My Ex's Father

by James H. Duncan


casually monolithic in a Stones t-shirt
smoking on the back patio
in the haze of infinite Sunday
 
he never asked me what I saw in his daughter
he never asked me to treat her right
or get her home early, just tossed me his
keys and let me move in when she
was away at college and I was homeless,
talked humanist indulgence and
vinyl records, Long Island
summers, and when Zeppelin jumped
the shark or if they ever did
 
he bought weed off my friends
but voted Republican and traveled
with Phish and would ask me
to drive him to the supermarket
sipping a Corona in the passenger seat,
a smoke dangling from his
lips and he’d go inside and come
back with lotto tickets and a sixer while
never having put on shoes that day
 
I’d lay in my girlfriend’s bed and
when she’d come home her head would
fit right in the crook of my neck and
we’d plan out a dream house,
double-headed showers,
woodstove, a library with one of
those ladders with wheels that rolled along
the walls lined with books, and we wanted
a guest cottage for her old man
so he’d always be around, and that made
us both really happy, we’d just shut
up and stare at the ceiling, smiling
 
she loved him but I idolized him, and
I think the difference was she wanted
someone like him to always be in her life
and I wanted to be what he was so effortlessly
but I knew I’d never get there, it was out
of reach for someone so shiftless when idle
as Paul Westerberg would scream when I played my
car radio too loud fixing the taillights
with him sitting on a stack of old tires riding
my ass about my shit garage band music and
laughing, seeing me get defensive, making
me laugh too, and god damn I missed
him when it had to end, hated leaving him
behind almost as much as leaving her
but she had fucked just a few too many guys
out there in Chicago and so I had to
pack my shit car up and find somewhere
else to be until the next one came
 
when I saw his obituary a decade later
I almost reached out, but the obit
was two years old online and there
wasn’t anything else to tell her anyway
so I just drove to the supermarket without
shoes and bought a sixer of Corona
and drove to the river that night
playing early Zeppelin before
hucking the empties into the Hudson
River and hoping they made their
way to Long Island somehow,
little empty messages in bottles
sending my thanks homeward bound
 

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