He was a stockily built, unassuming looking fellow. No more than 5’7” with his boots on, wider in the belly than the bicep. Maybe 200 pounds after a few sixpacks. Moderately long brown hair set off a slightly boyish face accented by a drooping moustache. A nearly ever-present grin and slightly squinting green eyes rounded out the picture.

I can see him now, making his way down a sidewalk on a cold winter morning carrying a dozen or so drop cloths, painfully hungover but stoically accepting his penance and ready to tackle another day in the life of a house painter.

Either oblivious or indifferent to the nervous elderly lady whose apartment we were in the process of preparing to be painted, he’d set the drop cloths down, flex both arms Hulk-Hogan like, releasing his all-purpose war cry:

“YEAH MAN!”

Even if I were 2 or 3 rooms away, I knew Ron Johnson was in the house giving his version of the Native American exclamation going into battle: It is a good day to die!

All I knew about Ron was what he told me, and after a while I didn’t really care how much of it was true, it made for a great story.

Supposedly he still held some sort of record in the largest brothel in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, his home town. I didn’t press for details but got them anyway. Unfortunately, it was during lunch on a warm day with windows rolled down as we were sitting in the truck in a McDonald’s parking lot. A nearby older lady had been enjoying her Big Mac. Until then.

He could segue seamlessly from sex to rock and roll. Moving to Denver he talked about all the times he drank with Led Zeppelin, whose members were playing little clubs as they were just getting started. This led to his becoming a roadie for the country rocker Elvin Bishop.

Acid parties in his high-rise apartment building, drug runs to Mexico and Miami, it all concluding finally with him being half in and half out of a bathroom window with a DEA agent pointing a shotgun at him.

Ron escaped somehow to Europe after that, driving a van full of weed around Spain in the turmoil following General Franco’s death, which led to a stay in Amsterdam’s hash and red-light district.

It was a little hard to reconcile these swashbuckling tales with the fellow covered in paint and dirty overalls driving a rusted-out Chevy Nova. Ron explained,

“I got older, got married, had to make an honest legal living. Especially when we had a baby boy. Named him Chance. I knew he was my last chance to get normal.”

So, Ron left the fast lane but plainly was keeping an eye on the exits that were always coming up that led back to sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

One day at lunch he said to me in utmost seriousness,

“I might not be in tomorrow. Not just tomorrow, but forever. Got enough money saved to spend an easy winter down in Mexico. I know, it means leaving the wife and baby, but hell, I ain’t the marrying kind, never was.”

Next morning, he was there unloading paint from the truck, grinning broadly as if yesterday’s conversation had never happened. He had an almost Zen-like absence of self-consciousness which likely buoyed him through his life’s choppy waters.

Last I heard from him he was planning on starting his own painting company and having another child. He could still be found at strip clubs, racetracks and coke parties. But he was spending more time with his family, he seriously vowed. We were sitting at a bar where we’d accidentally run into each other and I couldn’t help but ask,

“So, Ron, do you think you’ll ever figure out the meaning of life?”
With not a moment’s pause, he confidently replied, “Yeah man.”

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