Festus, Marshal Matt Dillon’s bewhiskered deputy, was asked what he was going to do after an obviously unsavory character took over the big man’s desk.
In an instant, Festus had his Colt six-shooter pointed up
beneath the bad guy’s jaw.
“First, I’m going to decide whether I’m going to fight you
or just splatter what little brains you have on the ceiling,” he told the guy
who crooked cattlemen had installed in Dillon’s chair while the marshal was
“missing … somewhere out in the valley ….”
My best friend -- at least the longest-living survivor of a
lifestyle some might have labeled “self-destructive,” while to us it was the
time of our lives – stopped snoring long enough to see if Festus was going to blow
the guy’s brains all over the ceiling of the U.S. Marshal’s office in Dodge
City, Kansas.
“This is better,” Jerry Manley said, as he swung his legs
off the mattress so he could sit up in bed.
“I didn’t want to watch that news you had on. I like to watch TV.
“Game shows and cowboys.”
“Game shows are probably good for you,” I said, after Festus
put his gun away and let the bad guy leave the marshal’s office. “If you play
along, they’ll help keep your brain active,” I said.
Jerry just shrugged at that. He doesn’t have a lot of hope
of recovering some of the phases and stages of his life’s memories, he reckons.
Still, even watching “Jeopardy” can stimulate, even if you don’t know answers
to questions like “Little Joe Cartwright is connected to the Andromeda by this
big snake.” (Answer: “Who is Adam Cartwright?” “Who is Pernell Roberts?” also
would be accepted.)
Joking aside, my beloved friend is fighting to hang onto his
memories. It’s why this long-haired relic of another age (me … Jerry’s daughter
Mary Jane has given her pop a close-cropped and dandy look) so often is sitting
in the recliner next to his bed when he wakes up. He remembers me, and I help
him remember the who, what, when, where, why and how factors of a journalist’s
life.
“You remember the night you almost killed yourself to save a
dog?” I asked him.
He smiled as that simple question sparked memories of one of
our marathon nights of harmless – to all but us – excess.
Like the time we went to the Little Ole Opry nightclub in
the backroom of my friend, John Maddox’s package store (that’s what they used
to call liquor stores back in the civilized days of the 20th
Century).
Jerry smiled and contributed a chuckle or two as we talked
about that night. For a few Fridays and Saturdays one spring in the mid-1980s,
the Opry performers would finish their sets and skits at the Grand Ole Opry
House out in Donelson, and they’d rush up to the room behind Pal’s Package
Store in Clarksville. It was a nice room, of the old-fashioned gangster-era
nightclub variety, with round tables and red, subdued lighting. E.T., Porter,
Little Jimmy, Lorrie Morgan and more would play for a few hours.
(The club was short-lived, closed after the real Ole Opry, a
bunch of three-piece suit corporate guys, sent their lawyers to Pal’s Package
Store, and sternly objected (or worse).)
But it was wonderful while it lasted. They sold beer by the
bucket full of bottles. Jerry and I had a few buckets full one night (or
probably more.) He dropped me off at the house where I lived unhappily (another
life) while plotting my escape. It
probably was 2 a.m. when he dropped me off, and he began his 10-mile drive to
the house he lived in in the St. Bethlehem community of Clarksville.
On his way home, probably a quarter-mile from his house, a
dog ran out in front of Jerry’s blue Honda Prelude. Rather than hit the dog,
Jerry steered off the road, rolling his car a few times.
He was all bruised up and missed a shift or two at The
Tennessean (he was commuting from Clarksville back then while plotting his own
future). Fact is, I didn’t know anything about the wreck until I got to work at The Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle at
2 p.m. or so and, as was customary, dialed Jerry at The Tennessean copy desk.
He wasn’t there. He’d been in a wreck, I was told by Nick Vanocur, another
friend (he died alone in a fleabag residential motel a few years ago.)
Nick said he thought Jerry was OK, but I quickly hung up the
phone and dialed the Manley estate in St. B. He invited me by after I got off
work. He was really beaten to hell by the incident. He was stiff, bruised and
scratched up. I poured him a bit of the Cutty Sark bottle we’d finish that
evening.
There’s a lot more to it, but this was the part I decided to
focus on the other day when I worked to pull Jerry from the partial fog that
has him in a Memory Care ward.
We were “reliving”
that tale – I was telling it while he was listening – when he shook his head
and slapped his knee.
“I shoulda hit that damn dog,” he muttered.
“You never would do that, Jerry. You know that.”
We laughed, though.
And then he asked me for some potato chips.
The reason I tell these stories to him is simple enough.
First of all, it jars some of the calcium loose that is clogging up his brain.
Like the game shows, there is something to be gained by listening to me.
Granted, they are sometimes two-hour-long, one-sided
conversations, but Jerry stays alert and smiles when something I have said
touches what’s left of a funny bone for a guy who pretty much is confined to a
large dormitory room with someone he doesn’t know. His name varies from Bob to
Thomas to “that guy.”
Jerry seldom leaves his room to go down to the party room. I
think he got pissed at the other patients when we were told we were being too
loud for them to hear what John Denver was saying in some stupid TV movie a couple
of weeks ago.
Jerry, who doesn’t say much, wasn’t loud. I was, to be heard
above the blasting television and the truly mindless chatter of those gathered
beneath quilts in the memory care ward.
I know it made Jerry mad that we were being told to be quiet.
And since the barbs and empty eyes were leveled at me, he got angrier.
Now he has calmed down.
“I just lay here and watch cowboy shows and game shows,” he said, as he
forked a bit at the stone-cold breakfast that had been left at the foot of his
bed two hours ago.
“I can’t eat this,” he said to me, forcing a bite of
stone-cold bacon into his mouth. "I don’t know why they left it here and didn’t
take me down to the breakfast room. I didn’t know this was here.”
When the nurse/dietician came in, I was a little stern.
“How’s he going to keep any strength if you just leave his food here while he’s
sleeping?” I said. I threw the plate of
cold eggs and the fixings in her face and she fell to the floor. Nah, that’s not true. But she did have to
think deeply for an answer.
“I came and got him at breakfast time,” she said. “But he
told me he didn’t want to come down there to eat.
“I’ll make sure he eats something at lunchtime.”
I told her how much he misses potato chips in the memory
care ward.
Jerry and I talked about food and women, newspapers and The
Beatles. He let out a couple of fine farts,
proof that he hasn’t lost it completely.
Festus was going out to the valley to find Marshal Dillon,
according to the dialogue on the blasting TV. “Matthew will come back and take
care of this. He won’t like it a bit that this guy is taking his spot.”
Doc Adams agreed, running his right hand along Festus’s
inseam.
Nah. But he did agree.
Jerry and I watched for awhile. I always like to watch
Dillon commit cold-blooded murder at the end of the show.
“I don’t think I’ll want any lunch,” he had said to the
nurse.
I reminded him that if he wanted to be healthy he needed to
eat. I felt like my Grandma Ghianni as I said it.
I hugged him the next time he woke up from fitful slumber
“I really like having you out here,” he said, adding that
for the most part he doesn’t want company. “You and I have gotten old.
Together. Don’t know how. Doesn’t seem so long ago that we were having all that
fun and making movies.”
As I walked out toward the “secure door,” so the guards
could let me into the “regular” nursing home, I ducked my head into the
dietician’s office and asked her again to “make sure he eats.”
She was next to the cafeteria/common/party room, where the
people were mostly sleeping, mouths open, while Festus found Marshal Dillon,
who climbed up on his chestnut horse so he could get back to town and gun down
the lawman-impersonator hired by evil cattle barons.
“You don’t do that sort of thing in Dodge City,” I said to
myself, parroting angry directions yelled at me, Jerry, Rob Dollar, John Staed, Jim Lindgren and Ricky G. Moore 42 years ago.
“You don’t do that sort of thing in Clarksville,” we were
instructed after a task force of armed cops interrupted our tickertape parade
through the streets of the Queen City of the Cumberland. We’d been passing
hand-rolled tobacco cigarettes and a Jack bottle or two filled with Coke, props
for our movie grand finale parade. Cops don’t like freedom of expression.
“I’m going to talk about that parade arrest next time,” I
said, inside my weary brain, as I walked to the secure escape hatch from the
memory care ward.
I was let through the
double-locked doors and walked through the other part of the nursing home,
where about 20 people were playing bingo in a hallway.
I wondered if they’d been given potato chips.
