“I don’t know why,” Jerry says.
Actually, it is wishful thinking for Jerry Manley, my pal
for a half-century … most of which he has forgotten.
Still, he wishes he was in the Lewisburg house where he
lived for a few years after life and a newspaper – for guys like him and me,
those things are one in the same – let him down.
“All I remember is being in my house. I think I fell down
and couldn’t get up. And I guess they brought me here. Here I am.”
He rocks back in the padded chair – “It’s not as comfortable
as it looks” – and says he wishes he still was in that house.
“But I guess I won’t be. Who is living there now?”
I answer that it’s his nephew, Steven, who moved in long ago
to share the house near a creek. Steven gradually assumed more and more of the care
of his deteriorating uncle. That last fall was what triggered the move to the
nursing home.
“I don’t remember much. Don’t even remember how long I’ve
been here,” Jerry says, with a smile, no bitterness.
I tell him it was right after Thanksgiving when his family
-- the loved ones who had done their best for him in between regular stays in hospitals,
rehab centers and old folk’s homes down in Lewisburg -- realized they couldn’t
care for him. And, he couldn’t take care of himself.
“We had a dog down there at my house,” he says. “A white
dog. Name was Snow. I’m surprised I can remember that. Course, I guess we named
him that because he was all white.”
My friend has always loved pets – I used to dog-sit for him
and his then-wife up in Clarksville, when they went to family reunions and
such.
Those family reunions were what Jerry built his summers
around for as long as I knew him. Folks
from Petersburg, Lewisburg and rural areas not deserving of names would show
up around the Fourth of July for a week or so.
He had two uncles who would come in from California. “One lived in San Diego, one in San
Francisco. One year we went out and visited them both. It was a beautiful drive
between them.”
He and his second wife took the Pacific Coast Highway – my favorite
road in all my ramblings – at least part of the way.
I remind Jerry that he was at the reunion (and single again)
when he got the call from the morning newspaper that they were buying him out.
That’s what they do with people like us, put a little package together and sweet-talk
you about their generosity as they stab you in the back. The sweet-talk fell on
deaf ears in my case, though there literally seemed to be a sharp pain between my
shoulder blades. Or maybe a couple feet lower.
Jerry didn’t even get the courtesy of being stabbed in the
back, and he’d been a valuable editor and leader at the paper for about 30
years. It was simply a cold call. The coldest variety.
“They just called me at the family reunion and said ‘don’t
come back to work,’” is one thing he remembers clearly, in a conversation we
had back in his room, before we ambled down to the lunch room.
I ask him what his response was. “I told them that was a shitty way to treat
me,” he says. “Shitty way. Shitty.”
I’d gotten to the nursing home in the morning, and as I
walked in with food contraband in my cargo shorts, I had to walk around a
gathering in the hallway of the part of the facility where people still have
most of their marbles.
“We had a lot of complaints about yesterday’s lunch,” says a
tall, young guy in his late-50s or early 60s.
He’s clearly some sort of administrator and, from the size
of the gathering of folks – many in wheelchairs – it is clear that he is
attempting to stave off some sort of revolt.
“We won’t serve that again,” he said, to a sour chorus of “no
more mystery meat.”
I gave the rebels two thumbs-up as I cut through their
cafeteria, where one resident was laughing about the hubbub, and continued to
the Memory Care Ward.
I heard one more “mystery meat” jeer as the door closes
behind me.
Jerry was sleeping as “Columbo” stumbled and yammered
through another murder on the big television.
I woke him by putting the bottle of Diet SunDrop in his
right hand.
“This for me?” he asks, as he twists the cap off. Both of
us had trouble with the cap the other day, so I had a woman at the gas station
where I bought this drink loosen it for me before I went to the nursing home.
I also gave him two packs of Ritz sandwich crackers – peanut
butter and the other cheese – and I sat down next to him.
“What was that headline we wrote?” he asks me right after I
bring up the subject of the legend of Chico the Monkey, a highlight of the many
years when I was in charge of the Sunday newspaper.
I bring that up every visit, because he smiles and he
remembers the night in the newsroom in Clarksville when police reporter Rob “Death”
Dollar wrote the tale of a police pursuit of an escaped monkey in a
neighborhood not far from Swan Lake Golf Course.
The monkey’s quest for freedom – sometimes people just want
to be free – baffled the sheriff’s deputies, who kept code-talking on the
scanner and talking about the monkey business.
Rob had gone out to the scene for a while, then came back
with notes and a report and worked the story as we listened to the scanner. Then I read it out loud, with Jerry and Rob
right there, all chipping in monkey puns and aping the words of Chico’s
pursuers.
“Deputies go bananas; 'Monkey at large'” was the headline
Jerry wrote – again with help from me and Rob.
We streamed it across the top of the front page of the
Sunday editions of The Leaf-Chronicle, and adjourned for scotch with the
exhausted deputies -- who did not catch the monkey -- to Buford Thaxton’s Camelot nightclub.
The following Monday morning began with one of my frequent invites
to publisher Luther Thigpen’s office.
I’ve written this story before, and it ends with a column I
wrote a few months later that begins “Chico, the monkey, is dead” or something
like that. He’d survived for months on his own before neighborhood dogs ate
him. Poor damn Chico. “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” a
friend wrote back in the 1960s.
This Chico story always perks Jerry up, and we go on to
remembrances of other stories told – most much more tragic, involving many GI
traffic fatalities (Fort Campbell is adjacent to Clarksville), asbestos in
schools, teenage rape and murder victims and killers. I guess, come to think of
it, Chico’s story was plenty tragic as well.
“Remember Skipper?” I’ll ask Jerry, when I bring up the name
of a down-and-outer we’d befriended, even taking him to bars and parties. He
was probably only 70, which seemed so old at the time.
“Sure,” Jerry says, reciting the first line of my initial
column about Okey “Skipper” Stepp: “Me and old Skipper sat on a bench. It was
hot. Boy was it hot.”
I had a deep love for Skipper, and he was the last person I
visited – at a nursing home, where he spent his final days – before I left
Clarksville for a somewhat spectacular, somewhat bittersweet life of a
newspaperman in Nashville.
“John Staed was here the other day,” Jerry says. John’s
nickname is “Street News Brother,” and he’s a good guy. He visited Jerry about
six weeks ago.
“Columbo gets too much
for me,” says Jerry, switching the channels and wildly ending up on a gospel preacher’s
show. We watch it for a little bit
before finding a cartoon version of Spiderman.
“Man, I’m hungry,” my friend says, as he throws the cracker
wrappers away and washes down the last crumbs with Diet SunDrop.
It is almost lunchtime, so we get up and walk, carefully – I’m
as much of a falling risk as Jerry is – through the hallways, stepping around
the workmen who are painting the walls. The rain of careless spots on the
carpet indicates that new floor covering is on its way.
“What is the name of this facility?” Jerry asks, as he sits
down in a comfortable – it seems --chair to wait in the dining hall/social room
for his lunch.
I tell him the name and add that it is in
Brentwood.
“I don’t know why, but I keep thinking I’m in Lewisburg.”
I leave him there to await his lunch and I go to the dining
room door, propping it open so that three other men I’ve met here can get in
for their lunch.
All of them shake my hand, like I’m the end of a receiving
line, as they pass me. I really like these people.
A dietician rolls her cart through the locked doors from the
regular wing to the Memory Care Ward.
“What you got for them today?” I ask her, as I see something
resembling big trays of hamburger and pasta and veggies, on her cart. Hamburger
Helper, perhaps?
“I just bring this stuff from the kitchen,” she says. “I don’t
know what it is.”
I look back and wave to my friend. I'm sad at the realization:
Jerry's not in Lewisburg anymore.
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