Pops watches stupid tornado movie, sings Lennon, recalls Bill Wyman, sees smokin' old woman; Laughter, snacks for Jerry, no hungry monster

 "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.)

Rob Dollar took this shot of me lecturing Bill Wyman at a bookstore a quarter-century ago. For younger readers, Wyman was a member of The REAL Rolling Stones. I skipped the offer of lunch with Wyman because my Aunt Rita needed to be picked up from the airport and make some meatballs for dinner.

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.

Dumbo Moore ponders whether he should hit himself with two pies. He did.

Flapjacks and Death, who financed the motion picture epic, sort out copyright details in the train yard. For most people, it's a lifelong dream to have a pie fight. Fairy tales come true for News Brothers.

“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.

This is a picture of Jerry Manley taken the Monday after I was "bought out" from a newspaper where we worked. Jerry was my last boss. Rob shot this in 2007.

This is a freeze frame from "Flapjacks: The Motion Picture." Harold "The Stranger" Lynch was gunned down in the famous spaghetti Western scene. Flap resurrected him from the dead and gave him a stick pony for his escape.  Flap digs a pony.

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.”

 

      

 

 

A tale of loneliness, love, death, missing friends and how 55 years ago, Jocko and Champo (or Champion) roamed the prairies and pubs

Half-century-plus friendship with Jocko included a weekend at the farm. Jim is at left, me in front. In the doorway, partially hidden, is our farm host John "Titzy" Nitz. Leonard "Nardholm" Sandholm is the guy in the doorway with the curly hair. That's Ivan Tos behind me. The other guy must have been a friend, too, but I don't remember his name.  

 There aren’t a lot of pictures of me and my best college friend, football player Jim Mraz, when we were young guys, roaming free, the farm fields, taverns, the parties.

Pretty much impossible, as we never stopped long enough for photos. We were too busy having fun and, of course, studying diligently at Iowa State University. Well, there may be mugshots someplace, but that's another issue.

We’ve been replaying those memories in many phone calls in recent months and years. And the end result is my side aches with laughter. It’s nice to be reminded that life really can be fun, if you give it a try.

We were young, wild, silly and – most important – we were kind to others when we roamed wild, the guys who led others to parched-eye dawns and lived to relish our all-night adventures over free eggs and bacon at all-night diners and truck stops.

And, as I’ve mentioned earlier in my writings, Jim and I were the “cooks” during hog-cutting weekend at the Nitz farm in Cherokee, Iowa. One of our greatest adventures, though we did feel bad for the hogs.

And the world-famous Viking Fest. Someday I’ll write about that, but it really was the best-ever party I’ve been to …. Jim and I were the hosts. We roasted the turkeys and cooked the pheasant stew (Nardholm, who fell to cancer a few years ago, but who I really loved) killed the birds.  All Jim and I had to do was take the bird shot out of the meat and throw it into a steaming pot on Gomez’s stove.  I’ll have to tell you about Gomez some other time.   He was in charge of our dormitory, all eight floors. He reached out to me and Jim, I think, because he thought it was better to keep the troublemakers close.  Gomez was a helluva guy.  His name was/is Ed Norton, like Art Carney on The Honeymooners. But he looked like the patriarch of The Addams Family.

Such a deep friendship as mine with Jim is more important than ever to me now. Stupid stuff, life etc., got in the way, sporadically, but our friendship never ceased beating in our hearts.

Jim, aka “Jocko,” as I nicknamed him 55 years ago or so, and I both have the afflictions of old men.  Some maladies worse than others. We talk about those, but we know that’s all part of the walk of life.

I really don’t have many friends, living, at least.  Too many of them, like Peter Cooper, have checked out early.  Our phone conversations, several a week for 20 years, were critical to me, and – I think – to him.  His ashes are up at Spring Hill Cemetery, where he is in the same mausoleum wall as our mutual friend, Mac Wiseman, the great flattop guitar player who used to call me regularly from his spread out in L.A. (Lower Antioch, in the southeastern section of Metro Nashville.)

If you read my most-recent book – Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes – you’ll come upon a huge lineup of my friends.  Most are gone, and I miss them.  You should buy the book, though. It’s available at amazon.com and you will relish the anecdotes and quotes and fly-on-the-wall observations.

I cherish folks like Bobby Bare, who is always there when I need a friend. My book traces that friendship for the last 52 years. Fifty-two more would be nice, but kind of unlikely. You don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, as Dylan said. It'd be nice to go back on the same train that brought me here before, but time goes forward. 

My other constant phone calls from the basement office I call home included a few a week with my big brother, Eric, who died a couple of months ago.  I still want to call him so we can share memories only siblings have. He was the only one left who was there from the start of my 72 years.  Some say, I’ll see him again someday. Hope they are right. I believe I’ll see him in my memories, at the very least, as I travel deep into the golden years his body didn't allow him to experience.

He was a big man, with a big laugh, and lot of love.  Nicer than me.

I have other friends I stay in contact with, like Tom “Carpy” Carpenter, a distinguished retired veterinarian who golfs almost every day at the links by his desert home outside Las Vegas and goes to see Brooks & Dunn or Adele at night in the casinos.  He was Jim’s roommate, and I know hanging around with us helped his academic career.  The first time he met me, I was surfing down the Hanson House hallway on an ironing board. Catch a wave, indeed. I truly was sittin' on top of the world.

Politics separates me from another great friend, though we converse on Facebook, and we know we are there for each other.

I have a great friend, also for 50 years or so, who is in a nursing home, fighting dementia. I see him frequently and love him. Vice versa. But they don’t allow phones, so I have to go to the nursing home to relive our memories. Or relive mine and try to revive his.

A lot of other guys don’t have time to return phone calls to an old derelict in his basement, and that’s fine. O-bla-di, o-bla-da, life goes on, bra….

More than a half-century ago, if you really wanted some fun in Ames, Iowa, well, my friend, Jim, and I, were the ones to call. Or tag along with and hope the police or campus security remained blissfully unaware.

The late Tony Durr, a great friend and lazy editor, long ago told me that if you are lucky, you will have had enough true friends in your life to fill the fingers of one hand. He assigned me mine. I assigned his.

Problem is that, if you are lucky, you will outlive most of those fingers.

Jocko, my friend, Jim ... well, he occupies the index finger that makes me laugh, cause trouble, curse, and participate in what we called "rolling" after doing quarters at Tork's.  (You had to be there, and if you were, you remember us. We were the guys in the pink-dyed long john's and bunny ears that you saw on central campus at midnight. My butt hung out slightly, because a girl named "Blondie" tore off my cotton tail. Jim and I were on our way to study at the library.)