Steve Lopez, metro columnist for the Los Angeles Times, was walking around downtown one day when he saw a shabbily dressed, homeless man serenely playing Beethoven on his battered violin at a street corner. He was intrigued — and, of course, looking for column material.
“Violin man. It’s got potential,” Lopez recalls thinking, in his book about the relationship that resulted from that encounter, “The Soloist.”
It took some time, but Lopez got that column, as well as quite a few others concerning the life of Nathaniel Ayers, a troubled but gifted African-American man whose years studying bass at New York’s prestigious Juilliard School were cut short decades ago by schizophrenia.
Ever since, as Ayers had descended into the sorrowful madness that is Los Angeles’ Skid Row, he clung to classical music as a love. To him, Los Angeles was an anointed place, despite his having to sleep on the street and live out of a shopping cart, because it had a statue of Beethoven in downtown’s Pershing Square. The city became one big recital hall for him to spend his days in solo recital, producing his own ongoing “Ode to Joy.”
Lopez’s columns attracted enormous attention when they first began appearing in 2005. Readers donated musical instruments. The Los Angeles Philharmonic invited Ayers to attend a rehearsal and then concerts, while one of its cellists offered free lessons.
Eventually Ayers even got to meet Yo-Yo Ma, a fellow Juilliard alumnus, after one performance. A downtown hipster club called Little Pedro’s Blue Bongo booked Ayers as a performer. And psychiatric and social-service workers, with Lopez’s support and urging, made a special effort to try to coax the reluctant Ayers to accept medication, get off the street and into supportive housing.
“The Soloist” is about the friendship that developed between Ayers and Lopez during all this. But it is not a simple, feel-good story about a triumph. Nor, for that matter, is it a tragic narrative. Mental illness doesn’t allow for such simple trajectories.
It is often heartbreaking, but also resiliently, cautiously optimistic. And against all odds, frequently beautiful. Ayers’ relationship to his music has an egoless, mystical intensity. He’s right out of one of Oliver Sachs’ stories about the mysteries of the human condition.
That intensity can make him charming and wise. Introduced to a symphony cellist before a performance, Ayers immediately notices a resemblance to the Hungarian-born cellist Janos Starker.
We — and Lopez — wonder from what well of memory and ingrained love for classical music does that comment come, considering Ayers’ more immediate day-to-day existence sometimes involves eyeing rats before falling asleep on a sidewalk.
But repeatedly, something happens to trigger Ayers’ sickness just when Lopez and others believe he has made a breakthrough. And when that happens, he goes into a terrifying, bullying rage, triggered by something as slight as a lit cigarette (he hates smoking).
There is one scene, late in his relationship with Lopez, when he gets so angry it appears he might attack Lopez. It is scary and incredibly sad, coming after so many positive developments.
“The Soloist” shows what has made Lopez, who is in his early 50s, such a successful columnist. He goes beyond a merely conversational tone, itself a gift, into the realm of the confessional. As such, he brings the reader into his own tangled feelings and ideas as he discovers the layers of history that have made Nathaniel who he is. There is also not a shred of sentimentality here.
Lopez becomes, in many ways, a family member struggling with a loved one’s illness. (Ayers has a loving sister, living out of town, who slowly re-establishes meaningful contact with Lopez’s help.) He is constantly worried that Ayers will be mugged or killed on the tough Skid Row streets for the musical instruments he keeps in his shopping cart. And as he learns more about public policies, Lopez increasingly questions what kind of society closes down institutions to put the mentally ill on city streets.
At the same time, he frets about his own future. His newspaper is going through financial difficulties and changes in leadership. The book brings us into his acute anxieties and vulnerabilities there. But it also amounts to a victory for those who believe in newspapers at a time when their relevancy is being questioned. There are still some important stories to tell — like Nathaniel Ayers’.
Steven Rosen is a freelance writer in Cincinnati.
Nonfiction
The Soloist, by Steve Lopez, $25.95
