The Soloist (Movie Tie-In)

by Steve Lopez

  But I’m having trouble moving on. Nathaniel, for all his intractable habits, has nothing on me when it comes to compulsive behavior. There’s always a better line than the one I just wrote, or a better column idea than the one I’ve got lined up for tomorrow. And nothing can be left hanging, whether it’s a decision on how to redo the front yard or whether a paranoid schizophrenic should be pushed to take advantage of his recent momentum and go immediately into therapy.

  Nathaniel helps answer the last dilemma when I visit his apartment and find him frantically cleaning everything with a squirt bottle of Formula 409 cleaner. The blinds, the window-sills, the floor. A chemical mist fills the air, thick enough to peel paint off the walls, and Nathaniel rushes from one task to another like a man chasing a wrapper blowing in the wind. He goes from baseboard to sink to bathroom, squirting and wiping with a rag, and it wouldn’t be a surprise to see him follow a stain pattern into the hall, through the courtyard and out in the street to make all of Skid Row spick-and-span. He finally puts down the bottle, flushes the toilet, washes his hands, squirts and wipes the mirror, runs a finger over the blinds and follows with the rag, then flushes the toilet and washes his hands again. The plumbing is good. The room has a glow. I can’t breathe because there’s a pint of ammonia in my lungs and Nathaniel isn’t done yet, but that’s okay.

  “You’ve come a long way,” I say, telling him Stuart Robinson is very impressed by the way he seems to be looking after the newer clients. “Maybe you can help some of the people who just came through the door. Anything’s possible now, especially if you take advantage of some of the services they’ve got here for you. The mental health advocates, the people who can help get you signed up on SSI to pay the rent here. The psychiatrists.”

  “I would support any psychiatrist who will support me,” he says without interrupting his fanatical cleanup.

  Is it the 409? Has it cut off the oxygen and impaired his thinking? I’m tempted to run through the streets in search of Dr. Prchal and get it going here and now. Yes, Nathaniel goes on, he wants to make his own “contribution to the psychiatric environment.” I don’t know exactly what that means but it sounds like progress. I ask again if he’s serious about seeing a psychiatrist and this time he deflects, saying he might consider it at some point. But as for his own contribution, he’d like to use what he knows to help people.

  “I’d want to be a music therapist,” he says as he disinfects the bathroom mirror.

  Eager to move ahead, I check in with Mark Ragins, my on-call doctor, for some advice on accelerating Nathaniel’s transformation. I still refer frequently to Ragins’s book A Road to Recovery as if it’s an owner’s manual, and it seems to me that in the doctor’s four-stage model, Nathaniel has just moved from No. 2, Empowerment (“Sometimes they need another person to believe in them before they’re confident enough to believe in themselves”) to No. 3, Self-Responsibility (“Old patterns of dependency must be broken, and mental health professionals need to encourage clients to take charge instead of settling for the ease and safety of being taken care of”).

  Ragins is glad to hear the news of Nathaniel’s breakthrough, but I can hear him chuckling over my sense of urgency. His prescription, more or less, is that rather than rush Nathaniel to the nearest shrink, I get a tranquilizer gun, point it at my hip and pull the trigger.

  “I wouldn’t push him into therapy right away,” he says.

  Coming inside was obviously a good sign, but that shouldn’t be misread as an indication that the next steps will be any easier than the last, the doctor warns me. Nathaniel will have enough of a challenge adapting to new routines and people, and a lot of that will be scary for him. This is no time, Ragins adds, to remind him of his history with doctors and meds, clinics and hospitals.

  What to do, then?

  Let him find his way. Be patient. Be his friend.

  “Relationship is primary,” Ragins says. “It is possible to cause seemingly biochemical changes through human emotional involvement. You literally have changed his chemistry by being his friend.”

  I don’t know if I’ve ever been a very good friend to anyone, maybe because friendship is too much about the past. Do you know what ever happened to what was his name? Do you remember the time? I’m too busy moving from one city and one job to another, loyal to the rhythms of a column-writing schedule that serves as my metronome. Who has time to look back? Friendship is easier when it has no history, no time for broken promises and all the little piques that fill a running tally sheet. To Nathaniel, as well, the past is irrelevant. Life is all about the next phrase, about feeding the monster, about finding a definition of himself that makes sense for at least one day. We’re like each other in many respects. Do you think about writers the way I think about musicians? he asked when I spent that night with him. Yes, I do. But I don’t have time to do enough of it.

  I don’t know if I’ve truly changed Nathaniel’s chemistry, as Ragins suggested. But, yes, of course we’re friends by most definitions of the word. I wouldn’t consider talking to him about a career move, the way I would with longtime pals, or about the challenges of being a good father and husband while devoting so much time to work. Come to think of it, Nathaniel and I don’t really have conversations. Mostly he talks or plays music and I listen. He can’t relate to my world and I have trouble relating to his, except for my growing interest in classical music. I can’t tell him about having been the victim of identity theft, because I’d have to explain debit cards, and it’s all about money, anyway, which holds no interest for him. He looks at me as if I’m an alien when I say I got an e-mail from his sister, Jennifer, and like I’m pretending when I explain that an e-mail is sort of a letter, sent electronically, through cyberspace.

  And yet for all that, he’s changed my chemistry, too. I’ve never volunteered for anything, never was a Big Brother or Scout leader, but Nathaniel still has me clearing space in a busy schedule to make time for him. I drive through L.A. enveloped by orchestral music, and I look forward to sharing my new appreciation of it with Caroline, who until now had only one parent with an ear for classical. If a friend is someone who inspires, who challenges, who sends you in search of some truer sense of yourself, Nathaniel is indeed a friend. In my euphoria over his move indoors, he has me thinking I might like to do something other than work for a newspaper. Something in the public service realm and very hands-on, like the Stuart Robinsons and Mary Scullions of the world. But I don’t quite know what it would be, or what I’m even qualified to do.

  As I leave his apartment one day shortly after he moved in, he calls me back and holds out his hand. It’s a long, firm handshake, followed by a smile. I look into his eyes and see the man he’s always been behind the racing, spinning madness. The son who lost a father. The musician who lost a chance. No, we don’t have too many so-called normal conversations. But what’s normal? I hold his hand in mine, and neither of us needs to say a thing.

  Darrell Steinberg calls me from Sacramento, where he’s putting together a staff to run the business of Prop. 63. Among other things, he needs a communications director.

  “Do you know of anyone?” he asks.

  I pause. Should I ask him if he’d consider me?

  The thought is still scary. But I tell Steinberg I’ve been wondering if it’s time for me to take a risk and start a second career.

  “We should at least get together and talk about it,” Steinberg says, encouraging me to take the leap.

  I tell him I’ll get back to him.

  Forget it, Alison says. She’s not moving to Sacramento. “Maria Shriver doesn’t even live there.” And I’d be miserable working as a state bureaucrat, she insists.

  Maybe so. But Times editor Dean Baquet, who replaced John Carroll, is headed for his own showdown with corporate bosses and could soon be gone as well. After a thrilling run of thirty years, did I want to spend the rest of my career with a scowl, reminiscing about the good old days? I’d been lucky beyond all my expectations, landin
g one great job after another. I caught brief glimpses of world history in the making (high tea with vanquished Iraqi soldiers in the first Gulf War, ninety-proof vodka with Muscovites celebrating the fall of Communism, diving for cover in a Bosnian graveyard as a funeral procession came under attack) and I chased news across the United States (the eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington state, the parade of presidential candidates through Iowa and New Hampshire, the trials of assassins and thieves ranging from a New York mobster to a Louisiana governor). I had the privilege of rattling cages and knocking on doors in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, of exposing fools and heralding saints. If I walked away now, no one could say I got cheated.

  Just for the heck of it I Google “real estate” and “Sacramento.” Dozens of Web sites pop up. I pick one at random and begin clicking on photos of houses all over the area. Sacramento is an hour from where I grew up, so I know the terrain. I like the area just north of there in the Sierra foothills, so I begin looking at houses in Auburn, a gold-rush town with a rustic, old-fashioned downtown. I find a three-bedroom ranch house that backs up to a creek, and the price is roughly half of what my house in Los Angeles is worth.

  “Take a look at this,” I tell Alison.

  “What is it?” she asks.

  “It’s a house in Auburn. Look at the price.”

  She pulls back and stands over me. By her posture alone, I know I’m in trouble.

  “You’re not still thinking about this, are you?”

  “Why not? At that price, we could make this work, even if I make half the salary. What do you think of the house?”

  She looks again, closer this time.

  “I hate it,” she says. “And I’m not moving.”

  “There are lots of others,” I tell her.

  “You’d go crazy the first day,” she fires back. “The highlight of your day is going to be getting up from your desk to go to a meeting. What is the matter with you?”

  I don’t see the job that way, I tell her. I’d craft it so that I tour the state, talking up good stories to reporters. I’d be able to stay in touch with Nathaniel that way, too, visiting him on swings down to Southern California.

  “You’re a reporter,” she points out. “When you know about good stories, guess what? You can write them yourself. You have the perfect job. What’s the problem?”

  Good point. And she has more.

  I’ve never had a nine-to-five schedule in my life, and one of the things I enjoy about my job is the variety of subjects. I’m a newspaper columnist, she says. That’s what I am and who I am, and if I have any sense, I’ll try to hang on to the job as long as I can.

  23

  Two months go by and Nathaniel has been in his room every night without fail. He’s up at seven to go to breakfast at Lamp, then back in at seven in the evening. By day he often goes back to the Second Street tunnel to play, and one day a man approaches in the middle of a practice session and sets down a case. Inside is a new cello. “I thought you could use this,” says the man, who walks away without giving his name or saying another word. Nathaniel now has two cellos and six violins.

  At the Ballington, a monitor lets Nathaniel into his room every night and makes sure he gets up in time for breakfast, but Stuart Robinson is thinking of rewarding Nathaniel for his continued progress by giving him his own key. Nathaniel sits in the dark at night, playing violin or cello for a while and then setting the instruments down and practicing his fingering by tapping lightly on his forearms. He sometimes does this, lying on his back, and keeps at it until he falls asleep in the middle of something beautiful, perhaps the Bach Prelude No. 1 or one of his old standbys, the Bloch Prayer or the Schubert Arpeggione.

  It feels strange that more than a year into our friendship, Nathaniel hasn’t been to my house, which is just five miles from Skid Row. He tells me he’d love to visit, but can’t very well fit his cart into my car or push it that far. I tell him he can lock it in his apartment and it’ll be fine.

  “Oh, no, Mr. Lopez. I can’t do that.”

  “Sure you can.”

  “Everything will be gone when I return. They’ll come through the windows, the vents, under the door. God himself does not know how they get in, but they do.”

  After several conversations that go no further, I tell Nathaniel I’ll look into renting a van big enough to haul his shopping cart. He thinks this is a fine solution, but when I mention it to Casey Horan, she doesn’t like the idea.

  “We need to get him to let go of that cart,” she says. He needs to trust that his apartment is safe, and that he can manage without his rolling security blanket.

  The cart really is about security, and letting go of it would be like letting go of the side of the pool for the first time. But there’s a method to the man’s madness, one that blurs the line once more between insanity and insight. As long as he has the cart, Nathaniel can’t very well be expected to visit, say, a psychiatrist. A cart probably wouldn’t fit through the door of a doctor’s office. And with a buggy in tow, he can’t very well be expected to make a complete return to so-called normal life. Like the terrifying life in which he lost his mind while under tremendous pressure at Juilliard. But part of the paradox of my relationship with Nathaniel is that I’m always trying, often in vain, to outsmart him. This time I’m thinking I might be able to do it by appealing to both his sense of tradition and his appetite.

  “What’d you eat for breakfast today?” I ask in the Lamp courtyard.

  “Oatmeal.”

  “Was it any good?”

  “It was all right. The food here is really not very good, and they poison it with beer and wine.”

  “I had bacon and eggs. There’s nothing like the smell of bacon filling the house in the morning.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I like bacon and eggs.”

  “You should come over to the house. How about Easter brunch? We’re going to have bacon and eggs, home fries, toast. I promise not to poison the food. Little Caroline will have an Easter egg hunt and we’ll fix her a basket with some chocolates. You remember Easter egg hunts when you were a kid? You like chocolate?”

  “Yeah, I like chocolate.”

  “What the heck, then? Would you like to come over? I’ll pick you up at your apartment, take you to my place and have you back in no time.”

  But I can’t tie his buggy to my Honda Accord and tow it to my house, I tell him. He’ll have to lock it in the apartment, but only for a couple of hours.

  Nathaniel asks me to repeat the date. He pulls a scrap of paper out of his shopping cart and writes it down.

  “Sunday, April sixteenth. Easter—Mr. Lopez’s house. Caroline Lopez. Jeffrey and Andrew Lopez. Mrs. Lopez. Steve Lopez, staff writer.”

  Sunday morning and the house smells of coffee and bacon. My wife and I have prepared a feast and now Caroline wants me to hurry up already and go pick up our guest.

  “Where’s Mathaniel?” she asks.

  Close enough.

  I drive downtown, past hordes of people awaking from a night on the pavement. I turn onto East San Julian Street and there he is, waiting at the door of Lamp like a racehorse in the gates. He’s wearing a flowery red Hawaiian shirt and a bandanna fashioned from yellow police crime scene tape. He has his cello and violin.

  No shopping cart.

  “I’ve been working on Saint-Saëns for Caroline,” he says as we load his things into the car. He wants his instruments in the backseat, not the trunk. To him, that would be like putting children in the trunk.

  He apologizes for his appearance as I drive, saying he has done the best he could to spiff himself up. His kinky black hair is wet and trained into place, parted in the middle. He seems okay. No sign of panic. In fact, he is clearly excited about this field trip. I make a point of driving past his old spot at Los Angeles and Winston and then through the Second Street tunnel. I want him to have a reminder of how far he’s come. He notes the handful of tunnel dwellers but keeps his thoughts to himself. On Glendale Boulevard
, the gray monotony of downtown disappears behind us and the San Gabriel Mountains climb into the clouds up ahead.

  “Is this Hollywood?” he asks.

  “This is Echo Park. Hollywood’s a few miles to the west.”

  “Los Angeles is a water town, like Cleveland. Lake Erie, Pacific Ocean. But I don’t know where it is. Yeah, I’ve seen it, but I don’t know what that means, that this is supposed to be a place on the ocean, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, the Rams of Los Angeles, loss of six yards on the play, when you can’t see the water from anywhere. I can’t believe how beautiful this is. Do you live in Hollywood, Mr. Lopez? No, you live in Silver Lake. Is that right? Silver Lake?”

  Of course, anything would look good after Skid Row, where there is no green, no horizon, nothing but that daily fracas and the inescapable stench of aimless despair. If not for that cart, he might have gotten out more often, out here where the change of scenery can’t help but be good for his spirit. In an ideal situation, I’d have a little bit of land and maybe an in-law cottage he could live in and use as a music studio. Of course, in a really ideal situation he wouldn’t need me to make it happen for him. He’d decide he wants out of Skid Row, that he’s ready to do whatever it takes. Go into treatment. Give meds another shot. Shove that damn cart into the Los Angeles River.

  If he sticks with the lessons from Mr. Snyder and gets in more practice time now that he’s living indoors, it doesn’t seem out of the question that he might one day work with students just like he did with me that day. Maybe he can help the kids over at the Union Rescue Mission, a block from Lamp. About a hundred children live there and I know the director, Andy Bales. He’s got a chapel with a stage and a piano, and I’m sure I could work something out with him. A music therapist. That’s what Nathaniel says he wants to be. I know it’s a long shot, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t encourage him to work toward that goal.

  It takes fifteen minutes to get to my house. Caroline greets Nathaniel at the door with a bashful smile and a half-step of retreat.