I wasn’t made for
these times.
Oh, I’m not talking
about the flood of 2021, which for the second time in 11 years, has altered my
lifestyle.
Not that my
lifestyle is all that great, I suppose, but I do take for granted things like
dry shoes, floors that don’t bubble and a good night’s sleep. All of those
things vanished at about 1 a.m. Sunday, when 8 inches of rain fell on my nice,
fairly pastoral, little section of Nashville.
Within moments, it
seemed, water from the rainfall – it had been raining for three days, really
and the ground was saturated – snuck into my basement. It spread quickly. And
for the last three days now, we’ve been cleaning up, drying out, praying for no
rain for awhile and dealing with insurance (Allstate does not return calls or
show much compassion… and my contractor, who is going to try to figure out a
way for this not to happen again.
Since the last flood
I survived was 11 years ago, well, if that cycle continues, I’ll be 80 next
time or just a fistful of forgotten ashes. In either case I don’t want to go
through this crap again.
But really what I’m
lamenting today is that one of my life’s favorite places, a greasy little
all-night pancake and coffee joint, on Riverside Drive in Clarksville,
Tennessee, is closing.
If you know me or
have read anything by me over the years, you may know about G’s Pancake House.
Forty years ago, and
for a few years on either side of that mark, it was a 2 a.m. Sunday destination
for me and my best friends, fellas with names like Badger and Death and
Chuckles and Flash. The Stranger made it occasionally. Tony Durr, occasionally.
Those last two, like the pancake house, are dead.
Well, Badger didn’t
make it much back then, as he wasn’t a newspaperman – which is all I ever
wanted to be until the corporate bastards took it from me and sent me out into
a world where no one hired 56-year-old men who refused to backstab to stay on
the right side of corporate politics.
But you’ve read that
story before (and it is available in book form). This little essay is about G’s
Pancake House.
When Jerry and Rob
and I finished up the Sunday Leaf-Chronicle newspaper in Clarksville, we’d
generally go to a little place called “Camelot” to let the local cops try to
loosen us with good Scots whiskey and where DJ Jimmy in the Morning lay
face-down on the front table. He’d often
raise his head long enough to buy us a round.
Often Chief
Sheriff’s Deputy Eddie Patterson – a foil during working hours, but a helluva
good friend when he had his pistols packed in the trunk of his car – was the
most generous guy when it came to buying drinks. Since he was pumping us to see
what we knew, perhaps he turned in the receipts to Sheriff Billy Smith.
We pumped Eddie and
the other 15 or so cops and deputies who joined in the all-night frivolity
among a mix of college students (not that many, really, as this was a pretty
rough bar, the kind where a dispute over arm-wrestling might send a fellow
through the air and landing on a table, which would break.).
We would applaud and
hope it didn’t happen to us. There were a few members of the nearby 101st
Airborne as well.
They were hoping not
to get into fatal wrecks on Fort Campbell Boulevard while returning to post. My
publisher had decided that there were so many of those dead GIs littering the
sides of our roads, we shouldn’t report them anymore. Bad for city image.
That’s beside the
point in this story, which is about the closing of G’s Pancake House. It wasn’t
just those of us who stayed out all night who ended up at G’s.
Sometimes, other,
less-desperate and desolate folks, would join us if we went right after work,
at midnight or 1 a.m., on either a Friday or Saturday. There is a “famous”
picture of me holding court with a bunch of newspapermen late on one Good
Friday. We broke flapjacks and drank
coffee, and, of course, prayed over these sacramental elements.
Anyway, there really
were countless nights at G’s. It’s where I got my name, still valid among many
of my old friends, or at least the ones still alive (a diminishing breed) of
“Flapjacks.” We all had names. Dumbo. Flash. Chuckles. Death. StrawBilly.
Street. Larry (too stiff a butt for a nickname, but a good guy nonetheless). If
our friend, Scott Shelton, a radio newsman was with us, his nickname was
Badger.
I moved out of
Clarksville back in the very late 1980s, on the cusp of the 1990s. I didn’t go
back to G’s often in the last three decades.
There were a few,
perhaps even a dozen, gatherings of the so-called “News Brothers” (again, see
the book) there over the years.
For many years, we
held an annual reunion in Clarksville. Those pretty much stopped when Scott
died.
Oh, he wasn’t one
for all-night frivolity. He was too busy at home with his wife, Elise, or
admiring his Beatles statues. Me, I was trying to stay away from home for much
of that time back then in what was a different life of melancholy and asking
“Why?”
Our gatherings
generally would be at G’s. The last one actually came after Scott died.
Following his funeral, all of us who didn’t have to beat it back to Nashville,
Hoptown or New York City (none of us were from New York City), ended up for a three-hour wake of
sorts. Again, flapjacks and “Flapjacks,” with his best friends.
Laughing about
Badger and about our old times together.
I remember Frank “Wuhm” White, an occasional News Brother, telling me on
that afternoon nine years ago that I really hadn’t changed over the years.
I guess I hadn’t.
Still haven’t. Which, as my old friend the Pilgrim said, is a blessing and a
curse, but the goin’ up really has been worth the coming down.
Anyway, enough about
me and my meanderings. This is supposed to be about the death of a pancake
house.
One of my former
bosses, Dee Boaz, sent me a link to a Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle story today
that says that G’s is shutting down after business ends Friday.
G’s Pancake House
was begun in 1972 in the Riverside Drive location, according to the little
feature story.
This week, the owner
decided to close the restaurant begun by her father. “On Friday, the original
location of G'S Pancake House at 803 South Riverside Drive will serve its
final charbroiled burgers, fried catfish, steak and potatoes and of course, G’S
Super Breakfast with pancakes,” according to the story by reporter Gary
Estwick.
I spent the best
part of my life in Clarksville, as far as I can remember. Although my search
for personal happiness and sobriety came here in Nashville, beginning in 1988.
So I don’t know the reporter, and I do know that the newspaper is nothing like
it used to be.
No crazy associate
editor, chain-smoking, wearing shades and a Hawaiian shirt and urging everyone
to laugh, even as we put together stories about teenage killers, the Full Moon
Rapist (I made up that moniker) and Manson-style killings. And, of course, the
tragic saga of Chico the Monkey.
What once was a huge
and historic building housing the oldest newspaper in Tennessee now is the
D.A.’s office. I think the newspaper is put out in a closet. I know the
printing presses are long gone and the pathetic little product (not blaming the
reporters here, but corporate greed) is printed, I believe, in Knoxville.
Or Louisville. Yeah,
you really can get breaking news in a paper if you print it three hours away …
another issue. Of course, it’s all about websites now. I wonder how many
website stories are clipped out and put in family Bibles and Little League
scrapbooks? They don’t even run free obituaries anymore. We used to hold the
presses to make sure all the funeral homes in Clarksville and surrounding
cities got their obits in to us. We’d type them up and typeset them. And it
made families feel part of the newspaper.
Well, The Leaf-Chronicle
did run sort of an obit on G’s, of course, this week.
And it hit me almost as hard as if a
person I know had died. Like I noted earlier, the last gathering I call recall
there was after Scott “Badger” Shelton’s funeral nine years ago.
The time before that was perhaps two
months earlier. Scott’s wonderful wife, Elise, a long-time friend of mine, as
well, had worked hard to get Scott to that year’s reunion of the News Brothers.
He was dripping with oxygen hoses and cancer
death was in his eyes. But there also was a gleam of happiness. Sure, he knew
his time was coming, way too soon. But he was there. At G’s. Eating flapjacks
with his old buddy, Flapjacks, who used to drop in on Scott’s news programming
decades before at WJZM Radio in Clarksville.
I’d drop in before I showed up for
work at 5:30 a.m. or take a smoke break and walk over there to play with Badger
and Jimmy in the Morning.
I should note that none of us took our
work lightly, but journalism used to be a deadline-heavy occupation, filled
with caffeine and nicotine, Scotch, beer, lies and sad truths.
When sane people were in their beds,
thinking about how early to get up for church or for Junior’s soccer match, we
were still at work.
When we got off, we needed a place to
go to blow off the stress, to laugh. Yes, there was a lot of death and
destruction with which we dealt. And there were gory photos we had to look at
and size for the pages.
And sometimes when we saw those
photographs, we just had to laugh. Not
out of disrespect, but to keep our sanity.
Well, sometimes I just have to write
to blow off those stresses, like figuring out how to keep my house from
flooding and which of the soggy stacks of old newspaper clippings should go in
the trash or recycling bin and which can be saved. Not many, by the way.
As I said, being a newspaperman was all
I ever wanted to do. I was not prepping for some horseshit P.R., 9-5, job. I also loved my colleagues in the news business.
I didn’t mind that people viewed me as a “free spirit” as long as they judged
me factual and honorable and compassionate.
I also love, perhaps more than anyone
else, the traditions of a newspaperman.
Hard-drinking is in my past, of course, but I sure as hell enjoyed it,
after deadline, most nights. The smoking, cigarettes sending their trails of
white up into the air of the newsroom or the Camelot or G’s Pancake House, also
were of that profession, of that era. Of bygone times.
I’m decades past my G’s years. But it
always has been reassuring to think about those time, those nights. That
particular Good Friday. Christ you know it ain’t easy to be an old-fashioned
newspaperman (or newspaperwoman) anymore.
In fact, I really think that these
younger people, as good as they are, have missed out on the most fun and
meaningful parts of that culture.
Like going through a half-pack of
smokes and a short stack of flapjacks and maybe 12 cups of coffee while
laughing into the night and waiting for dawn to break while having good
newspaper fellowship at G’s Pancake House.
It’s closing.
I’m cleaning up from another flood.
Many of the folks mentioned in this
story, from Chief Deputy Eddie Patterson to Scott Shelton and Jimmy in the
Morning are gone.
The News Brothers are old and
scattered. Donald Trump is partly to
blame for that, but that’s another long story.
I’ll never love a group of guys,
collectively, as much as I loved the News Brothers.
And I never laughed into the night,
after dealing with the horrors of reality and murder, as hard as I did at
Camelot and G’s.
Camelot closed long ago.
Now G’s is going away.
I’m 69, not 30 or 35.
And I wasn’t made for these times.
Christ, you know it ain’t easy.
