Friday, April 19, 2024

Harry Potter accompanies News Brothers as laughter takes over the Memory Care Ward and my pal, Jerry, enjoys contraband food and vague memories of pie fights and mean cops and Chico

 Jerry reaches to the stand next to his bed and retrieves a surprise.

“I’ve got this phone, but I can’t find a charger,” he says, flipping the telephone open and shut. “Somebody around this place must have a charger.”

He looks toward the hallway, where his roommate, Mr. Brown, stops in the doorway, says hello to a picture on the wall and turns to continue his morning ramble.

“I’ve really never met him,” Jerry says of his roommate since late November 2023, when Jerry was assigned his bed and dresser in the two-man room where both await their destiny.

I’ll have to say that Milford Brown seems to like me, always smiles and says “How are you?” when I encounter him either in the room or while he stalks, slowly, the long hallway in the Memory Care Ward of the nursing home.

Back to the newly discovered phone from Jerry’s stash on the nightstand.

Up until this moment -- on a really rain-spitting Friday in the town where country music rots in neon glory best exhibited when one of its biggest, racist stars thought it would be cool to toss a barstool from a sixth-floor watering hole -- that I found out my longest-tenured friend, Jerry Manley had a flip-phone squirreled away next to his autographed copy of “Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes” (the author is a pal) and a large digital clock. (I should add that drunken, racist stars of country’s new order cannot be found in that book.)

That clock, with its 3-inch-high numerals, had for months been staring right at Jerry, as he lay in his bed in the Memory Care Ward all day and all of the night.

But I’d noticed it was missing a few weeks ago. I asked him about it. He didn’t remember having a clock.

I actually thought it was stashed face-down beneath the books, but I hadn’t checked for it. I really think he took it down and hid it because time makes no difference when you are running out the clock in the Memory Care Ward.

I think he was even a bit pissed off that he’d found it.  So, he put it back at the top of the bookstack, but did not put it in a position where he could see it.  In this environment, meal-call is the way to mark a day.

“They come and get me when it’s time,” he said, admitting that the food was pretty good.  I think they roust their residents at 8, 11:45 and 5, but I could be wrong. 

A nurse came in while Jerry and I traded stories about Chico, the Monkey, the Clarksville Police who stopped our tickertape parade through the city and our fabled high-speed police chase that ended up in a pie-fight (policeman took part) and some hot stepping on the railroad tracks.

All of those events took place in the summer and fall of 1982, when The News Brothers – Flapjacks (me), Death (Rob Dollar), Chuckles (Jerry) and Flash (Jim Lindgren) spearheaded the filming of a “Hard Day’s Night”-style movie, eventually showing it in a world premiere presentation at the old Roxy Theater in downtown Clarksville.

All proceeds – somewhere close to $1,459 – was donated to local charities. While the fellows above were and remain The News Brothers, many other dissolute friends from The Leaf-Chronicle also participated when their wives would let them and the sun was shining and church had let out for the day.

Good guys like “StrawBilly Fields,” Harold “The Stranger” Lynch, Ricky “Don’t eat the paper, Dumbo” Moore, and the Rev. Larry McCormack participated when they could. StrawBilly is only in the first scene and actually has never seen the movie, as he left town shortly after his mentor Tony “Editor Tony Durr, 35, Missing” left town in the dead of night. 

None of the rest of us felt free to skip work for days on end to play golf with StrawBilly, which was Tony’s main role at The Leaf-Chronicle, so the round mound of rebound left to go become a public affairs whore for a Christian university.  After he got his fill of doing nothing for the school, StrawBilly became a government lifer in Nashville, governing laws regarding electric scooters.  He really is among the world’s nicest people, I should add, but I won’t.

John “Street” Staed also was a News Brother, with his biggest movie scene being getting out of his Volkswagen Rabbit and jumping in the air while waving his cowboy hat.  Street went on to newsroom glory throughout the Southeast, managing newsrooms … but eventually his past caught up to him, and he turned to a career in resuscitation or respiration.

It’s said he was among those best equipped to show people how to breathe, which I don’t doubt.

Around Eastertime, Street dropped in on Jerry in the Memory Care Ward. “We just talked about the stuff we used to do,” said Jerry when I inquired. He added that John “looks just like he always did.”

 “I didn’t realize that John looked frazzled, old, hollow-eyed and desperate 40 years ago,” I said, calling a picture of a mature Street up on my phone. None of us have aged well, I should note, but I won’t.

“I sure was glad to see John Staed,” Jerry told me, again.

Since we were talking about the Legend of the News Brothers – it does not have a happy ending – today, I turned the subject to our late and beloved friend Scott “Badger” Shelton, gone too soon 12 years ago.  The last official late-night Flapjacks Fest came 12½ years ago, when the most-loyal of us gathered at G’s Pancake House on Riverside Drive in Clarksville and feasted on memories and laughter and shared our careers’ bad endings and laughed at our disastrous personal choices.

Badger’s tale was different and sadder, as his wife, Elise, a hot chick who loves News Brothers, brought him to G’s. Beautiful Elise gave her life to helping Badger battle mortal cancer, a war entering its final skirmish. They invited us into their home for coffee and farts, laughs and fun, knowing the whole time that when the evening ended, we’d be saying farewell, forever, to our dying friend.

Mostly from that night, I remember Scott’s bold laughter as I hugged him goodbye and told him I loved him as he held the door for us. And I still feel the stunned silence that befell me and Jerry when we got into his truck to go back downtown and piss on the Roxy and swap more tales of our days of future passed with the rest of the Bros.  

In Jerry’s nursing home room, I did a little recounting of the previously mentioned tickertape parade, police chase and pie fight as he laughed. It’s hard to explain it if you weren’t in the back of Jerry’s orange Datsun mini-pickup in 1982, when the police cut us off in mid-tickertape parade.

“You can’t do these kinds of things in Clarksville,” said one of the friendly coppers who took our Diet Coke-filled whiskey bottles – props for our celebratory parade after we saved Clarksville and Jimmy Stewart – and dumped them down the sewer drain by the Royal York Hotel.

The orange pickup was our vehicle another day, when Kurt, the K-9 cop (I can’t remember his last name now), fired up his blue lights and siren and chased us at excessive speeds while Jerry piloted his Datsun and the rest of us were in the pickup bed, flipping birds and imitating masturbation, or something like that.

At the end of the chase came the pie fight, the rousing climax of the film.

“Not many people have had real pie fights,” observed Jerry when I reminded him that Kurt the Cop even got into the action by ducking just in time to avoid becoming a pie sandwich as two News Brothers closed in on him, front and back.

“We sure had fun making movies,” said Jerry.  In fact, he’s admitted that the filming of “Flapjacks: The Motion Picture” is second only to the tawdry, blood-soaked tale of Chico, the Monkey in his Clarksville memories.

Jerry asked me to stick around a bit longer as I rose to leave. I sat down again, and we watched a part of a Harry Potter marathon on the television.  “I think they are showing Harry Potter movies all day,” said my friend.

“That’ll give you something to look forward to,” I said, adding that I’d neither read nor watched one of Harry’s adventures until this particular day.

“Do you want me to set up your clock?” I asked.

“Nah. All that matters is that they come down and tell me when it’s time to go eat. I do hope someone has a phone charger, though.”

Just then, a nurse came to get him for lunch, but Jerry stalled.

“Stay some more if you want to,” he told me.

The nurse gave one of those provocative smiles to me and added: “I’ll save him a plate. We like Mr. Manley.”

I watched a scene where Harry stood hapless as a woman swelled up like a balloon and floated out into the sky over the UK. I was hoping she’d burst.

Arm-over-shoulder, we walked to the dining hall. Jerry was hungry. It had been a couple of hours since he ate the 32 cheese crackers and washed them down with a Diet SunDrop that I’d had in my jacket lining.

“Come back when you can,” he said.

“Love you man,” I responded, as the nurse let me pass through the secure doors. I wish I could have taken him with me to the Waffle House.

  

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