"Nobody loves you when you’re down and out ….”
That John Lennon song was in my occasionally melancholy
brain as I stopped in at my favorite Shell gas station to get gas and regular
supplies for smuggling into the Memory Care Ward where my lifelong newsroom
crony Jerry Manley sits and stares at a movie about a tornado.
“I don’t know if this is a weird movie or a true story,” he says to me, after I move his Rolling With The Stones book – by that band’s retired bassist Bill Wyman – so I can sit in the recliner next to his bed. (Wyman, by the way, really enjoyed a conversation we had 25-some years ago back when Davis-Kidd Booksellers existed. But that’s beside the point of this tale. I went to see Wyman with my friend and employee Peter Cooper, who is dead. He bought me a copy of that book for Bill to sign, which he did while joking around with me.)
Milford Brown, aka “Bob,” is in the chair next to me in the
room he shares with Jerry. He also stares at the silliness on TV while snoozing
and mocking the special effects. Nah, that was me. Except for the snoozing part.
It piques my interest that there are about a half-dozen
greeting cards on Jerry’s bureau. “I don’t know who they came from or
anything,” Jerry says, voicing surprise when I point them out.
“Maybe they are for Father’s Day,” I offer. “One of them may be from your daughter,
another from your son.”
I felt bad that I raised his expectations, though. I inspect
the cards and find that four of them are blank and unsigned. Two of them are to
someone named “Stan.”
“Does Bob go by ‘Stan’ sometimes?” I ask Jerry.
“No, I think his name is Milford or something like that. A
horseman.”
So. the cards are not for anyone who lives in this room. Or
perhaps they were for someone who did live here and, well, already checked out,
making room for Jerry.
Bob puts on his LCP cap – I have no idea what the initials
mean – and he moves over to the bureau, where he examines his faded Vols cap. His
new bedspread is a UT end-zone checkerboard done in yarn and probably with
either love or guilt as motivation.
He looks at the Vols cap, holds it in both hands, and
decides to leave it there, next to the blank cards and the two for Stan, and he
wanders from the room. He returns 15
minutes later, shuffles to the bathroom, turns on the light and leaves it on,
while not using the facilities. He stops again to ponder the faded Vols cap
before departing.
Jerry gets up and uses the facilities before he turns the
light out.
My pal is actually having a good day, as far as I can tell,
as he chain-eats the six peanut butter crackers and the six cheese crackers I
brought, washing them down with his Diet SunDrop, all the while watching the
door for an angry dietician. I actually
think I should just bring this stuff in a bag rather than sneaking them into
the nursing facility in my cargo shorts.
They surely know what I’ve been doing every week, sometimes
more frequently, since early December, when Jerry was brought here by family. Nobody’s
shot me yet for the contraband smuggling. They always thank me for visiting
Jerry.
Apparently. there are few visitors for any of the people who
live here, which is why, I assume, most of the residents and nurses and guards
armed with AK’s, black German shepherds next to them -- greet me with such good
cheer. Kidding about the guns, guards and dogs.
The woman who lets me in and out of the double-locked
facility is a strikingly beautiful woman with her dreadlocks, on this day,
piled atop her head. I tell her how lovely she is, and I’m relieved that she
smiles, glances slowly downward at me and thanks me. Never know these days if
you are supposed to compliment people on their beauty. Could get a guy in
trouble.
But she is pretty, my favorite sight, other than Jerry, Bob
and the guy who usually wears a Vanderbilt sweatshirt when I quietly move
through the carpeted hallways where these people will likely take their final breaths
and steps.
“How long you been in here?” I hear a man ask a woman out in
the “normal” nursing home section, where they are watching the tornado movie,
too.
“Oh, about eight months,” she says, pulling her peach shawl
tighter to rescue her from the chill of the 78-degrees thermostat.
“I’ve been here 80 years,” says the man. I don’t know if
it’s a joke or if he’s confused. Eighty years ago, the land where this nursing
home stands was a farm field. A massive stone mansion filled the middle of the
acreage that was set off by one of those Civil War-era stacked stone walls. I
always dreamt of buying that house, but it fell 20 years ago to progress. The
nursing home, a physical therapy facility and a Neptune Society office fill
that space.
That Neptune Society apparently is for people who have no
religious beliefs but who want to be cremated, their ashes turned into Snickers
bars or something unlike that. I don’t
know why this stuff keeps popping up. Crazy from the heat, as David Lee Roth titled
his first non-Van Halen recording back in the early to mid-1980s. “I’m just a gigolo,” he sang. “I ain’t got
nobody….Nobody who cares for me.... I'm so sad and lonely, sad and lonely ….”
Forty years ago or so, I was looking for a different kind of
music than Jerry and I normally listened to, so I bought all of Van Halen’s
albums for us to listen to while we drank 16-ounce Natural Lights and smoked in
my Clarksville basement. “Hot for Teacher.” “Panama.” “Jump….” Yeah, go ahead and imagine me and my pal turning
up the stereo at 3 a.m. and singing along. You gotta roll roll roll with the
punches.
Another woman, with a hat and a flowered dress, is sitting
outside the nursing home in a white, wicker chair. She smokes cigarettes. I’m sure that’s not allowed here, but what
are you supposed to do? Kill her? Nah, let her suck in those noxiously enticing
strands of smoke. I nodded at her, wishing, briefly, that I’d not quit smoking
24 years ago. Hell, she smokes and she must be 90. I’m 72 and feel like shit.
My journey to the nursing home got off on a weird start when
I made my normal stop at the Shell. After I paid for the crackers, drink and to
top off my gas tank, the clerk says: “Anything else today, Pops?”
She’s not insulting in tone. As I limp around, I must remind
her of her grandfather. Her whiter grandfather. Her Pops.
“Pops, you need any help getting this stuff out to your
car?” she asks, when she pushes my bag of nursing home staples and shakes her
ample frame and accessories to a Beyonce song blasting from the intercom.
“Nah, I can make it today,” I say, smiling at her.
“You be real careful, Pops,” she says.
My grandchildren do call me “Pops” – at least the ones who
can talk. I imagine the clerk’s grandfather is my age.
I straighten up, forcing myself not to bend over like an old
man as I walk out to my car. I look back and see she is watching me, likely
worried that I’ll fall down, dead, on the concrete surface near the pumps.
Yeah, go ahead and jump. Pops.
I flash her a smile and continue on my journey to see Jerry.
I’ve kinda backed into this chronicle this week.
“This is a movie, not a news show,” I tell Jerry as the
tornado whips through the local high school and leaves an amorous young couple hiding
in the destroyed “old paper mill.”
We watch the movie for awhile. The pretty girl in the
carnage has a badly cut leg. The boy doesn’t know what to do.
“I always hated covering tornadoes,” I tell Jerry, my
half-century news colleague.
“Me, too,” he says. “Too much damage. People losing all
they’ve got. So many killed. Too sad.”
“I much preferred covering a murder,” I say, and he laughs.
“Me, too. Unlike a tornado, only one person is killed, and
he probably deserved it,” he says, allowing just a smidgen of his old
newspaperman’s cynicism to sneak out.
I tell him about the John Lennon song that has been in my
head all day, and he smiles, as if he remembers the song.
But suddenly, I ask a question, and it sparks an answer that
does show there’s someone alive inside his head.
“You remember the pie fight?” I ask, referring to the great
old movie “Flapjacks: The Motion Picture” and its climactic police chase,
followed by a pie fight.
Actually, and I have lied before about it, the pies were
made of frozen pie shells in their tins, filled with shaving cream.
“Aren’t many grownup people who can say they’ve been in a
real pie fight,” I say.
He laughs. “I remember Ricky (Moore, sports editor/aka “Dumbo News Brother.) He couldn’t decide who to throw his two pies at, so he just hit himself in the face with both of them,” Jerry says, pantomiming Dumbo’s actions, forever captured on film.
“Making that movie with you, well, it was fun,” says Jerry.
“And I remember the gunfight scene, where we killed Harold Lynch.”
In our takeoff on a spaghetti Western fight, me, Jerry,
Dumbo and Rob Dollar squared off against Harold -- aka “The Stranger’’ -- in front of Clarksville’s
City Hall.
Dressed in full cowboy regalia – he had been a rodeo rider and a daydream believer –
he drew first and shot, but he was off target. We gunned him down with our
squirt guns, and he collapsed on the cobblestones. As Harold lay dying, I used
my powers to resurrect him, giving him a fresh pair of shades and helping him
to his feet. Bless you my son. You are healed.
He rode off on a stick pony I’d provided. Every grown man
needs to possess a stick pony, by the way. I also dig a moon dog.
The fact Jerry remembered all that pleased me. “Mostly all I can remember is who I am,” he says. “And I’m not always sure.”
The fact he couldn’t recall even what he had for breakfast
or the last time anyone other than me and John Staed visited troubled me.
Staed, a good guy and long-ago newsroom colleague who played
the bit part of “Street” – a worthless drifter with a green Volkswagen Rabbit –
in our movie, supposedly visits Jerry every week.
Always for the first time.
“He hadn’t been here before. He lives down in Birmingham. Good to see
him. I think he has a sister in the area.”
Indeed, John does have a sister in Brentwood. Just as true
is the fact that old Street has never visited Jerry in the nursing home. But when Jerry describes those ghost visits
with John, it always makes him feel better. So, thanks, John.
“Glad he visited. Mostly who I see is you," Jerry says. "I’m glad you keep
coming. You don’t have to.”
Except really, I do.
The dietician comes down to the room to get him to go down
to the party room for lunch.
“I don’t want you to turn into a monster, because you
haven’t had your lunch,” she says to him, while pinching my butt.
“He’s been my friend for 50 years, and he’s never been a
monster,” I tell her.
“You wait and see him after he misses a meal.”
She sits him down in the dining hall, where she tests his
blood, gives him a fistful of pills and puts a pair of insulin shots in his
gut.
“Nobody loves you when you’re down and out,” I sing to
myself after the beautiful young woman with dreadlocks lets me through the
double-locked doors when Jerry begins his lunch.
“Thanks for coming,” both nurses/dieticians say, as I slip
from Memory Care and try to remember my way to the parking lot.
In the “regular” nursing home, it looks like they are having
Hamburger Helper and burned toast. But they seem to be enjoying it.
The woman who snuck a smoke an hour-and-a-half before is no
longer outside, though aroma clings to the thick air.
I replayed the morning’s adventures as I climbed into my old
car.
I look back at the facility where my old friend is whiling away his
life while watching stupid movies and “Gunsmoke” reruns.
“Everybody loves you when you’re 6 feet in the ground,” I
sing the end of the Lennon song that has been on mental replay all day.
“C’mon, Pops,” I say.
“Let’s get the hell out of here.”
No comments:
Post a Comment