. But that’s not likely to happen, he has concluded, so it’s worth the risk.