Thursday, March 7, 2024

Ol' Flap chips away at his own loneliness and brings back a stream of old memories when Jerry meets "Elvis" and Matt and Bob (Dillon and Dylan) enter the scene for bloodshed and song

An innocent bystander, perhaps a local deputy sheriff, caught this photo of Jerry Manley, Tim Ghianni and Rob Dollar in the summer of 1981. Or sometime near then. We had just finished our evening's work at the daily newsroom.


 “Jerry, Jerry … Jerry….” I said as I sat in the party room in the Memory Care Ward.  I didn’t say it loudly – I had gotten in trouble with one old, black-dyed-hair woman a few weeks ago for my volume when talking to my best friend.

I reached over, a foot or so from my chair, and softly shook my best pal’s right arm. Jerry Manley – my running buddy for 50 years – stirred slightly from his nod-off state-of-mind and looked at me.

“What?” he asked, sleep, no irritation, in his voice.

“Jerry: just say ‘Elvis!’” I told him. He looked at me in his attempt to focus and wake up.

“Quick. I’ll tell you why later, but just say ‘Elvis,’” I said.

He didn’t fully open his eyes.

“Elvis,” he semi-hollered, before nodding off again.

The room, filled with kind folks whose minds have been blown askew by age and illness, erupted with applause. There even was a cheer of sorts from a guy I later learned was “Mr. Brown,” who – it turns out – is Jerry’s roommate, Joe or Bob or Tom Brown or whatever.  Maybe John, as in “John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave …” or whatever.  

All eyes in the Memory Ward party room focused on my friend.  

“He got it,” said one of two women with guitars who were set up, with a small amp or two, speakers and microphones in front of the TV where “Gunsmoke” played silently. Even though the TV was muted, I saw Matt Dillon gun down an outlaw or someone he just plain didn’t like much.  There’s blood on the streets in the town of Dodge City.

I’d been in the Memory Care Ward for about 45 minutes by the time of the Elvis incident.  The dietician, who did not know I had a fairly large bag of Lay’s potato chips jammed into the arm of the Sports Illustrated Titans jacket draped over my arm, had been glad to see me when she let me through the double-locked secure door separating the regular nursing home. 

“Thanks for coming to visit him,” she said. “He’s right in there. I love him. I love a man who doesn’t say much.”   

She pointed me to the party room, where everyone looked happy, though some looked downright confused.

Many memories have vanished.  Jerry, for example, can’t remember a good chunk of the most recent 30 years of his life. 

“I didn’t know you were coming today,” he had said when I slid into the chair next to him in the party room.  He never knows I’m coming. Heck, he doesn’t really know the day. Course it really doesn’t matter much to me.  

I spend a lot of time laughing with him, reminding him of the days when we tilted at windmills and often lost.  The impossible dream unrealized.

Anyway, back to the Elvis incident.

Jerry was among a score and probably more of his cohorts in the party room. Two nicely aged women who called themselves “The Senior Singers” or something like that, were the focus of the eyes, both cloudy and bright. Though some, like Jerry’s, were mostly closed.

Lovely women, perhaps in their 70s, they play the nursing home circuit. I assume they get some sort of grant money or stipend. They also – like me – are rewarded by the fact they are perhaps the youngest people in the room.

Jerry is the youngster of the clientele, by my guess.  And he’s nine days older than me. We used to celebrate our November 9 and November 18 (1951) birthdays by burning away the carbon from dusk to dawn, beer and Scots whiskey were our lighter fluids. And, generally our friends – many of whom were still alive back then – joined us.  But we literally were the last men standing and the first ones to work at The Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle the next afternoon.

“Swallow this,” I’d say, proffering a hand with aspirin or similar potion in it to Jerry as we’d start our days.  We’d wash it down with coffee – I drank 40 cups a day back then, down to about 15 cups these days, as age has eaten away at my general physical stamina.

The two women were singing standards, both country and pop, and sometimes pausing after a song to ask the crowd if they remembered who sang it on recordings.

“Oh! Susana” seemed to be among the favorites, as the crowd sang the chorus.  “… Don’t you cry for me, for I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee…” or something like that.

The “Theme from Maverick” also was a favorite, if I’m recalling correctly.

“The Fish Cheer!” was an uplifter for them all, as they flashed middle fingers into the air. I made that up.

But then there truly was “I Saw the Light!” that had those who could up on their feet dancing.  Mr. Brown got up by himself, clapped his hands and sang along. Doing some sort of solo buck-dancing that reminded me of “Deliverance” for some reason. 

A couple more songs were about God and mercy as they apparently gave thanks for the fact their lives are continuing inside this ward. Hell, I believe they even did “Forever Young,” which may have led to some later confusion. Or maybe it was “Lay, Lady, Lay.” Yeah, I know that one has adult themes, but these people are not only adults, they are post-adults, so they can handle it.

“She’ll Be Comin’ ‘Round The Mountain,” was perhaps the most popular, for both singing and dancing.

Hell, I even joined on that, trying to get my buddy to join me on the “She’ll be riding six white horses when she comes” line that always reminds me of a favorite encounter with a white-horseback-riding blonde in Marion, Iowa, 48 years ago. She got a saddle for me to use when I rode along. Long damn time ago.

I was about to lean over and tell Jerry about that horsey adventure, when the Senior Singers burst into “Love Me Tender,” the great Elvis song from the movie of that title.

Afterward, the younger of the two singers said: “Do you know this was from a movie about the Civil War? It starred a handsome young man from Memphis. Any guesses who that was? He sang the song, too.”

“Bob Dylan?” one man asked, (I’m telling the truth). I got up and crossed the room and yelled “No! You crazy old fuck” right in his face. He spit at me and recited the “Talkin’ John Birch Society Paranoid Blues.”

Nah. Again, sometimes my thoughts are more coarse than I am in real life, where I portray an old softie.

“Sinatra?”   “Paul Anka?”  “Tony Bennett?” “Neil Diamond?”  The names of the folks who sang the Great American Songbook were flowing across the room.

Since I’ve still got too many marbles to be eligible in this contest, that’s when I got Jerry to spout out “Elvis!” and receive applause for his mental acumen. I don’t think there were any prizes.

“Hey, man, I’ve got some contraband potato chips in my jacket,” I said to him after his triumph. “Let’s go back to your room.”

He’d been craving potato chips, and they limit him to a few on days when they serve a handful with sandwiches for lunch.

Food is not supposed to be sneaked in from “the outside.” At least that’s what Jerry told me, the first time he requested chips.

We stayed while these quite talented singers finished their set. “They like this song down in New Orleeeens,” one of them said. “This will be our last song today.”

“When the Saints Go Marching In!” brought those who could to their feet to be a part of the number and sing along.

I looked at Jerry and said: “This is a good one for us to leave on.”

So, with Mr. Brown and the other sweet saints – I really like these people, which portends well for my future, I suppose – dancing and singing and clapping the beat, Jerry and I went out in the hallway and to his room.

“I’ve got these for you,” I said, pulling the chips out of my sleeve.

“Man, that’s great,” he said, genuine surprise in his voice, as he grabbed the yellow bag and struggled to tear it open.

For the next 20 minutes, he ate chip after chip. “NewsNation” cable news channel was on the TV. Normally, Jerry wants cowboy shows, and I offered to see if “Wagon Train” or “Have Gun, Will Travel” was on.

“I don’t know how to change the remote, but this is OK. I don’t understand what they are talking about though. What’s AI?”

Now, I can’t explain artificial intelligence. I’m happy enough with the real stuff as long as I can hang onto it.

“Remember when we tried to piss on Max’s car as he was driving to work?” I asked, changing the subject as Elon Musk came onto the TV screen.

He laughed as I told him the story of two stone-cold sober, 35-year-old journalists of some renown standing on the overpass and emptying our bladders.  That was 37 years ago, and almost no traffic was on Interstate 24 at 3 or 3:30 a.m.

We had decided it was a good idea to salute Max Moss, perhaps the truest “newspaperman” except me who I’ve known. We just thought he’d like us to note his passing as he drove from the Moss estate off Fort Campbell Boulevard down to his wire editor’s job at the Nashville Banner. He’d been fucked by corporate at the paper in Clarksville, so he took the Banner job and the hourlong commute.

We didn’t hit anyone with our pitiful drizzle.  The little car we aimed at may have been Max’s Honda, but sometimes, men know, aim is not true. Also, it was 25 feet to the interstate below. Streams turn to light mist at best.

I should add that Max was beloved and respected by us both. It was just a 3:30 a.m. “good idea.” At least we were smart enough not to stand atop the rail.  

“I’d guess we had no chance of getting him,” Jerry told me the other day, after I described the night’s activities. “I sure liked old Max.”

“I loved him. He was my mentor,” I replied. “He was one of my favorite people of all time. I loved his wife, Merrily, too.

“She died a year or two ago, Max about a year before her,” I said.

“I didn’t know that Max was gone,” Jerry said. “Or I didn’t remember that. He was a great guy.”

“The best boss ever. Remember I nicknamed him ‘The Silver Hammer?’” I asked Jerry.

He laughed, remembering I’d given Max that name because of The Beatles’ song “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.”

Before Max died, I told him of that old “behind-the-back” nickname, and he approved, although he was more of an Elvis guy than a Beatles guy. He’d for sure have won the “Love Me Tender” singer question.

The dietician lady came into the room as Jerry was digging into the chips. She ignored it. Instead, she was there to help roommate Mr. Brown with some hygiene matters.

I figured she’d say something as Jerry kept crunching.

I told him I’d be back soon with more chips after she left.  “You want me to carry that empty bag out of here? Get rid of the evidence?”

He laughed and tossed the yellow bag across the room.

I needed to get back to my home office, where I’m a professional author in fast pursuit of bankruptcy.

We walked, arm-over-shoulder down the hallway, where the dietician met us, near the party room.

She had a glass of Cranapple juice for him.

“Man, I am thirsty,” Jerry said, reaching for the tall, plastic tumbler.

The dietician let me out the secure door to the “regular” wing of the nursing home.

“Thank you. Thank you very much for taking care of Jerry. He’s the best,” I told her.

The door closed behind me and suddenly I was interrupting a heated game involving aces and jokers and stacks of tiles.

Henry Mancini’s “Moon River” played on the Muzak system.

 

Friday, March 1, 2024

Golden hours in the memory care ward where potato chips are rare, Matt Dillon kills folks and we laugh about the Little Ole Opry the night Jerry rolled his blue Prelude to save a dog

Rob Dollar took this picture of Jerry Manley, me and Jim Lindgren while we met for Flapjacks and flapjacks 12 years ago or so. The restaurant is dead, and we're not doing so well ourselves.
 

Festus, Marshal Matt Dillon’s bewhiskered deputy, was asked what he was going to do after an obviously unsavory character took over the big man’s desk.

In an instant, Festus had his Colt six-shooter pointed up beneath the bad guy’s jaw.

“First, I’m going to decide whether I’m going to fight you or just splatter what little brains you have on the ceiling,” he told the guy who crooked cattlemen had installed in Dillon’s chair while the marshal was “missing … somewhere out in the valley ….” 

My best friend -- at least the longest-living survivor of a lifestyle some might have labeled “self-destructive,” while to us it was the time of our lives – stopped snoring long enough to see if Festus was going to blow the guy’s brains all over the ceiling of the U.S. Marshal’s office in Dodge City, Kansas.

“This is better,” Jerry Manley said, as he swung his legs off the mattress so he could sit up in bed.  “I didn’t want to watch that news you had on. I like to watch TV.

“Game shows and cowboys.”

“Game shows are probably good for you,” I said, after Festus put his gun away and let the bad guy leave the marshal’s office. “If you play along, they’ll help keep your brain active,” I said.

Jerry just shrugged at that. He doesn’t have a lot of hope of recovering some of the phases and stages of his life’s memories, he reckons. Still, even watching “Jeopardy” can stimulate, even if you don’t know answers to questions like “Little Joe Cartwright is connected to the Andromeda by this big snake.” (Answer: “Who is Adam Cartwright?” “Who is Pernell Roberts?” also would be accepted.)

Joking aside, my beloved friend is fighting to hang onto his memories. It’s why this long-haired relic of another age (me … Jerry’s daughter Mary Jane has given her pop a close-cropped and dandy look) so often is sitting in the recliner next to his bed when he wakes up. He remembers me, and I help him remember the who, what, when, where, why and how factors of a journalist’s life.

“You remember the night you almost killed yourself to save a dog?” I asked him.

He smiled as that simple question sparked memories of one of our marathon nights of harmless – to all but us – excess.

Like the time we went to the Little Ole Opry nightclub in the backroom of my friend, John Maddox’s package store (that’s what they used to call liquor stores back in the civilized days of the 20th Century).

Jerry smiled and contributed a chuckle or two as we talked about that night. For a few Fridays and Saturdays one spring in the mid-1980s, the Opry performers would finish their sets and skits at the Grand Ole Opry House out in Donelson, and they’d rush up to the room behind Pal’s Package Store in Clarksville. It was a nice room, of the old-fashioned gangster-era nightclub variety, with round tables and red, subdued lighting. E.T., Porter, Little Jimmy, Lorrie Morgan and more would play for a few hours.

(The club was short-lived, closed after the real Ole Opry, a bunch of three-piece suit corporate guys, sent their lawyers to Pal’s Package Store, and sternly objected (or worse).)

But it was wonderful while it lasted. They sold beer by the bucket full of bottles. Jerry and I had a few buckets full one night (or probably more.) He dropped me off at the house where I lived unhappily (another life) while plotting my escape.  It probably was 2 a.m. when he dropped me off, and he began his 10-mile drive to the house he lived in in the St. Bethlehem community of Clarksville.

On his way home, probably a quarter-mile from his house, a dog ran out in front of Jerry’s blue Honda Prelude. Rather than hit the dog, Jerry steered off the road, rolling his car a few times.

He was all bruised up and missed a shift or two at The Tennessean (he was commuting from Clarksville back then while plotting his own future). Fact is, I didn’t know anything about the wreck until I got to work at The Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle at 2 p.m. or so and, as was customary, dialed Jerry at The Tennessean copy desk. He wasn’t there. He’d been in a wreck, I was told by Nick Vanocur, another friend (he died alone in a fleabag residential motel a few years ago.)

Nick said he thought Jerry was OK, but I quickly hung up the phone and dialed the Manley estate in St. B. He invited me by after I got off work. He was really beaten to hell by the incident. He was stiff, bruised and scratched up. I poured him a bit of the Cutty Sark bottle we’d finish that evening.

There’s a lot more to it, but this was the part I decided to focus on the other day when I worked to pull Jerry from the partial fog that has him in a Memory Care ward.

  We were “reliving” that tale – I was telling it while he was listening – when he shook his head and slapped his knee.

“I shoulda hit that damn dog,” he muttered.

“You never would do that, Jerry. You know that.”

We laughed, though.  And then he asked me for some potato chips.

The reason I tell these stories to him is simple enough. First of all, it jars some of the calcium loose that is clogging up his brain. Like the game shows, there is something to be gained by listening to me.

Granted, they are sometimes two-hour-long, one-sided conversations, but Jerry stays alert and smiles when something I have said touches what’s left of a funny bone for a guy who pretty much is confined to a large dormitory room with someone he doesn’t know. His name varies from Bob to Thomas to “that guy.”  

Jerry seldom leaves his room to go down to the party room. I think he got pissed at the other patients when we were told we were being too loud for them to hear what John Denver was saying in some stupid TV movie a couple of weeks ago.

Jerry, who doesn’t say much, wasn’t loud. I was, to be heard above the blasting television and the truly mindless chatter of those gathered beneath quilts in the memory care ward.

I know it made Jerry mad that we were being told to be quiet. And since the barbs and empty eyes were leveled at me, he got angrier.

Now he has calmed down.  “I just lay here and watch cowboy shows and game shows,” he said, as he forked a bit at the stone-cold breakfast that had been left at the foot of his bed two hours ago.

“I can’t eat this,” he said to me, forcing a bite of stone-cold bacon into his mouth. "I don’t know why they left it here and didn’t take me down to the breakfast room. I didn’t know this was here.”

When the nurse/dietician came in, I was a little stern. “How’s he going to keep any strength if you just leave his food here while he’s sleeping?” I said.  I threw the plate of cold eggs and the fixings in her face and she fell to the floor.  Nah, that’s not true. But she did have to think deeply for an answer.

“I came and got him at breakfast time,” she said. “But he told me he didn’t want to come down there to eat.

“I’ll make sure he eats something at lunchtime.”

I told her how much he misses potato chips in the memory care ward.

Jerry and I talked about food and women, newspapers and The Beatles. He let out a couple of fine farts,  proof that he hasn’t lost it completely.

Festus was going out to the valley to find Marshal Dillon, according to the dialogue on the blasting TV. “Matthew will come back and take care of this. He won’t like it a bit that this guy is taking his spot.”

Doc Adams agreed, running his right hand along Festus’s inseam.

Nah. But he did agree.

Jerry and I watched for awhile. I always like to watch Dillon commit cold-blooded murder at the end of the show.

“I don’t think I’ll want any lunch,” he had said to the nurse.

I reminded him that if he wanted to be healthy he needed to eat. I felt like my Grandma Ghianni as I said it.

I hugged him the next time he woke up from fitful slumber

“I really like having you out here,” he said, adding that for the most part he doesn’t want company. “You and I have gotten old. Together. Don’t know how. Doesn’t seem so long ago that we were having all that fun and making movies.”

As I walked out toward the “secure door,” so the guards could let me into the “regular” nursing home, I ducked my head into the dietician’s office and asked her again to “make sure he eats.”

She was next to the cafeteria/common/party room, where the people were mostly sleeping, mouths open, while Festus found Marshal Dillon, who climbed up on his chestnut horse so he could get back to town and gun down the lawman-impersonator hired by evil cattle barons.

“You don’t do that sort of thing in Dodge City,” I said to myself, parroting angry directions yelled at me, Jerry, Rob Dollar, John Staed, Jim Lindgren and Ricky G. Moore 42 years ago.

“You don’t do that sort of thing in Clarksville,” we were instructed after a task force of armed cops interrupted our tickertape parade through the streets of the Queen City of the Cumberland. We’d been passing hand-rolled tobacco cigarettes and a Jack bottle or two filled with Coke, props for our movie grand finale parade. Cops don’t like freedom of expression.

“I’m going to talk about that parade arrest next time,” I said, inside my weary brain, as I walked to the secure escape hatch from the memory care ward.

 I was let through the double-locked doors and walked through the other part of the nursing home, where about 20 people were playing bingo in a hallway.

I wondered if they’d been given potato chips.

Friday, February 23, 2024

Nobody gets out of here alive .... I get frightened that I'm not going to fly out of the Cuckoo's Nest.... Of course, I'm nuts .... Laughter and 'Looney Tunes' with Jerry & the guys


 For a split second I thought I was going to be seized by the big memory care attendant and strapped down until someone could put a pillow over my head.

Nah, no pillow. But I did have a bit of worry there for a second at the nursing home, when it looked like they’d confused me for a patient.

That was toward the end of my visit with Jerry Manley this week. He's actually pretty well. There are holes in his memory. Big ones. But he's still articulate. And we love each other.

I was sitting in his room, when he lifted his tiny, empty water glass. “So damn thirsty,” he said.

I leaned forward on my walking stick to push myself up from the recliner in my best friend’s room in the memory care ward of the nursing home.

“I hate for you to have to go down and get it, but I’m thirsty,” said Jerry Manley – one of the four original News Brothers (who hates his “Chuckles” nickname, but has come to terms with it after 43 years.)

Jerry, who had been watching “The Rifleman” – Lucas McCain was bailing his son, Mark, out of trouble after the young man allowed a stranger to stay in the barn the night before – had just finished off the  mini-glass of water. By “mini,” I mean it was about double the size of a shot glass.

“Man, I’m thirsty,” he had said, again. It’s a pretty far stretch down to the dining/party room and kitchen, so I told him I’d go find him something to wet his whistle.

That’s when I used the walking stick – a cane that my brother, Eric, made from a tree limb and inscribed with a Paul McCartney quote: “I don’t work to be ordinary.”  I don’t really take the cane out of the house much, but I do use it to help me at home. It’s a beautiful piece of finished, knotty wood and I could kill someone with it. I use it when my back troubles me or if I want to kill someone.

Even back in the heyday of The News Brothers, pushing a half-century ago now, the problems with my back were visible. I never have been able to walk perfectly upright and my running down Third Street in the “Rocky” sequence demonstrates the off-kilter running style that results.

It’s from scoliosis, the severely curved spine my parents gifted me with, with additions of rotting, cracked discs and other lower-disc degeneration caused by my career as a mediocre – but chemically fueled and very fast on my feet – football player.

Anyway, I spent six or seven months going to a chiropractor for “spinal decompression” last year. It was designed to put tissue between the compressed discs. Didn’t work. Spine is too curved, apparently.

So, I’ve been using the cane a lot to keep myself upright.  I only use it if I’m going to be on my feet too long, and my focus on keeping the back straight turns to pain.

Outside of my house – which I rarely leave because most of my friends are dead or elsewise incapacitated physically or mentally – I mainly use it at the nursing home where Jerry moved while everyone else was celebrating Thanksgiving.  Those are long hallways, going from the regular retirement center to get to the secured memory care ward.

And no one there looks twice at an old man on a cane, unless it is to admire it.  I think the old ladies are looking at my crotch, though. “Still got it, Timothy,” I’ll fool myself.

When I got to the party room and asked the only attendant I could find on-duty for something my friend could drink, I was greeted by a resident who introduced himself as “Paul.”

“Who is this rascal?” he asked, to no one, as I waited for the attendant. “You new here?”

I told him my name and that I hadn’t yet met the requirements for entry into this exclusive and very clean club; that I was visiting because my buddy lived at the end of the long, freshly waxed hall.

“Well, hello, Tim,” he said. “It’s so nice to meet you. Come see me again.”

I shook his hand, and he turned back to the TV, where – and this is absolutely true – “Looney Tunes” cartoons were playing.

I gimped my way back to the room where Jerry lives and plopped down in the recliner that is wedged between his bed and a recliner “belonging” to his roommate who lives in the other full-size bed in the traditional dormitory-style living.

“You ever meet your roommate?” I asked Jerry. 

“I reckon I have, but I don’t remember. He’s not in here much,” he said.

There’s really not many places he could go, so I figure he must like to spend his time in the party room, or perhaps he has a girlfriend he’s shagging mindlessly someplace down the hall. (“Do it again, do it some more, I know that it’s nasty, it’s nasty for sure,” as Frank Zappa told me on the first Mothers album.)

“Here comes Bob now!” said Jerry, as the roommate, a 90ish-looking fellow in a yellow running suit, entered the room.

“Hello, Bob,” I said, as the roommate sat down in his recliner, about six inches to my left.

Jerry and I didn’t let that stop us, as we talked about all the great beer and otherwise altered adventures we had. How I had developed a particular love of Scotch and pretty much drank it by the fifth or even quart back in those days.   

“Remember, you used to come to my house every Sunday midnight and we’d drink 12 pints of Natural Light together as we made mix tapes til dawn?” I asked. “We’d go to work the next day. I don’t remember ever having a hangover.

“It would kill me today,” I said, adding I’d had a mostly dry existence for the last couple of decades.

‘’I suppose we must have had hangovers,” Jerry said.

“We just sucked it up and went to work,” I said, though I really don’t recall many hangovers. The ones I had, I usually cured with a quart of beer in the morning.

It was at about this point in the conversation that I noticed that every time I said something, Bob was breaking into sustained laughter and even slapping his hand against his armrest.

I showed Jerry a video Rob Dollar had posted, a clip from “Flapjacks: The Motion Picture,” that captured me, Rob, Jerry, John Staed and Harold Lynch out at Outlaw Field in Clarksville.

Hell, even Mayor Ted Crozier was there, wearing a “Tim Ghianni for Mayor” button. Ted loved me and we remained friends until his death a few years ago.

The basic scene has The News Brothers going out to the airport because America’s first man to orbit the globe, John Glenn, was flying in.

I was The Leaf-Chronicle’s associate editor, in charge of Sunday papers, and I had sent Harold, who was the government reporter, out there to interview the great astronaut on that Saturday morning.

The night before, I suggested (or maybe it was Rob) that the rest of us go out to the airport in the morning – we didn’t go to work until afternoon – to meet the astronaut, a senator who was in town to raise money for a potential presidential run.

He didn’t get to the White House, but as I’ve noted in previous dispatches, he really was a good sport, glad to meet The News Brothers.

Jerry laughed. But Bob, well, shit, he wailed. It was the funniest story he’d heard in years, I suppose.

I got the same reaction when I started reminding Jerry of our Chico the Monkey coverage, something that got me summoned to my fairly regular upholstered hotseat in the publisher’s office. Publisher Luther Thigpen didn’t think the pun-filled streaming-headline tale about deputies looking for an escaped monkey in St. Bethlehem was worth the play I gave it.

Luther, though, liked me. He smiled as I told him I’d do it again the same way. “We’ll just have to agree to disagree,” I told him, or some such.

“What was Luther’s last name?” Jerry asked.

Bob laughed when I said “Thigpen.”

He continued laughing when Jerry and I agreed that Luther, despite his faults and Chamber of Commerce mentality, at least had spent his formative years as a newspaper reporter and editor, so he – in hindsight – was the best publisher I’d ever worked for.

Jerry agreed.

Bob continued to laugh when Jerry asked: “Whatever happened to Chico?”

“He got eaten by dogs a couple of months after his escape,” I replied.

That threw Bob into writhing, almost-tear-laden laughter.

Jerry laughed, too.

Since I’d spent a couple hours with Jerry, and inadvertently driven his roommate into great curtains of laughter, I figured I’d better go home.

I pulled myself to my feet again, using the cane for support.

“Damn, I didn’t think we’d ever get old,” Jerry said, as I squeezed his shoulder and then made my way to the door to the hallway.

“Wagon Train” was on the TV as I left the room. I was tired and it was a long walk down the hallway, so I was leaning heavily on the walking stick.

An attendant, who reminded me of Nurse Ratched, came up to me and asked if she could help me.

“Are you looking for someone? Where’s your room?” she said, all-business.

“I don’t live here,” I told her. “My best friend, Mr. Manley, lives down at the end of the hall.”

I think she was pondering calling the big, black offensive tackle of an attendant when she saw my visitor badge. She reluctantly pressed the button that let me free of the very secure doors.

After I left the memory care ward, I wandered through the “normal” nursing home.  A guitar-strumming visitor was singing Ray Price and Sinatra songs, and some of the old people were clog dancing.

 One man was dancing as if he was holding tight to an invisible partner.       

Monday, February 19, 2024

'Simple Motion' should have been a classic Brace-Cooper-Jutz album, but death forced Peter's heartbroken amigos to push boundaries with masterful duet country-folk album




 My late editor-pal Tony Durr was editing one of my columns 40 years ago, when he looked up at me, caution in his voice and on his face: “You wear your feelings on your sleeve. It’s what makes you a great writer. It’s also what will kill you,” he said, then pretty much repeated himself: “But, it does give you your greatness.”   

“Greatness” is only a perception of the audience, of course.  And it’s why I can unabashedly boast that two of my friends, infused a dash with the spirit of a mutual friend whose illness took him too soon, have made a masterpiece. Greatness on display for all to hear.

Simple Motion, the new album by Eric Brace and Thomm Jutz, fit my generally melancholy spirit well the first time I decided to listen to the whole album, in sequence. And I played it again on my daily trek on my recumbent exercise bike.

I’ll first say that this is a masterful album, the best yet from the evolving outfit of musicians.

A decade or more ago, Brace teamed with Peter Cooper to make music and mix in highly tuned mirth.  Both had been music journalists. Both had been raised around the great D.C.-area folk/musical godfathers The Seldom Scene.  They both idolized the story songs of Tom T. Hall, as well as worshiped in person at the altar that was Fox Hollow, the Hall estate where I too was a regular visitor. (This isn’t about me, but I was a close friend of the late Tom T. and Dixie Hall, primarily because Dixie loved me and vice versa. I have a carved, Jamaican wood angel looking at me to prove it. Plus a heart that still feels that love.)

Anyway, both Cooper and Brace had other musical outlets and solo prospects in which they turned out what, to my biased mind, were Sunday-afternoon-mood classics.

But there was a certain chemistry between the two that made for great music. Cooper, the dearest of my friends in the music business and on a personal level, and Brace not only recorded duet albums, they began playing live, first at places like Nashville’s Station Inn, but on the road, from Kingsport, Tennessee, to pubs in England, Ireland and on the continent. Sleep in the bar’s backroom, wash out stage clothes in the bathroom sink.  Have a drink. Start over again.

Early on, they acquired a producer and guest guitarist in Thomm Jutz, one of Music City’s best guitarists and a German expat, lured from the Black Forest of Germany by Bobby Bare (long story, look it up in my book Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes, which you should read, anyway) to U.S. citizen, dwelling and music-making in Southeast Davidson County. A scholar, kind soul and mammothly-talented picker, he set up a studio and honed his guitar-playing abilities to the point where he might be the best of the thirteen-hundred fifty-two guitar-pickers in Nashville.  (That number comes from one of my friends and heroes, John Sebastian, leader of Lovin’ Spoonful and singer of “Nashville Cats.” The song was written in the 1960s at the Holiday Inn Vanderbilt, where the Spoonful stayed after a concert in Municipal Auditorium. I always make John tell me the story again when we talk.)

Anyway, it wasn’t long before Thomm not only played as a guest onstage and on-album (while still producing), he eventually became the third member of the band. Brace-Cooper recordings and performances were supplanted by Brace-Cooper-Jutz.

They are marvelous recordings and I am blessed that – thanks to my loyalty to Peter, who was among my life’s favorite people and one of my few confidantes – I went to performances consisting of all of those configurations, along with some of the best sidemen (steely Lloyd Green and Steve Fishell and Pete Finney, bassist Dave Roe, the miracle that is Rory Hoffman) and sidewomen (see Andrea Zonn, fiddle, and Sierra Hull, mandolin, who both own pieces of my heart. Andrea, in particular, makes me melt with her bow).   I even met and befriended wonderful and kind Jerry Lawson, the best and most soulful voice of the old Persuasions, thanks to these guys. Eric “rediscovered” his doo-wop hero and made a record filled with Nashville Cats.  The debut was at the Station, where, due to mobility issues, Jerry asked me to help him on and off the stage.

Those Station Inn shows, (one or two per year) were some of my happiest evenings.  Heck, I even took my son, Joe, along with me five or six times. The B-C-J song “Hartford’s Bend” is Joe’s favorite song. Mine is “Strawberry Fields Forever,” but that has nothing to do with this tale.  But, let me take you down, indeed:

Something happened just before the pandemic settled in on America.  Peter got sick. It was an illness that kept him from going on the road (though, everybody eventually stopped going on the road because of COVID.)

Eric and Thomm, though, tried hard to keep performing, while lamenting and saluting their friend, praying to the gut-string gods that they could be a trio again. His health deteriorated.  They missed him a lot as they tried to live up to his expectations while he stayed here in Nashville, writing songs and sometimes calling me at night to sing them. Eventually that illness caused Peter to fall, hit his head and die. He’d been reciting lyrics to me that very morning.

That last sentence was difficult for me to write, because normally, most days for the last 24 years, I’d be calling Peter, sick or not, and we’d laugh (he was funny, I profane) and sometimes even make up vulgar songs.

Those soul-lifting – for us both, I believe -- conversations ended when he died around the 2022 holiday weeks, and there remains a void and even a bit of bitterness and plenty of melancholy loneliness (self-pity at having someone else die seems selfish, but I yam what I yam, as Tom Petty used to sing with Howie.)  

The other day, a part of the void was filled when I listened to the first song to be released by the new duo configuration of that same group, Brace and Jutz.

It was a great song about “Nashville in the Morning,” a somehow optimistic portrayal of a city (my home for a half-century) that is choking in its own progress and gagging over its national identity crisis and stumbling over the promise of three pair of boots for the price of one. Their song’s focus is on the dewy beauty that remains here, just past dawn, before bachelorettes and California-bred carpetbaggers line the streets with drunken silliness and reckless driving and projectile vomiting.

I actually agree to that beauty, as the great John Partipilo shot the cover for my book at 5 a.m. on a brisk morning when the streets were empty even as the neon still danced on Lower Broadway.

Simple Motion is a giant musical and journalistic step forward, a vocal and guitar delight filled with imagery and life. Also, what’s missing in this album is the third voice, the higher-harmony of Peter Cooper, his contributions on rhythm guitar, his sarcastic worldview.  No “Grandma’s Batman Tattoo” --a crowd-pleasing romp written by Peter and my pal Tommy Womack -- reminiscent stuff in this set.

Peter’s missing, of course, because he’s dead. Damn it (not him).

But he’s on Simple Motion in spirit. In fact, he appears, or at least his spirit does, in a few of the songs. I’m not going to tell you which ones, but if you knew Peter, you’ll recognize the hat-tips, the bridges and flowing water, name-check and life boundaries offered by the still-living duo of musical partners in that fabulous trio.

I am not a music critic. I am, foremost, a music fan but mostly a lover of humanity, with thousands of pieces of recorded music. I generally draw from only a few artists for my daily listening. Seldom the day goes by when I haven’t listened to John, Paul, George and Ringo for at least an hour.

Petty, Mick and Keef, Kristofferson, Dylan and the Wilburys make up most of my daily soundtrack.

I do pull out one of my albums by Nashville’s best country singer, Jon Byrd (I only have two of his, as I am poor, but I do love his music.) Mac Wiseman gets his spins.

And always there’s the work of my favorite local musician and his amigos.

Peter gave me copies of all the albums he did as a solo artist, and I have wrangled up most of the B-C and B-C-J albums.  Being an almost-never-paid freelance writer and author (my book, Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes, continues to sell, but there’s not enough sexual fantasy, dysfunctional incestuous royalty nor exploding massive reptile penises in it to make it a top seller.) In truth, it’s a pure-as-country-water look into the lives of many of my best friends, most of them dead, in the music business. Speaking of my too-often dead corps of pals, Peter wrote the Foreword and also edited each chapter as I finished it. He was my biggest cheerleader. “Only you can write this book,” he’d say. “You have to finish it.” I did. Then he died.

Sure, I miss him a lot. And he should have been producing great music for years to come. He should be the third voice on Simple Motion.    

But, you know, as you listen to this absolutely fabulous album, likely the best put together during all phases of this group’s existence, he’s still there.  No, you can’t hear his voice in the magnificent harmonies, but you can feel his heart.

Eric Brace and Thomm Jutz have many different musical endeavors. Eric has the great band Last Train Home and Thomm is an award-winning, Grammy nominated bluegrass music writer and picker, almost to the point where they will put a “national treasure sign” on his battered Fedora.

Eric -- whose voice and songs, themselves, have matured -- startles and cajoles.  A comparison to Gordon Lightfoot is warranted, but I’m not sure it does Eric’s booming vocals justice.

Thomm’s matured. He’s not much like his hero, Bobby Bare, but his soft, pure vocals and sure guitar are reminiscent of “Fire and Rain”- era Sweet Baby James.  Like James Taylor, his pure tales have teardrops in them, even if the subject evokes smiles. Or perhaps a comparison to John Denver, a too-often-disregarded poet of fire and life and sweet home, is warranted.

They also are really nice guys who stood by their friend during his illness, decline and death and who kept him in mind as they carried the torch forward.

I still will listen to Peter’s Opening Day solo masterpiece, if I’m able.

 But Peter’s participation in “his” group’s musical progress will, by tragic necessity, lessen.  Brace-Cooper-Jutz will forever be just Brace and Jutz, B-J.

 Ghosts don’t make for good sidemen.

But there is hope, depending on your beliefs. For example, I speak with my old editor, Durr, regularly, even though he died alone and lonely long ago.

Spirits -- at least by my reckoning as I sit here with emotions dancing on my sleeves -- live forever, kept alive in the souls of those who loved the deceased: guys like Eric and Thomm, who are loyal to the trio in its latest two-voiced incarnation.   With Simple Motion.

 

     



Saturday, December 2, 2023

Best friend, office assistant, warm encourager's death blackens 72nd birthday ... Even though our chair feels empty, Champ's forever there for me

 “You are my best friend,” I said, fighting to keep my voice from shattering as my writing partner looked at me, a moment before his heart stopped.

It was about 12:30 a.m. on November 18, 2023 … a half-hour into my 72nd birthday, one that will never be remembered for candles and cake but rather always carry heartache and hints of hurt … until my own journey into the blackness into which my best friend would embark.



“You’ve always been a good boy,” I said, stroking Champ’s head. “Beautiful boy. You’ve been my best friend for a long time now.”

Even though blindness had accompanied his downward spiral in recent months, accelerating as autumn chill had settled in outside the French door where he would let slanting sun warm his frail body, the light disappeared from his eyes quickly as his heart stopped on what will forever be my most somber birthday.



My wife -- who never minded that I referred to my office assistant as “my best friend” every night before he settled down on my chest … or simply when he vaulted into my lap here in my office, as I began my daily quest for words to string together -- stroked his back and told him “We love you, Champ. You’re a good boy.’’ If she was trying to hold it together for my sake, she failed. “You’re such a good boy, Champ.”

Champ had always sought out Suzanne when he needed comforting, whether in a thunderstorm, when neighborhood scalawags celebrated July 4 or the New Year with bottle rockets or when workmen cursed and slung hammers against nails during various renovation projects.  Champ had lived through many of those in our home, a 1956-model brick rancher in Nashville’s Crieve Hall neighborhood.  Other than his annual physical or the occasional visit to the heart specialist to monitor an eventually mortal defect, he’d never been anywhere else.

In the hours before his death, he laid, gasping, on Suzanne’s outstretched legs and lap. He would try to purr. But then he’d cry, a soft, cat whimper. It was time, we knew. All three of us. We wanted that journey to begin and end at home. But that bad heart, his long-ago forecast fatal flaw, struggled to keep him going, faintly, in fits and stops, as fluids filled his lungs. He was struggling, even as he spread his love.  

Champ had been with us almost 12 years, after I picked him out of a Nashville Humane Society cage.

Everyone else in the cat room that winter’s day was playing with and adopting kittens.  It was the full-grown fellow, at least 2 years old, that I pulled from his cage.  He was happy about that. Me, too. I had called the Humane Society to see if any of their population already had been declawed. I didn’t want to do that to a cat, but if the deed had been done, I wanted him in my house rather than with someone else, who might let him wander, defenseless, as so many cats do. Too many coyotes and vermin around the woods behind my home.

“We’ve got one older cat here who’s been declawed,” I was told. “His name’s Mike.”

I asked for them to put a “hold” sign on his cage while we trekked the 20 minutes from what was to become Champ’s lifelong domain.

On that long-ago December 29, my daughter Emily, and my son, Joe, sat with Suzanne in the glass room where you “try out” cats. They’d all been looking at kittens, while they waited for me. Their eyes sparkled when I entered the room with the tabby in my arms’ crotches.

“This is the one I was telling you about. His name’s Mike, but that’s no name for a cat,” I said, handing the handsome eight-pounder to Suzanne.

The beautiful cat began campaigning for adoption, wandering around the little room, spreading purrs and rubbing against legs. He didn’t know the decision had been made as soon as I made that phone call, less than a half-hour before I lifted him from the cage and he purred, contentedly.

It was the birthday of my late mother, a cat-and-dog lover named Dorothy Champ Ghianni. Suzanne suggested we call him “Champ.”

It fit. I didn’t know at the time that he would become my office assistant as I wrote my yarns, mostly melancholy ones. My name’s Timothy Champ Ghianni. Jocko, or maybe it was Nardholm or Carpy… maybe even Uncle Moose … dubbed me “Champo” in college. Those from Hanson House who survive continue to call me Champo.  It’s been a life full of nicknames. There remain a few who call me “Flapjacks,” a name I earned during caffeine and nicotine-fueled newspaper deadlines, back in my favorite professional days. That’s another story. There’s a book about those days if you are interested.

When we got the former Mike to our house almost 12 years ago, Champ immediately strutted, calmly through his home, the place where he’d reign. He found the litterbox in the utility room and his food and water dishes at the kitchen’s edge.  

He was sweet and happy, immediately.  Suzanne took him to the vet in the next day or so, and the doc was concerned. He sent Suzanne and Champ to the specialist who detected the major flaw in the cat’s heart. “He’ll only live six more years, at the most. If he’s lucky.”

We were the lucky ones, as he spread love and devotion in our house for 12 more years.   

Quickly, Champ learned how to chase the melancholy from my soul – admittedly it sometimes ends up in my dispatches as I continue a life of chasing away the black dogs of depression – just by his presence.

My newspaper life ended in 2007.  That’s another story, and it can also be found in that book I referenced earlier.  It’s a story about personal ethics versus corporate tyranny. And it doesn’t have a happy ending. The scars exist still, and Champ, when he joined us, helped me cope with that still, long-lingering pain.

That’s all beside the point of this little tale, other than to note that on December 29, 2011, when Champ first moved into what became his house, the beautiful cat learned that a great place to spend the days was in my lap as I sat before my computer. Soothing any sourness in my soul as I composed news and feature pieces, class lessons, blogs and authored five books.

His calming attitude worked well, as I typed my way through a jumbled career that included freelance work (sometimes for free if I thought it might help my friends in music or the arts…. My heart and personal loyalty long has outpaced any push for riches, which is fortunate.)

 I also wrote for a major news service for a decade, a job I lost in the heart of COVID and when Reuters began trimming its part-time freelance staffers.  An every-other-week, slice-of-life-and-news, people-focused column I had written for a decade for Nashville Ledger similarly died of COVID cutbacks. Champ also sat on my lap as I worked hard to prepare writing and stylebook lessons and quizzes for my journalism labs at a local university.  When all those long-running jobs died at about the same time, ending consistent income, Champ sat in my lap and purred. Sudden loss of even minimal income wasn’t important to him. Or to me, thanks to Champ. 

Life cannot be bad when you’ve got a cat who loves you unconditionally in your lap and a great family around you.

Champ was with me from about 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, seven-days-a-week while I wrote my latest book, Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes.   He was there when I called friends like Duane Eddy, Kris Kristofferson or my dear pal Bobby Bare to talk about what I was writing.

He was with me when my best human Nashville friend, Peter Cooper, who was editing the book for me and who wrote the foreword, spoke to me about what I’d written during that year of typing and remembering. “Change nothing,” he’d say as he concluded each chapter, suggesting only minor grammatical or punctuation changes. “It’s beautiful. It’s written only as you could write it, Timmay.” (That was another nickname I earned, one used only by Peter. I also had been dubbed “The Dirt Man” or simply “Dirt” by my friend, my long-ago Tennessean entertainment staff gossip columnist Brad Schmitt, who continues at the paper, where he provides good-news and tasty filet/buttered biscuits tales…. Back in high school a bloodthirsty football coach dubbed me “Brahma Bull,” but that tale is long, painful and is in another of my books. My head still hurts, though.)

In 2019, when my Dad succumbed to his World War II-age and corresponding maladies, I would spend quiet time, mourning, with Champ on my lap. Dad used to watch Champ when we went on our seldom vacations, and I think Champ likely knew his “Grandpa” was gone.

Champ climbed in my lap each day last December when I’d get back from the hospital where Peter Cooper lay dying after damaging his brain in a hard fall a year ago Friday, December 1. He died five days later, and I miss him and our almost-daily phone conversations. 

My office assistant’s soft purring helped me survive those blackest days.  I cried, while Champ nudged his face against my own, calming if not fully chasing away the tears of heartbreak over a beloved friend’s too-young exit. Champ’s purr and his gentle head nudges were his way of saying “I love you. Everything’s OK.”

 I wish Champ’d been able to calm me the other night, early on my 72nd birthday, as I wiped the tears and petted his still body.

“He’s still beautiful,” Suzanne said, as she battled her own heartache. Her lap of solace for Champ would forever be empty now.

A major reason for our own love story, dating back into the 1980s, was Suzanne’s love of animals matched my own. To many, pets are for entertainment, accompanists to neighborhood struts. And that’s fine. As long as they are loved.

To others of us, they really are family members. There is incredible weight in this attitude, as we know they will only be with us an abbreviated amount of time.

Of course, Suzanne really is my best-best friend, she is a former lifelong journalist who loves animals. Fact is, our only real difference is that she turns to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John; while I find my solace in John, Paul, George and Ringo.

My mother -- or maybe it was James Thurber, James Herriot or cat-lovers Ernest Hemingway or John Lennon -- said long ago that the greatest gift pets give us is they prepare us for death. If we can say goodbye and not totally break when a pet dies, then perhaps we’ll be able to handle the deaths of parents, grandparents, best friends, work colleagues and Beatles.

True enough. But then, what prepares us for the death of our pets? One who is a best friend? I know the writing rules call for pets to be “its” and “thats” and only humans dubbed “whos,” but that’s heartless and complete bull shit.

Every year, near but never on my birthday, I write a column or a blog. I write it for me, soothing or cleansing my brain... It’s sort of a State of the Union, or a State of Old Timothy Address, a rundown of my thoughts. Generally melancholy, as I am, I run through what I’m thinking, what I’ve accomplished and how I’ve failed in the previous year … and then reflect back on the now 72 years since I was born in Saint Joseph Hospital, a dandy Catholic joint, in Pontiac, Michigan.

I often don’t publish it. It’s just for me, a way of busting through the cobwebs of death, disappointment and defeat that have been spun during the previous year/years. Oh, I do celebrate the triumphs, too, like the success of getting a major book publisher to take on my recent book about the Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes I had befriended.

I never published last year’s for example. It began with a litany of bad things that had accompanied my year and the good things, like my grandson (I now have a granddaughter, as well), my children’s successes and my spiritual bond with Peter. Before I could post it, Peter fell, hit his head and died. I rewrote that year-in-the-rearview meanderings to reflect that loss – but I never published that 2022 State of Timothy Address. Too damn sad. I did write and post a separate piece about Peter, as I thought it might help the many others who mourned him.  And writing always has been my own salvation.

Last I looked, the 2022 State of Timothy Address was about 15,000 words, as long as a novella. Perhaps if I ever do a collected works, weird scenes inside the goldmine that is Champo/Flapjacks/Timmay/the Dirt Man and Brahma Bull, I’ll include it. I’ll give you a hint: Nobody wins.

I read through that unpublished 71st birthday declaration again as I was thinking about Champ’s death on my 72nd birthday. There are several mentions in that one of that wonderful cat and how he helped me cope.

For example, near the end, I say:

Now, I am fortunate. I have a nice, little house in a prime Nashville neighborhood. I have been married 30-plus years to my best friend. And I have two kids and a grandson.  

And a cat, who helps me write this stuff. 

Again, that was just over a year ago, on my 71st birthday.

That cat isn’t around to help me on this one. He died and there was no cake. Just tears.

One thing Champ had to endure over the years was my love of music. For years now, I’ve been pedaling my recumbent stationary bike daily for miles to nowhere in my basement. That bike sits right next to my office door.

Sometime, usually in the mid-afternoon, I put on my favorite music – The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Tom Petty, The Traveling Wilburys, Bare, Kristofferson, Dylan, Cooper, Brace, Jutz, Byrd and death-era Cash.

At least 60 percent of the time, it’s The Beatles, as a group or separately.

And I begin the daily toil designed to keep my own heart healthy. I pump ‘til I sweat, climb off to arrive where I began.

Champ, who always claimed my office chair as his own as soon as I ducked out from beneath him, would just sit in the chair – he frequently spent his nights there in recent weeks, I guess because it was comfortable, smelled like me and he could find it in the darkness that had become his worldview.

He’d watch through the office door as I pedaled. Or at least look toward the sound.

Last week, in the days toward his decline, Champ heard an awful lot of Beatles. For some reason, I’ve been exploring the outtakes from John Lennon’s Imagine album package of a few years back, seeking answers or just smiles. Champ always seemed to like John’s voice.  I’m sure he was particularly fond of John’s description of life’s peasants in “Working Class Hero.”

 If I was playing The Stones, for example, he might get down and wander upstairs and jump in Suzanne’s lap to avoid the Crossfire Hurricane.  Jumpin’ Jack Flash may be a gas, gas, gas; but it’s difficult on feline ears.

Lennon, whose voice soothes me as well as provides heartache because of the fact he died more than 40 years ago when he could still be making music, seemed to be a favorite of Champ’s.

Course I don’t know that. I just know Champ sat quietly in my office chair as John sang by himself or with his Scouse cronies on my old stereo.

I’m not sure what was the last song my beloved office assistant heard. It could have been “Imagine,” “Crippled Inside” or a long piano solo from those Imagine outtakes, that to me are better than the finished album.

Thinking back to that day, as I write this, though, I’ll wager it likely was a “new” song – The Beatles’ hit record “Now and Then” – that I’ve been playing several times a day that Champ last heard.     

It’s John Lennon’s voice from the grave, an old cassette demo that was brought back to life by Paul McCartney, Ringo and Giles Martin.  A dead George Harrison plays guitar and harmonizes.

Some say, and I am among them, that the cassette left behind by John was a sort of love letter to his life’s best friend, his truest companion on the road through life, Paul. The two boys from middle-class Liverpool changed the world, with the help of a couple other Scousers. Some are dead and some are living.

Truly, the last music my beloved Champ likely heard included John’s purified voice singing: “Now and then, I miss you.”

It’s very true that Champ helped me write stuff all of these years.  Often, I wrote through too many disappointments, deaths and betrayals. Champ calmed me with his purr or head nudge, triggering emotional rescue. Then, and I’m thankful, my words would smile.

Accomplishments, like having a book published that was praised by Kris, Peter, Bare and more, also were put into perspective by his steady support and encouragement. Keith Richards got a copy of the book in trade for loaning me a couple of photos published inside, and I hope, even though it’s not only rock ‘n’ roll, that he liked it.

Sitting here in Champ’s office chair, thinking of the huge hole in my heart and the shock-induced nausea and diarrhea as his death exacted a physical toll on Champ’s favorite writer and best friend, he’s still here with me in spirit.

My lap is empty, and it’s colder down in the basement without Champ.

I keep looking at the chair when I come down to the office.

Champ: Now and then, I want you to be there for me.

Only in memories and warmth in my soul.



Saturday, June 24, 2023

The death of a newspaperman; Jim Monday was a big man with a big heart who leaves massive void as he promises he's leading the way to heaven


Then Big Jim Monday died. Quietly and with little notice for a man who touched so many lives. Including mine. In a very large and spiritual fashion.

Since cutting back on my blogs to focus on my book that was published recently, I haven't written many "They Call Me Flapjacks" pieces for awhile. Unless it involved the death of a newspaperman. In the last few months, I've written tear-drenched salutes to dead guys who happened to work with me during the half-century I've worked as a journalist.

Peter Cooper (who left journalism for guitars and museum display) died in December. Since he didn't spend his life in newspapers (though I hired him), perhaps I shouldn't refer to him as a newspaperman. He did a damn good job as my entertainment staff chief music writer, though. Better job, still, as my friend and biggest fan.

But Charlie Appleton sure was a newspaperman, throughout his life, and he died in February. He was kind of like a big brother to me, my shotgun passenger in the daily news wars. A kind and profoundly talented newspaperman, Mike McGehee died in January. He and I worked together and smoked cigarettes every predawn that we served as Nashville Banner editors. And I still miss Max Moss, my newspaper mentor, who died in 2021. He'll be with me every day, especially when I smile at the pica pole in my desk drawer.


Max Moss, left, and Jim Monday discuss front-page philosophy. This picture would have been taken sometime in the early 1980s. Max was managing editor, Jim copy desk chief, at The Leaf-Chronicle newspaper in Clarksville. I would guess this photo was taken by W.J. Souza, if he still was alive during that period.

All were men I loved, and I still miss them and especially their voices, as I sit alone here in my basement office with the four clocks counting down life -- in Nashville, Bucharest, New York and Los Angeles time -- on one wall, a portrait of John Lennon on another and the wooden hand-carved angel that Tom T. Hall gave me, from him and his late-wife, Dixie, looking up at me. She wears Mardi Gras beads and a Beatles COVID mask I've given her.

"Dixie sure loved you," said Tom T, as he autographed it for both of them. I didn't realize it until months later that Tom T. was giving away stuff to people he thought might like it, who might collect memories, because he planned to end his life. Peter got a bunch of stuff from Tom T. He didn't live long enough to use most of it. I think guitar virtuoso Thomm Jutz and great harmonizer Eric Brace, two of Tom T's friends, do have stuff they have lived long enough to use.

A hand-carved wooden Chet Atkins nameplate -- he carved it and his widow gave it to me to remember him -- is on the shelf next to a copy of my book, Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes. Chet's kindness to me fills up a chapter about him in this book that you should buy, and he reappears in other spots. There's a John Lennon "Give Peace A Chance" beer glass on the same shelf. Peter gave it to me at least 20 years ago after he emptied out the contents during December 8 Lennon death day celebration at a now deceased bar near Union Station.

I've spent the last couple months trying to help my book publisher sell copies of my book, filled with lively and often quite personal anecdotes from the mouths of those featured. And I've been fiddling about on a couple of potential follow-ups. Hadn't planned to do anything particular on this "Flapjacks" blog, though. I was sure something would come up I'd want to opine on or make fun of, but I had no topics that were urgent.

Until Jim Monday died....They say 87-year-old James Morris Monday had suffered a pair of falls and the second one on June 18 was fatal, injuring his God-loving brain. Peter pretty much died that same way, by the way, for those of you who keep asking.

I wasn't sure what I could write about Jim Monday, though. Because, even though he was old, I didn't expect him to die. No one ever called me an optimist, but I just figured he'd stick around long enough to sing at my funeral in 27 years. He had a helluva voice.

Sure, during our regular phone conversations -- I ALWAYS called him, as he was one of those who didn't realize phones worked in both directions -- he obviously was suffering the maladies of age. Dementia, hardening of the arteries, confusion, whatever. He still was a joy to have as a friend.

Old-guy confusion, perhaps, but he remembered me and our times together in the newsroom of the oldest newspaper in Tennessee. He remembered my wife, Suzanne, who also worked at that old newspaper for a couple of years.

I put in 14 years there, part of the time mainly because I loved the city of Clarksville, which The Leaf-Chronicle newspaper, founded in 1808, used to serve so well. Call 931-552-1808. No one answers in the newsroom. I called twice last week.

Corporate greed came much later than 1808. That newspaper -- where I worked 12 hour days, seven-day weeks as associate editor and with Jim as one of the stalwarts on the copy desk -- is now, like most newspapers published outside of New York and D.C. just a soulless receptacle and purveyor of press releases and shallow reporting. And the ones in the big cities are only alive because of costly life support.

Jim Monday is third from left, between me and Larry Schmidt, in this 1970s Leaf-Chronicle newsroom photo. I'd name them all, but it would take up too much space (and I'm old). My mentor, Max Moss, is the guy sitting down. And photographer W.J. Souza, a WWII tank driver, is the old man in the middle.


I'm old and in the way, some say. Perhaps they are right. But 30-40-50 years ago, every Little League and society function and civic club speech was reported in The Leaf-Chronicle. All police reports were printed. Court agate was always there. (You don't know what agate is, and that's just sad to me. )The TV schedule was printed daily. The County Commission and the City Council were reported on, in detail, both in day-of previews and day-after coverage. With art (photos, you'd say). And everyone who died in Montgomery County received an obituary ... for free. If it meant killing a house ad or wire story, well so be it.

About 10 p.m. each night, as a last-gasp task, one of the staff, sometimes me, sometimes Jerry Manley -- my best friend, who himself has some health woes -- Jim, Suzanne, Larry Schmidt, Rob Dollar, Ricky Moore, Jim "Flash" Lindgren, whoever was available, would go downstairs for one last swing by the mail slot where the funeral directors would drop off the obit forms.

"Got George Smith's death notice," or something like that, the director would say in the one-way phone that was by that mail slot.

Sometimes, Mr. Foston, or another funeral director, would call one in from the embalming room. Right on deadline. One of us, an editor, a reporter, a sports writer, a copy desk honcho like Jim or Jerry, hell, even that asshole city editor (I won't name him here, but he knows, as do we all) would take the dictation.

Everyone who died before the newspaper's final plates were shot by Camera Room Foreman Ronnie Kendrick got in the newspaper the next morning.

Ronnie would be glad to reshoot a page if necessary to get the obits in. Last time I saw Ronnie, he was running a Waffle House, off I-65, not far from my house. That was his fate after a half-century at the newspaper. I'm sure it was him, though I didn't recognize it at the time. At least he appeared well-fed. I loved his mom, who would make me occasional caramel pies. I'd share them with the newsroom, much to Big Jim's delight.
Dropping everything to get the obits in may seem like a small thing, but it really was the most important service by local newspapers, or even big-city newspapers, back until the corporate snakes and money-sucking, bloodthirsty slugs took over and figured, "hell, we've been giving away this space for free. Why don't we charge people hundreds of dollars for their mom's obituaries? Most families will pay it. They're still in shock."

It's only in recent years that people have figured out that the internet, the tool that allowed the pigs to kill newspapers, was also the best tool for obits. Funeral homes put them on their sites for free. Or at least for a bit of overhead on the gluttonous casket costs. Only the frivolous pay to put their family obits in the newspaper.

All of which is kind of a collection of my loose thoughts while pondering that Jim Monday -- a caring, loving, peaceful big man -- died Sunday.

Not a word in The Leaf-Chronicle, where he spent his life, or its website by afternoon the day after. Heck, I may be wrong (I may be crazy), but following the internet trail, it appears that the first time Big Jim's final bow was noted in his newspaper for life was in the regular obits on Wednesday. One of the most-beloved people in that city had been dead three days by then. I am no internet wizard, and I certainly hope I'm mistaken.

I found out after a Facebook message from an old-timer, Gary Green, who I haven't seen in 40 years, said he had heard a rumor that Big Jim had died. But he wanted me to check it out for sure. He knew I'd want to find out if that was true.

First thing I did was call Jim's phone. No answer. "I hope you're OK. I love you, Jim," I said to the recording device. I was thinking "Jim is dead." I used a harsh expletive, one that doesn't belong in a story about Big Jim, even though he used to get red-faced and laugh when I'd pepper the newsroom air with it while exhaling clouds of smoke while waiting for Harold "The Stranger'' Lynch to get back from a meeting at City Hall. I have never been shy nor proper nor politically correct. Just principled and hard-working. And I always love my newspaper staff and colleagues more than just about anything.

Nothing on the Clarksville news websites about Jim right then, so I looked up the site of the most-likely funeral home. It had one line, just a name. "James Morris Monday" it said. Services were to be announced later, it noted. I figured it had to be my Jim Monday, but you never take that sort of thing for granted, and I called Neal-Tarpley and Etc. funeral home and asked. "Is the Jim Monday you have the old newspaperman? The Big guy who used to write the religion column?"

The nice lady told me the family had just finished making arrangements, but yes, indeed it was the old newspaperman. I am obsessive compulsive, so I asked two more times.
Of course, it was Big Jim. Damn it.

The Leaf-Chronicle, where he spent a half-century, had nothing on its website other than assorted filler and pictures from Bonnaroo, the music festival IN MANCHESTER. That's a long ways from local news in Clarksville, the type of news the son of Corbin, Kentucky, shepherded as a reporter, as a copy editor, as copy desk chief, as religion editor and columnist.

A competing site, ClarksvilleNow, got the obituary up later that day, with a huge portrait of Big Jim, and the full-blown obituary taken directly from the funeral home and reprinted. Chris Smith, editor at that site, had worked at The L-C, so he knew this death -- while likely not of import to the quarter-million or so folks who live in the area now -- mattered a lot to the 60 or 70 thousand who grew from childhood reading Mr. Monday's column. Perhaps even seeing his mammoth frame outside, in the city he loved.

"He was a great man," or some such, Chris said when I called to thank him for thinking about the old-timers, the ones who built Clarksville.

Big Jim spent 51 years or so editing and writing for the L-C, including post-retirement years continuing with his folksy "Open Line" religion-based, family-values based weekly column. Sometimes he'd write about his favorite vacation spot, Pigeon Forge. Or his visits around the country and the world to keep up with his daughter, who married a military man named Mike, I believe.

Jim stopped writing a few years ago. They had a big party to celebrate the half-century at his work. Then he quietly exited. Anyone who has "retired" from a newspaper in the last 16 years knows what that really means.

"I don't hear from anyone up there at The Chronicle, but there aren't many left these days," Jim would lament during our phone conversations from his home in Sango, the bustling suburb of Montgomery County where quickly rising homes fill the formerly pastoral community that used to be tobacco barns, ponies and Brown's Store, where old-timers gathered for dollar pool and canned Pabst most nights. Maybe open a can of Vienna (pronounced "Vi-en-nee") wieners and spit tobacco juice in the empty can.

Hank Jr. wrote a song, "Stoned at the Jukebox," after a stop at a roadhouse near where I lived for awhile. He was halfway between his Nashville and Paris homes/offices and he decided this dank Sango country bar was a good place to stop.

Getting a little off-topic, but, hell, a friend of mine is dead. Another newspaperman is dead. A newspaperman is someone who lives and breathes newspapers and as a result is poorly equipped to do anything else with their lives. Newspapermen don't willingly leave the lifestyle to become public relations guys or run a bank or become professors or water heater execs. They can't function properly on the "outside." Nothing wrong with any of those fields, but newspapermen simply cannot do that. Too cynical, too ethical beyond reason or health. No 9-5 and forget about it. There's always that headline you worry about or the cutline beneath the picture on the agate page. I suppose we should write a "newspaperperson'' sted "newspaperman" nowadays? ("Sted" is editor's bizarre lingo.)

And that is fine. My wife was a newspaperwoman/newspaperperson. My friend and former boss, Dee Boaz, was a newspaperwoman. Sara Foley, who I've lost track of, was a newspaperwoman (I put her in here just in case she sees her name). Jane Srygley was a newspaperwoman. Frances Meeker, too. Charlie Appleton and Joe Caldwell were newspapermen. Harold Lynch was almost unmatched. Richard Worden, too. Bob Battle. Joe Biddle. John Bibb. Mr. Russell .... C.B. Fletcher. The Old Lefthander. Vince Troia is still alive, but he can't stop trying to figuring out ways to be a newspaperman again. Ken Beck, same thing, although he keeps his hands in by writing. Same with Larry Woody.

Some newspapermen, like Rob Dollar, noted above, try other things, but can't be happy as anything but a newspaperman. Jerry Manley, too. I used to drink with those two newspapermen after the presses rolled. "You know we're society's misfits. All newspapermen are," I'd say. They'd laugh. But nod. "Nothing else will make us happy."
Publishers can even be newspaper people. Luther Thigpen was one. So was John Seigenthaler. Irby Simpkins and John Jay Hooker, well, not so much. You get the picture.

Gender regardless, they all were of the impression that what they did daily, from obits to cutlines to making sure the right crossword puzzle answers were in the paper, mattered.

We didn't find out otherwise, until Korporate America chimed in that it really didn't matter, nor did we. What matters are dollars.

I first met Big Jim on September 12, 1974. That was the day I began my first newspaper job as a high school sports writer.

Sports Editor Gene Washer had hired me a week earlier, but I hadn't had a chance to meet the staff. They all were chain-smoking, pounding on typewriters, tearing copy off the UPI and AP machines, sending page layouts and copy to the second floor typesetters via pneumatic tube. Pica poles cut like switchblades through the thick, blue smoke.

It was a glorious, near-cinematic sight. Editor didn't like the story? It was violently impaled on a spike for consultation with the reporter later. Everyone who edited copy had a spike, a chunk of square lead with an eighth-of-an-inch-thick, 6-inches high piece of steel with a deadly point on the top. Eventually, OSHA came through and demanded the spikes be emasculated by bending the tip down, the formerly fierce jutting metal turned into a limp "U." I still have my spike, with the extra pica poles, in a box in the garage. Got a scale wheel, too.

The day I finally met Big Jim and the rest of the staff was short on introductions. My direct supervisor, Max Moss, handed me some local football stats to type up. Jim sat a few feet from me at the head of the copy desk. He was a mammoth man, who slimmed down considerably as he aged. He had a flattop haircut. A typical good old boy appearance. With the sweet soft voice colored by welcoming warmth in his greeting. That assured me I truly was in the right place.

I bummed a smoke from Max and went to work. I smoked in college, but I had quit. It took one hour in the blue-smoke cloud that hovered over the L-C newsroom to break me of that no-smoking habit. Hell, if you gotta breathe the stuff, might as well enjoy it. I finally quit smoking a quarter-century later, after firing them up with Eddie Jones, McGehee and other dead guys during my second newspaper job at the Nashville Banner.

I quit smoking four years into my work as entertainment editor at The Tennessean, something Bibb lamented, because he bummed at least one a day from me. A small price for being able to share time with one of the most legendary of sports editors.

Big Jim quit long before, as far as I know. He eventually let his beard and hair grow out, giving him a sort of extra-large Jerry Garcia appearance.

And, like I said, he began losing weight.

But he really didn't change. Big Jim was a local journalist, in the best sense. He encouraged his copy desk staff and led by example. He later was switched to No. 2, behind Jerry Manley, when we turned to an ayem product.

Jim oversaw the desk during the daytimes, Jerry at night when deadlines loomed.

Jim also was worshiped in Clarksville for his Sunday column.

During our phone conversations in recent years, I'd encourage him to put together a collection of those columns for a book. "Old Clarksville will love it," I'd say.

I don't think he ever did.

I have done my best to keep up with Big Jim over the years, 5-1/2 years ago even attending his late-in-life wedding (his first wife died long ago). We spoke frequently, but he was forgetful, even in the same conversation. Still I loved the Big Man.

"We sure used to put out one helluva local newspaper," I'd say.

"It's not like the old days now," he'd say. "But we really did a good job."

I should mention he also was a gospel singer of some renown. I have a CD of him singing old-time religious numbers and some he wrote. Jim also was my key into the gospel and pork barbecue worlds when I was in Clarksville. One day, The Pettus Family Singers -- cousins of local running sensation Wilma Rudolph -- came into the office to sing a few spirituals for Jim.

I introduced myself, and within days I was spending my free evenings at a barbecue stand across the river from the city, where Ole Steve Pettus taught me how to smoke whole hog and shoulders. Steve had been one of the singers, of course. His brother, Euless, often helped with the smoking. And I ended up being a fairly white face at the family's annual picnic. Wilma was there, too. And wherever they were, they sang harmonies of God and heaven.

That's all another story.

Heaven is a concept, of course, debated by many people. Regardless of that debate, Big Jim is up there now, his lilting tenor making Gabriel smile.

A few other things. Because of his desire to live a full life -- and he did -- he probably lost 150 pounds since I first met him. There was some of that weird "he looks so good" stuff from those who stood by the open casket Saturday. I'm glad some find comfort in that almost-lifelike appearance.

He loved pie and ice cream. And cornbread. And barbecue. And Red's Bakery's double-stuffed potatoes. And life.

He hated it when Red's Bakery closed, by the way. We all did.
He loved the family that surrounded him when he died and who gathered Saturday, June 24, in the funeral parlor.

I was fortunate in that after Suzanne and I made our seat selection we were joined by Dee and by Carolyn Lynch, Harold's widow, and their son, Chris. "This is an L-C row," said Dee. I only saw one other Chronicle person there. Suzanne reminded me that probably most of the people I worked with 36 years ago -- when I left L-C -- are dead. She was only half-joking.

Jim Monday absolutely hated what had happened to the newspaper where he spent his adult life.

"I'm just glad we came along when we did," he'd say, and I'd agree. "Glad we're not young. They'll never know what a great place a newspaper was. Being a newspaperman."

Even though he was 87 and had obvious health difficulties, I always hung up figuring there'd be another conversation.

I guess that will have to wait, I hope a few years. I may be a cynic, hardly the man of Christ like my friend. He had no doubts there was a heaven. That we'd all see each other again.

I'm hoping Jim Monday was right about that.