'Enjoy every flapjack.' Brahma Bull, Champo, Dirt Man, Flapjacks ... An erratic old man clasps his cane and stumbles toward three-fourths of a century, hoping the next one is better

 As soon as you’re born, they make you feel small, by giving you no time instead of it all.

That’s the first line of my late friend, John Lennon’s, “Working Class Hero,” which takes a deep and ragged dive into The Beatle’s scarred but sacred soul by displaying details of a life that’s consistently disappointing while promising at the same time.

It’s one of my favorite songs, and I play it a lot, especially listening carefully on days like this one, when I burn the page on another year of life and look, perhaps not so gentle anymore, into that sweet night.

“I wish I could go back,” says my best college pal, Jim “Jocko” Mraz, when we talk about our four scholarly years in adjacent rooms in a pair of concrete-block dormitories at Iowa State University.

“Me, too, Jocko,” says Champo, aka me. “But I think they have blown up our old dormitory.  I wish we’d thought of that.”

True on both counts. Progress has eliminated our first dorm, about a mile down Welch Avenue from the campus in Ames, Iowa.

For two years we were in Storms Hall, then our whole floor – Hanson House -- was relocated to Larch Hall.

Primarily, I reckon, we were relocated to the new dorm in hopes of getting us to calm down after adventures like the infamous Vator Bowl and just our “don’t say no” attitudes and our rolling waves of laughter. At least figuratively, we blew up that dorm, or rather the minds out in university officials, residence hall execs and the friendly dietitian Mr. Smith, who fed me as many vegetables as I could eat in an attempt to fire up my metabolism and counteract damage wrought by alcohol and starchy dormitory food.

I did lose 70 pounds my sophomore year.

When we moved en masse from the second floor of Storms to the seventh floor of Larch to begin my junior year, our new head resident was a just-freed Vietnam infantry lieutenant whose job it was to keep us under control. He failed. Marty was a helluva guy.

He’s dead now.

So are a lot of my college pals or cohorts.

Nardholm and Uncle Moose, farm boys from the Western Iowa plains, top the list of the dead guys I miss most from those years.

And I’ve tried unsuccessfully to find Gomez, who I’m hoping is not dead.  He was in charge of the whole residence hall complex, and his love for me and Jocko no doubt kept us out of reach of higher authorities during our junior and senior years.

We cooked pheasant stew in Gomez’s dorm apartment for the world-famous Viking Fest, a huge fund-raiser for me and Jocko. But that’s a story for some day other than this.  Perhaps in a book I’m writing because I’m, at this age, adopting a new, perhaps fatalistic view on life’s remainders: Enjoy every flapjack.

There’s a little Zevon and a lot of me in that statement.  During my college years, it wasn’t uncommon to find me, Jocko, Carpy, Nardholm and maybe even Titzy enjoying the taste of very inexpensive eggs and flapjacks at all-night truck stops scattered through Central Iowa.

After I graduated, I was a newspaperman in a then-small town now-called, laughably, “The Gateway to the New South.”  I may or may not touch on those years in this little post, but it’s safe to say most Saturday nights ended up with us – me (then-dubbed “Flapjacks”), and my cohorts “Death,” “Chuckles” and “Badger” and “Flash” and even old Mayor Ted and his drunken police escort wolfing down flapjacks (you may call them pancakes, but you’d be wrong) at G’s on Riverside Drive. That was 40 years ago, and Clarksville, Tennessee, then was “The Queen City of The Cumberland.”

When I was in high school, my nickname was “Brahma Bull,” so named by the head football coach after I became a brutal tackler and almost killed myself and the guy I tackled and ruptured his spleen.

Again, this is a story for another day. When I got out of the hospital, I decided I didn’t like being mean on the football field. Didn’t suit me, so I eventually told the coach he was a son of a bitch and/or a piece of shit.  “Brahma’s Bull” became the name of a column I wrote for the school newspaper, where I was sports editor and also assistant editor.

Almost got suspended for allowing lines like “her once hairy, but now barren” in a feature about things heard on the school bus.  Dan, the editor whose dad was Hef’s partner in the founding of Playboy, also shared blame. His dad, a nice guy, was pretty dumb, as he told Hef, the Epstein-for-life fellow that there was no future in a magazine of naked young women.  

After a firm lecture from the principal and a threat to take the editorial reins from us, I pleaded the First Amendment.  Dan agreed with me.  We did promise to cease any ideas of writing about shaved vaginas in the school newspaper after that.

Back to today’s episode:

Flapjacks, as you know, have been recommended by the CDC as a great way to soak up alcohol and make you gain weight at the same time.  Health, as I’ve insisted -- even when I was smoking three packs a day to wash down a dozen beers and a half-bottle of scotch (I was washing away three years of misery and hanging on by my fingernails while barely surviving a near-fatal personal mistake) -- has always played a central role in my lifestyle.

Oh, by the way, the thing about Mayor Ted and his drunken police escorts isn’t true. But they all were friends of mine. And Mayor Ted was as concerned as I was about health. He’s dead now. Last time I spoke with him (before his death, at least), he had tapered off to a giant glass of lemonade and vodka, heavy on the vodka, every day.  He invited me to go up to Clarksville and join him, and I told him I would if he didn’t die before I got to it. He did, so I didn’t.

But this really still is supposed to be – at this point in the tale – about my college studies when I went by the name of “Champo,” a few years before “Flapjacks” took over my life. I answer to either and appreciate it when people take the time to figure out which one I am at that particular time. One of my newspaper colleagues, a round mound of a fine fellow, dubbed me “Dirt Man” for my contributions of gossip to his celebrity column 20-30 years ago.

For clarity, I mostly answer to “Tim,” although one time my Dad, a confused and mourning WWII vet was trying to use the “Dirt Man” nickname given me by the gossip columnist, when he called me “Dirt Bag.” A long and sad story that involves death and uproarious laughter in a funeral home viewing room that was presided over by my mother.   

The laughter was welcomed. I think Dad called me Dirt Bag, at least in his head, until he died. And that’s OK. He didn’t know what I called him.

Just a few months ago I (Champo, remember him?) tried to track down a college friend who I’ll call “Jack,” who worked with me when we almost booked The Rolling Stones for a million-dollar paycheck in 1972 at Hilton Coliseum. The Alumni Association told me “Jacky’s dead. That’s what I said.”  He died 15 years ago, apparently, unless he told the alumni association beggars that he was dead, so they’d stop their trolling for NIL money. I do just tell those caller/beggars – usually virginal students working a phone bank --that I am dead, before I hang up.

 I thought about Jack and me and our meeting with Iowa State University officials and how I had at least showered and put on clean jeans to hear their skeptical responses and see them shake their heads.

“No fucking way, you God damn derelicts,” I think was the way the facilities manager put it, as he gently let us down after he studied our plans for money, seating, security (I had become intimately acquainted with concert security, according to Ames jailhouse records.)  We even had a target date that was in the week or so The Stones had off after a pair of shows in Chicago.

“Hey, you, get offa my cloud,” was my response to the university asshole who insulted me. I fired up a hand-rolled and retreated into the bitterly cold afternoon. Jack had to call the promoters and report we weren’t able to book their act, because the university didn’t want outlaws (us, not necessarily The Stones) taking control of school facilities. It’s that old “inmates/asylum” thing, and I can relate personally to both sides of that ratio.

Jack and I never were close friends, but he was a scheming fellow and a technological genius for the early 1970s. I don’t think he even liked Keith and Charlie and the guys. Three Dog Night was more his style. Or the Cowsills. He just wanted to participate in a true pipe dream I’d concocted.  The thrill of the hunt.

“I’m sorry to tell you your friend died in 2010,” is how the Alumni Office responded when I tried to get Jack’s take on collegiate adventures for a book I’m writing. Some of this may reappear there.  Or perhaps not. You can’t always get what you want, even if you do actually try some time.  You don’t really even get what you need. Bupkis. When I hear that Yiddish word, I always think of Butkus, as in Dick, No. 51, Bears linebacker who said his happiest thoughts were of seeing a quarterback’s head bouncing, separately, down the field after he tackled him. I don’t think he was joking.

Butkus is dead, which is fine by me.  I was a Gale Sayers guy. He’s dead, too. “Hit your knees and pray for Brian Piccolo,” he said, or at least Billy Dee Williams said in the TV movie, “Brian’s Song.”  The 1971 version fired up the tears among those of us in Hanson House’s TV room. ABC made a politically correct version in 2001. Piece of shit.

Speaking of death and shit, I had the opportunity to tell Nardholm and Moose that I loved them when they were in their final days, but it hurt. Damned cancer. 

Killed my best friend Jocko’s lovely ex-wife Nola, who was a kind and generous human being.  Her sister, Rita, told me I was a true gentleman back when I was best man and she was maid of honor at the nuptials of Jocko and Nola. I had made sure that Jim was in the right frame of mind when he took the strut into the chapel singing “She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes.”  

“When she comes!” I hollered back. “No, when you come!”

Joking. He was as sober as the two of us were for four years of higher education. And his mom, a wonderful Bohemian woman who loved me, woulda beat the ever-loving shit out of me if I’d let her son arrive at the church with glassy eyes and a sweaty bald pate.  

Fuck, Granny Mraz, who was a Hobe-hunter and made great Bohunk food, woulda kicked me in the giblets. It’s OK for me to use “Bohunk” as that’s how Jim referred to himself. In fact, conjure up the first line of Jethro Tull’s “Aqualung” and then sing these words instead of the real lyrics: “Sitting on a Bohunk (Bohunk), watching him shit, watching the flies. Yellow matter custard (custard), dripping from that God damned Bohunk’s eyes….” That was a song I wrote that was not used in the wedding celebration. (“Oh, Jocko, my friend, don’t you know they say I’m easy, you poor old sot, you see me while I pee.”)

 Our wedding pre-ceremony iced tea glasses, filled with vodka and ice and a dash of tomato juice and Tabasco back at the Marion, Iowa, motor inn, had mellowed us out and the main thing was I got Jim to the church on time. Remember when you were young and the hero was never hung? … Oops, slipped into John Lennon there for a second. What I meant to say was remember when we were young people and were told we could drink vodka and no one would smell it?

I slipped Jocko a fistful of mints, but Nola likely sensed alcohol was afoot when the groom was told “you may kiss the bride,’’ and he missed by six inches. Joking. He hit his target, demonstrating style and grace.  By the way, I was pretty sure they’d kissed prior to the pastor’s holy approval.

After the ceremony we drank beer in the barn while older family members sipped tea and ate spice cake and deep-fried Morel mushrooms in Stumpy’s big farmhouse.  The wedding party, sans the bride and groom who were in a nearby room at the motor inn, went for a swim in the pool that night.  

And I’m lucky that I’m able to stay in touch with Carpy, DVM Tom Carpenter, who plays golf by day and spends his nights smoking, drinking and shooting craps in a mob-operated gambling den at the northern outskirts of Las Vegas. None of that – except for the golf – is true. He’s a kind fellow, and I love him very much.

I’d be lying if I wrote that he met his wonderful wife at the Mustang Ranch, although I thought about it.

She’s a talented young woman who was a valuable banking officer, and she and Tom have lived a splendid life. They met at ISU and love their boys and grandkids.

One old friend, a Vietnam vet turned into an evangelist, and I spoke at least once a month for years until he told me I was going to hell.  I disagreed with him and told him to go fuck himself. We haven’t been in contact since. He’s probably proselytizing in a VA dementia joint by now if he’s not dead from his heart woes, fat ass or sanctimonious meanness.

Then there’s Jocko, who shared almost all of my adventures, at least when he wasn’t busy as an offensive guard on the Cyclones football team. We were a pair of well-known campus desperadoes, nice guys who pushed the boundaries of what could be considered good, legal fun.

When we talk, probably every two weeks or so, we do what old people do, we talk about our maladies and our medical treatments. We talk about his infusions and my attempt to walk again after spending much of the last year recovering from a pair of surgeries that were needed to rebuild my spine so I can walk upright and without pain.

I may have said once upon a time that “I hope I die before I get old.” But I didn’t mean it, God. I enjoy my life now and look forward to putting away my walking canes – my brother, who died a year and a half ago, hand-carved the first one, the second one is my dad’s.  I took it from the hospital after he died more than six years ago. My nieces gave me my brother’s cane, the one he used in his dream trip to Ireland a few months before he died, just last week. I also have Grandpa Champ’s cane. I am well-supported by my walker, but am transitioning to the canes.

I think I need a rack for my collection.

OK, so Jim – who sometimes uses a cane for hips compromised and replaced due to football injuries and who has other medical woes, as all of us old guys do – and I do warm up our conversations with updates about our maladies.

And then we laugh as we remember the long, sometimes strange and foamy, trips we’ve taken to get here.  

“Tork’s, 4 p.m.,” is the full content of a text I sent Jocko last Friday, a day when he wasn’t getting chemo.

“I’ll see you there,” he said.

“Carpy and Titzy and Nardholm might be with us, too,” I said, listing the names of the guys I referred to as my “Rolling Squad” back in the years when I was an honor student by day and an unafraid of authority or society rascal by night, especially beginning at 4 on Thursdays and breaking on through to the other side of the weekend. Party ended at dawn Monday. Shower, get to class.

Tork’s Pub, right across the street from the gym where I took naked steam baths and wrestled with Olympic champion Dan Gable, is gone. Dan was in the steam bath to make weight for his NCAA champion career. I was just a retired high school wrestler who wanted to sweat off the beer. We’d wrestle. I’d lose. I feel like I contributed in my own sweaty way to Dan’s championship Olympics and NCAA wrestling career and his subsequent career as the world champion wrestling coach at cross-state rival the University of Iowa.

Jocko tells me Tork’s has been replaced by a restaurant called Thumbs. I’ve not been back to Iowa since I went to visit Jocko, Nola and Rita, who was singing in the wedding of a cheapskate named “Soreny” a few decades ago. Soreny wasn’t among my closest friends – his greatest value as a pal was he kept track of where there was a special on beer each weekend.

He was scouting out dollar pitchers, because he was priced out at Tork’s where it cost $1.25, with every eighth pitcher free. Tork’s was a dark, rotting dive bar back when I celebrated my 18^th birthday there, on this date in 1969.

 I can’t imagine it didn’t take a lot of money to restore it to convert it to a restaurant. Maybe they blew it up, too. I’m sure we’d have done it if we could. Sure supplied enough very natural gas to the closed-off tavern.

“Fuck, it’s all gone so fast,” I say to Jocko, who is my oldest and truly best friend going back to our arrival in Ames, Iowa, in the autumn of 1969, when we finished a quart of gin together to baptize our new friendship.

“You’re going to be 74 on November 18,” he said, remembering doubtless birthdays that were forgotten even as we celebrated them.

“Hell, a year from now I’ll be 75,” said Jim. “I thought my parents were old when they were 75.”

“They were,” I say, by way of consolation to my buddy, who turned 74 in the summertime, when the weather was hot, when you can stretch right up and touch the sky. Or something like that.

I’ll not go farther into our relationship here, other than to say that he knows me better than most people do, and he still loves me, even as sunset gets earlier and earlier and the Northern Lights somehow become visible in the South.

“Nobody better give me a party when I turn 75,” says Jim. “I won’t go.”

“Let’s go back to Tork’s,” I said, knowing such transit would be only courtesy of some kind of time warp.  “Then afterward, you can call Mo. I’ll see if Blondie or Red might be around.” (I always used to ask them to marry me, a decent way to greet women who admired my reputation as “The Dancing Bear.” I’ll save that story, but I was famous and harmless campuswide.

Jocko laughed at the Tork’s mention.

I suggested we could eat on the house at any restaurant in Ames, a fast-running privilege we’d successfully negotiated for ourselves and our willing apostles all those years ago.

A friend of younger acquaintance but of same vintage, Jerry “Chuckles” Manley turned 74 a week ago Sunday.

He probably didn’t even know it.

Time is a clouded concept for Jerry, who has been my comrade since the mid-1970s, when we both set out in the newspaper business, public service and the populace’s well-being in our minds.  

“Follow the money,” said Hal Holbrook when he met Robert Redford in the parking garage in one of cinema’s best newspaper movies.

While he was giving clues to Redford, it turned out that corporate newspapers took “follow the money… and fuck the news” as the modern motto of “journalism. “Fuck the staff, too. Especially the old guys.”

On the subject of great newspaper movies:

 If you can get your hands on “Flapjacks: The Motion Picture,” you’ll get a taste of newspapering the Tim “Flapjacks” Ghianni way. And the way also pioneered by my great pal Robert Stanley “Death” Dollar, my personal sidekick, wing man, News Brother and sounding board since 1981.

Jerry “Chuckles” Manley, Jim “Flash” Lindgren (who just returned from a visit to Stonehenge) and Scott “Badger” Shelton, whose journalism expertise was showcased on 50-watt radio stations throughout the South, all played key roles in the film and in my life.

Scott’s been gone pushing 14 years now, again that damned cancer. Jerry’s perhaps dazed and confused.  Flash is boxing away one of those nasty muscular and neuro afflictions.

Rob has a pair of hippo valves -- or perhaps buffalo valves? – keeping his heart strong. He almost died the day they put them in. I know, because I was there and told the doctors they’d better fix him up as they rolled the almost-dead man out of his ICU room.  

 “Don’t fuck this one up,” I instructed the heart surgeon, who picked his nose with one of his blue-gloved hands while a nurse scratched his nuts. I figured Rob, who has been a huge pal for 44 years now, was going to die. I was glad when he did not. I’m still glad.

He celebrated his survival by purchasing a Mustang convertible which he runs at 100 mph on the Pennyrile Parkway in Kentucky. That’s not true, though. I sure do enjoy it when we tell each other stories about the raped and dead teenagers we saw as we covered the news together. And poor Chico, the pet monkey whose escape we chronicle, was eaten by dogs.

That sort of journalism idealism my friends and I shared was great for maybe 25 of the 35 years I spent as a newspaper journalist and the last 18 or so spent freelancing.

Around the turn of this century, they wiped idealism out of newsrooms. As well as idealists, particularly the ones who were 56, as I was 18 years ago.

Old cats like us were set free of the bond of dollar-centric “journalism,” if that’s what you call it these days.

I still have friends in journalism, and I love them. I just remind them to keep their backs and butts to the wall and mark their 56^th birthdays on their calendars, so they can begin packing their stuff early enough to avoid the embarrassment of cleaning out their space while younger, better-paid people fill the diminishing news hole while padding their resumes for work at PR agencies. Oh, that’s right, there is no news hole anymore. Digital news space is infinite, like the Black Hole. And AI has proven to be an admirable space-filler. When they threw me out the door, they offered me a piece of cake and an armed escort. I threw the cake away and joked with the gun-toting security guards as they carried my shit to the old, white Saab.

“I wish we could have another birthday party,” said Jerry the other day, when I reached him at his suburban Lewisburg fortress of solitude he shares with his nephew. They used to have a white dog, too, but I think it died. Jerry says he thinks the dog’s name was Snow.

Back in the autumn of 1981, when Jerry and I turned 30, we hosted an all-night birthday party. I think we were the last ones standing when dawn struck, about six hours before we had to get to work for the Sunday newspaper. Our pal, Rob Dollar, who was 25 at the time, left just before us, because he had to get to the police department to go through the reports for potential cop and crime stories. A pretty good, young guy, he’d abandoned a CIA career to come work with me. 

He's come to terms with that stupid decision now. We christened our decades of friendship by clasping hands and singing “rabbits running from a ditch, must be the season of the witch” just past dawn, as we left the party.

As for the last year, for that is what I annually write about when I do this self-serving salute, well, it’s been bad and good.

Bad because they spent eight hours rebuilding my spine, neck to butt, layering human bone and metal parts, spraying it with WD-40 and sewing the long incision shut. Apparently, I almost bled dry. And, especially, a delightful 2-3-foot scar, vertically maps out the territory where newspaper honchos planted their figurative daggers until 18 years ago.

I was apparently “critical” when things went wrong in the surgery, but I got over it.

For me, it’s also been delightful, as I can walk now, using canes or a walker, without the constant pain of the last couple of decades. I sometimes just walk without assistance, to build up my stamina, always with something nearby to grab before I plummet to the hardwood. I have done that. It’s a hard effort to climb back to my feet. Just like me, a hard rain is gonna fall.

My plan is to live another 30 years in order to get my money’s worth for the surgery that I’m still recovering from.

One of the worst things about this recovery is that I never see nor hear from anybody, for the most part, and I’m not getting out of the house much.

And I’m unable to call my brother, Eric, to talk about it or about our lives. He’s been dead a year and a half, and I’m pissed about that still. “’Scuse me!” I’ll shout when I kiss the sky and try to get Eric’s attention now. He didn’t really believe in heaven, but I suspect he’s glad he was wrong. Was he? I’ll find out in 30 years.

Speaking of heaven, that’s where he was reunited with his widow. Ann, perhaps the kindest person I’ve ever met was a great sister-in-law for almost 40 years. She died just a few weeks ago, so I can’t call her either. Fucking cancer.

I am lucky in that my wife, Suzanne, is around, because it allows me to heal at home, where I for weeks was barely able to make it to the living room. My range has widened, and the last 2-3 weeks I’ve been able to make it down to my office in Da Basement.

A great thing about the surgery is that I’ve regained two or three inches in height, which delights me when I look into the mirror and sing “a working class hero is something to be.”

Especially one who is learning again how to walk without pain into a planned three more decades.  

“If you wanna be a hero, well just follow me,” I sing from John’s “Working Class Hero.” When I look behind me and see my friends, all those listed above, laughing and lurching around like they are old men on canes.

Enjoy every flapjack.