"Flash" is disappointed, I'm drinking Diet Mountain Dew, missing anti-demented "Chuckles" and singing "CHICO and The Monkey Man"

 I finally got the top off the 20-ounce bottle of Diet Mountain Dew this morning.

It and the Ritz peanut butter crackers that it is washing down my throat for a healthy breakfast combo was supposed to be my weekly “contraband” snack that I sneak into Jerry “Chuckles” Manley in the Memory Care Ward.

I’m not a Mountain Dew – Diet or full-bodied – connoisseur.  But I’d already drained my morning pot of coffee while thinking about the sight of poor Milford/Bob curled up on Jerry’s bed, sleeping soundly. Probably glad he didn’t have to watch his back in the event of another roommate assault, as I surmised later.

Jerry wasn’t in the other bed – I don’t think he’d ever use Bob’s bed or chair – and I relive that grim realization today, as I sip on the Diet Mountain Dew. It was meant for Jerry, of course. I always bring him soda and a couple of packs of Ritz peanut butter crackers, which he lustily eats and drains as I sit with him, searching for words that might jiggle his brain out of neutral.

I’m pretty much done with the Ritz peanut butter crackers that tasted so good for breakfast that I had one more for dessert. If I ever see Jerry again, I’ll buy him some more.  If….if….

My long-time friend Jim “Flash News Brother” Lindgren, one of the four originals of our fraternity and a kind fellow who still worships at the skewed altar of a man we know and love as “Flapjacks (just kidding, he may be a Lutheran, and they don’t like pancakes) – had been worried, and he and his daughter, Jayne, drove down from Indianapolis.

"Flapjacks" and "Flash" get a preacher to snap their picture while Milford/Bob sleeps on "Chuckles''' bed.

He had two aims. He wanted to see Jerry, or the man masquerading behind a blank stare as Jerry, for himself.

And, just as much he was checking on me – I believe my lonesome ramblings and twisted wit about my visits to the Memory Care Ward, which has been Jerry’s “home” for three-quarters of a year – had troubled him.

Since I’ve been going at least once a week, occasionally twice if I have the stomach for it, I have been emotionally, physically even, affected by the ghost formerly known as Jerry “Chuckles News Brother” Manley. 

I look in his eyes, and he is in there, someplace.  He occasionally peeks out, then retreats inside his mental turtle shell.  Apparently, anger has begun to build inside this good man. Or what’s left of him.

Even in this condition, Jerry remains my longest-tenured newspaper friend, a generally kind, non-violent, jovial soul as long as I’ve known him. After all, even though he has never spoken to Bob/Milford, his roommate in the Dormitory of the Demented and Demi-Deceased and Dying, he never seemed to be upset when Bob would climb up in his bed, at as long as Jerry wasn’t using it (not that there’s anything wrong with it).

Bob/Milford, a much-honored horseman in real life – evidenced by all the horse contest ribbons, is a gentle fellow, as well. When I first started visiting Jerry here – I believe I am the only real company he gets – I would talk with Bob/Milford if Jerry was in the bathroom or if Jerry was staring, almost unconsciously at the flat-screen TV they share.

Bob/Milford must be the one handling the remote, as Jerry has not learned yet how to push the magic buttons that turn the TV on, change channels or adjust volume. Or maybe the nurses do that … or used to do that … when they’d come to razor-dribble some blood from Jerry’s finger for his four-time-daily blood-sugar tests.  Lately the result is he gets four insulin doses after each of those visits.

Last week, the television was set on one of those music channels, where the screen is filled with a photo of the artist/artists and some biographical info.  I’ve read that music is one of the best ways to break through the shell keeping dementia’s brain fog in place.  Perhaps one of the nurses, Kimmie maybe, had put the music channel on.  Music might bring a little light into the zombies’ eyes, about the only things Bob/Milford and Jerry have in common.  

I love Jerry and I’ve come to care about Milford/Bob – likely 95 years old and 75 pounds are my guesses – and our early conversations have degraded, from him talking proudly about his horses and assuring me that this is a great place to live and die to false-teeth clicks, grunts, huge smiles and some unintelligible words.  I still try to communicate with him. I’ve made a lot of friends in the cuckoo’s nest, and I count him among them.

My only clue to a crack in this Odd Couple’s living arrangements came about two months ago when I arrived at the door of the room only to find Bob trying to say “locked out ….Jerry ….locked out.”

I got the nurses to unlock it, and all was fine. I figured the lockout was an accident. But this week, after Jerry picked Milford/Bob up from his (Jerry’s) recliner, lifted him into the air and wrestling-slammed him to the floor, I’ve decided that Jerry probably locked his roommate out that occasion. And then there was Bob’s peed-on recliner. I don’t know who was responsible.  Perhaps that’s why Bob was determined to use Jerry’s and why Jerry reacted in this way.

Yes, I’ve buried the lead. But I didn’t want the image of 250-pound Jerry’s WrestleMania move on 75-pound Milford/Bob –  to be the only reason you read this blog. After all, this writing is copyrighted by old Flap and is restricted to a set audience, and I think most of you don’t read it. Even late-comers to the historic News Brothers community should read this stuff. Or else you are heartless fuckers who should resign your commission. Let me know if this story of the ranking News Brother struggling to bring some life back into a veteran newsman’s uncomfortably numb brain touches you at all.

I will say that the real Jerry is a kind and soft-spoken soul who generally doesn’t make it a habit to pick old people up and slam them down on the floor.

I did not want to tease the heartless among you into reading this report by starting with the image in my mind – as I was no witness – of the skirmish. The nurses described it from their view on the cameras  they keep in inmates' rooms.

When Jim aka “Flash”– who had come down from his job as a race-car breeder and horticulturist in Indianapolis to check on his old friends – accompanied me into the nursing home and attached nuthouse, he was a little nervous about seeing Jerry.

He was afraid Jerry might not recognize him and that he may have some sort of weird reaction. I told him that sometimes Jerry didn’t talk at all, just stared at the world’s reality that is on TV – from “Gunsmoke” to Neil deGrasse Tyson repeats to the latest episodes of “Perry Mason” – and that on those days I did all the talking. I’d generally try to raise a smile by talking about Chico the Monkey, who escaped from his cage and was pursued by terrified Montgomery County deputies, an event that was well-covered by The Leaf-Chronicle one Sunday morning 40 years ago.

The squirrel monkey’s demise – Chico roamed free for a couple of months near Dunbar Cave before being run to ground and eaten by neighborhood dogs – was handled in a personal column I wrote that began simply: “Chico is dead.”   Jerry always enjoys talking about the Chico story and my gory column obit follow-up, because the Chico pursuit – Deputies Go Bananas: ‘Monkey At Large’ -- is the only occurrence he remembers from his 35-40-year newspaper career. And that’s probably because I tell it to him often.

I also like to play to his “happy place” by talking about our charity fund-raising efforts as News Brothers, the most elaborate of which was our world-premiere screening of the timeless and twisted “Flapjacks: The Motion Picture.”

“I really liked rolling around on the ground with you and making movies,” he’s told me on more than one occasion. In addition to his KISS-like tongue-wagging, Jerry’s film persona, Chuckles, was something of an acrobat.  When we ran as a foursome in a scene, Jerry was bound to throw in a somersault worthy of Simone Biles’ most-ineffective student.  But it remains damn funny.

To prepare Jim, a 65-year-old youngster who in reality doesn’t breed race cars and hemp plants but was “bought out” (a cruel euphemism) from his job at an Indianapolis newspaper, I just told him to try to reach into his own pocketful of memories from the time he worked on Jerry’s copy desk and try to remind our friend of those events and, especially, of who he is. “Jerry was an imposing man,” Jim remembers.  “He was like a rock.”

“Like an i-i-i-sland,” I complete an old Paul Simon lyric.

 Jim’s had trouble visualizing his old boss and copyediting hero in the guy I’ve been describing for almost nine months in this space, so he wanted to come to terms with it personally.

I have said before that I have asked Jerry what his prognosis and diagnosis were, and he said “I don’t know. I never have seen a doctor.”  (He actually has, his daughter has had to take him for some appointments checking out the vanished or hibernated cancer in his colon.)

Now, I’m afraid he is seeing many doctors. And, perhaps, many more.  Makes me want to act like Chief Broom when I think of it. If you don’t know who that is, then you are too immature to be reading this blog about my flight over the cuckoo’s nest.

Anyway, Jerry objected when I asked if he had been diagnosed with dementia or Alzheimer’s Disease, the two reasons there are 40 rooms full of people in the Memory Care Ward, where he resides.

“No,” he’d say, a bit churlish. “I don’t have dementia or Alzheimer’s: I just can’t remember anything.”  

In fact, he wouldn’t remember things I told him minutes before. He would wonder how many months it had been since I’d been there (I’ve not missed a week, other than when I had Covid for a week after Christmas.)

He could remember nothing of his 30 years at the morning newspaper in Nashville – I wish I could forget my decade surrounded by the corporate anus-tonguers who told me I was a maverick “and we don’t have room for mavericks in this corporation.” You were supposed to moan and climax when the editors preached the company line. If you disagreed on the basis of intellect or morals, truth or, especially, personal sense of ethics, you were cut loose.

Seventeen years ago this week for me, the armed guards, who loved me and admired my courage and ethics, carried my stuff to my old Saab, hugged me and said goodbye. I’ve not been back in the building since.

In fact, the cause of journalism became so pathetic that they blew up the building, just like Springsteen’s chicken man -- to make room for condos and a hipster grocery. The morning "newspaper" staff, those who serve the 5,000 subscribers to the print product and the not brave, new world of clicks on the computer, now “lives” on a couple floors high on a low-level “skyscraper” in Midtown Nashville. Reporters, and there are a few, can keep track of the city by just looking out the windows. On warm days, the company brings an ice cream truck to the parking lot. A double-dip chocolate and maraschino cherry cone apparently does buy loyalty.  Hell, I wish they’d tried that on me instead of telling me I was too old and wrote too much about old musicians and Black people.  For that story, buy the book When Newspapers Mattered on amazon.com.

The book does not have a happy ending. But even co-author Rob “Death” Dollar had no idea of how sad and pointless life would become for Chuckles, one of our main comrades in the ethics war.

 Jerry made it for four more years than I in the Big G newsroom before they called him at the annual cousins dance-off-and-mate and melon-seed-spitting contest and pig roast – the annual weeklong family reunion in the urban Lewisburg/Petersburg cluster – and told him the box containing his pica pole and an empty pickle jar was in a box by the back door.  Of course, they always framed it as something good. “A buyout,” though is just a layoff or a firing when the bosses pay you pennies a day for years of service and kick you in the testicles. Or, less frequently but likely as painful, vaginas.  Both in some cases.

You are supposed to feel grateful for the pieces of silver and use your time to find another job. Anyone out there who is a 56-year-old white male can tell you my experience on the job hunt. The only boss interested in me when I was tossed to the curb included me. For semi-sanity – all I’ve ever aspired to -- I relied on my wife, Suzanne, and a few friends and my memories of Chico the Monkey.  Robert Penn Warren, Billy Joe Shaver and Billy Bob Thornton were among my many friends/admirers who couldn’t help.  I do think Robert Penn’s being dead was his main obstacle. The other two may have been drunk.

I was only at that newspaper 10 miserable years, mainly so I could pay off our adoptions of our two children from Romanian orphanages.

My frustration found a place in my writing.  Jerry was an editor, not a writer, and his frustration at not being appreciated after more than 30 years of service to the morning "newspaper" likely at least fueled his stark decline.  I actually think it’s been going on for years, but he was able to function OK. Until last Thanksgiving when they found him, unable to deal with life’s most-basic chores, in his home.

He’d been in and out of facilities before, but this time there was no “out.”

“I guess I’m here until I die,” an unusually cheerful Jerry would tell me when I’d visit him in the Memory Care Ward.

“A least you aren’t passed on the floor in your own shit,” I would counter, by way of cheering him up. I forever have been chastised for being an optimist.

Stopping now for another slug of Mountain Dew. “Do the Dew,” they say on commercials. Or is it Dew the Dew?  Do the Do? Dew the Do?

As usual, when I’m on my way to visit Jerry, I stop at the Shell station run by my friend, Quincy. I always top off my tank and go in to get the beverage and crackers – banned by the nursing home, so for months I snuck this stuff in my boxers. When I realized the nurses didn’t worry about the contraband, after all this guy’s gonna die of something, I stopped hiding it.

Quincy was saddened that the Diet SunDrop he special orders for my nursing home friend was not in stock. He helped me find my substitute, Diet Mountain Dew, and promised the Diet SunDrop would be there next week. 

I think he’ll be disappointed that I don’t stop and pick it up. Maybe I’ll take up lottery scratch cards so Quincy and I can have something to bond over. I’m certainly not going to keep buying this shit I’m drinking.

Anyway, after visiting with Quincy, I picked Jim up at a nearby Starbuck’s so his daughter, Jayne, would be occupied, and we went to the nursing home.

I should tell you here that Jim is fairly deep into his battle with Parkinson’s Disease, so he really didn’t think he could drive all this way from the Brickyard on his own. Jayne did some of the driving and kept her eye on her dad and the road.

Actually, Jim seems to do well with his Parkinson’s, and it’s obvious he’s a fighter. But it’s a damnable disease and there is no way out. You just fight your way to the end, and hope that end is many, many years in the future.

So, I should point out that there were five main News Brothers back in 1982-83, when we reigned. Me (“Flapjacks”), Rob Dollar (“Death”), Jerry Manley (“Chuckles) and Jim Lindgren (“Flash”) were the forces behind the movie we made and the fun we had that raised as much as $3,300 for local charities. I say five, because Radio Newsman Scott Shelton covered our activities for the radio and – when Jim went to Indy – “Badger” became our fourth News Brother.

It was kind of a Pete Best/Ringo situation, and Scott “Badger” really was a better drummer. He even had a full kit in the basement he’d turned into a Beatles shrine, even though he hated Ringo. That’s another story.

OK, of those five, let’s see their status 40-some years later. I am unemployed and write  books and visit dying friends and other lunatics. I also have trouble walking, even more laughing. Rob has two pig valves in his ticker and is unemployed and helping his hometown of Hopkinsville’s historic preservation. He also loves cats, writes books and is very tired. Jim Lindgren has Parkinson’s. Scott is dead after a valiant duel with cancer. Jerry may well be nuts.

In our visit to Jerry, Jim and I walked through the regular-people retirement center and through the double-locked doors into the corridor lined with rooms for the gang who can neither shoot nor think straight anymore.

We said our pleasantries to Kimmie, the head nurse, who just last week was attacked by a guy wielding a fork in the dining hall, and wandered down to Jerry and Milford’s room.

Jim stayed in the doorway while I checked. As I said earlier, Bob was in Jerry’s bed, but Jerry wasn’t in Bob’s. I checked the bathroom for a corpse or constipation. Empty.

I told Jim to wait in a little visitor’s area outside Jerry’s room, and I went down to the dining hall/social room and nurse’s office.

I looked around and didn’t see Jerry. I didn’t see the fork guy either.

“Kimmie,” I began, quickly drowned out by a woman sitting nearby. “Meow. Meow. Mee-owww,” the woman said.

Kimmie shook her head and told the woman her name was “Kimmie” and not “Kitty.”

The woman licked her right hand and “meowed” some more.

“I can’t find Jerry Manley,” I said to Kimmie. “He’s got a friend here who came all the way from Indianapolis to see him.

“Do you know where he is?” Since Jerry has no friends in the nursing home, I didn’t think he was paying a social call in one of the 40 rooms of the lunatic asylum.

“Ohhhh,” said Kimmie. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you when you came in, but Jerry’s not here. He’s in the hospital.”

I asked a number of questions, and she answered patiently since I am a regular in this place; and I really don’t think many people from the outside, not even relatives, visit.

“He was involved in a confrontation,” she said.

She went on to answer my questions, and it turns out Jerry was the one who did the confronting.

“He picked up Milford, who was sitting in Jerry’s recliner, and he threw him down on the floor,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

Nurses, who watch on closed circuit what’s going on in the rooms, observed the ruckus and ran down there, while others called authorities.

“I don’t think the police came to get him, but I’m not sure. At least they didn’t arrest him. The ambulance guys took care of getting him in a gurney and they took him to the hospital.”

I was stunned, but not really surprised.  He may not have dementia, but he sure acts like it, with his anger and this attack leveled at a little old man who simply sat in the wrong chair.

“I’m not sure what will happen. He may come back. They do bring them back sometimes after they’ve been in the hospital for a week or two. Sometimes.”

She added that the fork attacker also was sent down to Vanderbilt Psych last week, “and if they decide to let him back here, he could be in another week or so.”

Perhaps Jerry and the aspiring fork killer can become pals.

If Jerry’s not allowed back in?

Kimmie shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s still got his bed here.’’

I didn’t push it, but I thought that, even if he is deemed harmless, will they let him back in his room with Milford/Bob?

There aren’t any other beds here, other than the fork swashbuckler’s.

I went back down the hall to fill Jim in on what had transpired and that he had traveled, Parkinson’s dragging at his body, all the way from the Brickyard for nothing.

He was disappointed, but, of course, was happy to spend time with me.

As we got up from our seats in the visitors’ area, a preacher came out of the room across from us. He told us he had dropped in – for about 5 minutes –- to see his Mom. “She has no idea who I am at least half of the time.”

We asked him to snap a shot of the two of us, and he did, hurriedly.

Before we left, I wanted to check on Milford/Bob. And I wanted to introduce him to Jim.

The old fellow woke up and smiled. I asked him how he was, and he smiled. I said he had gotten into it with his roomie, and I hoped he didn’t hurt. He just smiled, gurgled something that may have been a line from “White Rabbit.”

“Hi, Milford, my name is Jim,” said my old pal from Indy. “It’s nice to meet you.”

Milford/Bob smiled again, and I told him to get back to sleep.

The preacher who had taken our picture was conducting a little service in the dining/commons room.  I didn’t know what he was talking about, which I’m sure is the case for most of his audience.  They’ve gotta do something to kill time between meals, and searching for an afterlife is better than watching “I Love Lucy.’’

Then he led them in a song about a river.  We listened briefly to the song, recognized it and – after all we were in a Memory Care Ward – we couldn’t remember the song’s title when we got back into the world.

I thought it was “Shall We Gather at the River,’ but Jim said it wasn’t a religious tune.

I do know the topic was a river, someplace. So, I’ve been thinking about which it may have been.

In the days since, I’ve decided that perhaps it was “Tweeter and The Monkey Man,” a song I generally sing by substituting “Chico” for “Tweeter”

“The undercover cop was found
Face down in a field
The Monkey Man was on the river bridge
Using Chico as a shield ….”

That really wasn’t the song, but it is one of my favorites. And it is not religious, so perhaps it fits Jim’s description.

I should note that I love Jim "Flash" and know how difficult it was, with his Parkinson's, to get down here. He had to plan, make sure medications were adequate and rest up, and his daughter Jayne had to get off work. He says he'll come back, once I find out whatever happened to "Chuckles."

Since our visit, I have tried to track Jerry down. The ambulance took him to Vanderbilt Medical Center, where he was waiting in the ER for placement, perhaps in the psych ward?  But, as of today, he’s “discharged,” according to the hospital; and “he’s not at the residence,” according to the nursing home.

I love the guy and I’m sure I’m going to miss him.

I’m about finished with the Diet Mountain Dew now. People must be fucking nuts to drink this stuff.  
   

 

Halfway down the long hallway of the damned and demented, Tim stops to talk with a nurse about "Where's Jerry?" Jim "Flash" Lindgren took this photo of me, who you can see, barely, in the hall. 

     

 (Copyright, August 18, 2024 by Flapjacks. Copying and sharing is prohibited.)