Remembering Joe Johnson

 

Joe and Maximus 2019

This isn’t an obituary because I don’t know what Joe Johnson did in the 85+ years of his life that we didn’t know each other. But in the five years that I did know Joe, likely the five slowest years of his life, he was a one-legged maniac hellbent on squeezing his remaining years for all they were worth. Joe finally bought the farm a couple weeks ago. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that he kicked the bucket too. Characters like Joe don’t just pass away or any other kind hearted euphemism; guys like him going kicking and punching into whatever comes after this life. 

I don’t know if it is relief or disappointment now that I know that Joe’s phone calls will stop; harassing me almost daily to clear space in my schedule to help him pull off some hare-brained scheme or build something ridiculous on the old high school on the hill above town. The genius of Joe Johnson was that his ideas were often so bonkers, that they sorta made sense. He lived by Tom Petty’s immortal words, “you don’t slow down, you don’t grow old.” And Joe didn’t slow down. Even after he lost a leg, he was constantly motoring around on crutches, collecting antiques, driving his neighbors crazy, tinkering with his junk vehicles. 

Within twenty minutes of meeting Joe, back in 2018, I found myself in the basket of his ancient forklift with no brakes, fifteen feet in the air, being driven by a mostly deaf man with a peg leg. He had showed up at my house unannounced and demanded my help putting an addition onto his shop. Never one to turn down an adventure or an old man in need of assistance, I agreed. Minutes later, I was dangling from a rafter, screaming at him to bring the basket back up so I could put my feet down. Thus began a strange partnership at the tail end of his life. He was partly my boss, partly my neighbor and sometimes my great-grandfather. 

After his workshop burned spectacularly in the spring of 2020, he conscripted me to rebuild him a new one. Though I always suspected that he had a million dollars hidden in a mattress somewhere, he was determined to milk every last cent from the insurance company. He had a mysterious vision and he was determined to achieve it regardless of his age, health or rationality. He would propose dreams like circus tents or airplane hangars and I would chase those dreams to fruition or ruin. It was endlessly frustrating and exhilarating at the same time. 

Every time I would meander through the burnt out double doors, I would brace myself for whatever madness was waiting inside. I always felt like I was Marty McFly and Joe was Doc Brown from Back to the Future. Some days he was cracking jokes and hatching convoluted and ingenious plans for future artworks and some days he was twirling an antique revolver and screaming bloody murder into the telephone at some poor insurance adjuster. Maximus, his morbidly obese black wolf dog would nuzzle my hand or sit on my foot as I sat on the armrest of his couch/bed and got his daily update. Sometimes I would hear, word for word, the same update for five days in a row, and some days his ideas changed like the hands of the clock. A large elk covered in Mardi Gras beads sat beside a display case of pioneer artifacts and Joe’s dirty clothes. Dozens, if not hundreds of guns leaned against the walls cluttered with neon beer signs and antique etchings. The old building creaked and groaned constantly as if exasperated with Joe and his never ending projects. 

As I munched on a tupperware of leftovers, he would roll his wheelchair over to the furnace/time machine in the corner and toss in a few logs before lighting up a Swisher Sweet and unfurling his notebook with whatever crazy idea he had come up with at 2:00 AM the night before. He would randomly hand me a couple hundred dollars and demand that next time I find myself in Helena, I clean out every tobacco outlet in the valley of Swisher Sweet cigars. So I did. I bought thousands of cigars for “Grandpa Joe,” so many that the store clerks knew my truck. 

That was the way life went around Joe, random, eccentric and thoroughly unexpected. Who else has papier mache airplanes and three-wheeled cars in their yard? Who else wants their workshop to be decorated like a circus tent with rattle-can blue garage doors? Who else demands that you move the two ton drill press and upright piano so he can stash a collection of mannequins behind the stairs? I was just one of many neighbors and strangers would meander through his smoke-stained doors at all hours. His temper or stubbornness would exile various people for a few days or months from the halls of the old high school, but his tenacity and madness would bring them back around. Joe frustrated me more than any other person I ever worked for because “no” was simply not an answer to him. But every time he was not listening to reason, I would remind myself that if I ever make it to his age, I hope to have a fraction of the fire that he had. 

As ornery and stubborn as he was, Joe was one of those rare people who made his neighborhood, his town and his world a more interesting place. His property didn’t have any KEEP OUT or NO TRESPASSING SIGNS. He gathered a wealth of knowledge and friends that most people couldn’t collect in three lifetimes. Many obituaries can fit in a few paragraphs. I could barely fit 1/18th of his life in two pages. That was Joe Johnson.