The Story Behind The Soloist

Steve Lopez, Los Angeles Times columnist and author of The Soloist, told the Closing Session crowd how he met Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, and how their relationship grew and the story developed into the book. "The deal with writing a column is, it's like having a pet monster that's always hungry," Lopez said. "You have to keep finding more stories." He met Ayers, a homeless musician with schizophrenia, while in downtown Los Angeles checking on another story lead. Ayers was playing a violin that was missing two strings, and on his shopping cart, he had written "Little Walt Disney Concert Hall"—a reference to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, which houses the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Ayers wasn't asking for money. When Lopez asked why he was playing there, amidst the sounds of car horns and sirens, Ayers pointed at the statue of Beethoven in nearby Pershing Square and said that it inspired him. At that point, Lopez said, he didn't even know if the story would develop into a single column. But he continued meeting with Ayers, and discovered that he had studied music at the prestigious Juilliard School. And when he called Harry Barnhoff, Ayers' childhood music teacher in Cleveland, "I could hear Mr. Barnhoff weeping on the other end of the line," at what had become of one of his most talented students. "I wrote the column not really realizing what I had," Lopez said. "That column connected because when readers saw the story, they saw a 'There but for the grace of God' element." In the following days, boxes came into Lopez's office: six violins, two cellos, and a series of other instruments including French horn, trumpet, and piano. Lopez went on to describe his concerns that Ayers' new instruments would make him a target for thieves and violence; how Ayers was eventually persuaded to take an apartment in the Lamp Community, an organization that helps people with severe mental illness move into homes; how he and Ayers were invited to attend a concert at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, how they took a road trip to San Francisco, where Ayers was honored by the National Association on Mental Illness; how Ayers reconnected with Juilliard classmate Yo-Yo Ma, and how his relationship with Ayers continues today. He also shared his outrage at the state of treatment for mental illness in this country. "Why is it that on every Saturday morning there's a 10K Race for the Cure for everything except schizophrenic paranoia?" he asked. "There's still a stigma. That stigma means it's okay for a Juilliard student or anyone else to wander the streets mumbling. Now that I cared about Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, it wasn't okay." Lopez called his relationship with Ayers a gift, and expressed his hope that attitudes would change out of the story. And he recognized that Ayers was the individual that could make that possible. "If I were writing columns on mental illness, no one would have read them. But here I had a story" that resonated with readers.