Poem: When I Was Your Age I Was Jumping Off Cliffs by Mindy Nettifee
“I could remember every word to every song Prince ever wrote. Sign.”
A poem by Mindy Nettifee
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“I was dreaming when I wrote this, forgive me if I go astray.” -Prince
I.
We had gotten lost on purpose, on the way to a mountain retreat
for Christian youth, and pulled over at the first vacancy sign we saw
to use someone’s dad’s emergency credit card to rent a shabby cabin.
Having two liters of rum and Pepsi in the trunk of a borrowed station wagon
was exactly our idea of an emergency. There was no ice
to be had on the premises, but the moon was on the wax.
We wasted no time piling around the table
and filling red plastic cups with warm booze fizz.
The rum wasted no time candying our blood.
The radio began speaking in steel guitar on the AM,
and we started taking everything as a sign of our good fortune.
The card deck was missing the Jack of Diamonds. Sign.
Kat burned a cigarette hole in her cardigan in the shape of a heart. Sign.
I could remember every word to every song Prince ever wrote. Sign.
It was deep in the fall of 1999, and Joe DiMaggio had died,
and Herman Miller had died, and Shel Silverstein had died,
and John F Kennedy, Jr. had gone down in that plane with his beautiful wife,
and all the gun nuts were already huddling in bunkers
like Wile E. Coyotes at the ends of days,
and we had 300 square feet of shitty parquet to dance on.
We didn’t believe in the Lord, but we were sure this is what he wanted.
We didn’t believe in Fate but we wanted to be on her good side anyway.
So when there was a knock at the door, without discussion, I answered.
II.
I once babysat for a kid named Chance who,
on the night before his seventh birthday,
when I asked what he was going to wish for,
told me, “Once you start believing in the Devil,
everything you want is a trick.”
He was a sad, dark little preacher’s kid,
but I knew what he meant.
There’s a calculus to wishing.
It’s all about angles of desire.
If you really want something,
don’t you dare aim for it.
Don’t ever speak its name.
III.
It was impossible to tell what this dude’s deal was.
He had arrived at our cabin door after midnight
in the middle of a forest in stiff new surf shorts,
with an aging chilled out Alaskan huskie at his side,
and he hadn’t asked to be let in,
just whether one of us might be able to roll his joints for him.
I looked into the husky’s refrigerated blue eyes,
and took in his trembling right hand, and said simply, yeah, sure,
and swung the door open on our small party.
He handed me a bag of shake and some papers and strode in.
He took his place in the kitchenette where the girls
were shuffling cards and penning tattoos.
I began sorting seeds and stems at the small coffee table,
and he began telling stories.
Whatever drug he was on made his preaching shouty.
There were some gambling debts, a woman named Linda,
a Lamborghini, islands with names I did not recognize,
a father possibly in federal prison for tax fraud or grand theft,
a love affair between Linda and a man named Reggie,
a yacht fire, someone named Shark, someone who lost an arm,
the chain of events was unfollowable, but we listened rapt
because he was minding an internal momentum,
he was getting to a point, and then suddenly he was there,
and he propped up his 40-something man leg on a chair
and started smacking his bare tensed calf muscles
yelling, “SEE? I STILL GOT IT!”
And when we didn’t break out into applause,
he climbed up on top of the table,
threw his arms wide, and screamed,
“WHEN I WAS YOUR AGE, I WAS JUMPING OFF CLIFFS!”
He was at least half crazy, and I was at least half drunk
and half his age, but thought I understood.
The wanting to have “it,” and the need for the world to recognize.
The man had had enough life fall through his ungrateful hands
to know the world doesn’t hand “it” out, there’s a finite amount of “it,”
and then one day the world is indifferent to you having or not having “it,”
if not outright taking it the fuck back, and your struggle, THE struggle,
unfolds before you, a yellowing brick road surrounded on all sides
by the choked jungles of reward and comeuppance,
and this is the part where everything hinges on how you choose to see “it.”
The dog wove quietly around the cabin making soft angles of the space,
letting all the night ghosts in with his bright white fur,
occasionally circling back to his master, his charge,
then going back to pacing the labyrinth he could see and we could not.
I had steadily rolled the weed first in dollar bills, then in papers,
And assembly-lined them up on the coffee table
till they looked like a row of long limp teeth.
The moment I had finished, he seemed to sense it,
abruptly ended his ceremony in the kitchen,
collected his teeth from the table, called his dog and left.
But not before turning around to hand me a joint
And one last piece of advice – “don’t get old.”
“Sounds like a death curse,” I said.
“It’s a curse either way.” I nodded.
I closed the door on him and the rum in us burst out laughing.
We all started smacking our body parts and yelling
“I still got it!” well into the night’s black heart.
By the time we fell asleep my thoughts were a flat hum.
The husky still felt close, pillows of his breath clinging to the room. Sign.
A man growing reckless because he wanted to grow young. Sign.
Remembering that poor fucking kid Chance. Sign.
I wondered what he wanted so badly.
Whether he made his birthday wish or dared not to even think it.
What did I want?
What wish was so deep, so bright, I was hiding it even now?
A pair of blue eyes.
A flock of dog pillows.
A lock of girl legs.
Loom lap.
Rum tongue.
Candy world.
Year clock.
Click.
Cliff.
Dream.
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Header image courtesy of Theo Gosselin. To view his photo essay "Vagabonds" for NAILED, go here.
Mindy Nettifee is an award winning writer and accomplished performance poet and storyteller. She is the author of two full-length collections Sleepyhead Assassins (Moon Tide Press) and Rise of the Trust Fall (Write Bloody Press), and a collection of essays on writing Glitter In The Blood - A Poet's Manifesto for Better, Braver Writing (Write Bloody Press). She is a three-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, a Powell's Books Indie Press Best Seller, and she co-edited the anthology Courage - Daring Poems for Gutsy Girls (Write Bloody Press). She has performed and taught in over 500 hundreds of venues, colleges and universities across America and Europe, competed in five National Poetry Slams, opened for indie rock act the Cold War Kids, headlined national poetry tours The Last Nerve, The Whirlwind Company and The Poetry Revival, and was featured in the critically acclaimed poetry concert documentary The Drums Inside Your Chest. Her stories have been featured on The Moth podcast. She currently works with BackFence PDX, The Moth, and Literary Arts in Portland, Oregon and performs monthly in the regular cast of E4P's New Shit Show. Visit her online: here.