I am 50 years old; my sister is 48. We are standing in the doorway at the back of the building watching people file into the small space in our small town—despite it all the hall is called the Grande Hall. I smile to myself at this idea. Older men that I barely recognize appear in the brightly lit door frame and find their way into the grand space, mixing with other folks they don’t know. Some have partners, most do not. I realize, unexpectedly, how moving it is that these men who have come alone did come alone. That sits heavy in me for a moment. There have been a lot of these sobering moments of perspective into the life of my father since he passed away.
My father fell asleep smoking on his sofa. He’d drank too much and didn’t wake up when his cigarette fell into the dug-out hole his little dog had chewed out of the couch. He’d covered the hole with a crochet blanket knitted out of yarn that become toxic when burned. The fire investigator told me this. The fire investigator also told me he went to high school with my father. He told me my father was everyone’s friend, he made everyone laugh, and he was sorry for my loss. I said, thank you.
The fire marshal was in the Grande Hall as well. This Grande Hall in this small town. Everyone was here.
My father raced dirt bikes as a young man. He was 19 when I was born. He had raced dirt bikes in the unknown riverbeds and dry rolling hills of central California since he was 16 years old. Every weekend small daylong communities would prop up to race on Sunday in these unused places. It was the early 1970s. My dad hauled his dirt bike and his young family to the racetrack in a van with the name of his father’s piano store painted on the side. It said E.E. Long Piano Co. His father had bought the business from a man named Long, but he didn’t change the name. Our name was Johnson.
The brightly lit doorway of the Grande Hall is quiet now. Everyone has found a seat, and it is time to start this service for my father. I am nervous. I have printed out my speech, which I grip with shaky hands. I stand in the back next to my sister, our shoulders touch and there is some comfort in that. Friends and relatives take turns at the microphone, recounting their memories of our father. I am the last person to speak in this service.
My father was an oddly muscular man. If you were to witness him grilling steak in my grandparent’s backyard, standing next to his mother and father, you’d wonder how such a brute of man could be born to these two small people. My dad wasn’t tall, but he was thick. Maybe because he delivered pianos as a teenager? I don’t know. Maybe he was from a different place. He wasn’t like his brothers, and my sister and I were not like him either. He was his own thing. He escaped death constantly by some will of the gods, as every decision he made was a bad one, a dangerous one. He told jokes loudly. His own laughter made everyone else laugh. Somehow, we all felt safe in his presence.
At the microphone was a retired police officer named Jerry Stratton. He had pulled me over when I was a teenager on my dirt bike as I tried to make the illegal journey from our garage to the railroad tracks. I was 14 years old. He looked at me through my googles and helmet as I trembled in fear of the law. He asked me for ID I didn’t have. He asked me my name and I said, “Nic Johnson.” There was a thoughtful pause before he said, “Are you Greg Johnson’s son?” I admitted that I was. There was another long silence as Jerry looked off down the street. This wasn’t the last time this would happen. He resolved to say, “I used to chase your dad through these streets on his dirt bike, how old are you son?” I admitted to being 14, too young to have driver’s license or any rights to operate a motor vehicle on public streets. He told me to push my bike back to the house. I did that. It was a long way to push a motorcycle, but I was grateful to be let go. Jerry recounted this story at the microphone, he looked back to me at the end and nodded to the Johnson legacy in our small town. It seemed like he enjoyed his part in that story. I smiled at him in recognition of simpler times. We shook hands and he went back to his seat.
My father was a soft human. Despite his physical strength, size, and power, he was deeply vulnerable. When my mother left him for the lead singer of a local band he was destroyed. He was destroyed for life; it was not recoverable. He punched holes in the doors and walls of our house. He punched the lead singer right off the pitcher’s mound at a Sunday softball game—knocked him clean out and then walked away. I watched this from the truck in the parking lot. He’d said to me, “wait here.”
My father drank too much. I remember getting pulled over by the highway patrol on our way to the lake. My sister and I staring at the flashlight beam as we slept in the long front seat of the truck. The patrolman telling my father he was clearly intoxicated and shouldn’t be driving with kids in the car. But dad was charming and confident, and we were sent on our way with a warning. My sister and I newly aware that there was such a thing as being intoxicated.
It appeared as if no one else was coming to the microphone to say something about our father. This was my cue to close out the service with my carefully crafted statement about my father. The emptiness was then filled with a rustling from the back of the room. An older man that I didn’t recognize made his way slowly around seated people and painfully down the aisle. He stopped to look at me and my sister. He made his way to the microphone. I gripped my sister’s arm, not sure what was about to happen.
The following is what he said, to the best of my ability to recount it.
“My name is Ron Bass. I raced motorcycles with Greg when we were kids. Some of you know me, I am mason, a brick layer. I have maybe worked on your houses at some point. I want to tell you a story about Greg. We raced most weekends at Spillway Park, in the riverbed of Santa Maria. It was mostly the same folks racing there every weekend. Greg, as you know, had a young family.”
He looked back to my sister and me.
“Mandy, his wife, and Nic and Tami—Tami was a baby, Nic was just walking at the time. There was a guy in the pits who had Doberman pinchers, two of them. He had them tied up, but they barked like crazy and ran to the end of their ropes like they’d kill you whenever you walked past his truck. I remember, on more than one weekend, Greg looked at that man and said, “If those dogs ever get near my kids I’ll kill ‘em.” Well, one weekend one of them did get loose. And there was Greg walking through the pits with Nic. And this dog was coming fast. And this is the thing I’ll never forget as long as I live. Greg put Nic down behind him and got down on his knees facing that dog and he waited for it. When that dog got to him, he wrapped in his arms around it and choked it to death right there in the dirt.”
There was never a more silent room than this Grande Hall we all found ourselves in. I didn’t know where to look.
Ron Bass continued, “Greg had a lot of problems, we all know that. But he loved his family, and he would protect you, and me, and all the people he loved to the end. He was a good man. Thank you.”
Ron Bass then walked back to his seat, and that seemed to take forever. No one else came forward.
I made my way to the microphone.
I said, “Hello, I am Nic Johnson, Greg’s son. Thank you all for coming. I had prepared something to say, but I can’t think of more perfect way to think of my father than what Ron just said. Thank you, Ron Bass. I’m only going to say, thank you dad for protecting us with your beautiful strength, we live our lives in your debt. Thank you, dad.”
I looked back at my sister. She nodded in agreement, and that concluded the service of our father.