DJ Wilson at Malcolm Martin Park. “Let’s walk across Eads Bridge,” he said one day. “You’ve gotta see the view of the Arch.” It was a fresh perspective, a new angle on the familiar. What his journalism gave us every time.
DJ Wilson made fun of everything but death. Roughly once a month, he’d show up at work in, uncharacteristically, a suitcoat and tie. He went to more funerals than anybody I know. His parents’ friends, his aunt or uncle, a neighbor. Later, sometimes, a friend—but not often, because he was still too young.
He went to those wakes and funerals not because he was Irish and raised Catholic, though he was, but because he felt like it mattered, and he had a deep and abiding sense of loyalty. Illness, pain, misfortune, or injustice won his instant sympathy. Other conditions of life, he graced with a caustic wit. (When I told him I was getting married, he said dryly, “That’s optimistic of you.”)
More sentimental and sensitive than he’d ever let you guess, DJ was always keenly aware that for most of us, life is hard, and while he might down a few beers and watch a soccer game to forget that fact for a minute, he never tried to pretend or romanticize. He faced brain cancer the same way, reminding me by text of a British colleague who’d announced calmly, after suffering after a soon-fatal aneurysm crossing Grand Avenue, “Something untoward has happened in my head.”
I worked with DJ first at Saint Louis University. So laidback it took a while for his sharp intelligence to hit you, he kept his feet propped on his desk whenever possible, a huge hole visible in the sole of his shoe. He was the first vegetarian I’d ever met, and I was charmed to see that he ate junk food readily; this was principle, not a health crusade. Later, we shared an office at the RFT. One day I was diving into research for a story on shock therapy, and he reached about two-thirds of the way down a stack of old newspapers and clippings that was taller than the divider (the fire department later ordered it dismantled) and located, on the first try, an article on the topic from the late 1970s. He repeated such feats regularly, knew something about everything, steered me to what mattered and called bullshit on what didn’t.
You couldn’t be glum around DJ. He was as pessimistic as Eeyore, but in a remarkably cheerful way. Wrote at the very last minute, hunched over his keyboard, turning even politics into poetry. We tried faking an earlier deadline; he saw through it. When I felt shy and scared, he’d define our job with a shrug: “We call up strangers and ask them questions.” He was too cynical to judge any side with rigid ideological fervor, and so people talked to him. They also talked to him because he was honest, and his heart was so obviously in the right place, even if theirs wasn’t.
Also, if you talked to him, you’d get to hear his stories about his kids. Those stories were better than any standup routine, and when you finally regained some control, you realized he’d grabbed hold of your heart while you were laughing. Total love, totally unvarnished. The definition of unconditional.
Some people guard their love, extending it only to their family. But DJ saw the entire world with a sort of cynical tenderness. Remember the Rally Cat? DJ emailed, “Every screw up is an opportunity for redemption. or at least something positive. they should have never let the cat go, yet having screwed up, they are trying to capitalize on this...& the feral cat outreachers (think about that title, what a hard group to outreach to) will get some financial support. let's hope they'll capitalize on this too. there are many more needy cats than the rally one.”
Here’s DJ on foster care (he and his wife were the sort who wound up adopting their foster kids): “Well, yeah. people should care and do more. and yes, the state of Misery should be ashamed of itself, pay a price, and change its ways. yet people don't. basically. care. there is no long line to fill out an application to be foster parent. the kids are waiting, the adults aren't.”
It’s impossible for me to imagine this city without DJ Wilson; it’s a loss at the molecular level. He breathed politics and social justice (most people choose either/or, which explains a lot), and he was the most opinionated but least judgmental man I’ve ever met. There were only two kinds of people he couldn’t abide: those who were pretentious and those who were malicious.
He used to end a conversation by saying, amused and resigned, “And the beat goes on.”
On April 20, that beat stopped.
And the world will be a little less sane without him.
