Rain falls on the Big City, grey dusk the prelude to night. Marquees project the zeal of a midway, the flash and whirl of esoteric guidons flush beneath the reclusion of cold rain. Neon reflections ripple within pools of flooding sewers upset by footfall and the pace of pedestrians, the normal face of street and avenue hidden by collars pulled high, hats on heads tilted down, umbrellas. A traffic light halts then grants vehicular passage. Headlamps carve the murk in passing. The drone of churning cylinders falls mute beneath drumming strings of rain that slap and clap domed-steel roofs and sidewalk pools lit as from beneath by streetlamps flickering to life. One-by-one, the flickering lights, hollow cones dissolving across the cold stone of a buildingfront. An inner-warmth leaks out through the lamp glow of windows.

One window remains unlit, a modest bay window fixed to a second-floor apartment and framing twilight’s fade. A man inside gazes into the grey resolve. He sits, listening to a recording on a vintage victrola. The heavy stylus nicks through wax imperfections, the amiable warmth of well-worn grooves. The recording is a lucid jazz, a shade of the recent past rife with the colors of midnight. Notes hang like smoke in the air. Heating coils creak from a radiator in the corner, the cryer announcing the coming of warmth. All views run through the filtered grain of the overcast hour. It is night.

The recording ends. The man cuts the phonograph’s cycling arm, closes cover. He closes the blinds before putting on trenchcoat and hat. He exits the apartment, descends stairs to the foyer. Its disregard is apparent: handtooled railings worn to bare wood, patched carpeting and web-streaked chandeliers that must have been something when the hotel building first opened in the 1880s. He exits the building’s front door, placing careful steps in descending slate-topped stairs. He lands on the sidewalk before Stuyvesant. The Big City unfolds before him, an electric streetmap larger than life. He turns down 52nd Street, sidewalks slick beneath a dark spitting sky. Cold rain continues to fall. It beats an easy rhythm on trenchcoat shoulders. The man hears it, absorbs it, can feel it in his bones.

Cataracts sweep a curbside race, converging on a sewergrate at the corner of Stuyvesant and 52nd. Pedestrians thread crosswalks alongside a current of lightstreams trailing tail lights. These same pedestrians run to shelter beneath any number of awnings granting reprieve from the elements. Hotel valets attend to their occupation, outfits of rainslicks over tuxedo shirt and tie. Tea houses and restaurants serve capacities of clientele edged by the constraints of time and its wait. Every glance is held in the grasp of a breakneck tempo, as natural to the metropolis as streetsides quaking to the tune of subway trains far beneath. It is a phrenetic pace offset by the man. Calm, anonymous, he ambles down 52nd heading westside. If even aware of the driving rain, it’s of little concern. It holds him in its rhythm.

The man continues on down 52nd, his loose gait striding a streetside showcasing multiple personalities. A Port Authority precinct guards the entry floors of the New Amsterdam Tower. The soaring black-on-grey angles of the Trans Atlantic Utilities, Simeon Life, and Fowler buildings rounding out the corner’s sixty-story-plus cohabitants. The tall and the small wring fervent hands along this cut of avenue, a capitalist concierge doling out prosperity and despair to simple storefronts standing, at once, together and alone. They brood over each other’s fates, eyes of plateglass behind masks of metal bars: closed for the day. Some rent out studios and flats on second, third, and fourth stories. Some do not. Some fly the Star of David. Korean laundromats, French bakers, and Persian tobacco merchants shove elbows with a dance hall, dive hotels, an Irish pub. The man walks up on and by Tujaque’s Grill, an armed forces recruiting office square-pegged into an adjoining structure. There is the odd and familiar, the bright and moody, the enthusiastic, the indifferent. . . . And they all pass with hardly a glance, leading up to 873 West 52nd Street: The Hotel Royale, a neoclassic gem. Its detail is its kick, that of the Sullivan school; having been constructed in 1898 when revival was the rage: hopeful, yet weary of the new.

In its basement a jazz club finds anonymous shelter. Having been retrofit, it’s something no one would even notice unless looking for it. The hotel spills nuance, flirts with those passing. The club rests low, unadvertised, holding its story within. A gaunt confident allure. It seems like any other basement joint, another club in a city built on them. But to the man this is more than just a club, a place for a drink and congenial wisdom. This is a place so keen to memory that it can be remembered informally, buzzed through the doors of recollection with an informal moniker like the corner or the station. To this man, this is the club.

Beat lights escape the club’s front window: mandarin, diffuse, spread warbling across the landing, the cowl of night’s curtain having lowered. A taxi passes, a Buick; a limousine heading east, a delivery van to the west. . . . And the man stops on the sidewalk overlooking the club. He looks down its staircase: slate-steps weathered by so many years beneath shuffling feet. The rain has slowed, but still spatters the old stone stairs smoked by exhaust and cracked by the cold and ice; cigarette butts having washed down the landing like fractured timber caught in a flood. The front window just below street level. Stacked glass bloc emit light in the organic order of art deco. It yields a glimpse inside the club, but a glimpse. The man stares at shapes moving within. A bartender materializes as nothing more than a contortion, a liquid abstraction through the lens of gutters sluicing down the window front. The guise retains its gist within. The legs of barstools point up, infer a continued state of preparation for the evening ahead. Doors don’t open till eight. The bartender walks behind the bar, an impression distorted by glass bloc stacked like brick. A glimpse and that is all. . . .

It was many years before when the man, who was at that time only a young man, had come to The Big City. He’d followed a calling, had felt drawn as by invitation. He had stepped out of a life dark and obscure and into a life of lights. But it wasn’t the flashing lights he’d come for. It wasn’t the marquees or tuxedos, stretch limousines or golden avenues. He didn’t know why he had to come to The Big City. . . .

The man breathes deep the air soaked of cold spring, winter flaunting its stranglehold on the equinox. He adjusts his trenchcoat on thin-boned frame, a shouldershake shaking down rainbeads. He moves on, glances peripherally. The tropical light flooding the club’s landing, tints notched as if sliced. He continues up 52nd to its cross at Algonquin. Views swallowed in acres of brownstone. A streetlamp throws circular light over the intersection, the evening shivering a cold saturation. Joints wrench with a chill sent like an electric arc to the bone. A bus, a Fairlane, and Rolls all pass. A taxi rifles past, serves up dopplered sheets of waterspray. They soak sidewalks plastered in discarded newsprint. The rain picks up. Drops pelt trenchcoat as the sound of a dozen fingers flicking, snapping: stick to snarehead, a flickering backbeat. A light flickers in a third-story window, a hurricane lamp just lit. The shrill cry of a siren growing, receding. A carhorn sounds. A cardoor slams shut. The man stands at the intersection, waiting to cross. Rainbeads roll off hat brim, fall across vision. . . .

It was twelve years earlier in 1956, when the man—then a young man—had come to The Big City. He didn’t know why he had come to The Big City. He had followed a calling, had seen a sign and set out for this land of lights, a pilgrimage on a faith alone. . . . Yet when he arrived he was confused. He was all wrapped in the ardor of youth. He began to curse the calling, curse all he knew. He couldn’t understand what was already obvious. Life was just a big mystery to the young man, a never-ending cycle of damnation into which he and his kind had been cast. Or at least, that is what he’d thought. . . . But all that changed one cold windy night. That was the first night that he saw it all clear as day. That was the night he went to 873 West 52nd , the night he met the Jazz Man at the club.