“I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round. Sure do love to watch them roll…….”
The great John Lennon’s voice and his “Watching the Wheels” song from 1980 -- released about the time some deranged douche bag with a gun asked him for his autograph, smiled and shot him in the back -- played in my head when I talked with my longest-tenured journalism pal, Jerry Dale Manley. He is sometimes called “Chuckles” by those of us who love and maintain the Legend of The News Brothers. He doesn't like the nickname, bestowed on him in 1982 by News Brothers founders me ("Flapjacks") and Rob Dollar ("Death").
But he answers to it. "Chuckles, my ass," he used to spit out when we took attendance at pancake rallies, police raids and funerals. Actually, Chuckles skipped the funerals. I assume they reminded him of his future.
“I’m just sitting here watching TV and looking around for
something to eat,” Jerry said, in a sort of rhythm that brought to my mind the John
Lennon song.
Now, it’s not unusual for John’s songs to spring into
my consciousness as I go about these lazy, crazy fucking days of winter. A time
when there’s no soda, no fresh fruit and beer, as Uncle Nat might have put it. (You have to be my age to understand the Nat "King" Cole reference. Man he could sing. So could his daughter, Natalie. They both are dead.)
Lennon’s music, either alone or with the others in the gang
of four he drafted when he created The Quarry Men and The Beatles, plays in my
mind a lot. Even more now that it’s less than a week from the 45th
anniversary of his death. I don’t do much to mark the bleak occasion. Maybe I'll pull out my copy of "Catcher in the Rye" and ask "Why?"
I ask that about a lot of things as I break on through toward the other side. No one has the answers.
Anyway, I’m going way off the deep end, literally perhaps,
and it happens most times when I get a chance to talk with Jerry, who has been
my pal and wacky tobacky and beer and journalism mate for more than 50 years.
We began our friendship at The Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle
and have maintained it through the changes in attitude, changes in latitude,
changes in life in general. The most
difficult part for me of the friendship began two years ago this week, when his
family had him incarcerated in a nursing home Memory Care Ward, a couple of
miles from my house.
You may or may not remember that I visited him once or twice
a week at the place where everybody doesn't know their name. At times, when I pushed past the vacant-eyed masses of loose clothes to get to Jerry's cell, I was neither recognized nor acknowledged. Other times
he was as clear-headed as his roommate, who he picked up from his (Jerry’s) chair
and twice pile-drived him into the rug.
I always took peanut butter sandwich crackers and their cheese-filled sisters and a Diet
SunDrop, smuggled in my pants to give Jerry something to eat other than the
cold gruel and two-day-old Oreos fed at the insane asylum. I began my year of smuggling into the locked and guarded nursing home wing with potato chips. They kept on making too much noise in my pants, kinda like my admirers used to do when I was young. So I switched to the crackers.
I’d look Jerry's nuthouse roommate’s name, but it doesn’t matter, and I
imagine he’s dead. Anyway, that act of throwing the skinny corpse-like old man to the floor slammed Jerry into a crossroads. They were either
going to send him into state facilities, force him to pay thousands more a month
for a single room or go home with someone.
His nephew, Steven, who just had throat surgery this Monday
and can’t talk much, picked Uncle Chuckles up at the Vanderbilt nuthouse (where
the nursing home had dispatched him after his violent wrestling maneuver with
the guy who surely is dead by now), Bob is what they called him, but I think he
was Milford. He was a horseman who pissed
his pants. Everybody did at the Memory Care Ward. Hell, some days I felt like
doing that just to fit in.
“Steven really takes care of me,” said Jerry, when
Steven handed him the phone. Most times that I call, Steven does the talking. I guess Uncle Jerry is sitting nearby watching "The Rifleman" or "Have Gun Will Travel." This time, though, Steven could not talk much because of his
throat surgery the day before. He's been having throat difficulties for months. He assured me it wasn't cancer when I called last time. This time, he really couldn't tell me what the surgeons removed or repaired, so he passed the phone. His uncle seemed to be able to handle the phone real well, for which I was grateful and relieved.
“Yeah, Steven had some surgery, can’t remember when, but
they thought he was in good enough shape that they could finally send him home,”
said Jerry.
I could hear the refrigerator door open. Steven no doubt was
getting ready to begin on the “fried, Southern cooking. Breakfast food, I hope.
I really like breakfast food” that is the staple for the old man and the younger man, who gave up his own freedom to take care of his beloved uncle.
Sometimes, not often, Jerry says they “go to the Shoney’s Family
Restaurant nearby, where they serve breakfast 24 hours a day. I really like
that. Breakfast bar.”
I reminded Jerry of the many 2 a.m. nights when we – he, me,
Rob Dollar and whoever else we could talk into it – would go eat flapjacks and
eggs at G’s Pancake House on Riverside Drive in Clarksville. If the Cumberland
was too high, they’d put sandbags outside their front doors.
“Man, that was great,” said my old pal, as his voice brightened with those memories. “Sounds like a
great way to spend a day.”
But he knows he won’t likely ever leave Lewisburg again, let
alone drive to Clarksville. Besides that, they’ve closed G’s and are trying to
make Clarksville – which was a beautiful and historic "Queen City of the
Cumberland," with the mixed Antebellum and comfortable-as-broken-in jeans neighborhoods that describes – into a prefabricated “Gateway to the New South.”
Obviously some Gen X college marketing major and transplant from elsewhere dreamed up that new nickname. Hell, this was the city that for a couple of centuries played host to Tennessee's oldest newspaper, founded in 1808. Now it's just a weekly brochure promoting all that's good and filled with press releases from the Chamber and Fort Campbell. (That's another story, as I spent 14 years at that paper. If you are interested in what happened there, I'd recommend a book called "When Newspapers Mattered: The News Brothers and their Shades of Glory." Rob and I wrote it. Jerry bought three copies.)
With an almost-ghost of a newspaper and immature marketing that betrays a wondrous past, there are other striking changes. In addition to G's being gone, there are no greasy spoons, but all the modern chains of fat and special sauce that mostly weren't there when I lived and loved there.
And hell, the Cat West, a strip joint at the state line, where we’d go
bush-eyed in Oak Grove, Kentucky, is closed, too. At the newspaper, trying to protect the sensibilities of our readers, we had a one-column spot on the upper left side of the front page where we put stories about the Cat West, sex crimes, drunken soldiers pissing on the Public Square, etc. When we laid out the paper -- I assisted Jerry in determining what went where -- we referred to that one column, above the fold, as "The Cat West Corner."
I think the guy who bled to death after being shot just below his testicles by a stepson or whatever went there. Fatal traffic wrecks, too, until the publisher mandated that we no longer cover them, so as not to upset the Chamber as it sought to recruit Japanese and Chinese industry. We still covered them. We'd just slip them inside and seldom used photos of body parts scattered on the roadway. The publisher would get upset with me and "welcome" me to the nice, red-velvet-butted chair in his office. "Ghianni's chair" was the unofficial name.
Clarksville doesn't look right now. It’s all new development of disposable houses from Oak Grove to Fort Campbell to Clarksville. How disposable? Just watch the TV news when a hard rain’s gonna fall on the “Gateway.” Little Pink Houses get blown away and/or flooded easily.
Jerry and I talk some about the changes in the town we both loved. He seems to remember a half-century back pretty damned well.
As far as Jerry’s health: “I’m as good as I’ve ever been,”
he says. “No health complaints.”
He seemed a little perplexed when I asked how his latest
test to see if his kidneys were filtering the poisonous shit out of his blood came
out.
Steven had told me his uncle’s kidneys were down below 30
percent, and dialysis depended on regular testing. Jerry is pretty unaware that there is any kind of problem and does not remember the tests.
“I reckon they’re still working fine, given how much fried food I eat,” said Jerry of his kidneys. I didn’t ask him about the colon cancer his ex-wife told me he had a couple of years ago. Or about the diabetes that had his foot rotting there for awhile. I know that was true, as he showed it to me.
I softly asked about the dementia that put him in the nursing home, but he really didn't remember much about that. I didn't push it. Surrounded by the love of his nephew, he seems to be much better than he was when walking the halls of the living dead more than a year ago.
“I really feel good,” said my beloved pal, among the
kindest, smartest guys I’ve ever met. A fellow who would take on any dare I threw at him. I'm glad he survived our friendship. I did, too, pretty much.
I asked Jerry if he remembered that last month he turned 74,
just nine days before I did the same.
When we turned 30, oh, a decade or more ago, he and I threw our own big
bash.
We bought the beer (well, actually, I did. Jerry still owes me for half of the keg and of the cost of the potato chips and stuff we put around to soak up the suds, pre-vomit, to keep everyone on their feet dancing until dawn.) Jerry, me, Rob and Greg Kuhl were the only ones who made it until dawn. Greg, who retired to become a full-time marathon runner in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, died years ago while out for a run. Heart attack. I think the death of his soulmate, his dog, Blue, was a contributing factor.
Nobody threw up at the party in which Jerry and I put the old "30" mark on our youth. Editor Tony Durr almost wrecked his car by pulling on the windshield wipers other than the gear shift as he tried to leave. He had told me he wasn't going to come to the party because as our boss, he didn't want to see us being stupid or drunk. He came, got thick-tongued in his Cajun pronunciations and left. He finally found the gearshift, jumped a curb, let sparks fly, tore the lever grindingly into reverse and disappeared backward into the rainy November night.
Good thing his young, impressionable staffers weren't scarred by the guy I loved and referred to (to his face) as "the little, short assshole with a beard." He was a great editor, though, as he pretty much put me in charge of the paper. He could easily have ended up in "the Cat West corner" the next day. He survived that, though not life itself. That's another story that you can find in the book mentioned above.
As the party continued, Jerry and I noticed there was sweet smoke billowing from the basement of the party house. As both hosts and the guys we were celebrating, we only thought it our duty to keep going downstairs to make sure those folks
were happy.
“I wish we could do a party like that now,” Jerry said. “But I’m too old. Reckon you are too.”
Fact is, Jerry didn’t do anything unusual for his 74th birthday. He
didn’t hear from or see his kids – he says he seldom does as “they have their own lives
and are busy” – nor did he and Steven have a cake and eat it, too.
“Nah, we don’t celebrate holidays around here. Not even going
to put a Christmas tree up. No kids around here.”
He and Steven aren’t alone in the house. There is Steven’s
little, white dog. Last time I heard, the dog was named “Snow or something like
that.” This week it’s “Hero or Zero,” according to Uncle Jerry. He loves the dog.
All told, I loved my conversation with my pal, as he is
mentally (or physically, at least) in a much better place than when he was
beating the shit out of Memory Ward roommate Milford to keep him from pissing on his chair.
“I mostly just sit here and watch TV,” says Jerry. “We’re watching
some old movie or show. I don’t know what it is. Don’t know what it’s about. It’s
some kind of story where they have some fantasy heroes is it.”
What’s on TV doesn’t matter to him. “I just like sitting here
watching it,” he said. “This really isn’t any good.”
It sounded like Steven was working to get some biscuits and
milk gravy – Jerry’s very favorite entrée – together, so I let him go.
I’ll call back in a couple of weeks, bringing him some of my
joyous Christmas spirit. Ho-ho, fucking, ho.
So, I hung up and sat here and decided to crank this out in a few minutes.
Sorry about typos, tense shifts, whatever. If that sort of shit
bothers you, then you should not be reading this anyway. You’re simply not qualified to walk among
News Brothers. Like Chuckles, Flapjacks, Death, Flash and Badger. There are a few more of you who aren’t dead
or demented, or both, yet. Goddamn
Stranger’s been dead 35 years or more now. Badger 14.
As I sit here, I again sing that song by my late friend,
John Lennon. It seems appropriate not just for Jerry, but for me.
Love always,
Flapjacks.
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