Don Johnson is Christ! (A true story)

Don Johnson will tell you that he’s a terrifically skilled bricklayer and mason. He’s not bragging, mind you, he just wants you to know that as a skilled, in-demand laborer he is quite capable of earning a decent wage, paying his bills and living a life of respect. We’re standing on a brick sidewalk not far from a memorial “to our Confederate dead”, almost smack-dab between the fine Victorian mansions of the North Hill District and the soup kitchen where Don takes most of his meals.

Don tells me how fortunate he was that on the night he was jumped by two young thugs, robbed, beaten and abandoned, he was in the parking lot of the hospital that was to treat him. In town on a temporary bricklaying job, Don had only a small bag of clothes and toiletries, an old plastic paint bucket of tools, and a cell phone. He was robbed of all save the worn jeans and ragged T-shirt he was wearing as he told his story. Barely conscious, bleeding from a number of cuts on his swollen face, and mumbling incoherently through a jaw broken in two places, Don managed to drag himself to the hospital emergency room.

“After about a week they told me I could go home,” Don continued, “but I asked them ‘What about my jaw? Aren’t you going to wire my jaw?’” But his jaw was not to be wired. The thieves who robbed Don of his livelihood also robbed him of his wire-cutting pliers. “You have to have wire-cutters with you at all times when your jaw is wired,” Don explained matter-of-factly, “’cause if there’s an emergency you have to be able to cut the wire.”

The grandson of a prominent Southern lawyer and judge, Don Johnson will tell you the story of how when he was a boy he would go to visit his grandfather at the courthouse. The boy was impressed by the larger-than-life portrait of his grandfather hanging on the wall in the courtroom. He would sit with his grandfather the lawyer and judge and listen to stories of true crime and justice. The judge would ask the boy, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” “I want to be a lawyer just like you, Grandpa,” Don told him. But the judge cautioned the crestfallen boy away from the law. “I don’t want you to ever have to lie to earn your living” he told him.

“So that’s how I ended up as a bricklayer,” Don went on with his story, “’cause you work with your hands; you never have to talk to no one…you never have to lie.”

Don Johnson made a point of assuring me that he wasn’t THAT Don Johnson. I’m sure he meant the actor Don Johnson but I didn’t need much convincing to understand that the weathered, tired, sweaty man before me was not the same pastel day- glow Don Johnson of “Miami Vice” fame. He did offer to show me his ID, I’m supposing a driver’s license, but I took him at his word.

Together with his clothes and tools, Don also lost his cell phone. Stored in the phone were the numbers of the man for whom he had been working, now hopelessly out of touch, and Don’s brother in Tampa. Don doesn’t remember his brother’s number off the top of his head and for some reason he is unable to find him through directory assistance. A nice lady at the mission gave Don a sheet of notebook paper, a pen, and a stamped envelope so that he could write home to his brother.

Did he write the letter? I don’t know and I don’t ask; I don’t even think to ask. I’m thinking that at any moment in the Don Johnson saga I am going to be asked for money. I am just out for a morning walk with the baby in the stroller and the dog on a leash and minding my own business when Don Johnson stepped into my life. The whole time I am listening to his story I am scheming ways to get away from this homeless guy and get on with my walk. He’s a little bit scary and dirty and sweaty and he smells like booze even though he doesn’t seem to be drunk.

“I just want to shake your hand, sir” Don Johnson says to me as if we are wrapping this up. Okay, I’m bracing for it. Here it comes…the pitch, the whimper, the beggar's appeal…“God bless you and your beautiful baby,” he says with a warm smile, his blue eyes suddenly clear and full of joy and promise. “Huh?” I am taken aback. “Well, God bless you too Don,” I replied quietly, almost ashamedly. “Oh I am blessed, sir, Jesus Christ lives in me and as long as I have Christ I have nothing to ever worry about!” And with that Don Johnson wishes me a good day and makes his way on down the brick path. So that was it, I thought; Christ is with Don Johnson…Christ is IN Don Johnson.

In whom will I find Christ today?