Kansas City Lightning (25 page)

Though Charlie was the soul of attentiveness and manners when he was in Buster Smith's presence, once the job was done he was more than ready to stay out all night long. Those long nights included running over to Fourth and Main, where an Italian woman known as “Moms” sold marijuana, four reefers for a quarter, a full red Prince Albert tobacco can measured into a paper bag for three or four dollars if you had it. Since the automobile accident, Charlie had learned how to clean out the seeds and the stems, pinch off the sometimes gummy marijuana into a cigarette paper, lick it, and inhale the smoke with the loud viper puff that was more a theatrical gesture among reefer smokers than a necessity. The smoke in his bloodstream slowed things down; it brightened the sound of music, the textures of voices, the songs of birds, the industrial noises of city life. He even put his digital virtuosity to work on the party trick of rolling a cigarette with one hand. He also started experimenting with the stimulant Benzedrine, which allowed him to go on and on, practicing, jamming, walking the streets and looking in windows, talking of his dreams with friends, and remaining out until those who'd gone off to bed hours before were awake again and ready to play.

Once everyone else went home, Charlie sometimes stayed in Paseo Park,
alone with his saxophone on a bench that had been filled with musicians a few hours earlier, all of them swinging the blues and going through hard tunes, neither the people in the neighborhood nor the police bothering them. Popping more Benzedrine whenever he found himself about to fall asleep, Charlie stayed out until his mother came and took him home. He later told his third wife, Doris Parker, that if not for Addie he might never have gone home; staying out was too exciting.

Sometimes it would be two or three days before Addie found him, nearly muttering in a hoarse and tired voice, mouth dry, lips white, eyes ablaze, joints in his knees and arms aching, his body smelling from not having changed his clothes, but his soul feeling as satisfied as his body was exhausted. It was during this period that Charlie began to notice that his appetites were larger than those of others, that he started to sense that he was somehow a danger to himself.

On the job, Charlie Parker was punctual, and at first Smith had few real problems with him. Now and then Charlie nodded off, but no one really understood what was happening with him. Hard drugs were still novel then; most musicians either drank or smoked reefers. Parker later told fellow heroin addicts that morphine was the first high that pulled him down into the tiger trap of addiction. It was strange: morphine was an upper-class high, one that moved through the decadent world of casual substance use that Cole Porter wrote of in “I Get a Kick out of You.” Though many claimed to have influenced Charlie musically, no one seems to have taken credit for the first time he was shown how to prepare the powder and shoot it into his arm, for the moment when he was introduced to the slowed-down, drowsy world of sedation and chaos.

Still, there are tales that shed some light on Charlie's darkness. According to one Negro hustler who ran an after-hours gathering spot called the Happy Hollow, heroin didn't come to Kansas City until around 1940, when he went north and got permission from the Chicago mob to bring it in himself. If he is to be believed, then, the only thing Charlie Parker could have scored in 1937 was morphine stolen from a pharmaceutical dispensary or a hospital. This connection to the medical world is highly possible; some of the old heads from the time remembered a woman known as “Little Mama” who worked as a nurse or in some similar capacity at a Kansas City hospital, and who, legend has it, introduced the
young musician to hard-core dope. Little Mama is said to have been small, dark-skinned, nicely proportioned, and vivacious. If Charlie's drug struggles began with her, that would make her a female counterforce to the power of Addie Parker, nurturing the gummy darkness that would stain the course of his life. Whoever the culprit was, bassist Buddy Jones told Robert Reisner that Parker himself described the beginning to him: “Getting high at fifteen, Bird told me what he felt. He pulled out $1.30, which was all he had and which was worth more in those days and he said, ‘Do you mean there's something like this in the world? How much of it will this buy?' ”

Charlie's curiosity about narcotics may even have been related to his affection for Sherlock Holmes mysteries, which he read during his teenage years. Arthur Conan Doyle's tales had the kind of intellectual materials that would resonate with a curious but introspective young man like Charlie. The detective Holmes was no average person. He was gifted to a superior extent, but alienated by his peculiarities and his focus on elements missed by those who moved more casually through life. Parker wouldn't have had to read very far into the Holmes stories before encountering the second of Conan Doyle's Baker Street tales,
The Sign of Four
, with its startling opening:

If Charlie Parker the fledgling professional was looking for ways to rationalize his burgeoning dependence on drugs, he could easily have found one in the example of Holmes, who goes on from that passage to exhibit incredible powers of detection, a mastery of large implications divined through small details. If Charlie read the story before encountering the sweet haze of morphine, his curi
osity is understandable. Each Doyle sentence is a road leading into a world where calculated or desperate destruction became comprehensible through the heightened gifts of a great detective. The Holmes stories transcend constraints of race or class, since any brilliant young person in the modern world might identify with a detective solving the riddles of the universe.

The Holmes stories, of course, were narrated by his friend and helpmate Dr. John Watson, and there was something further about the narcotic lifestyle to be learned from Watson's reaction in the very next paragraph of
The Sign of Four
:

Watson's attitude toward Holmes's behavior—troubled, yet guiltily indulgent—anticipated the attitude of many of Charlie Parker's admirers as his career grew. When Watson does question the great detective about his drug use, noting its potential danger to his health, Holmes responds: “I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment.” Pressing Holmes further, Watson mentions not only the drug's effects on the body but also the “black reaction” that comes over his idol under the sway of the drug. “Surely the game is hardly worth the candle,” the doctor urges. “Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed? Remember that I speak not only as one comrade
to another but as a medical man to one for whose constitution he is to some extent answerable.” Holmes almost welcomes the doctor's questions, but his answer is hardly comforting: “My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.”

It would take a while, though, before Charlie Parker's comrades even recognized what was affecting him. To Buster Smith, he seemed no more than a somewhat fatigued but enthusiastic fellow when he took his place on the bandstand at the Antlers. “Son, don't be sleeping on my bandstand,” Smith said whenever he caught Parker's head starting to droop forward. “Sleep at home. Get yourself some rest, son. No sleeping up here.”

But Charlie didn't let anything get in the way of his work—at least not yet. He was too impressed by Buster Smith, so much so that he was starting to call him “Dad,” which was hardly surprising, as he was trying to learn everything he heard Smith play. Somehow, he managed to keep his wild side in check around his first flesh-and-blood mentor. Smith had no idea what made Charlie seem to need so much sleep, and Charlie was able to keep him guessing: all he had to do was snap his head up, open his eyes, and become attentive, smiling slightly as though acknowledging that he just needed a long night's rest.

Once he got back out onto the street after the show, Charlie kept up his other apprenticeship—in the codes and activities of the nightlife, the solid rules of the evening. Those rules were segregated, at least during certain hours. During those hours the musicians and the people in positions of service appeared and did their jobs, the former using instruments to turn the smoky air of a nightclub into a paradise of rhythm, lyricism, and blues, while the waiters appeared and disappeared at the tables with an elegant balancing of drinks, food, and advice for the evening—much as the white train passengers of the time were served by other graceful Negroes, among whom spillage and accidents were as rare as the appearances of intelligent Negroes in American films.

If a Negro musician hit it off with a white woman, there were ways of pursuing that interest, too. Later, the musician could have a light-skinned guy
take a cab to her neighborhood, pick her up, and bring her to one of the whorehouses on Tenth Street, or to an after-hours spot where he could get a room for the night. Of course, there were still limits—one of them being that the woman couldn't be attractive. It didn't get
that
liberal: as long as she was stringy-haired or old and shapeless, the club owner would turn away if he saw boudoir looks being exchanged. At some of the clubs, Negro musicians were allowed to sit at the tables with customers; this was tolerated almost exclusively in rooms owned by the Italian gangsters, who were so powerful that they did whatever they wanted and allowed whatever they felt like allowing.

After hours, yet another set of rules played themselves out at the “spook breakfasts,” which began after everything else was over—starting at four or five in the morning, often extending till noon. At the spook breakfasts, held at a different club each week, musicians played while obliging locals served up hot dogs, hamburgers, and chili—quick food, nothing that took too much time. The spook breakfasts were wide-open racially. When white customers felt comfortable rubbing shoulders (and whatever else) with Negroes, they could come and live for a few hours in a world of ethnic diversity after dark. White musicians who had heard about Kansas City swing brought their horns if they felt they were ready, their ears if they felt they weren't. Everybody in the nightlife knew about the spook breakfasts, and they were never at a loss for customers.

Even more private than the spook breakfasts were the kinds of after-hours shows given at the Antlers on Saturday nights. Admission to these shows was restricted, more or less, to those who knew Bus Pasler personally; they might be rich, they might be politicians, they might be black or white, but if they were tight with Pasler and could pay the price, their way was cleared to the upstairs room where the “freak shows” took place. “In the freak shows they had freedom the backwards way,” one musician recalled. “Everybody [was] looking at something strange, or they was up in front of people
doing
something strange.”

The shows, also known to the musicians as “smokers,” generally involved sex acts presented in an almost vaudeville style, with the band performing musical backgrounds for different kinds of erotic exhibitions. Men in dresses were seen performing oral sex on other men, or being mounted by men after being lubri
cated in a slow, sensual preamble. Women had sex with other women. Some puffed cigars with their vaginas; others had sex with animals. On those secret Saturday nights, playing third alto in Buster Smith's band, sixteen-year-old Charlie Parker had his eyes opened yet further to the difference between what went on in the conventional world and what happened when people chose to reject the laws of polite society, to satiate their appetites, whatever they might be. It was a spectacle to erode one's confidence in rules and laws, in anything beyond the pursuit of mutually agreed upon satisfaction. Morality had its peaks and valleys, and in Kansas City, those down at the bottom seemed as confident in what they were doing as those on the top.

The world of the musicians themselves, however, rose high above the corruption that surrounded it. There was a feeling of community among them when they were out in the streets after their jobs were done, or as they prepared themselves to look their best for the next engagement, some dance or college date at home or not so far away. It was a world in which the smell of barbecued ribs, chicken, and chili; the feel of new shirts; the fresh scent of leather shoes; and the nosegay of soaps, pomades, and colognes added up to expressions of excellence and visions of glamour.

“Musicians were strictly following rib joints and chili joints after work,” bandleader Jay McShann recalled. “Guys would have them a taste or two or three or more through the night; some might take some drags off a reefer; either one or both would make you hungry. Your stomach would be crying out for
something
to arrive and come on down there and get to filling it up. None of this has stopped you from continuing to have a little taste between shows, out in the alley behind the club with guys, that sort of thing. One more sip and just a little bit more hunger. So the hours are passing, you're up there sweating and swinging, and your stomach is still crying the blues, louder by the minute. With all this activity, you knew you had to get something down in your stomach, and by the end of the gig, you wanted it to be hot, it had to be a solid, and it better be
right
.