Days of Wine and Ukuleles

I sing today of an ordinary man on a melancholy day, because Robert Nevel Johnson has died and something should be said about that.

He died of cancer in the colorless confines of a hospital room after telling his wife, Mary, “Now I wish I could just go to sleep.”

This was after she promised him that with Social Security, a part-time job and help from a loving family she would make it all right financially.

“It’s OK to go,” she said gently.

Bob needed her assurance because first in his mind was the welfare of his wife of 54 years, and before that the five children they had raised together.

Once given that assurance, he let go of the pain and grief that is cancer and slipped quietly into his dreams.

I say he was an ordinary man not as a means of dismissal but as a song of praise, for even those who do not lead parades fashion lives of decency and personal courage.

Los Angeles glows with the strength of them. They’re the ones who rush into violent mobs to help someone they don’t know, who brave flames to put out fires that don’t threaten them, who enter dangerously damaged buildings to assist earthquake victims they will never see again.

Bob was ordinary only in the sense that he did not aspire to great things and was not eaten alive by the corrosive acids of ambition that damage so many of us beyond repair.

He wanted to work, he wanted to support his family and he wanted to enjoy what he had as long as he could.

Even in the dwindling days of his life he could go on a family picnic and haul his portable oxygen tank into a nearby saloon for a whiskey old-fashioned before his last ride home.

*

I know of him because he was my friend. Bob came into my life when I was a boy and he was not long out of high school, a hell-raising street kid with savvy beyond his years.

His life at home was filled with emotional pain, and he ran from it. Mary’s home life was not much better, and they met the way anguished people often do, seeking out each other in a crowd of strangers, destined to be one.

Mary was still in school when they were married and no one thought the union would last beyond Tuesday. But they fooled everyone, rode out adversity and for half a century remained true to the fate that had brought them together.

From a shaky beginning emerged Bob the man, filled with a sweetness one could barely imagine when he was taunting teachers and rolling cars in the wildness of his youth.

He raised four sons and a daughter with loving care, and was the strength in their family when two of the boys died young, one of cancer and the other from a drug overdose. He held back his own tears so that others could cry.

But even under those terrible circumstances, Bob was a positive man, pursuing a half-dozen careers in an endless search for the best way to support his family. He drove a truck, tended bar, opened a milk depot, became a carpenter and for a while was a keno boss in a Lake Tahoe casino.

They were not huge successes, but Bob liked doing them all and, in the end, there is a kind of glory to that. He was never beaten down.

*

The man rarely cursed life. The closest he came to dreary self-evaluation in my presence was once when he was praising a friend’s achievement and denigrating himself by saying, “Even my name is ordinary.”

I’m not sure he was ever aware of how much his family adored him and how much his friends valued him. My admiration went the full route: I joined the Marines because he had been a Marine before that, and what was good for him was good for me.

Bob was my drinking buddy and my singing partner. He had somehow learned to play the ukulele and, with Ed Fernandes, the three of us entertained at parties with flawed but enthusiastic renditions of “The Three Caballeros.”

There were other tunes too, but that one seemed to characterize what Bob once referred to as our days of wine and ukuleles.

We’re three caballeros, three gay caballeros, they say we are birds of a featherrrr . . .

“Everyone liked my dad,” his son Wayne said to me the day of his funeral, one of those brilliant, bright blue days that precede rain. “He fit in wherever he went. I remember once he won enough money gambling to buy a Cadillac and everybody was ecstatic. It was his one big victory.”

Not really. Bob Johnson’s whole life was a victory, because it was a triumph of the soul that few of us ever achieve, a place in the heart reserved for those who are special.

He was a good man and I’ll miss him, both as a friend and as element of those days of wine and ukuleles that can never be again . . . because we were three caballeros, and now we are only two.