by Steve Lopez
25
The one thing I do know is that I can’t sit by, waiting for Nathaniel to self-destruct. The solution is so obvious I can’t believe I didn’t think of it sooner. A music studio. If he has a place to go, other than Lamp, and other than his apartment, it would get him out of the fray, give him some privacy and a purpose. It would almost be like going to work each day, or to school. He could wake up, have breakfast and head over to his studio to practice or take lessons. I’m not thinking of anything fancy, and not a recording studio, per se. Any old storefront might do. If he feels like it, he can put up a thousand “No Smoking” signs, hang the Marlboro man in effigy, whatever. Ideally, it would be nice to set him up several miles from Skid Row, but how would I get him there each day? For better or worse, Nathaniel considers this his neighborhood. So I begin cruising the area in search of “For Rent” signs, thinking I might be able to cover the cost before gentrification drives everything up and out of sight. But I find that, even on Skid Row, the prices are way out of my range.
Casey Horan has a solution.
The other Lamp facility, two blocks from where Nathaniel lives, is about to be remodeled. Horan says she can figure a music studio into the plans, and although it wouldn’t be exclusively for Nathaniel, he can use it pretty much as he pleases.
“We could give him the title of artist in residence,” Horan says.
It’s brilliant.
“A studio? I have a studio.”
“You have a studio apartment. This would be a music studio.”
“You mean like Disney Hall?”
“Not quite that fancy.”
“A recording studio, with Sony or something like that, where we could make recordings? Could you call someone at Sony?”
“This might be a little more modest than that, but I guess you could make recordings in there if you wanted to. You could practice with Mr. Snyder, and you could teach all the people here who want to learn music. You could give me lessons again, if you don’t think that would drive both of us crazy.”
He’s intrigued but says if there’s going to be a studio, it should be up at Disney Hall.
“I don’t want to have to deal with all the hooligans and thieves who would steal everything and treat the studio like an ashtray,” he says. “These are people who don’t give a hoot about anything but their drug habits and their nonsense, and I’m not puttin’ up with any of that ridiculous behavior from those knuckleheads. They cannot be trusted in Los Angeles, they cannot be trusted in New York City, they cannot be trusted in Cleveland, Ohio, polluting themselves and destroying their minds with the drug known as tobacco.”
“You’d be artist in residence,” I argue. “We’re going to have to come up with a name for it.”
“A name for what?”
“Your new studio.”
“I don’t want any studio. I don’t need any studio. I already have my apartment.”
“That’s not big enough for you to play music with friends. I haven’t told you yet, but someone has a piano they want to donate to you.”
“A piano?”
“One of my readers. She read a column about you and said she has a piano she doesn’t use anymore. We can put it in the new studio. You can play it yourself or have someone accompany you while you’re on cello or violin. I’d love to hear you on bass, too, if we could ever find you a string bass.”
“I can put the piano in my apartment.”
“It won’t fit.”
“Is it a grand, or a baby grand?”
“No, I think it’s an upright, but you barely have room to sleep in your apartment. We need to put the piano in your new studio so you can jam in there with other musicians. Now, what do you want to call the studio?”
He insists that if it really happens, he wants the studio to be used for art shows, poetry readings and theater productions in addition to music.
“That’s up to you,” I tell him. “You’re going to be the artist in residence. Maybe you can do Hamlet and take the lead.”
He has a suggestion for a name.
“The Beethoven, Mr. Lopez, Little Walt Disney Concert Hall and Performing Arts Theater of Los Angeles, California.”
Too long, I tell him. And it should say something about Cleveland or the Settlement School, where he studied under Harry Barnoff.
“I’ve got it,” he says. “The Lopez Beethoven Settlement West Studio of Los Angeles, Home of Beethoven.”
Whatever it will be called, the studio won’t be a reality for weeks, if not months, and in the meantime Nathaniel is dismissing my every suggestion that he follow up on his promise to consider seeing a doctor. I remind him that his very words were “I would support any psychiatrist who will support me.” But now he insists he doesn’t need help, and says no member of the medical profession can be trusted. I tell him I’ve met lots of people with schizophrenia who get up in the morning and go to work or school, raise families and live productive lives with the help of regular care and medication. Nathaniel tells me that in Cleveland he was arrested and taken to mental hospitals too many times to count, and he’s ingested every psychotropic drug known to man. Nobody, he says, is going to do that to him again.
“There’s a new generation of drugs,” I tell him. “People who had problems with the old drugs say the new ones work better and have fewer side effects.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t need any of that.”
My mother and father called me a hardhead in Italian and Spanish when I was a boy, and Alison settles for English. In any language, it’s true. I must have inherited some of the immigrant pluck my parents grew up with as first-generation Californians, or in my case, maybe it’s just plain stubbornness. I suspect this has something to do with my continued scheming to get Nathaniel together with Dr. Prchal. Though she has met him, I don’t think he knows she’s a psychiatrist. So what if she just happens to be with me one day when I stop in to see Nathaniel, and the three of us chat about this and that? She’ll be an acquaintance, not a doctor. With a few visits like that, she might be able to seduce him into treatment, as she herself suggested that night at Little Pedro’s Blue Bongo.
“Okay,” Prchal says. “Let’s give it a try.”
She agrees to meet Nathaniel and me before work one day, at 7 A.M., in the Lamp courtyard. Nathaniel and I arrive within seconds of each other, and I know the moment I see him that we’re in for trouble. Nathaniel is tight, his face full of shadows. When Prchal arrives he barely acknowledges her. Prchal and I sit at one of the picnic tables and Nathaniel stands over us, keeping his distance and looking as though he’s deciding whether to bolt.
“Nathaniel, I brought Ms. Prchal here today because I know you’ve had some issues with the management. Casey Horan was out of town so I thought maybe you’d like to talk to Ms. Prchal about what’s been troubling you.”
Prchal’s face is drawn, her mouth tight. I wonder if I’ve just blown it by suggesting she’s an administrator. She, in turn, introduces herself as a doctor, and Nathaniel shoots me a look. Uh-huh, he seems to be thinking. You set me up.
I have such a bad feeling about where this is headed, I consider calling the whole thing off. But it’s already too late.
“The problem I have is that the so-called staff of this place is horrible,” Nathaniel says, shaking his fist in the direction of Stuart Robinson’s second-floor office. “The issue I have is that nobody here knows how to do their goddamn job because they are imbeciles, and they are a DISGRACE, and I will not have any of these motherFUCKERS tell me what I can or cannot do, when they do not have one ounce of ability to do their own motherfucking jobs because they are inept, ignorant, horrible bastards who cannot perform the simplest aspect of their sworn duties.”
His eyes are red with rage. I’ve never seen this side of him and I have no idea what might come next. I discreetly position my feet so that if he leaps at Prchal, I can try to protect her. I don’t really expect him to do such a thing, but I can’t read him and I can’t be sure. Something
unrecognizable burns in his eyes. I try to stay perfectly calm, speaking to him in a normal tone in the hope of bringing down the temperature a degree or two. Mr. Robinson, I tell him, has a lot of responsibility and handles it to the best of his ability. But this only makes it worse.
“Mr. Robinson does not DO his job. Mr. Robinson does not know HOW to do his job, because if he KNEW how to do it, I wouldn’t have to deal with all the DRECK that comes in here off the street to steal everything and disgrace this property with their filthy, ugly, dirty criminal habits that Mr. Robinson should DIE for because he does not have the sense, he does not have the gumption, he does not have the motherfucking ability to DO HIS GODDAMN JOB, DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR, and I want him OUT OF HERE, that WORTHLESS snake—he’s lower than a snake—and everyone else OUT of here who is too incompetent, or spineless or STUPID, and does not have the ability to perform their duties. IS THAT CLEAR?”
It goes like this for fifteen minutes. Prchal endures a verbal mugging, and each time she tries, calmly, to respond, he pounces again. His chest puffs, his fists are like rocks. My hands are on the table, ready to leverage a quick jump if necessary.
Prchal checks her watch at 7:20, stands quietly and leaves. A bit of the tension leaves with her, but not much. I sag at the picnic table, flattened by this display. She came to help, I tell Nathaniel, and yelling at her did neither of them any good. I tell him Stuart Robinson is a good man in my book, and that if Nathaniel expects to continue enjoying the privilege of an apartment and three meals a day, it’s time to start treating them with more respect.
He nods, grudgingly, and I see a hint of regret in him as I leave. But before I’m halfway down the block, he’s at war with himself again and howling. I can hear him all the way to my car. When I shut the door and turn the key, I get a symphony. The music on my car radio is so moving it almost brings a tear. Mozart, I guess. I sit for a few moments, overwhelmed by the beauty of the music and the contrasting ugliness of Skid Row. A drunk urinates against a building. A madwoman screams at her demons. A child of eight or ten, backpack slung over his shoulders, passes on the way to school. I kill the music and drive away.
26
My trip to New York has no agenda other than to know this one part of his life a little better. I want to walk the halls he walked as a twenty-year-old, pull his file and see his grades and teacher notations. I want to see the apartment building where he played Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings while looking out the window at the falling snow. There are so many things about him I’ll never know. I don’t know exactly what he hears and sees, nor can I begin to imagine. I don’t know if he snapped because of the pressure of being black in a mostly white environment, a bad trip, the pressure at Juilliard, a chemical imbalance or some combination of all those things. I don’t know if it’s true that there’s a fine line between genius and madness, or that musicians and other artists are more susceptible to breakdowns. When someone suggests that Nathaniel is an example of the latter, I tell them Skid Row is filled with housewives and plumbers and salesmen and truck drivers who all had breakdowns. Mental illness doesn’t choose the most talented or the smartest or the richest or the poorest. It shows no mercy and often arrives like an unexpected storm, dropping an endless downpour on young dreams.
Nathaniel arrived in New York in the fall of 1970 after a year on scholarship at Ohio University, where he did very well but was restlessly determined to follow in Harry Barnoff’s footsteps. He had nailed his Juilliard entry audition in late spring, calling Barnoff with the news, and he spent the summer studying with other Juilliard students at the Aspen Music Festival, where he was confronted for the first time with intense instruction and musicians who were at least as good as he. But if the air was thin in Aspen, oxygen masks should have been dropping from the ceiling at Juilliard. Nathaniel has told me about the butterflies he felt the first time he saw the gray slab that takes up an entire block at Lincoln Center on New York’s Upper West Side.
Joseph Russo, Nathaniel’s old friend and classmate, has agreed to escort me through the building, telling me that if you were good enough to be allowed past security and into the hallowed halls, you were assumed to be exceptional and expected to become extraordinary. That went for actors, dancers and singers as well as musicians. It was not uncommon for Nathaniel to retrieve his bass from the third-floor lockers and, while wrestling the bulky instrument to class, be forced to dodge a ballet dancer who was twirling through the hall, limbering up on the way to class. Actor Kevin Kline started at Juilliard the same year as Nathaniel. John Houseman was a teacher. Music filled the corridors and the air crackled with creative energy. It was an atmosphere some students found exhilarating and others found frightening, but there was more of the latter on the fourth floor, where dozens of tiny practice rooms, roughly the size of jail cells, line the halls. They could be torture chambers, Russo says, and the pain was never greater than when you heard another student playing better than you thought possible. No matter how good you were, someone was better, and across the street was Avery Fisher Hall, home of the New York Philharmonic and the best of the best. The math was pretty simple and the odds daunting. The vast majority of Juilliard’s students would never set foot in Avery Fisher or any other concert hall without buying tickets. If he was going to be one of the fortunate few, Nathaniel, one of roughly twenty-five bass students at Juilliard the year he began, would have to do better than the bulk of his classmates, many of whom were from privileged backgrounds. He wasn’t intimidated, but he was very much aware that he was the black son of a woman who ran a beauty parlor in Cleveland.
Room 315 was designed without air, windowless as a bomb shelter, and there isn’t much in it besides a desk and a few chairs. It’s the room where Nathaniel auditioned in spring and where he played again for his new teacher and mentor, Homer Mensch, who would decide which of three orchestras Nathaniel would be assigned to. Nathaniel was asked to play Camille Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals, a staple in the string bass repertoire of orchestral solos. In Saint-Saëns’s creation, the bass becomes an elephant, and Nathaniel did his confident best to coax a respectable pachyderm out of the plywood instrument his mother had bought him in Cleveland, used, for just over $100.
As Nathaniel played, Mensch, a former member of the New York Philharmonic, watched and heard everything. Right-hand bowing, left-hand slide-dance on the fingerboard, pitch, musicality. Mensch thought Nathaniel’s music memory showed room for improvement and his ear was not quite fine-tuned enough yet, but he was struck by the young man’s big, warm sound. Each note had feeling and expression, even when Nathaniel’s pitch was slightly off, and his vibrato was striking, his left hand fluttering like a butterfly coming in for a soft landing. Mensch would have liked to see smoother and more technically adept bowing action, but the mechanical stuff was fixable over time. Sound was another matter altogether, and with some students, it couldn’t be taught. You had it or you didn’t.
Mensch decided Nathaniel was too good for the repertory orchestra but not ready to join the concert orchestra. He assigned him to the theater orchestra, and believed that with hard work, and lots of it, Nathaniel’s potential was unlimited. “That Nathaniel can play,” Mensch told Hal Slapin, a bass player who was in his second year at Juilliard when Nathaniel arrived. Not only did he have the talent, Mensch told Slapin, but the desire was equally evident. Nathaniel Ayers had not gone to Juilliard simply to get by.
Thirty-five years after he left, there’s still a record of Nathaniel in the Juilliard vault, and it feels strange to hold his transcripts and recognize his handwriting. On his application, he lists his father’s address as unknown. He lists his source of revenue as limited, with a small scholarship from a fund Harry Barnoff has managed to tap into in Cleveland. The file also contains his transcript and the half-sheet judgments of his jurors. They’re like little report cards for the all-important auditions that were required for placement in orchestras and for year-end evaluation.
Nathaniel’s fir
st semester at Juilliard clearly did nothing to shake his confidence, but he discovered that his work had only just begun. He got an A-minus in his bass class with Mensch and an A in his theater orchestra class. But he drew a C in piano, and B’s in ear training and music literature. In the second semester, he brought the literature grade up to a B-minus, but in ear training, he was down to a C-minus. At the end of his first year, another audition would determine how far he had come and whether he kept his scholarship. He played Saint-Saëns again, as he had when he first met Homer Mensch, along with Brahms and Koussevitzky, and his jury included three judges. There was Mensch; bass teacher David Walter, another legendary upright player; and Channing Robbins, an esteemed cellist.
Walter saw nothing not to like, and the grades he entered on the half-sheet scoring form were glowing.
Talent—A.
Technique—A.
Tone—A.
Rhythm—A.
Intonation—A.
Remarks—Excellent in all respects. A+.
Channing Robbins, who taught with Leonard Rose and was considered a technical master, particularly of bowing technique, was equally impressed.
Talent—Excellent.
Technique—Excellent.
Tone—Very full and vibrant.
Rhythm—Excellent.
Intonation—Excellent.
Memory—Used music.
Remarks—A very musical performance and a
promising talent.
I feel as though I’m eavesdropping on the life of a young man in his prime, and this recorded history of Nathaniel’s brief career fills me with pride and profound sadness. It’s like looking at photographs taken moments before someone’s unexpected death. I pause and sit back, gazing into the hallway at students as young and ambitious as he once was.