Nabil Ayers - My Life in the Sunshine: Searching for My Father and Discovering My Family

When I see a movie theater advertising Straight Outta Compton, I know how Im about to spend the next two hours. What better setting, I think, to watch a blockbuster about the LA rap group N.W.A. than thisthe city from which it emerged.

It is the summer of 2015, and I am in Los Angeles for the FYF music festival, where, backstage, I am repeatedly mistaken for a newly famous director who has made music videos for Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West, and Frank Ocean, and goes simply by his first name, Nabil. When I am introduced to some people, its telling to hear their voices suddenly become more hip-hopattempting to drop a bit of street into their wordsan affectation they adopt only when they think theyre meeting the rap video director.

Not that Nabil always elicits a humble apology. People arent aware that even though he has made videos for hugely famous Black artists, Nabil is half-white and half-Iranian and looks much more white than I do.

While I was hoping to spend today at the festival with the artists I work with, instead I slowly walk around the newly revitalized downtown Los Angeles, recovering from a terrible case of food poisoning. The thought of seeing Straight Outta Compton in a comfortable, air-conditioned theater is much more appealing than the sensory overload of a crowded music festival. I force down the rest of my banana, guzzle my remaining seltzer, and still feeling weak, buy a ticket to the matinee.

Compton begins with a bang. In five fast minutes, the Los Angeles police destroy a drug house. Bullets and expletives fly, vicious dogs bark, and armored vehicles smash through residential walls like theyre made of paper. And Im completely sucked in, happy to have my mind numbed by Hollywood action, even if the portrayal is devastatingly true to life.

The bombastic opening scene ends, and the ensuing silence is broken by a piano sound, followed by an unmistakably familiar, lazy synthesizer melody. My pulse suddenly feels very present in my body. The songs patient, buoyant pace drives the cameras slow movement, which reveals a bedroom adorned with posters, records, DJ gear, and eventually a teenage boy lying down with his eyes closed and headphones wrapped around his head. The character, meant to be N.W.A. founder and producer Dr. Dre, wears a Los Angeles Dodgers jersey and hat as he subconsciously air-plays the piano, the congas, and the synthesizer along with the song. The overhead shot shows a record spinning with a legible red Polydor label at its center. The scene, which contains no dialogue, does everything to convey that Dre is lost in the music.

The camera closes in on Dre surrounded by album jackets, and I brace myself, knowing what Im about to see.

And there it is, one album, standing apart with its white border. A man in a tight yellow T-shirt, a beard, and an Afro stands against a bright yellow background. His hand rests confidently on his hip, and he smiles as he looks off camera, radiating casual conviction. I cant read the album title, but I dont need to. I already know the man on the cover.

The music is so loud that I physically feel it in my chest and ass. The lyrics offer the first voices in the scene. My life, my life, my life, my life... in the sunshine blasts from the modern theater speakers and the chorus of male and female voices further shakes my weakened constitution.

Im alone in a dark movie theater, three thousand miles from home, feeling skinny and sick and completely caught off guard by the most famous song by my father, Roy Ayers.

Everybody Loves the Sunshine was a moderate hit when it was first released in 1976. But its grown over timeits been sampled more than one hundred times by various artists including Mary J. Blige, Common, J. Cole, Tupac, Snoop Dogg, and Black Eyed Peas. Its been covered by DAngelo and Cibo Matto, spanning decades and constantly refreshing itself into modern context. Ive heard it in many different iterations over the years, a perennial, persistent reminder of my otherwise absent father.

After one very long minute of music, Dres mother surprises him by turning off the record, which snaps him out of his meditative state. My chest feels hot and my breath is short.

My first reaction is to sink into my cushy chair and look around the theater to see whether anyone is looking at me. Is this what it would feel like to run into him? I wonder. Id last seen my father nine years earlierwhen I was thirty-fourbut that had been planned: a lunch in Seattle, my first ever meeting with him as an adult. The time before that, when I was eleven, I had no idea who he even was. Since moving back to New York City, where he lives, Im always slightly, subconsciously on guardready to run into him. But I definitely wasnt expecting it in a dark movie theater in Los Angeles while getting over food poisoning.

Though my father and I live in the same city and are both in the music business, our paths have never crossed in the seven years that Ive lived in New York. Occasionally, someone asks me how hes doing. It surprises me every time, and I usually respond with something like, Youd probably know better than I would, which feels confrontational and often leads me to quickly offer a slightly apologetic, less biting explanation that hes never been a presence in my life.

How, I wonder, did a hippie child in New York City who never knew his father become a grown man who still didnt know his father but encountered his music regularly? Were moments like these truly coincidental? Or had my fathers DNA guided me into a life in music, and ultimately to the places where his presence caught me off guard?