Joseph Jarman Cadges
a Cup of Tea
He
walked into the restaurant; we weren’t
open
yet, but that didn’t stop him. He
had
the look of a dignified hustler, sly
with
a learned air, but still familiar.
“Say,
could I get a cup of tea?” he said
as
if he were a guest in a country house
instead
of the evening’s entertainment.
“Sure,”
I said, knowing who he was and
what
he played, much of which didn’t
make
sense to me, heard from wood and
fabric
speakers on a roommate’s stereo.
“Twenty-five
cents,” I said as I handed
him
the cup and he gave me a look like
a
minor deity, asked to pay for a sacrifice.
“Now
really, brother,” he said with a knowing
smile;
the teabag was already in his hand.
What
was I going to do—grab it back?
“All
right,” I said. No one would ever know
but
I felt as if I’d been swindled. Later,
listening
to him play, my poor dreams
of
rock stardom dissolved in the wave of
sound
and masks and painted faces, bizarre
yet
reserved. Spectacle, the least important
element
of tragedy according to Aristotle,
lends
an air of the occult to music.
A
self-conscious primitive nonetheless
partakes
of the madness of divines.
Today
I checked the menu of the H&H
Café,
a soul-food restaurant on Chicago’s
South
Side for the year 1970; breakfast served
all
day, $1.10 for two scrambled eggs and grits,
a
side order of brains and two buttermilk biscuits.
That
twenty-five cent cup of tea seemed a bargain.
Con Chapman
Tags:
Poetry