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.”
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.”
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