27
At some point, Prince got it in his mind that he wanted to visit a few long-lost cousins, aunts, and uncles in Daneport, Iowa, for a weekend. I hadn’t been in years, and after a long paint session at the Vances’s old place, a shacklike home covered with fallen leaves from a nearby adjacent towering oak, I zoomed on over to Prince’s and we packed up and hit the road.
In the passenger seat of Prince’s blue Ford F-150, I hang my arm out the window and let it cut through the warm August wind. Soon the leaves will be changing and everything else will follow. That was the thing about the Midwest man, the seasons. In California I hear it’s sunny all year, just one long extended summer bath. Well, what I know is that this far north, in Johnston and the whole Midwest, we have every part of summer, fall, winter, and spring, over and over again.
With each new season came change and resurrection, each year was marked in a concrete way. It’s romantic how a red-hot midwestern summer simmers gently and slowly into a fresh cooling, most breathtaking fall, where the trees along the rivers shimmer vibrant yellows and reds and dying greens. Burnt orange horizons mark our part of the country before winter, and in your bones, you can sense that we are all standing at the long end of a shortening line, one last wonderful edge to look over before the harsh white winter bites and holds furious for the yearly December descent.
What is a man without these treacherous months, standing frozen and bare to the elements, humbled and struggling? Not to mention the beauty. There is no conception of man quite glorious enough to capture, paint, or imagine the year’s first snowfall. There is nothing like that spiritual glide, that wonder, shining white and gorgeous, floating down from the sky. Freezing and pure, crystalloid like diamonds, it covers everything. I never missed the first snowfall. I’d stand in my yard, crisp grass beneath my bare feet and bask in it.
Winter makes the spring and the summers what they are. Just as dark defines light and pain defines joy. They need one another. To think there are places out West never freezing, places where there is no shedding of coats during the wide celebration of the revitalized sun breaking through in the springtime. For them it must be one continuous folding, day after gorgeous day. Where was the story in that? And how did they ever keep time? I imagine in California it’s just one long year, where days race by in a flash. Before they knew it, they were probably on their porch in their robes, somehow sixty, smoking cigarettes, looking out at their dry grass and wondering aloud, where has it gone? Time. With us, here in the hard-earned Midwest, we bury our clocks in the snow and retrieve them in spring when everything melts, cleansed and more thankful to have them. For now, summer coats my skin. Prince drives the Ford like a pro, and most everything feels right about this.
It didn’t take Prince long to get over our failed bar-owning venture. He doesn’t really understand how it had played out at the core, but Prince has always had a real knack for accepting things in stride, and moving right along, perpetually assured that something else was on the horizon.
That’s something most people didn’t grasp, not in their whole searching lives, the idea that what is yours is yours, and what isn’t, isn’t. We’re both pretty fantastic about the beautiful now. I never saw Prince hang onto much of anything apart from what happened with his pops, and that’s a different beast altogether, that was something he would never relinquish, not ever. It dawns on me, perhaps that was the choice all along, that we can hold onto one single crux with both hands, but just one. There’s no room for others. Regardless, Prince had it figured out. I knew he wasn’t going to talk about the bar for a long time, in the same way he hadn’t brought up Shelby for weeks now. I knew he was on. Moving again. Head up and wandering, curious.
We’re drinking from a couple to-go cups of coffee from the Shell getting all jazzed up, and it’s the energy we need on our four-and-a-half-hour journey through Wisconsin into Iowa and Dubuque.
“Alright pal,” Prince goes, “well here’s the deal. I ain’t seen a few of these bunch in years, but I remember Kassy being all sorts of ideal and blonde and excited about you last time we saw her. I’m thinkin you play your cards right, man, and she’ll be yours, all yours. Wouldn’t that be somethin, Cash? You in the family? Might make me take a couple more trips to Iowa, huh? That wouldn’t be so bad now, would it?”
“No, it would not,” I admit. Truth is, I remember Kassy clear as day. It’s been years but we’ll be reunited at last. Prince’s cousin in my mind all of a sudden has me thinking about how fast everything can change and how navy blue enigmatic the world really is. It’s the color of hope in the heart.
God, I’m all coked up on coffee, feeling downright electric, looking out the window at the long sections of gorgeous sprawling valleys throughout the countryside. There’s nothing like this Midwest landscape, these hilly swaths of land rolling and flowing all around, as far as the eye can see. Down in the valley there are corn fields and countless patches of harvestable seeds, farms, cows, and goats, winding semi-trucks and their drivers, of course, of course. But these patches of deep green oceans are the greatest. We drive all the way up through the plains and get high as possible in the land. At the top, swerving and curling, we look out both sides of the truck and see the whole country around us. Miles and miles of fields and occasional forest, always freedom. And the air is so clean it will heal you. No air comes cleaner across America and of this, I am sure. You can see herds of sheep, sometimes bison, and my favorite of all, horses, moving their way through the whole blooming universe before them—free. I tell you, driving through Wisconsin in summer can make a man think about God and angels and smile.
I say to Prince, “That’s the thing about these drives, every time man, every single time, I’m lookin out at those plains and I feel like an animal myself, ya know? Like one of those birds but in cars and the air is so damn clean man! Where else could we possibly be? I can see a hundred miles east from here! All the way to fucking Maine man, I’m serious, doesn’t it look unstoppable?”
And Prince laughs hard at that. I love it, whenever Prince and I are on the same page about something he’ll just laugh and shake his head and say, “Yeah man, yeah man, yeah,” his black hair slicked back, even in the swirling wind.
He reaches into the center dash, speeding fast as ever through the hills, and pulls out a spliff. Brown and crisp. He must have rolled it back at his place before we left. He’s smiling emphatically and all at once he could be five again. Prince loves to smoke. He’s one of those cats that could fool you too. It was nearly impossible to be absolutely certain whether he was high or not. It just sorta matched his personality, ya know? His sensibility. You really had to know him to tell, and unfortunately, the same cannot be said about me.
When I smoke I get red eyed and silent or too philosophical and strange. All these big, Earth-shattering thoughts fly in and out of my head and either render me mute or incomprehensible. Still, when Prince wants to smoke while driving headfirst through the valleys between Wisconsin and Iowa I say yes, and yes again. This was it, man—the life! Life on the road!
Prince goes, “take the honors, pal,” and so I light the thing up and inhale. I breathe it in and hold it down, deep to the roots of my lungs. To get high is to get high, yeah? I’m never half in, not on anything. I pass the spliff back, coughing a bit out the window. The smell sails around briefly before escaping, running loose to the countryside like all of those horses. We smoke the thing down, and Prince tosses it to the pavement, flying by.
God, we’re in it now. The countryside is amplified, bright and mysterious and magnificent. The sensations man, they’re the whole deal. The feeling of cloth on the black old seat and the rubber beneath my forearm on the window’s graying edge. The near neon red lights on the radio, the cigarettes in the cup holder, ashen. The polychromatic terrain all around, out the window, the sea! Green brown yellow gray orange and blue. The blue blue blue deep navy blue sky flying up and overhead is endless! The clean, clean air, always recycled and giving back, a gift from the countless trees of all different stature. They sideline our travels, towering over us and becoming our guides. And driving the Ford, Prince is in the pocket, I just know it. He has these square old black shades on, unshaven, smirking, and his trusty white T, black pants, and work boots, weathered.
So here we are, the heart of the journey, in matching white tees and boots. My blue jeans feel smooth, worn down, and have a couple burn marks right by the front pocket. They’re black orange and singed in that spot. Prince puts some music on. U2. I coulda told you he’d play them. Prince loves these guys, often saying things like “the Joshua Tree, Cash, is the best, it’s the best, it’s one of the best albums ever made,” and I’d laugh and shake my head, but I tell you what, today, moving like rockets through the valley, high, giant, and limitless, U2 might as well have been God manifested. Bono’s voice sounds almighty, resounding. He’s delivering the message. Prince has these great booming speakers in the truck and he blasts them throughout all the land. Bono serenades the cows in the pastures and the farmers nearing their weekend, optimistic. He’s singing about running and hiding off, tearing down all the walls that hold us, reaching for the flames among the nameless streets. You see what I mean?
Today we’re really on it man, rolling and rolling and rolling. We begin to sing. I’m pounding the drums on the dash, whipping my head back and forth and truly believing we have found it at last. We are U2 and U2 is us. And it dawns on me that these are the essential moments. Music, art, and life. Friendship. This communication, one and both, flying through the universe, high and alive. The sky and the valleys and the animals and the music and us. Nameless and together. One beating heart on the road.