The third movement was excruciatingly beautiful. But that was his rule about third movements. One should hang breathlessly on every note, a great feeling of anguish nearly spilling from one’s heart. It was mostly strings, violins accompanied by violas and cellos, exchanging melodies with the plaintive voice of the oboes. When it was really good, it brought tears. He let them run down his face and onto the pavement, concentrating mightily on the delicate work at hand. One slip of the baton, one false gesture, and he might lose the building intensity, might fail to caress each note with its tender due. In some deep place in his being, he wanted desperately to lose his way through these passages, but he would not give up his control. He must hear every measure, cue every instrument at its proper moment, until the final note. This was the work of a great conductor and the right of the composer.
Manzanar Murakami sensed the time of day through his feet, through the vibration rumbling through the cement and steel, and by the intervals of vehicles passing beneath him. At that moment, cars swooped at steady intervals, trucks trundled but trundled quickly. Traffic was thick but moving. It was manageable traffic. People in this traffic could count themselves lucky. They might reach their destinations ten to fifteen minutes early. Manzanar calculated that it would probably be twenty past the hour or ten ’til. It was prior to or after the amount of time it took for workers to normally leave their offices, pack their belongings, descend in elevators, retrieve cars from parking lots, plod through city streets, wait on ramps for traffic meters, then to finally merge onto the great freeway system. They had not yet all arrived, or a great wave of them had already plowed through in a slow grumpy mass. Those who cruised by at this reasonable speed, considering the hour, were the early birds or riffraff of the great mass. They took advantage unknowingly of what Manzanar knew to be a traffic window—a window of opportunity where a traveler might cruise between the congested clumps of aggravated rush-hour traffic.
Such a traffic window was essential for the third movement. There was just enough tension and yet the possibility of reverie. Not the stoned reverie of night traffic at seventy miles an hour, but a controlled reverie of rhythmic cadence and repeated melody. An incredible yearning went forth, perhaps of love and desire. Even if it were only the simple hunger for dinner, it was a hunger Manzanar sensed in a brutal and yet beautiful way. There was an inexplicable clarity about the third movement, a sweetness tinged with pain. It was as if his very heart tilted forward, his arms offering and yet containing this heart, opening and closing as the wings of a great bird, coaxing the notes tenderly to brief life, conducting sound into symphony.
Those in vehicles who hurried past under Manzanar’s concrete podium most likely never noticed him. Perhaps there were those who happened to see the arching movements of a man’s arms, the lion’s head of white hair flailing this way and that, the silver glint of the baton or a figure of strange command outlined starkly between skyscrapers in the afternoon sunlight. And perhaps they thought themselves disconnected from a sooty homeless man on an overpass. Perhaps and perhaps not. And yet, standing there, he bore and raised each note, joined them, united families, created a community, a great society, an entire civilization of sound. The great flow of humanity ran below and beyond his feet in every direction, pumping and pulsating, that blood connection, the great heartbeat of a great city.
From the beginning of daylight saving in April, the city watched its days lengthen until the solstice, when daylight lingered across the skies as long as possible. It was the end of the school year, and children had or had not graduated from one class to the next, eager to wake to listless days at the beach, on cool porches, under sprinklers, or before the interminable TV. Never mind that they had been signed up for summer camps, Y camp, work camp, athletic camp, leadership camp, swim school, remedial reading, remedial math, college for kids, year-round school, summer school, summer jobs, a job at McDonald’s, a job a Disneyland, jobs for youth, the family business, keep kids off the street, the family vacation, vacation with grandma, vacation with dad who lives in Florida or mom who lives in Dallas, a trip to Epcot, a tagging crew, gangs, or detention. Never mind. Today none of that had started. It was Monday. It was hot and listless and expectant. All the TVs in L.A. were turned on. Maybe no one was watching, but they were turned on, turned on to cartoons—Warner Brothers, Disney, Hanna-Barbera. It was summer, the first day of freedom.
All this Manzanar knew. Gone were the yellow school buses, the sporty Nissans and Mazdas favored by the college-bound, the Tercels, Corollas, Accords, and Tauruses favored by educators, the mothers and their early-morning Chrysler and Previa vanpools. When education left the freeways, a certain unclogging was achieved. Manzanar likened it to lowered cholesterol in the blood stream. It was the same when bureaucrats were given holidays. And it was the reason for the unusually good window in traffic. The first day of freedom might mean many things. For Manzanar, it was this extra elbow room on the usually densely occupied freeway. It called for more expansive gestures, a greater elasticity in the musical measure.
Manzanar Murakami had become a fixture on the freeway overpass much like a mural or a traffic information sign or a tagger’s mark. He was there every day, sometimes even when it rained, but it rarely rained. After all, this was L.A. There was a schedule of sorts, a program, an appropriate series of concerts and symphonies in accordance with the seasons and the climate of the city. As noted by many others, climatic change in L.A. was different from other places. It had less perhaps to do with weather and more to do with disaster. For example, when the city rioted or when the city was on fire or when the city shook, the program was particularly apt, controversial, hair-raising, horrific, intense—apocalyptic, if you will. There was an incredibly vast repertory, heralding every sort of L.A. scenario. Particularly eloquent was the Overture to the Santa Anas. Few contemporary composers rivaled the breadth and quantity of his compositions, and no one had yet dedicated their entire repertoire to one city, not to mention L.A. Few composers of his category were so unknown, so unheard, so without recompense for their art, so maligned, and so invisible.
To say that Manzanar Murakami was homeless was as absurd as the work he chose to do. No one was more at home in L.A. than this man. The Japanese American community had apologized profusely for this blight on their image as the Model Minority. They had attempted time after time to remove him from his overpass, from his eccentric activities, to no avail. They had even tried to placate him with a small lacquer bridge in the Japanese gardens in Little Tokyo. But Manzanar was destined for greater vistas. He could not confine his musical talents to the silky flow of koi in a pond, the constant tap of bamboo on rock, or manicured bonsai. It was true that he had introduced the shakuhachi and koto to a number of his pieces, but he was the sort who imagined a hundred shakuhachis and a hundred kotos. Indeed, he had written a piece for a hundred shamisen—the sound of their triangular bones beating on strings echoing through the stretched skins of a hundred cats was deafening and thrilling. No. Only the freeway overpass, the towering downtown horizon rising around it, would do.
It was suggested that he could be taken by helicopter and left on a mountain top—certainly a grand enough vista for a hundred shamisen or a thousand cellos. But those who knew Manzanar knew that he would find his way back, track the sounds back to the city, to the din of traffic and the commerce of dense humanity and the freeway. The freeway was a great root system, an organic living entity. It was nothing more than a great writhing concrete dinosaur and nothing less than the greatest orchestra on Earth.