Commentary: 20 years and counting: How a chance encounter with a street musician led to a lasting bond

I was driving through Westlake, on my way to pay Nathaniel Anthony Ayers a visit at his nursing home, when it hit me.

My God. Has it been 20 years?

Hard to believe, but yes.

The year was 2005. It was around noon, as I recall, on a drizzly, late-winter day. I heard music in Pershing Square, followed the sound and spotted him next to a shopping cart heaped over with his belongings.

And so it began: Mr. Ayers with a violin that was missing two strings, trying to get back on track three decades after illness forced him out of New York’s prestigious Juilliard School. Me with my notebook, getting to know this Cleveland-born prodigy while trying to navigate a mental health system that left thousands fending for themselves on the streets of Los Angeles.

Neither of us could have known where we’d be headed together in the years to come. To Disney Hall. To the Hollywood Bowl. To Dodger Stadium. To the beach. To the White House. To an operatic series of starts and stops, of swelling strings and crashing cymbals, riding the waves of what Mr. Ayers calls the music of the gods.

“Can you believe we’ve been friends for 20 years?” I said to him during my visit a week ago.

He’s been immobilized by a hip injury, and looked up quizzically from his bed. He hadn’t done the math, but it couldn’t be disputed — we’d taken the express train from our 50s to our 70s. He smiled and said that when we met, he was “on the street, homeless, playing a violin with two strings.”

Former President Barack Obama shakes hands with Nathaniel Ayers at an event commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 2010.

(White House)

That was the headline of the first column. “Violinist has the world on 2 strings,” a reference to his unshakable love of music, despite his predicament. He played near the Beethoven statue in Pershing Square, for inspiration, he said. And the sign on his shopping cart said, “Little Walt Disney Concert Hall.”

I reminded Mr. Ayers — that’s what I call him, and he calls me Mr. Lopez — of the response to the first column I wrote about him. Soon after, six readers sent him violins, two others gave him cellos and one donated a piano we hauled into a Skid Row music room, with his name on the door, at the homeless services agency now known as The People Concern.

It took a year to convince him to move indoors, and he taught me so much in that time, primarily about how every individual in his shoes has a unique set of needs and fears, as well as a complicated history of trauma and stigmatization. Such people often languish in a disjointed, multiagency system of care.

Through Mr. Ayers, I’ve met countless dedicated public servants in the mental health field. They are out there every day doing difficult, noble work, offering comfort and changing lives. But the need is great, complicated by the street drugs some people use for self-medication, and progress is often stymied by multiple forces despite billions of dollars worth of investments in solutions.

Jon Sherin, former chief of the L.A. County Department of Mental Health, said that while good work is done by many, bureaucracy sabotages innovation and erodes the morale of front-line workers.

“We live in a world in which people are paid to deliver a service regardless of whether it has any impact, and billing becomes the primary agenda of the bureaucracy and everybody in it,” said Sherin, a psychiatrist who endured similar frustrations when he was at the Veterans Administration. “We’re taking care of process, and we’re not taking care of outcomes.”

The goal, Sherin said, must be adequate resources for housing and help, along with creating safe living environments that offer what he calls the three Ps — people, place and purpose.

In the last two decades, many have stepped up to provide those things for Mr. Ayers, with varying degrees of success and no shortage of either heartbreak or hope. His sister Jennifer is his conservator, longtime family friend Bobby Witbeck checks in on him and so does long-ago Juilliard classmate Joe Russo. Gary Foster, who produced the movie “The Soloist,” based on my book by the same name, has served Mr. Ayers and many others for years as a board member at The People Concern.

Back in 2005, Peter Snyder, then an L.A. Philharmonic cellist, offered to give lessons to Mr. Ayers. They took place in an apartment where he would eventually live.

After the first column about Nathaniel Ayers, six readers sent him violins, two others gave him cellos and one donated a piano.

(Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

Adam Crane, who was then working in communications at the L.A. Phil, opened the doors of Disney Hall to Mr. Ayers and reintroduced him to a community of musicians: Pianist Joanne Pearce Martin, cellist Ben Hong and violinist Vijay Gupta, among others, befriended Mr. Ayers and played music with him.

One night at Disney Hall, Crane and Hong took us backstage after a concert so Mr. Ayers could reunite with a former Juilliard classmate by the name of Yo-Yo Ma.

“Nathaniel … has had an astounding, life-changing impact on me,” said Crane, who is now with the New York Philharmonic.

“I’ve often spoken about the power of music to transform lives, but I’ve never experienced it as profoundly and passionately as I have in the time I’ve spent with Nathaniel. From the first time we met in 2005 — when he was in my office playing my cello (his joy, as well as his past training, shone through) — to the years that followed, I’ve seen Nathaniel both medicated and un-medicated, living on and off the streets. The one constant has been his dependence on — and sheer love of — music for his happiness and survival.”

I knew there was an instant bond between Crane and Ayers, but I didn’t know the full story until later.

“There was an immediate connection,” Crane explained, “not only in our shared love of music, but in our battles with mental illness, however differently it manifested in each of us. Nathaniel has helped shape my understanding of mental illness and the human condition, and he has profoundly deepened my perspective on what music can mean to people.”

I visited Mr. Ayers a few weeks ago with one of his former social workers, Anthony Ruffin, who lost his home in the Altadena fire in January. Mr. Ayers was not always Ruffin’s easiest client — he could be resistant to help and even combative. At one point, Mr. Ayers “fired” Ruffin, just as he had “fired” Ruffin’s mentor, Mollie Lowery. But Ruffin is a skilled observer who saw through the mask to the essence of the man, and he was inspired by the resilience he witnessed.

“There’s so much going on in the world, and when I meet and talk with Nathaniel, it makes the world seem perfect,” Ruffin said. “When he speaks to me, he always gives me a little bit of insight about life in general, and I walk away from his presence humbled. Extremely humbled.”

Mr. Ayers has plenty he could complain about. Being homeless for so many years has taken a toll on his body, and for the past couple of years, hip and hand injuries have kept him from playing his violin, cello, keyboard, double bass and trumpet.

Nathaniel Ayers plays the cello during a brief stint in the hospital.

(Steve Lopez / Los Angeles Times)

But on my last visit, when I asked how he would describe the last 20 years, he didn’t hesitate.

“Good,” he said cheerily.

We talked about our visit to the White House, when he performed at the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act and met then-President Obama, sporting a white suit and top hat he had purchased at Hollywood Suit Outlets. And we talked about his reunion with Yo-Yo Ma, when the cellist hugged him and said they were brothers in music.

I remember Mr. Ayers refusing to get out of my car one night until the last note of the Sibelius Symphony No. 2 played on my radio. I remember him saying that in his New York apartment, he practiced Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings on his upright bass while watching snow fall outside his window. I remember the night on Skid Row when, before falling asleep, he grabbed two sticks on which he had written the names Beethoven and Brahms. When the rats come up from the sewers, he said, a tap of the sticks would make them scatter.

Since our chance encounter 20 years ago, he has given me a greater understanding of patience, perseverance, humility, loyalty, love. He is a reminder that beyond first impressions, stereotypes and the borders we construct, there is shared humanity and grace in opening yourself to the richness of it.

When I asked Mr. Ayers his advice on getting by, even through all the hardships and disappointments he has faced, he pointed to the radio next to his bed, which is tuned always to classical KUSC, 91.5 on the FM dial — home to the music of the Gods.

“Listen to the music,” he said.

steve.lopez@latimes.com