While I was getting rebuilt, news reports of deaths of Sly and Brian had me shouting 'Boom-laka-laka boom' & wishing I could catch a wave in my room as I was missing in action and few noticed

 Boom-laka-laka boom…. Hell with it. I just wasn’t made for these times (Although I do hope that recent major, life-altering surgeries perhaps get me ready for times ahead.)   

And I’m not just talking about THESE times, as in the last few months when I’ve been Missing In Action from my News Brothers chronicles, public John Lennon worship and other ceremonial and benevolent duties. Hell, for a couple of weeks of that time, I lay in a fog and in constant pain while helicopters whirly-birded outside my window dropping off heart-attack victims, shredded motorcycle drivers, chainsaw casualties, victims of guitar duels and castrated serial killers. Or whatever. I found the 'copters amusing as I gazed in pain from the ghastly uncomfortable bed with its plastic anti-piss and blood-resistant cover and automatic torture controls that nurses use to keep you in your place. Literally. It actually was a nice place.

 I was busy having my neck and spine rebuilt, two operations separated by two-plus months because of a fiercely violent virus I contracted during pre-op before the second surgery, which then was delayed.  That ailment took me by surprise and really pissed me off. Afraid of an illness delaying what, to me, was life-or-death … cripple-or-walk … surgery, I had holed up in Da Basement since Christmas Eve.  Visitors must wear masks (or preferably use the phone or leave me alone.) 'Twas precaution wasted, as a vile and viral occurrence struck me down when I went into the waiting room for a February pre-op, days before my second (and most massive) surgery. Hordes of smelly patients and family members were playfully swapping flying phlegm. I figure I got sick there from someone’s boogers floating like invisible zeppelins, driven by a whole lotta love through the hot, still air. So, a late-February daylong rebuild-my-spine surgery (my neck discs had been overhauled and replaced in January) was put off until the next available date … late May.

 

I first ran into Brian Wilson and his brothers, cousin and their buddy, Al, one night after I made a miscalculation about the best way to get into a concert in Ames, Iowa. He's dead now. I interviewed him during my career and wanted to play in his sandbox.

In between the surgeries, and when I wasn’t too ill to make it to my office, I wrote here occasionally, acting like all is well in FlapjacksLand.  I didn’t talk about my health, because I figured no one really cared. Really, other than the occasional foray into my sick and twisted mind, for most of the last six months, I’ve been “missing” from my failed write-for-sanity exercises. Resounding silence here in this "brotherhood" taught me what I’d already figured was the case. Fortunately, my long-time sidekick, Rob “Death” Dollar – one of those I told about my surgery -- kept The News Brothers page alive and, at my request, kept my condition a secret from anyone except his best friend, Columbo. Not the one-eyed detective.  The lovely stray cat he’s adopted. Oh, I'm sure Rob told his Mom, who I love and who likes me very much, as she should. Just one more thing on second thought: He may have told the late Peter Falk, as well. Or our pal, The Lone Ranger, also deceased.

I only told a few people I was having the new spine and neck installed. I’m intensely private, though I used to run around in skin-tight, pink, tie-dyed long johns with my sidekick, Jocko. That was a long time ago, a half-century-plus. I still have the pink long johns—the rear end was torn off by a 6-foot-tall woman with red hair and a hungry heart (everybody’s got one, lay down your money and you play your part) -- in the bottom drawer with my high school letter sweater. "We are the Dingbats, mighty, mighty Dingbats." Hell, I’m 73. Long time since the Class of 69 -- including me in a burgundy tux and a girl who would ditch me when her ignorant, acne-covered college boyfriend came home -- danced to Baby Huey and The Babysitters at Lake Forest Country Club. I need to toss that refuse from a life nearly fully lived.  I will hang onto the yellow socks I wore on every test day since seventh grade, though …. Maybe wear them right on into the furnace or Metro garbage bin.  I know I’ll be wearing The Lone Ranger mask Clayton Moore (aka “Mr. Lone Ranger) autographed in the winter of 1983, my Working Class Hero  T-shirt and red Converse “Chucks.” Fifty-six years ago, those same style shoes were called “Jack Purcells’’ and we all had to have a pair for physical education (“gym class”).   And an extra-extra-large athletic supporter. I only got quick peeks at what the girls were wearing to protect their invisible scrotums.

Sylvester Stewart led one of the best, groundbreaking bands of all times. I was fortunate to see him play his organ. And I yelled "Ride, Sally, Ride." Some tall girl wanted me to add some bottom, if you read on. He's dead now.

While on the subject of the thrilling days of yesteryear I’m sure the tall Iowa State sophomore with the flaming hair and hungry heart is the one who exposed my scarcely covered cheeks that winter night when Jocko and I showed up at the Residence Hall Fair "Alice in Wonderland'' booth, staged by Hanson House (the floor on which we lived) and a girls’ dorm house I have forgotten. Willow? Rosa? Nellie? Whoa! I do remember some things (a surprise for anyone who was with us.) We were representing some of Alice’s friends and comrades in a colorful booth we built in a campus-wide coed competition. The rabbits had fur, rather than pink long johns, in Lewis Carroll's true tale. Red was tall, but of course you may remember Carroll's Alice was 10 feet tall, according to my rock heartthrob, Gracey Slick. Feed your head.  We won the competition for best booth. Or maybe it was best rabbits talking backwards. But the Red Queen understood.

 “Tim Ghianni: You haven’t changed a bit in 50 years,” the tall woman, signing her name only as “Red” wrote on Facebook a couple of years ago while she was sitting with other female alums at an Iowa State football game. It was a compliment. She was proud that I’d escaped the adult humdrum and was spending my time writing in Da Basement. Grew old, not up.  Surprising to many, I did not die before I got old, as Roger Daltrey predicted. I just never got old. I have many friends, however, who followed Roger's advice, or that should be "had" many friends. Roger's now just an old man with short hair who sings with wounded pipes while Pete stumbles while attempting his flying guitar windmill. See me, feel me, touch me, pick me off the floor.  Still a decent show, especially when John Entwistle and Keith Moon make aboriginal appearances. Of course, normal people would call them "apparitional appearances.'' I've seen them many times. I do know Who they are....

I wonder if Red’s got the big, cotton ball that was safety-pinned and then brutally snatched from my long johns’ rear end?  I really didn’t mind, although the draft was a little uncomfortable. It was Red’s attempt at cracking away at the mysterious young guy who sometimes only shaved half his face. That’s another story. I did shower twice a day, though. And I never missed class. Despite it all, I was an honor student, I think, though I may have squandered that all away.

An old woman one night went to her front porch in Ames, Iowa, where I was a scholastic legend, and scolded us for “necking” on her sidewalk. It was kind of reverse from a scene from “It’s A Wonderful Life,” where a fat, old man with a pipe and wearing a wife-beater, told Georgie he should kiss the girl. Youth is wasted on the young, he complained. I was with Red that night. I also spent time with “Blondie.” It was smart to identify them by their hair color so as not to get them confused.  Jocko was with “Mo,” I believe.  Champo and Jocko and Curly Mo.  Blondie and Red? Was Carpy with us? Nardholm?

This is me, recovering from surgery. Sometimes I forget to shave to save energy for the nimble and painful art of healing. I stopped trimming the beard when the surgeries commenced. I have trimmed it again back to its Hemingway-like style. My hair, however, is a mess and basically has not been cut since the day I took my "voluntary buyout" from Nashville's morning newspaper, 18 years ago this August..

I was Facebook Messaging with a friend’s wife in those gridiron stands – Mrs. Titzy – when Red reached out, fondly, from the past by trespassing onto the Message long enough to let me know she forgot to remember to forget. Five decades ago, she had a tidy little house off-campus where Jim/Jocko and I crashed many parties with our strategically dipped hats, apricot scarves and watched ourselves gavotte. Or our long johns. The larger the hole in the rear, the more uncomfortable it was to ride on the back of Jocko’s 175 cc Honda motorcycle (we were an amazing sight as it looked to all concerned that we were just two big guys with wheels coming out of our pink long johns or faded jeans, our cleanest dirty shirts waving in the wind). I wore a football helmet. Jocko had his "legit" head-covering. You know, maybe Red didn’t live there. She just invited us for general amusement and good looks and our well-choreographed singing and dancing. Mostly, she and I would go into the room where the record-player was located and we’d deejay and talk about love and war and my expected expenses-paid vacation in Southeast Asia. Smart girl. So was Blondie. I wouldn't have hung out with dumb girls or guys, except maybe the guy we called "Dog Shit." Actually, Mr. Shit graduated high in his class. A lot of my friends did.

Anyway, those of you who knew I was undergoing a full-body overhaul this winter/spring/summer have been good about not sharing that information. You didn’t know my first scheduled main spine surgery got almost to the operating room when the anesthetist said he’d not put me under. Too sick, remember? He said he didn’t want to kill me, an admirable sentiment not shared by all. But it delayed that final surgery by about two months. And, according to experts, it got a little scary on the redo in the OR when I sprung a two-unit gusher that further fueled my chronic anemia while the surgical nurse fought with what she said was a tough job of getting me stitched up and getting the blood to stop squirting.  I’m still undergoing fierce rehab, but I did grow two inches and can walk with support from a walker, cane, my wife, Suzanne, or my son, Joe, who came down from his home in Minneapolis to help care for me. His bosses allowed him to be remote for six weeks so he could tend to his old dad. “Not all bosses are assholes,” I told him, "although most of mine certainly were.”

I am surprised some on this page, the bulk of whom had no idea I was risking it all, or at least most of it, in an eight-hour surgery, didn’t comment on my absence from posting commentary and photos. I thought we were News "Brothers?" I kinda felt like Old Yeller, in that when they found out the dog's true value, they put a bullet between its eyes. The Invisible Man finds out his true value. So did The Elephant Man. I am a human being, so instead of succumbing to loneliness, I hit my last number and I walked to the road. Hell, I don’t know where that sentence sprung from, other than a dead guy named Tom Petty. I love the dead. He’d have been glad to meet me if my surgery failed:  “You belong among the Wildflowers,” he tells me, time to time. "Or maybe DEAD flowers," I correct him. He always gets the giggles. And some Twinkies.

Anyway, I’ve had Jocko and Rob “Death” Dollar to call. It is part of an All-Star team of disease and bodily malfunction. Jocko is recovering from multiple myeloma. Rob has a bad heart with a half-dozen or perhaps eight pig valves and three from a buffalo.  Like old people do, we talk about when we were young and what’s wrong with us. Oh yeah, then there’s Jim “Flash” Lindgren and his Parkinson’s. Friendship with me is something outrageous, contagious, courageous, because no one gets out alive. Jerry “Chuckles” Manley couldn’t call because he’s forgotten how.  And Scott “Badger’’ Shelton is long dead, although I always welcome him into my dreams about our friendship with Mr. Lone Ranger.  Rob’s always in those dreams, as well. And there's my old college friend, Dr. Tom “Carpy” Carpenter – who first met me (I was a junior) when he was headed with his parents to his assigned room to begin his freshman year. They all had to step aside because I was surfing down the dorm hallway on an ironing board (“Catch a wave and you’re sitting on top of a girl,” I told the virginal veterinary-hopeful with the typical frosh buzzcut. Or something like that. Actually, I just said "Surf's Up." And I don't think his parents were helping with his luggage, but I like the story. Carpy, a loyal and loving lifetime friend, has even checked in from the golf course where he spends his time spending the money he got from a successful vet practice on the SoCal Coast. He even was the vet for John Wayne’s dogs.  True. He is a cancer survivor, clear and strong now as he also spends nights at the blackjack tables at a seedy old-style casino a half-mile from his Las Vegas estate. He doesn’t drink anymore. Most of us don’t. “Can’t have just one,” the potato chip people proclaim.

"Surf's Up, Champo," he said, one afternoon when I caught him a week ago on the Vegas golf course after his 5-iron shot dropped into a water hazard filled with alligators and rotting gangster bodies.

Whiskey and food writer Jim “Culinarity” Myers has done a welfare check and recommended some of his family’s famed Milwaukee remedies to chase away the pain as my body tries to heal. I think he’s healthy, though he’s finally discovered age, like Dexter, is creeping its homicidal scythe his way. He drove home to Wisconsin this summer, but the Nazi border cops at the Illinois border stopped him on his way back with big wheels of cheese and 12 cases of Milwaukee's Best in his trunk. He gave the beer to the cops. The wheels of cheese he had to use as spare tires because the coppers used spike strips to stop him and tore the wheels of his '87 LeBaron. 

Anyway, this little piece of writing began with me stating I don’t belong in these times. And that’s really what I am writing about.

“These Times” when some of my preferred icons disappear from the material world and people offer the common explanation: “Well he (or she) was 82... And then there were all of those drugs.’’

 The latter comment always carries a note or three of jealousy. Or perhaps unearned righteousness. Yes, folks. There were all those drugs. Or did you forget, conveniently, who you were before you “grew up” into a successful, white-starch, career person with a jolly Scots whiskey belly, two kids, khakis, Kiwanis membership, green greed and a boat you seldom use?

Or are you, like me, continuing to fiddle away with the piano keys in the sandbox of your mind and nod, affectionately looking in happy poverty back at your random and sometimes benevolent life?

When discussing fallen heroes, for the self-important and chubby, it’s as if that too-much-dope “he had it coming” dismissal might deaden the pain caused by the worm-bait remainders of the recently breathing, who helped punctuate my own 7.35 (or something like that) decades.

Generally, when folks of the caliber and personal import of Sly Stone and Brian Wilson die, I quickly turn the rich, black soil and worm bait of my own soul and do one-take "Flapjacks" reflections that end up being examinations of my encounters with them and of the holes they leave and the ones their corpses fill. Sometimes the dregs of my soul innocently spill out onto this word stew.  I can’t stop them.

I didn’t write of Sly Stone’s June 9 and Brian Wilson’s June 11 deaths, even though both men, artistic genius and culture wagon-masters, had massive impacts on me simply by passing through my life while laughing, inhaling, stumbling or being passed-over-a-crowd-like-a-beach-ball-in-a-mosh-pit.  I was way too ill and crippled up to write.

Since music owns half-plus of my soul, I am fortunate to even have personal, quite shallow to my skin, stories to share about such magnificent and revolutionary musicians as these recently deceased geniuses who brought smiles to my often deadpan or otherwise altered façade.

Sly – Sylvester Stewart -- made his mark by proving that different skin colors and musical textures, i.e. The Family Stone, could have universal, color-blind appeal. And every time I saw the band perform, I did, indeed, want to hear his organ and say “ride, Sally, ride.” As noted earlier, I was glad to add some bottom, so the dancers just won’t hide. Of course, on winter nights, that bottom was chapped.

I guess my biggest and best memory of Sly is from one of those concerts, 50-plus years ago, in the Armory at Iowa State University.  I believe it was the first time I’d seen him in anything other than celluloid dreams and personal smokescreens.

Sly arrived four hours late (I believe that Iron Butterfly and Moby Grape had to extend their warm-up sets to keep our attention between announcements about how long it will be until The Family Stone’s increasingly tentative arrival. Can you imagine Iron Butterfly doing In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida for 90 minutes?) Great White or Mason Proffit may have been involved like two hangmen hanging from a tree.  That don’t bother me, at all. Concerts used to come in nightlong packages and tickets were $6 or occasionally free with student ID and “activity ticket.” The free ones often included a visit by me to the stage, where I played tambourines or worked on my image as the “Dancing Bear.” I did climb onstage with Joe Cocker once. He didn’t even notice, nor did I. At least one of us was high with a little help from our friends.  Or, in my case, I may have been showing off and looking at the crowd, needing somebody to come in through my bathroom window. Generally, though, I was sad because I was on my own. Though hardly "A Complete Unknown" (there was a movie by that title recently, and I’ve watched it twice to decide it was a waste of time, enjoyable as a Bullwinkle cartoon.  If I want to learn something about Bob Dylan, the self-created churlish guy or the changeling, I’ll watch “Don’t Look Back” or “Rolling Thunder Revue” or “No Direction Home.” Why waste time on a biopic when the real guy is still out there? I learned nothing other than I really liked the guy who played Pete Seeger, who I did speak with once on the phone. He's dead, too.)

Anyway, “Sly’s landed at the airport in Des Moines now,” said one of those calm-voiced Armory PA guys, an example of one of the updates as Jocko and I passed the quart of Old Grandad. Or perhaps it was Everclear.

Since we all had to trudge through minus-15 Ames, Iowa, winter, we knew that the weather outside was frightful and likely would delay Sly even longer on the 30-mile frozen highway. U.S. 69 was often covered by ice and snow of the eastbound prairie winds. Sly did like snow, but not the frozen field kind. Frozen forehead pick-me-up? Yep. Hey, don’t forget old Champo, Mr. Stewart. All we need is a drummer, for people who only need a beat, yeah ….

Sly and The Family Stone hit the stage at midnight with all the fiery energy money can buy or ingest and a genius collection of musical talent. He was the front man, the heart and soul of the best single package of musicians I’ve ever seen share one spotlight. It was a dazzling carnival that lifted hearts, shook butts and sent souls to the rafters of the old armory. 

Dance to the music.

And it was single moments after the show started that me and Jocko were on our feet and shaking the wooden grandstands. Jim was 6-4 and pushing 250, No. 63, an offensive guard on the Iowa State football team. I was 6-2-plus a smidge and 240 or sometimes a stone less, depending on beer money. (As noted, with the neck rebuild in January and the spine in May, docs say four inches taken away from me by age and general body rot have at least half returned to put me at 6-0, almost 200 and made me a very sweet and generous sort and a massive Taylor Swift fan.)

 As for me and Jim/Jocko a half-century ago, most of our adventures ended up with stops at the all-night Taco Tico, perhaps even the one where somehow we both acquired aluminum coat trees.  He’s still got mine in his home in Florida, where he stays fit, fights ailments and entertains his grandchildren. His granddaughter, living a half-mile away from Jim, always expects a fresh apple from the old man. Sometimes we’d eat from chips bags as we cruised the grocery store aisles, looking for something digestible. Pay for what we consumed mostly when we went to the cash register with Jocko beans and Wiedeman or Van Merritt beer (69-cents a six pack.)

Jim and I love each other this half-century later.  We’ve had massive personal setbacks and pain, but it all vanishes like it did the other day when we laughed about my big brother, the now-dead Eric, who bought a ticket for the Sly pit and stood right up against the center-stage, easy to pick out of the crowd as he almost always wore a purple/black knit beret. A girls hat? Sure. You tell the big guy with 278 pounds of muscle and blueberry pie gut that he looks feminine. He loved hats right up until his death 15 months ago.

“You remember your brother catching Sly when he fell off-stage?” said Jocko.  “And after he got him back on the stage, Sly fell again and he was passed all around the arena, like a beach ball.”

All’s square and far out.

It was the best show I ever saw … at least other than a Faces show I caught with Smokin’ Joe Matejka down at the armory in Des Moines one blizzard-marked night (we had to spend the night in the back of a station wagon with some girls who picked us up as we hitchhiked from Ames.)  We did keep warm in that car. But Smokin’ Joe and I were restricted to the back of the wagon and our chauffeurs stayed in the front.

Now, let’s giddy-up, giddy-up 409 to the other recently dead hero. His stage style was as a sometimes smiling statue, nothing like Sly and his gang, but I also saw Brian Wilson in concert – either with The Beach Boys or as the featured performer at the Nashville July 4 fireworks extravaganza and vomit-fest or with symphonies and the like.

I interviewed Brian two times, and found him an affable sort, though I think he was wearing his pajamas. Understated and soft-voiced, he had an invisible smile, like the joke was on him. And yet the words, mostly simple and rhythmic, were elegant and made me want to catch a wave or drive to the hamburger stand, now.

One of the greatest of American artists, Brian – who took many sabbaticals from the group he kept alive with the sacrifice of his tormented and magical soul – was with his brothers, cousin and Al, their pal, outside Iowa State’s Hilton Coliseum in 1971 or so. They were waiting for It’s a Beautiful Day and The Ides of March to end their sets. (“I’m the friendly stranger in the black sedan, won’t you hop inside my car?” sang The Ides in their hit, "Vehicle." I have a very ribald and perverse version of that song, but it’s too tasteless to put here.  The 18-year-old Champo and Jocko would dirty up any popular song as we performed for ourselves, girls like Blondie, Red and Mo, university residence hall officials, whoever was in range whenever the song played in a dorm hallway or party.

You should have heard what we did with The Doors’ “Touch Me” or even “You’re So Vain,” which we paraphrased when we walked into parties like we were walking, hard-nippled onto a yacht.  I’m digressing. By the way, we never really sang about wanting “to hold your hand.” “Truckin’” was too easy. And I still have a decades-tested Joe Cocker impression in my damaged body. 

Brian and Mike Love, Carl, Dennis, Al Jardine were joking around, passing more than gas as they waited for their top-of-the-bill spot in the field outside the Hilton. That’s where they were when we became lifelong compadres. Or something hazily similar or probably not.

I was caught up in the dark result of some sort of mild confusion involving alcohol and a penchant for getting into concerts for free (this wasn’t included in the activity ticket.) Me, Jocko and The Coach and maybe a few of my apostles, maybe even Carpy (though he may have been studying, his one major weakness), skipped the box office and took a side entrance into the arena, down the truck ramp where the gear and performers were loaded in.  Hell, I’ll bet Nardholm was with us, too. I'd guess Dog Shit chickened out.

Perhaps my bright, yellow snow boots failed me or maybe they just made me an easy target, but within moments I exited the arena up and out the same ramp, with a gentle Ames police officer holding onto my handcuffed arms and doing his best to help me smoke my cigarette with his other hand. We joked around, as after all, this was not really a felon he was leading. Just a barely drunken music fan and bargain-hunter.   He told me I should have waited until the show started, because at that point security really doesn’t care. Too busy dancing.

And that’s how I first met Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys. He was with one of the incarnations of his band on this tour as the cop and I approached them on the frozen, muddy field.

They all laughed through their own thick clouds of Iowa’s finest produce and Brian seemed to laugh the hardest. Nah, that probably was Dennis.

“Hi, guys,” I hollered to the Boys, who had to step aside to allow me to pass through their soul-circle and into the squad car.  They cheerily laughed and greeted me and the cop. And the cop took off my handcuffs and let me sit in the non-criminal passenger seat instead of in the back. He put his cop hat on my head and laughed.

 “Catch a wave and you’re sittin’ on top of a girl,” the cop sang the song I’d taught him.

 “I wish they all could be California Girls,” I answered. The friendly copper obviously had become fond of me and my suddenly shocked-sober manners and apologies, and he clearly was enamored with Brian and the Boys. Later in life, my friend, Rob Dollar and I were friends with a friendly copper who enjoyed back-shooting suspected felons. I think it was a county budget-saving measure. Another day………

On the way to the Ames City Hoosegow, the cop and I chain-smoked and replayed and laughed about our Beach Boys encounter. His favorite song was “Surfer Girl.”  He told me not to feel bad I was missing the concert, as I got a much closer look at the headliners than I would have sitting in the arena.

He also offered me all sorts of cigarettes and told me not to worry, enjoy the experience. There was no failure to communicate. Long story, but I did have a quiet night, smoking and laughing with the  cops while we waited for Jim and my other pals to enter the jail after my five-hour sober-hold expired and say “We’re here to pick up a derelict named Tim Ghianni. You got one of those here?”

My belt was returned by the desk corporal, and I left into the cold, Iowa dawn and to the nearby all-night hamburger stand. Ten greaseburgers for a buck. About 50 greaseburgers went out the door with us and into the Ames morning. Soak up the night before prior to breakfast in the dining hall.

I’ve told different and varying versions of the above story at times, but Brian Wilson’s laughter always is present. Sometimes I even have mentioned Dennis Wilson’s buddy Chuck Manson, who turned out to be something of an asshole. Helter-Skelter, my ass, you crazy fuck.

Like I say, I interviewed Brian many years later, and each time I began our conversations by recounting how The Beach Boys’ laughter in the sweet smoke of that frozen Iowa field was among my life’s highlights. He would laugh and kick loose the sand in the sandbox that surrounded his piano. “Champo, I really like the way you think,” he said. “Reminds me of myself. You really should stay in your room, though."

The words above are just rattling out of my head because I hadn’t been able to write anything after Sly and Brian died.

I admired them both greatly and have, as close as I can figure, the collected works, going all the way back to The Beach Boys’ classic “409” on a carefully preserved 45 rpm. 

Giddy up giddy up giddy up 409 (giddy up giddy up 409)
Giddy up 409 (409, 409)
Giddy up 409 (giddy up giddy up 409)
Giddy up 409...
Nothing can catch her
Nothing can touch my 409 (409, 409, 409, 409)
Giddy up 409 (409, 409, 409, 409)
Giddy up 409 (409, 409, 409, 409)

Sly, well, nothing he wrote was better than “It’s a Family Affair” and his stoic, heart-draining delivery.

One child grows up to be

 Somebody that just loves to learn

 And another child grows up to be

 Somebody you’d just love to burn.

Mom loves the both of them

You see, it’s in the blood

 Both kids are good to Mom

Blood’s thicker than the mud.....

 It’s a family affair………….

 I really hadn’t sorted out what to say before I started writing, so I hope the above works as something of a tribute to great men who shared fleeting moments of my life and who continue to populate my soul as well as answer "Where I Been?" these past seven months, even though no one asked.

It's been fun to relive the Sly show as well as my encounter with The Beach Boys in the frozen mud and hemp field and fun with Jim or Jocko, as we survived many adventures together and I would go back in a minute.  I probably wouldn’t even run more quickly down that ramp if I had a do-over, because I enjoyed my five hours in jail, where I bummed smokes from the cops and I did pull-ups on the pipes across the ceiling. I even sang “Imagine" and my version of Chicago’s (still Chicago Transit Authority and not yet easy listening) “Saturday in the Park” – “Saturday cutting farts, sounded like the Fourth of July.”  Jim and I sing that to each other during the Independence Day phone calls.

The hoosegow night was very, very good to me, from the failed bolt into the concert all the way to my post-dawn release and the fact I hugged the officers “goodbye” as they set me free. And, especially,  my red-eyed outlaw behavior allowed me to spend time in a frozen field with all of The Beach Boys, years before they began to splinter and die. By the way, I did go to city court and tell hizzoner I wasn't drunk. "I've had a lot more to drink most nights." He accepted a nolo contendere plea and fined me $25, including court costs.  

And any time I can think of my brother, who was generally a very tame and sacrilegious fellow, participating in an uncommonly colorful manner, I just have to smile.

Wouldn’t it be nice if I was younger?

I thought that a lot in the days I’ve been undergoing surgery, rehab, physical therapy, the things that have occupied my recent weeks and months and the sleepless nights punctuated by the pain of healing and growing a new spine.

“Pee in this jar so we can check your volume.” 

 “You have a bowel movement yet?”

“You can get more oxy at 2 a.m.”   (“C’mon 2 a.m., c’mon,” I’d whisper into the sheets of the torture chamber that they consider a bed in the therapy wing. The lumpy and contorted mattress itself and my ability to spend 24 hours a day in it was reason enough to have me craving the oxy.

Well, actually about 20 hours were spent daily in my cell. I did four hours of painful therapy and, sometimes, around midnight, when I knew there was no way to sleep in the torture contraption, I’d slip out of bed and collapse in the chair in front of the massive TV and watch baseball game reruns all night.

That pretty much was the soundtrack, day and night, as I wrestled with tears and despair for more than two weeks.

The tears came pretty much from a combination of exhaustion – I probably only slept 10 total hours during my incarceration at a hospital O.R., the ICU, the stepdown and then the rehab hospital.

Fiercely uncomfortable in my near-mortal’s pain, the regular visits by the nurses – “You feel like getting up and going Number 2?” I was asked until the 13^th morning when we had a victory parade, my meager turd serving as grand marshal.

“I’m so proud of you,” chirped Tia, the nurse, as she scouted out my meager, brown sample.

“Now that you can hatch a turd, we’ll probably get you out of here soon,” said a kind overnight tech, an Army retiree whose body was covered with U.S. Army images and ranks and likely hearts and tombstones.

 “Having No. 2 is important.”

I should have had that tattooed on my torso as a permanent reminder. I was just glad I could produce it, so they didn’t need to follow through on their enema threats. I hate having warm water shot up my ass, though some may like it. I’m not one to judge.

“Number 2,” I said with a laugh that usually ended with me asking “Number 9?”  from semi-conscious state as I lay in bed all night, waiting for breakfast and watching MLB replays. “Turn me on, dead man.”

The nurse just looked at me and said she didn’t know what was on Channel 9. And she wasn’t one to make light of the dead man reference.

Early on in my hours of darkness, I gave up on changing the channels, settling in for the duration with MLB except for the night I spun twice through “Shawshank Redemption.”

(Oh yeah, I did also stumble on the film “Kelly’s Heroes” and enjoy the memory of the night 55 years ago when we filled the trunk of my Ford Falcon Futura Sports Coupe and its black vinyl top with a half-dozen other fellows so we could get in the drive-in in Boone, Iowa, at a reduced rate.)  In case you wondered, Wikipedia stipulates that Boone is pronounced “Boon.” And every Thursday, they had all-you-can-eat pizza and fried chicken 55 years ago. We'd line our book bags with foil and do an eat-a-slice, steal a drumstick sort of rhythm going.

Back to my rehab a few weeks ago. Held captive in a bed equipped to set off an alarm if I got out, I wanted to get busy living. 

I guess, going back to the beginning, that’s the instinct that led me to voluntarily opting for massive spinal surgery that has resulted in weeks of agony, irregularly punctuated by constipation and diarrhea. I’m all right now, though. I learned my lesson well.

“What’s your 1-10 pain level, 10 being the worst?” I was asked in the months leading up to surgery and even today, as I go in for maintenance work on the steel and concrete construction that is now standing in for my original spinal column and neck.

“The numbers all go to 11,” I would say.

That was then, this is now, when I’ll fess up and admit that the recent months of fear and loathing (not prayer and redemption) have me settling in at a pain level of about 3 most of the time.

“I’m not going to refill the oxy, because it’s really not good for you,” my personal care physician said the other day as he laughed at my descriptions of my hellish, sleepless nights in the rehab center after I’d had my spine pulled out, cleaned with brake fluid, sanded down and Gorilla glued. I actually told him the oxy was just making me sick, so I stopped taking it weeks ago. No Number 2 sends my brain into a fuzzy No. 9. Turn me on dead man.

I guess I just wasn't made for these times.

Wouldn’t it be nice if I was younger?

 Boom laka-laka-laka, Boom laka-laka-laka, Boom laka-laka boom

I laughed as I thought of me and Jim in our pink long johns and my late pal John Lennon's "Revolution 9" returned from a deep space in my brain:  Then there's this Welsh Rarebit wearing some brown underpants.

Mine were pink.

 

Eric was saving the expensive Irish whiskey for special occasions; A year ago it turned out to be his wake: A rapscallion little brother's kiss of love, loss

Eric, who particularly enjoyed brown whiskeys, had a secret stash that he hid from guests.

If he hadn’t died a year ago today, perhaps I’d be enjoying my first sip of this secret stash with him as he sat, surrounded by his three cats – one resting atop his belly – in the kitchen of his house, five miles from my own.

The notorious cat man and gentlest of souls had splurged for this secret, hiding it away on the top shelf of his kitchen booze cabinet, high above the regular stuff.

It was a $150 or maybe even $175 bottle of Jameson 18-year-old, Limited Reserve Irish Whiskey, if I recall correctly.

 He had tasted it, but then put it back on the top shelf, saving for special occasions.

He did not expect that occasion to be his wake, nor for those who drank it to be among the 40 or 50 friends, cousins, in-law families and his own nuclear family, with spouses and offspring.

His widow, Ann – and I was deservedly their best man all those years ago – didn’t have any alcohol.  She couldn’t and can’t now, as she, with courage and fortitude and faith, continues her battle with cancer well into its second year. I love her and find this damned cancer unfair, as she already lost her husband.  This isn’t about her, though, but I believe she’ll eventually triumph. If you pray, this is a good time. If not, send your best thoughts.

The splurge on the Jameson was just that, an extraordinary purchase. Eric -- who I normally referred to as “Brother,” since I only had one … and now have none -- wasn’t cheap. I’m told you can get pretty damned good brown whiskey (his color of choice) for $50 or $60 range. I really don’t know, because I pretty much retired from that game 30 years ago, limiting consumption to special occasions, holidays, deaths, and the like.

Eric’s upper shelf hidden treasure came after he and Ann had returned from both the Irish Republic and Belfast, where his protestant youth minister son-in-law Michael and his Christian social services worker daughter, Maria live.

My big brother enjoys Lake Michigan 

Eric and daughter Maria strike delightful poses for the camera

I did call him while he was in that green land of Bono and St. Patrick. Highlights included his visits to the locations of his favorite movie: The John Wayne-Maureen O’Hara classic “The Quiet Man” – and times spent at Guinness breweries and Irish whiskey distillers. 

There was joy in his voice when I talked to him during that tour. Much of it came from his delight at seeing where the great film, about a former boxer, who escaped from the violence in the blood-soaked rings of America in pursuit of a quiet life in his homeland. If you knew my brother, it only makes sense that this former Illinois All-State offensive tackle and less-successful college football player -- whose body had been torn apart by that sport, causing the need for a dozen replacement parts over the decades – would find camaraderie with the Duke’s Sean Thornton.   

Brother’s blue Italian eyes were smiling all during that three-week tour, and I’m told he more than held his own when it came to blarney while in the pubs or visiting castles and the like. 

That visit came in the summer of 2023. It was his first, and turned out to be only, trip overseas in his 74 years. 

He did tell me once on the phone that he was almost ready to get home and see those young fellas who thoroughly overtook the heart of the 5-10, 350-pound nicer of the two decrepit Ghianni boys.

But being with Maria and Michael in their warm embrace kept homesickness at bay. 

You see, he also loved his time at home in Nashville, within driving range of his other daughter, Ana, and Josh and their two boys, Sabatino and Emilio (aka Tony and Leo).

 Sometime, after returning to the States and immediately playing with his grandsons in Rutherford County, he splurged on that whiskey.

“I’m going to save that for really special occasions,” or some such he told me, laughing, almost apologetically, for this dynamic expense.

“You can taste it if you come by,” he told me during one of our frequent phone calls. I still have the last voicemail he left me on my phone. The gist of it is that he said he was going to call me back in a later time that never arrived. 

Michael, Maria, Ann, Eric, Ana and Josh with their sons Sabatino and Emilio

He did admit to me, many months post-Ireland over cheeseburgers and beer (him) and dark iced tea (me) at our regular Brown’s Diner lunch, that he began to feel a bit out-of-sorts even before he went to Ireland. In the hospital, he told me he ignored it, figuring he’d get better. “I can’t do this anymore,” he said.

As for the whiskey invitation, he knew I no longer drank much alcohol. In my younger years, when I was a newspaperman, a rapscallion running like I was running out of time, I drank, sometimes to excess.

I told him I’d be glad to taste it though.

Well, when he talked about that special occasion, he wasn’t talking about the wake that came three or four days after he died a year ago.

He didn’t know that 40 or 50 people would be in his paradise, a rock and plant and waterfall-fountain retreat he’d built with his very big and rough hands on a reasonably hot Nashville day.

Pulled pork and fixings -- or maybe it was Mexican food, with beans, rice and guac? (Doesn't matter now) -- filled the counter in the outdoor kitchen he’d constructed next to that oasis, presided over by The Buddha. Eric was no Buddhist, but that statue did kind of favor him on a good and healthy day when he would have been sitting in black T-shirt and sweatpants in this green-grass paradise of stones, water and landscaping.

Water and sodas and beer filled coolers in that outdoor kitchen. The brown whiskeys – mourners brought some and Maria put it all (save for the special bottle, I believe) on the counter below the whiskey shelf.

I mostly sat there, in the shade of outdoor kitchen, trying to converse pleasantly, but mostly a mourning quiet man, realizing Brother was gone for good.

Sometime as that long, sad spring day turned into a night of laughter and tears, the special bottle was discovered and put on the whiskey counter. At least that’s the way I figure it.

For the most part, the bottle was as drained as were those of us who had spent a morning at a funeral home and many, many hours laughing through melancholy, which is what you are supposed to do at an Irish wake for an Italian-American who saw himself in John Wayne’s gentle giant who won Maureen O’Hara’s heart.

I went upstairs to visit with my son Joe and Maria and Michael, when I saw the special bottle had been ransacked.

Eric, who was somewhere in the clouds or chirping with the crickets, depending on what you believe, wouldn’t have minded, though.

The bottle was for a special occasion. He wasn’t there, but his loved ones were, plastic tumblers and shot glasses from his special collection filled, remembering him and reflecting on his impact on them.

Unfortunately, I never got to taste from the special bottle, but that’s OK. I wasn’t planning on coming out of my reckless retirement on that day. I had too much to think about.

I sure as hell miss my brother. I’m still waiting for him to drive his tan pickup truck over here to pick me up for lunch at Brown’s Diner. Maybe I’ll have a beer with my cheeseburger this time. I think it’s my turn to buy.

 #####

I was the eulogist at the funeral at Woodlawn, where the kindly undertakers allowed family a few minutes to see Eric’s earthly remains before planned cremation.

 

If you are interested, you might like to read that eulogy. Eric would have laughed his ass off and made fun of me:   

 

The long, black cloud settling in on the ICU room a few days ago, I knew my brother was listening to what people were saying, so I leaned close to his left ear.

“I love you, Eric. More than you may know. I’m going to miss you.  But I still wish you hadn’t pushed me down when I was taking my first steps.”

Eric stirred a little. I think others in the family were worried that he was moving too much, for a man on the brink, to be healthy.

So, I was asked not to say any more right then, so he’d calm down.  There still was hope, of course, but it was dimming.

But that motion by my big brother as he lay there?  I swear he was laughing. About me reminding him of his jealous cruelty to his baby brother more than 70 years ago.

He always laughed when I recounted that incident that our Dad captured on his Super 8mm movie camera back in 1953. 

I’ve seen it countless times. I was taking my first steps on the sidewalk in front of our house at 1812 Beverly Road in Sylvan Lake, Michigan.

I don’t know how old I was. Less than 2.  Just as I begin those steps for posterity, a to-then-unparalleled achievement by me, Eric comes from behind and pushes me down. Then he walks to the camera, smiling.

That kind of defined our relationship until we got into our teens, really. Eric simply didn’t take kindly for a long time to the fact Mom and Dad brought this beautiful specimen home from St. Joseph Hospital in Pontiac, Michigan.

He never apologized, by the way.  But I more than forgave him.  He looked up to me for my accomplishments. I looked up to him, not just for his accomplishments but for how nice he was.

Yes, this guy who pushed his fragile and sweet baby brother down on the sidewalk went on to become my best friend, other than my wife.

If I was shook up for any reason, personally or professionally or financially or simply because I’m a guy who gets all shook up, I’d call him or see him.  He had simple, practical, to-the-point advice.

I’d like to think that I was something of a lifelong security blanket to him, after he stopped pushing me to the concrete, rubbing my face into a rug or slugging me in my left arm. Always the left. 

When my arm aches, I’ll generally blame it on a lingering after-effect of a COVID or flu shot. Perhaps. More likely deep bruises left by my brother, right up into our mid-teens when we squared off, in one of those kicking, punching, spitting, hair-pulling fights on our parents’ front lawn in the Chicago area. Neighbor kids came to watch. They probably were too young to bet, but if they did, I’m sure they’d have picked Eric to leave me dazed and confused.

I figured I was going down myself, but I’d started the fight because I finally had enough. I did beat him that day.  And when he stood back up, he smiled.  He was proud of me. We never had a fistfight again. In fact, we became each other’s biggest advocate.

I always was so proud that Eric was my brother, even during the early, bully years. He was smart. He was athletic. He was a great football player to my mediocrity. My Dad liked him a lot better than he liked me…..

That’s true, of course.  That was one thing Eric and I agreed on.  We also agreed on a lot of things about Dad and his peculiarities.  We loved him like we had loved our mother, who had her own quirks.

I’m not going to go any further on this subject, but last Saturday, when my wife and I were in Eric’s hospital room, his daughter, Ana, called. He spoke with her and his two grandsons on Face Time. He had no favorites between these beautiful, beautiful, beautiful darling boys. But he asked Ana to call back in an hour or so.

“Tim is here with Suzanne,” he told her. “We want to make fun of Dad for a while.”

It was one of our favorite topics when we’d go out to an occasional lunch at Brown’s Diner or maybe when he called me from his backyard garden and just wanted to talk and laugh and to offer up a toast to Dad’s memory.

I need to add that Eric liked to get me in trouble. Eventually I figured out how to reverse the score. I remember one time his bullying backfired mightily, embarrassing Mom and Dad.  I don’t think a switch came out, but there was anger in the air after Eric locked us both in Davy Crockett’s boyhood cabin on the Nolichucky.

I was maybe 3, Eric 5, when our parents decided to take us on a road trip – we took one every summer – to the South.  We saw D.C. We saw the changing of the guard at Arlington. We saw Gettysburg.

But it was at Davy Crockett’s cabin that Eric came up with the wise idea that he was going to scare his little brother by locking me in the cabin with the big, wooden sliding lock. Problem was he hadn’t thought it through well. Sure, I was scared by being locked in. Just me and my brother. I couldn’t open the door.

But you see, Eric couldn’t lift that wooden bar either. We both were locked in. Outside, we could hear Mom and Dad yelling for us, as if we were lost.  It fell on Eric – who was taller than me – to holler through the open window.

The park ranger crawled through that window and unlocked the door, angrily escorting us out and I’m sure telling Mom and Dad to keep the little beasts under control.

Oh, we also got in trouble together, I should note.  One time, in Chicago, Eric and a friend of ours and I were out blowing off illegal firecrackers on the Fourth.  The biggest booms came when we tossed a batch of Lady Fingers near a school. The firecrackers echoed. Apparently, phones were dialed. 

Suddenly, there were sirens coming our way. We ran through the backyards, trying to find sanctuary from the police.  Just as they turned onto our street, we came upon my mother, who had our dog, Misty, out on a leash. When she had heard the sirens, she figured they were for us, so she was out in the dark giving us an alibi.  “Just pet Misty and be quiet,” she instructed us. “And we’ll walk home.”

The cops saw this Norman Rockwell scene of a mother walking three young boys and a dog on the Fourth of July and they figured we were not the suspects in the harmless, but noisy explosions.

I talked with my best college friend the other day, telling him Eric had died. Eric seldom joined us in our all-night weekend adventures on the streets of Ames, Iowa.  But my friend, like Eric, was a football player at Iowa State University.

“He was a real good fellow,” said my friend, Jim Mraz. Then we laughed about the day we left our dorm to go across campus to see Eric compete in a campuswide pie-eating contest. They were blueberry pies. Eric won.  Jim and I laughed at the memory of the big guy with blueberries filling his beard and hair as a price of winning. 

So many stories. The New Year’s Eve we went to downtown Chicago to see the film The Great White Hope, only to find out that the rest of the theater – except us – were fully uniformed Black Panthers.  We stayed, but when one of the Panthers got up to go get some popcorn, he stomped his boot, accidentally, on my foot.

“Oh, man, I’m so sorry,” I told the guy. Eric was just watching, holding in a laugh that out of fear I had apologized to the guy who should have been apologizing to me.

Younger days shouldn’t be forgotten. There was the Camp Spikehorn gang, me, Eric, and our cousins Marc and Jeff. We were all in single digits age-wise, and Marc and Jeff, who spent chunks of their summers with us, went to Camp Spikehorn day camp a couple of summers when we lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Marc’s gone now. And Eric has joined him. But Jeff’s still around. And he may or may not remember that the biggest thing we got out of the camp was the song “Up in the air, the junior birdman, up in the air upside down, up in the air, the junior birdman, with your noses to the ground.”  There are hand motions and hand-goggles to go with it. I’m not sure if Jeff remembers it or not.  The only reason I do is that Eric would break into that song, from a dead silence, all of his days.

And when you hear the grand announcement
That your wings are made of tin,
You will know the junior bird men
Have turned their box tops in.

For it takes five box tops,
Four bottle bottoms,
Three wrappers,
Two labels,
And one thin dime.

I can’t help but smile when thinking how that song would have sounded coming from the mouth of a 90-year-old Eric.

I’ll not find out, of course.

And I’m a little angry.

Eric, what a fine mess you’ve gotten me into this time.

For all of our early bickering, that nasty downward shove to this toddler, all the “I’ll tell Mom” threats, mostly unrealized, as we knew we’d both get in trouble, I loved you more than just about anything.

For my 72½ years, you were there. My big brother. The football hero who Dad loved best. The guy who collected abandoned cats like they were baseball cards. The kindest and nicest guy I ever knew.

Eric: I fully anticipated that this would be you up here talking about your crazy brother. I was sure you would outlive me. I told you so. It didn’t work out that way, so I’m going to pledge to stick around as long as I can, at least long-enough to teach your grandsons, the lights of your life, Emilio and Sabatino, the Junior Birdman song.

Sixty or 70 years ago, there was this nice family, basic middle-class Midwesterners. Mom and Dad at the ends of the table, Eric and me on either side.   We had the basic Beaver Cleaver All-American conversations while we choked down brussels sprouts and liver, if that was the meal of the day.  Most days, of course, the food was delicious.

And they were beautiful dinners. An All-American Family. Four people loving each other more than anyone else in the world.

That’s in my memories, and that’s good. In reality, there’s only one still sitting at that table.

 

  

It's a good thing Uncle Chuckles has a devoted nephew as he stares at TV, eats monstrous portions and wonders why he can't get offa that cloud of mental haze and kidney poison

 Jerry Manley, also known as “Chuckles,” a name he hated but that we stuck him with, since he offered none when we were “christening” News Brothers back in 1982, is alive.

Not well, but alive. And he’s watching television all day, when he’s not eating.

Many people who have some sort of dementia forget to eat. Not Jerry. He eats all the time, according to his wonderful nephew Steven, who takes care of Jerry down in the house they share in Lewisburg.

He’s doing the job Jerry’s children should be doing, but I guess they don’t have time or energy.

Steven, who was a chef and worked at night, quit that job to work as a construction crew boss many months ago. He did that so he could be home at night, feed his uncle, take care of  his other needs.

When he leaves during the day, Steven leaves food in portions available so Jerry won’t eat everything all at once. “I think he just forgets that he has eaten, so he gets hungry again.”

Jerry apparently sleeps and eats and watches TV day and night. Not altogether a horrid retirement, as long as he’s got Steven to help him.

According to his nephew, who is back-burnering some of his own health woes, Old Chuckles generally knows who he is and who Steven is, and he makes it to the bathroom on his own.  I worried (or really knew) that he wasn’t making it to the bathroom on time when he lived in the nuthouse near me for most of a year.

You may recall that I visited him once or twice a week for 10 months, carrying illegal foodstuffs Diet SunDrop and cheese or peanut butter crackers with me for him to devour as we watched TV and he enjoyed the brand new episodes of Gunsmoke, Columbo and The Twilight Zone.

Of course, he got tossed from that old-nuts-and-derelicts home for pile-driving his roommate a couple of times.  All Bob/Milford was doing was sitting in Jerry’s chair. Anyway, the subtle violence – he really didn’t put weight on it, but simply tossed Milford from the chair to the floor, all captured on Nurse Ratched’s nuthouse video cameras – was enough to get Jerry tossed.

The only relative to step in, because he didn’t want Jerry to be institutionalized in the state facilities or elsewhere, was Steven.

I caught up with Steven today, as he was working a construction site in Franklin. He told me about his own health woes, mostly that he’s ignoring to take care of Jerry.

“Jerry’s doing OK,” said Steven. “Problem may come tomorrow, when we go to his kidney doctor.

“They probably will put him on dialysis, which will complicate what I do,” he said.

“His kidneys are really bad though, so it might help. All of the toxins from the bad kidneys may be what has contributed to the fog.”

I remember times, in the 1970s, 1980s and even into the 1990s when Jerry was my invincible sidekick. We would laugh and drink all night and put out great newspapers when we were more-or-less sober. It was really a rock 'n' roll lifestyle, and we loved it.

  He was one of the four main News Brothers, good journalists who gave their souls to newspapers that eventually kicked them to the curb.  None of us -- Jerry, Rob "Death" Dollar, Jim "Flash" Lindgren or me "Flapjacks" are as spry as we were 40-very-odd years ago. Another beloved fellow who joined us in our jousts with korporate Nazis was Scott "Badger" Shelton. He died 13 years ago of cancer.

Jerry was a great newspaperman, especially when it came to line-editing and headline writing.

Now he sits in his house in Lewisburg with his kidneys failing and the world a confusing fog.

Well, actually, he and I sat in our houses in a confusing fog on many days and nights when we were younger, back when I had a great back and Jerry was lucid and had good kidneys.

Welcome to life after leaving the fast lane. 

   

 

 

  

Every picture tells a story, don't it? I've run this shot before on Facebook, but thought this is a good day to tell the more-or-less true story of the pictured scalawags and my dead pal, Tony Durr

 Derelicts and scalawags and the occasional cretin with a giant forehead were everywhere I looked on that last night Tony Durr was in Clarksville, after he had found it necessary to resign his editor’s job at The Leaf-Chronicle.

Actually, he disappeared for weeks without explanation “to take care of some personal matters,” was the Big Guy’s explanation. True enough. Tony was feverishly looking for another job after he’d been questioned about bending health insurance rules in order to pay serious medical bills for his desperately ill almost-fifth wife, who was beautiful but sometimes bordered on death from her battle with the effects of systemic lupus erythematosus.

Jerry "Chuckles" Manley, Ricky "Dumbo" Moore, Tony "little short asshole with a beard" Durr, Tim "Flapjacks" Ghianni, Rob "Death" Dollar, "StrawBilly" Fields and John "Street" Staed prepare for Tony Durr's last day at The Leaf-Chronicle newspaper. Thomas Anthony Durr may have been Flap's best friend, but that has nothing to do with his departure from that and many more papers and his eventual lonesome death. There are a million stories in Flapjacks' faltering memory, and this is one of them.

His sudden and unexplained disappearance – he was at work on a Friday and didn’t return until three weeks later, just a day or two before our farewell party for him – provided fodder for some of us in the newsroom, especially me and Rob Dollar, to make a newspaper satire of a movie about our searching for the suddenly vanished Tony.

More later, perhaps, but basically our film premise was we were looking to solve Tony’s “mysterious disappearance,” primarily because he had abandoned us without explanation and no one – not the Big Guy, our publisher Luther Thigpen, not my pal and mentor Max Moss (God, I still love and miss him …Max, I mean, although the Big Guy also is dead.) Max did, during the Durr-less vacuum, ask me to take on even more dominant newsroom roles.  Like the ones I’d been doing for little or no credit when Tony was the big boss editor, golf fanatic and jogger.

“Where is Tony?” we asked. “Fuck’f I know,” said the Big Guy, jingling his pocket change, small tears in his eyes.

 “I can’t tell you right now, partner,” Max told me, personally. “Sound reasonable?”

Tony actually had fled, as the old Gene Autry movies might have it, just ahead of the posse.  I loved the guy, still do, a bunch, miss him daily, but his disappearance and the eventual reason – as fictionalized by Max in a newsroom meeting – was unsurprising.

Basically, the official line was that Tony had leaped at new opportunities in the dirt pit that was San Antonio, Texas, 45 years ago.

Confidentially, Max told me more. You see, bending rules and work expectations – I had ended up doing most of his editor’s work during his active year as editor, while Max took care of Tony’s clerical and Big Guy issues and editorial stances – was something Tony was good at. And his natural Cajun charm almost always got him out of any corner. Pretty Boy Floyd of the newspaper world. Five-five, 35 years old. Perhaps that many jobs.

It was almost as soon as he got back from San Antone that we were forced to say farewell.

Hence the night of the scalawags and dirtbags in this picture. These were guys Rob and I already had designated as The News Brothers, a group of hard-working, exploding-cigarette-bumming, plastic-vomit carrying rebels who laughed while tilting at the windmills (aka, The Big Guy and corporate policy), while at the same time pricking away at the cone of silence in the law enforcement world so we could get scoops. We used scotch as our “pricking” weapon. And our friendly demeanors.

Rob and I, along with my now-demented pal, Jerry Manley, were lucky that Chief Sheriff’s Deputy Eddie Patterson and various other members of law enforcement hierarchy were as loose with their wallets as they were with their lips when they started buying us 2 a.m. rounds of double-scotch on the rocks at Buford Thaxton’s Camelot. Sometimes Skipper – an old con man and adventurer Rob and I loved – came along to fascinate cops and young ladies – like Max’s college-age daughter, Karen, although I’m not sure she saw this act – with his teeth-in-the-beer-glass routine and his tales of Hawaiian whores and his frequent quotes from the Old Testament.

I did, one night, see Karen, who was under-age and who I’d known since I started hanging out with the Moss family when she was still in grade school, sitting with frat boys and others with anxious fingers and petty ambitions, at a table at 2 a.m. Rob, Jerry and I asked the bartender to take her a glass of milk. We were looking out for her virtue. By the way, she’s now a beautiful businesswoman, in her 50s.  I know she was red-faced when the milk arrived. I’ll tell you that at that point in my life, I only wished that she was 15-20 years older. Old dog, old tricks.   

Ahh, but back to that night of the sunglasses-wearing derelicts and their thrift-shop suitcoats and trousers, I was the only one who really knew why Tony had suddenly gone on a job-hunt splurge that ended up with him leaving for San Antonio, Texas, in the middle of the party (i.e. 3 a.m.)

We had been writing a book together on his small porch at his stone house that he only recently had purchased. He abandoned that project (and I’m sure mortgage payments) via still-of-the-night disappearance a few weeks before the party, and explained his absence to me with a midnight meetup when he crept back into town wearing leather cowboy chaps and spurs and a battered Navy peacoat. And little else.

I look at the picture of the derelicts and scalawags here – with Tony, “the little, short asshole with the beard” as we dubbed him in the movie about his disappearance, “Flapjacks: The Motion Picture” in the middle – and I grow anxious and melancholy as I recall our adventures together as a couple of journalists, one legit and one not-so-much.  

There was the time when he and I raided a nursing home in the middle of the night, trying to catch administrators off-guard after getting elder-abuse complaints.  All we caught were some of the nursing home denizens, the ones who were night owls, drooling in the TV room. Dramatic expose shot to hell, we met with nursing home corporate hounds and lawyers the next day and abandoned the story. I do have to add that there were procedural changes at that nursing home in the weeks after our “raid.” I was told about this in a wine-loosed late-night discussion with one of the younger female administrators. Pretty woman.

Tony Durr goes on TV in Anchorage where he proclaims to one and all on C-SPAN that "I AM an ALASKAN." Not many years before, he had been "A CLARKSVILLIAN." He also said he was "A TEXAN and then "A CHICAGOAN." He was a lovable and gentle chameleon and a rascal, and I loved the little CAJUN. He's been dead more than 30 years, but I talk to him often, when he and I both lie through the stars and heavens. I really miss him. He was the first of my truly close friends to die. Most of them have since followed. Even my parents, Dot and Em Ghianni, were taken in by Tony's charm and told him how much they appreciated his protective attitude toward their beloved baby boy. Despite his many flaws, he was a truly damn nice guy.

And there was the time Tony got so upset with littering along the U.S. 41A bypass, that he told me to come along with him, bring some gloves and grab a trash bag. From newspaper janitor John Spurlin, who had a dent in his skull from where someone had shot him, Tony grabbed one of those sticks with the nail protruding from the point. The two of us spent an afternoon cleaning a median, taking photos and otherwise chronicling this environmental calamity. I kept on telling him that we ought to get back to take care of the newsroom.  He kept drawling things like “Manley’s there, Jim Monday’s there, that prick Wendell is there. We’ll go back when we please.”  There was no story in the cleanup, though I did pound out my “Clarksville Calling Card” column, complete with a photo of the late and lamented Editor Tony Durr with his garbage stick and a black bag full of beverage cups and popsicle sticks and chicken pieces.

And then there was W. Robert Cameron, the self-titled “Savior of the Cosmos,” who Tony found on one of his runs – he often ran along railroad tracks during jogging that took up many business hours. Tony didn’t do anything about W. Robert, but sensing “a great Ghianni column” in the Manson-like figure on the railroad embankment, he trotted into a nearby Shoney’s and called me, said there was a guy who looked like my type of human-interest piece. I spent half-a-day on the trestle and also arranged with my cop friends – who came to arrest him for trespassing (he’d gone into the Shoney’s to panhandle) – to take W. Robert to the county line rather than arrest him. I ordered and paid for W. Robert’s lunch while we waited for the law. All I’ll add here is that W. Robert was hitchhiking to Austria. I always have wondered if he made it. I know I didn’t.

Tony and I had a lot of fun, and he enjoyed being with a real newspaperman as much as I enjoyed being with a big-dreaming pretend journalist who learned most of his newspaper tricks by watching “All The President’s Men” and by being a computer corporation’s salesman whose job it was to sell and install newsroom computer systems. He’d apparently hang out with the journalists at each location, until he got to Clarksville, where his charm so worked on the Big Guy that he was offered a job, including the medical insurance that was his downfall.

Basically, I have to say that Tony was and remains one of the people I’ve loved best in the world and still do, 30 years after he was found dead, empty pill bottle and an off-the-hook telephone receiver near his sprawled body in a Coast Guard Barracks in Alaska. His stint in the Coast Guard included about a year as a telegraph operator at U.S. Navy Support Facility Diego Garcia, a small island which, according to the Navy “provides logistic support to operational forces forward deployed to the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf areas of responsibility in support of national policy objectives.”

It's hard to imagine Tony as the guy helping to translate American war and peace troop and ship and airplane movement while sitting on this little island just south of the equator. His return to the Coast Guard base in Alaska was his final stop after maybe six or seven wives and that number of newspaper editor’s jobs in his last few years of life.

He probably went through so many women and jobs because he was versed in the laissez les bons temps rouler of his Arcadian upbringing. Or maybe it was the “short man’s complex,” like that which drove Hitler and Kareem.

In addition to trying to attract me to the newspapers where he landed, Tony also offered me refuge from real life – and mine had gotten complicated – by proffering shelter from the storms of life among the gators, bugs, snakes and semi-civilized, untamed Cajuns at his family’s tomato farm in the swamps of Louisiana.

 He told me to come spend a few weeks, my vacation time, or even abandon life altogether and join him in the bayous, where he often sought comfort from his many personal and professional failures.

“Everything will be on me,” he said. “I’ll even pay for your gas to get here. The Durr family farm is right in the middle of the bayous.

“It’s hot, but quiet. We have the best tomatoes in Louisiana,” he said. “You can get your head right here.”

It’s funny to read that note now, because I don’t think Tony ever did get his head right. I was in the middle of a life decision, and I’d been consulting him for advice. I took the advice, regretted it almost immediately, and spent three years drinking my way to freedom. Man, I could have used that bayou tomato farm hideout then.

I probably should have gone down to the bayous. Whenever I use that word, bayou, I always think of John Fogerty, a rock icon I got to know some. He was the leader of Creedence Clearwater Revival, and “Born on the Bayou” was one of the hits for these Central California rockers.  John’s best song, “Who’ll Stop The Rain,” is perhaps the most gorgeous and complicated and understated plea for our nation to get out of Vietnam.  Still I wonder what took us so long.

In the final years of his life, I was offered jobs, one from each newspaper where Tony had landed.  I never took those jobs, in San Antonio, Chicago or Anchorage or even Kodiak, because I knew that sooner rather than later Thomas Anthony Durr’s charm and bullshit would catch up with the reality of his jobs, and I’d be excess and likely unwanted baggage at his last newspaper spot.

 I did not want to be suddenly unemployed in Kodiak, Alaska. I guess I could have become a king crab fisherman. I’m surprised Tony didn’t do that. Course, from all accounts, it is a tough job, “The Deadliest Catch,” as they call it.   Hell, I think I’ll add that to his legend here: As soon as he lost his job at the newspaper in Kodiak, Tony went into the cold Pacific waters where he spent six months on the Calypso as a Alaskan King Crabber.  Yeah, that’s better.

OK. So perhaps he was a big talker even more than a big dreamer. I told him early-on – shortly after he came to Clarksville to be my boss – that I knew he was “full of shit, but I love you anyway.”

“You’re the only one who has ever said that to me,” said Tony. “I’m glad you see me for who I am. Call me on it anytime.”

And, you know, I did on countless phone calls and in hotels and bars in the towns where he’d brought me for job interviews. I remember one night he was supposed to meet me at the original Billy Goat’s Tavern, below the Wrigley Building, in Chicago. I had just landed in the Windy City for a job interview the next day at The Sun-Times. I was interviewing to be “Senior Writer,” and my job would be to wander Chicago streets looking for human stories. It would have been a great gig, but I didn’t get it. My visit was just a setup. They just brought in one of the editor’s cronies from elsewhere in the Rupert Murdoch chain. Got an offer to work in the city room instead, but pay was less than I was making in Clarksville, moving costs were on me, and I knew Tony likely would be castoff within six months. I had grown up in Chicago. Too cold to be unemployed.

Anyway, after I checked into the Sun-Times condo where I stayed, Tony called and said to meet him at Billy Goat’s. It’s where I was for more than two hours, sitting near the cook whose “Cheeseburger, cheesburger, cheeseburger” trademark chant had been appropriated by John Belushi when he was at Chicago’s “Second City,” an improv gig that eventually got him to “Saturday Night Live,” where he took the “cheeseburger” guy to a generation. He also played a giant samurai bee and others on SNL, while learning how to consume speedballs. The latter is what canceled his performing career one night at the Chateau Marmont in Beverly Hills. One of the things I remember about that was Wendell Wilson’s almost tears when he heard that Big John had died. I don’t know why that alleged “newspaperman” had any feelings for anyone, let alone a drug-addled comedic genius. Wendell was none of those.  I was sad, because I saw a taste of myself in Belushi.  

Anyway, even though I was in town for a night, Tony stood me up for a few hours. “I was walking past the symphony hall and I saw these two young women in line and I began talking to them,” he said. “They ended up taking me to the symphony. I left at intermission. Did you get a cheeseburger?”

This story’s getting too long now, so I want to get back to the gathering of derelicts in the picture here who danced, ate and appropriated liquor during the quick farewell party to Tony.

By the way, as I did trek to visit him in his latest job locations, he also had become a regular visitor to my apartment and houses in the years before the fatal dose in the Coast Guard barracks. Hell, one day, I drove him down to the newspaper, where he went to see the Big Guy. Despite the circumstances of Tony’s departure, it was obvious Luther loved him. I think they went out to lunch at Austin’s and perhaps jingled the change in each other’s pockets. Two desperadoes on different missions.

 Tony and I talked, at least once a week, while looking at the same star, me in Nashville, him in Alaska.  The calls to and from Diego Garcia were trickier, filled with dead air and static and Tony’s tales of getting in bar fights with drunken sailors and his melancholy lookbacks at his failures, mostly the women who punctuated his errant path.

He paid for my gas and a night’s hotel stay for an interview in San Antonio. I enjoyed the hotel on the River Walk, but enjoyed the week I slept on an air mattress in Tony’s house much more. “Once you get here, you can move to Old San Antonio,” he lied, knowing full well that I was going to decline the $400 a week and no-moving-money offer and just wait until he played out his string.

Actually, a few weeks before Tony’s disappearance, my police reporter pal, Rob Dollar, and I (associate editor/columnist) started calling ourselves “The News Brothers.” It was a reaction to corporate interference and their almost Chamber of Commerce-sanctioned news mission and our own determination to say “fuck it” and go for nothing but the truth.

Tony Durr, shown here as Santa Claus, hugs Okey "Skipper" Stepp, while Flapjacks soberly smiles. Tony spent most of a week at Tim's Clarksville apartment in order to be a special guest at the all-night screenings of the fabled film, "Flapjacks: The Motion Picture," which was sorta "inspired" by Durr's disappearance.   

Tony was around for the birth of the News Brothers. He wasn’t one. But he enjoyed our spunk. “Tim, you are crazy, but this News Brothers attitude is great for us and the newspaper. And every Saturday, you wear that Hawaiian shirt (we had to wear shirts and ties and pants and underwear during the week). You are to this newspaper what Hawkeye Pierce was to the 4077^th.”

The News Brothers lived on, long after Tony’s disappearance and we produced classic investigative journalism, blood-and-guts school board, Rotary and cops coverage and eventually a lead story about the escape of a pet monkey, the police “manhunt,” followed a few weeks later by my sad column about the dogs chasing down and eating poor Chico.

Our News Brothers association – several others joined us in this Quixotic quest – was fertilized by physical exhaustion caused by non-stop coverage of a beautiful teenage girl’s disappearance, rape and murder, combined with the same style of journalistic adrenaline jolt from covering the kidnapping and murder of a football player at the local university.

Those stories plus nonstop tales of death on the highways (especially soldiers from nearby Fort Campbell) and other redneck rapes and mutilations had made us emotional shells. So, as a way to “reset” our attitudes, I – as the editor in charge on Saturdays and the Sunday paper – told everyone to wear shades to work one day. Rob offered the advice that we should call ourselves “The News Brothers.” In addition to the shades, we began to “dress” like so many derelicts, with hats, second-hand store clothing and, as noted earlier, distribute exploding cigarettes and rubber vomit when it seemed like we all needed a lift. Sometimes Rob and I brought black licorice sticks to distribute.

There is a whole book about those days, “When Newspapers Mattered: The News Brothers and their Shades of Glory.”  It’s fun in parts, and sadder in others. And the death of local daily journalism is the end-prediction, 35 years before the presses stopped and a pathetic billionaire’s Twitter and the Chinese-spy ring’s TikTok became the main distributors of news.

Of course, there is that movie that we filmed as we “searched” for the “little, short asshole,” etc. A lot of guys partook. Rob “Death News Brother” and I “Flapjacks” wrote it and paid for it and Jerry “Chuckles” Manley and Jim “Flash” Lindgren formed the rest of the core of the corps. John “Street” Staed, Ricky “Dumbo” Moore, Reverend Larry McCormack, StrawBilly Fields and Danny “I am Reagan” Adkins joined us when their wives or pet snakes would let them. “Flapjacks: The Motion Picture” – which featured many of these derelicts in discarded clothing – played to rave reviews on November 12, 1982, and contributed many, many piles of bills to local charities.

It ought to be noted that the opening action scene showed The News Brothers, including Tony Durr and StrawBilly Fields, dancing like drunken fools with the rest of us up a ramp from an alley in downtown Clarksville. Sam and Dave’s “Soul Man” blared from a boombox.

It was the News Brothers’ arrival at Tony’s farewell party, that I had planned, to coincide with his last shift at the newspaper.   

I had asked my friend, Jerry Uetz—who owned Austin’s, the restaurant where Tennessee Williams sought refuge and “Flap” had admired O.J.’s use of steak knives to eat ice cream —to stay open for an after-work party, beginning at midnight, after Tony finished his last shift and hours before he fled to Texas.

Jerry Uetz used to run the best restaurant in Clarksville, years ahead of what eventually became a downtown revival.  He also always has been a good friend to Flapjacks and loaned him his restaurant on the night the News Brothers said goodbye to Tony Durr. Tony's long-gone, but four decades later, Jerry's still going strong. He may be retired from the restaurant business, but he's a helluva great guy. During his time in Clarksville, Flap ate at Jerry's Austin's Restaurant regularly, even taking double-murderer O.J. Simpson there once. I think I also took John Wooden, "the Wizard of Westwood," there when I hosted him for much of a day. A friend of mine, Tennessee Williams, once sought refuge at Austin's after terrorizing the staff at a bank three doors down Franklin Street. Long story but it involves a mask, a sword and a loud proclamation "Reaganomics." The police then interrupted his ice cream dessert. Photo is from Jerry's Facebook page.

Not only did Jerry Uetz allow the joint to stay open, as soon as I got to the back door, he gave me the keys and told me to lock up when we left. He stayed for an hour and hugged Tony and me. At dawn, a few living News Brothers rolled out of Austin’s, me locking the door. Rob and Chuckles both double-checking to make sure I hadn’t fucked up. Tony had left around 3 and supposedly was enroute to San Antonio. 

The rest of us showed back up around noon to clean up Jerry’s restaurant and bar, only to be greeted by this kind gent, who had already cleaned it up and was eating what had been left of our potato salad.  He did not even mention the fact that when our own booze – a few cases of beer and some scotch – ran out, we helped ourselves from his bar.

“I like this,” he said of the potato salad. “We’ll call it even.”

 Jerry, a great gentleman, and I crossed paths again when I later visited in San Antonio to interview for the job on Tony’s staff. I was greeted by Jerry Uetz, who at that time was opening a restaurant in that Texas city. Jerry insisted on taking the whole crew out to dinner. Eventually, he returned to Clarksville to reopen his restaurant there for a few years.  I have online contact with him to this day.

Anyway, as noted, Tony left in the middle of the party and began his drive to “San Antone.” StrawBilly Fields also left the paper around this same time, mainly because he had no one to take him golfing when he should have been working. Tony spent more time teaching StrawBilly how to hit a nine-iron than he did editing Billy’s scattershot copy. Billy went on to run the corps of East Nashville Good Ole Boys who had a pistol grip on Music City’s tourism, politics and finances and party buses.

But we didn’t throw Billy a party on his last newspaper night. Refused to, in fact. Most of us didn’t even know he was gone until someone asked, “Whatever happened to Billy Fields? Wasn’t he around here when we began our movie?” Everyone looked at the almost-busted desk chair that Billy had occupied, shrugged and got back to work. (Billy reminded me later that when he left for P.R. in Podunk, Ky., everyone simply applauded and called the lovably large fella “a hack and a whore.”)

So, the picture of the derelicts and whoremongers and drunks (pre-beverages), was shot on Tony’s final day at The Leaf-Chronicle. I’m not even sure he was supposed to be in the building at that point.

Yes, we went to work in those clothes. Laughed at death and exploding cigarettes for 12 hours. Lighted farts and I drank 40 cups of coffee.

We took Tony with us down to the Royal York Hotel (flophouse) coffee shop, where I chain-smoked, Rob fiddled with his Kools, Jerry Manley ate pancakes and smoked Virginia Slims and Tony and Skipper tried to one-up each other in lies about conquest on the mattresses and linoleum floors and beds of nails of the world.  

"Death" and "Flap" -- Rob Dollar and I --loved to take our old pal, Skipper, out of his flophouse and into the world of sober, after-hours reflection. Skipper always thought Tony was full of shit. It takes one to know one. I loved Skipper, who I first befriended one hot Clarksville day when I sat down next to him on a bench outside the Royal York Hotel. It was hot, boy was it hot. He's dead now, too. Most of my friends are, I guess.

I still miss Skipper, who like most of my friends, is dead. He did come to the farewell party, but we had to walk him back to the hotel at about 2. I think Danny Adkins was his escort, since no one would trust me, Rob or Chuckles with the safety of a 70-year-old World War II fighter pilot and rodeo cowboy.

And Tony, well, if I’m outside in the dark, I look at the star at the tip of The Big Dipper and I say “I miss you. I love you still, Tony. And yes, doctors have told me I am nuts.”

Then I just laugh.

The Durr era in Clarksville was very short, but it did help Flapjacks become the leader of a newsroom and helped with the spark behind the Tim Ghianni and Rob Dollar creation "The News Brothers." Many tales from Ghianni and Dollar's time in newsrooms as well as adventures involving the rest of those rascals are told in this book.  

 

 (All of the selections in this blog are copyrighted by Timothy Champ Ghianni)