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First Time in K.C. By Bill Scheller
It was the first of June, 1980.
I pulled into
Kansas City from L.A. on the Southwest Limited a little after seven and walked out into a muggy Sunday morning. I’d barely gotten down the station steps when I was met by another railroad traveler, who rode a different kind of train. “I just got off a freight,” he told me. He was tidy for a bum, with iron-gray hair neatly combed back. “I’m catching another one for Amarillo, but first I need some spare change for a loaf of bread and some lunchmeat.” There was only a slight slur to his speech, only a slight reminder of his last bout with whatever had distracted him from bread and lunchmeat. I told him I only had about fifty cents in change. “It’ll look like a million bucks to me,” he said. “God bless you.” We went our separate ways. Mine led to the Midwest Hotel, a sorrowful old place I’d called from the station. I walked into the lobby, where the desk faced a battery of vending machines. The clerk was an old man in a polyester imitation of a seersucker suit, tieless, his pants held up with suspenders – he sat at a switchboard, the old kind with plugs and wires, getting flustered because another guy and I were waiting to check in, and the person he was talking to wouldn’t let him go. Finally he switched the plug, took a message for somebody on another line, and
got up to deal with us. Meanwhile a dowdy older woman with too much lipstick was checking out. A middle-aged man with pomaded hair took my bag and ran the old elevator up a few floors. The door opened on two maids, and he told them they’d have to move their piles of clean sheets out of my room. One maid looked put out. Then the subject of Reggie came up – where was Reggie? And who the hell was he? We got to my room and the one maid said, “Come on, Reggie, you’ll have to move.” Reggie emerged from the bathroom. He was maybe thirty, with nothing particularly disreputable looking about him; he probably worked as some sort of factotum at the hotel and loafed in unoccupied rooms. On my bed there was a napkin, an apple, and a hardboiled egg with a fractured shell. The TV was on, with pastor Truman Dollar asking for “fifty dollars if you want the two cassettes with important messages.” Cheap at the price: “This namby-pamby spineless religion that refuses to call a spade a spade is not worth havin’,” said the Reverend Dollar. The next night I walked the long way back from Arthur Bryant’s, the famous barbecue joint, stuffed to the gills with brisket, sauce, and puffy white bread. It had rained while I was in Bryant’s, but the air was 9
