Coffee shop singer

Lee was a self-taught folksinger whose second love was music. He was a starving green-eyed romantic with a uniform of ripped-knee jeans and plain white T-shirts. His hundred-dollar peroxide haircut was mussed up enough to suggest he had mowed it himself.

Born with Ivy League blood in New Hampshire, he skipped Dartmouth and caught the interstate west. He declared himself destitute, free from the trappings of wealth. For backup, he relied on a small trust fund.

I met Lee at a coffee shop where teens and old hippies waited their turn to play. Lee swaggered to the corner stool with his battered guitar. The lacquered wood glistened with hairline scratches. His calloused fingertips had gradually faded the fretboard, especially the frets closest to the tuning pegs.

The microphone was set up in an area normally reserved for paying customers. I hung onto every word and let the chiming guitar strings lead me with their leash.

With a tambourine jangling beneath his tapping foot, Lee rasped a folktale about a card game and the woman who got away. Between verses, his strumming swelled and subsided. After four verses, most coffee shop customers chatted to the background music and responded with scattered applause after the seventh and final verse.

Wish he would have recorded that one. All I remember is the aching chorus:

You're the queen who steals the hearts
An ace is up my sleeve
You aimed and fired two poison darts
What a mangled web we weave