Kris Kristofferson's words helped make Nashville my home, his friendship warmed my soul; For 88 years, his love and laughter and poetry made the world a better place. Now he's passed the rainbow

 

Kris Kristofferson and I sing "The Silver-Tongued Devil and I" outside a building that occupies the site of the old Tally-Ho Tavern. This was in 2003, when I asked the great singer-songwriter and human being to join me for a stroll down his Memory Lane on an even-then-unrecognizable Music City Row. Johnny Kristofferson, then 16, took this picture for us.  

The party's all over
Drink up and go home.
It's too late to love her
And leave her alone.

Epitaph (Black and Blue) is evidence of how Kris Kristofferson took personal heartache and soul-numbing regret and faded-jeans despair and seldom-success and turned it to poetry.

He sliced open his heart and shared it with the world in his songs, like this particular one about a lover and a friend who died with a needle in her arm, figurative and literal. 

This song, literally, came to Kris and his wingman “Funky” Donnie Fritts, the Alabama Leaning Man, when they shared the quiet, after all of the farewells and tears, after their friend Janis Joplin “died all alone.”

Janis was the best female rock singer ever (I am hyperbolic, yet truthful). One of her greatest accomplishments was turning Kris’ windshield wipers-punctuated, harp-driven tale of loneliness and lost souls in a dark, wet night, “Me and Bobby McGee,” into a Top 40 (when there was such a thing) radio classic.

Kris -- with the Leaning Man’s musical help -- turned his heartbreak, Janis’ self-destructive waste, Funky Donnie’s bluesy accompaniment, and his own “why couldn’t we have saved her from herself and the world” melancholy and turned it into “Epitaph (Black and Blue),” a song that is one most people skip over.  To say it’s one of his best is opinion only. How many songs qualify in that ranking?

Fittingly, “Epitaph” is the final song, the 10^th track, from his breakthrough album, The Silver-Tongued Devil and I, that proved this student of William Blake’s recommended life of excess, an admirer and by then a friend and student of John R. Cash, was not to be ignored.

He was, with his words, changing the vocabulary of country music. Yes, there were the beer-soaked pickup lines at The Tally-Ho Tavern – my own favorite watering hole a half-plus century back.

There also was the lover’s lament – “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again),” the contradictions offered by beliefs in Christ, peace and patriotism in “Good Christian Soldier,” the love, innocence and subtle melancholy of “Jody and the Kid.” Janis’ death, mourned in “Epitaph” is revisited in “Billy Dee” – “yesterday they found him on the floor of his hotel, reachin’ for that needle arm that drove him down to hell.”  He took his “why?” reaction to Janis’ death and used it to populate the tale of promise snatched away by the world.

 It may be his soul was bigger than a body's oughta be

singin' songs and bringin' laughter to the likes of you and me

cause the world he saw was sadder than the one he hoped to find

but it wasn't near as lonesome as the one he left behind

yesterday they found him on the floor of his hotel

reachin' towards the needle, Lord, that drove him down to hell

some folks called it suicide, others blame the speed

but we all called it crucified when Billy Dee O.D.'d

  And there is “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33” about life, ambition and disappointment. This and the title track are the two with which I most identify.

 “See him wasted on the sidewalk in his jacket and his jeans, wearing yesterday’s misfortunes like a smile. Once he had a future of money, love and dreams, which he spent like they was goin’ out of style….”  

It was that album, his second with his The Border Lords band, that announced to the Baby Boomers -- the folks who digested every word by Dylan and Lennon and McCartney, every wail of Clapton’s and Hendrix’s guitars, every tale of debauchery and resulting conquest by Richards and Jagger … well, you get the idea – that there was a voice as complex on Nashville’s 17^th Avenue South.   And it was accompanied by Dobro players like Uncle Josh Graves or the flattop picking of Mac Wiseman.

I bought that album in 1971 at the same store and perhaps on the same shopping trip that I bought Led Zeppelin’s first (and by far, best) album. A year or so before I bought Steppenwolf’s debut there.  Everything by Dylan. Of course, Beatles and Stones and Sly and Who, Simon & Garfunkel and Airplane, Dead and Messenger Service.  Hell, even Vanilla Fudge and Iron Butterfly and Moby Grape ended up on my turntable.

But suddenly, there was this voice telling -- not in psychedelic wordplay but in plain, simple language turned to Blake-style poetry -- tales of misery and dreams and a cussing kid kicking a can down lonely 17^th Avenue South on a hungover Sunday Morning.

I smoked my brain the night before on cigarettes and songs that I’d been pickin’.

That song of a regretful and quiet Sunday was on his self-titled first album (later titled “Me and Bobby McGee” to capitalize on Janis’ impact).

In that album, that includes “Bobby McGee,” by the way, there’s a wicked slash at American middle-class hypocrisy – told in a Salvation Army Band growl -- titled “Blame it on the Stones.

Father's at the office, nightly working all the time
Trying to make the secretary change her little mind
And it bothers him to read about so many broken homes
Blame it on those Rolling Stones.

 In the wake of Kris’ death last Saturday, September 28, 2024, a host of expert music critics and even more heartsick fans have weighed in on the guy’s importance, even though most had ignored him in the last decade or two.

Early in the 2000s -- actually the night after I was told the newspaper was "buying me out," I attended a Kris Kristofferson "residency" at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. Kris and I were just chatting, probably about corporate cruelty. Great photographer John Partipilo shot this photo. 

In this little piece, I’m only a human being, a Boomer, of hand-rolled, hoisting Mad Dog vintage, who listened to this man with stubble-bearded wisdom and values. I’m no music nor social scholar, I’m a normal guy who discovered Kris’ music as tonic for my own long nights and my real fears of being drafted back in 1971. So much of this stuff, from the 1960s and 1970s was crafted at 1717 17^th Avenue South – a long-gone, rotting, redneck tenement-like apartment building where my friend the Rev. Will Campbell told me the floors were dirt, even the upstairs ones.  They also were so flimsy, Will – a walking contradiction as a civil activist Baptist preacher, liberal leftist and kind old man – told me he always feared his upstairs neighbor Kris would come right through the ceiling at the end of a long shift serving and drinking beer at The Tally-Ho.  

Of course, The Tally-Ho Tavern – later The Country Boy – was actually a character in Kris’ tales. It is where The Silver-Tongued Devil fuels his seductive nature with a bottle of beer or two.

Kris actually worked at that tavern – now a Curb building is in that spot – and told me many times about how he was paid something like $50 a week and all he could drink.  “I came out ahead on that,” he’d say, with that charming laugh. It may have been $100 a week. I am just visiting my head for this tale, not doing any research. If I miss a lyric or two, a year or two, a street or two, that’s only because my mental transmission falters with grief.

Kris long-ago moved from Nashville. But he kept coming back. Waylon, Cash, Vince Matthews, Billy Ray Reynolds, Captain Midnight all were here to greet him.  Now all are dead. One of his few remaining close friends from those days is Chris Gantry, who, when I told him how sorry I was that his old friend had succumbed to the physical and mental maladies of the last many years said: “At least now he’s free.”

On one of Kris’ visits to Nashville, after Johnny Cash died, he and his family stuck around awhile for a planned tribute special. He’d not been to Music City Row (as he called it) during the daylight in the 30 years since he moved West – to Malibu and Maui.  Swimming pools. Movie stars … as his friends Lester and Earl sang.

I asked if he’d like to spend his Sunday with me, walking down the Row, resurrecting memories of what had been the Hollywood of country (and some rock and blues) recording. I was surprised, kind of, that he took me up on the idea.

“Can I bring my son, Johnny, along?” he asked.

It was a Sunday Afternoon Coming Down, filled with comrades’ laughter, sure, but always downcast by reality.

 “I wish the old stuff was still here,” or something like that, he said, as we walked what are the various Music Squares East, West, etc. – the “identities” given to 16^th and 17^th avenues south and their cross streets when the city began to bastardize history for the sake of tourism and to make way for condominiums where historic homes and recording studios once stood. Hell, my friend Chet Atkins’ office and the house it was in, the building where the Nashville Sound was fertilized, didn’t even survive the front-loaders and swinging ball-busters.   

In that civic effort, a massive statue of nude dancers, penises and vaginas fully exposed, was installed in the middle of a new roundabout in a spot where one of Hank Williams’ homes had stood, neglected. But now gone.  No one in Nashville now would miss it, of course. And they would have little idea of who Hank Williams was or that Kris did his best to bring that troubled son of Alabama’s musical grit intact and even push past those honky-tonk heartache boundaries.

“Look, Ethel, they’re nekkid!” hooted Kris, imitating the character in an old Ray Stevens’ Shriner song, as we rolled past the massive statue I refer to as Nudica. It’s impressive, but has little to do with three chords and the truth.     

Of course, I wrote a long story about that day spent with Kris on Music City Row. I was joyous for the pleasant surprise that was offered by having Kris and Lisa’s son, Johnny, along for the ride, and the walk.  Johnny, 16 then, had no knowledge of his dad’s history on these streets. Johnny was and remains a great young man, hatched and raised in the glory that was Maui. (“We are safe, the fires are on the other side of the island,” Lisa told me when I called after Maui’s “main city,” Lahaina, disappeared in flames a year ago.)

Johnny made a video of that excursion as his dad and I walked and talked, as Kris reflected and allowed slight melancholy for what already was lost – and this was more than 20 years ago – of the history of Music City Row.

Johnny wanted to share this bit of his dad’s history in a class project for his school not far from the Kristofferson homeplace on the edge of a volcano on Maui.

Outside the Curb building, in the space where once stood The Tally-Ho, Kris and I looked at each other, nodded and put our arms over our shoulders and sang “The Silver-Tongued Devil and I”:

I took myself down to the Tally-Ho Tavern to buy me a bottle of beer
I sat me down by a tender young maiden whose eyes were as dark as her hair
And as I was searchin' from bottle to bottle for somethin' unfoolish to say
That silver-tongued devil just slipped from the shadows and smilingly stole her away
I said hey little girl don't you know he's the devil he's everything that I ain't
Hidin' intentions of evil under the smile of a saint
All he's good for is gettin' in trouble and shifting his share of the blame
And some people swear he's my double and some even say we're the same
But the silver tongued devil's got nothing to lose I'll only live till I die
We take our own chances and pay our own dues the silver-tongued devil and I…

 Johnny sent me a copy of the videotape. Fortunate for everyone’s ears is that he didn’t record our duet.  Kris’ voice fits his songs. My voice sounds best when I’m trying to scare raccoons away from my garbage bin.  Johnny did take a slightly out-of-focus photo of the restless duet.

There were many more days and evenings with Kris (and usually his family was there, too) for the next couple of decades.

Once, backstage at the Ryman, Kris and Lisa said I was one of their favorite things about visiting Nashville.  Perhaps hyperbole? But I know when I got to spend time with them, those were some of my favorite things about living in my world.

When I wanted a picture of Kris and Lisa for my book -- Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes -- Lisa Kristofferson got their son, Kris Kristofferson Junior to shoot one, ASAP, and send it to me. This shot was taken two years ago at a ski resort where the family had gathered. I will always love the Kristofferson family.

One time, in 2005, they were here to promote a racehorse feel-good movie, Dreamer. The interviews were taking place in his room at The Hermitage Hotel, but mine was scheduled in the dining room, giving him a more-casual, friendly respite and time for a few cups of coffee.

I told the greeter at the dining room that Kris was going to be down there in a few minutes and he and his publicist would be looking for me.  “When he gets here, I’ll just be the old man sitting at that table way back in the corner,” I said. The table was well out of eyeshot from the dining room entrance.

Five minutes later, big hands gripped my shoulders from behind. “Hello, Old Man,” Kris said, with a typical broad laugh.

“Hello, Young Man,” I replied, as I signaled to the waiter that he’d better bring us a full coffee pot. I had trimmed down to maybe a dozen cups a day from my 40-cups-a-day heyday.  And I knew Kris liked his coffee bold and black or in a glass over ice, with a wedge of lime.

There were other stories I wrote about him, about his music and his movies. There were more times when there was no story, just two old friends talking about life and family.

Sometimes, those visits turned more into talks with Lisa, as Kris conducted movie star business. That was fine, as I came not only to love Lisa but admire her deeply for taking a man whose fast-paced life was directed toward an early grave and turned him into a happy adult, a great fellow and friend. The guy who worshiped above all his family and his home. And, obviously, his music.  Lisa said Suzanne and I made a perfect couple, perhaps because she sensed the similarities of the women’s challenges and triumphs.

The most foolish I felt during our friendship was when word came to the guys on my entertainment writing staff that Ray Price had died.  That is big news in Music City, and so I jumped in with chief music writer Peter Cooper and entertainment columnist Brad Schmitt to work on getting reaction so we could put a story together for the front page. (Peter, by the way was a treasure, my best friend in Nashville, who seemingly had a world of “almost-best friends,” including Kris. He’s been dead almost two years.  Stupid.)

I always chipped in on those deadline obituaries, since it is hectic to track folks down. I was entertainment editor, and we shared a “shotgun” approach to quote-getting: Just keep calling and asking and see who you can get. In the next 40 minutes if not sooner.

I told the guys I’d get Kris, whose “For the Good Times’’ was turned into a forever classic by Ray, who I was fortunate to know. Kris regarded it as one of his life’s great achievements. So did Ray.

I called and Lisa answered. They were up in Toronto, Canada, touring. They were out for a seven-mile run, so I told her what had happened, and she said Kris would call back when they got to the hotel, and he caught his breath and composure.

Kris called within minutes, and he was both breathless and teary as I filled him in on the widespread national news reports about the death of his friend.

 Then, within a half-hour, those news reports were rescinded. The Cherokee Cowboy perhaps was not dead, after all.

 Weary of the “is he or isn’t he?” I called Ray’s house in Texas. His wife, Janie, told me Ray, who was on his deathbed, was not dead yet. My muddied memory has me talking to the Cherokee Cowboy on the phone, offering encouragement, at Janie’s urging and with her help.  Perhaps it didn’t happen.

Then I immediately called Kris and Lisa to tell them their friend was still breathing.

“We already sent flowers,” said Kris.

I said I was sorry for the fake news that made he and Lisa send their condolence floral arrangement, and he thanked me. “Nah, it’s better this way. He can get the flowers while he’s living.’’

I don’t need to rattle on about other encounters, other interviews, other chats.

I guess I should add that he was an enthusiast of my writing: “Tim is a wordsmith unlike any other,” he wrote as a Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes’ cover blurb after he’d read advance copy. “We’ve shared some good times together, and he encapsulates the experiences as if they were yesterday. A truly gifted writer and friend.”  

I do need to add though that Kris is one of the main reasons I’ve spent my half-century as a journalist in the Nashville area.

Once my future was shiny as the seats of my pants are today, till old mother luck and all her daughters started ducking me.

 I told Kris that song, “I May Smoke Too Much,” seemed close to the bone for me. I also laughed when I asked if he meant to have an “f” rather than a “d” on “ducking.” He laughed back at me.

I’d become a disciple of his music, and especially his writing, while I was still in college. My folks moved from the Chicago area to Nashville after my junior year in college.

The thought of spending my last undergraduate summer in Nashville rather than drinking beer in the leftfield bleachers at Wrigley Field was tempered by one thing: I was going to make sure I met Kris Kristofferson, the guy who sang songs that narrated my life so far.

He's a poet, he's a picker
He's a prophet, he's a pusher
He's a pilgrim and a preacher, and a problem when he's stoned
He's a walkin' contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction,
Takin' ev'ry wrong direction on his lonely way back home.

 I didn’t stalk him, although I did call the number I found in the phone book, where I also found his address.  (Phone books were huge volumes that annually updated phone numbers and addresses, for those of you who never saw one.)

But I did begin taking myself down to the Tally-Ho Tavern to buy me a bottle of beer. And I wandered Music Row, where I met a lot of guys with guitars. I did watch as folks like Billy Ray Reynolds, Charlie Daniels, Funky Donnie Fritts, Billy Swan and Kris picked and sang at the picnic tables behind the bar. I didn’t interrupt them. I had nothing good to add.

And I went to Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, had long talks with Tootsie and drank at least one beer. Forty years later, I joined Kris and Lisa at Tootsie’s where bar owners installed a copper or brass plaque in the floor, honoring Kris as the first member of their “Floor of Fame.’’

He said a few generous words, then climbed down from the stage, asking me if I thought his words were OK.  I patted his back with approval.

I don’t go to Lower Broadway anymore. Drunken bachelorettes in crotch-exposing flimsy dresses and conventioneers and tourists stumbling and barfing really isn’t my scene. So, I have no idea if there have been more plaques added to the floor at Tootsie’s.   

It was in that old lounge that I began to listen to the musicians, like Lefty, E.T., Porter and the rest talk about their misadventures while they savored a beer or two between sets across the alley, when the Opry was at the Ryman full-time.

He has tasted good and evil in your bedrooms and your bars, and he's traded in tomorrow for today, runnin' from his devils Lord and reachin' for the stars and losin' all he's loved along the way ....

 The love for the city that was the setting for that song about the fellow who begins the first verse "wasted on the sidewalk" (in a bit of the song toward the top of this ramble) –  “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33,” which I viewed biographically -- was enhanced by a chance encounter with Bobby Bare and Shel Silverstein that summer of 1972. They helped me steal 1,000 pounds of bricks from Fifth Avenue South, outside a peep show. That story is in my book, Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes, and it may, perhaps, have been that theft that solidified this town as my life’s destination. Course, Kris’ words were the magnet.

In recent years, Kris has been fading.  In 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, he and Lisa retired from constant touring and filmmaking and settled in at the house at the edge of a volcano in Maui.

There have been occasional appearances. A couple of months ago, he sang with Rosanne Cash at Willie’s televised 90^th birthday tribute.  He appeared happy. Withered. Not well.

After that, as I often have done, I called the home on the edge of the volcano to check in with Lisa. Most times, I don’t get a voice, just a message box, and I leave words of love and admiration for Kris, for her and her beautiful spirit and for his family.

When I learned Kris was gone, that he had died Saturday, surrounded by his family, I was sad. But I was grateful he was with those whose lives made his own worth giving up evenings at the Tally-Ho or Tootsie’s or waltzing with the stars on Hollywood Boulevard to stay home with family. Reading books, picking his guitar.  Singing songs and bringing laughter.

“He is happy,” Lisa told me several months ago. “He sits here and sings his songs.”

One of his favorites was “Here Comes That Rainbow Again,” an O. Henry-meets-John Steinbeck tale, a look at the sometimes-hidden goodness of the human spirit.

She sent me a video showing a smiling Kris, out in the yard in Maui, looking for both ends of the rainbow.     

And the daylight was heavy with thunder
With the smell of the rain on the wind
Ain't it just like a human?
Here comes that rainbow again

 Now The Pilgrim of another song, myth and friendship, has found out what’s on the other side.

But if this world keeps right on turnin' for the better or the worse,
And all he ever gets is older and around

From the rockin' of the cradle to the rollin' of the hearse,

The goin' up was worth the comin' down

 I could go on and quote Kris songs until the day after tomorrow. As a younger man, my old pal, Jerry Manley, who is not well, and I would “entertain” at parties by singing from Kris’ songbook. I also did a mean Joe Cocker, but that’s another story.

 I didn’t know way back then that the man who wrote what seemed in many ways to be the story of my own life would become a friend.

 And I didn’t meet him, really, until early in this century, a friendship born first by an interview about music and movies and concreted with a long walk on an uncommonly sunny fall day on Music City Row after Johnny Cash died.

 Now Kris is gone.

  The party’s all over.

Drink up and go home….  

 

 

 

 

Well, it's all right, even if the sun don't shine, because my beloved comrade, Chuckles, is riding his bed while going to the end of the line

 

Jerry "Chuckles News Brother" is doing all right as he sleeps all day in his home that is carrying him toward the end of the line.

I've emotionally missed my weekly/twice-weekly visits to see Jerry during the nine months he lived in a room with Milford/Bob in the Memory Care Ward a few miles from my humble home and office (AKA "Da Basement”).

I’ve even had to explain to my friend, Quincy, the Shell Station manager, that he no longer needs to stock the Diet SunDrop. He had special ordered it for me so, during the nine months I visited Jerry in the cuckoo’s nest, I had his favorite beverage – and some peanut butter crackers or somesuch – to give him a break from cranberry juice and institutional slop.

When Quincy ran out of Diet SunDrop, he suggested some of his vintage Diet Mountain Dew for Jerry. He liked the change. Me, I wouldn’t ever buy any of that swill for old Flapjacks. A guy has to be fucking nuts to like that stuff.

Quincy asked if my friend in the nursing home is dead. “No,” I said. “He’s only sleeping,” but not in the nursing home.

“Good. Those damn places are worse than prisons,” Quincy said. I do continue my long-standing tradition of topping off the gas tank on the 1985 Saab at Pump No. 8, and I continue to get pissed if someone, especially anyone with Alabama plates, blocks my pump.

I say “Alabama” plates, but they could be from any state or country, even my neighborhood. I am an intense creature of habit.  Don’t fuck with my pump.

I don’t go into details with Quincy, but Jerry was evicted from the nursing home for uncommon violent behavior: At least twice, he got mad at Bob, who was sitting in Jerry's chair, and he picked him up and threw him to the floor. That is one of the sad results of dementia or Alzheimer's.

Milford/Bob probably misses me, too, since for some reason I could speak his garbled language and make him laugh. Seventy-five pounds, dripping wet, I’ll bet 250-plus-pound Jerry had little trouble doing one of those big-time wrestling body slams or pile-drivers with the little guy.

Actually, it was not that violent, apparently. Milford/Bob wasn’t hurt. But he was frightened as he looked up at the fat guy in the reclining chair where he’d been sitting up until then.

Jerry had nowhere to go but home after they threw his fat ass to the curb (he had similar treatment 14 years ago at The Tennessean.)

 So his nephew, Steven, took custody of him and hauled him to the house Chuckles owns halfway between the edge of nowhere and a pile of dead cows and a slave cemetery, in too-rural Tennessee. I would not go out there unless I had a white sheet in the back seat, so I could blend in with the citizenry.  Actually, I made that part up, and I will, perhaps, drop in and see him sometime. I’ll need my Dad’s WWII MP’s billy club handy, though.  

Even if I wanted to go, I’d have to ask for directions, and I’m not sure Jerry knows where he is or who he is.

The first thing he’ll ask me is where I been. And I don’t know. Haven’t for a long time.

 Steven, had been living in the house with Uncle Chuckles for years prior to his lockup in the looney bin, and he voluntarily decided to turn his life upside down by taking Jerry back home and caring for him. He was the only family member willing to make that commitment.

"It's been better than I thought it would be," said Chef Steven this morning, September 11, 2024, when I called him at the restaurant where he works.

"So far, he just sleeps all day," said Steven, who rousts old Chuck when he gets home from work, when they eat and watch movies together until bedtime.  They used to enjoy beer, whiskey and more, but I promise, after being around him for most of a year, such activity would find him face down on the floor.  And I’ll bet Steven can’t pick him up.

Steven does worry what will happen if Jerry ever decides to escape his snug bed during the daytime and wander out into the living room, wondering "Where I been?"

"I may have to get someone to come in during the days, then," said Steven, adding that if necessary, he'll quit his job to care for his uncle.

That's a pretty big burden for a younger man to bear, but he loves his uncle and does not want him back in the looney bin. Manley blood apparently carries with it large responsibilities down there in too-rural southern Tennessee or wherever the hell the shack is.

Jerry used to have a dog down there, with Steven. “His name was ‘Snow’ or ‘Frosty’ or ‘Snowy’ or something like that,” Jerry used to guess. “I can’t remember. White dog. Nice dog.” I hope the dog is still there to provide company if Jerry ever gets out of bed in the daytime.

By the way, I'm sure Milford/Bob, who I miss since my visits to the nursing home have ended, is glad Jerry's gone, too. Now he’s got two chairs he can pee himself on, while riding and clicking his false teeth, remembering his days as a ribbon-winning horseman.  Those ribbons decorated the walls.  There was plenty of room for Jerry to add his own decorations, but he never could remember what was important to him. Believe me, I asked.

Jerry is shown in a photo here riding on a Clarksville Fire Department truck to the world premiere of "Flapjacks: The Motion Picture" on November 12, 1982.

Rob Dollar -- aka "Death News Brother" -- and I had arranged for our arrival on the fire truck, since the Firemen's Christmas Toy Drive was among the beneficiaries of the less than $3,703 we raised for charity during our all-night showing of the movie at The Roxy. We also saved The Roxy, but that’s another story.

Rob and I also gave money to the Police Department Widows and Children's fund. The police participated in our Bullitt-like chase up and down the hills of the Queen City and they also "arrested us" at the end of the premiere to make sure all of the money got out to safety -- they kept it at the Clarksville Police HQ until the next day.

There also is a part in the movie where police, unaware that we were just making a movie,  pulled us over, stole our props and beat the shit out of us. “You don’t do things like that in Clarksville, boys,” they screamed as their billy clubs made Jerry cry.  Well, the beating part is untrue. Jerry’s crying has more truth, since we were riding in the back of his old, orange Datsun mini-pickup when the sirens and blue lights came at us.  And the thunder rolled.

The final beneficiary of our charity film showing was The Mustard Seed, a Goodwill-type food and clothing agency that was on Third Street, across from the Courthouse. It also is where we bought all of our costumes during the film shoot that lasted a few months of Saturday early mornings.

Of course, I remain "Flapjacks," the title character of our little character study. Jim Lindgren ("Flash") was the fourth primary News Brother, and he's in Sweden today. It is a family ancestry hunt, as Flash, like so many of us wonders where he been.

I think of Jerry often. I miss him, even being with him while he made little sense and had no clue as to whether it was day or night or where he been for months.

I love the guy. And, now that it’s been a month since he was thrown out of the nursing home for unseemly behavior, I really do wonder if he remembers I was with him all of those mornings. And the fact it doesn't matter to anyone but me. Does he even remember who I am? (At least I do, and I'm a pretty decent guy, most times.)

“Maybe somewhere down the road aways, he’ll think of me and wonder where I am these days.  Maybe somewhere down the road when somebody plays Purple Haze.”

That’s not my quote. It’s from The Traveling Wilburys. I thought of it while I was writing this little tale today and pondering Jerry’s life and future. My own, for that matter.

The name of the song is “End of The Line.” I play it every day.  Just in case.

 

 

James Earl Jones' death sparks memories of the night a Black Panther stomped my foot in a theater filled with his comrades as Irish priest laughs

 The clumsy Black Panther, in full regalia, accidentally stomped on my foot in the front row of the theater balcony. 

I was the one who apologized. And an Irish priest laughed at me, as we surveyed both levels of the theater, filled with Panthers in full uniforms and the White priest who was their spiritual adviser.

 Of course, there were those three White kids who had somehow crashed their obvious Black Panther New Year's Eve celebration, thanks to a car malfunction. We were already in our seats when the Panthers marched into the theater, in formation, most smiling, looking forward to the film. I can't claim a lack of apprehension.

That event was part of the first thought, a memory, really, that came to me when I heard that James Earl Jones had died. I've told the story before, and sometimes, as life's haze comes and goes, it varies. But it is very true, regardless.

It was New Year's Eve in 1970, when we had a bit of car trouble just south of the Loop in downtown Chicago.

My brother, Eric, our friend Gene Chapman, and I were going downtown to take part in the State-Lake celebration welcoming 1971, when something went wrong with the faded-bronze Mustang with the cheap sparkling wine on ice in the trunk.

Looking for help, we lurched south on State Street, getting into an increasingly sketchy section of town, when we finally spotted a Shell station -- back then there were mechanics, with full-scale bays and lifts at every gas station. This was long before corporations decided it would be cheaper for them if we'd pump our own gas.

A couple of mechanics took a quick look at the car. Nothing serious, we were told, but it would be a couple of hours. So we decided to leave the car and go catch a movie while it was repaired. The closest theater, I can't remember the name, was playing "The Great White Hope," the fictionalized account of the struggles and triumphs of great boxing champ Jack Johnson.

The movie house was just a couple blocks .. or maybe a dozen ... toward downtown.

We'd been wanting to see the movie, as I was a great boxing and social justice "fan" (probably not the right word, but this is one-take writing), so Muhammad Ali was one of my heroes. There were slight parallels between my favorite boxer and James Earl Jones' character, Jack Jefferson. And the play that begat the movie was loosely based on the life of great and controversial boxing legend, Jack Johnson.

It was the perfect tale for the Muhammad Ali era.

This night south of the Loop, as we stepped cautiously through territory where we were unfamiliar and obviously alien, came three years after Ali was stripped of his championship title for refusing to be drafted. "Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10 thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville (his hometown) are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?" he asked. He lost peak fighting years before Americans, Black and White, and most -- even veterans -- realized stripping a guy of his title doesn't mean war is over (if you want it). The penalty was unjust.

I spent time with Ali on three different occasions over the years, one of the fortunes of being a newspaperman, back when newspapers existed.

But this little, top-of-my head, one-take anecdote sparked by the death of a great actor isn't about Muhammad Ali.

It's about James Earl Jones who died September 9, 2024, and the night a half-century-plus before when he became one of my favorite actors, even though I was in a room filled with Black Panthers, one of whom had accidentally crushed my right toe with his combat boots.

Jones' Jack Jefferson was, as noted, based on the tale of Jack Johnson, the incredible Black prizefighter in the early quarter of the last century. The first Black heavyweight champion, he was an empowering symbol of freedom shoved in Jim Crow's face. Promoters searched high and low for someone to beat him in the ring. Not just any someone, but a White guy. .. "The Great White Hope" of the title.

James J. Jeffries, a former and very White champ, was lured by society and racist sportswriters to come out of retirement to be that hope. He threw in the towel in the 15th round. The controversial Black guy won. Violence erupted among the races, in celebration and in denial.

It was hubris, his flaunting his love of White women and the Mann Act that eventually did Jack Johnson/Jack Jefferson in. I'm not going to go into details, as you should read about Johnson yourselves or at least see James Earl Jones portray that towering and glowering and flamboyant and violent figure in the fictionalized account.

The film scored poorly at the box office and received less-than-lukewarm reviews. But I found it amazing when I watched it on that New Year's Eve with hundreds of Black Panthers, including the one who stomped on my foot to set the tone for the night.

The celluloid tale of a Black man dictating his own course, generally unbowed by Jim Crow, probably wasn't really successful because a lot of White people had yet to come to terms with Muhammad Ali and we still were far from a nation of equality. Are we there now? You decide. The almost universal love for Ali is perhaps an indicator. And so are the colors of skin in pop culture, network news and in politics.

I don't know the sociological answers nor claim any Carnak the Magnificent insight.

I'm talking, after all, about a movie. And a dead actor.

Yes, it was a controversial movie, and I didn't like being stomped by the Black Panther.

But the film pretty much launched James Earl Jones to the point where his death leads the network news. Of course, it's not just his acting. His voice, that of Darth Vader, Alex Haley and Mufassa in "The Lion King," also contributed to the love of this actor. And, of course, there was his dignity that truly was the best part of "Field of Dreams."

Who has been untouched by his portrayal of a blind former ballplayer in "The Sandlot?"

He was a Black face who helped Slim Pickens end the world in "Dr. Strangelove."

Back to "The Great White Hope" 54 years ago, as seen in a theater filled with uniformed Black Panthers and one Irish priest and three young, White guys. 

It was a tale of discrimination and of Black empowerment, all wrapped up in fight scenes and love scenes and hate scenes.

I can't remember the name of the theater. And while I cheered for the Jones character for real, I likely would have at least feigned support for him as I sat in the middle of this well-dressed army.

I remember how moved I was by the performance. I remember ambiguous feelings toward the massive Black fighter and how the movie ended. That's as it should be, by the way.

I've seen "The Great White Hope'' a few times since, and I love James Earl Jones' Hollywood breakthrough performance. I'll always look forward to hearing his voice and seeing his majestic screen presence as long as movies exist.

But when he died, I thought not about Mufasa or Vader, but about my seat in the front of the balcony, and the Panther who accidentally stomped on my foot as he went for popcorn.

"Excuse me," I said. "I'm sorry."

The Panther smiled, knowing that I was not the one to apologize, but I'm sure knowing why I did.

The Irish priest slapped me on the knee and laughed.

The big Black Panther returned with his popcorn and took great care not to stomp on my foot.

"I'm sorry," he said. "Don't want to step on you again."

"Flash" is disappointed, I'm drinking Diet Mountain Dew, missing anti-demented "Chuckles" and singing "CHICO and The Monkey Man"

 I finally got the top off the 20-ounce bottle of Diet Mountain Dew this morning.

It and the Ritz peanut butter crackers that it is washing down my throat for a healthy breakfast combo was supposed to be my weekly “contraband” snack that I sneak into Jerry “Chuckles” Manley in the Memory Care Ward.

I’m not a Mountain Dew – Diet or full-bodied – connoisseur.  But I’d already drained my morning pot of coffee while thinking about the sight of poor Milford/Bob curled up on Jerry’s bed, sleeping soundly. Probably glad he didn’t have to watch his back in the event of another roommate assault, as I surmised later.

Jerry wasn’t in the other bed – I don’t think he’d ever use Bob’s bed or chair – and I relive that grim realization today, as I sip on the Diet Mountain Dew. It was meant for Jerry, of course. I always bring him soda and a couple of packs of Ritz peanut butter crackers, which he lustily eats and drains as I sit with him, searching for words that might jiggle his brain out of neutral.

I’m pretty much done with the Ritz peanut butter crackers that tasted so good for breakfast that I had one more for dessert. If I ever see Jerry again, I’ll buy him some more.  If….if….

My long-time friend Jim “Flash News Brother” Lindgren, one of the four originals of our fraternity and a kind fellow who still worships at the skewed altar of a man we know and love as “Flapjacks (just kidding, he may be a Lutheran, and they don’t like pancakes) – had been worried, and he and his daughter, Jayne, drove down from Indianapolis.

"Flapjacks" and "Flash" get a preacher to snap their picture while Milford/Bob sleeps on "Chuckles''' bed.

He had two aims. He wanted to see Jerry, or the man masquerading behind a blank stare as Jerry, for himself.

And, just as much he was checking on me – I believe my lonesome ramblings and twisted wit about my visits to the Memory Care Ward, which has been Jerry’s “home” for three-quarters of a year – had troubled him.

Since I’ve been going at least once a week, occasionally twice if I have the stomach for it, I have been emotionally, physically even, affected by the ghost formerly known as Jerry “Chuckles News Brother” Manley. 

I look in his eyes, and he is in there, someplace.  He occasionally peeks out, then retreats inside his mental turtle shell.  Apparently, anger has begun to build inside this good man. Or what’s left of him.

Even in this condition, Jerry remains my longest-tenured newspaper friend, a generally kind, non-violent, jovial soul as long as I’ve known him. After all, even though he has never spoken to Bob/Milford, his roommate in the Dormitory of the Demented and Demi-Deceased and Dying, he never seemed to be upset when Bob would climb up in his bed, at as long as Jerry wasn’t using it (not that there’s anything wrong with it).

Bob/Milford, a much-honored horseman in real life – evidenced by all the horse contest ribbons, is a gentle fellow, as well. When I first started visiting Jerry here – I believe I am the only real company he gets – I would talk with Bob/Milford if Jerry was in the bathroom or if Jerry was staring, almost unconsciously at the flat-screen TV they share.

Bob/Milford must be the one handling the remote, as Jerry has not learned yet how to push the magic buttons that turn the TV on, change channels or adjust volume. Or maybe the nurses do that … or used to do that … when they’d come to razor-dribble some blood from Jerry’s finger for his four-time-daily blood-sugar tests.  Lately the result is he gets four insulin doses after each of those visits.

Last week, the television was set on one of those music channels, where the screen is filled with a photo of the artist/artists and some biographical info.  I’ve read that music is one of the best ways to break through the shell keeping dementia’s brain fog in place.  Perhaps one of the nurses, Kimmie maybe, had put the music channel on.  Music might bring a little light into the zombies’ eyes, about the only things Bob/Milford and Jerry have in common.  

I love Jerry and I’ve come to care about Milford/Bob – likely 95 years old and 75 pounds are my guesses – and our early conversations have degraded, from him talking proudly about his horses and assuring me that this is a great place to live and die to false-teeth clicks, grunts, huge smiles and some unintelligible words.  I still try to communicate with him. I’ve made a lot of friends in the cuckoo’s nest, and I count him among them.

My only clue to a crack in this Odd Couple’s living arrangements came about two months ago when I arrived at the door of the room only to find Bob trying to say “locked out ….Jerry ….locked out.”

I got the nurses to unlock it, and all was fine. I figured the lockout was an accident. But this week, after Jerry picked Milford/Bob up from his (Jerry’s) recliner, lifted him into the air and wrestling-slammed him to the floor, I’ve decided that Jerry probably locked his roommate out that occasion. And then there was Bob’s peed-on recliner. I don’t know who was responsible.  Perhaps that’s why Bob was determined to use Jerry’s and why Jerry reacted in this way.

Yes, I’ve buried the lead. But I didn’t want the image of 250-pound Jerry’s WrestleMania move on 75-pound Milford/Bob –  to be the only reason you read this blog. After all, this writing is copyrighted by old Flap and is restricted to a set audience, and I think most of you don’t read it. Even late-comers to the historic News Brothers community should read this stuff. Or else you are heartless fuckers who should resign your commission. Let me know if this story of the ranking News Brother struggling to bring some life back into a veteran newsman’s uncomfortably numb brain touches you at all.

I will say that the real Jerry is a kind and soft-spoken soul who generally doesn’t make it a habit to pick old people up and slam them down on the floor.

I did not want to tease the heartless among you into reading this report by starting with the image in my mind – as I was no witness – of the skirmish. The nurses described it from their view on the cameras  they keep in inmates' rooms.

When Jim aka “Flash”– who had come down from his job as a race-car breeder and horticulturist in Indianapolis to check on his old friends – accompanied me into the nursing home and attached nuthouse, he was a little nervous about seeing Jerry.

He was afraid Jerry might not recognize him and that he may have some sort of weird reaction. I told him that sometimes Jerry didn’t talk at all, just stared at the world’s reality that is on TV – from “Gunsmoke” to Neil deGrasse Tyson repeats to the latest episodes of “Perry Mason” – and that on those days I did all the talking. I’d generally try to raise a smile by talking about Chico the Monkey, who escaped from his cage and was pursued by terrified Montgomery County deputies, an event that was well-covered by The Leaf-Chronicle one Sunday morning 40 years ago.

The squirrel monkey’s demise – Chico roamed free for a couple of months near Dunbar Cave before being run to ground and eaten by neighborhood dogs – was handled in a personal column I wrote that began simply: “Chico is dead.”   Jerry always enjoys talking about the Chico story and my gory column obit follow-up, because the Chico pursuit – Deputies Go Bananas: ‘Monkey At Large’ -- is the only occurrence he remembers from his 35-40-year newspaper career. And that’s probably because I tell it to him often.

I also like to play to his “happy place” by talking about our charity fund-raising efforts as News Brothers, the most elaborate of which was our world-premiere screening of the timeless and twisted “Flapjacks: The Motion Picture.”

“I really liked rolling around on the ground with you and making movies,” he’s told me on more than one occasion. In addition to his KISS-like tongue-wagging, Jerry’s film persona, Chuckles, was something of an acrobat.  When we ran as a foursome in a scene, Jerry was bound to throw in a somersault worthy of Simone Biles’ most-ineffective student.  But it remains damn funny.

To prepare Jim, a 65-year-old youngster who in reality doesn’t breed race cars and hemp plants but was “bought out” (a cruel euphemism) from his job at an Indianapolis newspaper, I just told him to try to reach into his own pocketful of memories from the time he worked on Jerry’s copy desk and try to remind our friend of those events and, especially, of who he is. “Jerry was an imposing man,” Jim remembers.  “He was like a rock.”

“Like an i-i-i-sland,” I complete an old Paul Simon lyric.

 Jim’s had trouble visualizing his old boss and copyediting hero in the guy I’ve been describing for almost nine months in this space, so he wanted to come to terms with it personally.

I have said before that I have asked Jerry what his prognosis and diagnosis were, and he said “I don’t know. I never have seen a doctor.”  (He actually has, his daughter has had to take him for some appointments checking out the vanished or hibernated cancer in his colon.)

Now, I’m afraid he is seeing many doctors. And, perhaps, many more.  Makes me want to act like Chief Broom when I think of it. If you don’t know who that is, then you are too immature to be reading this blog about my flight over the cuckoo’s nest.

Anyway, Jerry objected when I asked if he had been diagnosed with dementia or Alzheimer’s Disease, the two reasons there are 40 rooms full of people in the Memory Care Ward, where he resides.

“No,” he’d say, a bit churlish. “I don’t have dementia or Alzheimer’s: I just can’t remember anything.”  

In fact, he wouldn’t remember things I told him minutes before. He would wonder how many months it had been since I’d been there (I’ve not missed a week, other than when I had Covid for a week after Christmas.)

He could remember nothing of his 30 years at the morning newspaper in Nashville – I wish I could forget my decade surrounded by the corporate anus-tonguers who told me I was a maverick “and we don’t have room for mavericks in this corporation.” You were supposed to moan and climax when the editors preached the company line. If you disagreed on the basis of intellect or morals, truth or, especially, personal sense of ethics, you were cut loose.

Seventeen years ago this week for me, the armed guards, who loved me and admired my courage and ethics, carried my stuff to my old Saab, hugged me and said goodbye. I’ve not been back in the building since.

In fact, the cause of journalism became so pathetic that they blew up the building, just like Springsteen’s chicken man -- to make room for condos and a hipster grocery. The morning "newspaper" staff, those who serve the 5,000 subscribers to the print product and the not brave, new world of clicks on the computer, now “lives” on a couple floors high on a low-level “skyscraper” in Midtown Nashville. Reporters, and there are a few, can keep track of the city by just looking out the windows. On warm days, the company brings an ice cream truck to the parking lot. A double-dip chocolate and maraschino cherry cone apparently does buy loyalty.  Hell, I wish they’d tried that on me instead of telling me I was too old and wrote too much about old musicians and Black people.  For that story, buy the book When Newspapers Mattered on amazon.com.

The book does not have a happy ending. But even co-author Rob “Death” Dollar had no idea of how sad and pointless life would become for Chuckles, one of our main comrades in the ethics war.

 Jerry made it for four more years than I in the Big G newsroom before they called him at the annual cousins dance-off-and-mate and melon-seed-spitting contest and pig roast – the annual weeklong family reunion in the urban Lewisburg/Petersburg cluster – and told him the box containing his pica pole and an empty pickle jar was in a box by the back door.  Of course, they always framed it as something good. “A buyout,” though is just a layoff or a firing when the bosses pay you pennies a day for years of service and kick you in the testicles. Or, less frequently but likely as painful, vaginas.  Both in some cases.

You are supposed to feel grateful for the pieces of silver and use your time to find another job. Anyone out there who is a 56-year-old white male can tell you my experience on the job hunt. The only boss interested in me when I was tossed to the curb included me. For semi-sanity – all I’ve ever aspired to -- I relied on my wife, Suzanne, and a few friends and my memories of Chico the Monkey.  Robert Penn Warren, Billy Joe Shaver and Billy Bob Thornton were among my many friends/admirers who couldn’t help.  I do think Robert Penn’s being dead was his main obstacle. The other two may have been drunk.

I was only at that newspaper 10 miserable years, mainly so I could pay off our adoptions of our two children from Romanian orphanages.

My frustration found a place in my writing.  Jerry was an editor, not a writer, and his frustration at not being appreciated after more than 30 years of service to the morning "newspaper" likely at least fueled his stark decline.  I actually think it’s been going on for years, but he was able to function OK. Until last Thanksgiving when they found him, unable to deal with life’s most-basic chores, in his home.

He’d been in and out of facilities before, but this time there was no “out.”

“I guess I’m here until I die,” an unusually cheerful Jerry would tell me when I’d visit him in the Memory Care Ward.

“A least you aren’t passed on the floor in your own shit,” I would counter, by way of cheering him up. I forever have been chastised for being an optimist.

Stopping now for another slug of Mountain Dew. “Do the Dew,” they say on commercials. Or is it Dew the Dew?  Do the Do? Dew the Do?

As usual, when I’m on my way to visit Jerry, I stop at the Shell station run by my friend, Quincy. I always top off my tank and go in to get the beverage and crackers – banned by the nursing home, so for months I snuck this stuff in my boxers. When I realized the nurses didn’t worry about the contraband, after all this guy’s gonna die of something, I stopped hiding it.

Quincy was saddened that the Diet SunDrop he special orders for my nursing home friend was not in stock. He helped me find my substitute, Diet Mountain Dew, and promised the Diet SunDrop would be there next week. 

I think he’ll be disappointed that I don’t stop and pick it up. Maybe I’ll take up lottery scratch cards so Quincy and I can have something to bond over. I’m certainly not going to keep buying this shit I’m drinking.

Anyway, after visiting with Quincy, I picked Jim up at a nearby Starbuck’s so his daughter, Jayne, would be occupied, and we went to the nursing home.

I should tell you here that Jim is fairly deep into his battle with Parkinson’s Disease, so he really didn’t think he could drive all this way from the Brickyard on his own. Jayne did some of the driving and kept her eye on her dad and the road.

Actually, Jim seems to do well with his Parkinson’s, and it’s obvious he’s a fighter. But it’s a damnable disease and there is no way out. You just fight your way to the end, and hope that end is many, many years in the future.

So, I should point out that there were five main News Brothers back in 1982-83, when we reigned. Me (“Flapjacks”), Rob Dollar (“Death”), Jerry Manley (“Chuckles) and Jim Lindgren (“Flash”) were the forces behind the movie we made and the fun we had that raised as much as $3,300 for local charities. I say five, because Radio Newsman Scott Shelton covered our activities for the radio and – when Jim went to Indy – “Badger” became our fourth News Brother.

It was kind of a Pete Best/Ringo situation, and Scott “Badger” really was a better drummer. He even had a full kit in the basement he’d turned into a Beatles shrine, even though he hated Ringo. That’s another story.

OK, of those five, let’s see their status 40-some years later. I am unemployed and write  books and visit dying friends and other lunatics. I also have trouble walking, even more laughing. Rob has two pig valves in his ticker and is unemployed and helping his hometown of Hopkinsville’s historic preservation. He also loves cats, writes books and is very tired. Jim Lindgren has Parkinson’s. Scott is dead after a valiant duel with cancer. Jerry may well be nuts.

In our visit to Jerry, Jim and I walked through the regular-people retirement center and through the double-locked doors into the corridor lined with rooms for the gang who can neither shoot nor think straight anymore.

We said our pleasantries to Kimmie, the head nurse, who just last week was attacked by a guy wielding a fork in the dining hall, and wandered down to Jerry and Milford’s room.

Jim stayed in the doorway while I checked. As I said earlier, Bob was in Jerry’s bed, but Jerry wasn’t in Bob’s. I checked the bathroom for a corpse or constipation. Empty.

I told Jim to wait in a little visitor’s area outside Jerry’s room, and I went down to the dining hall/social room and nurse’s office.

I looked around and didn’t see Jerry. I didn’t see the fork guy either.

“Kimmie,” I began, quickly drowned out by a woman sitting nearby. “Meow. Meow. Mee-owww,” the woman said.

Kimmie shook her head and told the woman her name was “Kimmie” and not “Kitty.”

The woman licked her right hand and “meowed” some more.

“I can’t find Jerry Manley,” I said to Kimmie. “He’s got a friend here who came all the way from Indianapolis to see him.

“Do you know where he is?” Since Jerry has no friends in the nursing home, I didn’t think he was paying a social call in one of the 40 rooms of the lunatic asylum.

“Ohhhh,” said Kimmie. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you when you came in, but Jerry’s not here. He’s in the hospital.”

I asked a number of questions, and she answered patiently since I am a regular in this place; and I really don’t think many people from the outside, not even relatives, visit.

“He was involved in a confrontation,” she said.

She went on to answer my questions, and it turns out Jerry was the one who did the confronting.

“He picked up Milford, who was sitting in Jerry’s recliner, and he threw him down on the floor,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

Nurses, who watch on closed circuit what’s going on in the rooms, observed the ruckus and ran down there, while others called authorities.

“I don’t think the police came to get him, but I’m not sure. At least they didn’t arrest him. The ambulance guys took care of getting him in a gurney and they took him to the hospital.”

I was stunned, but not really surprised.  He may not have dementia, but he sure acts like it, with his anger and this attack leveled at a little old man who simply sat in the wrong chair.

“I’m not sure what will happen. He may come back. They do bring them back sometimes after they’ve been in the hospital for a week or two. Sometimes.”

She added that the fork attacker also was sent down to Vanderbilt Psych last week, “and if they decide to let him back here, he could be in another week or so.”

Perhaps Jerry and the aspiring fork killer can become pals.

If Jerry’s not allowed back in?

Kimmie shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s still got his bed here.’’

I didn’t push it, but I thought that, even if he is deemed harmless, will they let him back in his room with Milford/Bob?

There aren’t any other beds here, other than the fork swashbuckler’s.

I went back down the hall to fill Jim in on what had transpired and that he had traveled, Parkinson’s dragging at his body, all the way from the Brickyard for nothing.

He was disappointed, but, of course, was happy to spend time with me.

As we got up from our seats in the visitors’ area, a preacher came out of the room across from us. He told us he had dropped in – for about 5 minutes –- to see his Mom. “She has no idea who I am at least half of the time.”

We asked him to snap a shot of the two of us, and he did, hurriedly.

Before we left, I wanted to check on Milford/Bob. And I wanted to introduce him to Jim.

The old fellow woke up and smiled. I asked him how he was, and he smiled. I said he had gotten into it with his roomie, and I hoped he didn’t hurt. He just smiled, gurgled something that may have been a line from “White Rabbit.”

“Hi, Milford, my name is Jim,” said my old pal from Indy. “It’s nice to meet you.”

Milford/Bob smiled again, and I told him to get back to sleep.

The preacher who had taken our picture was conducting a little service in the dining/commons room.  I didn’t know what he was talking about, which I’m sure is the case for most of his audience.  They’ve gotta do something to kill time between meals, and searching for an afterlife is better than watching “I Love Lucy.’’

Then he led them in a song about a river.  We listened briefly to the song, recognized it and – after all we were in a Memory Care Ward – we couldn’t remember the song’s title when we got back into the world.

I thought it was “Shall We Gather at the River,’ but Jim said it wasn’t a religious tune.

I do know the topic was a river, someplace. So, I’ve been thinking about which it may have been.

In the days since, I’ve decided that perhaps it was “Tweeter and The Monkey Man,” a song I generally sing by substituting “Chico” for “Tweeter”

“The undercover cop was found
Face down in a field
The Monkey Man was on the river bridge
Using Chico as a shield ….”

That really wasn’t the song, but it is one of my favorites. And it is not religious, so perhaps it fits Jim’s description.

I should note that I love Jim "Flash" and know how difficult it was, with his Parkinson's, to get down here. He had to plan, make sure medications were adequate and rest up, and his daughter Jayne had to get off work. He says he'll come back, once I find out whatever happened to "Chuckles."

Since our visit, I have tried to track Jerry down. The ambulance took him to Vanderbilt Medical Center, where he was waiting in the ER for placement, perhaps in the psych ward?  But, as of today, he’s “discharged,” according to the hospital; and “he’s not at the residence,” according to the nursing home.

I love the guy and I’m sure I’m going to miss him.

I’m about finished with the Diet Mountain Dew now. People must be fucking nuts to drink this stuff.  
   

 

Halfway down the long hallway of the damned and demented, Tim stops to talk with a nurse about "Where's Jerry?" Jim "Flash" Lindgren took this photo of me, who you can see, barely, in the hall. 

     

 (Copyright, August 18, 2024 by Flapjacks. Copying and sharing is prohibited.)

    

            

Gentle soul raises fork to counter-attack what it's like to be sad at Jerry's joint, where bizarre witchy woman spurs memories of when 'Tennessee' Williams stalked me with a spear and headress

Some of the crazy, old News Brothers are alive but not kicking like they sure used to. Here is a photo from November 12, 1982, hours before the world premiere of our classic cinematic newspaper lament Flapjacks: The Motion Picture. From left, Rob "Death" Dollar, Jerry "Chuckles" Manley and the ever-cheerful Tim "Flapjacks" Ghianni. The movie was a Beatles-style visit to our lives in the newspaper business. We raised as much as $3,200 for local charities. The film played all night in the Roxy theater in what then was a desolate section of Clarksville. We had to have police protection from the fans and others of society's dregs. Jerry never will be so free again. Tim and Rob aren't really doing all that well, themselves.

The fork flashed through the air, within inches of the more-than-adequate midsection of the nurse, who was trying to push the fellow – a nameless guy I consider a friend after my months of hanging out in the Memory Care Ward -- up to his spot at the lunch table.

“Don’t!” or something similar the man yelped, first pulling the fork back toward the table and then pushing it out toward the nurse again, with as much force as feeble, meatless arms can muster.

I don’t know this fella’s motivation for violence. He may not, himself.  I’m sure he didn’t remember afterward.

But this is the first time I’ve seen him in a wheelchair, a part of the continuing descent I see around me every time I visit the nursing home where men and women, including my half-century pal Jerry Manley, punctuate mental descent with physical rot. 

It bruises my soul when, as a frequent visitor to the nursing home’s Memory Care Ward, I witness these folks’ disappearance into themselves… . Some of the faces I grew accustomed to greeting have vanished. Life here is a guaranteed dead end. Of course, that end awaits us all. It’s just more poignant here.

Perhaps in what is left of his mind, the fork-slasher realized that from now on he is going to be pushed in his wheelchair to wherever the nurses want him and, of course, he must eat what they tell him to eat, a blandness universal in these diets. That combination may have sparked the rage. 

There is no such thing as freedom of choice in a Memory Care Ward.

All I know is that the man with the fork is one of the many folks in this ward who have “adopted” me as their “friend from the outside” in the eight months since I’ve been paying visits to my longest-tenured newspaper friend, Jerry “Chuckles News Brother” Manley.

All Jerry did when the guy threatened the nurse with a fork was shrug. Apparently, this stuff happens a lot among those relegated to this cuckoo’s nest. Like Jerry, who won’t fess to being a dementia or Alzheimer’s patient. In fact, he insists he’s neither: “I just can’t remember anything.” Like things I’ve told him three minutes before.

As I’ve noted in the past, Jerry hates the “Chuckles” nickname, but when my friend Rob Dollar and I were coming up with nicknames for The News Brothers 42 years ago, Jerry just seemed like a “Chuckles.”  His appearances on the screen – I’ve noted our 1982 film made for charity –just made anyone smile. How can you resist a guy who spends his main closeup showing that his tongue is as flexible and expressive as KISS tongue-man Gene Simmons? Neither of us were big KISS fans, but we did like to rock ‘n’ roll all night and party every day. Perhaps the reluctant “Chuckles” is paying for it now?

Ah, those names. I am “Flapjacks.” Rob Dollar is “Death.” Jim Lindgren is “Flash.”  The three of us and Jerry were the three main News Brothers back when we were almost fab and truly benevolent, making movies, healing hearts, aiding charities and, especially putting out Damn Nice Newspapers.

Back then, the 24,000-circulation Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle regularly pounded The Tennessean, Nashville Banner, the Memphis newspapers and Knoxville and Chattanooga as well in “contests” for best newspaper in the state, best special section, best columnist, best sports section, etc. We even were dubbed Best Paper in the Southeast.  And all that acclaim came because we put our real lives on hold and dedicated waking hours to committing great journalism. And drinking about it after.

Our professional lives were our personal lives, and some – like me and Jerry – pay for it in loneliness because we never spent time developing “social” friends. Instead of social graces, we developed nasty habits. Newspapers were everything. Now they are nothing.  And those of us who were newspaper-ink-bleeding castoffs, well … we’re old, dead or in The Memory Care Ward.

I believe The Tennessean, a now insignificant newspaper in Nashville, now wins most of the awards for newspapers with 5,000 circulation or less. I do cheer for my old friends who work there still.

Seventeen years ago they dared not cheer for me, when the lousy bastards made me give my regards to 1100 Broadway by taking a meager buyout package or wait for the layoffs in six weeks. The guards – the same ones who had protected me from Lee “Tennessee” Williams, a skateboard-riding scion of Clarksville society who spent his free time living in the streets of Nashville – helped me carry my professional remnants, pica poles, scale wheels and pictures of The News Brothers and my kids out to the parking lot.

Old Tennessee Williams stalked me from our days at The Camelot in Clarksville and from the day he took part in what should have been my fatal fall from the Leaf-Chronicle roof for one day’s filming of the sequel to “Flapjacks: The Motion Picture,” our “Hard Day’s Night”-like movie that we made to raise money for charity. That sequel footage never has been seen and the 8 mm film has faded into memory or not. “Flapjacks II: The Revenge of the Big Guy” was never finished. Too many firings and deaths left me with faded-out-film and devastated memories in a yellow Kodak box.

 Getting a little afield here, but I should say that one day Tennessee Williams came to the front of the old newspaper building on Broadway. He had painted his body red, wore an Indian headdress and was pointing a feathered spear at the guards, who tried to calm him down. The guards, steel-guitar Hall of Famer Johnny Sibert and his pals, would not let me out of the building to try to calm Lee down.  They told me he’d been there many nights, sometimes sleeping inside the back door of the newspaper when Johnny took pity on him on a cold night. Lee always was looking for me.  Johnny Sibert worried I had my own Mark David Chapman and always warned me to be careful when I left the building.

The day of his Indian attack, old Tennessee was hauled off by a police car.  I believe they took him to Cloverbottom, the state’s beloved looney bin.  The last time I saw him, though, came when I rear-ended a car at an Interstate exit when I sped to a hospital because my mom was dying. The car I hit took off. Lee stood there with a “World is Ending” type of sign and applauded.  My mom died. 

 Johnny Sibert, the protective guard, had settled into that line of business after a long career as a steel player with another now-deceased buddy, the great Carl “Hey Joe” Smith.

I was the last person ever to interview Carl, the first one in a few decades. That story can be found in my book Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes. The world had forgotten Carl, who basically invented the concept of country music television.

As far as I know, Jerry is the only News Brother in the cuckoo’s nest. “Flash” has some ailments, I can’t walk well, “Death” is tired and sore and sporting a seriously repaired ticker.  “Badger” – radio newsman Scott Shelton, who took over for “Flash” when George Martin said he wasn’t a good-enough drummer – died pushing 13 years ago. Fucking cancer. Actually, Scott had always been affiliated with us, but joined up full-time when “Flash” moved to Indianapolis to breed race cars.

It’s been a long, strange trip and, on this day, it finds me looking maybe nine feet to see the old fellow with the fork, again aiming it to the nurse’s belly as she tried to work his wheelchair close enough to the table so that he could eat without getting the Hungarian goulash on his nicely pressed khaki trousers.

She backed away, going to get her supervisor.  One of them took a picture of the poor guy, fork extended, I suppose to show to family or psychiatrist.  I’m sure there likely is a penalty for errant behavior in the cuckoo’s nest. But I’m not sure. Hot electric wire on his balls?

He put his fork down and then took a full-fisted swing at the nurse who hollered: “Don’t you hit me, you crazy mother-fucker” and slammed his head down into his plateful of food.

The guy just laughed, and used his fingers to eat the goulash that was on his face.  The face-in-food incident is of my imagination.  Up until that it was all true.

As was the long, low howling of one of the diners – I think she was the one who calls me and whoever gets in her way “knucklehead.’’  Jerry frowned at her, even though the fork attack didn’t bother him. Likely made perfect sense.

An hour earlier, this psychedelic nursing home visit began when I pulled my old Saab into one of the handicapped parking spots out front. As I’ve noted before, I have a hard time walking upright, so I asked my doctor, finally, to fill out my application for one of those crippled placards. One thing you can’t hide is when you’re crippled inside or outside. In either case, I had put off getting that placard until a couple of months ago, about the time my brother, Eric, who died recently, gave me the hand-carved cane he made for me. He had one himself. I thought he and I could hang around together, playing dueling swords with our canes and drinking his favorite Irish whisky. But God, or whoever is in charge of deadly injustices in the holy pecking order, took him.

Nothing sadder than a cane-wielding swordsman dueling into the empty air on the back deck while holding an empty glass, so I quit doing that last week, as my neighbors were beginning to notice.

As I parked, I saw a woman, really disheveled and witchlike in appearance, downing a glass of lemonade – that’s what the nursing home had on its porch for those who can go outside – and start walking around the long, circular sidewalk. Her crinkled and evil eyes were fixed on me as she walked past benches, lawn chairs and landscaping. Her evil demeanor reminded me of a legless gypsy I encountered on a sidewalk in Arad, Romania. She was a beggar, and, when my son, Joe, gave her a piece of candy, she tossed it away and laughed at him.

Course, this old lady had legs. When she stopped right in front of the Saab and stared at me, my first notion was to put my car in drive and run her over.

Finally, I shut off the car and got out. “Can I help you, ma’am?” I asked, a bit timidly. She began whistling and muttering a song of sorts and stood there staring at me.

Now, the most troubled of the folks at this nursing home are not supposed to be in the front section where they have access to the yard. She perhaps was just visiting somebody. Or perhaps she’s near the point where she’ll graduate to the Memory Care Ward. Or she’s an escapee.

“She said ‘I know what it’s like to be dead,’” I sang to myself. as she walked away from me. I may not be able to walk well, but I took the very long way around the front yard, so I could avoid her when I went in. “She’s making me feel like I’ve never been born.”

 After I signed in – the warden, Nurse Ratched, eyed my sack, but said nothing. I always bring Jerry food contraband that I get at my friend, Quincy’s, Shell Station. Generally, I pull into Pump No. 8 and top off my gas. Inside, I pick up two packs of Ritz peanut butter crackers and … there’s no Diet SunDrop in the cooler.

Quincy started stocking that beverage at my request, because Jerry said it was one of the things he missed “inside.”  On this day, I settled for a sugar-free Mountain Dew instead.

Quincy, who was outside emptying the trash containers between Pumps 7 and 8 told me he’d get the Diet SunDrop when his vendor comes in. “It’s a real good thing you’re doing,” he always tells me, adding that nursing homes “are worse than prisons.”

Anyway, I used to sneak the contraband in my clothing, but it was uncomfortable, especially in the summer, so I just carry it in in a sack. No one seems to notice or care. When people are dying or slipping into oblivion, why not allow them a few snacks to brighten their limited days?

In fact, once I got to the Memory Care Ward, I remembered that Quincy hadn’t loosened the top on the bottle, and it was impossible for me to open with my arthritic hands.

So, I asked a nurse – the one who later was attacked with a fork – to open it for me. “I’ll just open it and then put the top back on far enough, so it doesn’t leak,” she said, handing it back to me to take to Jerry, no questions asked.

Bob/Milford, Jerry’s roommate, is in a sitting room, a couple doors down, a place where patients and families can gather. Even go out through a door into an enclosed courtyard. Bob/Milford was sitting, quietly, staring at a black TV screen.

“I know what it’s like to be sad,” I said to Bob, who I consider a friend. “Why don’t you come back to the room?”

He clicked his false teeth and said “No. No. No. No.”

I patted his shoulder, and went on to the room where Jerry sat in his recliner, watching a music station on television. It’s just one of those cable stations, where they play music while a photo and facts about the artists are displayed on the screen.

“Indian Lake is a scene you should make with your little one
Keep it in mind if you're lookin' to find a place in the summer sun….”

I sang along with the second line. Before telling him “I went to see the Cowsills in 1969. They were on a triple bill with The Grassroots --“In my midnight confessions, when I tell all the world that I love you,” I sang.

“The top of the bill that night was, Guess Who, Canadians just then breaking in America,” I said before launching into the grunting prelude to “American Woman, stay away from me….”

I don’t think Jerry even noticed my miniconcert.  Perhaps he used his decline as an excuse to ignore it.

“I’ve just got it on this music channel because that’s where it was, and I don’t know how to change the channel,” was his sole response to my little performance. “Volume, either.”

The remote control sat by his bed, but after so many months, I no longer give forgotten-in-five-minutes remote control lessons.

“It’s better for you to listen to music than watch the news, like when Harrison Ford was trying out spacecraft,” I say, referring to a day a couple of weeks ago when Milford/Bob and Jerry both thought a sci-fi movie was real-life news.

The TV switches to Frank Sinatra singing “Something,” the George Harrison song that Ol’ Blue Eyes thought was the best love song of all time.

The sight of Old Blue Eyes triggered me to tell Jerry that it was 50 years to the day that Frank’s pal, Dick Nixon, climbed aboard Marine One after resigning as president.

“It doesn’t seem that long, but it does,” Jerry responded as he finished off the crackers and pint of Diet Mountain Dew. “This is really good for a change,” he said, adding he’d prefer the Diet SunDrop, but my replacement pick satisfied his soda-educated palate.

Brian Wilson, brothers Dennis and Carl, Mike Love and Al Jardine were singing “God Only Knows” on the TV, when the nurse came in and gave Jerry his blood sugar test – “254,” she said, looking at me and smiling. It’s supposed to be around 180, and perhaps my treats are to blame. She gives him a quadruple dose of insulin.

The nurse sees the empty cracker wrappers and Diet Dew bottle, but she doesn’t say anything about it.  Jerry’s smiling, at least, which I’m told is uncommon.

“Lunchtime,” she reminded him, so I wandered down the hallway with Jerry. Milford/Bob hadn’t moved from his spot in front of the black TV, so I called out and asked if wanted to join us. He just looked at me and nodded, but obviously his answer was “No. No. No. No.”

“I wish I could remember something, so I’d have something to say,” said Jerry, as I sat at his lunch table, where we listened to the woman howl and watched the fork man do his work.

“That’s’ OK, Jerry. They are going to need my chair now for lunch, so I’d better leave.”

He nodded. “Hey, how old am I?”

I told him he was 72, nine days older than me. “We always celebrated our birthdays together. Remember the 30^th? It was the best party ever.”

He looked blankly at me, then slowly smiled and nodded. “You be careful.” I think he was telling me to take care driving home. But he also may have been warning me of the fork man, as there was no way to leave this room without passing right by him. Easy fork range.

 This normally gentle man held his fork high, in his right hand, then put it down on the table when I neared.   

 “You are a lot more friendly than your friend,” he said – something he’s told me many times, always punctuating by nodding toward Jerry.

“Jerry’s an acquired taste,” I said, smiling. “It’s taken me 50 years to get used to him.”

The crazy old lady was not out on the front grass or by the lemonade table when I got outside, after stopping to chat briefly with Stockton, the guy who always wears Vols clothes and who is trying to talk me into moving here.

“Have a great day,” he said. “Good to see you, my friend. Where are you from?”

“Same as last time,” I tell him. “Nashville.”

I climb into my old Saab, maybe shaken more than usual, realizing that these visits are darkening my soul.

“I know what it’s like to be dead,” I sing to myself. ‘’What it’s like to be sad….”

  Copyright August 12, 2024, Tim Ghianni, all rights reserved