I first heard this expression in a book called You Can't Win You by Jack Black, the life story of a burglar. The book was published in 1924 and I read it as a boy fascinated by this dark furtive purposeful world. I managed to get a copy and re-read the book with poignant nostalgia. Between the reader in 1924 and the reader in 1980 falls the shadow of August 6, 1945, one of the most portentous dates of history.
Train whistles across a distant sky. This is a peep show back to the world of rod-riding yeggs and peat men and cat burglars, bindle stiffs, gay cats and hobo jungles and Salt Chunk Mary and fence in her two storey red brick house down by the tracks somewhere in Idaho. She keeps a porcelain coffee pot and an iron pot of pork and beans always in the fire. You eat first and talk business later the watches and rings sloped out on the kitchen table by the chipped coffee mugs. She named a price and she didn't name another. Mary could say no quicker than any woman I ever knew and none of them ever meant yes. She kept the money in a cookie jar but nobody thought about that. Her cold eyes would have seen the thought and maybe something goes wrong on the next lay. John Law just happens by or a citizen comes up with a load of 00 buck shot into your soft and tenders.
In this world of shabby rooming houses, furtive gray figures in dark suits, hop joints and chili parlours the Johnson Family took shape as a code of conduct. To say someone is a Johnson means he keeps his word and honors his obligations. He's a good man to do business with and a good man to have on your team. He is not a malicious, snooping, interfering self-righteous trouble making person.
You know a Johnson when you see one and you get to know those of another persuasion. I remember in the Merchant Marine training center at Sheepshead Bay when the war ended. Most of the trainees quit right then and there was a long line to turn in equipment which had to be checked out item by item; some of us had only been there a few days and we had no equipment to turn in. So we hoped to avoid standing for hours, days perhaps in line for no purpose. I remember this spade cat said, 'Well, we're going to meet a nice guy or we're going to meet a prick.' We met a prick but we managed to find a Johnson.
Yes you get to know a Johnson when you see one. The cop who gave me a joint to smoke in the wagon. The hotel clerk who tipped me off I was hot. And sometimes you don't see the Johnson. I remember a friend of mine asked someone to send him a hash cake from France. Well the asshole put it in a cheap envelope with no wrapping and it cut through the envelope. But some Johnson had put it back in and sealed the envelope with tape.
Years ago I was stranded in the wild of East Texas and Bill Gains was sending me a little Pantopon through the mail and he invented this clever code and telegrams are flying back and forth.
- 'Urgently need pants.'
- 'Panic among dealers. No pants available.'
This was during the war in a town of 200 people. By rights we should have had the FBI swarming all over us. I remember the telegraph operator in his office in the railroad station. He had a kind, unhappy face. I suspected he was having trouble with his wife. Never a question or a comment. He just didn't care what pants stood for. He was a Johnson.
A Johnson minds his own business. But he will help when help is needed. He doesn't stand by while someone is drowning or trapped in a wrecked car. Kells Elvins, a friend of mine, was doing 90 in his Town and Country Chrysler on the way from Pharr, Texas to Laredo. He comes up over a rise and there is a fucking cow right in the middle of the road on the bridge. He slams on the brakes and hits the cow doing 60. The car flips over and he is pinned under it with a broken collar bone covered from head to foot with blood and guts and cowshit. So along comes a car with some salesmen in it. They get out cautiously. He tells them just how to jack the car up and get it off him but when they see that blood they don't want to know. They don't want to get mixed up with anything like that. They get back in their car and drive away. Then a truck driver comes along. He doesn't need to be told exactly what to do, gets the car off Kells and takes him to to a hospital. The truck driver was a Johnson. The salesmen were shits like most salesmen. Selling shit and they are shit.
The Johnson family formulates a Manichean position when good and evil are in conflict. It is not an eternal conflict since one or the other must win a final victory.
I recollect Brion Gysin, Ian Sommerville and your reporter were drinking an espresso on the terrace of a little cafe on the Calle de Vigne in Tangier... after lunch a dead empty space... Then this Spaniard walks by. He is about 50 or older, shabby, obviously very poor carrying something wrapped in brown paper. And our mouths fell open as we exclaimed in unison
- 'My God that's a harmless looking person!'
He passed and I never saw him again, his passing portentous as a comet reminding us how rare it is to see a harmless looking person, a man who minds his own business and gets along as best he can in a world largely populated by people of a very different persuasion, kept alive by the hope of harming someone, on the way to the Commissaria to denounce a neighbor or a business rival leaving squiggles and mutterings of malevolence in their wake like ugly little spirits.
February 3, 1982... A program on San Salvador... a reporter has contacted a guerrilla group. One look at those faces and I know where I stand. I know them all. They are Johnsons. The reporter is checking the contention of the junta and the Reagan administration and the guerrillas are armed with soviet weapons via Cuba and Nicaragua...
- 'Lets see your guns.'
Young man has a Belgian assault rifle 9M... handsome boy about 20 has an M-16, a little fat boy about 16 has a .22 held together with wire and tape.
- 'Fifty years old' he tells us smiling.
Man in his thirties, nice smile: 'Me I ain't got no gun.'
- 'Well where are the Russian AK-47s you are supposed to be getting from Cuba?
- 'No hay.' (There aren't any)
Look at these facts. Nice faces. Johnson faces. You can't fake it. That old Spaniard couldn't have been a KGB Colonel, or a Cousin, or MI6. No agent could have that cover. Because it isn't a cover. It's the real thing.
Three guns for 20 men. Shy handsome boy of 15 has been with the guerrillas since he was 14. Why? No ideology no rubbish. Self defense. Once you take up arms against a bunch of shits there is no way back. Lay down your arms and they will kill you. I've seen the Policia Nationale in action in Columbia during the civil war. Vicious thugs, no Johnson faces there.
That's all the orientation I need to make up my mind about San Salvador. Don't want to hear Haig's lies or any other lies. Haig is no Johnson. He's got one of the most basically dishonest faces I ever saw. And the same look on his face when he lies as General Westmoreland... LIE LIE LIE written all over it.
