Nobody gets out of here alive .... I get frightened that I'm not going to fly out of the Cuckoo's Nest.... Of course, I'm nuts .... Laughter and 'Looney Tunes' with Jerry & the guys

 For a split second I thought I was going to be seized by the big memory care attendant and strapped down until someone could put a pillow over my head.

Nah, no pillow. But I did have a bit of worry there for a second at the nursing home, when it looked like they’d confused me for a patient.

That was toward the end of my visit with Jerry Manley this week. He's actually pretty well. There are holes in his memory. Big ones. But he's still articulate. And we love each other.

I was sitting in his room, when he lifted his tiny, empty water glass. “So damn thirsty,” he said.

I leaned forward on my walking stick to push myself up from the recliner in my best friend’s room in the memory care ward of the nursing home.

“I hate for you to have to go down and get it, but I’m thirsty,” said Jerry Manley – one of the four original News Brothers (who hates his “Chuckles” nickname, but has come to terms with it after 43 years.)

Jerry, who had been watching “The Rifleman” – Lucas McCain was bailing his son, Mark, out of trouble after the young man allowed a stranger to stay in the barn the night before – had just finished off the  mini-glass of water. By “mini,” I mean it was about double the size of a shot glass.

“Man, I’m thirsty,” he had said, again. It’s a pretty far stretch down to the dining/party room and kitchen, so I told him I’d go find him something to wet his whistle.

That’s when I used the walking stick – a cane that my brother, Eric, made from a tree limb and inscribed with a Paul McCartney quote: “I don’t work to be ordinary.”  I don’t really take the cane out of the house much, but I do use it to help me at home. It’s a beautiful piece of finished, knotty wood and I could kill someone with it. I use it when my back troubles me or if I want to kill someone.

Even back in the heyday of The News Brothers, pushing a half-century ago now, the problems with my back were visible. I never have been able to walk perfectly upright and my running down Third Street in the “Rocky” sequence demonstrates the off-kilter running style that results.

It’s from scoliosis, the severely curved spine my parents gifted me with, with additions of rotting, cracked discs and other lower-disc degeneration caused by my career as a mediocre – but chemically fueled and very fast on my feet – football player.

Anyway, I spent six or seven months going to a chiropractor for “spinal decompression” last year. It was designed to put tissue between the compressed discs. Didn’t work. Spine is too curved, apparently.

So, I’ve been using the cane a lot to keep myself upright.  I only use it if I’m going to be on my feet too long, and my focus on keeping the back straight turns to pain.

Outside of my house – which I rarely leave because most of my friends are dead or elsewise incapacitated physically or mentally – I mainly use it at the nursing home where Jerry moved while everyone else was celebrating Thanksgiving.  Those are long hallways, going from the regular retirement center to get to the secured memory care ward.

And no one there looks twice at an old man on a cane, unless it is to admire it.  I think the old ladies are looking at my crotch, though. “Still got it, Timothy,” I’ll fool myself.

When I got to the party room and asked the only attendant I could find on-duty for something my friend could drink, I was greeted by a resident who introduced himself as “Paul.”

“Who is this rascal?” he asked, to no one, as I waited for the attendant. “You new here?”

I told him my name and that I hadn’t yet met the requirements for entry into this exclusive and very clean club; that I was visiting because my buddy lived at the end of the long, freshly waxed hall.

“Well, hello, Tim,” he said. “It’s so nice to meet you. Come see me again.”

I shook his hand, and he turned back to the TV, where – and this is absolutely true – “Looney Tunes” cartoons were playing.

I gimped my way back to the room where Jerry lives and plopped down in the recliner that is wedged between his bed and a recliner “belonging” to his roommate who lives in the other full-size bed in the traditional dormitory-style living.

“You ever meet your roommate?” I asked Jerry. 

“I reckon I have, but I don’t remember. He’s not in here much,” he said.

There’s really not many places he could go, so I figure he must like to spend his time in the party room, or perhaps he has a girlfriend he’s shagging mindlessly someplace down the hall. (“Do it again, do it some more, I know that it’s nasty, it’s nasty for sure,” as Frank Zappa told me on the first Mothers album.)

“Here comes Bob now!” said Jerry, as the roommate, a 90ish-looking fellow in a yellow running suit, entered the room.

“Hello, Bob,” I said, as the roommate sat down in his recliner, about six inches to my left.

Jerry and I didn’t let that stop us, as we talked about all the great beer and otherwise altered adventures we had. How I had developed a particular love of Scotch and pretty much drank it by the fifth or even quart back in those days.   

“Remember, you used to come to my house every Sunday midnight and we’d drink 12 pints of Natural Light together as we made mix tapes til dawn?” I asked. “We’d go to work the next day. I don’t remember ever having a hangover.

“It would kill me today,” I said, adding I’d had a mostly dry existence for the last couple of decades.

‘’I suppose we must have had hangovers,” Jerry said.

“We just sucked it up and went to work,” I said, though I really don’t recall many hangovers. The ones I had, I usually cured with a quart of beer in the morning.

It was at about this point in the conversation that I noticed that every time I said something, Bob was breaking into sustained laughter and even slapping his hand against his armrest.

I showed Jerry a video Rob Dollar had posted, a clip from “Flapjacks: The Motion Picture,” that captured me, Rob, Jerry, John Staed and Harold Lynch out at Outlaw Field in Clarksville.

Hell, even Mayor Ted Crozier was there, wearing a “Tim Ghianni for Mayor” button. Ted loved me and we remained friends until his death a few years ago.

The basic scene has The News Brothers going out to the airport because America’s first man to orbit the globe, John Glenn, was flying in.

I was The Leaf-Chronicle’s associate editor, in charge of Sunday papers, and I had sent Harold, who was the government reporter, out there to interview the great astronaut on that Saturday morning.

The night before, I suggested (or maybe it was Rob) that the rest of us go out to the airport in the morning – we didn’t go to work until afternoon – to meet the astronaut, a senator who was in town to raise money for a potential presidential run.

He didn’t get to the White House, but as I’ve noted in previous dispatches, he really was a good sport, glad to meet The News Brothers.

Jerry laughed. But Bob, well, shit, he wailed. It was the funniest story he’d heard in years, I suppose.

I got the same reaction when I started reminding Jerry of our Chico the Monkey coverage, something that got me summoned to my fairly regular upholstered hotseat in the publisher’s office. Publisher Luther Thigpen didn’t think the pun-filled streaming-headline tale about deputies looking for an escaped monkey in St. Bethlehem was worth the play I gave it.

Luther, though, liked me. He smiled as I told him I’d do it again the same way. “We’ll just have to agree to disagree,” I told him, or some such.

“What was Luther’s last name?” Jerry asked.

Bob laughed when I said “Thigpen.”

He continued laughing when Jerry and I agreed that Luther, despite his faults and Chamber of Commerce mentality, at least had spent his formative years as a newspaper reporter and editor, so he – in hindsight – was the best publisher I’d ever worked for.

Jerry agreed.

Bob continued to laugh when Jerry asked: “Whatever happened to Chico?”

“He got eaten by dogs a couple of months after his escape,” I replied.

That threw Bob into writhing, almost-tear-laden laughter.

Jerry laughed, too.

Since I’d spent a couple hours with Jerry, and inadvertently driven his roommate into great curtains of laughter, I figured I’d better go home.

I pulled myself to my feet again, using the cane for support.

“Damn, I didn’t think we’d ever get old,” Jerry said, as I squeezed his shoulder and then made my way to the door to the hallway.

“Wagon Train” was on the TV as I left the room. I was tired and it was a long walk down the hallway, so I was leaning heavily on the walking stick.

An attendant, who reminded me of Nurse Ratched, came up to me and asked if she could help me.

“Are you looking for someone? Where’s your room?” she said, all-business.

“I don’t live here,” I told her. “My best friend, Mr. Manley, lives down at the end of the hall.”

I think she was pondering calling the big, black offensive tackle of an attendant when she saw my visitor badge. She reluctantly pressed the button that let me free of the very secure doors.

After I left the memory care ward, I wandered through the “normal” nursing home.  A guitar-strumming visitor was singing Ray Price and Sinatra songs, and some of the old people were clog dancing.

 One man was dancing as if he was holding tight to an invisible partner.