Kansas City Lightning

by Stanley Crouch

  Charlie needed a meal, a bath, and two or three days of sleep—that much was obvious—but he wasn’t at all fearful. Being in Smith’s company again enlivened him at the same time that it calmed him down. Charlie’s legs may have hurt and his shoes may have cut into his swollen insteps, but sitting there with Buster Smith was as soothing as a hot bath and a good meal. After finally arriving in this notorious city of endless strangers, he was glad to feel the human presence of one of the best parts of home.

  Then there was the town itself. Like everyone else who listened to the radio, went to the movies, or thumbed through a magazine, Charlie knew about New York’s harbors, lined with big cargo ships and ocean liners; its huge parks; the bright glare of its nightlife; and its spunky little mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia, famous as a cartoon character for everything from accompanying the police on raids to smashing slot machines to reading the funny papers, eventually and endearingly, to young and old over the radio.

  The Negroes in Harlem had another level of style, Charlie saw, and the concrete forest of buildings in lower Manhattan, even more impressive than in Chicago, almost took his breath away. There was a look in the eyes and faces of New Yorkers, a pace and syncopation to their walk, that seemed to rise with urbane fire during the business day, then stretch into the gathering places of the evening, the deep points after dark when the sheer presence of so much humanity adds an electric hum to the air. The city’s feeling was at once elegant and smart-alecky, as sharp as stainless steel and jagged rust.

  This hard-boiled urbane sensibility transcended all the superficial categories of prejudice and privilege, even as it recognized a harsh human fact: that no amount of fine form and style, sophistication and gallows wit, optimism and good Samaritan ways, could forever hold the blues at bay.

  Ever ready, this was a place of boundless appetites, a city that demanded eight newspapers to keep up with its story, three major league baseball teams to thrill it, and rapid transit above the ground, on the ground, and under the ground to get it where it was going.

  The Big Apple was always in need of something new in order to realize itself, another set of cultural release valves to manage its ever-looming pressures. And the artistic fecundity that manifested itself in New York in these years grew partly from inspiration, partly from desperation. Like every professional musician who played dance halls, Charlie knew that New York’s Broadway shows provided the songs that got people humming across the nation and around the globe. Anyone who went to the movies saw how often the era’s romantic comedies, its tales of high society and down-low gangsters, and its ethnic melodramas were set in the metropolis on the Hudson.

  The city had the best dance halls in America, the biggest movie theater in the world, and the longest chorus line anyone had ever seen, not to mention the best restaurants and clothing shops. And just a few subway stops away was Wall Street, where fortunes were made and broken.

  It was simple. If you wanted to become a movie star, you went west to Hollywood. If you had any other kind of serious career in mind, you went to New York. Starring roles weren’t available to Negroes in those years, but there was plenty of room in show business for those who had the playing and composing skills, or who were tall, tan, and terrific enough to find work and make careers for themselves on bandstands, in Tin Pan Alley, or on the stages, which welcomed as much dancing and singing glamour from Negroes as the conventions of the time could bear.

  Now Charlie Parker was here, with a roof over his head and Buster Smith standing by him in full support. He knew nothing about how the New York music scene functioned, other than what he’d heard by word of mouth, or dreamed as he listened to broadcasts or studied recordings. But he had no doubt that he was in the right place. Addie Parker’s son would take Manhattan if given the shot.

  AS CHARLIE WAS surprised to discover, Buster Smith wasn’t exactly feeling the same way about New York. He was doing a little writing for Basie, working around a bit, but the Professor of Kansas City still hadn’t managed to create the kind of impact in this town as he had back home. New York was full of so many good musicians, and there was so much going on, that it was easy to get passed over. A talented player could find little gigs here and there, but if you wanted to break out, you needed to get with a successful band, or put your own group together.

  The Professor seemed as though he was waiting for something to happen—something that wasn’t arriving as quickly as he expected. He’d never been much for jamming all night and running the streets, and that kept him from rising in the uptown or downtown pecking order. But neither was he a beggar or a complainer. He was solid as ever, as a player and as a friend. He encouraged Charlie to get out there on the town and find out what he could do. He invited him to sleep at the apartment during the day, when Mrs. Smith was at work, and even let him use his alto for gigs whenever it was available—which was plenty these days. Since the Professor spent his time hanging out with old Basie over at the Woodside, or talking with some of the other Kansas City guys, that gave Charlie the run of the place.

  Seeing how Buster Smith was faring, Charlie realized that he’d have to make some changes to his own plans. It was obvious that good things didn’t come to you automatically in New York City. He wasn’t thinking about starting a group of his own, not yet; his hope was that Smith would start a band and ask Charlie to join, giving him his toehold in New York and a steady living. In truth, Charlie wasn’t even thinking that hard about earning a living—all he really wanted was to play—but he knew he’d have to find some kind of money somewhere, which put a splash of dread in the game. There it was. So what? Nothing in New York could be any worse than the hunger, the cold, and the anxiety of that long, rattling railroad trip east.

  And there was more: here in New York, Charlie was surrounded by a quality of Negro life and excitement that he’d never witnessed before. In all of this man’s Harlem, and all of this Manhattan, there had to be something for him. All he needed was a chance to prove himself, to let everyone know that he was serious now, that the lazy boy was gone. Not that many people in New York knew who he’d been, of course. But it was still true: the guy who walked the streets with Junior Williams back in Kansas City, talking about what he wanted to do, was in the country’s fastest game now. He had shown them in Kansas City. He’d gotten his respect in Chicago. New York couldn’t be all that different.

  The Professor’s apartment was close to everything. There were jamming clubs and hangout bars up the street, a block away, and then more a few blocks over from there. Once he got cleaned up and a little rested, some food in his stomach and a pat on the back from Buster Smith, Charlie hit the streets. He started moving around, looking and saying nothing, trying to notice how musicians related to one another and what to expect from Harlem life. He saw the terrible look on the faces of those who lived in the streets or who had been taken all the way down by alcoholism, but he also saw how well dressed people were in Harlem; he would have to pull himself up to something like their standards. He had snuck out of Chicago with some of Goon Gardner’s duds and a pocketful of money he’d gotten pawning Goon’s clarinet. But now Goon’s clothes were the worse for hoboing wear and the money was gone with the wind.

  This was no town for a ragamuffin. It didn’t take Charlie long to discover that the night spots where the big-timers hung out—on 133rd Street, known as the Jungle—were off-limits to guys like him. Before you could get in where Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Chu Berry, Roy Eldridge, and those kinds of people gathered, you needed more than some talent and some enthusiasm. The staff was genial, but they meant serious business, and the people who went in were groomed and polished and smelling good, musicians or listeners, Negroes or whites.

  Charlie wandered through this obvious capital of Negro America with the same acute curiosity that had driven him from club to club with Rebecca as a boy back in Kansas City, peering into doorways, trying to glimpse what those people were doing in there. The high-style stratum of Harlem night
life looked like it rose up off the pages of fashion magazines. He spotted big-time musicians coming out of barbershops and beauty parlors, driving down the streets in their cars, standing in front of the Woodside, or coming out of the YMCA. And he saw the Negro upper crust: respectable types such as teachers, doctors, real estate agents, lawyers, politicians, beauticians, chefs, morticians, and owners of restaurants, bars, and what have you. He was savvy enough to pick out the well-to-do hustlers, the ones with an extra pound of ice in their eyes and the swagger that barely concealed the violent confidence of a dirty boxer.

  Charlie watched them all as he walked and walked the boulevards and neighborhoods of Harlem. He would take up a nonchalant position up the block from some passing spectacle, moving along if the block was too clean or if some local doorman started after him with a bat, telling him to get wherever the hell he was going. It was easier on the big streets, like Seventh Avenue and Lenox Avenue, where the action was nonstop. Through it all stood Charlie, watching in silence, wondering how long he’d remain in this strange exile. As he later told Jay McShann, one day he stood out in front of the Savoy Ballroom in his shabby clothes, a nickel and a nail in his pocket, and realized that he felt as happy as it was possible for him to feel.

  AS ONE WHO hailed from a wide-open town, Charlie soon began to learn how things went in the uptown underground, in that haze where the hustlers, pimps, and gangsters made their livings. There were bloody stories connected to some of the rooms where jazz was played, and some of them led to the Negro numbers runners who made policy gambling part of the Harlem culture.

  One such establishment, not far from Charlie’s base of operations, was the Turf Club, at 111 West 136th Street. It was a fancy restaurant with a gambling game upstairs, both of them run by a fleshy West Indian named Casper Holstein, the inventor of the very numbers racket that Dutch Schultz had bloodied and kidnapped his way into control of, knocking Negroes from the top for good.

  The Dutchman reigned over the numbers until 1935, when he was given a finalizing lead nightcap after promising to kill New York’s syndicate-busting state prosecutor, Thomas E. Dewey. In the wake of Schultz’s murder, LaGuardia redoubled his pressure on the Sicilian, Jewish, and Irish lawbreakers who operated different levels of the syndicate, lording it over the docks, the prostitution and drug trades, and the gambling underworld, along with scattered smuggling and hijacking operations.

  As shrewd as they were brutal, Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, who steered the executive branch of the underworld, knew that the little mayor did not toady to thugs. The only way to survive was to work around him.

  Fiorello LaGuardia, in short, was no Tom Pendergast.

  One of the disreputable rooms was also one of the first places where Charlie Parker started feeling comfortable—socially, at least. It was Monroe’s Uptown House on 134th Street and Seventh Avenue, just a block from Buster Smith’s apartment. The room functioned as a homemade salon and barroom business office for its owner, Clark Monroe, a hustler all the way to the molecules. Almost six feet tall and handsome, light-brown-skinned, sporting such finely straightened hair that you might wonder if it actually grew out of his head like that, Monroe was always walking with glossy shoes, in impressive suits, surrounded by women. Clark Monroe was living that nighttime highlife—a luxury he’d inherited from Barron Wilkins, the room’s former owner.

  Tales still floated around about Wilkins, who’d been a big deal in the twenties, when Harlem was in vogue. He ran a joint that catered to the light and the damn near white as well as to those sometimes vivacious, sometimes corny, sometimes voyeuristic Caucasians who cruised uptown in their limousines, hot to mix their champagne tastes with the hotsy-totsy rhythm and the decadence-for-sale of darkest Harlem. All his customers, his money, his girlfriends, and his intimate expectations, however, weren’t enough to save Barron Wilkins. He was gummed up in so many shadow empires that, when he was murdered by a Negro pimp named Charleston, some said it was done on a syndicate contract. His room remained largely unused until Monroe took it over.

  Clark Monroe had no such violent fate coming. He was a smooth type who could get just about anything anybody wanted, or could call someone to take nearly anything an itinerant but efficient thief brought in and help sell it to the readiest buyer. Monroe collected a little at both ends of such deals, fencing hot dresses, silverware, overcoats, watches, jewelry, and plenty else, all of it presented with enough finesse to prevent the uninitiated from discovering that some low-life trade was taking place nearby them.

  Monroe enjoyed lording it over the night in his joint, where he would stroll in after midnight looking every inch the potentate ready to get all the jobs done. He had a real love for the music, and a real affection for musicians, though he didn’t offer them much more than a place to play and some food to soak up the booze afterward. Still, if you wanted to better your musicianship and could swing, you were welcome in Clark Monroe’s—even if your clothes were as substandard as Charlie Parker’s.

  Charlie soon found himself in the musical second line, the jam sessions where journeyman jazzmen got together late at night and played for a few dollars, over at Monroe’s joint or up at Dan Wall’s Chili House on Seventh Avenue between 139th and 140th Streets. At first he didn’t do much more than stand around holding Buster Smith’s alto case under his arm. Sometimes the musicians ignored him; other times they would ask him to unpack his horn. Then, after waiting his turn, he would take off into the music, his good ear moving him through the tunes until he found an opening to showcase what was becoming his style, alternating breathless passages of fast notes and the long, sometimes mournfully shrill calls of his Kansas City blues heritage.

  The response was neither encouraging nor the opposite. Most of the musicians just looked his way for a moment and then focused on the next one blowing a suitable style through the tune.

  No matter what reaction his playing garnered on any given night, one thing is almost certain: given his empty pockets, Charlie made sure whenever possible to leave the bandstand soon enough to make it to Monroe’s, where if you blew for a prescribed amount of time you would get free vittles. He knew how obnoxious it would seem to run in at the last minute, trying to get a meal after only a few notes; blundering through the after-hours etiquette could turn people against him, and sacrificing respect was one risk he couldn’t afford to take. His awareness of social nuances, which showed in the way he carried himself, quietly made Charlie a welcome visitor at Monroe’s kitchen, his full plate a symbol of his fringe membership in the circle he was cautiously attempting to join.

  Charlie took good care of Buster Smith’s horn and dutifully stayed in the streets until his mentor’s apartment was free and he could get some rest. He routinely fell into a deep sleep there with his clothes still on, driving Mrs. Smith up the wall when she returned at the end of the day to see him dead to the world atop the covers, dirty shoes still on his feet. The boy was just strange, she thought; no amount of complaining could get him to undress. He couldn’t even say why. But he was so sweet and charming that she forgave him every time.

  When Charlie awoke, he would wash and get a bit of that good old home cooking under his belt as he told the Professor of his Harlem adventures. In his pressed suit and polished shoes, drawing on his cigar the way he used to during those long afternoons he spent writing music in the Kansas City clubs, Smith assured Charlie that things would come around, that he had the talent—and the right kind of determination—to find whatever he wanted in New York.

  What New York had to offer Charlie deepened his already great hunger to get more and more together with his horn. Even as his confidence grew, and he began to get noticed on the New York scene, the ever-present loner beneath his genial surface started to resurface. Jobs began to turn up, but he didn’t always take them, lest they interfere with what he was working on. He would rather be broke and closer to sounding the way he wanted to than be earning some money—even if it prevented him from buying the clothes he needed
to show up on a proper bandstand.

  Charlie was also encountering some of the same resistance that Lester Young had when he came to New York six or seven years earlier. People were always telling him how to play and what he should do with his sound. Where Lester had been told his sound was too soft, Charlie was told that he needed to do away with that hard, ugly tone and cultivate one that was softer and rounder, prettier and more pleasing to the ear, like the plush, urbane, and sensuous tones that Benny Carter or Johnny Hodges had perfected. The guys he was spending time with—many of them second-stringers—told him what he should be listening to, around town and on records. Those guys, all of them intent on getting to the top themselves, or as close to it as possible, had plenty to say, lots of New York whys and wherefores, most of it delivered with neither restraint nor respect. Charlie listened and nodded, never arguing in defense of himself, but inside him a strain of resentment began to spread.

  BIDDY FLEET WAS jamming with a little four-piece group when he first noticed Charlie coming into Dan Wall’s Chili House. The spot was “mostly an eating place,” with a large room in the back where musicians could play and “the manager didn’t mind it.” Charlie took the saxophone case he was carrying, put it down unopened, and just stood there saying nothing. For all Fleet knew, he could have been bringing in someone else’s instrument and waiting for the owner to show up. Maybe the guys had asked Charlie to play out of curiosity; maybe they were looking for something to spark the kind of excitement all musicians hope for from the moment they leave their homes and head off to the evening bandstand. It was impossible to know.

  Fleet was a stocky, dark-brown-skinned man with conked hair and a short body who wore a fine-fitting suit and shoes shining like a costly showroom car. He took to Charlie on the spot, noticing in his improvisations that the saxophonist was interested in things out of the ordinary, even if they were guaranteed to bother some people. The guitarist had become accustomed to the odd huff of criticism himself, harassed for strumming fancy chords that were unfamiliar to the bulk of Harlem jazz musicians, who were used to improvising off the melody and a bit of skeletal harmony.