53
“Did I ever tell you about the last conversation I had with my dad, Cash?”
Prince and I are sitting in his living room sharing a good old-fashioned smoke.
He’s been hitting spliffs as well and is floating much higher than I am.
There are shreds of tobacco strewn about the table that look like little insects at first glance.
I have a couple beers in me and we’re enjoying the night conversation.
Prince and I can keep the ball rolling forever these nights.
And the wheel turns.
“No, I don’t think you have.”
“Didn’t think so.”
He takes his black lighter and raises it to the edge of his tightly rolled spliff.
What a movie star Prince is.
He ignites one end and the embers spread quickly around the borders.
He breathes in the air with practiced ease and lets the hot gray smoke gather in the lining of his lungs.
By the time he sets it free, it is a thin fog, streaming straight down to the carpet.
“He had been goin on for months about the way this branch was hangin out all long and ugly in the yard.
It was blocking his view of the land from the deck.
For almost a year he had been talkin about that branch.
Well one morning”—and he takes another long drag—“we were standing on the back porch having a coffee and he starts tellin me this story about how when his father got back from the war, as a kid, he had developed a terrible limp.
Joshua was my grandpa’s name.
And dad tells me how Grandpa Joshua had a horrible time of it coming back home at first getting adjusted and all.
He was so fucked up, you know.
Thought he was Quasimodo or something.
But he goes on to tell me how his dad never once complained, never once.
He said his dad was damn proud of what he’d done.
That he had helped save the world at twenty-one and the rest would fit in how it would.
He got over the limp.
He said that he lost friends.
Family.
He said he was lucky, he got to go home to his mother after all, you know? Who was he to complain about a limp?” And Prince takes the last hit of his spliff.
He thinks for a moment.
“He said all that and then walked out to the shed, got the ladder and put it straight up to that fuckin branch. And I followed him. I was supposed to keep it steady. And I tried. That was that. You know Cash, I’d take on more than a limp for the rest of my life if I could chop it up with my dad one more time.”
“I bet.”
“And I mean, just, one, more time Cash. Just one.”
“Yeah.”
He pushes his black hair back and out of his face and stares up at the ceiling. He’s soaring higher than ever, flying over the past and all the lessons that were left for us there.
“I ain’t defendin your dad none, Cash. You know I ain’t.”
“I know.”
“I’m just sayin, I wish like hell I could talk it out with mine.”