Derelicts and scalawags and the occasional cretin with a giant forehead were everywhere I looked on that last night Tony Durr was in Clarksville, after he had found it necessary to resign his editor’s job at The Leaf-Chronicle.
Actually, he disappeared for weeks without
explanation “to take care of some personal matters,” was the Big Guy’s
explanation. True enough. Tony was feverishly looking for another job after
he’d been questioned about bending health insurance rules in order to pay
serious medical bills for his desperately ill almost-fifth wife, who was
beautiful but sometimes bordered on death from her battle with the effects of systemic lupus erythematosus.
His sudden and unexplained
disappearance – he was at work on a Friday and didn’t return until three weeks
later, just a day or two before our farewell party for him – provided fodder
for some of us in the newsroom, especially me and Rob Dollar, to make a
newspaper satire of a movie about our searching for the suddenly vanished Tony.
More later, perhaps, but basically our film
premise was we were looking to solve Tony’s “mysterious disappearance,” primarily
because he had abandoned us without explanation and no one – not the Big Guy,
our publisher Luther Thigpen, not my pal and mentor Max Moss (God, I still love
and miss him …Max, I mean, although the Big Guy also is dead.) Max did, during
the Durr-less vacuum, ask me to take on even more dominant newsroom roles. Like the ones I’d been doing for little or no
credit when Tony was the big boss editor, golf fanatic and jogger.
“Where is Tony?” we asked. “Fuck’f I
know,” said the Big Guy, jingling his pocket change, small tears in his eyes.
“I
can’t tell you right now, partner,” Max told me, personally. “Sound reasonable?”
Tony actually had fled, as the old Gene
Autry movies might have it, just ahead of the posse. I loved the guy, still do, a bunch, miss him
daily, but his disappearance and the eventual reason – as fictionalized by Max
in a newsroom meeting – was unsurprising.
Basically, the official line was that
Tony had leaped at new opportunities in the dirt pit that was San Antonio, Texas,
45 years ago.
Confidentially, Max told me more. You
see, bending rules and work expectations – I had ended up doing most of his editor’s
work during his active year as editor, while Max took care of Tony’s clerical and
Big Guy issues and editorial stances – was something Tony was good at. And his
natural Cajun charm almost always got him out of any corner. Pretty Boy Floyd
of the newspaper world. Five-five, 35 years old. Perhaps that many jobs.
It was almost as soon as he got back from
San Antone that we were forced to say farewell.
Hence the night of the scalawags and
dirtbags in this picture. These were guys Rob and I already had designated as
The News Brothers, a group of hard-working, exploding-cigarette-bumming,
plastic-vomit carrying rebels who laughed while tilting at the windmills (aka, The
Big Guy and corporate policy), while at the same time pricking away at the cone
of silence in the law enforcement world so we could get scoops. We used scotch
as our “pricking” weapon. And our friendly demeanors.
Rob and I, along with my now-demented
pal, Jerry Manley, were lucky that Chief Sheriff’s Deputy Eddie Patterson and
various other members of law enforcement hierarchy were as loose with their
wallets as they were with their lips when they started buying us 2 a.m. rounds
of double-scotch on the rocks at Buford Thaxton’s Camelot. Sometimes Skipper –
an old con man and adventurer Rob and I loved – came along to fascinate cops
and young ladies – like Max’s college-age daughter, Karen, although I’m not
sure she saw this act – with his teeth-in-the-beer-glass routine and his tales
of Hawaiian whores and his frequent quotes from the Old Testament.
I did, one night, see Karen, who was
under-age and who I’d known since I started hanging out with the Moss family
when she was still in grade school, sitting with frat boys and others with
anxious fingers and petty ambitions, at a table at 2 a.m. Rob, Jerry and I
asked the bartender to take her a glass of milk. We were looking out for her
virtue. By the way, she’s now a beautiful businesswoman, in her 50s. I know she was red-faced when the milk
arrived. I’ll tell you that at that point in my life, I only wished that she
was 15-20 years older. Old dog, old tricks.
Ahh, but back to that night of the
sunglasses-wearing derelicts and their thrift-shop suitcoats and trousers, I
was the only one who really knew why Tony had suddenly gone on a job-hunt
splurge that ended up with him leaving for San Antonio, Texas, in the middle of
the party (i.e. 3 a.m.)
We had been writing a book together on
his small porch at his stone house that he only recently had purchased. He
abandoned that project (and I’m sure mortgage payments) via still-of-the-night
disappearance a few weeks before the party, and explained his absence to me
with a midnight meetup when he crept back into town wearing leather cowboy
chaps and spurs and a battered Navy peacoat. And little else.
I look at the picture of the derelicts
and scalawags here – with Tony, “the little, short asshole with the beard” as
we dubbed him in the movie about his disappearance, “Flapjacks: The Motion
Picture” in the middle – and I grow anxious and melancholy as I recall our
adventures together as a couple of journalists, one legit and one not-so-much.
There was the time when he and I raided
a nursing home in the middle of the night, trying to catch administrators
off-guard after getting elder-abuse complaints.
All we caught were some of the nursing home denizens, the ones who were
night owls, drooling in the TV room. Dramatic expose shot to hell, we met with
nursing home corporate hounds and lawyers the next day and abandoned the story.
I do have to add that there were procedural changes at that nursing home in the
weeks after our “raid.” I was told about this in a wine-loosed late-night
discussion with one of the younger female administrators. Pretty woman.
And there was the time Tony got so
upset with littering along the U.S. 41A bypass, that he told me to come along
with him, bring some gloves and grab a trash bag. From newspaper janitor John
Spurlin, who had a dent in his skull from where someone had shot him, Tony
grabbed one of those sticks with the nail protruding from the point. The two of
us spent an afternoon cleaning a median, taking photos and otherwise
chronicling this environmental calamity. I kept on telling him that we ought to
get back to take care of the newsroom.
He kept drawling things like “Manley’s there, Jim Monday’s there, that
prick Wendell is there. We’ll go back when we please.” There was no story in the cleanup, though I
did pound out my “Clarksville Calling Card” column, complete with a photo of
the late and lamented Editor Tony Durr with his garbage stick and a black bag
full of beverage cups and popsicle sticks and chicken pieces.
And then there was W. Robert Cameron,
the self-titled “Savior of the Cosmos,” who Tony found on one of his runs – he
often ran along railroad tracks during jogging that took up many business
hours. Tony didn’t do anything about W. Robert, but sensing “a great Ghianni
column” in the Manson-like figure on the railroad embankment, he trotted into a
nearby Shoney’s and called me, said there was a guy who looked like my type of
human-interest piece. I spent half-a-day on the trestle and also arranged with
my cop friends – who came to arrest him for trespassing (he’d gone into the
Shoney’s to panhandle) – to take W. Robert to the county line rather than
arrest him. I ordered and paid for W. Robert’s lunch while we waited for the
law. All I’ll add here is that W. Robert was hitchhiking to Austria. I always
have wondered if he made it. I know I didn’t.
Tony and I had a lot of fun, and he
enjoyed being with a real newspaperman as much as I enjoyed being with a
big-dreaming pretend journalist who learned most of his newspaper tricks by
watching “All The President’s Men” and by being a computer corporation’s
salesman whose job it was to sell and install newsroom computer systems. He’d
apparently hang out with the journalists at each location, until he got to
Clarksville, where his charm so worked on the Big Guy that he was offered a
job, including the medical insurance that was his downfall.
Basically, I have to say that Tony was
and remains one of the people I’ve loved best in the world and still do, 30
years after he was found dead, empty pill bottle and an off-the-hook telephone receiver
near his sprawled body in a Coast Guard Barracks in Alaska. His stint in the
Coast Guard included about a year as a telegraph operator at U.S. Navy
Support Facility Diego Garcia, a small island which, according to the Navy “provides
logistic support to operational forces forward deployed to the Indian Ocean and
Persian Gulf areas of responsibility in support of national policy objectives.”
It's
hard to imagine Tony as the guy helping to translate American war and peace
troop and ship and airplane movement while sitting on this little island just
south of the equator. His return to the Coast Guard base in Alaska was his final stop after maybe six or
seven wives and that number of newspaper editor’s jobs in his last few years of
life.
He probably went through so many women
and jobs because he was versed in the laissez les bons temps rouler of his
Arcadian upbringing. Or maybe it was the “short man’s complex,” like that which
drove Hitler and Kareem.
In addition to trying to attract me to
the newspapers where he landed, Tony also offered me refuge from real life –
and mine had gotten complicated – by proffering shelter from the storms of life
among the gators, bugs, snakes and semi-civilized, untamed Cajuns at his
family’s tomato farm in the swamps of Louisiana.
He
told me to come spend a few weeks, my vacation time, or even abandon life
altogether and join him in the bayous, where he often sought comfort from his
many personal and professional failures.
“Everything will be on me,” he said.
“I’ll even pay for your gas to get here. The Durr family farm is right in the
middle of the bayous.
“It’s hot, but quiet. We have the best
tomatoes in Louisiana,” he said. “You can get your head right here.”
It’s funny to read that note now,
because I don’t think Tony ever did get his head right. I was in the middle of
a life decision, and I’d been consulting him for advice. I took the advice,
regretted it almost immediately, and spent three years drinking my way to
freedom. Man, I could have used that bayou tomato farm hideout then.
I probably should have gone down to the
bayous. Whenever I use that word, bayou, I always think of John Fogerty, a rock
icon I got to know some. He was the leader of Creedence Clearwater Revival, and
“Born on the Bayou” was one of the hits for these Central California
rockers. John’s best song, “Who’ll Stop
The Rain,” is perhaps the most gorgeous and complicated and understated plea
for our nation to get out of Vietnam. Still
I wonder what took us so long.
In the final years of his life, I was
offered jobs, one from each newspaper where Tony had landed. I never took those jobs, in San Antonio,
Chicago or Anchorage or even Kodiak, because I knew that sooner rather than
later Thomas Anthony Durr’s charm and bullshit would catch up with the reality
of his jobs, and I’d be excess and likely unwanted baggage at his last
newspaper spot.
I did not want to be suddenly unemployed in
Kodiak, Alaska. I guess I could have become a king crab fisherman. I’m
surprised Tony didn’t do that. Course, from all accounts, it is a tough job,
“The Deadliest Catch,” as they call it. Hell, I think I’ll add that to his legend
here: As soon as he lost his job at the newspaper in Kodiak, Tony went into the
cold Pacific waters where he spent six months on the Calypso as a Alaskan King
Crabber. Yeah, that’s better.
OK. So perhaps he was a big talker even
more than a big dreamer. I told him early-on – shortly after he came to
Clarksville to be my boss – that I knew he was “full of shit, but I love you
anyway.”
“You’re the only one who has ever said
that to me,” said Tony. “I’m glad you see me for who I am. Call me on it
anytime.”
And, you know, I did on countless phone
calls and in hotels and bars in the towns where he’d brought me for job
interviews. I remember one night he was supposed to meet me at the original
Billy Goat’s Tavern, below the Wrigley Building, in Chicago. I had just landed
in the Windy City for a job interview the next day at The Sun-Times. I was
interviewing to be “Senior Writer,” and my job would be to wander Chicago
streets looking for human stories. It would have been a great gig, but I didn’t
get it. My visit was just a setup. They just brought in one of the editor’s
cronies from elsewhere in the Rupert Murdoch chain. Got an offer to work in the
city room instead, but pay was less than I was making in Clarksville, moving
costs were on me, and I knew Tony likely would be castoff within six months. I
had grown up in Chicago. Too cold to be unemployed.
Anyway, after I checked into the
Sun-Times condo where I stayed, Tony called and said to meet him at Billy Goat’s.
It’s where I was for more than two hours, sitting near the cook whose
“Cheeseburger, cheesburger, cheeseburger” trademark chant had been appropriated
by John Belushi when he was at Chicago’s “Second City,” an improv gig that
eventually got him to “Saturday Night Live,” where he took the “cheeseburger”
guy to a generation. He also played a giant samurai bee and others on SNL, while
learning how to consume speedballs. The latter is what canceled his performing
career one night at the Chateau Marmont in Beverly Hills. One of the things I
remember about that was Wendell Wilson’s almost tears when he heard that Big
John had died. I don’t know why that alleged “newspaperman” had any feelings
for anyone, let alone a drug-addled comedic genius. Wendell was none of those. I was sad, because I saw a taste of myself in
Belushi.
Anyway, even though I was in town for a
night, Tony stood me up for a few hours. “I was walking past the symphony hall
and I saw these two young women in line and I began talking to them,” he said. “They
ended up taking me to the symphony. I left at intermission. Did you get a
cheeseburger?”
This story’s getting too long now, so I
want to get back to the gathering of derelicts in the picture here who danced,
ate and appropriated liquor during the quick farewell party to Tony.
By the way, as I did trek to visit him
in his latest job locations, he also had become a regular visitor to my
apartment and houses in the years before the fatal dose in the Coast Guard
barracks. Hell, one day, I drove him down to the newspaper, where he went to
see the Big Guy. Despite the circumstances of Tony’s departure, it was obvious
Luther loved him. I think they went out to lunch at Austin’s and perhaps
jingled the change in each other’s pockets. Two desperadoes on different
missions.
Tony
and I talked, at least once a week, while looking at the same star, me in
Nashville, him in Alaska. The calls to
and from Diego Garcia were trickier, filled with dead air and static and Tony’s
tales of getting in bar fights with drunken sailors and his melancholy
lookbacks at his failures, mostly the women who punctuated his errant path.
He paid for my gas and a night’s hotel
stay for an interview in San Antonio. I enjoyed the hotel on the River Walk,
but enjoyed the week I slept on an air mattress in Tony’s house much more. “Once
you get here, you can move to Old San Antonio,” he lied, knowing full well that
I was going to decline the $400 a week and no-moving-money offer and just wait
until he played out his string.
Actually, a few weeks before Tony’s
disappearance, my police reporter pal, Rob Dollar, and I (associate
editor/columnist) started calling ourselves “The News Brothers.” It was a
reaction to corporate interference and their almost Chamber of
Commerce-sanctioned news mission and our own determination to say “fuck it” and
go for nothing but the truth.
Tony was around for the birth of the
News Brothers. He wasn’t one. But he enjoyed our spunk. “Tim, you are crazy,
but this News Brothers attitude is great for us and the newspaper. And every
Saturday, you wear that Hawaiian shirt (we had to wear shirts and ties and
pants and underwear during the week). You are to this newspaper what Hawkeye
Pierce was to the 4077th.”
The News Brothers lived on, long after
Tony’s disappearance and we produced classic investigative journalism, blood-and-guts
school board, Rotary and cops coverage and eventually a lead story about the
escape of a pet monkey, the police “manhunt,” followed a few weeks later by my
sad column about the dogs chasing down and eating poor Chico.
Our News Brothers association – several
others joined us in this Quixotic quest – was fertilized by physical exhaustion
caused by non-stop coverage of a beautiful teenage girl’s disappearance, rape
and murder, combined with the same style of journalistic adrenaline jolt from
covering the kidnapping and murder of a football player at the local
university.
Those stories plus nonstop tales of
death on the highways (especially soldiers from nearby Fort Campbell) and other
redneck rapes and mutilations had made us emotional shells. So, as a way to
“reset” our attitudes, I – as the editor in charge on Saturdays and the Sunday
paper – told everyone to wear shades to work one day. Rob offered the advice
that we should call ourselves “The News Brothers.” In addition to the shades,
we began to “dress” like so many derelicts, with hats, second-hand store
clothing and, as noted earlier, distribute exploding cigarettes and rubber
vomit when it seemed like we all needed a lift. Sometimes Rob and I brought
black licorice sticks to distribute.
There is a whole book about those days,
“When Newspapers Mattered: The News Brothers and their Shades of Glory.” It’s fun in parts, and sadder in others. And
the death of local daily journalism is the end-prediction, 35 years before the
presses stopped and a pathetic billionaire’s Twitter and the Chinese-spy ring’s
TikTok became the main distributors of news.
Of course, there is that movie that we
filmed as we “searched” for the “little, short asshole,” etc. A lot of guys
partook. Rob “Death News Brother” and I “Flapjacks” wrote it and paid for it
and Jerry “Chuckles” Manley and Jim “Flash” Lindgren formed the rest of the core
of the corps. John “Street” Staed, Ricky “Dumbo” Moore, Reverend Larry McCormack,
StrawBilly Fields and Danny “I am Reagan” Adkins joined us when their wives or
pet snakes would let them. “Flapjacks: The Motion Picture” – which featured many
of these derelicts in discarded clothing – played to rave reviews on November
12, 1982, and contributed many, many piles of bills to local charities.
It ought to be noted that the opening action scene showed The News Brothers, including Tony Durr and StrawBilly Fields, dancing like drunken fools with the rest of us up a ramp from an alley in downtown Clarksville. Sam and Dave’s “Soul Man” blared from a boombox.
It was the News Brothers’ arrival at Tony’s
farewell party, that I had planned, to coincide with his last shift at the
newspaper.
I had asked my friend, Jerry Uetz—who
owned Austin’s, the restaurant where Tennessee Williams sought refuge and
“Flap” had admired O.J.’s use of steak knives to eat ice cream —to stay open
for an after-work party, beginning at midnight, after Tony finished his last
shift and hours before he fled to Texas.
Jerry Uetz used to run the best restaurant in Clarksville, years ahead of what eventually became a downtown revival. He also always has been a good friend to Flapjacks and loaned him his restaurant on the night the News Brothers said goodbye to Tony Durr. Tony's long-gone, but four decades later, Jerry's still going strong. He may be retired from the restaurant business, but he's a helluva great guy. During his time in Clarksville, Flap ate at Jerry's Austin's Restaurant regularly, even taking double-murderer O.J. Simpson there once. I think I also took John Wooden, "the Wizard of Westwood," there when I hosted him for much of a day. A friend of mine, Tennessee Williams, once sought refuge at Austin's after terrorizing the staff at a bank three doors down Franklin Street. Long story but it involves a mask, a sword and a loud proclamation "Reaganomics." The police then interrupted his ice cream dessert. Photo is from Jerry's Facebook page.
Not only did Jerry Uetz allow the joint to stay open, as soon as I got to the back door, he gave me the keys and told me to lock up when we left. He stayed for an hour and hugged Tony and me. At dawn, a few living News Brothers rolled out of Austin’s, me locking the door. Rob and Chuckles both double-checking to make sure I hadn’t fucked up. Tony had left around 3 and supposedly was enroute to San Antonio.
The rest of us showed back up around
noon to clean up Jerry’s restaurant and bar, only to be greeted by this kind
gent, who had already cleaned it up and was eating what had been left of our
potato salad. He did not even mention
the fact that when our own booze – a few cases of beer and some scotch – ran
out, we helped ourselves from his bar.
“I like this,” he said of the potato
salad. “We’ll call it even.”
Jerry, a great gentleman, and I crossed paths
again when I later visited in San Antonio to interview for the job on Tony’s
staff. I was greeted by Jerry Uetz, who at that time was opening a restaurant
in that Texas city. Jerry insisted on taking the whole crew out to dinner.
Eventually, he returned to
Anyway, as noted, Tony left in the
middle of the party and began his drive to “San Antone.” StrawBilly Fields also
left the paper around this same time, mainly because he had no one to take him
golfing when he should have been working. Tony spent more time teaching
StrawBilly how to hit a nine-iron than he did editing Billy’s scattershot copy.
Billy went on to run the corps of East Nashville Good Ole Boys who had a pistol
grip on Music City’s tourism, politics and finances and party buses.
But we didn’t throw Billy a party on
his last newspaper night. Refused to, in fact. Most of us didn’t even know he
was gone until someone asked, “Whatever happened to Billy Fields? Wasn’t he
around here when we began our movie?” Everyone looked at the almost-busted desk
chair that Billy had occupied, shrugged and got back to work. (Billy reminded me
later that when he left for P.R. in Podunk, Ky., everyone simply applauded and
called the lovably large fella “a hack and a whore.”)
So, the picture of the derelicts and
whoremongers and drunks (pre-beverages), was shot on Tony’s final day at The
Leaf-Chronicle. I’m not even sure he was supposed to be in the building at that
point.
Yes, we went to work in those clothes.
Laughed at death and exploding cigarettes for 12 hours. Lighted farts and I drank
40 cups of coffee.
We took Tony with us down to the Royal
York Hotel (flophouse) coffee shop, where I chain-smoked, Rob fiddled with his
Kools, Jerry Manley ate pancakes and smoked Virginia Slims and Tony and Skipper
tried to one-up each other in lies about conquest on the mattresses and
linoleum floors and beds of nails of the world.
"Death" and "Flap" -- Rob Dollar and I --loved to take our old pal, Skipper, out of his flophouse and into the world of sober, after-hours reflection. Skipper always thought Tony was full of shit. It takes one to know one. I loved Skipper, who I first befriended one hot Clarksville day when I sat down next to him on a bench outside the Royal York Hotel. It was hot, boy was it hot. He's dead now, too. Most of my friends are, I guess.
I still miss Skipper, who like most of
my friends, is dead. He did come to the farewell party, but we had to walk him
back to the hotel at about 2. I think Danny Adkins was his escort, since no one
would trust me, Rob or Chuckles with the safety of a 70-year-old World War II
fighter pilot and rodeo cowboy.
And Tony, well, if I’m outside in the
dark, I look at the star at the tip of The Big Dipper and I say “I miss you. I love
you still, Tony. And yes, doctors have told me I am nuts.”
Then I just laugh.
The Durr era in Clarksville was very short, but it did help Flapjacks become the leader of a newsroom and helped with the spark behind the Tim Ghianni and Rob Dollar creation "The News Brothers." Many tales from Ghianni and Dollar's time in newsrooms as well as adventures involving the rest of those rascals are told in this book.
(All of the selections in this blog are copyrighted by Timothy Champ Ghianni)
