Jerry reaches to the stand next to his bed and retrieves a surprise.
“I’ve got this phone, but I can’t find a charger,” he says,
flipping the telephone open and shut. “Somebody around this place must have a
charger.”
He looks toward the hallway, where his roommate, Mr. Brown, stops
in the doorway, says hello to a picture on the wall and turns to continue his
morning ramble.
“I’ve really never met him,” Jerry says of his roommate
since late November 2023, when Jerry was assigned his bed and dresser in the
two-man room where both await their destiny.
I’ll have to say that Milford Brown seems to like me, always
smiles and says “How are you?” when I encounter him either in the room or while
he stalks, slowly, the long hallway in the Memory Care Ward of the nursing
home.
Back to the newly discovered phone from Jerry’s stash on the
nightstand.
Up until this moment -- on a really rain-spitting Friday in the
town where country music rots in neon glory best exhibited when one of its
biggest, racist stars thought it would be cool to toss a barstool from a
sixth-floor watering hole -- that I found out my longest-tenured friend, Jerry
Manley had a flip-phone squirreled away next to his autographed copy of
“Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes” (the author is a pal) and a large
digital clock. (I should add that drunken, racist stars of country’s new order
cannot be found in that book.)
That clock, with its 3-inch-high numerals, had for months
been staring right at Jerry, as he lay in his bed in the Memory Care Ward all
day and all of the night.
But I’d noticed it was missing a few weeks ago. I asked him
about it. He didn’t remember having a clock.
I actually thought it was stashed face-down beneath the
books, but I hadn’t checked for it. I really think he took it down and hid it
because time makes no difference when you are running out the clock in the
Memory Care Ward.
I think he was even a bit pissed off that he’d found it. So, he put it back at the top of the
bookstack, but did not put it in a position where he could see it. In this environment, meal-call is the way to
mark a day.
“They come and get me when it’s time,” he said, admitting
that the food was pretty good. I think
they roust their residents at 8, 11:45 and 5, but I could be wrong.
A nurse came in while Jerry and I traded stories about Chico,
the Monkey, the Clarksville Police who stopped our tickertape parade through
the city and our fabled high-speed police chase that ended up in a pie-fight
(policeman took part) and some hot stepping on the railroad tracks.
All of those events took place in the summer and fall of
1982, when The News Brothers – Flapjacks (me), Death (Rob Dollar), Chuckles
(Jerry) and Flash (Jim Lindgren) spearheaded the filming of a “Hard Day’s
Night”-style movie, eventually showing it in a world premiere presentation at
the old Roxy Theater in downtown Clarksville.
All proceeds – somewhere close to $1,459 – was donated to
local charities. While the fellows above were and remain The News Brothers,
many other dissolute friends from The Leaf-Chronicle also participated when
their wives would let them and the sun was shining and church had let out for
the day.
Good guys like “StrawBilly Fields,” Harold “The Stranger”
Lynch, Ricky “Don’t eat the paper, Dumbo” Moore, and the Rev. Larry McCormack participated
when they could. StrawBilly is only in the first scene and actually has never
seen the movie, as he left town shortly after his mentor Tony “Editor Tony
Durr, 35, Missing” left town in the dead of night.
None of the rest of us felt free to skip work for days on
end to play golf with StrawBilly, which was Tony’s main role at The
Leaf-Chronicle, so the round mound of rebound left to go become a public
affairs whore for a Christian university.
After he got his fill of doing nothing for the school, StrawBilly became
a government lifer in Nashville, governing laws regarding electric scooters. He really is among the world’s nicest people,
I should add, but I won’t.
John “Street” Staed also was a News Brother, with his
biggest movie scene being getting out of his Volkswagen Rabbit and jumping in
the air while waving his cowboy hat.
Street went on to newsroom glory throughout the Southeast, managing
newsrooms … but eventually his past caught up to him, and he turned to a career
in resuscitation or respiration.
It’s said he was among those best equipped to show people
how to breathe, which I don’t doubt.
Around Eastertime, Street dropped in on Jerry in the Memory
Care Ward. “We just talked about the stuff we used to do,” said Jerry when I
inquired. He added that John “looks just like he always did.”
“I didn’t realize
that John looked frazzled, old, hollow-eyed and desperate 40 years ago,” I
said, calling a picture of a mature Street up on my phone. None of us have aged
well, I should note, but I won’t.
“I sure was glad to see John Staed,” Jerry told me, again.
Since we were talking about the Legend of the News Brothers –
it does not have a happy ending – today, I turned the subject to our late and
beloved friend Scott “Badger” Shelton, gone too soon 12 years ago. The last official late-night Flapjacks Fest came
12½ years ago, when the most-loyal of us gathered at G’s Pancake House on
Riverside Drive in Clarksville and feasted on memories and laughter and shared
our careers’ bad endings and laughed at our disastrous personal choices.
Badger’s tale was different and sadder, as his wife, Elise,
a hot chick who loves News Brothers, brought him to G’s. Beautiful Elise gave
her life to helping Badger battle mortal cancer, a war entering its final
skirmish. They invited us into their home for coffee and farts, laughs and fun,
knowing the whole time that when the evening ended, we’d be saying farewell,
forever, to our dying friend.
Mostly from that night, I remember Scott’s bold laughter as
I hugged him goodbye and told him I loved him as he held the door for us. And I
still feel the stunned silence that befell me and Jerry when we got into his
truck to go back downtown and piss on the Roxy and swap more tales of our days
of future passed with the rest of the Bros.
In Jerry’s nursing home room, I did a little recounting of
the previously mentioned tickertape parade, police chase and pie fight as he
laughed. It’s hard to explain it if you weren’t in the back of Jerry’s orange
Datsun mini-pickup in 1982, when the police cut us off in mid-tickertape
parade.
“You can’t do these kinds of things in Clarksville,” said one
of the friendly coppers who took our Diet Coke-filled whiskey bottles – props for
our celebratory parade after we saved Clarksville and Jimmy Stewart – and dumped
them down the sewer drain by the Royal York Hotel.
The orange pickup was our vehicle another day, when Kurt,
the K-9 cop (I can’t remember his last name now), fired up his blue lights and
siren and chased us at excessive speeds while Jerry piloted his Datsun and the
rest of us were in the pickup bed, flipping birds and imitating masturbation,
or something like that.
At the end of the chase came the pie fight, the rousing
climax of the film.
“Not many people have had real pie fights,” observed Jerry
when I reminded him that Kurt the Cop even got into the action by ducking just
in time to avoid becoming a pie sandwich as two News Brothers closed in on him,
front and back.
“We sure had fun making movies,” said Jerry. In fact, he’s admitted that the filming of “Flapjacks:
The Motion Picture” is second only to the tawdry, blood-soaked tale of Chico, the
Monkey in his Clarksville memories.
Jerry asked me to stick around a bit longer as I rose to
leave. I sat down again, and we watched a part of a Harry Potter marathon on
the television. “I think they are
showing Harry Potter movies all day,” said my friend.
“That’ll give you something to look forward to,” I said, adding
that I’d neither read nor watched one of Harry’s adventures until this
particular day.
“Do you want me to set up your clock?” I asked.
“Nah. All that matters is that they come down and tell me
when it’s time to go eat. I do hope someone has a phone charger, though.”
Just then, a nurse came to get him for lunch, but Jerry
stalled.
“Stay some more if you want to,” he told me.
The nurse gave one of those provocative smiles to me and
added: “I’ll save him a plate. We like Mr. Manley.”
I watched a scene where Harry stood hapless as a woman
swelled up like a balloon and floated out into the sky over the UK. I was
hoping she’d burst.
Arm-over-shoulder, we walked to the dining hall. Jerry was
hungry. It had been a couple of hours since he ate the 32 cheese crackers and
washed them down with a Diet SunDrop that I’d had in my jacket lining.
“Come back when you can,” he said.
“Love you man,” I responded, as the nurse let me pass
through the secure doors. I wish I could have taken him with me to the Waffle
House.
