Tea Time At the Chaos Cafe (Continued)
…and it starts like a fever dream. The fever of the onset of the end times. A feverish tea time. Tea time and Chaos. Chaos fever at the Café End. Café time of Chaos, fever and tea. Tea time at the Chaos Café is a great, feverish blur.
When Artimus opened the Chaos Café ten years earlier it was not an immediate success. Most often the only customers were the occasional drunks from the Buddha Bar who’d gotten the toss and wandered in by accident. The stench of rotgut liquor, cigarettes and piss lingering long after they were thrown out of the Café, too. There was still a stain near the small stage in one corner by the front door of the café where one of the drunks had puked onto the floor before knocking over a table and blacking out.
Business only started to pick up after a librarian at the county library suggested the café should host an open mic night. The date was set for a unusually warm Friday afternoon in October. A few of Artimus’ friends made flyers in the old cut and paste punk rock style and stuck them around the local college campus and in the local bookstores. The turnout was completely unexpected and nearly overwhelming to the usually stoic Artimus but as he ran from the register to the espresso machine or pastry display he could barely contain the smile on his face.
There was a lot of previously untapped talent in the city he had not been aware of before that fateful night. The musicians poured their hearts out into original songs and cover versions. The comedians had the audience in the palms of their hands. Best of all, though, were the small batch of writers who turned up to rant and half rap their latest works from typewritten page into microphone. It was poetry time at the Chaos Café.
That first night had been meant as a one off but when Artimus saw the crowd it drew and the money it brought in he immediately made it a weekly event. The buzz spread like a forest fire through the city streets and across the college campus and the next week saw even more talent turn out with friends in tow. One poet in particular rose high above the others and each week seemed to grow better and better as if channeling the energy of the audience through his words. Even Artimus began to notice the strange glow which radiated from every pore along the man’s body as he prowled the stage half shouting his poisonous verse into the cheap house microphone. Sometimes he violently chopped at a battered guitar as he read. His words floating on a sea of atonal noise. Other times he practically threw a cheap children’s toy organ around the stage and into the crowd while screaming the final line of some new work. When he went on stage everything within blocks of the café fell into a dead silence.
The open mic nights began getting noticed by all the local free papers. Journalists and even television news crews began to show up. There was an infamous Salon expose making the rounds. The open mics began to revolve around this angry young poet as if he were the eye of some avant garde storm. Even before he transformed into the narrator he was the glue holding the story of the Chaos Café together.
Yet, just as these open mic nights had begun to reach their apex with the poet poised to break through he suddenly vanished from the café altogether. Eventually the journalists lost interest and moved on. The TV crews went back to covering polite public interest stories. Salon published a follow up article entitled “Poetry Time at the Chaos Café: What Happened?” The other writers floundered without the poet as guidance and soon they stopped coming to read as well. It was only a matter of months before Artimus cancelled the open mic nights altogether.
When the dust had cleared only a few stray regulars remained and Artimus slumped in his chair from open till close when he wasn’t doling out the occasional refill. So when the day came that the poet returned transformed by the years and the booze into the middle aged narrator it almost seemed to exist as a living answer to the Salon’s rhetorical question. What had happened is poetry time had moved on and was quickly replaced by tea time at the Chaos Café.
The Narrator had seemed to doze off in his seat. The blood stained words of his manuscript had dried in the table’s center. Artimus turned another page from his perch behind the counter. The smoker chain smoked while weeping softly. Lou Reed was singing for his Coney Island baby. Outside the lighting continued slicing the city’s financial district to ruins. Somewhere in the distance a woman screamed herself hoarse. The rain poured and hissed. Tea time at the Chaos Café pushed onward.
It starts like a fever dream.
When the smoker was young and did not yet smoke or know about tea time at the Chaos Café he was nothing more than another anonymous art student at the local university. Each day he would sit beneath the same tree on the quad and fill up his notebooks with verses about flowers, birds and the trees outstretched towards the skies. He dreamed of reading his words before an attentive audience who would cling to his every word and alliteration. They would see him for who he was then, he was sure of it. The world would recognize him and he would no longer exist as another sullen face in the crowd. They would hear his words and identify with his passions and fears. He would never feel alone again after that.
When he read the notice on the school’s community message board that a local café near the campus was holding an open mic night he knew his moment had arrived. He snatched up his notebooks and marched directly there for the Friday night debut two hours ahead of the set start time. As the crowds grew and the list made the rounds he scanned the faces of all the participating local talent. These would be his peers soon enough, or so he thought.
When the lights dimmed slightly the first act of the evening ambled up onstage dressed head to toe in black. Knowing he was up next, the student held his breath hoping against hope this would be an easy one to follow. The man onstage, all shadow and long unkempt hair arranged a child’s toy organ on a barstool and several typewritten papers on a nearby music stand.
What happened next was something akin to a star exploding. The organ distorted and droned as the man violently attacked the keys with eyes rolling back in his head. He swayed in place for some time to some silent rhythm only he was attuned to. The audience members whispered to one another trying to find some sort of explanation for this noisy spectacle they were witnessing and that’s when the shadowy figure on the stage provided his answer. Leaning into the microphone he half recited half shrieked the opening lines from the pages before him. They were to act as a kind of guide through this onslaught for the next ten minutes. The audience ceased whispering and fell into a stunned silence as this ritual was carried out before them. The last line fell in a howl with the man picking the organ up off the stool and thrown over his head where it smashed in two on the stage floor behind to punctuate the bitter sentence. The applause that followed was nearly as deafening as those ten minutes had been. A star was, as they say, born in that moment.
The student would barely remember being onstage that night following the star making moment he’d just witnessed. This must be how the people following Hendrix at Monterrey must’ve felt, he thought. When he exited the stage there was hardly a single clap. Behind the counter the cappuccino machine roared to life as the proprietor, Artimus mixed a fresh drink for the young poet the student had been upstaged by before he even had a chance to read. His spirit crushed the student didn’t even bother sticking around for the next act and instead of rushed quickly out the door into the street and quickly asked a man at one of the patio tables for a cigarette.
Thus the student became the smoker in an instant. He would return to the Café every day after that but he would never write another word. Not even a word for tea time at the Chaos Café.
