The Soul of Baseball (4 page)

B
uck O’Neil made time. He said that moving is the secret to living. Moving, he said, is the opposite of dying. Buck sank into the leather seat of his dented Cadillac. It was five forty-five in the morning. Drops of rain splattered against the windshield and the beads trickled like teardrops toward the wipers. The windows fogged from the inside. Buck shivered, mostly in disgust. He was going to Nicodemus to talk baseball. His ride was late.

“All right,” he griped, “we gotta make time. Let’s get this show on the road.”

Buck reached out his jittery right hand and turned on the radio. Smooth jazz played. Buck never understood how those two words,
smooth
and
jazz,
ever got together. Celebrity marriage. He snapped off the music. Smooth jazz sounded sacrilegious here. Buck’s Cadillac was parked on the corner of Eighteenth and Vine in Kansas City. Through the mist and fog you could see the street sign marking the spot. Jazz fans still took photographs of that sign. Charlie Parker had grown up here, Lester Young, Bennie Moten, Hootie McShann, Big Joe Turner, Mary Lou Williams, magical jazz names. Once, in a bar nearby, late at night, Count Basie and his small orchestra improvised a little Kansas City song for a radio broadcast. “What do you call that?” the radioman asked. They had always called the song “Blue Balls,” but Basie knew that would not do on radio. He looked at the clock and saw it was 1
A.M.

“We call it ‘One O’Clock Jump,’” Basie said. It became his most enduring classic.

It was like that then. Music poured out of every gin joint on every corner. Kansas City was Boss Tom Pendergast’s town then, and it was wide open. The nights were lit by neon, dice rolled, slots spun, ice clicked, whiskey soaked the air, kings and jacks popped in back rooms. Waitresses at Dante’s Inferno wore devil costumes, and the Hey Hay Club offered shots of whiskey and marijuana cigarettes for the same price: twenty-five cents. Gangsters, hookers, angels, sharks, suckers, preachers, loners, and ballplayers brushed shoulders. Kansas City jazz was a little bit blues, a little bit gospel, and a whole lot of winging it. The background was a four-beat rhythm, the walking rhythm, straightforward as a Baptist preacher.
BUM-bababa-BUM-bababa-BUM-bababa-BUM
. Sometimes a song lasted an hour. In the wee small hours, after their gigs, the best jazz players gathered near the corner of Eighteenth and Vine, and they dueled with music. The musicians fed off each other’s riffs, stole each other’s sounds, crashed each other’s rhythm, and shouted the blues at each other until past morning. There were no ticket prices for what they called spook breakfasts. Buck said he never again heard anything quite like it.

“I dreamed last night, I was standing on Eighteenth and Vine,” Big Joe Turner, the singing bartender, hollered at the Sunset Club, while Pete Johnson banged on piano. Later, in the 1950s, Joe Turner would record
Shake, Rattle & Roll,
which kicked off rock and roll. By then, Eighteenth and Vine was already dead.

Buck O’Neil looked out his Cadillac window—Eighteenth and Vine was still dead. Politicians had tried to revive this corner. They cleaned up the place, tore down some buildings, and lined the sidewalks with streetlamps. They fronted empty office buildings with a new brick made to look like old bricks. This was supposed to make old buildings seem new but look old; it was all very confusing. Nothing moved. Streets looked frozen, like a Hollywood set waiting for a marker to snap and a director to shout “Action!” Rain splashed on slick black streets, and the neon sign of the new Gem Theater reflected off the puddles, casting an artistic blue tint on the scene.

The new Gem Theater was a perfect symbol of what Eighteenth and Vine had become. It had been built to honor the old Gem Theater, where people gathered to watch movies. The only trouble: They did not show movies in the new Gem. It held a few events, a couple of concerts, but mostly it remained empty. It wasn’t the same at all. The old Gem had been filled every night. Buck remembered one particular day when he sat in the balcony for a movie at the old Gem. First, though, they showed highlights of a fight between Joe Louis and an actor named Jack Roper. Roper had hoped to stir some interest before the fight by calling Louis an overrated ape. He only stirred Louis’s anger. Roper landed one stunning right-hand punch in the fight. This woke up Joe Louis, who promptly pummeled Roper into a trembling heap two minutes and twenty-two seconds after the fight began. Buck could still hear the cheering from the balcony of the old Gem Theater, and it continued even after the movie began. Roper later returned to his acting career. He played in sixty-nine movies, mostly in uncredited roles as men with names like Sledgehammer Carson and Waldo the Wyoming Wildcat. They showed some of those movies at the old Gem.

Buck glanced at his watch again. It was 6
A.M.
The driver was now fifteen minutes late. Buck muttered something about being too old to wait on the corner of Eighteenth and Vine. Buck O’Neil was the last of the ballplayers, the last of the 1930s Kansas City Monarchs. The other players with their great baseball nicknames—Satch and Turkey, Streak and Sonny, Too Tall Ted and Bullet Joe—all of them were long dead and buried, uncelebrated, their stories untold, which was why Buck O’Neil sat in a dented Cadillac in an early-morning rain in the first place. He was going out of town to tell their stories again.

“One day I was walking around here with Duke Ellington,” Buck began, a story to pass the time.

“We were walking around, and Duke said, ‘Buck, let’s go listen to some music.’ So Duke and I walk into this little club right here on Vine. This whole area, everything, was clubs back then. I don’t even remember the name of the club we went into—the place had a million names. What was the name of that place? I’ll think of it. We had to walk down a few stairs to get there. And when we sit down, we hear this chubby Kansas City kid blowing on his saxophone. We didn’t know what he was playing, you know. He played it fast and wild and all over the place. But you had to listen because it was different, man. You never heard anything like it. You don’t hear too many things that are just different.”

Buck smiled. He delivered the punch line.

“Charlie Parker,” he said. “Charlie Parker. Oh, man. Charlie Parker.”

The story ended. There was a point. Buck wanted me to know just how much fun he’d had in those years when he could not play Major League baseball because of the color of his skin.

“People feel sorry for me,” he said. “Man, I heard Charlie Parker.”

A car pulled up. A man stepped out and hurried over to the window. He said his name was John, and he apologized for being late. He mumbled something about traffic, and then he held an umbrella over the window to keep Buck from getting wet. Buck got out, stepped out from under the umbrella, and walked in the rain. “How do you get to Nicodemus?” Buck asked.

“Well,” John said. Then, as if he had rehearsed the line, he said: “You go straight until you get to nowhere and then you turn right.”

“All right, then,” Buck said. “I’ve been to nowhere before.”

J
OHN, THE DRIVER,
was a manic radio fiddler. His impatience burned. Even before he had driven us out of the Kansas City metropolitan area, John had already spun through five or six radio stations. Over the sounds of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, John announced that he did not know what to do with his life. Apparently, he was a life fiddler too.

“Buck,” he said, “I still haven’t figured out what I want to do.”

“Some people it takes longer than others,” Buck said.

The drive from Kansas City to Nicodemus took five hours, though with the unvarying Kansas backdrop of wheat, milo, and Casey’s General Stores, it could feel like ten days longer than forever. Buck had not traveled western Kansas in fifty years, since his days as a barnstorming ballplayer with the Kansas City Monarchs. Even so, he remembered playing baseball in many of the towns on the highway signs—Council Grove, Abilene, Great Bend, Russell, Hays. He remembered playing town teams on hard dirt infields while a hot Kansas wind swept through them. He said the roads were bumpier then. Now, interstate highway I-70 rode as smooth as chocolate silk pie, and when gliding through western Kansas toward the Colorado border, you could feel like you were not traveling at all, like the car stood still and only the clouds and antiabortion signs outside moved. “It looks exactly the same as it did fifty years ago,” Buck said. “But at least you can get there faster.”

The scenery repeated itself as if on a loop, and John’s frenzied radio fiddling entertained Buck for a while. Billy Joel sang about the Stranger for a moment—that face we all hide away forever—and when that dissolved into static, John changed stations and OutKast asked women to shake it like a Polaroid picture. Johnny Cash walked the line. Fragments of football and basketball games faded in and out—it was that season. Buck nodded his head at a steady pace to the ever-changing music. Near Dorraine, John found a radio station playing
The Orchestra Hour
. A song had just ended, and the disc jockey, or whatever such people are called now, said it was an old one, going all the way back to 1938, Buck O’Neil’s first year with the Kansas City Monarchs. “That,” the DJ said, “was Ben Bernie.”

“Ben Bernie!” Buck shouted as if he had run into an old friend. Ben Bernie was an orchestra leader who had gained a surprising sum of fame by leading a big band and, on occasion, shouting “Yowzah!” into his microphone. It was like that in 1938. You could become famous for shouting “Yowzah!” Another bandleader, Gray Gordon, earned his fame by playing songs while a grandfather clock tick-tocked in the background. Ants had to dance to Gray Gordon’s tick-tock rhythm. Another bandleader, Kay Kyser, became even more famous. He called himself the Ol’ Professor and had huge nonsensical hits with his Kollege of Musical Knowledge, songs like “Three Little Fishies” with its unforgettable chorus:

 

Boop boop dit-tem dat-tem what-tem Chu!

Boop boop dit-tem dat-tem what-tem Chu!

And they swam and they swam all over the dam.

 

None of these men led orchestras on Buck’s side of town. Ben Bernie was strictly for the white crowd, which in Kansas City meant north of Twenty-seventh Street. For black children, a swimming pool marked the border. The shrieking and splashing happened behind closed gates; black children were not allowed in. For adults, newspapers divided its real estate ads under two headings: “North of Twenty-seventh” and “South of Twenty-seventh.” Kay Kyser, Gray Gordon, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and Ben Bernie played north, often at the Pla-Mor, Kansas City’s entertainment wonderland. The Pla-Mor had its own sandy beach, a dozen bowling lanes, and the biggest dance floor for six states around. The Pla-Mor dance floor was cushioned by forty thousand springs. You could dance all night, you could dance all night and still have begged for more. The kids danced in marathons. Every Friday and Saturday night, couples swung and swayed to “Over the Rainbow” and “All or Nothing at All” and “Stardust,” the last written by Pla-Mor pianist Hoagy Carmichael. Sometimes at the end of long nights, couples tossed nickels at the feet of those exhausted lovers still holding each other up in the moonlight. “Yowzah!” Ben Bernie would say. The Pla-Mor was, according to the billboards, the only place to fall in love. One time Cab Calloway, the black bandleader, came to the Pla-Mor to see a show. A policeman cracked him in the head numerous times. The cop’s defense in the ensuing lawsuit was that he had told Calloway at least twice that colored were not welcome at the Pla-Mor.

“Music can’t be racist,” Buck said as
The Orchestra Hour
weakened into static. “I don’t care what. It’s like baseball. Baseball is not racist. Were there racist ballplayers? Of course. The mediocre ones…. They were worried about their jobs. They knew that when black players started getting into the Major Leagues, they would go, and they were scared.

“But we never had any trouble with the real baseball players. The great players. No, to them it was all about one thing. Can he play? That was it. Can he play?”

John muttered something. “What’s that?” Buck asked.

“We all bleed red,” John said in a voice so quiet Buck seemed to miss the words again. He saw a road sign for Abilene, the town where Dwight Eisenhower grew up. Buck started singing a song that welled up from somewhere in his memory.

 

Abilene, Abilene.

Prettiest town I ever seen.

 

Buck seemed surprised when nobody sang along.

Along the highway, white signs burned through the grain-elevator monotony of Kansas. “The Cost of Abortion is a human life,” read one. “Abortion Kills What God Created.” “Choose Life: What a Wonderful Choice.” On the radio, a woman asked a doctor if the pulsating in her ear was anything to worry about. The doctor did not seem to think so. Oil wells pumped near Russell, where Bob Dole was raised, and on the radio a deep-voiced announcer asked, “What is the passion of Christ?” He paused for a moment and then said: “You are.” John switched stations, this time to a Johnny Cash marathon. We heard “Walk the Line” for the second time. “You didn’t expect to find rap out here, did you?” Buck asked.

John flipped again to a show called
Swap Shop
. The first caller said he was in the market for wood, mostly two-by-fours. The host of the show asked, “Well, what are you selling?” The man said he had a chainsaw chain sharpener in excellent condition. This seemed to reassure the host. An older woman called in and said she was selling mums and, improbably, a pair of men’s sneakers size 9
¹
⁄2. “Never been worn,” she said.