Johnny

Very candidly I heard an old man ramble something under his breathe. However I heard it loud and clear, "I don't have much longer to go now." While this phrase could be ambivalent, I couldn't have mistaken his meaning. I had only known Johnny for a short time. He incessantly talked of the past as if somehow to make sense of where he was headed. Some may be bothered by this revelation in which he had just spoke. It is all part of the divine order. My sidelined process of watching him slip into the void of dementia existing somewhere between this realm and the next will be something I will always remember. Sometime ago he was an editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, he spoke a lot of having to meet the deadlines. "If ya didn't drink going into it, you definitely drank when you were finished and if you didn't you weren't going to make it." he would tell me. In the times of Hyatt Ashbury and the flower children, he was a romantic at heart. As a youngster he once shot himself through the calf with a .22 caliber bullet in which he bandaged himself. For fear that his Irish father would put a hurting on him worse than the bullet ever would. We shared an affinity for jazz music. He called me "babe" which could be awkward as I am a man but I found it endearing. I am not mad at his resignation of life although I will miss him. Johnny never missed a deadline. "Heres looking at you kid, I'll catch you on the other side babe."