Kansas City Lightning (34 page)

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 nightlife 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 twen
ties, 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.

Biddy Fleet didn't particularly care what those New York musicians thought, as long as it didn't get in the way of his employment. He was a veteran of the challenging Colonnade jam sessions down in Washington, DC, where titans like the burly Chu Berry and the elfin Don Byas came to the bandstand and blew through all twelve keys with tones as big as tobacco barns, slithering out highly sophisticated chords that either you could play or you couldn't. They didn't mess around down there; the harder it was, the better they liked it. After finishing off an invention, they would stand in solemn repose or sit with their heads tilted as they listened, their eyes full of disdain or gravely appreciative corroboration.

Fleet considered himself a “symphony hound,” which was a way of saying that he was impressed by the notes he heard in concert music, where the harmony was richer. As bassist Jimmy Butts said, “He was very knowledgeable about music, and he wouldn't hesitate to tell you what was right and what wasn't. He didn't do it in a nasty way, though. He was just sure and easy about it, on the calm side—but he would definitely tell you if you got out of line in that music. Oh, he would tell you.”

Whenever Fleet plucked something Charlie didn't understand, the saxophonist would ask, without hesitation or embarrassment, “Would you please do that again?” He was a lean Kansas City kid with a good ear and a quick mind, Fleet remembered, as well as an increasing interest in playing intriguing, unexpected notes as he shifted from chord to chord. “Bird was playing when I met him, and sounding as the Bird sounds,” Fleet said. “Bird wasn't satisfied with the way he'd been doing, and I imagine that's why he knew there had to be something else. See, Bird kept thinking.”

This shared concern with breaking out of common territory brought them together for informal skull sessions, where they talked about the chords of certain tunes; often the guitarist would pull out his instrument and illustrate what he meant. To Fleet, it seemed as though Charlie was looking for someone to confirm what he was already hearing in his head, the thing that was the other side of both the unflappable authority of his Kansas City blues and the tunes he already knew
how to get through.