by Steve Lopez
The most critical assessment came from Mensch, who knew Nathaniel best and was of the opinion that he was capable of playing better. He gave Nathaniel an Excellent for talent, but judged his tone, technique and rhythm to be merely good, and as for intonation, he wrote “generally good.”
Overall, Nathaniel was handling the demands and the pressure with flair, even if, in Mensch’s assessment, there was room for improvement. But nothing was out of the ordinary in that regard. Some students developed quickly, others took longer to hit their stride and many others dropped out and disappeared, never to be heard from again. In the case of Mensch, who saw so much potential in Nathaniel, he wanted to send the message that this was no time to begin coasting. Nathaniel’s scholarship was extended, the jury decided he had passed muster to move up to the concert orchestra the following semester and he was invited to summer in Aspen again after a brief vacation in Cleveland. It might have been a triumphant homecoming after a year in New York City, at one of the world’s elite music conservatories, but for the fact that Nathaniel’s family barely recognized him.
His clothes didn’t match. His hair was messy. He was zealous, jumpy, provocative. Jennifer remembers how uncomfortable he made her with his nervous energy and awkward conversations. It was obvious to everyone who knew him well that something was different. From Aspen, he began calling Harry Barnoff and telling him the experience was overwhelming, and when he returned to Juilliard for the fall 1971 semester, his grades began falling. He got an incomplete in Music in Western Civilization, with C’s in everything else but orchestra class. When forced to sit for long stretches through lectures and instruction, he was fidgety and unsure of himself, his mind wandered and he felt claustrophobic. He began hearing voices and looking over his shoulder to see who was there, but it was like chasing shadows. Music was the only thing that made sense. When asked to remove his string bass from its case and make music, he was focused, reassured and inspired. Juilliard was constantly suffocating and reviving him.
“He was crazy,” says Eugene Moye, a cellist who briefly roomed with Nathaniel. Moye was considered a superstar, along with classmate Yo-Yo Ma. But it was Moye’s skin color—his father was black and his mother white—that drew Nathaniel to him.
“He called me Gray Boy,” says Moye. “Both of us were in an extreme minority. He was a very angry black man, and very anti-white. ”
Nathaniel took to drawing on the walls and ceiling of their apartment, and did amazingly dead-on caricatures of teachers and classmates and scribbled musical references and racial epithets, turning their apartment into a mad tapestry of race-tinged, twenty-year-old angst. Nathaniel didn’t stop until every square inch of surface was covered. He went ninety miles an hour all the time, filling the walls the way he filled time and space, ranting, raging, rapping about the great injustice done to the black man. “It wasn’t a silly anger. It was a sort of informed anger and he was very adamant and very intelligent.”
The only time Nathaniel calmed down was when he played music. If Moye’s cello was nearby, he grabbed that instead of his own bass, amazing his roommate with his ability to hack out a decent sound on an instrument that required an entirely different understanding and sensitivity. Moye didn’t care what Nathaniel played, as long as he stopped talking for a few minutes.
“He was fine when he was playing.”
But there was more talking than playing. A month after moving in with Nathaniel, Moye packed up and left.
In the spring semester of his second year at Juilliard, Nathaniel got F’s in music literature and visual arts. He got an incomplete in music in Western civilization and withdrew from ear training. His only A was in his concert orchestra class, where he advanced to the front line among bass players. In the third-floor orchestra practice hall, standing among peers and cradled in the embrace of Beethoven, Brahms and Haydn, he was steady, he was sane, he was at peace.
“Very sensitive musical playing,” juror David Walter wrote at Nathaniel’s year-end solo performance before the same three judges who had watched him play a year earlier. This time Nathaniel played the first three movements of the Bach Sonata No. 2. “Excellent bow control for expressive playing, possibly a larger dynamic spectrum on f side would be desirable.”
Talent—A.
Technique—A.
Tone—A.
Rhythm—A.
Intonation—A.
Memory—B+
Grade—A.
Scholarship—Definitely.
Channing Robbins gave him the same glowing assessment as Walter, and Mensch, as before, was a little stingier, giving Nathaniel a B overall and recommending that his scholarship be renewed, despite his failing grades in other classes and his occasionally peculiar or aggressive behavior. If he could play this well, the teachers agreed, surely he could find his focus. No one on the jury seemed to realize that the promising young student from Cleveland was losing his mind.
In the Juilliard archives, the folder on Nathaniel contains no mention of what was happening to him. There is no indication, other than the F’s and incompletes, that his greatest achievements as a musician were accompanied by the most devastating events of his life.
“Date of complete withdrawal, Oct. 6, 1972,” says an entry in his file.
“Reason: Program too demanding at present.”
One night, while visiting classmate Daniel Spurlock in his Upper East Side apartment, Nathaniel began asking Spurlock and his fiancée probing questions about their devout Christianity. Spurlock sensed that Nathaniel was trying to find a path to spiritual meaning for himself, so he happily obliged his fellow musician until Nathaniel’s behavior took a strange, chilling turn. It began with a distant look in his eyes, and next thing Spurlock knew, Nathaniel began stripping off his clothes. His alarmed hosts called for help, and Nathaniel was taken to Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric emergency room. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and calmed with heavy doses of Thorazine.
“I remember sitting in the cafeteria one day with several of the other guys and they told me that Nate had a severe breakdown,” says classmate Hal Slapin, who never saw him again. Juilliard in the early 1970s “was not a place where students had much of an opportunity or were encouraged to bond. As one would expect, competition was stiff and Juilliard at that time was not at all a nurturing environment, especially for a student that was having any type of personal difficulty. I’m told that it is a very different place today, but back then it was survival of the fittest and there was absolutely no support for someone having personal problems. Students mostly went their separate ways simply because there was no alternative. Vietnam unrest was a pervasive part of the atmosphere, racial tensions were high, and students dropping out for all kinds of reasons was not at all an unusual situation. In retrospect, considering Nate’s background and difficulties, Juilliard in the early seventies was probably the worst environment that someone as fragile as he could possibly have been in.”
We were in my car once, listening to KUSC, when Nathaniel swooned over a piece the moment it began.
“Does this mean to you what it means to me?” he asked.
It was beautifully evocative, beginning with an expectant swell that suddenly pauses early in the first movement, like an infatuated suitor who stops just short of saying too much. The music was hope and longing, a poem to the idea of romance and the promise of love. My appreciation of music had grown immeasurably through Nathaniel. I felt it as much as I heard it, taking note of the mood changes and wondering at the themes. I marveled at the genius of creations so universal and lasting that they can survive death and war, the clamor of invention, the whims of style, the turn of centuries.
“What does it mean to you?” I asked.
“This takes me back,” Nathaniel said. “I used to practice this at Juilliard. I remember standing in the window of my room at the Chalfont Hotel, playing this while watching the snow fall. There’s the bass. Do you hear it? I can’t believe that anyone could have something so brilliant in
his head and have the ability to get it all down on paper, every note of it perfect.”
“What is it?”
“It’s Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings. Isn’t it gorgeous? This takes me back. Does it take you back?”
Before leaving New York, I walk to the intersection of Seventieth Street and Amsterdam, where Nathaniel lived with Eugene Moye and with other classmates. I know he was in a corner unit on the tenth floor. I can see the window where he once practiced. I can hear the music as I stand on this busy, noisy corner, with cars and pedestrians streaming by and the subway thundering underground. One hundred and twenty-five years after Tchaikovsky created this music, Nathaniel has given it to me, making it new again. I understand the peace it brings him, a constant amid chaos in a language he speaks. I know the opening phrase and the way it humbles and inspires. I know the neat footwork in the second movement’s waltz, and I see Nathaniel dancing to it with his bass, up in the window of the old hotel.
27
I still can’t quite let go of the possibility that there will be a breakthrough, that he’ll sign on for treatment or be one of those rare people whose illness dramatically subsides in middle age. But the visit to Juilliard is a reminder that for nearly two-thirds of his life, Nathaniel has been in a grip no one has been able to break. Not music teachers, not doctors, not his mother. He has survived in his own way and on his own terms, sustained for decades by music. Reluctantly, I begin to confront my own limits and try to accept that although I can help him, I’m not ever going to heal him. Dr. Ragins has had it right all along. The best thing I can do for Nathaniel is be his friend.
Nathaniel and I go to a Dodgers game and he cheers wildly for the hometown team, jumping out of his seat when the Dodgers rally against the Colorado Rockies. He announces to Section 29, while wearing a brand-new blue Dodgers cap, that he is thinking of abandoning the Cleveland Indians. We listen to classical KUSC on my car radio and it’s like having a DJ on board, with Nathaniel narrating and patiently tutoring me.
Stuart Robinson talks Nathaniel into signing a contract saying he will abide by the rules, respect other clients and earn his keep by offering the wisdom of experience to newcomers. But Nathaniel’s new sense of responsibility makes him even less tolerant of transgressions, so he muddles through the days alternating between model citizen and unruly agitator. There is one visitor who always lifts Nathaniel’s spirits. He has fallen hard for Pam, the documentarian who sometimes takes him to the beach for a day and talks to him for hours in person and by phone. When Nathaniel ends up in the hospital with a bladder infection, she’s the one he calls to pick him up and calm him down. He smiles at the mere mention of her name, but Robinson and I begin to worry that his infatuation has become an obsession, and that he’ll end up with a broken heart. When Nathaniel hangs her photo in his room and begins calling her his fiancée, Robinson tells Pam it might be best if she didn’t come around so much. Whether she wants to believe it or not, he tells her, she’s giving Nathaniel the wrong impression.
To help Nathaniel get over it, I begin shopping for a new object of his affection. He says he used to play a flute but it was stolen when he got to Los Angeles, and he’d like to have another one. But as soon as I find one for sale, he changes his mind and says he’d rather have a trumpet. He played briefly as a teenager, he tells me, and when I suggest it might be time to choose a single instrument—preferably the violin or cello, since he’s so invested in them—he sees no logic in that. Music is music, he says, and the more ways you can get at it, the better. And so I buy him a trumpet.
“It’s not his best instrument,” Robinson says with a pained expression after Nathaniel begins blowing his horn for hours every day in the Lamp courtyard, torturing both the crazy and the sane.
“It sounds like it’s coming along,” I say in defense. “He’s got a bit of a Miles Davis sound, don’t you think?”
Having a trumpet means needing sheet music. We drive to a store in Santa Monica and Nathaniel rifles through the stock for more than an hour, the proverbial kid in a candy store. He doesn’t limit himself to trumpet music, declaring that he’s never going to give up the cello or violin, so he needs this Dvořák, that Beethoven, this Bach and that Brahms. It costs me $662 to satisfy his needs, and it takes as long to check out as it took to drive to Santa Monica.
“Mr. Lopez,” he says on the way back, “I’d like to see all of the columns you’ve written about me, if I could.”
It’s an odd request, given his usual lack of interest. By now I’ve written maybe a dozen columns about him and he’s commented on one or two, as far as I can recall, telling me he doesn’t really care to read about himself. When I’ve asked in the past if he has a problem with me writing about him, he has said he’s flattered that I would consider him interesting or important enough. But I wonder if, for him, the columns are a sad reminder of what he once had, or if they read too much like a medical diagnosis he’d rather not hear.
I tell Nathaniel I was under the impression he didn’t like reading the columns about him. That’s true, he says. But he’d like having them anyway.
And why doesn’t he like to read them?
“It’s more interesting to be out in the world,” he says, “than to see it reflected in the mirror.”
For all his troubles, Nathaniel has gone years without a worry common to the rest of us. He has no money, wants no money, needs no money. But, ordinarily, room and board aren’t free. Nathaniel has been getting a free ride at Lamp in part because his story has generated donations to the agency. For other residents, a disability check helps pay the bills, but Nathaniel has been off the books for years and claims to have no interest in applying for Social Security. When I tell him a book or movie about his life can help cover his expenses, he insists he doesn’t want the hassle of managing money he doesn’t need, so I suggest we ask his sister, Jennifer, to handle his legal and business affairs. If she wouldn’t mind, he says, it’s fine with him. “Jennifer is a loving sister who’s done all that I could ever ask of her.”
I hire an attorney to draw up the papers, and Nathaniel meets with him at the Beethoven statue and plays violin for him. My friend is in a particularly good mood and showing off a bit. When the attorney asks Nathaniel if he indeed wants his sister to be granted authority over his financial affairs, Nathaniel says that sounds good to him, but he doesn’t want to go to court himself. The attorney says he thinks that can be arranged.
Two weeks before Jennifer’s visit, I drop by Lamp to hand Nathaniel the paperwork. Although he doesn’t have to appear in court, the law requires that he be notified of the conservatorship hearing.
“Do I have to go to court?” he asks when I hand him the manila envelope.
“No, but Jennifer does.”
Nathaniel drops the envelope into his shopping cart and begins drumming on his cello case. He taps, taps, taps with drumsticks he’s picked up somewhere, bobbing his head in rhythm. Everyone at Lamp is happier with his drumming than his bugling.
Two days later, I call Lamp to check on him. I’m on hold for several minutes before the receptionist comes back and says Nathaniel doesn’t want to come to the phone.
“Does he know it’s me?” I ask. He’s never refused a call.
“Yes, I told him it’s you.”
“And he won’t come to the phone?”
“That’s what he said.”
“This is a first.”
“Maybe you can try back later.”
When I call the next day, he again refuses to come to the phone. Now I’m getting nervous. With his sister due to arrive soon, I’ve tried to stay in close contact with Nathaniel and keep him in good spirits. He and Jennifer haven’t seen each other in six years and I know how excited she is. On the third day, when he again refuses to take my call, I drive to Lamp and find him up on the landing at the top of the stairs like a sentry, blowing his horn.
“That sounds like it’s coming along,” I tell him.
He ignores me and
it’s clear something is wrong.
“I bet that would sound good in the tunnel,” I say, mindful of the complaints from Lamp clients and employees. “You’d probably get a nice big echo.”
He brings the trumpet down from his lips and finally acknowledges me.
“How’ve you been?” I ask. “I tried reaching you, but they said you wouldn’t take the call.”
He shrugs and pouts.
“Is something wrong?” I ask.
He takes two steps down the stairs, then a third, and stops. He’s holding his trumpet like a weapon, shaking it at me from a distance of ten feet and threatening to come closer. His eyes burn, veins rise. His entire body is coiled, ready to strike.
I stay as calm as possible. If I relax, maybe it will cool the eruption.
“I’ll tell you what’s wrong,” he says, his jaw tight. “I’m not going to any court and I’m not going to talk to any judge. What was that stuff in those papers about me having a schizophrenic mind?”
“That was just—”
“I’m not schizophrenic, and NOBODY, I said NOBODY, is going to take me to a hospital.”
“You’re not going to a hospital. That’s not what this is about. And you’re not going to court. Jennifer’s going to take care of that.”
“My little sister is NOT coming to Los Angeles.”
“She’s due in a few days, Nathaniel. She’s very excited about seeing her big brother.”
“Well, she is MY sister, and she is NOT coming here. And I am not going to have any more of this Nathaniel, Nathaniel, Nathaniel. I’m Nathaniel and you’re Mr. Lopez, and there is not going to be any more of that.”
“Fine, and I’m sorry. From now on, you’re Mr. Ayers.”
“I don’t want any of this nonsense because I don’t need it. I don’t need Lamp, with all these drug-addicted thieves and the incompetent people who work here and don’t even do their own jobs. Animals are better than these people. Mr. Snyder, Disney Hall, the studio, you can keep all of that because I’m not having any part of it. Take the violins, the cellos, all of it. I’ll go back to the violin I had in the beginning and go back to Cleveland. I don’t have to stay in this STINKING town that I ABSOLUTELY MOTHERFUCKING HATE. I DESPISE LOS ANGELES. I DESPISE YOU!”