The Soloist (Movie Tie-In)

by Steve Lopez

  Maybe it’s that emotion, or a developing savior complex, that has driven me to the Third Street tunnel, where Ernest Adams, a fifty-six-year-old African-American, has taken up residence again after the baseball-bat beating that nearly killed him.

  “You wanna feel this?” Adams asks, taking off his ball cap.

  Not really. He was beaten like a holiday piñata six months earlier, and the dent in his head is the size of the San Fernando Valley. To be polite, I run a finger over the damage as the hair rises on my neck. It’s impossible not to imagine the two young thugs cruising for trouble that night, juiced up on a bum-bashing video. Did they first consider Nathaniel, a block away? If so, was he saved only because he was awake, working out a few kinks in the Elgar Cello Concerto?

  Adams was asleep when they came. He has no recollection of their approach, of the bats on his skull, of the bone fragments being driven into his brain. For a man who was on life support at County-USC before his transfer to Rancho Los Amigos for rehab, Adams looks remarkably good. He’s smiling like a survivor who can’t believe he’s made it back from the brink. Brady Westwater, a downtown resident who has known Adams for years, thinks the brain injury has exaggerated a speech impediment, making Adams speak a little slower than before. The beating also blinded Adams in his left eye, which is now milky and blank, and he says doctors told him his sight would never return.

  So why has he returned to the very spot where he was left for dead?

  Adams, it turns out, is different from Nathaniel in one significant way. Whereas Nathaniel sticks to himself as much as possible, Adams lives for human contact. That’s why he has come back, he tells me. He was a familiar face to so many people who took comfort in seeing him, and he can’t let them down.

  “I was kind of hoping this would be the impetus to get him to make a change and get off the streets,” says James Velarde, a friend who lives nearby and visited Adams in the hospital, first at County-USC and later at Rancho Los Amigos.

  As I stand out here with Adams and Westwater, the column is already taking shape in my head. This isn’t just a nice little feature about the recovery of man beaten to within an inch of his life. It’s an opening for a rant about a screwy system in which Adams was rescued from death only to be sent back to the scene of the crime at his own peril. I call his doctor at Rancho Los Amigos and she tells me arrangements were made for Adams to continue his recovery at a nursing home, but he refused to go. In cases like that, says the doctor, a patient’s rights are paramount. He can do as he pleases, whether it’s in his best interest or not. The hospital will offer cab fare or bus tokens to a patient who has no other transportation, and he can go wherever he wishes.

  “That’s the best we can do?” I ask the doctor. Adams is having trouble speaking after a brutal clubbing, and he’s been given a free ride straight back into harm’s way. At the very least, shouldn’t a social worker have been assigned to check and make sure he wasn’t crawling around in a gutter or wandering into traffic outside the tunnel?

  The doctor doesn’t disagree with the thrust of my concern, but she says the law is the law, and the hospital is bound by it. By now I’m tired of hearing about the law. Because of the law, the hospital didn’t call Adams’s mother to tell her he was being released. He’s an adult, so she has no right to know unless he wants her to. Because of the law, friends who hoped to talk Adams into a new and safer life indoors were not informed of his release, despite their humane requests.

  “I want to be out here,” Adams says, as if this is Beverly Hills. “I want to be my own man, to be under nobody’s care. I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs. I read the Bible, and I want to get the good life the right way.”

  Maybe he’ll leave eventually, he says, but at the moment he’s on a mission from God. Unnamed detractors have challenged the very existence of the savior, he claims, and his purpose in life is to show them God has his back, and that the good people outnumber the bad.

  “Princes walk upon the face of the earth and hold the reins, while peasants ride on horses,” he says.

  A man approaches and asks the three of us if anyone can spare a buck. Adams is the first to reach into his pocket.

  Westwater and I move out of earshot while Adams talks to the man. We need to get him back to Rancho Los Amigos, says Westwater. He needs a checkup, and maybe the hospital can help him sign up for Social Security disability, which would pay for a place to live.

  Lord help me. Here we go again.

  “I’m really glad I did this,” Adams says on our way back downtown after a visit to Rancho Los Amigos in the town of Downey. His doctors have just told him his recovery is proceeding nicely, and he’s been approved for a Social Security disability check that will cover the cost of housing if he chooses to move indoors. Adams claims, at least, that he’s ready to do just that.

  It occurs to me, as we cruise the Harbor Freeway past the University of Southern California and the Memorial Coliseum, that I’m doing things I’ve never done before, and breaking my own standards of journalistic distance and objectivity in the process. Even a columnist, with a license to advocate for one thing or another, generally stops short of personal involvement in the life of a subject. It’s important to keep your judgment sharp and your motives pure. But I’ve been more than an advocate in the cases of Adams and Nathaniel. I’ve been a social worker for both, and a friend to Nathaniel. Does it have something to do with their personalities and predicaments? No doubt, but it feels as though there’s more at play. After thirty years of fulminating about this or that, always from a safe distance and usually to no avail, I want something more, even if it involves the risk of failure. It’s not just a journalistic calculation, but a matter of curiosity and a desire for meaning. I envy the doctors who saved Adams’s life. I admire the musicians who can hear and appreciate Nathaniel’s genius. I’m inspired by the Stuart Robinsons and their patience and grace.

  It’s Nathaniel who has me thinking this way. I deal too often with people who are programmed, or have an agenda, or guard their feelings. Nathaniel is a man unmasked, his life a public display. We connect in part because there is nothing false about him, and I come away from every encounter more attuned to my own feelings than I would be after, say, an interview with the mayor or the governor. Nathaniel turns my gaze inward. He has me examining what I do for a living and how I relate to the world as a journalist and as a citizen. Despite the many frustrations he presents, I’ll never have a richer reward than knowing him well enough to tell his story.

  As we reach downtown, I tell Adams I hope Nathaniel will come around just as he has. It’s a bit strange that Westwater is still on the phone, trying to find an apartment for a man who doesn’t have one, while Nathaniel refuses to move into one that sits empty. Maybe the two of them can room together, I suggest to Adams.

  “He’s more stubborn than you are,” I tell him.

  “Oh yes, I’ve seen him,” Adams says. “If he doesn’t watch out, he’s going to get himself into trouble.”

  I have no idea what he means.

  “He gets into arguments,” Adams explains. “He’s very confrontational. ”

  I know about the daily disputes in the Lamp courtyard, but Nathaniel leaves there each day for the solitude of the Second Street tunnel. As I think about it, though, I recall seeing Nathaniel do something recently that was out of character. I was driving by and saw him playing violin as a cyclist approached. Nathaniel leaped up and lunged at him as if he intended to knock him off his bike. I couldn’t imagine that Nathaniel really intended to do anything other than mark his territory, because I’d heard him complain about cyclists whizzing by perilously close. But the cyclist shook his head angrily.

  “What exactly have you seen?” I ask Adams.

  “A nasty argument,” he says. Also with a cyclist.

  The same one, possibly?

  Adams says Nathaniel was lugging his cart through the Third Street tunnel in the direction of Skid Row when he got into it with the guy. Adams
doesn’t know what started the skirmish, but Nathaniel began taunting the guy.

  “He had a gun, and he was ready to use it,” Adams says of the cyclist.

  “He had a gun?”

  “He said it took every ounce of strength for him to keep from blowing your friend away.”

  The minute I drop Adams off, I go looking for Nathaniel. He isn’t anywhere near the tunnels. I try Pershing Square, then the Lamp courtyard. I zigzag through Skid Row for an hour. No sign of him. Angry and scared, I drive back to the office and try to distract myself with the backed-up phone calls and e-mails and the business of the next column, whatever it might be. I tell myself he’ll be fine because he always is. After work I make the rounds again, driving by the Central Library, too. I park and go inside, hoping to find him foraging for sheet music, but he’s nowhere. At Lamp, Robinson is gone and no one else knows anything.

  “I’m sure he’s fine,” Alison tells me at home, although I know she’s worried, too. For Nathaniel and for me.

  I give it another try around midnight, driving the same route. This time I go back to his old spot at Los Angeles and Winston streets and there’s someone sleeping there, but without a shopping cart. That can’t be him. Should I call the police, the hospitals or the morgue?

  Tuesday morning, January 31, 2006.

  Nathaniel’s birthday.

  The phone rings at 7:30, one of those rings that catches you by surprise and raises your skin. I peek at the caller ID and sit back again. It’s a 1-800 telemarketer.

  I’m anxious and afraid to call Lamp. Robinson won’t be in for a while, so I hold off and read the paper, play with Caroline at her coloring table, pay a few bills. None of this gives me a moment’s peace. Finally, I head downtown.

  My first stop is the Second Street tunnel, then Pershing Square. I don’t know where to go next. I dial Lamp and Robinson takes my call.

  He’s not anywhere, I tell him, frantically relating Ernest Adams’s story about the gun. I tell him I’ve checked everywhere except with the police and the hospitals, but those will be next.

  “Has there been any sign of him over there?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” Robinson says in a sly, relaxed tone. “He’s right here.”

  Thank you, thank you, thank you.

  I don’t know what he’s been up to, I tell Robinson, but he wasn’t in any of his usual spots. I checked the tunnel three times last night.

  “Do you have any idea where he was?” I ask.

  “Yes,” Robinson says. “He spent the night in his apartment.”

  He what?

  I pull the car over to avoid driving up on a curb. Almost exactly one year after our first encounter, he did it.

  He did it.

  He did it.

  Hallelujah!

  “Are you kidding?” I ask Robinson.

  “No,” he says with a giddy laugh.

  “I don’t believe it,” I tell him.

  “You want to come see him?”

  I want more than that. I want to throw a party, hire a band and make Nathaniel the conductor.

  After dinner the night before, Nathaniel had dropped his head, exhausted. It wasn’t the spaghetti that had done him in, although that might have helped. He was just exhausted. Thirty-five years of running can do that. Thirty-five years of staying busy to keep from coming unraveled.

  “Can I stay in my room tonight?” he asked Robinson when dinner was done.

  Robinson had to leave for home and left the matter with one of his staffers, uncertain that Nathaniel would follow through. He didn’t know until the next day that his aide opened B-116 and watched Nathaniel pull the cart inside and close the door. That was it. At the prospect of once more hauling all his possessions to the tunnel a mile away, up and down curbs and squeezing through traffic, the fight went out of him.

  Casey and Shannon, Patricia and Stuart were right all along. He would do it, but in his own time. It couldn’t be forced, it couldn’t be rushed and it couldn’t be helped by calling the police and having him cuffed and confined. That would have been a disaster. Nathaniel was in charge, and our role was simply to be there, holding a door open for him.

  Nathaniel’s breakthrough makes me all the more appreciative of what he’s been up against. I wonder if the confrontations in the tunnels might have been the expression of his last fight against a move inside. And I think there was something to Robinson’s observation that taking the apartment meant having something to lose. It also meant closing the door to just himself and the voices, and perhaps to the frightful recognition of his illness and of the lost years. It was the first step in a return to the world of rules and expectations, a world in which he’d snapped. Moving inside was perhaps riskier and more courageous than walking into a room at Juilliard, at the age of nineteen, for an audition. Here, the stakes were much higher.

  I drive straight over to Lamp and find him in the courtyard, drumming his cello case with his fingers.

  “Oh, Mr. Lopez,” he says, behaving as if nothing has changed.

  I hold back an urge to hug him. I don’t want to make so big a deal of it that he starts questioning his move. But I can’t let this development pass without acknowledging it.

  “I looked for you out at the tunnel last night and couldn’t find you,” I tell him.

  “Yeah. I slept in the apartment.”

  “Oh, you did? How was it?”

  “I was worried I wouldn’t be able to hear any of the street noises I like. But I heard planes and sirens, and the faucet dripped all night. It was great.”

  He says he soaked his feet in a bucket and took a hot shower, but the best part of the deal was washing all the bugs out of his clothes.

  “Nathaniel, what day did you tell me was your birthday?”

  “Oh,” he says. “That’s January thirty-first.”

  “Today is your birthday,” I tell him. “Did you know today is the thirty-first?”

  “It is?”

  “Yes. You woke up in your own apartment on your fifty-fifth birthday. Happy birthday, Nathaniel.”

  Robinson suggests that before I bake a cake and hang streamers in B-116, or whatever else I might be planning, I should stand back and see how things go over the next few days. He’s seen people move out as quickly as they moved in, and at the risk of breaking my heart, he tells me Nathaniel could be one such restless soul.

  I ask if there’s a time when you can rest assured that someone’s safe and in the clear.

  I can tell Robinson doesn’t want to answer the question.

  “I don’t think he’s ready to be in there full-time yet,” he says. “He might never leave the streets altogether.”

  This is not what I want to hear in our moment of glory. I hope that for once, Robinson is wrong. But he’s the practical clinician who has seen it all, and I’m still the emotionally invested novice. Robinson informs me that he’s obliged to do something Nathaniel might not like. He isn’t running a hostel, and he needs Nathaniel to understand that. The room isn’t a place to flop occasionally. It’s either going to be his home or he won’t be allowed to keep it. That’s the way it is with other clients, and Nathaniel isn’t going to get a free pass because he’s got a buddy who writes for the Los Angeles Times.

  It’s more than a fairness issue, Robinson explains. It’s part of the recovery philosophy. One aspect of giving Nathaniel back his dignity is to treat him like an adult. So Robinson is going to explain that if he wants to keep the apartment and show respect for the people who have invested time in his welfare, he has to make a commitment. He’s going to have to sign a contract that says he’ll sleep in the room at least three nights a week, for starters.

  Estimating conservatively, I’d guess there have to be about six hundred things Nathaniel might find objectionable about this deal. First and foremost, he’s not a deal maker. The beauty of living on the streets is that there are no forms to fill out, and being forced to sign a contract could drive him right back out there. Then, too, there’s the comp
lication of keeping a calendar. He doesn’t always know whether it’s Tuesday or Friday, and now he’s going to be expected to have a date book in his head.

  But when Robinson lays his proposition on the table, Nathaniel doesn’t hesitate.

  “Okay,” he says, and he picks Monday, Wednesday and Friday nights.

  On Tuesday night, he goes to his room, packs up his things and sleeps in the tunnel.

  Wednesday night, he eats dinner at Lamp, goes back to his room, turns out the light and goes to sleep.

  He’s made it through half a week.

  On Thursday night, he packs again and sleeps in the tunnel.

  So far, so good. Can he do it? Can he complete his third night indoors and honor the contract?

  Friday night, no questions asked, he retires after dinner to room B-116.

  Home.

  Part Three

  22

  “Have you noticed how different he looks?” asks Shannon Murray. “He looks good, doesn’t he?”

  He looks cleaned up and rested, like a man who had forgotten what either of those things felt like. The edge is gone, too, and there’s a softer look in his eyes. Stuart Robinson says he saw Nathaniel observe clients he had previously ignored or argued with, as if he might be recognizing himself in them. He even offered words of support to a couple of them.

  A smarter man than I would nod pleasantly, be grateful for small wonders and go find something to do at least twenty or thirty miles from Skid Row. A smarter man would turn things over to the professionals, who, after all, did most of the work anyway and were right all along about what approach would work best for Nathaniel.