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.

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