Daniel Johnson 2.27.25

Our lives are but shooting stars, briefly sparking across the dark night’s sky, the buzzing light slowly fading into black. But some lives burn the slightest bit brighter and even years later, when we close our eyes, we will still see the faint trace of their journey. Daniel Ray Johnson lit up the sky. If you knew him, close your eyes for a few seconds and picture him. He is likely smiling, possibly with a tool in his hand, a dog by his side and a wide smile on his face.

A Meet Cute 

Looking back on it now, nearly a half century later, I suppose it was when I kissed him that my friendship with Dan really took off.

It was freshman year at UWM and we were at the house of one of our friends’ parents. A bunch of us, mostly kids Dan had gone to high school with, and a couple of us newbies who had met at college, sitting around a living room or a basement, sort of like the ‘70s Show without the pot. I was one of the outsiders, feeling a bit socially awkward and silly. He was in a purloined dining table chair, holding forth, the center of all attention, his presence impossible to ignore, his magnetism irresistible.

The topic had veered off track, and Dan had made a joke about homosexuality I found distasteful. He was prone to making outlandish statements and this was my first experience. I stood up from my chair, walked over to him, sat down on his lap and, leaning into him, kissed him on the cheek.

A blowhard – an asshole – would have taken offense, would maybe pushed me away or struck me, but Dan responded by wrapping his left arm around my waist and pulling me closer, giving me a wee squeeze, and furthering the joke.

We had each found a kindred spirit.

Dan, the boisterous, tuba playing, southside Milwaukee, backup high-school football player, and me, the quiet, wallflower immigrant. We had very few things in common, but one was a sense of humor. And I quickly came to see that this imposing guy, prone to Hawaiian shirts as loud as his own personality and to views that left me shaking my head too many times too count, was in actuality a pussycat. While Dan liked to pretend that he was hard and selfish and opinionated, that it was his way or the highway, it was an act.

He was a complicated man but there could be no doubting the size of his heart. He had many loves. Ace – his wife, Paula. The boys, Carl and Hunter. His dogs. All dogs. The oppressed. Palestine in recent years. The Tubes. Monday night basketball. Breasts. Laughter.

The deepest, longest laughs – ones that left me bent over, or crawling on the floor, struggling to breath – those always happened when I was with Dan. As did the biggest adventures.

There are so many stories

 A couple of years after we met, we outfitted his beater car with signs affixed to each side of the car that read: Johnson-Woods Detective Agency: Death is our constant companion. We drove it for weeks around the east side, once spending the day in wait outside the old Shorecrest Hotel on Prospect before spotting the local Mafia boss. We watched him walk to a car, and then followed that car around town for the remainder of the day. All good. No one shot at us, and we never heard from the FBI, who were likely legitimately following him.

We spent much of college in the Gasthaus in the basement of the UWM Union. And we worked together at National Auto Spring, him crawling under disgusting garbage trucks to replace springs and me stacking said springs in the next-door warehouse and driving deliveries. At lunchtime, we’d sit and wonder about our co-workers – all grizzled, rough-living mechanics, many of them damaged men, from Vietnam or drugs or violence – and renew our vows to both finish college. And then, usually, we’d reenact a comedy bit we had seen on Saturday Night Live or Monty Python, leaving the both of us howling and the old mechanics cursing at us.

The sunrise hike camping weekends. The time Bruce pulled a slingshot from his trunk – a monster, weapon-of-war looking thing. We stood one of the boys – Hunter? Carl? My memory fails but I’m sure the right one still remembers – atop the next hill over from us. Dan pulled back as far as he could, the strain trembling his body, and let it rip. We watched the armament of choice, a Stay Puff marshmallow, a bright white cube of foamy sugar, string a line across the slight valley between us with just the slightest hint of an arc, and pop dead center into Hunter’s chest, knocking him off his feet. He was fine and ate the marshmallow; the rest of us broke into hysterics each time we brought it up over the weekend and at subsequent camping trips over the years.

We (figuratively) split a six-pack of Milwaukee’s Best with Hunter S. Thompson. The doctor. A literary hero of mine and a role model of sorts for Dan. Not the drugs. The attitude. The fuck-it-all I’m-going-to-be-myself and I’m-going-to-have-a-hell-of-a-good-time doing it attitude. Living large. Gonzo. Buy the ticket, take the ride. I don’t think Dan said no very often.

We drove to Texas for lunch. Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, then Texas. We were somewhere around Normal when the stones in my gall bladder began to take hold, prompting an all-out, mad blitzkrieg through central Illinois farm country in search of a public toilet. Finally arriving in Texarkana for lunch, we settled on a story if anyone asked where we were from. We were from Washington, D.C. we decided, looking for a site for a new civil rights museum. We stayed in Texas just long enough to down lunch at a cafeteria-style diner downtown before deducing from the hard looks of the locals that they were not all that welcome to the idea of a civil rights museum coming to their Texarkana.

With Dan, in his Hawaiian shirt, at the Texas/Arkansas border. The lunch wasn't worth the 36-hour, round-trip drive, but the memories were.

We went swimming in Lake Michigan on New Year’s Day. Twice. Dan with his trusty tuba. Me with my translucent blue skin. Years later, after he and Paula had moved to Florida, he pleaded with me to give him a good six months’ notice if I was coming down, so they could stock up on enough sunscreen.

Our adventures were often roof-raising. And, once, even literally. He decided his house needed more space, needed a full third floor, so he went about designing an addition and then building it himself. There is likely no one else in my life who could convince me to stand in a temporarily open-air attic with a half dozen or so other guys, all lifting the long edge of each side of the roof, one side at a time, while others hoisted the new walls into place. No one fell. And, though it threatened very convincingly with squeaks, groans and shudders, the roof didn’t collapse.

We had a pie fight, with 150 of our closest friends, which went viral before anyone knew what viral meant, with a national news crew coming to town to film the pie fight for CBS Sunday Morning and interview requests from Canada, Britain, India and the Jimmy Kimmel show.

We talked in recent years about another adventure, joked about fitting it in before we were both relegated to using walkers. Maybe a Route 66 road trip – a drive through the heart of the diseased American dream – blogged, or podcasted or otherwise recounted.

I began to sense in the past year or so that it wasn’t likely to happen. It won’t now. The ride is over.

Hunter Thompson once wrote “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming ‘Wow! What a Ride!’”

Mahalo, Daniel Ray Johnson, my brother. Wow! What a ride!

The Johnson-Woods Detective Agency. Death was our constant companion. Boredom never was.