The Ghost of Johnny Cash Sings of Fire

by Benjamin Drevlow

Joe Vasquez

When Johnny Cash died I pretended Johnny Cash was my father and my father, like Johnny Cash, was finally dead so I could finally forgive him all the ways that he’d been mean and dismissive to me and how I’d been worthless to him, the youngest of three boys, the mama’s boy, how I didn’t know a crescent wrench from a phillips head, didn’t know patience for boredom, my father finally dead to me because in boredom I had imagination and in my imagination I could imagine my father, who almost kind of looked like Johnny in a midwestern Germanic kind of way, his wavy black hair, his swarthy skin, that jawbone rigid as a sawhorse — even if my father’d never dare to flip the world the bird, my father missing half his middle finger from a baling accident, the baling accident being me accidently turning on the baler when I wasn’t supposed to, but also Johnny’s drugs and alcohol versus my father mostly a one-Pabst man, at night after all the work on the farm, no cocaine, no amphetamines, no whatever else Johnny did when he got bad, but then there was the singing, my father mostly in the church, my father having grown up the son of a preacher, oh my father could sing sing sing, just not lines like I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, my father never really listening to the radio even but then there’d be the sometimes at evening, the dying light of the gloaming on the way home from baling some distant hay field all day and he’d turn on the country station for five minutes and it’d be just me and him, the one country station we could get, the luck of a song like Burning Ring of Fire and boy you should’ve heard my father hit those bass notes, my father with that booming baritone, that wavy dark hair and swarthy complexion and half a middle finger courtesy of his youngest son, and finally for once not singing about god but singing about fire, my father who was not dead then and still not dead now 20 years later, 20 years of me talking to his living ghost, preparing for his untimely death, his haunting me how I still can’t sing a note for the life of me and haunting me how I still haven’t forgiven him for all the ways I’ve failed him, but I’ll always have the ghost of those songs in the car, the burn burn burn parts, and I’ll think about how Johnny Cash wasn’t such a great father himself, cheating on his wife, and all the drugs and alcohol, to hear the stories they tell about him now, versus how I can’t imagine my father ever snorting and shooting up on anything in his life, not even for the pain in his arthritic hips, my father never drinking anything hard, anything but PBR or MGD, a little wine from time to time, the blood of Christ shed for you, and I think probably we all wind up in the same place, the living ghosts of our fathers on their death beds and all the things we want to say to them but will never be brave enough until after they’re dead, until their ghosts haunt our late night bedrooms, tossing and turning as we try to rewrite their stories for ourselves, all the happy parts between the sad parts, the angry parts, the parts we could never be the heroes of, and it all becomes a sad song, a country song, play it backwards and maybe our fathers come back better men and we all get rebirthed innocent baby boys cooing Da-Da, Da-Da, or rather, No Da-Da no, no leave, Da-Da, no leave.

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Benjamin Drevlow is EIC of BULL and poet laureate of all things bull. You can check out more of his bull stuff at thedrevlow-olsonshow.com or on twitter, insta, face, bsky, & threads @thedrevlow. Photo by Joe Vasquez on Unsplash