by Steve Lopez
I feel sick, gutted, empty. He’s shaking the trumpet as if nothing would please him more than to bash me with it. He’s even closer to losing control than he was that day with Dr. Prchal, and I stand motionless, not frightened so much as broken. A Lamp employee steps into the courtyard to make sure he doesn’t come after me.
“You can take the trumpet, I don’t want it,” he says, spitting the words at me. “I do NOT need ANY of this, and I do NOT need any probate court, no judge and no lawyer, and I will not have my sister Jennifer set foot in this city. EVER. DO YOU HEAR ME? EVER!!!”
The whole block hears him.
We’re standing in the courtyard where I picked him up for Easter five months earlier, and he’s turned on me in a way I never would have imagined. Has nothing mattered, the whole thing a waste of my time and his? This deranged twin has risen from Nathaniel’s darkest depths, and Lamp employees hurry through the door again to see if I’m in danger. I motion to them that it’s okay, that I think I’ll get through this with my head still attached, but this is entirely new. He’s never yelled at me, never threatened. I edge closer, thinking that when he looks me in the eye, he’ll see more clearly the man who has spent a year and a half trying to help him. What he sees, instead, is betrayal. He thinks the court hearing is part of a plot to have him committed.
“I don’t EVER, EVER, EVER want to see you back here again,” he screams. “DO YOU HEAR ME?!!!”
I tell him he’s got it wrong. Nobody’s going to have him carted away against his will; we’re only trying to help. But Nathaniel— Mr. Ayers—doesn’t believe a word of it, and his self-control has short-circuited. His eyes boil and his screams are feral. The person he most trusted has lined up against him, or so he has convinced himself. I see the sharp, flat edge of the trumpet I bought him only a week earlier and imagine its imprint on my skull. I struggle for something to say or do, and all I can think of is the fact that music is his only medication, the only thing that soothes. I ask what pieces he’s been working on, but he flicks my inept question away with contempt, as if only a moron would ask such a thing at this particular moment. He will destroy me, he promises, trumpet extended like a bludgeon.
“If I ever see your face again, it’ll be the LAST TIME!” says the man who sat at my kitchen table and cooed over my daughter. Now he’s calling me a motherfucker and with trembling hands orders me out of his life, guaranteeing that if I ever return, my guts will be spilled on the floor of this courtyard.
Do I call the police, run for my life or try to wait him out?
“I DON’T NEED ANY OF IT, DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME? And I don’t EVER, EVER want to see your MOTHERFUCKING ASS here EVER AGAIN! Now Get OUT! GET OUT! GET THE FUCK OUT!”
I take a few steps back and stand at the door, listening to the echo. Another staffer checks to make sure he isn’t going to try to beat me to death with the trumpet.
“If I EVER see you again, your blood will be in a PUDDLE on the floor. Now GET OUT, GET OUT. I DON’T EVER WANT TO SEE YOUR FACE AGAIN OR IT WILL BE THE END OF YOU!”
I can’t take any more. I step outside the door and stand on the sidewalk. Stuart Robinson comes out and puts a hand on my shoulder.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
I can’t speak. I look at him, unable to answer.
“It’s all right,” Robinson says. “He’s having a bad day.”
I’ve tried for months to help this man and I’ve accomplished nothing. It isn’t his threat that bothers me. I don’t take it all that seriously. What bothers me is seeing him like this. I’m his pal, and I know he appreciates everything I’ve done. Still, he can’t stop himself. This is the way he torments Jennifer on the phone, calling her his best friend one time and psychotically cursing at her the next.
“He’s so sick,” I say to Robinson, barely getting the words out. “That’s what bothers me the most, is seeing him so sick.”
Robinson suggests I take a walk and come back another day.
“It’s all right,” he says. “It’s all right.”
28
I drive home and hug Caroline and Alison, feeling as though I’ve been away for months. Alison hears the details and her eyes fill. He’ll come around, she says. He didn’t mean any of it. I’m sure Nathaniel’s mother told herself that a thousand times, and I’m sure she believed it. And yet each time had to be more difficult than the last. He was her son. Her only son.
For me, it’s a low point that now seems as though it was inevitable, and there’s a small measure of relief in knowing it’s behind me. I mope around the house to echoes of Nathaniel’s mad taunts, but their impact is blunted. I know I’ve done what I can. For the first time in my life, I’ve gone out of my way to help someone in need, and my conscience is clear. Yes, it all began with me looking to get nothing more out of the relationship than a column or two, but it became so much more. I experienced the simple joy of investing in someone’s life, and the many frustrations have made the experience all the more rewarding and meaningful. I might not have always made the right choices in trying to help, but I came by each one honestly. I worked through the arguments for and against commitment. I wrestled with definitions of freedom and happiness, and wondered at times who was crazier—the man in the tunnel who paid no bills and played the music of the gods, or the wrung-out columnist who raced past him on the way home from sweaty deadlines to melt away the stress with a bottle of wine.
I read Caroline a story and put her to bed feeling blessed for my family’s health, and I can’t quite tell if this growing sense of contentedness is from exhaustion or the wine. Before falling asleep, I’m hit with another wave of sadness over the courtyard scene, but I feel absolved, too, as if his tirade was an act of mercy. I can’t save him and I don’t have to keep trying, nor do I need to be anything other than his friend. I close my eyes and let go, floating into deep sleep.
Two days after the courtyard meltdown, I haven’t spoken to Nathaniel or checked on him with Stuart Robinson, but I’ll have to drop by before much longer. His sister is due to arrive in a few days, despite his protests.
“I’m going for a bike ride,” I tell Alison on Saturday morning. I’m planning to take the usual route along Riverside Drive and into Griffith Park, looping around the back of the Los Angeles Zoo. But after starting in that direction, I turn around and head for Sunset Boulevard. Sunset winds through Echo Park and into downtown, and I figure I’ll go only as far as the Second Street tunnel. If he’s there, fine. If not, I’ll head back toward Silver Lake.
I cut south on Figueroa, curious about whether he still believes I’ve betrayed him and was setting him up, all along, to be committed. I’m also worried that if he ever calmed down and reflected on the things he said, he may be despondent. The suicide rate among people with schizophrenia is frighteningly high. In his rage, might he have done something to himself? Or has he packed up and moved out of the apartment, rejecting it as yet another trap in my efforts to have him committed?
I pick up speed as I glide down the gentle grade toward Second Street. This is the area where I looked for him that night, fearing he was in trouble when in fact he was spending his first evening in the apartment. My hunch is that he’ll be in the tunnel now, to assert his control over his own destiny. I spent so many months trying to talk him off the street, arguing that it made more sense to live and to practice music indoors, he may be here as an act of rebellion.
I hit the intersection of Second Street and there he is. He’s tied ten little U.S. flags to a speed limit sign and he’s sitting on an office chair with the back missing, playing cello. He doesn’t see me approach and then is startled to find me next to him.
“Oh,” he says.
I realize I haven’t even thought of what I might say.
“Mr. Ayers, I was just getting a little workout and thought I might find you here. Did you hear? The Dodgers pulled out another one. They’re one game away from clinching a spot in the playoffs.”
“They’re going to be in the pl
ayoffs?”
“It looks pretty good.”
“Do you think you could get tickets?” he asks.
I tell him I’ll give it a shot.
“All right, Mr. Ayers, I’ve got to go.”
“Mr. Lopez, you don’t have to call me that.”
“No, it’s fine. I’m Mr. Lopez and you’re Mr. Ayers. That’s only fair.”
“I don’t want you to call me Mr. Ayers.”
“Well, you’re older than I am, you know. I should have been calling you that all along.”
He gets up and stands before me, a different man than the one who threatened my life. His shoulders are rounded now, his body in a remorseful slump.
“I can’t believe I said those things,” he tells me.
“It’s not a problem. We’re friends and sometimes friends piss each other off, and that’s just part of the deal. I didn’t take any of it personally.”
“I can’t believe you’d still be my friend after that,” he says.
The ride home is uphill, but I don’t feel it. I pump hard around the Silver Lake reservoir three times, until the sweat is flying and the breeze feels cool on my face. I turn for home after the third lap and can’t wait to tell Alison. I didn’t need an apology from him. I only needed to know our friendship still meant something to him. He’s okay, thankfully, and we’ll go on from here.
29
Jennifer Ayers-Moore looks very much as her mother does in the jazz-age photo her brother keeps in his apartment, smooth-skinned and ageless, with pretty, clear eyes that hide neither her anticipation at seeing her brother nor the years of dread. We embrace in our first meeting after twenty months of phone calls and it feels as though we’ve known each other forever. Jennifer and her longtime close friend Kim, who has come along for moral support, have just arrived from Atlanta and are staying at a hotel six blocks from her brother’s apartment. She and Kim are in the hotel restaurant for a quick bite, and they’ve taken the table farthest from the window that looks onto the street.
“I don’t want him to come by and see us,” Jennifer says. She remembers too well her brother’s tirades, which terrified her and were like a dagger through her mother’s heart. Jennifer is eager to get the legal business out of the way the next morning before going to see her brother. His blowup, she tells me, was undeniably related to the business with the court. He erupted manically many, many times when their mother forced the issue, calling the police or trying to hospitalize him.
Jennifer apologizes for his outburst and offers her thanks for my efforts, but I tell her there is no need. She knows the old Anthony, she tells me, the big brother who watched out for his sisters after their father left, who helped his youngest sibling with her homework and worked so hard to become a musician. She’s glad that on the day I met him, I saw a glimmer of that person and was patient enough to get to know him in full.
It takes only minutes for a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge to declare that Jennifer can handle her big brother’s affairs. We walk out of the courthouse and down the hill to the L.A. Times parking garage two blocks away, then drive toward Skid Row. Jennifer is rigid in the front seat. I’ve warned her about the neighborhood her brother calls home, because I know it will pain her. Not that she hasn’t read about Skid Row in my columns, but in any description, words fall short.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she says as we enter the homeless capital of the United States. Every street is a campsite and infirmary. I avoid the worst of it for her sake. I don’t take her through the Nickel, the brokenhearted stretch of Fifth Street where the country’s worst secrets are kept, a corridor of missing limbs and flattened hope, with dealers and thieves roaming like hungry wolves. But even at the edges of the epicenter, the streets are littered with trash and with lost souls, the majority of them African-American. It’s so striking I feel the need to explain it to Jennifer as best I can, as if apologizing for Los Angeles. But I don’t know what to say except that the city remains largely divided economically and ethnically, and these were the ones who had no health insurance, no jobs that could cover the outrageous price of housing and no family to turn to when they became desperate or ill.
Jennifer sinks deeper into her own thoughts. I see traces of anger, compassion, guilt and helplessness. What could she or anyone in her family have done differently? What can they do now? This is where her big brother spends his days and nights, the musician, the brain, the handsome youngster the girls giggled over. He’s landed out here with all these lost chances, and Jennifer is cut in half, anxious to see him but sick at knowing he is here.
“It’s better than it was,” I tell her as we approach Lamp, trying feebly to put a positive spin on a catastrophe. “Your brother had a lot to do with that, after all the attention this place got from City Hall. Of course, there’s a long, long way to go.”
I slow on the approach, trying to spot him in the courtyard through the fence.
“There he is,” I announce.
Jennifer moves up in her seat. “Where?” she asks, straining to see.
“Right through there.”
“Oh, yes,” she shrieks, bounding out of the car. “That’s him!”
Her brother spots us and rushes to the doorway, where he pauses as if considering whether he can believe his eyes. They hug in the corner of the courtyard, Jennifer in tears and her brother with a look of shock and relief. A half dozen people loiter nearby, but brother and sister are oblivious, alone in each other’s arms, a lifetime revisited in a single embrace. When they let go, he stands back and stares.
“You look just like our mother,” he says, and then he turns to Kim. “She looks just like our mother,” he assures her.
“We had some life,” Mr. Ayers says to his little sister. “Didn’t we?”
Mr. Ayers insists on giving his sister a tour of Lamp. She’s so happy to see him that she temporarily tucks away her concerns about Skid Row and the asylum scene in the Lamp courtyard, where people are jawing at each other or settling scores with ghosts. Mr. Ayers insists on showing Jennifer his room, which I take as a good sign—pride of ownership—and a reminder of how far he’s come from the days of tapping at rats with his Brahms and Beethoven sticks. By now, however, his room is a snapshot of his mind. It resembles a spider’s lair, with police crime scene tape and cloth streamers dangling from the ceiling, and his doodles covering every square inch of wall like cobwebs. Beethoven’s name is written a hundred times on the door of his closet, and one wall has been felt tip-penned into the set of the “Tonight Show Star-ring Johnny Carson,” with “special guest Steve Lopez, Los Angeles Times staff writer.” It’s all too familiar to Jennifer, who has seen her brother torment their mother with his destruction of her home. All of her mother’s pain is there in Jennifer’s eyes, and all of her love, too.
Over the next few days, we visit the Beethoven statue, the Second Street tunnel and the slab of pavement at Los Angeles and Winston streets where her brother used to sleep. We all go to my house for dinner one night, where Caroline is excited about the visit and Mr. Ayers makes himself at home as he has before, serenading us on violin.
Jennifer has never been to Los Angeles, so the next day we drive along Rodeo Drive and under the swaying lollipop palms of Beverly Hills, a distant galaxy twelve miles from Skid Row. We take Sunset Boulevard through the forested glen known as Bel-Air and past the little outposts where hawkers sell maps of movie star homes. We tumble out of the hills under a deep blue sky and land on the shores of the Pacific. Mr. Ayers sets up his music stand in Palisades Park overlooking Santa Monica Bay and provides the soundtrack for a sun-drenched view that extends from Malibu to Palos Verdes, with Santa Catalina Island lightly sketched in the distance. He plays Saint-Saëns and Schubert, and Jennifer sits quietly and listens as she contemplates this strange universe. Santa Monica has its own teeming homeless population, a counterweight to Skid Row, and sad souls mill about with empty eyes, scabby blankets and this million-dollar view, even as an obvious dr
ug trade goes on behind us near the public bathrooms.
Jennifer and I talked about trying to get her brother away from Skid Row at some point, maybe move him out here where the breeze moves in from across open water and the light often comes softly through the mist. But none of that can wash away the reality that just like on Skid Row, the help in Santa Monica is near the need, so the result is this little patch of hell in the middle of paradise. Jennifer and I would like to believe her brother can one day live on his own somewhere, take care of himself and do even more with music. To that end, I tell her the music studio could help, if it ever opens. If her brother slips into a routine there, and gets to where he can play and maybe even record with some of his friends from the orchestra, it might stabilize him to the point where he’s open to treatment and maybe even medication. And if, and maybe, and possibly . . .
The weather is too nice and the people-watching too distracting to dwell on any of that now. Jennifer is with her big brother at long last in this crazy city their father moved to, breaking their young hearts. Strange, the way it has all worked out, with Jennifer taking over the financial responsibilities of a big brother who was always so wise and able. He plays now against a backdrop of sea and sky, a symphony under the trees, right here where impossible wealth meets hopeless suffering. Botoxed weight-watchers in designer sweats come jogging past drunken vets passed out on fields of green. Down the hill and across the cinnamon sands, the tide is up and the waves keep coming, a thunderous ancient rhythm.
30
Yo-Yo Ma is coming to town.
How do I know this?
Mr. Ayers is a walking billboard. He has scrawled the time and place on a white T-shirt and he’s wearing it proudly. My name is up in lights, too, along with the LAPD.