Nathan Woods
Making the band A wheelchair wasn't going to keep Nathan Woods from being a part of the Wall of Sound
06:46 PM CDT on Saturday, October 29, 2005 It's less than 25 minutes till game time, and three Dallas County school buses lined up by Kinkaide Stadium exhale their impatient riders. First out is the drill team, stepping onto the steaming concrete in high-heeled white boots. Next out scrambles the band, boys wiggling into sousaphones like warped golden inner tubes, percussionists heaving clunky drums out the back emergency door. "Let's move this band, Wall of Sound!" yells Freddie Millener, the director better known to the Lincoln High School marching band as "Sir."
Peering into the third bus, he sees Wall of Sound's not-so-secret weapon
has yet to be unloaded. "Come get Nathan off that
bus!" Behind the driver's seat sits 16-year-old Nathan Woods, a trumpet player, waiting to join the chaos outside, smiling as usual. Three trumpeters join forces, and in a mass of scrunched white-and-purple uniforms, they carry Nathan down the bus steps. They place him in the TiLite wheelchair waiting on the sidewalk, complete with spinning rims you'd expect to find on a souped-up Cadillac. Another player hands him his trumpet. A baritone player pushes him into position in the parade formation. The drums start their thundering cadence, the cue to start the march into the stadium. Only a 100-foot stretch of pavement separates Nathan from the field, the spotlight, the place where he first became known as "24s," Lincoln's marching band superstar. Getting to this point has been a much longer road than that. Nathan never saw the car coming. On May 18, 1997, at 5:18 in the evening, the 7-year-old walked with his older brother, Jermaine, on the sidewalk along Martin Luther King Boulevard in New Orleans on the way home to the B.W. Cooper housing projects. Nathan licked a vanilla ice cream cone he'd just gotten free for earning straight A's on his second-grade report card. A champagne-colored Chrysler swerving down the street jumped the curb and hit him from behind, launching him into the air, instantly crushing his spinal cord. Two months after the 13-hour surgery to fuse neck vertebrae together, screw a halo into his skull and a brace into his broken left thigh, Nathan told his mom, Wennifur, that he forgave the hit-and-run driver, who has never been caught. When he finally stopped using painkillers a month later, Nathan said he couldn't feel his legs. When Wennifur told him he would never walk again, Nathan asked her to roll him into the corner and let him die. They lay in the hospital bed and cried. But Nathan didn't die. Instead, a year later he moved to Dallas after his mom researched Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children, and he decided he wasn't going to be one of those "bored" people in a wheelchair. In fifth grade, Nathan picked up the bass drum but quit a week later because he was behind the drummers who'd started a year earlier. He was in and out of the hospital for surgeries to put him back together again through middle school and, in eighth grade, he decided to give band another shot. He wheeled into the band room in eighth grade at Pearl C. Anderson Learning Center, and told the director, Sylvester Wallace, that he wanted to join. Mr. Wallace told him he looked like a trumpet player, and handed him a school horn. Three days later, Nathan honked his first note. The trumpet and he meshed " 'cause it was the loudest," and, after all, everyone in band sat. His freshman year at Lincoln, Nathan had a lot of friends – "I'm the only guy in a wheelchair at school so they're gonna know me" – but belonged to no particular group. But then he saw the Wall of Sound, storming into the pep rally: their uniformity, their energy, the way the students would stand up on the bleachers and dance to the beat. Band is big stuff at Lincoln, and Nathan had one thought: I want to be part of that. But doubts came next: A guy in a wheelchair in a marching band? If I wheel out on the field, will they laugh? "I didn't want to attract attention," he says. But he also knew if he didn't, the wheelchair would win. So he blazed into Mr. Millener's office and said he wanted to play in the Lincoln exhibition game that spring. Mr. Millener laughed. Then Nathan said, no, he was serious. And then Mr. Millener got serious, too.
The question was how. Nathan thought he'd need someone to push him. But who? Enter Tabias Miles, a slender cymbal player. Tabias asked if Nathan wanted a push to the field for the first practice. Although Nathan hardly ever let anyone push him, he agreed. Once they got on the field, Tabias asked him if he wanted to be pushed through the drill. A partnership formed. After Nathan told Mr. Millener he wanted to showcase his moves, his role in the show morphed from an experiment to a main feature. Still, at halftime, Nathan was frozen in fear as Tabias grabbed Nathan's trumpet and rolled him out to the 50-yard line for his debut. A few bars of music went by until a band member yelled, "Dance!" Nathan started to do just that – waving his arms in the air and jamming in his seat. The crowd went berserk. "When they see me on the field, I guess they got riled up," Nathan says. The next day at school, kids he didn't even know said, "You did it, foo! How long you gonna stay in the band?" "Now I'm like, 'Yee-uh! I'm in the band!' " He bobs in his chair for emphasis. "I haven't had one bad comment yet." A drummer gave Nathan the nickname of "24s," referring to the diameter of his chair's wheels, and the next season, Tabias and Nathan choreographed custom moves for dance breaks. Tabias popped him a wheelie and kicked high on either side of the chair. When everyone fell onto the ground, Tabias lay down and pulled Nathan's chair back onto his legs. The two were on the TV news three times. Nathan became not just the boy in the wheelchair, but a school celebrity. "In my opinion, he made the band what it is," says Devon "DeeDee" Wright, a Lincoln junior. "Without 24s, it ain't nothin'. When he was on the football field doin' his thang, I say, 'That's my boy!' " And the 80 band members accepted him as family. After practices, a pack of 10 walked home down Malcolm X Boulevard alongside his chair. At a game at Grambling State University, they carried him down 132 steps so he wouldn't have to sit in the stadium's handicap section. But they make it clear Nathan isn't some charity case. Trumpet player Jarvis Sheppard, 17, says, "To see him play makes me wanna play harder. Like he's in a wheelchair, it's like, 'Oh I know I can do this.' " After an operation in December, Nathan says he gained feeling in his upper legs, and he was pumped for his junior season. But in February, Tabias went into the hospital with abdominal pain and came out with a diagnosis of a groin injury and doctor's orders: No heavy lifting. "I was mad," Nathan says. Yeah, he knew he could find someone else. But without Tabias, it just wouldn't be the same. Two days till the opening game this fall and Nathan still has nobody to push him. But he's too much the man about school to let that get him down. In his plaid Dickies shirt, jeans and immaculate white Reeboks, Nathan zooms down the hallway, beating his chest and air-bass-drumming – "do dodo boom, do dodo boom" – slapping five and snapping with each guy he passes. Kids twirl his spinners, another starts an impromptu rap: "Spin baby spin like a ride at the fair." And that's just the boys. As his cousin puts it, "The wheelchair is like the light, and the girls are like the bugs." Although his official girlfriend goes to another school, that doesn't stop girls from sitting on his lap to ride to class, or Nathan touching their hands as he passes, or giving another one the "call me" gesture as the elevator closes and whooshes him down to the first floor so he can turn in his nomination sheet for "Most Popular." "I'm gonna be 'Most Popular,' Yee-uh!" he says to no one in particular. He usually tells kids he was shot four times in East Dallas so he won't have to talk about that day in New Orleans. But he's still in a wheelchair and he needs a push, the problem at Thursday practice. Up for the push to the field is Vander George, the slim and polite 16-year-old lead clarinet. But despite good intentions, Vander is a little spacey with a wheelchair, and doesn't hear Nathan's "Stop! Stop!" when the band halts, plowing him into a mellophone player. Plus, Mr. Millener wants Vander to play. So once on the field, Nathan realizes he's "got no push." A first. He wheels toward the sidelines, the band calling after him. "Where you runnin' to?" "Where Nate go?" Mr. Millener steps in. "Nathan, get in your spot!" Nathan shakes his head. Finally, a tank of a former bass drummer watching practice, Garon Bell, who graduated last year, lumbers out to the field pushing him. "Where his spot at? I can push you for 10 years. C'mon baby, let's do this." Nathan's in again. But alumni aren't allowed in the show. So at Friday practice, Demetria Cornelious reports to duty "because Nathan's my friend, and I knew he was in need." Demetria is a strong baritone player in a pink Baby Gurl tee. She can handle a wheelchair. The challenge of finding a steady push will mar his season. He'll watch some games from the stands, even skip some practices, because he doesn't want to ask band mates not to play in order to help him. With his junior season jumbled, he'll start planning ahead: "My senior year, I'm going out with a bang." Care to release any details? "You're gonna have to wait to see." Marching band has crystallized Nathan's plans. He wants to go to either Louisiana State University or Grambling State University, Mr. Millener's alma mater, to march with the legendary Tigers. He's even chatted with Grambling's director, whom he says was receptive to the idea of a member on wheels. But his mom has faith that someday, with rehab, he'll "rise out of that chair." Nathan believes that, too. But for this first game, Nathan's proving to the coward driving like a hellion down Martin Luther King on a sunny day in 1997 that you may have hit a 7-year-old boy, but you sure as heck didn't break him. And he's getting down on a football field in Dallas showing that he's beaten you, that's he's not wasting one breath on you, that you are the last thing on his mind. Nathan Woods has won. "A lot of people would be, like, 'I'm in a wheelchair, my life is over,' " says William Hollins, a trumpeter. "Nathan be like, 'It ain't over till I take that last breath.' " Perhaps Nathan says it best. As he rolls up behind the band section bleachers, he looks down onto the field he just rolled off and spots two wheel marks snaking through the grass along the five-yard line to the track. "Phat B!" he yells to the lead sousaphone player – otherwise known as LaBrandon McLane – standing on the bleacher in front of him. "Phat B!" LaBrandon swivels around, and Nathan points down to the tire tracks: "I left my mark." LaBrandon looks down at the lines and snickers. And Nathan smiles. E-mail sundaylife@dallasnews.com
Copyright Dallas News
|
The Wall
of Sound is a band constantly in motion. The players pump, sway, grind and
jump during drum breaks, and sometimes while playing, too. Having Nathan
roll out to the sideline to play and wheel off wasn't an option. He would
be on the field.