Читать книгу A Road Trip Into America's Hidden Heart - Traveling the Back Roads, Backwoods and Back Yards - John Drake Robinson - Страница 10

I don’t know if Jesse James ever ate fried chicken. Historians don’t seem to care much about that. But I care. And I found a spot in Jesse’s back yard that I suspect he would’ve liked. Laid back. Unpretentious. And good.

The first thing Jesse would like about Harmer’s Café is that it’s as secluded as a hideout. At least it’s secluded from major highways. You won’t see a sign on I-29 directing you to tiny Edgerton, home of Harmer’s, since interstate signs won’t point to any town that sits two blacktops away from the highway. And you won’t see any billboards touting Harmer’s charms. It’s the kind of place that relies entirely on word-of-mouth.

Mouth is the operative word. Harmer’s eschews fancy visual cues. There’s no mood music, no corporate brand. The restaurant’s interior offers a refreshing ambiance that’s, well, real. Real linoleum. Real vinyl. Real fake pictures on the walls. In this age of corporate color schemes and themey menus, plastic décor and cardboard taste, Harmer’s hearkens back to the time when small town corner cafés had character. The booths, a victory of function over form, jut from the walls and point to randomly positioned four-top tables in the middle of the room. To paraphrase the Bard: the food’s the thing.

Harmer’s serves catfish on Fridays and Saturdays and fried chicken on Thursdays and Sundays. In between, main courses range from meatloaf to ham, served blue-plate style. Each side gets the loving attention you’d give your fiancée. For example, the green beans aren’t just green beans. They snuggle with onions, brown sugar and bacon.

Because my body is a temple, I had the chicken fried steak with mashed potatoes, smothered in cream gravy. Stewed tomatoes added some color. For extra fortification, and upon recommendation, I punished a piece of chocolate cream pie. Satisfied, I pushed away from the table and paid cash, the customary currency of the small town café, although I hear Harmer’s recently began accepting credit cards.

Taking one last look around, I caught a glimpse of the kitchen through the slit where the cooks pass food to the servers. A rush of gratitude compelled me to stride over and shout a thank-you through the hole in the wall. Cooks don’t hear “thank you” enough. Just ask ’em. On my way out, I fished for a complimentary toothpick from the little metal dispenser on the counter. After lunch, a toothpick becomes more than a toothpick. It’s a memory chip, an afternoon reminder of a satisfying meal.

As the Kansas City skyline jumped above the horizon, I could see the old Art Deco skyscrapers standing defiantly against their sleeker, newer sisters. Behind them is the unique silhouette of a penthouse restaurant shaped like a flying saucer atop the old Hyatt Regency Hotel. Even though the hotel has changed names, the flying saucer still sits atop the building, a constant reminder to me that this was the grisly scene of a skywalk collapse in the hotel’s lobby back in 1981.

The collapse killed 114 people who had gathered for happy hour at a Friday tea dance to celebrate the birth of bebop in Kansas City. The huge crowd was jumpin’ to the music, and the highest skywalk couldn’t bear the weight. It gave way, pancaking dancers on two skywalks beneath, all crashing to the crowded dance floor below. I was driving through Kansas City on that day, and I remember seeing scores of ambulances and rescue engines screaming down I-70. I turned my radio to a news station and got sketchy details of the story. I could see the top of the hotel 20 blocks away. Its flying saucer looked normal. No smoke. No fire. But the lobby was a deadly gumbo of steel and concrete and flesh and blood.

Today I thought about a different Hyatt death story.

I heard about it from the lips of a good friend. Among the things Bob Smith does well, storytelling is at the top of the list. He swears this story is true. Bob’s not dead. But for the purposes of this story, he became a dead guy.

Bob got mad at Kansas City’s old Hyatt Regency Hotel. Earlier he had called the hotel and booked a room for the night. As the day progressed, he realized that his work was finished early, and he could drive home. So he called his assistant to have her cancel the room. But the hotel refused. The hotel’s policy said that rooms must be canceled before 3 p.m. of the day of occupancy. Bob’s assistant called at 3:05. So the room was his.

Fine. He went to the hotel lobby and calmly approached the desk clerk, a young man probably in his first job.

“Can you give me Bob Smith’s room number, please?” Bob asked.

“Are you Bob Smith?”

“No,” Bob lied.

“I’m sorry, sir, but the hotel can’t give out information like that. I’ll ring his room for you....”

“Well, that won’t work,” Bob said. “You see, Mr. Smith died last night, and I’m from the family. We’ve decided that since he had this room, and we couldn’t cancel it, we’d just go ahead and have the visitation here instead of at the funeral home. You know, we’ll save expenses. Oh, and the casket will be here in a few minutes. Can we get a couple of bellhops to help us get the casket on the elevator? And that marquee over there... we’ll use that to announce the floor where Bob’s body will be. Mourners will start arriving about 4:30.”

The blood drained from the desk clerk’s face. “Please, sir, tell me you’re joking.”

“I am,” Bob said. “And please tell your management what I think of their cancellation policy.”

Just a few blocks from there, in what some people call a rougher part of town, the sidewalks of 12th Street and Vine are worn thin by the heels of whores who strolled where Lieber and Stoller immortalized the song “Goin’ to Kansas City.” Down the street I stopped to take part in a ritual that’s been happening every Saturday night since at least the Roaring ’20s. Well, the ritual began only after Saturday night gave way to Sunday morning, after nightclubs—the Spinning Wheel and Dante’s Inferno, the Hi Hat and the Hey Hey—kicked the last patrons out the door. The musicians regrouped, climbing the creaking stairs to the second floor of a nondescript brick building on the fringe of 18th and Vine Streets, the epicenter of bebop. This building is its schoolhouse, where on early Sunday morning young wide-eyed cats would get a lesson, standing next to Count Basie and Charlie Parker and Big Joe Turner and Mary Lou Williams and Walter Page, who invented the walking bass.

It’s the Musicians Mutual Federation, a union for black musicians, founded back in the days when African Americans were not admitted to white restaurants or white hotels or white country clubs or white Army barracks or white labor unions. Every Saturday night after the bars closed, every major jazz talent who played KC stopped at this address for the regular Saturday night jam. On this late Saturday night, I thought I’d take a turn at the piano. The McFarland brothers showed up with their trumpet and sax and tap shoes and talent, and joined some equally impressive young phenoms. I sat on my hands until 4 a.m., mesmerized, and never got up my courage to play.

I returned to my favorite home away from home, the stately old Raphael Hotel. Almost forgotten, it sits across a creek from the Plaza—the world’s first shopping mall—and has sheltered shoppers in its cozy confines for the better part of a century. It got a makeover recently, and while the guest rooms got new upholstery and pillows and flat-screen TVs, they also kept the bathrooms with the postage stamp-sized white tile, and the boxy little elevator with the retractable scissor-gate door that yearns for its old friend, the elevator operator.