Jerry "Chuckles" Manley gets Lewisburg cheeseburgers on the rare day he plays canasta with his devoted nephew and other ravings from our long lives filled with busted dreams

 See him wasted by the TV in his sweatsuit eating beans, wearing yesterday’s misremembers like a smile.  Chuckles had a future full of money, love and dreams, but now he just sits there and eats and smiles.

I sort of paraphrased, well, not really sorta … the first lines of my dead friend Kris Kristofferson’s classic Pilgrim, Chapter 33 … when I began this update on the weird health and bleak times of my half-century pal, Jerry Dale Manley, aka “Chuckles News Brother.”

Jim "Flash" Lindgren caught this shot 15 years ago of Rob "Death" Dollar, me (to far right) and our pal Jerry "Chuckles" Manley in orange shirt at a restaurant that served as News Brothers' HQ in Nashville. This is where Rob and I met often with our book publisher and also where the two of us met Abe Lincoln having green eggs and ham.  Like most places frequented by The News Brothers, the restaurant closed and has been replaced by a designer Mexican joint for Nashville's rotten batch of millennials.

We used that song – we, as in me, “Flapjacks” and Rob “Death” Dollar and Jerry in a pivotal scene in the great movie, “Flapjacks: The Motion Picture,” back in 1982.  The fourth primary News Brother, Jim “Flash” Lindgren wasn’t present on this full Sunday of shooting. (We also did our gay nightclub scene, one of our Mericourt Park scenes and I believe our graveyard scene on this day.)

The “Pilgrim” scene actually focused on me, obviously wasted on the sidewalk on Third Street in Clarksville, Tennessee.

Rob and Jerry, who are fine method actors, arrived – I believe it was after the Mericourt Park frolicking – to find me sitting on the sidewalk in my jacket and my jeans, smoking and appearing generally despondent. It’s really not hard to find me that way, even today. We were, as you may know, searching for editor Tony “Little, Short Asshole With a Beard” Durr. He really wasn’t lost, he had fled Luther and “The Leaf-Chronicle” in the middle of the night and taken a job in San Antonio, Texas. (He later paid for me to come down there to interview to be his assistant Sunday editor of the “Express-News,” but I turned him down, based on his track record, the pay was less than at the L-C, and they wouldn’t pay moving expenses.  I had identical experiences when he got them to offer me a job at the Chicago “Sun-Times” and the “Anchorage Gazette” (or whatever the fuck it was.)

Well, I’ve taken a long sidetrack here. You see, today’s bit of writing is about Jerry, “Chuckles,” who, with Rob “Death” convinced me to throw down my exploding cigarette while Kris sang “The Pilgrim,” and join them in the fictional search that was the “glue’’ of the free-ranging film whose main targets were popular culture and our own naivete and lifelong propensity for valor and eventual defeat.

I love my News Brothers, special kudos to the four main assholes who risked all to make movies and in real life to tell the news to a fact-starved populace. Too bad there are no newspapers today.  

Jerry, of course, is one of the fabulous four, and I worked with him, on and off, throughout our several weary decades as newspapermen. (That, too, has a real-life sad ending.)  

As you may recall, in the year 2024, I spent a day or two a week visiting him in the Memory Care Ward of a nuthouse a few miles from where I live. I would take him Diet SunDrop and peanut butter crackers (or other equally good for a healthy diet and basic nutrition stuffs) for him to snack on. At first I snuck the stuff in in my pants. But as I became bolder, I just toted it in, daring Nurse Ratched and the others to take it from me. A couple of them were quite nice-looking, so I had hoped I’d be patted down and my crotch searched.

Tim, you are getting too far afield. These guys won’t read this, old buddy. Doesn’t matter. The writing is the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king and purge my sandpaper soul.

Anyway, you may recall that Jerry – who had been dismissed from two cuckoo’s nests down in his hometown prior to moving on up to Brentwood – was tossed from the local Memory Care Ward for taking his roommate Bob/Milford, who was sitting in Jerry’s chair and singing  “Rocky Raccoon”,  and picking him up twice and doing one of those wrestling pile-drivers, tossing him to the floor. I made up the pile-driver, but it had to hurt, as Bob/Milford weighed maybe 75 pounds and Jerry was bulging, I imagine up toward the 270 range, by that time.

Since Jerry’s family, he has two grown and professionally advanced children, didn’t do anything about it, his nephew, Steven, who had shared Jerry’s Lewisburg house, didn’t want Jerry going into another soul prison. So, he took him home early this fall.

I’d been to visit Jerry for about 10 months, but to me, an old and defunct cripple, cluttering my 40-year-old Saab down to Lewisburg just isn’t practical. I got emotionally and physically drained enough when I was spending my hours here, in the asylum. I know I physically would not be able to endure 1½ hours of Tennessee interstate somnambulism at the end of the visit.

If you’ve read my irregular dispatches, all found on this page and in my “They Call Me Flapjacks” internationally acclaimed blog (I have a Brit who lives and works in Germany who is perhaps my greatest fan, and he’s a damn nice guy as well, despite his taste in international writers), you likely know that I’ve tried to keep everyone in the News Brothers community posted on Jerry’s health as he lives with Steven. (My dispatches also are well-received by my beloved pal, Scott “Badger” Shelton, who died 13 years ago next Thursday, January 23, 2012. Fuck, I miss him. But I do talk to him. Shouldn’t be surprising, as I talk to myself all the time, too, and I’m half-dead).

So, you know that Steven turned his life upside-down to care for his uncle. He “retired” from his profession as a chef and went to work as a construction supervisor, so he could have regular daytime hours and not leave Jerry at home alone and be there for evening meals, “Kojak” reruns and heated hands of canasta.

I called Steven yesterday, just to see how both he and his Uncle Chuckles are doing. It is a huge sacrifice Steven made to keep Jerry out of a state asylum or a retired-and-mentally-drained-people’s bunkhouse and death watch facility.

“I’m doing OK,” said Steven, who I caught after his construction job ended for the day. “It’s hard, but Jerry’s worth it.

“He’s not too much trouble.’’

In fact, he says Jerry has “some days” – like the day I called – when the dementia fog is broken by the rare Lewisburg sun. If you can’t get a tan, then you stand in the Lewisburg rain.         

“He goes days without saying a thing. Then, today, he’s been talking. A lot. Surprising. Sometimes he sleeps all day and sits up, watching TV all night, but other times, like today, we talk and it’s nice that he’s ‘around.’”

Steven laughed. “Only trouble he gives me is when I have to fight him to get him in the shower, but he needs to stay clean.”

Jerry’s refusal to shower was the reason one nursing home dismissed him, only to send him looking for a place where he could pound the shit out of anyone named Bob/Milford.

“Otherwise he goes days at a time without talking.

“If he has a good day, maybe we can meet for lunch,” he added, saying that his uncle occasionally will go for a car ride, but more often kicks up a fuss.

“He’s eating OK. In fact, he sent me to town to get him a cheeseburger,” said Steven. “That’s what I’m doing now.

“Only other trouble I’ve had is that he needed to have a bigger toilet put in. He’s too big for the one he had in the house.”

Another old journalism comrade of mine currently is dying in a nursing home, refusing to eat.

At least Jerry is eating.

I told Steven to get himself a burger or two himself when he got to town.

“Oh, and tell him he’s a damn nice guy.”

I hung up the phone and shivered.  “Fuck, Timothy,’’ I muttered, before breaking into “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33.”

Peace and Love triumph as Ringo spreads joy (and to me a dash of mortal melancholy) in "Look Up" concert that Nashville guests turn into glorious tribute to a Beatle who loves country music

 

Ringo raised me to tears of joy and melancholy during the magnificent Ringo & Friends at the Ryman concert and television taping Wednesday night.

While the show was to support the launch of his new, country album, “Look Up,” it really turned into a tribute to the 84-year-old entertainer who has been a part of my life for more than 60 years.

And not all the joy came from the iconic Beatles drummer and his almost soft-shoe showmanship, but from the people who gathered around to perform with him or to perform some of his classics while he waited in the wings with affable music producer and performer and Dylan crony T Bone Burnett, who served as master of ceremonies.

The concerts – the first installment was Tuesday – were to promote Ringo’s new country album, “Look Up,” that restates his love of country music. That love was shared by his Beatles cohorts, who borrowed heavily from all types of American music.   

Ringo restated his love of country music with his wonderful “Beaucoups of Blues,” his second solo effort, released in 1970, as members of the Fab Four moved their own directions.

Ringo Starr during The Beatles' final stage in the first picture, from the film "Get Back" (still playing on Disney-Plus) and the cover of his first country album, "Beaucoups of Blues," from 1970).  

On this night, most of the classic songs Ringo has voiced with his old mates and in the years since were covered by some of Nashville’s best, mostly young, musicians, while Ringo showed off some of his new songs from “Look Up.”

For example, Molly Tuttle got the crowd singing along to “Octopus’ Garden,” a song Ringo wrote – with generous encouragement from his cohort George Harrison – and which is on arguably The Beatles’ best (and last) album, “Abbey Road.”

Jack White, who helped get the show going when he joined Ringo on “Matchbox,” was a generous guest.

White also did “Don’t Pass Me By,” another Ringo classic, and he was the star’s biggest support during the soul-stirring finale, “With a Little Help From My Friends.”

 Indeed, after that finale – an intense and exuberant singalong featuring most of the night’s performers as well as guests like Emmylou Harris and Brenda Lee and the loud, perhaps offkey Ryman crowd -- White stayed on the stage, enjoying his favorite activity, playing guitar, while the backing band continued to play after the rest of the guest stars, led by Ringo, almost rhythmically exited stages right and left.

Billy Strings, a great musician in part responsible for the resurgence of bluegrass music, did Ringo’s Beatles classic, “Honey Don’t,” and he and Tuttle teamed up for “What Goes On.”

War and Treaty, Sheryl Crow, Jamey Johnson, Larkin Poe, Mickey Guyton, Rodney Crowell, Sarah Jarosz and more all took their turns at singing for (occasionally with) Ringo.

Ringo does his "job" as drummer for The Beatles in 1964, in this photo from Wikipedia. 

My tears – some happy, some melancholy dealing with mortality – actually were spurred by the great showman himself, when he performed songs like “It Don’t Come Easy,” “Boys,” “Photograph,” led the singalong of “Yellow Submarine” and especially the star-filled stage finale of “With A Little Help From My Friends,” his best-known Beatles song (from “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”)

That joyous melancholy for me reached its peak earlier, on the 10^th song of the night, “Boys,” when Ringo climbed up behind his drumkit to sing and to play that instrument where he is most at home and where he first became an international household name more than 60 years ago.

Something about being 50 feet from Ringo Starr on the drums (the giant screens made it closer) while he did that Beatles classic song – on which he was the original voice – and watching him play the drums “Ringo-style,” an easy smile on his face as he sang….

Likely this gentle man had memories flooding him of when he did it back in 1963 with his mates, John, Paul and George. And it emphasized to me the fact that it was 61 years ago that I heard that song first, with this same guy on drums. Wednesday night, I put my walking cane aside to stand up for the ovation. I’m no longer a kid. And that great drummer no longer is a young man.  

And Ringo’s rendition of his solo hit, “Photograph” hit also bit deeply my heart. It was written in 1971 by him and by George Harrison. But over the years, the tale of lost love has become something of an essential part of Ringo’s set, and many view it as a sad farewell to Lennon, who was gunned down nine years after the song was recorded.

Ringo's two nights of Ryman concerts will be spliced together for what ought to be an amazing CBS TV special.

Also, Ringo – who lives in Beverly Hills, California -- is donating a chunk of the concerts’ proceeds to Los Angeles-area wildfire relief.

As Ringo guaranteed at the beginning of the show, it would be a night of peace and love. It was that. And, to me, it also was a night of pleasant memories and visions of mortality. Peace and love.

Ringo with his cowboy hat for the new country album, "Look Up."