Trips: First Time in K.C. Bill Scheller

TRIPS

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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 Limiteda 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

still brow-moppingly humid. At the hotel I stopped at the soda machine and nodded hello to a fiftyish black guy in a grey duster who was lounging in a lobby chair. He was the night elevator operator.

“How do you like Kansas City?” he asked.

“Nice. Tired me out, though. I’ve been walking all day.”

“Where you all been?” His voice was avuncular, friendly.

“All over. I was just over at Arthur Bryant’s.”

“Arthur Bryant’s. Is that so. Now how you know about Arthur Bryant’s?”

I told him I had read about it in the East – Calvin Trillin used to sing its praises in The New Yorker. The elevator man knew it well; he’d been there just the day before, and even knew Bryant himself. “Yes sir, that’s all Arthur knows is barbecue. Been at it since this big. I wish you could have met him, he’s a fine gentleman.”

We went up to my floor. He had the elevator stopped with the door still closed, and it was getting stuffy. We talked about Bryant’s a little more, then just as it looked as if he was going to open the door he said, “Now, anything you need, you just ask me. You like to do any steppin’ out with the girls, you see me.”

“Ah, I don’t usually go in for that kind of thing,” I answered. I felt like I came across as a jerk, or a good Christian, or a guy who played for the other team.

“Now, I’m talkin’ young and clean …”

The last resort –I told him I was waiting for someone at home. Now I felt like a high school kid saving himself up. Well, he was nice about it, and clapped me on the shoulder like an old black uncle. I gave his big belly a tap and said, “See you later.” A couple of days later, early in the morning, I was heading downtown to catch the eastbound Southwest Limited for Chicago. Just outside the station, there was the same bum, the bread and lunchmeat man. “Say, Bud,” he said as I walked past. “Can I ask you something? I’m catching a freight to St. Louis, and . . .” I smiled and cut him short. “I thought you were headed for Amarillo.” He was good-natured in his discovery and defeat. “I missed that train,” he said.

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