Leaning on my cane while “I Love Lucy” blares red-haired nonsense from the TV, I ask Jerry if he wants to stand there, stupefying or if we should go back to his room for a while.
I tell him I’ve even discovered a high-walled, secure
outdoor compound and ask him if he wants to go outside. He declines. Seven months without fresh air and sunshine
apparently haven’t troubled him. He was surprised to learn about that concealed
compound, though. Maybe, if we’re alive, we can go out there in the cool of
autumn, I tell him, adding. I think it’s good bet we’ll make the fall, whether
he knows it or not.
“I feel empty,” he answered, as Lucy wailed, and we stood in
the nursing home’s Memory Care Ward TV, dining, singing and dancing hall. “I
feel empty. Empty.”
I looked into his nearly vacant eyes, and I could see that
emptiness. Tombstones in his eyes, as my
old friend John Kay put it in song a half-century ago. Speaking of eyes, that
Steppenwolf leader is legally blind, so I’m not sure his is the best
illustration. God damn the pushing man,
though.
The dieticians and other care workers were in the kitchen
giggling and getting lunch ready for these lovely, confused, mentally absent or
empty people, in the Memory Care Ward.
Residents had been gathering here for a half-hour or more,
many offering open-mouthed reactions as a color episode blasted Lucy referring
to Ethel as an “older woman” in an effort to pull off one of her pitiful scams.
“Oh, Ricky!” “Oh, Lucy!” The snappy
dialogue continues its mind-numbing progress. Perfect and non-challenging for
this roomful of folks gathering for one of their day’s three, semiconscious highlights:
Lunch.
Because so many inmates were jammed in the lunchroom –
they’d been singing hymns this morning when I showed up at the home --
anxiously awaiting their deep-fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches as noon
ascended, there was no room for me and Jerry Manley to sit and wait.
The aroma of the food being prepared indicated it contained
broccoli. Or something dead to be fed to these men in khakis and golf shirts,
women in full makeup and dresses. The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the
crowd, I say to myself, invoking Old Broadway for my amusement or simple
distraction.
It certainly isn’t like the deep-friend peanut butter and
banana sandwich smell that filled my kitchen one New Year’s Eve, 40 years past,
when for some reason Jerry and I got uncommonly hungry, and the pickled pigs’
feet weren’t sufficing.
Former Clarksville Mayor Jim Durrett presents a certificate, a ribbon uniform decoration and other honors to retired Montgomery County, Tennessee, Detective Cliff Smith. This was more than 35 years after Cliff, then slim and cool, with the dandy beard and shades, came in through the bathroom window to capture the vile killers of Rodney Wayne Long.
“Let’s go back to my room,” Jerry suggested, turning away
from the crowd. “I feel like walking, anyway.”
That’s what we’d already been doing this morning prior to
this trip to the room where a crowd of emptiness and empty bellies engulfed him
and his mood: We’d been walking the long hallway of the Memory Care Ward.
In fact, that’s what Jerry was doing when I said the day’s secret
password – “succotash” – and was admitted through the double-locked doors
separating the dementia-laden patients from the mentally “aware,” who occupy
the big chunk of the nursing home on the other side of those doors.
The “regular” residents can come and go. In Memory Care,
they can stay and die. In fact, when I
parked my 40-year-old Saab out front, I almost was run over by a bright, red
EMT truck, the driver vaulting out with a heavy bag of life-restoring tools
over his shoulder. Or maybe it was a
case of Natural Light and pickled pigs' feet. He was already deep inside the
nursing home by the time I got through front-door security and used my haggard
face to “sign in.” The facial
recognition machine obviously knows me and its screen reads: “C’mon in, Pops,
manley’s waiting for you.” Yes, it always prints manley lower-case.
I had my normal Shell station stash with me, but I had been
disappointed that the woman who calls me “Pops” and wants to do all she can to
make me happy, was off work on this day. Her stand-in was lovely and kind, but
she didn’t offer to lighten my load by grabbing my sack and carrying it to Pump
No. 8.
While I walked through the “regular” section of the nursing
home, it was noticeably empty. Usually by mid-morning, the geezers – folks my
age and older -- who live here are involved in games of bingo, strip poker
(most wrinkles wins), craps, Monopoly or cornhole, all the while cheered on by
the social workers.
If you’ve never seen people pitch their bean bags in heated
cornhole competition while sitting in their wheelchairs, you’ve missed
something. Sometimes a mobile teammate
will push the wheelchair-rider forward, giving him or her a bit of momentum
leading to the underhand pitch. Of course, if that teammate doesn’t pull back
on the handles, the wheelchair rider crashes into the Bozo the Clown cornhole
goal. Sometimes they play “show you
mine….” Or spin the bottle.
On this day, however, the “normal” section was empty, except
for a lone gentleman, dressed from cap to trousers in University of Tennessee
orange.
“I guess you’re celebrating the big national championship
earned by the Vols in the World Series the other night,” I said to the man.
“Pretty good games. Congratulations.”
“Where are you from?” said the man, who identified himself
as Stockton Davis. I think he thought I was a new neighbor, as I look the part.
But I had to disillusion him.
“I’m from here, not this nursing home, but from here in
Nashville. House, five, six miles from
here,” I answered, giving him my name and showing off my walking stick with a
Paul McCartney quote burned into it by my brother, Eric, who I loved and who is
just recently dead.
“You live here?” I asked Stockton.
He pushed back the bill of his Vols’ baseball cap and smiled.
“Now I do, but I’m from Obion County (Tennessee). Right up at Reelfoot Lake. I
kinda miss it.”
Not caring for snakes nor swamps nor aromatic fishermen stomping
around with fish guts on their boots, I am not a Reelfoot fan. Course, I didn’t
tell Stockton that.
“How long you been living here, in this rest home?” I asked.
“Ten years. I really like it here. You’d like it here.”
I told him that I visit at least once a week, and that my
main purpose is to see my longest-tenured newspaper pal, Jerry “Chuckles News
Brother” Manley, who has lived here since just after Thanksgiving 2023. I told
him we used to make newspapers and movies together and we drank too much,
smoked too much, every blessed thing too much. We joyfully danced close to the fire,
getting singed by life’s more-sober realities a time or two.
Perhaps our lifestyle 30-40-50 years ago has some bearing on
my friend’s dementia. But, so far, I’m OK. Walk like shit, but I get around, ‘round,
‘round, I get around.
I left Stockton and ambled -- which I can do with the cane
made for me by my big brother not long before he left me in a sleep-deprived
rain of nightly tears -- to the double-locked doors into the Memory Care Ward.
Typically, I have to hold the waist of my cargo shorts with
my non-cane hand. My pockets are loaded with packs of Ritz peanut butter
crackers and a pint bottle of Diet SunDrop, the contraband I’m smuggling in for
Jerry. If I let go of my waistband, the contraband would pull down the shorts.
I look good in boxers, but save that exposure for Sunday mornings when I watch
“Meet the Press.”
“Come on in here,” said a nurse I’d not seen before, after I
rang the doorbell to ask for admittance into the world of the absent-minded,
confused, forgetful and walking dead.
That’s when I hollered “succotash.” She shook her head and
looked toward what some claim is heaven.
She knew who I was
and who I regularly visited. “He’s not in here (the lunchroom near the security
door). Probably down in his room.”
“Shall we gather at the river,” the folks in the party room
sang, directed by a chubby visiting pastor, his hands swaying to the tune and
promising glory.
I scoped this nurse up and down, and I turned to go down the
hallway, only to come upon a heavyset fellow – the medical staff is pleased he
has gained two pounds each week since he’s been here – in a sweatshirt and
pajama pants. One of the things they most worry about dementia patients is that
they forget to eat and then die. Jerry’s certainly not at that stage. Yet.
Damage from the diabetes that almost cost him his foot a
year ago is evident in the stained and bruised big toe protruding from his
“walking socks.”
Since he’s having such a difficult time walking down the
hallway, I give him a brutal shove, and he falls, like mortally wounded King
Kong, onto the paint-spattered carpet.
Of course, that’s not true. I love the guy, and I’m happy to
see him on a day when he’s trying to be active. I sidle up to him and let him know I’m here. I
put my arm over his shoulder to steady him a bit. Course, I’m not so steady
myself. I’ve lost much of my mobility, but my brain still is at its peak.
“Man, it’s good to see you,” Jerry says, focusing tired
eyes. “I’ve been walking a lot. I think it’s probably good for me, but I don’t
know.”
He tells me there are no doctors here to check on his rise
and decline, and that pisses me off. Course, he can’t remember much that’s
happened since 1982.
We do a couple of lengths of the hallway before he turns
into his room, near the hall’s end.
Then he kind of laughs and apologizes in the same
breath.
“Old Bob is sleeping in my bed,” he says, gaiety dancing in
his voice, as if he’s about to repeat the Goldilocks and the Three Bears tale.
But he’s not joking. Bob is right there. The small and thin
fellow, Tennessee Vols cap by his side, is sound asleep in Jerry’s bed.
“Just come on in, man,” Jerry says to me, a bit quietly so
as not to disturb Milford/Bob, who probably is 95 and very tired,
apparently. He’s not actually “in” the
bed, as he’s on top of Jerry’s bedspread and sheets, but he is using Jerry’s
two pillows – including the faux-furry one he likes -- and sleeping the morning
away.
“Go ahead and sit in his chair,” Jerry says, pointing me to
Bob’s spit-stained recliner. Each of these men has a bed and a recliner, so
Jerry drops into his.
For the first time in the seven months I’ve been coming
here, the television is off. I have asked before if it stays on all night, and Jerry
“reckons so,” but here it is, off and quiet.
“Down in the dining room, ‘I Love Lucy’ is on, but the
volume is off. They are singing church songs again,” I tell Jerry, who hadn’t
noticed that even as he walked past that dining hall several times. Gimme that
old-time religion.
“I hate ‘Lucy,’” vows Jerry.
We’ve always pretty much agreed on issues of war and peace, beer-drinking,
smoking, politics, women, old dogs, children and watermelon wine. Well, mostly our
wine was cheap Dago Red, by the gallon or sometimes two. “Just hate Lucy. Hate
her.”
“Yeah, I always hoped Ricky or Fred Mertz would kill her,” I
say, and Jerry laughs. “It could have been in one of those Lucy Goes to
Hollywood episodes. Rock Hudson could have been the guest star who decapitated
her by accident at Disneyland. Ricky would laugh and say ‘Oh, Lucy!’ and use
her head as a bongo.”
Jerry nods at my creative vision.
“Does Milford, or Bob, sleep in your bed a lot?” I ask,
pointing out the frail elephant in the room.
“Yeah,” Jerry says. “I’ll go out and come back and there
he’ll be, sleeping away.”
“Can’t you do something about it?” I ask, as I watch the
motionless old man and wonder if he’s dead. All those pony and horse riding and
raising ribbons on his wall won’t mean a thing when he’s knockin’ on heaven’s
door.
“What can I do? Nothin’,” Jerry says, no anger in his voice.
“Let him sleep.”
I’d guess that Bob weighs less than half of Jerry’s 244
pounds, but he’s very break-able-looking. Kind of like a little porcelain doll
in flannel and jeans. Jerry’s not going to risk hurting him or his feelings by
lifting him up and telling him “Get the fuck off my bed.” (Long ago, I once
told a job applicant in Clarksville to “Get the fuck out of my chair,” and he
later decided not to take the job offered by Max Moss. He’s likely gone into
the insurance industry or other Korporate Amerikan pursuits, thanks to me. I
should point out in fairness that I was just coming to work on a Saturday
morning, it was cold outside and my first action on such days was to put my
yellow fedora and Deerfield High varsity jacket on the chair where the
surprised kid was seated, before putting the exploding cigarettes on my desk.
I’m a creature of habit, obsessive about doing things in proper sequence. And I
hadn’t yet properly placed the rubber vomit before the news meeting.)
Jerry looks at the tiny man who’s been sleeping in his bed. “He
gets up eventually, and I get my bed back. I never get in his,” he says,
nodding toward Bob’s bed, draped in a UT Vols checkerboard end zone comforter.
I ask Jerry what he knows about Bob’s giant display of horse
and pony ribbons on the wall near the door.
“I didn’t even know they were for horse-riding. I’ve never
looked at them, and I’ve never asked Bob about them.
“We don’t talk very much. But you never know where he’ll end
up sleeping,” he says.
The same could have been said about me and Jerry 50 years
ago.
For the next hour or so, I deliver pretty much a monologue
featuring our personal and professional adventures, trying to draw some
memories out of Jerry.
“You remember the Rodney Long and Kathy Nishiyama murders?”
I ask, repeating a query I’ve made in the past.
The stories tore into
our souls. Rodney, 18, was a college football player abducted by a pair of
burglars running from the police. David Frey and Stephen Drake abducted him and
executed him, hollering “Good Shot” as the gun barrel sat against his skull
when the trigger was pulled. They killed him for his car, and escaped to New
Jersey.
Kathy, 16, was kidnapped, raped, decapitated by Eddie
Hartman, the pride of White Bluff, Tennessee. A Dickson County Jail trusty,
apparently tired of bending over in the jail shower, he took a squad car up to
Clarksville, hungry to get his rocks off before or after killing a beautiful
young woman who he’d made stop for him by flashing his blue lights.
The day after Kathy went missing, a friend of mine in
Dickson told me that the authorities down there were covering up the fact that
a broken, gold necklace was found in the squad car Eddie was driving. I
called and asked the Sheriff’s Department, and listened to their lies. I even
asked the sheriff himself. More lies.
The CYA theory of law enforcement.
Anyway, long newspaper stories -- primarily put together by
the team of cops reporter Rob “Death” Dollar, me “Flapjacks” doing
human-interest stories about grieving parents and towns and editing Rob’s copy,
and old “Chuckles” doing the final edit, layout, design and writing headlines
--resulted.
At night, those deaths still wake me. (Or they did. In
recent weeks it’s been Eric’s death that shakes me to my nightmare core. I
can’t seem to recover, though I’m hoping not to reunite with him anytime soon.)
The fact that Jerry, Rob and I handled those stories
concurrently led to a fine bit of madness among us, and that’s why we made a
movie called “Flapjacks: The Motion Picture” and gave ourselves those
nicknames. Other newsroom staffers who admired our sense of justice and fashion
similarly got nicknames like “Dumbo,” “StrawBilly Fields,” “Street” and “Dicksnot.”
Me, Jerry and Rob adopted a fourth main
News Brother, Jim “Flash” Lindgren, who worked with Jerry on the copy desk and
who tells me he still has night sweats about his decision to throw his lot in
with the likes of us. Radio newsman Scott “Badger” Shelton, who covered those
same stories in newsbreaks between “Jimmy in the Morning” and his early morning
spins of stacks of wax, eventually joined us. He’s dead now, too, and I miss
him. “Jimmy in the Morning” died after being forced out of radio and into the
world of air-conditioner repair. As good as any national deejay, Jimmy was fond
of scotch and bought a lot of it for me, Rob and Jerry and friendly coppers.
Not a day goes by that I don't think about the murders of two beautiful, young people, Kathy Jane Nishiyama and Rodney Wayne Long. Those murders inadvertently launched The News Brothers on their quest for self-destruction, whiskey and fun.
“Didn’t they find out that the same person committed both murders?” asks Jerry now, 42 years after a dog carried Kathy’s skull out of a woods line. Witnesses thought Bowzer was simply carrying an empty gallon milk jug.
After I explain it, again, to him, he remembers. “That was a tough time for all of us,” he
says.
“How’d they catch them?”
I explain the circumstances. Eddie, an inmate, was suspect
No. 1 from the day of the murder.
The two fugitives who killed Rodney were located in a house
in New Jersey, their home state, where everything is legal as long as you don’t
get caught.
“Montgomery County Detective Cliff Smith went up there from
Clarksville, and he caught them when he entered the house. He came in through
the bathroom window.” I do a snippet of my famed Joe Cocker impression.
Jerry laughed. “Man,
I love The Beatles. Their music never gets old.”
Unfortunately, he has no source for music here, only hearing
it on television specials and the like. He also has no phone.
“I wonder why they
won’t let you have a phone?” I ask.
“I suppose because they don’t want us to call anybody” is
his no-nonsense response. That rule makes it impossible for his son, in
Houston, Texas, to talk with his dad. His
daughter in Nashville, too. And he’d likely get calls from News Brothers and
family in Lewisburg that might stimulate his brain. Instead, he sits lonely,
waiting to die.
As far as he remembers, I’m the only one who visits. Though
again, he brings up the vision of John “Street News Brother” Staed visiting
from Birmingham, Alabama. An axed newspaperman and respiratory therapist, John
has not ever visited Jerry here. But he
has in Jerry’s mind, and it makes him smile.
“It was a couple of weeks ago. He looks like he always did,”
Jerry says of the man he really hasn’t seen in more than 40 years. Most of us
don’t look the same now. I’m not even a
replica of old Flapjacks. I look better, but I look very old.
“I need to get a DVD player in here, so we can watch our
movie,” I say, nodding to the empty TV screen. “Or we could play it on the big
TV set in the party room, and the whole floor could watch it.”
Jerry nixes that idea, thinking the movie might confuse the
already mentally feeble or absent among his neighbors. Suicide might result. I know it came close in my case, part of the
reason we made a movie.
“Hell, Jerry, they might be the first audience we’ve ever
had who understands the movie,” I say, and we both laugh.
A stunning nurse, the one with dreadlocks, comes into the
room to round up the residents for lunch.
“Milford. Milford! Milford!!! Milford!!!!” she says, volume
escalating. “What are you doing in Jerry’s bed?”
Bob doesn’t answer, as Aliya, the beautiful nurse, gut-laughing,
helps the almost lifeless former horseman get off Jerry’s bed.
While he puts his Tennessee cap on, she gets down on her
knees in front of Jerry, helping him get his shoes on, so he can eat in the
dining hall. (Her position would have delighted the old Jerry.)
“No shirt. No shoes. No service,” is a mantra the residents
must use when they enter the lunchroom. If they’ve remembered their shoes, they
can line up at the trough.
Aliya holds Bob on his feet, helping him move his legs,
guiding him down the long hall to the lunchroom, where he sits with the guy
with the Vanderbilt sweatshirt and a newcomer I don’t know well. Jerry will sit with “the guys,” according to
Aliya.
I have seen Bob deteriorate much in seven months. Now he no
longer smiles. Just stares. And sleeps in Jerry’s bed.
I put my arm over Jerry’s shoulders, explaining I’ll leave
as soon as he gets settled with the guys at a lunch table.
“I wish you didn’t have to do all the talking when you
visit, but I really can’t remember anything,” he says. He then repeats that
whole sentence as if for the first time.
Then he adds that “I wish I could come out to your house and
see you, but they won’t let me out of here. Guess I’ll die here. At least I get
to watch TV all day and sleep when I want to.”
He looks toward me, those tombstones finally allowing some
light to sneak from his eyeballs.
“I feel empty. Empty,” he repeats. “Not hungry. Just empty.”
I look away briefly, seeing Lucy still doing stupid stuff on
the lunchroom television.
Jerry turns and starts toward his spot at the table. Then he
stops, looks at me.
There’s no room for me to sit with him at the guys’ table, though
I’m certain there soon will be an opening.
(Copyright, July 1, 2024, Tim "Flapjacks" Ghianni)
