He misses Lewisburg, but Jerry's content in this clean, well-lighted place; Crackers for my pal, handshakes with my new friends

Jerry "Chuckles" Manley, with aviator's cap, speaks with radio news hound Scott "Badger" Shelton as, left, Rob "Death" Dollar and, at right, Tim "Flapjacks" Ghianni, Jim "Flash" Lindgren and ET look on. A few months later, Chico, the monkey, escaped. I think ET phoned home.  

 “I keep thinking I’m in Lewisburg,” says my beloved friend, as he waits for lunch to be served in the dining and social hall of the Memory Care Ward.

“I don’t know why,” Jerry says.

Actually, it is wishful thinking for Jerry Manley, my pal for a half-century … most of which he has forgotten.

Still, he wishes he was in the Lewisburg house where he lived for a few years after life and a newspaper – for guys like him and me, those things are one in the same – let him down.

“All I remember is being in my house. I think I fell down and couldn’t get up. And I guess they brought me here. Here I am.”

He rocks back in the padded chair – “It’s not as comfortable as it looks” – and says he wishes he still was in that house.

“But I guess I won’t be. Who is living there now?”

I answer that it’s his nephew, Steven, who moved in long ago to share the house near a creek. Steven gradually assumed more and more of the care of his deteriorating uncle. That last fall was what triggered the move to the nursing home.

“I don’t remember much. Don’t even remember how long I’ve been here,” Jerry says, with a smile, no bitterness.

I tell him it was right after Thanksgiving when his family -- the loved ones who had done their best for him in between regular stays in hospitals, rehab centers and old folk’s homes down in Lewisburg -- realized they couldn’t care for him. And, he couldn’t take care of himself.

“We had a dog down there at my house,” he says. “A white dog. Name was Snow. I’m surprised I can remember that. Course, I guess we named him that because he was all white.”

My friend has always loved pets – I used to dog-sit for him and his then-wife up in Clarksville, when they went to family reunions and such.

Those family reunions were what Jerry built his summers around for as long as I knew him.  Folks from Petersburg, Lewisburg and rural areas not deserving of names would show up around the Fourth of July for a week or so.

He had two uncles who would come in from California.  “One lived in San Diego, one in San Francisco. One year we went out and visited them both. It was a beautiful drive between them.”

He and his second wife took the Pacific Coast Highway – my favorite road in all my ramblings – at least part of the way.

I remind Jerry that he was at the reunion (and single again) when he got the call from the morning newspaper that they were buying him out. That’s what they do with people like us, put a little package together and sweet-talk you about their generosity as they stab you in the back. The sweet-talk fell on deaf ears in my case, though there literally seemed to be a sharp pain between my shoulder blades. Or maybe a couple feet lower.

Jerry didn’t even get the courtesy of being stabbed in the back, and he’d been a valuable editor and leader at the paper for about 30 years. It was simply a cold call. The coldest variety.

“They just called me at the family reunion and said ‘don’t come back to work,’” is one thing he remembers clearly, in a conversation we had back in his room, before we ambled down to the lunch room.

I ask him what his response was.  “I told them that was a shitty way to treat me,” he says.   “Shitty way. Shitty.”

I’d gotten to the nursing home in the morning, and as I walked in with food contraband in my cargo shorts, I had to walk around a gathering in the hallway of the part of the facility where people still have most of their marbles.

“We had a lot of complaints about yesterday’s lunch,” says a tall, young guy in his late-50s or early 60s.

He’s clearly some sort of administrator and, from the size of the gathering of folks – many in wheelchairs – it is clear that he is attempting to stave off some sort of revolt.

“We won’t serve that again,” he said, to a sour chorus of “no more mystery meat.”

I gave the rebels two thumbs-up as I cut through their cafeteria, where one resident was laughing about the hubbub, and continued to the Memory Care Ward.

I heard one more “mystery meat” jeer as the door closes behind me.

Jerry was sleeping as “Columbo” stumbled and yammered through another murder on the big television.

I woke him by putting the bottle of Diet SunDrop in his right hand.

“This for me?” he asks, as he twists the cap off. Both of us had trouble with the cap the other day, so I had a woman at the gas station where I bought this drink loosen it for me before I went to the nursing home.

I also gave him two packs of Ritz sandwich crackers – peanut butter and the other cheese – and I sat down next to him.

“What was that headline we wrote?” he asks me right after I bring up the subject of the legend of Chico the Monkey, a highlight of the many years when I was in charge of the Sunday newspaper.

I bring that up every visit, because he smiles and he remembers the night in the newsroom in Clarksville when police reporter Rob “Death” Dollar wrote the tale of a police pursuit of an escaped monkey in a neighborhood not far from Swan Lake Golf Course.

The monkey’s quest for freedom – sometimes people just want to be free – baffled the sheriff’s deputies, who kept code-talking on the scanner and talking about the monkey business.

Rob had gone out to the scene for a while, then came back with notes and a report and worked the story as we listened to the scanner.  Then I read it out loud, with Jerry and Rob right there, all chipping in monkey puns and aping the words of Chico’s pursuers.

“Deputies go bananas; 'Monkey at large'” was the headline Jerry wrote – again with help from me and Rob.

We streamed it across the top of the front page of the Sunday editions of The Leaf-Chronicle, and adjourned for scotch with the exhausted deputies -- who did not catch the monkey --  to Buford Thaxton’s Camelot nightclub.

The following Monday morning began with one of my frequent invites to publisher Luther Thigpen’s office.

I’ve written this story before, and it ends with a column I wrote a few months later that begins “Chico, the monkey, is dead” or something like that. He’d survived for months on his own before neighborhood dogs ate him. Poor damn Chico. “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” a friend wrote back in the 1960s.

This Chico story always perks Jerry up, and we go on to remembrances of other stories told – most much more tragic, involving many GI traffic fatalities (Fort Campbell is adjacent to Clarksville), asbestos in schools, teenage rape and murder victims and killers. I guess, come to think of it, Chico’s story was plenty tragic as well.

“Remember Skipper?” I’ll ask Jerry, when I bring up the name of a down-and-outer we’d befriended, even taking him to bars and parties. He was probably only 70, which seemed so old at the time.

“Sure,” Jerry says, reciting the first line of my initial column about Okey “Skipper” Stepp: “Me and old Skipper sat on a bench. It was hot. Boy was it hot.”

I had a deep love for Skipper, and he was the last person I visited – at a nursing home, where he spent his final days – before I left Clarksville for a somewhat spectacular, somewhat bittersweet life of a newspaperman in Nashville.

“John Staed was here the other day,” Jerry says. John’s nickname is “Street News Brother,” and he’s a good guy. He visited Jerry about six weeks ago.

 “Columbo gets too much for me,” says Jerry, switching the channels and wildly ending up on a gospel preacher’s show.  We watch it for a little bit before finding a cartoon version of Spiderman.

“Man, I’m hungry,” my friend says, as he throws the cracker wrappers away and washes down the last crumbs with Diet SunDrop.

It is almost lunchtime, so we get up and walk, carefully – I’m as much of a falling risk as Jerry is – through the hallways, stepping around the workmen who are painting the walls. The rain of careless spots on the carpet indicates that new floor covering is on its way.

“What is the name of this facility?” Jerry asks, as he sits down in a comfortable – it seems --chair to wait in the dining hall/social room for his lunch.

I tell him the name and add that it is in Brentwood.

“I don’t know why, but I keep thinking I’m in Lewisburg.”

I leave him there to await his lunch and I go to the dining room door, propping it open so that three other men I’ve met here can get in for their lunch.

All of them shake my hand, like I’m the end of a receiving line, as they pass me. I really like these people.

A dietician rolls her cart through the locked doors from the regular wing to the Memory Care Ward.

“What you got for them today?” I ask her, as I see something resembling big trays of hamburger and pasta and veggies, on her cart. Hamburger Helper, perhaps?

“I just bring this stuff from the kitchen,” she says. “I don’t know what it is.”

I look back and wave to my friend.  I'm sad at the realization:

Jerry's not in Lewisburg anymore.        

 

 

      

Regretting that my last 'Dance with The Guitar Man' has ended, but celebrating long conversations with twang-master Duane Eddy

 When I learned that the great man Duane Eddy finally had succumbed to the cancer he had been fighting valiantly -- his wife Deed always by his side -- for so many years, I rubbed at my eyes.

I’d always figured we’d have another phone call, and then another.  He could regale me with tales of Beatles and Wilburys and the sound of a guitar inside an Arizona sewer pipe.

I would likely ask him again about his friend, Richard Boone, who was Paladin in “Have Gun -- Will Travel.” Duane performed “The Ballad of Paladin” and even appeared in a few episodes back when he was making his minor dent in Hollywood.

Boone’s friendship was precious to Duane, and – as a fan of both men and a friend of the latter – I knew that by mentioning it, we could veer off into all sorts of fun and off-the-record (figurative and literal) tales about Hollywood.  He would tell me about being a guest on the set of The Shootist, John Wayne’s last and best movie.  His pal, Richard Boone is one of the guys dispatched by J.J. Books in the 1976 film’s blood-spattered climax.  

When I told Duane I had that movie poster framed and on the wall of whatever house I’ve lived in since the Clarksville, Tennessee, movie house operator, Johnnie Harper, gave it to me 48 years ago, he was impressed.

Whenever I added that 1963’s “Dance with The Guitar Man” – with “Stretchin’ Out” on the B-side – has been a part of my life since it was released 61 years ago, I could hear the smile in his voice.  That 45 rpm disc sits in front of me as I write this.   

This 45 rpm recording has been with me since 1963, except for a few years after I gave it to my late, great friend, Peter Cooper, also a friend of Duane and Deed Eddy. Grimey's gave it to me after they collected Peter's records to sell for the estate. 

No more opportunities for conversations now, and it sucks at my soul. I just want to make one last call to check in on my hero. None of us ever gets that “one last call” before the Grim Reaper settles in for the kill on anyone we love. It doesn’t seem fair.

But I also smile when recalling the number of free-flowing conversations – Duane was as interested in my life as I was in his – that weren’t so frequent once the disease began to sap him even more, forcing him to rest and try to recover.

The pandemic limited us to phone calls, because we couldn’t risk me dragging a deadly virus into the home of a man whose body was immunocompromised by cancer treatment.

The last several times I called him, the answering machine – with Deed’s voice on it – would be all I could reach, and I’d leave a quick message of hope, love and my gratitude at calling this man a friend.

Other times, I get Deed herself, a wonderful and kind woman, who would tell me Duane was resting and for me to call back later. Perhaps he’d be feeling more like talking. Those follow-up calls were either too late or somehow missed.  And I’d think, well, Timothy, just remember to call him again.

Deed Eddy is by her husband's side through glory, illness and, now, in her memories. Photo provided by Americana Music Association for my book, Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes.

And I did. No one answered.

Duane was one of many musicians who I considered as something much more important. I considered him a friend.

When I constructed a book featuring those friends, Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes, a chapter on Duane was critical to me.  The book is about musicians I befriended, most of them dead, but who I thought the world needed to appreciate in this era of disposable music.

The fact a guy like Morgan Wallen is packing three nights of shows at Nissan Stadium is evidence of how far the music world has fallen. Or perhaps the world in general, if you follow the news. (I could understand it when Taylor Swift had her long stand, but, to my knowledge she neither ranted racist words nor threw a bar stool from a sixth-floor rooftop bar, nearly hitting a police officer on Broadway below.)

Friends like Duane, Bobby Bare, Mac Wiseman, Kris Kristofferson, Perry Baggs, Earl and Louise Scruggs, Tom T. and Dixie Hall, Billy Joe Shaver, Frank Howard (and the Commanders), Waylon and Willie and the boys and a score more are featured in that book’s chapters.

Few of them remain on the right side of the grass. I talk with Bare frequently. Willie remains one of the world’s true forces of good, Kris is trying to enjoy life in Hawaii as his memories of glory fade, but his love for Lisa and the kids keeps him strong.

The book took a year to write.  It started from a list of musicians I loved and knew belonged in this elite company. I am not a musician, so my appreciation for these people is as just that, people … human beings whose hearts and souls somehow connected with my own.

Several of them died even as I was in the process of writing, rewriting and editing of that book – all told a three-year process.

Duane lived to read the book, especially his chapter.

Instead of sending it to him, I simply called and asked Deed to make him comfortable. I wanted to read it to him. I figured it would be easier for him to listen to it and offer any corrections on the phone.

Then I sent him a copy. He only found one error (I had Deed listed as his fourth wife, but she was  his third … and she was the love of his life), and said he wasn’t worried about it if the publisher couldn’t correct it. I got on the phone to New York or New Jersey or wherever the Rowman & Littlefield Backbeat Books editors were located and made sure that correction was made.

In my past as a newspaperman, the “rule” was that you never let the subject of a story read it ahead of publication.  I, though, am not much of a guy for rules. Never have been. Paying for it, but hell, I am me. Besides that, the rules of book-authoring are different and more flexible. And the newspaper world didn’t want me anymore, ever since the guards helped carry my memories, mugs and personal paraphernalia to the parking lot at 1100 Broadway back in 2007. There’s not even a newspaper there anymore.

On the day Duane died, I had been in an e-mail exchange with Professor Chris Cooper, multiply honored political science and public affairs dude at Western Carolina University.  He was the baby brother of my friend Peter Cooper, a great fellow whose ugly disease pursued him for years before it captured and killed him in 2022.

I was simply sending Chris something I had written a month ago when my own big brother died. I knew he would appreciate it. Different cause, but death just the same.

And there is that impenetrable baby brother loneliness of having no one alive who shares the same family-unit life experiences.

I have tried to compensate by calling my friends. There aren’t many still alive. Duane was on my list to “call soon.”

When I found out that Duane died, a loss that was all-but-ignored by Nashville media, I went down to my record room, where 68 years of record collecting fills every space. 

Many of them are CDs, of course, as the CD era hit hard in my “early” adult years and, while slowly vanishing, will return to prominence when younger people rediscover the value of an album rather than a streamed song. There are countless LPs as well, most from my elementary and high school and college years until the CD era hit when I was in my 30s. And others I’ve picked up more recently. The last LP I bought, before CDs killed that form for a few decades, was Springsteen’s “Born in the USA.”

I passed my Bruce collection the other day.

I knew exactly what I was looking for: “Dance with The Guitar Man.” I bought it when I was in sixth or seventh grade. It has been with me ever since, through life changes, college years, lives and deaths.

I find solace in this collection, even though the stereo system I can afford is battered, old and lonely. Like me.

This 45 rpm was not in my collection for almost 20 years, though.

After I brought Peter Cooper to Nashville to write about music on my staff at The Tennessean (a local Nashville daily), a deep friendship grew.

He was much younger than I, and he reported to me. But when he wasn’t working, and even later when he was a big shot at The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, we spoke of things like marriage, children, life, death, brown liquor and music. Often, all of those elements combined.

Perhaps 20 years ago, Peter first met Duane, for a story in the newspaper.  It became one of those emotional stories he “wrote from home” for me, always with his wiener dog, Russell, in his shirt. 

On the following Christmas Eve, I went down to my record room and rescued this old 45. I drove it over to the Cooper home – my wife, Suzanne, had wrapped it – and I gave it to Peter for Christmas. There was not yet a young Baker in the house, but Peter played the 45 loud for his wife and Russell. I’m sure passersby on Fatherland could hear it.

When Peter died, I didn’t think about that record.

But my friends Doyle and Mike, the think tank that is Grimey’s, the most-human record store in Nashville, purchased all of Peter’s music collection from the estate. 

When I learned that, I called them, and asked that, when they got to sorting through that collection of CDs, tapes and vinyl, if they found the “Dance with The Guitar Man” 45 rpm, complete with my grade-school scribbling signature on it (we used to take records to each other’s houses, so it was necessary to tag them to make sure you got them back), that they pull it aside and I’d buy it from them.

Mike called me to tell me he found it and would put it away for me. It was mine. No charge. “Peter would have wanted that,” he said.   

I did buy some other stuff when I went to the store – music from The Band, The Byrds and Tom Petty – but I didn’t have to pay for the old 45, on which my old signature is still there. Just fading, with life and time.

The record was on a shelf with Beatles, Stones, Elvis and other notable musicians’ work. So I fished it out, played it on my crackling system and brought it here for inspiration as I write this.

I should add that my friendship with Duane came long after I first interviewed him.  I was entertainment editor at the newspaper, and I found out that Duane had just released a new record, in the UK, where his star never faded. I think the information came from Deed, proudly calling to tell someone that her great husband had a hit overseas…. And ask why no one in America was interested.

I spoke with Duane – and Deed – for a story about a great man, a great artist, who can hardly be heard in the States, but who continued, then, to pack them in over in Swinging England. Even in his most-ill years, Duane entertained going back over to the UK, where he remains an iconic figure.

We spoke a few times over the years after that story, and when I became a freelance writer (after being aged out in the daily business), I knew that a story on Duane, his history, his continued relevance, his pure humanity, was worth doing.

I posted that story, published when I was a regular contributor at Nashville Ledger, on my Facebook page Wednesday.

With that 2018 story came a lasting friendship, and it included many conversations.

And, of course, there was the chapter in my book.

The fact I’d been able to not only write about, but befriend this man, a humble and honorable man whose twang changed music, is the stuff that has made a life in journalism – unfortunately abbreviated by age and by the steady demise of newspapers – worthwhile.

I looked at the 45 rpm record the whole time I’ve been spitting this reflection out, from my melancholy heart.  

Then I called Deed and left a message. The words were halting in delivery, harder on my heart. I wanted to ask her to have Duane call me back.

         

I save Jerry from orange balloon attack that brings joy and anger to the Memory Care Ward, cheese crackers and Diet SunDrop in my boxers, dead teenagers, movie, Chico evokes smiles and sorrow

 The massive orange balloon was rocketing straight for Jerry Manley’s face when I, by instinct, reached across and belted it, as hard as I could, across the room.

“Sorry, man,” I said to Jerry, as the other folks in the social and dining room of the Memory Care Ward either looked disgusted or laughed at me for my fevered interference. “I think you were supposed to hit that one.”

“That’s all right, Tim. I didn’t see it coming.” Jerry rolled back and forth on his heels and toes and watched the balloon soar from patient to patient in the Memory Care Ward. Or, perhaps, I should say “from resident to resident,” since the main medical attention I’ve seen involves Jerry lifting his shirt, so the nurse can put insulin injections in his stomach, something that troubles my friend: “I don’t know why they have to put them in my stomach.”   

Diabetes protocol debates aside, I had intruded on the Memory Care Ward residents’ game by accident.  Jerry was supposed to hit it.  One of the other folks even hollered “Jerry” as the balloon floated across the room.  It would have hit my old friend square in the face if I’d not reacted.

Jerry "Chuckles" Manley, me "Flapjacks" and Rob "Death" Dollar a dozen years ago as we share flapjacks. Jim "Flash" Lindgren took this photo. The restaurant went out of business shortly thereafter.

Jerry didn’t even know he was playing. They “dealt him in” on the morning’s festivities by sending the massive Volunteer-orange object toward his head.  As noted earlier, my natural reaction, when an object is soaring toward the head of a pal or loved one, is to throw myself – or at least my left hand – into the path of danger. I’d do it for just about anyone who has shown me kindness, let alone a fellow who “grew up” with me, purple hazily flavoring my 20s and 30s and 40s …. etc.   

The entire balloon attack incident, as shocking as it was to us both, was not what we were expecting after we walked down the hall from his dorm-like room to see if it was lunchtime yet.

It was 11:29, a minute to lunchtime in this world where time is meaningless, and Jerry simply wanted to stretch his legs and see if the ham and cheese sandwiches and chips and sugar-free pudding were ready.

The balloon then flew back to Jerry, and I – not wanting to again risk the ire and possible trampling by this horde – simply stepped out of the way. Jerry tapped it back toward a tall guy with a Vanderbilt sweatshirt.  That man hit it back, and it landed on top of a woman who was napping in her wheelchair. She didn’t wake up when another resident punched it out of her lap.

The Vandy guy again hollered “Jerry!” and sent the balloon toward my friend. Jerry delivered a perfect punt, sending the balloon toward the console TV where Emmylou Harris was singing her greatest hit. I love Emmylou, by the way, she’s beautiful and loves dogs and always treats me with kindness and respect. But she’s not a hitmaker.  I do wish Gram Parsons hadn’t died, his body stolen and burned in the desert at Joshua Tree by my friend Phil “Road Mangler” Kaufman. Different story, but Gram and Emmy were magic.

Up until the balloon attack, Jerry and I spent a couple of hours down in his room, where he feasted on two eight-packs of Keebler cheese crackers – white and orange cheddar -- and washed them down with a pint of Diet SunDrop. I had requested my local Shell station to start carrying that beverage after Jerry told me, weeks ago, that it was the beverage he’s missed most since his voluntary incarceration in a place where he’s not seen the sun since Thanksgiving.  It’s a full-time total eclipse for him, as he and roomie Milford Brown keep the shades and blinds shut. It could be 4 a.m. or High Noon, and they’d not know the difference as “Gunsmoke,” “Harry Potter” movies and “Wheel of Fortune” play round the clock.  

The crackers and soda were this day’s contraband food, that I snuck into the nursing home in the lining of my jacket. I worry that I’ll have to figure out some other way to get the snacks past the watchmen and watchwomen at the facility. (I also feel bad for not bringing any for Milford, but I can only kill one sick, old man at a time with my kindness.)

Even on this day, when it is sunny and 70, the black Iowa State jacket with the pockets in the lining, is a little too warm. In fact, I took it off as soon as I unloaded the contraband goods.

“I don’t know how I’m going to get this stuff in here next week. Summer’s coming and it won’t look right to show up here wearing this black jacket,” I told my friend, as he began what has become a weekly feast in recent months.

Even though he doesn’t remember it’s in recent months.

“When was the last time you were here? Four months ago?” Jerry asked.

“No, Jerry, it was six days. I try to come at least once a week,” I answered, as I pondered how to hide crackers and soda in my pants.  (“Is that a bottle of SunDrop in your pants or are you in love with me?” I fear the guardwoman at the front desk might ask.)

“I thought you’ve been here a lot,” Jerry responded, shaking his head at his confusion. “Sorry, I’ve got no concept of time. You live near here?”

I told him 5-6 miles away, and he nodded. When I told him the nursing home was only a mile or so from my late parents’ home – Jerry used to come over to swim in the pool and drink with me when I lived there between lives – he smiled. That was 35 years ago. To Jerry, it could have been yesterday or never.  My mother always was concerned by our vodka consumption out by the pool, particularly if Jerry was headed to work that night.

He told me that famous former journalist and respiratory therapist “John Staed was here just the other day.”

That visit was on Easter, which was last month. John, who lives in Birmintham, Alabama, is a good guy and a News Brother of the original vintage. “We talked about what we used to do,” Jerry said. “But I can’t remember what we talked about.”

Other than “Street” Staed’s visit, and my weekly forays into the nursing home where the patients now know my name, Jerry doesn’t remember having visitors.

As for my “familiarity” here in this clean, well-lighted place, it actually is fulfilling.

In fact, after “signing in” on a facial recognition gizmo, I wandered through the “main” part of the nursing home.  This section is for people with physical or age-related disabilities or woes who still possess all their marbles. 

I have to cross this nursing home’s width to get to Jerry’s locked ward. I generally smile at folks as I pass right through their games of dominoes or cornhole. When I was in college in Ames, Iowa, “cornhole” was not a game involving beanbags and polished wood. Wood was involved, though.

I always apologize for interrupting the competitors, and sometimes I can avoid it by swinging wide through their dining hall, especially if it’s not lunch hour.  One day – when all of the cornholers were playing from wheelchairs -- I stopped and watched.  I may even have applauded their abilities to “put a little English” on the bean bags even while trapped in wheelchairs.

An attractive and well-dressed 80-plus woman, pearls hanging around her neck, was happy to see me. “You are here to see your friend, Mr. Manley,” she said.

I did wonder how she knew Jerry, who is confined to the back half of the facility where nobody even knows their own names – or so seems.

 I thought briefly that perhaps she was an escapee from that secure mind-fogged unit, making a brave escape out into the wilds of Brentwood, Tennessee.  But she stopped at one of the tables where other folks sat, and she fished a pack of cards from a pocket.

“Must be playing crazy eights,” I said, to myself and no one in particular.  Instead, she started dealing five-card stud.  Read ‘em and weep.

Anyway, I like these people, both in the “regular’’ wing and in the “behind-locked-doors” section, where my longest-tenured friend has resided for almost half-a-year but admits he has no concept of time. He could have checked in here yesterday or years ago, in his mind. Doesn’t matter, since he really doesn’t know how he got here.    He does have a pretty good idea of when he’ll leave. Me, too.

As Jerry munched, greedily, on his first pack of crackers – he had skipped the oatmeal and toast, his breakfast that remained on a tray on the chair next to me – I struggled with the top of the SunDrop bottle.

Jerry then tried it. No luck. And he handed it back to me. It was about five minutes of give-and-take between two old men who had been friends most of their ever-shortening lives. (Sorry, I’ve been dwelling on mortality lately, as my brother died a month ago and I keep waiting for his regular 10:30 a.m. call and his booming “What’s new in the world of high adventure” greeting. Often, our conversations continued over burgers at Brown’s Diner, so I’ll never visit that establishment again.)

Finally, I told Jerry I’d take the soda bottle down the hall to see if one of the nurses, lovely Black women with charming smiles to make an old man cry, would open the bottle.

“If I go down there, I’m afraid they’ll take it away,” I said to Jerry as we eyed the greenish-yellow pint I was holding.

“We won’t be any worse off,” said Jerry, nodding toward the bottle that neither of us could open. If the nurse took it away, well, it wouldn’t be much worse than having it grow warm and unopened on his nightstand, next to the empty cracker wrappers.

Preparing mentally to lose my $2.29 liquid investment, I ambled down the hall, or ambled as fast as my cane would let me, until I found a nurse.

“You are young and strong and lovely,” I said. “I’ll bet you can open this.”

I thought I’d get scolded for the contraband. Instead, she opened it and handed it back to me.

Two minutes later, Jerry was drinking his favorite concoction and we laughed while I talked about Chico the Monkey.

I grew more serious when I brought up the subject of the 1982 murders of Kathy Jane Nishiyama and Rodney Wayne Long.    

“They ever find out who did those?” asked the man who daily edited the stories, sized the art, laid out the pages and wrote the headlines for those horrible tales 42 years ago.

I won’t bother to go into it here much, but Kathy’s rapist killer, Eddie Hartman – a Dickson County Jail trusty who borrowed a sheriff’s car to pull over victims like Kathy (God knows how many he got away with) died on Death Row. A handsome young killer, Eddie had grown old and wizened while waiting for Old Sparky. I think lung cancer got him.

Stephen Drake and David Frey, who killed Rodney, an Austin Peay football wideout, just so they could steal his car and escape Clarksville cops looking for them in relation to a series of Memorial Drive burglaries, both went to prison.

Drake got shanked in the yard over in the prison in Only. Frey finally was paroled about a year ago and lives about 10 miles from me.  I’ve tried to contact him to see if his life turned out as well as he planned, but neither he nor his attorney will respond.

The gun they used to execute Rodney – “Good shot!” they congratulated themselves after a powder-burn bullet to his skull – was stolen earlier that brutal day in one of the burglaries. Rodney was at a Wendy’s drive-thru near the Red River in Clarksville.  The young murderers tricked him, said their car had broken down out near Oakland Road. He drove them out there, just off the Guthrie Highway, and they executed him.

Those murders of beautiful young people and also contact with the killers pretty much soured all of our lives at the newspaper where we day-to-day covered the almost consecutive bloodshed.  They revisit me sometimes at night.

That constant stress of covering those murders and pursuits of killers and funerals and trials exhausted all of us.  I wrote a book with police reporter Rob Dollar – When Newspapers Mattered: The News Brothers & their Shades of Glory—about those days. And we even made a movie Flapjacks: The Motion Picture to break the tension and raise a couple thousand, more or less, for charities.

For Jerry’s pleasure and to spark memories, I call snippets of that movie up on my phone. (I was “Flapjacks”, Jerry was “Chuckles,” Rob was “Death” and Jim Lindgren “Flash” in the film’s starring roles.  John “Street” Staed, Ricky “Dumbo” Moore, Larry “the photographer” McCormack, Billy “StrawBilly” Fields all played themselves in the film. Harold “The Stranger” Lynch steals the show in the crucial gunfight scene.

Jimmy Stewart, John Glenn, Clarksville Mayor Ted “Wild Turkey” Crozier (endorsing me for mayor), Okey “Skipper” Stepp, diner owner Raissa Gray and her son Judson, and Dennis “Danny” Adkins and the bouncing head of the late Tony Durr all play smaller roles. Laura Warren cuts a fine figure as one of the folks who run behind Rob and me in the “Rocky” scene. I always liked Laura. Wonder what became of her?

A K9 cop, another cop who was known for fatally back-shooting fleeing suspects, motorcycle gang, the entire Clarksville fire department and hundreds of Hollywood extras celebrating Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic, all appear in the film.

When I play those scenes on my phone, Jerry laughs at what he sees. His favorite memories in his life involve hanging out all night with me,  “making movies” and the newsroom night when reporter Rob Dollar, with assists by me and Jerry, turned Chico, an escaped pet monkey, into Clarksville folklore.

“Lifesavers, a part of living,’’ Jerry sorta sings along during the scene when I pull a pack of that soothing candy from the pocket of my ugly Mustard Seed sportscoat and pass them down the line of News Brothers, all gathered on the railroad bridge over the Cumberland River, after we get thrown out of town by “The Big Guy,” our publisher, played by “Danny” in a Reagan mask.

“This really makes me happy,” says “Death” when the candy gets to him.

It makes Jerry happy to see it these days. It’s a colorful reminder that 40 years ago, we had the world by the horns (while the newspaper execs and lawyer had us by the balls) and celebrated that fact.

Jerry’s real memories are mostly gone, but they live on in the movie.

And, as everyone knows, Chico the Monkey is dead. Eaten by a pack of dogs, a brutal act ending his own attempts to be free.

After we watched a few scenes from that long-ago movie, Jerry and I walked, arm-over-shoulder, down to the recreation/dining room where residents were laughing at each other’s reactions to being pummeled by an orange balloon.