Away On A Far-out Father's Day Fantasy

Don't bother calling to wish me a Happy Father's Day because I won't be here, kids, I've got the day off. I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, and all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by. But I'm in Minnesota. So I'll just climb in my black Lamborghini and head for the territories and west of Minneapolis pick up a county road that runs straight on flat prairie for a couple hundred miles. I'll raise my radar antenna and let that 270 hp V-12 engine run free and reach the Dakota border in the time it takes to drink a cold one and listen to Waylon and Willie - and don't call me on my cell because I don't have it with me, just Mr. Samuel Colt, a deck of cards, a roll of Benjamins and a dog named Lucky.

It's like Robert Louis Stevenson said: "To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor." That's a man talking.

Father's Day is all about retail sales and zero about me, and I am having none of it. I've got enough cheap cologne to open a funeral parlor and I don't need neckties - I just carry one for a tourniquet in case of snakebite - and I don't want a card that says "It's Father's Day and I'm here to say: when it comes to the Long Haul, I'm awfully glad that you're my Dad cause you're the BEST of all!!!" because you and I know it ain't me, babe, so why say it?

I never wanted to be a Father. All I wanted was the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking, and a gray mist on the sea's face and a gray dawn breaking. But I was in Minnesota at the time. We were dancing at Whiskey Junction, Suzanne and me, and she took me down to her place by the river - and how much of this do you really want to know? - and I touched her perfect body with my mind and the next thing I knew I was dating a lady with a basketball under her belt. Wowser, she was enormous.

She got big and she got very needy. "Rub my back," she said about 37 times a day. "Go get me some persimmon sherbet and dark chocolate with anchovies in it. The good kind." She used to be wild and loved to jump on a horse and ride like the wind, and then she became Somebody's Mother and was transformed into an obsessive neurotic. One minute she was Cindy Crawford and one night I came back and she was Dorothea Lange's sharecropper's wife from the Dust Bowl, a good-hearted woman in love with a good-timing man.