An old punk feels lucky after he stumbles through nursing home blackjack game to make his day hanging out with old pal ... 'Dirty Jerry?'

 “Do you feel lucky?” is the first thing I heard as I stepped between the freshly painted walls of the “regular” nursing home, enroute to the Memory Care Ward, my cargo shorts’ pockets stuffed with contraband food stuffs.

The words didn’t come from one of my favorite movie characters, Inspector Harry Callahan, aka “Dirty Harry,” with whom, despite my non-violent streak, I am able to relate.

Of course, the questioner didn’t punctuate her question with “punk,” nor was she holding a well-polished and frequently used Remington .44 Magnum while addressing some errant killer or insane clown.

(Like most of us, she was misquoting Inspector Callahan, who says: “You’re thinking ‘Did he fire six shots or only five?’  Now to tell you the truth, I’ve forgotten myself in all this excitement. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world and will blow your head clean off, you’ve gotta ask yourself a question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya punk?”)

In this case, the punk was a woman, at least 90, and she was smiling at the “Dirty Harry” imitation, because she had just been dealt a Jack, shooting her hand to 16.

The “normal” folks in the nursing home -- in the wing I must cross to get to the Memory Care Ward, where my pal, Jerry Manley, resides -- were in the thick of a game of Blackjack, using playing cards that likely measure 6-by-9 or some such.

She did feel lucky. “Hit me,” she said to the nursing home recreation staffer and card dealer, and she landed a three of diamonds, taking her to 19 and tying her with the woman across the table.

“You want another card?” asked the dealer, anxious to flip another one to either of these women.

“Too rich for my blood,” answers one of the players, even though, as far as I can tell, the stakes literally are nothing.  They simply are keeping score as to which Mabel, Sheila or Rita wins the most hands.

There are no men at the table. I’ve noticed, in general, a lack of men in the normal nursing home.  This could be disturbing, except I know being male is basically a fatal disease, as we are dealt the genetic earlier-death hand at birth.  I’ve been running like I’m running out of time for 72 years.  It may not actually be death that thins the ranks in the social room, though. Perhaps the men stay in their rooms, playing solitaire or coughing up phlegm. Or both.

I don’t know, as I do my best to not scrape against the freshly painted walls, since I’m wearing my Beatles rooftop concert T-shirt, among the favorite of the 30 or so Beatles shirts I own. On that topic, if you are a Disney-plus streaming customer, a restored version of “Let It Be” – the film that originally chronicled the final days of the Fabs 50 years ago – is restored and on that platform.

I first saw that movie when it was on first run, in the theater at the old Harding Mall in Nashville (now a Mexican Walmart is there).  The movie, which was critically panned at the time and that was heartbreaking for any Beatles fan, only stayed at the theater in Nashville for a week. I sat through it alone, twice, in the Summer of 1972.  And, I will have to say, it felt like a gut punch … or lower. Deflating and painful. I like to sit alone in the darkness and cry whether I’m at a movie or looking at the stars. 

Anyway, I talked with Jerry some about the Beatles movie during this visit. He doesn’t have Netflix in the Memory Care Ward.   In fact, he was watching “The Moonshiners,” or whatever the Discovery show about the purveyors of white lightning is called. This edition had nothing to do with illegal spirits. Instead, the ‘shinemakers were racing big-wheeled “mudbug” three-wheel ATVs through the swamps.

I turned the volume down, so I don’t know what that had to do with making moonshine, although perhaps you needed to down a quantity of the gut-burning stuff to drive one of these contraptions.  The last moonshine I ever drank – other than the legal stuff they sell at retail stores – was given to me by my late friend Tom T. Hall.  I know he liked bourbon in the glass and grass, but he also liked his moonshine. I believe he got it from another late friend of mine, the Civil Rights Warrior and errant Baptist preacher to the Outlaws the Rev. Will Campbell.

In the many years before he himself went into a Memory Care Ward, the Reverend Will used to call me from his front porch in Wilson County to my desk at the morning newspaper or at my house. “You are the only one up there who remembers these guys,” he’d say. And we’d talk about Martin Luther King Jr., Waylon’s famous knife-throwing expertise with Captain Midnight and Tompall, Kris’ beer-soaked fellowship and, of course, Jesus.  I never met Dr. King, but it would have been nice.  The rest of them I consider/considered friends. Jesus, of course, is just all right with me.

Actually, Jerry wasn’t in his room when I got there. He was down in the social/meal room, sleeping in a recliner while a game show – I don’t know which one – played. Given the hour, it likely was “The Price is Right,” but, since I no longer have pets to spay or neuter, I didn’t pay attention.

My new friend Milford Brown – who goes by the name Bob and who has to be in his mid-90s – saw me first.  He was sitting next to Jerry, who is his roommate in this dormitory of dementia, and he tapped him, trying to awaken him.

Two other fellows, one who always wears a Vanderbilt sweatshirt and another who closely resembles Bob, call out Jerry’s name. First, they extend their hands for me to shake. Folks in this ward in general like to see me.  It’s a mutual feeling.

One woman, who is curled up in her wheelchair, tells me “I’m really cold.  I wonder if you can get me a blanket for my legs?”

I walked a dozen feet to where a nurse was playing rummy with a cranberry juice-sipping resident and told the nurse about the woman. “Please get her a blanket,” I said. “She’s really cold.”

The nurse does that, as Jerry pushes himself up from his recliner and we begin the long trek down the hall to his dorm room – where I already have put his Diet SunDrop and two packages of Ritz cracker sandwiches, cheese and peanut butter.

He plops down on his queen-size bed, which is stripped for laundry I suppose, and reaches for the SunDrop. I’ve already pried it open, when I was at the Shell station where they stock it for me to take to Jerry. If I can’t loosen it there, then I ask the folks who work there – who I regard as friends since I’ve gotten gas there for decades – to open it.

Fact is this Shell station at Old Hickory and Franklin Road is a newer version of the first stop I made in Nashville when I drove my old Falcon down here after my folks moved here in 1972.  I blew a hole in my exhaust manifold around Indianapolis, and I roared with engine noise and little compression to this location, where I put a dime in the pay phone and called my folks to get precise directions to their home.

It is near another Shell Station where Metro cops stopped and frisked me one night when I was driving from my family home to my small Clarksville apartment. I was pushed around and threatened, because they said I “match the description” of some long-haired guy in a similar car who forced a motorcycle cop off Granny White Pike.  I would never do that, and I finally convinced them to let it be.

I did write a long letter to Metro Police Chief Joe “Hang ‘Em High” Casey about that swarm, push and frisk operation.  We became friends, and as far as I know I was the last person to interview him, spending an afternoon with him in his Donelson apartment months before his death.

All aside the point, except Jerry and I spent a lot of time talking with friendly coppers – and cold-blooded back-shooters, as well – during our lives in newspapering.  He was, besides me and Rob Dollar, the only friend I had who had no desire to do anything else. He was totally unequipped to deal with life after his 30 years at the morning newspaper ended with a “Don’t come back/Don’t look back” call from the now-vanished historic newspaper building on Nashville’s Broadway.

I have continued writing as a freelancer and authoring several books, most of which are available from amazon.com or if you simply stop me in the street. Please buy them.

Jerry really didn’t continue with anything. His second marriage had failed not that long before his newspaper dreams were jerked away from him, so he retreated to Lewisburg to be around his mother (who died a couple of years ago), his brothers and his cousins.

The last few years found him fighting colon cancer – “I guess they got it, I don’t know,” he responds when I ask him about that.

“I don’t remember anything,’’ he says, adding that the only person who has visited him other than me lately was John “Street” Staed, a former reporter/horrible sports editor/and fine newspaper editor, who is among our shared old friends.

John’s a good guy. And he tells me he’s never visited the nursing home.  But he is glad to be remembered by Jerry and says he will visit when he comes up from Birmingham, Alabama, to visit his sister in Brentwood.

“I was glad to see him,” adds Jerry. “Can’t remember much of what we talked about.”

I turn Jerry’s semi-frown into a smile when I bring up the tragic story of Chico, the Monkey.  Remembering the night we – copy desk chief Jerry, cops reporter Rob Dollar and me as the associate editor – chronicled the panicked pursuit of an escaped pet monkey by Montgomery County Sheriff’s deputies.

As noted in earlier transmissions, I elected to lead the Sunday morning Leaf-Chronicle with that story, with the headline “Deputies go bananas: ‘Monkey at large!’”

I got my semi-regular audience with an angry publisher on the following Monday, but it was worth it. Not for Chico, of course, as his two months of freedom ended when he was eaten by dogs.

When we are sitting in his nursing home dorm room, I use the Chico story to open the partially closed mental doors in Jerry’s head, and we talk about other newspaper adventures.

We spend a lot of time talking about Rodney Wayne Long and Kathy Jane Nishiyama. Both beautiful young people, they were abducted and murdered in the winter of ’81-’82, and those stories forever scarred us all.

“That was a lot of work, but we did a great job,’’ says Jerry. “They ever find out who killed them?”

I go through the prison lives and deaths of Rodney’s joy-killers David Frey and Stephen Drake and the Death Row lung cancer that killed Kathy’s monstrous murderer/rapist Eddie Hartman. Frey is the sole survivor, finally enjoying a parolee’s life.

I remind Jerry of the story I broke, at about 1 on a Sunday morning, when I bullied Chief Sheriff’s Deputy Eddie Patterson to admit to scanner rumors that Rodney’s wallet had been found along I-75, past Knoxville, as the murderers drove his car to escape justice. They were bound for New Jersey and eventually apprehended when Montgomery County Detective Cliff Smith climbed into a window in the house where they were hiding. “He came in through the bathroom window” was a newsroom joke back then.

The wallet story led to a 90-point streamer hed: “Wallet found: It’s Rodney’s.” The next day, in those eerily similar cases, Kathy’s purse was found down in Houston County.

“Did I write that ‘Wallet Found’ hed?” asked Jerry. Actually, he didn’t.  Editor Tony Durr, shortly before he was run out of town, wrote that headline.

But Durr’s dead. And Jerry is grasping for memories. So, “Yep. You wrote that headline,” I told him.

He nodded. (I should mention that Durr left town in the middle of the night at the suggestion of the newspaper chain. He was one of my closest friends, and he tried to hire me away to San Antonio, Chicago, Anchorage and Kodiak newspapers when he became an editor at each. I went for interviews, but didn’t get the jobs. Which was good. Tony washed out of those jobs like he washed out of six marriages in his short life. I loved the guy.)

“That’s when we made the movie, isn’t it?” Jerry says, and it indeed was.
After the trauma of the teenage murder victims and young killers, including the funerals (which I covered, scenes and sounds that still make my heart ache), Rob Dollar and I created The News Brothers, as a way to act and dress while dealing with the black damage to our souls.

From that sprang our movie “Flapjacks: The Motion Picture,” in which me as “Flapjacks,” Rob as “Death,” Jerry as “Chuckles” and Jim Lindgren as “Flash” made fun of murders, cops, popular culture and our corporate bosses.  The slightly over two-thousand we raised all went to local charity. Staed, Ricky “Dumbo” Moore and a very large StrawBilly Fields also were in that film. Harold “The Stranger” Lynch killed in the gunfight scene.

“That’s what I really remember most about working with you,” says Jerry. “Making the movie and hanging out with you until dawn on Sunday nights.’’

“I was thinking about your dogs the other day,” I say. “You and Gloria (first wife, who got the house) had two tiny poodles. When you went on vacation, I’d go over to your house in St. Bethlehem and take them out in the morning and at night. I think I went over there at lunchtime, too.”

He doesn’t remember the dogs or their names, though he does remember one he and his nephew, Steven, had in the Lewisburg house they shared, and where Jerry was found, passed out on the floor, before he was shipped to the nursing home.

“It was a white dog. I think we called him Snow. Or at least that would have been a good name for him, since he was all white.”

Jerry finishes his packages of crackers and the pint of SunDrop, and looks up. “I’m really hungry,” he says.

“Well, it’s 11:45, so they’ll be serving lunch soon,” I say.

“Let’s go down there,” he says, struggling to his feet. “I need to walk some, anyway.”

We arm-over-shoulder walked down to the lunchroom, and I turned to go out the double-secure door.

The Blackjack game had ended. Giant cards nowhere in sight. I wondered if they used those giant foam dice – that the “cool kids’’ and Low Riders hang on their rear-view mirrors – when they play craps.   

After I check out at the front desk, I talk, briefly, with an old woman who is enjoying the rainy day beneath the portico.  “Regular residents” are allowed this freedom.

Jerry’s not seen the world outside his freshly painted Memory Care Ward since Thanksgiving.

“I don’t know how I got here,” he’ll always say. “But it’s OK. I eat and I sleep and watch TV.”

I look back at the nursing home as I climb in my old car.  Inside, my old friend is eating bologna and cheese sandwiches to get fueled for an afternoon of “Gunsmoke” reruns. Or old movies. He is especially fond of movies about his favorite Harrys, both Callahan and Potter.

I feel pretty damn lucky for a 72-year-old punk.