“I wish I had a pencil-thin mustache, the Boston Blackie
kind, a two-toned Ricky Ricardo jacket and an autographed picture of Andy
Devine….”
This song was pounded from my brain’s rotting interior when
I entered the nursing home where an “I Love Lucy” marathon was playing
full-blast on the TVs (all of them) to drown out the drills and sledges of the
ongoing “modernization” of the facility where my longest-tenured friend, Jerry
Manley, lives in self-enforced isolation.
The residents are always glad to see me when I arrive. I get
enough hugs and back-pats from the guys – and sweet, semi-lewd looks from the
women – on my visits to make me feel pretty upbeat at first. Jerry, however, mostly ignores the other
dwellers in the Memory Care Ward, perhaps for emotional rescue or self-preservation.
No telling when these folks, mostly “old people’’ in their 80s and 90s, will
check out, so why become emotionally invested? It’s not a bad point of view, I
suppose. But I’ve become so familiar
here, there are many – Jerry included and especially – who I’ll miss when
they’re gone. Or I am.
In fact, on every visit to Jerry’s room – at the end of a
long hall – I take a deep breath before stepping through the doorway, anxious
about the state of the bodies inside.
Jerry was fitfully napping on this day. Roomie Bob, aka
“Milford,” a horseman who really likes me and my company, was sleeping like a
dead man. When he finally rolled over to
get his Tennessee Vols hat and head out on his morning rounds of the ward I
realized, gratefully, that Bob was all right. “I love the dead, before they’re
cold; their bluing flesh for me to hold,” as sweet, old Alice Cooper, another
random friend, sang as the final track on his 1973 “Billion Dollar Babies,”
must-have rock album.
But old Vincent Furnier is going to have to populate my
battered -- by space, time, football and random acts of self-abuse -- brain
another day. (Perhaps I'll write about the day in 1974 or so that I walked with Alice while he competed in a pro-celebrity golf tournament in Nashville. Other sports writers and journalists stayed close to Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford. I did meet them, but their inebriated mumbling and the suck-up nature of the pack of scribes made me think I'd get a better quotes from Alice. We drank beer and laughed. Welcome to my Nightmare.)
On this day, my whole visit to see Jerry was conducted to a mental
soundtrack of Buffett’s 1974 lament for days of innocence long-past: “Pencil
Thin Mustache.”
Lucy and Ricky Ricardo made sure of that when they
triggered those lyrics in my head while doing their insipid comedy show on
every TV – from the one right by the nursing home entrance into the section
where the “normal’’ old people live to the one in the party/dining room behind
the double-locked doors to the Memory Care Ward, where I am obviously loved by
all these people who are losing their minds.
It even canceled out the John Kay and Steppenwolf music that
had occupied my mind after I got gas, cheese and peanut butter crackers and
Diet SunDrop at the Shell Station where I normally stop before going to see my
old friend, Jerry.
“Living in a nursing home is like being in prison,” says the
station manager Quinssy, who knows why I always buy these snacks. “Worse….
“It’s good that you go see your friend, though. I’m sure
mostly people are put in those places and forgotten. You’re a good man, old friend.” Perhaps it’s
bull shit, but I choose to believe it.
The Steppenwolf music was blasting from the open-air sound
system of some large Japanese bike that was as close to a real man’s bike as
the skinny teenage boy and girl pilot and passenger were to being bikers. Captain America, Billy and even George Hanson
would have been sent into rollicking laughter to see these Brentwood kids on
their $50,000 toy.
I figured John Kay – who is a friend of sorts, allowing me
long ago to be the first and only journalist to enter his secluded compound
just off the Natchez Trace, where I spent two or three days – and his band’s music would stick with me all
day. “Sookie, Sookie, Sookie, Sookie, Sookie, Sookie, Sue.”
And that would have suited me fine. I’m more Born to be Wild
than drunken three-piece-suit Parrot Head in my soul.
But, with Ricky Ricardo’s agonizing “Oh, Lucy!!,” on TV, Steppenwolf’s
mental discography was supplanted by Buffett’s “Pencil Thin Mustache” as soon
as I was immersed in this headquarters of the living dead just outside the
outskirts of Nashville.
I’m not a huge Jimmy Buffett fan, believing that he played too hard to please the idiot Parrot Heads who drank rum concoctions enough to puke and tried to live like Caribbean pirates after finishing up their latest case files and stock deals before driving their Infinitis or BMW SUVs to the arena.
Thing is, Jimmy was better than that and allowed his songs
to turn him into a caricature of the fine young songwriter I saw at the Exit/In
a half-century ago or at the Sunset Ceremony at Key West in the early
1980s. It’s a regular evening carnival
down in that straight, gay trans or whatever you wannabe slice of
paradise. I had enough Sloppy Joe’s slushy
rum drinks to puke, but I didn’t, and I really enjoyed it when the fine
troubadour and songwriter strummed and sang solo as the sun slipped into the
Gulf of Mexico.
Jimmy used to do that regularly when he was just a regular cheeseburger
in paradise, before he became a huge star and belonged to the world of pirates
and starched-collar pirate wannabes and other assholes ...and became really, really wealthy.
Lucy continued being stupid and Ricky aghast on the TV in
Bob and Jerry’s room in the dormitory of dementia.
Jerry sat up and reached for the contraband food and drink I had transported into the nursing home in my cargo shorts. He chomped into the crackers, one after another, quickly, crunching like he was running out of time, pausing long enough to wash down a double mouthful with the SunDrop. I shoulda lined the crackers up like cocaine to make his fast-paced consumption easier.
“Hi, Tim!” said a fellow who usually wears a Vanderbilt
sweatshirt as he and his wife (who is a non-resident and is just visiting for
lunch) walked past the room and saw me sitting next to Jerry, as Lucy and Ricky
ranted “comedically” on the TV.
“Nice haircut,” I tell Jerry, asking if perhaps his daughter
cut his long brownish hair into a butch and trimmed his lush beard to
stockbroker-appropriate precision.
She did cut it a few months ago, but the nursing home did it
this time. “I haven’t seen her in a long
time,” he says of his daughter. “She’s really busy. I guess.”
Course, she could have been here recently, and he just
doesn’t remember. “I don’t remember
anything,” he admits.
“You remember the first time I really got in trouble with
Luther?” I ask Jerry, who was with me at the time, 43 years ago or so.
“Wasn’t that right after we got those computers?” Jerry
asks.
I set the story up in his mind by describing when The
Leaf-Chronicle switched from old-fashioned manual typewriters to electric
ones.
“Remember, we kept our manuals in the wells of our desks,
and anytime the power went out, we’d pull out the manuals to finish that day’s
newspaper.” That actually happened so often – perhaps the new gizmos overloaded
the circuits – that the quick swap became routine, almost choreographed. We hardly missed a word in the quick
typewriter reinforcement ballet.
I was a simple sports editor without a lot of love for
authority when the company bought Harris computers to use in writing and
assembling the paper. We got an editor in the deal. Harris troubleshooter and
bull-shitter Tony Durr came up from Florida to help us with the transition to
his company’s computers. Luther liked the concept of having a computer expert
guide his young newsroom, so he hired Tony as editor. Great guy, lazy editor and one of my life’s four
best friends, Tony finally left town, a defrocked editor, in the middle of the
night a couple years later.
A group of newsroom grunts who my friend, Rob Dollar, and I
dubbed “The News Brothers” threw Tony an all-night farewell party, but he and
his girlfriend and soon-to-be his fifth or sixth ex-wife, left at about 2 a.m.
He was still wearing the shades and half-tuxedo he’d worn to the party as he
drove toward Riverside Drive.
I’m reminding Jerry of all of this to lead up to the fact
that there was a bank of the computers set up in the newsroom, and Luther came
up to instruct us to practice on them – they were not connected to composing
etc. yet – so we’d be ready when we made the switch. We all were required to
participate in these between-editions training days.
The little, short asshole with a beard from Harris computers
hovered around the newsroom in case we had any questions. I should add that I’m
just being honest about Tony, but I loved him as a friend and a dreamer. As far
as his managerial duties, once he was hired away from the computer company,
well, most of those fell on me. And I
leaned on Jerry and the copy desk and “newspaperman Wendell Wilson” to do their
jobs so the paper would get out even while the editor was out chasing rainbows and unicorns or playing golf. Wendell last was spotted in public sitting on hay bales and protesting
the death penalty in Arizona, his home state, where he retired.
“StrawBilly Fields,” Jerry inserts when I’m talking about the golf. StrawBilly, who no longer is “the big fat kid” of Jerry’s faded memories, was taken away from his reporter’s duties to play golf with Editor Tony Durr often. It was then that Billy likely realized that his greatest successes would come by kissing up to his bosses, which – in addition to his brains, personal loyalty and charm -- is perhaps why he had a long and spectacular career as a good ole boy East Nashville insider in Metro Nashville Government. His last Metro duty, if I remember correctly, was to oversee the party buses and wagons carrying at-least-half-naked bachelorettes around the Lower Broadway tourist district. He would use his short, hand-held ruler and tell the girls if their panties or privates were being displayed to drunken conventioneers. I may have that story wrong.
I actually think Billy is one of the nicest guys on the
planet. And, he never acted otherwise.
I’ve known him since he was a student athletic trainer at Austin Peay State University in
Clarksville, where I’d chain smoke with head football coach Boots Donnelly
every afternoon while I covered practice for the newspaper. Billy didn’t smoke,
but I’m sure he’d have taken it up if I’d told him to. I think his main job was to make sure his balls were clean and inflated. I mean the footballs, of course, that he would distribute to the Governors football players.
Finally, I’ll get to my first nasty encounter with Luther,
the first time I was told to sit in a chair facing his desk and listen.
Publisher Luther Thigpen had encouraged us to write whatever we
wanted as we learned the new computer system.
I reminded Jerry, when telling the story, that the Big Guy did not tell
us he was monitoring us from a master computer in his office.
“It was announced today that Tim Ghianni has taken over The
Leaf-Chronicle in a bloodless coup,” or something similar is how Jerry began
his shakedown story-writing practice. He went on to explain, in the story, that the newsroom,
loyal to me more than to the newspaper (true), had supported me in the bloodless
takeover from publisher Luther.
Jerry inserted a quote from me about the future and the
types of real news stories that would be our focus. And we’d also begin a
steady stream of stories about The Beatles and Muhammad Ali, or something like
that.
I think the story ended with “former publisher Luther Thigpen could not be reached for comment at presstime.”
All good clean fun, until my phone rang. “Uhh, Tim, I need
you and Jerry Manley to come downstairs.”
It was Luther, and I really didn’t know why he called ….
Until he held up a copy of the story he’d printed off the computers upstairs.
“Fellows, because Tim’s name is in this, I think you wrote
this,” said Luther, scratching his nuts, turning his head to the left and
coughing.
“But if not, then I know it’s got to be from you, Jerry,
because you are Tim’s closest friend and would support such a coup.”
He moved his hand into his pocket and began jingling change
as his face reddened. “Tim, did you write this?”
“No,” I said. “But it’s a pretty funny story. People are
just up there having fun with the computers. That’s what you told us to do.”
Luther again poked at his pocket, where dimes collided, and added: “This is not
fun. This is disrespectful. Do you know who wrote it?”
For the first and last time, I lied. “No,” I said. “But I
really don’t see it as a big deal. It’s just funny for anyone to think I could
be a publisher, since I hate the Chamber of Commerce.”
The Big Guy nodded in agreement and pointed his moist finger
at Jerry: “Mr. Manley did you write this?”
“No,” Jerry said. “But it’s just fun. Someone having a good
time while practicing.”
Once Jerry added that he had no idea of who wrote the story,
Luther huffed slightly, then smiled, recalling, at least briefly, that he
blazed his corporate path as a legitimate newsroom editor before he moved to
Clarksville.
“I know newspaper people have fun, but I’m reading what you
are writing, and don’t do this again.”
So, it’s obvious he didn’t believe our story. As I’ve said
elsewhere, the more and more I became the true heart of the newsroom, Luther
would call me downstairs for interrogation. I actually liked the guy. Conflicted corporate bastard.
Sitting in the dementia dorm room, Jerry and I laughed at
that story, shenanigans that predated my helping turn the newspaper on its ear
with my News Brothers cohorts. Jerry “Chuckles” Manley, Rob “Death” Dollar and Jim “Flash” Lindgren were my chief
co-conspirators. Others joined up when
their wives allowed them to put their incomes on the line for a few pressure-releasing
laughs.
That latter group included Ricky G. “Dumbo” Moore and John “Street”
Staed. Harold “The Stranger” Lynch literally killed in the gunfight scene. And
John Glenn, Jimmy Stewart and Skipper were funny as hell in the resulting movie
Flapjacks: The Motion Picture. We screened it at the Roxy Theater in
downtown Clarksville and could have raked in thousands of dollars for
local charities.
I am Flapjacks, and it is my life story. Later, our dear
friend, radio newshound Scott “Badger” Shelton assumed a prominent role when
Flash moved to Indiana, a generally thoughtless and ill-fated decision.
Curiously-- though “Street” had the least screen time in the
movie for reasons unknown, foreign and domestic -- Staed has been much on Jerry’s
mind as he whiles away his nights and days, watching “Gunsmoke” and History
Channel offerings and “I Love Lucy” in his dormitory of dementia HQ.
Every time I visit – once or twice a week -- I ask Jerry who
has been to see him recently.
“John Staed came by the other day,” Jerry always says. “It’s the
first time he’s been here. It was good to see him.
“We went out for a drive, all over the place. We went to eat
in a little café. I can’t remember the name or what I had to eat.”
Jerry tells me similar stories of John’s first visit every
week. Problem is that John, while a damn nice boy, has not visited Jerry.
Those rambles are only in Jerry’s dreams and wishes. And it
doesn’t hurt anything.
I have asked the nursing home folks, and Jerry is not only
not allowed to go out for a ride, he has to stay behind the double-locked,
guarded doors to the Memory Care Ward. Only
his daughter can take him out of the ward, and then, it’s no farther than the
game room, in the back of the regular old-folks dwellings. That’s where a
family member and an inmate can put together jigsaw puzzles. Before it rains
any more.
“I didn’t know anyone could take you out of this place,” I
say, gently, to my friend.
“Yeah. All you gotta do is promise to get me back here.”
Maybe, when he sleeps, he pictures himself in a boat on a
river or perhaps he and I are going out for a drive, too. Perhaps he’s reliving
the after-midnight adventures of our relative youths, like when he pulled up to
my Clarksville house in his blue Honda Prelude.
I was standing in the driveway, smoking, regretting the most unselfish
but dumbest of my life choices. I had a bottle of Scotch with me and a six-pack
at my feet.
Jerry rolled into my driveway, smoke billowing through his
sunroof. Bruce Springsteen was wailing away on “Glory Days” on the stereo.
“Hop on into my pink Cadillac,” said Jerry.
I did and the next five hours took us to country roads, with a swing through Guthrie, Kentucky, where my friend Thomas Warren (Robert Penn’s brother) ran the town grain elevator.
Sometimes at night, I too recall those days and how my
friend and I, connected like brothers, tried to have fun while negotiating the
traitorous ways of life and newspapers.
On this day, I walk Jerry down to the dining hall and sit
for a while, until one of the residents needs my chair.
“I Love Lucy” is blaring from the TV set.
And again, I think of that Buffett tune, a fine song that
really is aimed at Baby Boomers who wish they could go back. Course, we can’t. We just die.
That's why I wish I had
a pencil-thin mustache
The "Boston Blackie" kind
A two-toned Ricky Ricardo jacket
And an autographed picture of Andy Devine….
You likely don’t
remember Andy Devine. He played “Jingles” on The Adventures of Wild Bill
Hickock TV series and Cookie in a series of Roy Rogers films. He was fat
and had a high-pitched laugh. I met him once at the Michigan State Fair when I
was a little kid. He and Wild Bill castmates were riding horses and giving out
miniature loaves of Wonder Bread. I do not have an autographed picture, though I did see a two-headed cow.
Andy’s Hollywood niche was as the consummate sidekick, kind of like the fellow I left in the lunchroom, where he was asking if he could have bacon and eggs instead of a sandwich for lunch.
“You’ll get your bacon
and eggs in the morning,” says a strikingly beautiful dining worker, as she
brushes her long dreadlocks out of her face.
“Cranberry juice tastes like water, and my legs hurt,” Jerry says in some sort of reply as I get up, and the lovely dining worker lets me out of the Memory Care Ward.
Lucy Ricardo is now
screaming about something else on the TV set as I get close to the
check-in/check-out station.
“You have a nice time
playing spoons?” asks the receptionist, which startles me until I realize she’s
talking to one of the “regular” nursing home residents, who is behind me.
“Spoons? What’s that?”
the older woman queries.
“That’s what they had
you playing all morning,” answers the receptionist.
“I don’t remember that,” is the reply. They continue to talk about that game as the receptionist pushes the button unlocking the two sets of front doors for nine seconds. Enough time to get out before the locks automatically secure.
I walk to my old Saab,
with Buffett holding a “Pencil Thin Mustache” accompaniment in my head.
Yeah, but now I'm
gettin' old, don't wear underwear
I don't go to church and I don't cut my hair
But I can go to movies and see it all there
Just the way that it used to be
I crank up my old car
and drive away from the prison quickly.
