George the ape goes on 'Rampage' on Jerry's TV while the great newspaperman munches crackers, spills Sprite and nursing home 'knucklehead' points out similarities to Chico, The Monkey

 

“I guess this one’s gonna end up like Chico, the Monkey,” I said to my pal, Jerry Manley, as we looked at a giant ape battle authority on television while we talked about old times as journalists and News Brothers and half-century friends.

At least I talked. He mostly opened his eyes briefly, turned to me, and mostly agreed.  

Memories grow dimmer with each sunset.  But even Jerry won’t forget the night we came up with the headline “Deputies Go Bananas: Monkey At Large!”

I won’t let him.  Fortunately, the memory of that story, even the night of the primate pursuit, remains like yesterday in my mind.

 Actually, I remember plenty, too much in fact, as terrors from past “lives” revisit me most nights.

Seldom are my night monsters carrying joy. I do sometimes relive past adventures with Jerry, as well as good and sometimes bloody times with Rob Dollar – we wrote a book about our newsroom lives 12 years ago. Other visitors in my “dreams” include Tony Durr, long-dead, empty pill bottle by his side; Scott "Badger" Shelton, radio-voiced great friend and Yellowest Dog Democrat who fought to laugh, even as we saw cancer consume him; Peter Cooper, a historian and musician who lost his battle with an evil illness; Harold “The Stranger” Lynch, a dear friend who died of cigarettes; Jocko, my best college pal, who continues chemo for myeloma while also recovering from a hip replacement.

Jocko, Carpy, Nardholm and Titzy – with occasional accompaniment by a Bible-thumper who has turned both cheeks and cussed and proselytized away his friends; a Wizard asshole and Dog Shit and the Hanson gang – lived studiously and hard back in our Iowa State days.  Unlike the characters in recent news stories, we always had a “no man left behind” philosophy that made sure we got back to the dorm safely as a team.  If one of us was going to drown in a river, we all would be there, holding hands. Sometimes one of us needed to be bailed out of jail, but the Ames Police Department is filled with good guys who didn’t mind letting an inmate bum a smoke until his pals got by to bail him out.

Anyway, my memories remain, and I can recall not just in my nightmares but daydreams as well, a life of great post-college journalism adventures with Jerry, my longest-tenured newspaperman friend. For half a century now, we’ve been pals. For at least half the time, we chased the dawn.

Night time may have been the right time, but there were exceptions. There was a Saturday morning we went together to our old friend, Louis Buckley’s, funeral in Guthrie, Kentucky. We’d ridden together, so afterward, we killed a bottle of Cutty Sark in Jerry’s house in St. Bethlehem before he went to 1100 Broadway in Nashville and me to 200 Commerce Street in Clarksville. Real newspapers used to live in those buildings. Not now. District attorney is on Commerce. Big damn hole at 1100 Broad.   There were far too many ‘holes when I worked there.

Our most-remarkable friendship was built around our love of being newspapermen, of covering murders, a “Full Moon Rapist” (I nicknamed the monster for headline-writing purposes) and kidnappings of teenagers, found dead in forests and streambeds. Skull dragged out of the woods by dogs, as humans looking on thinking it was an empty gallon milk jug. Rob wrote most of those stories, though I did plenty and especially paid attention to the human cost of brutality. I edited Rob’s stuff – Jerry edited mine – and I’d send it to Jerry for the final edit, layout and headline.  “Wallet Found: It’s Rodney’s.”  “Long’s life cut short.”

Jerry, who is in a Memory Care Ward -- at what used to be called an “old-peoples’ home” --five miles from me, can’t remember much at all. And it’s getting worse.

“What was your favorite news story we did back then?” I ask him on most of my weekly visits.  And on this matter, he does have a flickering memory: “Deputies Go Bananas: Monkey At Large!” he’ll say.  Or something close to it.

The Chico the Monkey story makes him happy and reminds him of the heights of both of our journalism careers.

Perhaps because I’ve been bringing it up weekly during the last four months he’s been in the old-people’s home’s Memory Care Ward, he has latched onto the Chico, the Monkey, story as the best in our half-century (both of us were fucked by Korporate Amerika, but that’s a long story. Too many people’s lives were forever charred and scarred by the bean-counters and age-discriminators).  Not just in newsrooms, where upper management “people” graduate from “Be a shithead to your employees school,” where they learn about acceptable age-discrimination forms and appropriate back-stabbing techniques.

Jerry learned his career was over – after more than 30 years at a large Nashville newspaper – when his supervisor called him while he was on vacation at the annual Manley family reunion down in Petersburg.  He almost choked on his watermelon.

Jerry recalls it pretty well, but is too sleepy to be resentful.

But he clearly recalls the night Chico got uneasy and made a fatal jailbreak.  The pet monkey escaped someplace out near St. Bethlehem, at Clarksville’s edge, and the Sheriff’s Department was called out.

Since there were no teenage rapes, red-neck knife murders, Klan rallies nor ax fights going on that night, the Montgomery County deputies went out in full force, and the entire evening of monkey business was dominating the newsroom police scanner. You could hear them chew on donuts from Don’s in between “10-4,” and  “10-7” as they jabbered their primate excitement. Rob, who had secured the police report, was writing the story, while we all smoked and listened to the deputies as they went ape over the fact this was not your normal night in Montgomery County, Tennessee. Me, Jerry and Rob loaded the story with as many monkey cliches as possible. I did get in a bit of a jam with the publisher over that, but I had grown accustomed to the punitive chair in front of his desk.

Chico the Monkey never was captured, enjoying swinging freedom until he was eaten by dogs a couple of months later. I wrote a column-length obituary about the death of the county’s only well-known monkey. Got a bit of a tongue-lashing from management, but Chico deserved it.

Whenever we talk about Chico the Monkey, Jerry’s always surprised when I get to that gruesome ending. Jerry was no longer at Clarksville paper when the monkey was eaten. I think Rob may have been gone, too, fired because he applied to be police chief in order to gain entry to the closed hearings to replace Ira Nunally – a great man and pal, who retired to be a crossing guard over on Crossland Avenue.  The hearings were closed to the media and to the public, so Rob figured he’d cover them by being interviewed for the position, since his master’s degree was in law enforcement administration.  The brass did not support him, when the mayor and other officials called to complain. W. Wendell Wilson, who had cleared the assignment from his city editor’s spot, kept his death-skull-face down and did not defend Rob as the figurative dogs ate him, as well.

But back to my monkey tale. This retelling of the Chico story is relevant because when I went got into Jerry’s room, he was glued to the giant ape movie on TV.

I had a bit of difficulty getting into the room. When I got halfway down the hall to Jerry’s less-than-memorable residence, Mr. Brown, his roommate, was standing outside the door, motioning as wildly as a 90-year-old monkey.   “Jerry. Jerry. Door. Jerry. Door,” Mr. Brown said, pointing to the door handle.

Indeed, it was locked, so I summoned a nurse who came down to unlock it. Jerry barely looked away from the screen, where a giant ape was being shot by enough automatic weapons to arm a militia’s attack on innocent women and schoolchildren.

“Hey, man, sit down,” Jerry said, motioning to Mr. Brown’s recliner. I asked Mr. Brown if it was OK for me to use it. Jerry answered first: “He won’t care.” Mr. Brown tried to smile and nodded. Then he crawled up in the bed next to the reclining chair.

I gave Jerry two packs of eight Keebler cheese-sandwich-crackers and a Diet Sprite that I had smuggled into the old-people’s home in the lining of my Iowa State jacket, the black one that my old college friend, Captain Kirk, gave me before the Bible ripped away his formerly loving and loved demeanor. “For God so loved the world, but he doesn’t love you, Champo,” is pretty much a direct quote from our final conversation five years ago. Another story, but if you believe the Captain, I’m going to Hell. I hope I don’t have to go to a Memory Care Ward first.  Rather be eaten by dogs.

So, while Jerry enjoyed his snacks – I got him what he requested the week before – we both watched the movie, “Rampage.”

The Rock, as good an actor as Pat Boone and Tab Hunter ever were, was trying to save this giant, genetically altered ape for an hour or so, as he helped fight off evil government forces bent on eliminating this not-necessarily-so-gentle giant from the face of the Earth.  

“Damn, this is going to end up like Chico, the Monkey,” I said, as cops and government thugs kept emptying AR’s into the ape.

“No, I think George lives,” Jerry said, as we watched a big cargo plane carrying the giant ape burn and head earthward.

The Rock and an equally talented actor named Naomie Harris and some other random official parachuted from the cargo bay of the crashing plane.

George, the name of the ape, is trapped in the plane that is on fire and subsequently crashes into the jungle or weeds or a soundstage in Century City.

As the plane explodes on impact in the weeds, there is concern on The Rock’s face – he has a couple of weapons in his rich acting arsenal, and concern is among them.

“Dead like Chico,” I said again.

Jerry looked kind of angered by my insistence on the dead primate scenario.

I’d never seen the movie before, and I was hoping the fiery crash and explosion was the end of this 2019 film that blends elements of “Old Frankenstein” with “King Kong” with “ET,” all tied together by the best acting since “Kojak.” I’ve watched “Kojak” a couple of times lately on one of those oldies channels. I remembered it from my youth as being a good show. It’s stodgy crap. Who loves you, baby?

Certainly not me.  Although I’m a sucker for “The Rockford Files.” I identify with Jim.

Anyway, between nodding off, Jerry is watching this film attentively. He’d seen it before. And, he assures me again that George doesn’t die.

Jerry, who I love, is in the Memory Care Ward for a four-month stretch now. “I don’t remember how or when I got here,” he’ll say.  “I guess I’m not getting out anytime soon.”

Never is not soon, and he knows it. He is not happy about it, but he’s making an effort at living the best life possible.

And that means he’s spending his nights across a dorm room from a guy I have surmised is perhaps John Brown. Or Tom Brown. Or Joe Brown.

I know he’s “Mr. Brown” – as in the husband of the woman who had a lovely daughter in the old Herman’s Hermits song. I never cared much for the pretenders to The Beatles’ throne from Merseyside or anywhere.  But I have spent time with “Herman” – Peter Noone—and found him to be a kind and humble man. A one-trick pony? Sure, but he cashed in on the State Fair circuit.  The only time I’ll cash in is when I cash in my chips before incineration or when I’m eaten by dogs.  

Jerry took another bite from one of the cheese crackers from my contraband hauled out of my coat lining. One eight-pack was cheese-and-cheese, the other cheese-and-peanut butter.

He spilled the Sprite. “Fuck, now I’m going to have to change before dinner,’’ he said. Around these parts, wet trousers are common, but it’s not usually because a fella spills his Sprite.

“I’ll bring you two next time,” I said to Jerry, who stopped worrying about his trousers and focused on the ape movie. 

I’m still not sure of the protocol of sneaking food in from the outside. The Memory Care Ward dieticians make sure that their charges in the special, double-locked and guarded section of the nursing home have three balanced meals as well as snacks.

Problem is the snacks are things like bananas and sugar-free pudding if you are diabetic, which Jerry is and for a long time had a sore on his foot to prove it. It’s healed up now, he tells me.. 

“They don’t give us any junk food,” Jerry noted a few weeks ago. “I’d like it if you could get some in here next time.”

His first choice was potato chips. He wanted as many as he could eat, and the dietician told me they only serve chips – perhaps a handful – when sandwiches are on the lunch menu.

“I really want chips,” he offered again before I left the nursing home that day after I helped cajole the nurses and such into giving him at least another banana and a drink.  They had the banana. He wanted a soda, but those are out.  Crannapple juice, water and some types of milk are the refreshments.

The chips he wanted in his room so he could dig into them while watching “Gunsmoke,’’ the famous true-to-life docuseries about a tall marshal who enjoys gunning down folks, good and bad, if they so much as cast a glance at his favorite whore, Miss Kitty.

Actually, most of the folks deserve it, if, for no other reason, they know there’s a 100 percent chance they’ll be bleeding out in the dust as Marshal Dillon laughs and fixes himself a hand-rolled.  Better than being eaten by dogs, like poor Chico.

The dietician came into the room just after Jerry finished his crackers.

“It’s lunchtime, Mr. Jerry. It’s lunchtime, Mr. Brown.”

Jerry reached into his dresser for a dry pair of trousers and Mr. Brown rolled out of the fetal position on his bed and smiled. Clearly he was hungry. I felt badly I didn’t bring him crackers, too.

But then I’ve found I like all these people and I’m too poor to be their junk food Super Fly.

So, The Rock still in pursuit of George, the ape, I got up from Mr. Brown’s recliner, and I thanked him for letting me use it.

Walking slowly down the hall, using my cane, the nurse who had let me into Jerry’s room looked, with nothing bordering lust, at my very slow stride.

“I thought you were going to stay here with Mr. Jerry.”

I picked up my cane and swung it at her. Nah, I picked it up and forcefully added some pep to my step. I don’t like to be viewed as a soon-to-be client at an old-people’s home.

She let me out through the locked security door just as I heard one of the residents holler “He’s a knucklehead.”  I didn’t think she was talking about me. Maybe Mr. Brown, who was right behind me.

On the other side of the locked security door, the regular residents were playing cornhole and listening to a Willie Nelson record.

Ol' Flap chips away at his own loneliness and brings back a stream of old memories when Jerry meets "Elvis" and Matt and Bob (Dillon and Dylan) enter the scene for bloodshed and song

An innocent bystander, perhaps a local deputy sheriff, caught this photo of Jerry Manley, Tim Ghianni and Rob Dollar in the summer of 1981. Or sometime near then. We had just finished our evening's work at the daily newsroom.

 “Jerry, Jerry … Jerry….” I said as I sat in the party room in the Memory Care Ward.  I didn’t say it loudly – I had gotten in trouble with one old, black-dyed-hair woman a few weeks ago for my volume when talking to my best friend.

I reached over, a foot or so from my chair, and softly shook my best pal’s right arm. Jerry Manley – my running buddy for 50 years – stirred slightly from his nod-off state-of-mind and looked at me.

“What?” he asked, sleep, no irritation, in his voice.

“Jerry: just say ‘Elvis!’” I told him. He looked at me in his attempt to focus and wake up.

“Quick. I’ll tell you why later, but just say ‘Elvis,’” I said.

He didn’t fully open his eyes.

“Elvis,” he semi-hollered, before nodding off again.

The room, filled with kind folks whose minds have been blown askew by age and illness, erupted with applause. There even was a cheer of sorts from a guy I later learned was “Mr. Brown,” who – it turns out – is Jerry’s roommate, Joe or Bob or Tom Brown or whatever.  Maybe John, as in “John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave …” or whatever.  

All eyes in the Memory Ward party room focused on my friend.  

“He got it,” said one of two women with guitars who were set up, with a small amp or two, speakers and microphones in front of the TV where “Gunsmoke” played silently. Even though the TV was muted, I saw Matt Dillon gun down an outlaw or someone he just plain didn’t like much.  There’s blood on the streets in the town of Dodge City.

I’d been in the Memory Care Ward for about 45 minutes by the time of the Elvis incident.  The dietician, who did not know I had a fairly large bag of Lay’s potato chips jammed into the arm of the Sports Illustrated Titans jacket draped over my arm, had been glad to see me when she let me through the double-locked secure door separating the regular nursing home. 

“Thanks for coming to visit him,” she said. “He’s right in there. I love him. I love a man who doesn’t say much.”   

She pointed me to the party room, where everyone looked happy, though some looked downright confused.

Many memories have vanished.  Jerry, for example, can’t remember a good chunk of the most recent 30 years of his life. 

“I didn’t know you were coming today,” he had said when I slid into the chair next to him in the party room.  He never knows I’m coming. Heck, he doesn’t really know the day. Course it really doesn’t matter much to me.  

I spend a lot of time laughing with him, reminding him of the days when we tilted at windmills and often lost.  The impossible dream unrealized.

Anyway, back to the Elvis incident.

Jerry was among a score and probably more of his cohorts in the party room. Two nicely aged women who called themselves “The Senior Singers” or something like that, were the focus of the eyes, both cloudy and bright. Though some, like Jerry’s, were mostly closed.

Lovely women, perhaps in their 70s, they play the nursing home circuit. I assume they get some sort of grant money or stipend. They also – like me – are rewarded by the fact they are perhaps the youngest people in the room.

Jerry is the youngster of the clientele, by my guess.  And he’s nine days older than me. We used to celebrate our November 9 and November 18 (1951) birthdays by burning away the carbon from dusk to dawn, beer and Scots whiskey were our lighter fluids. And, generally our friends – many of whom were still alive back then – joined us.  But we literally were the last men standing and the first ones to work at The Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle the next afternoon.

“Swallow this,” I’d say, proffering a hand with aspirin or similar potion in it to Jerry as we’d start our days.  We’d wash it down with coffee – I drank 40 cups a day back then, down to about 15 cups these days, as age has eaten away at my general physical stamina.

The two women were singing standards, both country and pop, and sometimes pausing after a song to ask the crowd if they remembered who sang it on recordings.

“Oh! Susana” seemed to be among the favorites, as the crowd sang the chorus.  “… Don’t you cry for me, for I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee…” or something like that.

The “Theme from Maverick” also was a favorite, if I’m recalling correctly.

“The Fish Cheer!” was an uplifter for them all, as they flashed middle fingers into the air. I made that up.

But then there truly was “I Saw the Light!” that had those who could up on their feet dancing.  Mr. Brown got up by himself, clapped his hands and sang along. Doing some sort of solo buck-dancing that reminded me of “Deliverance” for some reason. 

A couple more songs were about God and mercy as they apparently gave thanks for the fact their lives are continuing inside this ward. Hell, I believe they even did “Forever Young,” which may have led to some later confusion. Or maybe it was “Lay, Lady, Lay.” Yeah, I know that one has adult themes, but these people are not only adults, they are post-adults, so they can handle it.

“She’ll Be Comin’ ‘Round The Mountain,” was perhaps the most popular, for both singing and dancing.

Hell, I even joined on that, trying to get my buddy to join me on the “She’ll be riding six white horses when she comes” line that always reminds me of a favorite encounter with a white-horseback-riding blonde in Marion, Iowa, 48 years ago. She got a saddle for me to use when I rode along. Long damn time ago.

I was about to lean over and tell Jerry about that horsey adventure, when the Senior Singers burst into “Love Me Tender,” the great Elvis song from the movie of that title.

Afterward, the younger of the two singers said: “Do you know this was from a movie about the Civil War? It starred a handsome young man from Memphis. Any guesses who that was? He sang the song, too.”

“Bob Dylan?” one man asked, (I’m telling the truth). I got up and crossed the room and yelled “No! You crazy old fuck” right in his face. He spit at me and recited the “Talkin’ John Birch Society Paranoid Blues.”

Nah. Again, sometimes my thoughts are more coarse than I am in real life, where I portray an old softie.

“Sinatra?”   “Paul Anka?”  “Tony Bennett?” “Neil Diamond?”  The names of the folks who sang the Great American Songbook were flowing across the room.

Since I’ve still got too many marbles to be eligible in this contest, that’s when I got Jerry to spout out “Elvis!” and receive applause for his mental acumen. I don’t think there were any prizes.

“Hey, man, I’ve got some contraband potato chips in my jacket,” I said to him after his triumph. “Let’s go back to your room.”

He’d been craving potato chips, and they limit him to a few on days when they serve a handful with sandwiches for lunch.

Food is not supposed to be sneaked in from “the outside.” At least that’s what Jerry told me, the first time he requested chips.

We stayed while these quite talented singers finished their set. “They like this song down in New Orleeeens,” one of them said. “This will be our last song today.”

“When the Saints Go Marching In!” brought those who could to their feet to be a part of the number and sing along.

I looked at Jerry and said: “This is a good one for us to leave on.”

So, with Mr. Brown and the other sweet saints – I really like these people, which portends well for my future, I suppose – dancing and singing and clapping the beat, Jerry and I went out in the hallway and to his room.

“I’ve got these for you,” I said, pulling the chips out of my sleeve.

“Man, that’s great,” he said, genuine surprise in his voice, as he grabbed the yellow bag and struggled to tear it open.

For the next 20 minutes, he ate chip after chip. “NewsNation” cable news channel was on the TV. Normally, Jerry wants cowboy shows, and I offered to see if “Wagon Train” or “Have Gun, Will Travel” was on.

“I don’t know how to change the remote, but this is OK. I don’t understand what they are talking about though. What’s AI?”

Now, I can’t explain artificial intelligence. I’m happy enough with the real stuff as long as I can hang onto it.

“Remember when we tried to piss on Max’s car as he was driving to work?” I asked, changing the subject as Elon Musk came onto the TV screen.

He laughed as I told him the story of two stone-cold sober, 35-year-old journalists of some renown standing on the overpass and emptying our bladders.  That was 37 years ago, and almost no traffic was on Interstate 24 at 3 or 3:30 a.m.

We had decided it was a good idea to salute Max Moss, perhaps the truest “newspaperman” except me who I’ve known. We just thought he’d like us to note his passing as he drove from the Moss estate off Fort Campbell Boulevard down to his wire editor’s job at the Nashville Banner. He’d been fucked by corporate at the paper in Clarksville, so he took the Banner job and the hourlong commute.

We didn’t hit anyone with our pitiful drizzle.  The little car we aimed at may have been Max’s Honda, but sometimes, men know, aim is not true. Also, it was 25 feet to the interstate below. Streams turn to light mist at best.

I should add that Max was beloved and respected by us both. It was just a 3:30 a.m. “good idea.” At least we were smart enough not to stand atop the rail.  

“I’d guess we had no chance of getting him,” Jerry told me the other day, after I described the night’s activities. “I sure liked old Max.”

“I loved him. He was my mentor,” I replied. “He was one of my favorite people of all time. I loved his wife, Merrily, too.

“She died a year or two ago, Max about a year before her,” I said.

“I didn’t know that Max was gone,” Jerry said. “Or I didn’t remember that. He was a great guy.”

“The best boss ever. Remember I nicknamed him ‘The Silver Hammer?’” I asked Jerry.

He laughed, remembering I’d given Max that name because of The Beatles’ song “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.”

Before Max died, I told him of that old “behind-the-back” nickname, and he approved, although he was more of an Elvis guy than a Beatles guy. He’d for sure have won the “Love Me Tender” singer question.

The dietician lady came into the room as Jerry was digging into the chips. She ignored it. Instead, she was there to help roommate Mr. Brown with some hygiene matters.

I figured she’d say something as Jerry kept crunching.

I told him I’d be back soon with more chips after she left.  “You want me to carry that empty bag out of here? Get rid of the evidence?”

He laughed and tossed the yellow bag across the room.

I needed to get back to my home office, where I’m a professional author in fast pursuit of bankruptcy.

We walked, arm-over-shoulder down the hallway, where the dietician met us, near the party room.

She had a glass of Cranapple juice for him.

“Man, I am thirsty,” Jerry said, reaching for the tall, plastic tumbler.

The dietician let me out the secure door to the “regular” wing of the nursing home.

“Thank you. Thank you very much for taking care of Jerry. He’s the best,” I told her.

The door closed behind me and suddenly I was interrupting a heated game involving aces and jokers and stacks of tiles.

Henry Mancini’s “Moon River” played on the Muzak system.

 

Golden hours in the memory care ward where potato chips are rare, Matt Dillon kills folks and we laugh about the Little Ole Opry the night Jerry rolled his blue Prelude to save a dog

Rob Dollar took this picture of Jerry Manley, me and Jim Lindgren while we met for Flapjacks and flapjacks 12 years ago or so. The restaurant is dead, and we're not doing so well ourselves.
 

Festus, Marshal Matt Dillon’s bewhiskered deputy, was asked what he was going to do after an obviously unsavory character took over the big man’s desk.

In an instant, Festus had his Colt six-shooter pointed up beneath the bad guy’s jaw.

“First, I’m going to decide whether I’m going to fight you or just splatter what little brains you have on the ceiling,” he told the guy who crooked cattlemen had installed in Dillon’s chair while the marshal was “missing … somewhere out in the valley ….” 

My best friend -- at least the longest-living survivor of a lifestyle some might have labeled “self-destructive,” while to us it was the time of our lives – stopped snoring long enough to see if Festus was going to blow the guy’s brains all over the ceiling of the U.S. Marshal’s office in Dodge City, Kansas.

“This is better,” Jerry Manley said, as he swung his legs off the mattress so he could sit up in bed.  “I didn’t want to watch that news you had on. I like to watch TV.

“Game shows and cowboys.”

“Game shows are probably good for you,” I said, after Festus put his gun away and let the bad guy leave the marshal’s office. “If you play along, they’ll help keep your brain active,” I said.

Jerry just shrugged at that. He doesn’t have a lot of hope of recovering some of the phases and stages of his life’s memories, he reckons. Still, even watching “Jeopardy” can stimulate, even if you don’t know answers to questions like “Little Joe Cartwright is connected to the Andromeda by this big snake.” (Answer: “Who is Adam Cartwright?” “Who is Pernell Roberts?” also would be accepted.)

Joking aside, my beloved friend is fighting to hang onto his memories. It’s why this long-haired relic of another age (me … Jerry’s daughter Mary Jane has given her pop a close-cropped and dandy look) so often is sitting in the recliner next to his bed when he wakes up. He remembers me, and I help him remember the who, what, when, where, why and how factors of a journalist’s life.

“You remember the night you almost killed yourself to save a dog?” I asked him.

He smiled as that simple question sparked memories of one of our marathon nights of harmless – to all but us – excess.

Like the time we went to the Little Ole Opry nightclub in the backroom of my friend, John Maddox’s package store (that’s what they used to call liquor stores back in the civilized days of the 20^th Century).

Jerry smiled and contributed a chuckle or two as we talked about that night. For a few Fridays and Saturdays one spring in the mid-1980s, the Opry performers would finish their sets and skits at the Grand Ole Opry House out in Donelson, and they’d rush up to the room behind Pal’s Package Store in Clarksville. It was a nice room, of the old-fashioned gangster-era nightclub variety, with round tables and red, subdued lighting. E.T., Porter, Little Jimmy, Lorrie Morgan and more would play for a few hours.

(The club was short-lived, closed after the real Ole Opry, a bunch of three-piece suit corporate guys, sent their lawyers to Pal’s Package Store, and sternly objected (or worse).)

But it was wonderful while it lasted. They sold beer by the bucket full of bottles. Jerry and I had a few buckets full one night (or probably more.) He dropped me off at the house where I lived unhappily (another life) while plotting my escape.  It probably was 2 a.m. when he dropped me off, and he began his 10-mile drive to the house he lived in in the St. Bethlehem community of Clarksville.

On his way home, probably a quarter-mile from his house, a dog ran out in front of Jerry’s blue Honda Prelude. Rather than hit the dog, Jerry steered off the road, rolling his car a few times.

He was all bruised up and missed a shift or two at The Tennessean (he was commuting from Clarksville back then while plotting his own future). Fact is, I didn’t know anything about the wreck until I got to work at The Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle at 2 p.m. or so and, as was customary, dialed Jerry at The Tennessean copy desk. He wasn’t there. He’d been in a wreck, I was told by Nick Vanocur, another friend (he died alone in a fleabag residential motel a few years ago.)

Nick said he thought Jerry was OK, but I quickly hung up the phone and dialed the Manley estate in St. B. He invited me by after I got off work. He was really beaten to hell by the incident. He was stiff, bruised and scratched up. I poured him a bit of the Cutty Sark bottle we’d finish that evening.

There’s a lot more to it, but this was the part I decided to focus on the other day when I worked to pull Jerry from the partial fog that has him in a Memory Care ward.

  We were “reliving” that tale – I was telling it while he was listening – when he shook his head and slapped his knee.

“I shoulda hit that damn dog,” he muttered.

“You never would do that, Jerry. You know that.”

We laughed, though.  And then he asked me for some potato chips.

The reason I tell these stories to him is simple enough. First of all, it jars some of the calcium loose that is clogging up his brain. Like the game shows, there is something to be gained by listening to me.

Granted, they are sometimes two-hour-long, one-sided conversations, but Jerry stays alert and smiles when something I have said touches what’s left of a funny bone for a guy who pretty much is confined to a large dormitory room with someone he doesn’t know. His name varies from Bob to Thomas to “that guy.”  

Jerry seldom leaves his room to go down to the party room. I think he got pissed at the other patients when we were told we were being too loud for them to hear what John Denver was saying in some stupid TV movie a couple of weeks ago.

Jerry, who doesn’t say much, wasn’t loud. I was, to be heard above the blasting television and the truly mindless chatter of those gathered beneath quilts in the memory care ward.

I know it made Jerry mad that we were being told to be quiet. And since the barbs and empty eyes were leveled at me, he got angrier.

Now he has calmed down.  “I just lay here and watch cowboy shows and game shows,” he said, as he forked a bit at the stone-cold breakfast that had been left at the foot of his bed two hours ago.

“I can’t eat this,” he said to me, forcing a bite of stone-cold bacon into his mouth. "I don’t know why they left it here and didn’t take me down to the breakfast room. I didn’t know this was here.”

When the nurse/dietician came in, I was a little stern. “How’s he going to keep any strength if you just leave his food here while he’s sleeping?” I said.  I threw the plate of cold eggs and the fixings in her face and she fell to the floor.  Nah, that’s not true. But she did have to think deeply for an answer.

“I came and got him at breakfast time,” she said. “But he told me he didn’t want to come down there to eat.

“I’ll make sure he eats something at lunchtime.”

I told her how much he misses potato chips in the memory care ward.

Jerry and I talked about food and women, newspapers and The Beatles. He let out a couple of fine farts,  proof that he hasn’t lost it completely.

Festus was going out to the valley to find Marshal Dillon, according to the dialogue on the blasting TV. “Matthew will come back and take care of this. He won’t like it a bit that this guy is taking his spot.”

Doc Adams agreed, running his right hand along Festus’s inseam.

Nah. But he did agree.

Jerry and I watched for awhile. I always like to watch Dillon commit cold-blooded murder at the end of the show.

“I don’t think I’ll want any lunch,” he had said to the nurse.

I reminded him that if he wanted to be healthy he needed to eat. I felt like my Grandma Ghianni as I said it.

I hugged him the next time he woke up from fitful slumber

“I really like having you out here,” he said, adding that for the most part he doesn’t want company. “You and I have gotten old. Together. Don’t know how. Doesn’t seem so long ago that we were having all that fun and making movies.”

As I walked out toward the “secure door,” so the guards could let me into the “regular” nursing home, I ducked my head into the dietician’s office and asked her again to “make sure he eats.”

She was next to the cafeteria/common/party room, where the people were mostly sleeping, mouths open, while Festus found Marshal Dillon, who climbed up on his chestnut horse so he could get back to town and gun down the lawman-impersonator hired by evil cattle barons.

“You don’t do that sort of thing in Dodge City,” I said to myself, parroting angry directions yelled at me, Jerry, Rob Dollar, John Staed, Jim Lindgren and Ricky G. Moore 42 years ago.

“You don’t do that sort of thing in Clarksville,” we were instructed after a task force of armed cops interrupted our tickertape parade through the streets of the Queen City of the Cumberland. We’d been passing hand-rolled tobacco cigarettes and a Jack bottle or two filled with Coke, props for our movie grand finale parade. Cops don’t like freedom of expression.

“I’m going to talk about that parade arrest next time,” I said, inside my weary brain, as I walked to the secure escape hatch from the memory care ward.

 I was let through the double-locked doors and walked through the other part of the nursing home, where about 20 people were playing bingo in a hallway.

I wondered if they’d been given potato chips.

Nobody gets out of here alive .... I get frightened that I'm not going to fly out of the Cuckoo's Nest.... Of course, I'm nuts .... Laughter and 'Looney Tunes' with Jerry & the guys

 For a split second I thought I was going to be seized by the big memory care attendant and strapped down until someone could put a pillow over my head.

Nah, no pillow. But I did have a bit of worry there for a second at the nursing home, when it looked like they’d confused me for a patient.

That was toward the end of my visit with Jerry Manley this week. He's actually pretty well. There are holes in his memory. Big ones. But he's still articulate. And we love each other.

I was sitting in his room, when he lifted his tiny, empty water glass. “So damn thirsty,” he said.

I leaned forward on my walking stick to push myself up from the recliner in my best friend’s room in the memory care ward of the nursing home.

“I hate for you to have to go down and get it, but I’m thirsty,” said Jerry Manley – one of the four original News Brothers (who hates his “Chuckles” nickname, but has come to terms with it after 43 years.)

Jerry, who had been watching “The Rifleman” – Lucas McCain was bailing his son, Mark, out of trouble after the young man allowed a stranger to stay in the barn the night before – had just finished off the  mini-glass of water. By “mini,” I mean it was about double the size of a shot glass.

“Man, I’m thirsty,” he had said, again. It’s a pretty far stretch down to the dining/party room and kitchen, so I told him I’d go find him something to wet his whistle.

That’s when I used the walking stick – a cane that my brother, Eric, made from a tree limb and inscribed with a Paul McCartney quote: “I don’t work to be ordinary.”  I don’t really take the cane out of the house much, but I do use it to help me at home. It’s a beautiful piece of finished, knotty wood and I could kill someone with it. I use it when my back troubles me or if I want to kill someone.

Even back in the heyday of The News Brothers, pushing a half-century ago now, the problems with my back were visible. I never have been able to walk perfectly upright and my running down Third Street in the “Rocky” sequence demonstrates the off-kilter running style that results.

It’s from scoliosis, the severely curved spine my parents gifted me with, with additions of rotting, cracked discs and other lower-disc degeneration caused by my career as a mediocre – but chemically fueled and very fast on my feet – football player.

Anyway, I spent six or seven months going to a chiropractor for “spinal decompression” last year. It was designed to put tissue between the compressed discs. Didn’t work. Spine is too curved, apparently.

So, I’ve been using the cane a lot to keep myself upright.  I only use it if I’m going to be on my feet too long, and my focus on keeping the back straight turns to pain.

Outside of my house – which I rarely leave because most of my friends are dead or elsewise incapacitated physically or mentally – I mainly use it at the nursing home where Jerry moved while everyone else was celebrating Thanksgiving.  Those are long hallways, going from the regular retirement center to get to the secured memory care ward.

And no one there looks twice at an old man on a cane, unless it is to admire it.  I think the old ladies are looking at my crotch, though. “Still got it, Timothy,” I’ll fool myself.

When I got to the party room and asked the only attendant I could find on-duty for something my friend could drink, I was greeted by a resident who introduced himself as “Paul.”

“Who is this rascal?” he asked, to no one, as I waited for the attendant. “You new here?”

I told him my name and that I hadn’t yet met the requirements for entry into this exclusive and very clean club; that I was visiting because my buddy lived at the end of the long, freshly waxed hall.

“Well, hello, Tim,” he said. “It’s so nice to meet you. Come see me again.”

I shook his hand, and he turned back to the TV, where – and this is absolutely true – “Looney Tunes” cartoons were playing.

I gimped my way back to the room where Jerry lives and plopped down in the recliner that is wedged between his bed and a recliner “belonging” to his roommate who lives in the other full-size bed in the traditional dormitory-style living.

“You ever meet your roommate?” I asked Jerry. 

“I reckon I have, but I don’t remember. He’s not in here much,” he said.

There’s really not many places he could go, so I figure he must like to spend his time in the party room, or perhaps he has a girlfriend he’s shagging mindlessly someplace down the hall. (“Do it again, do it some more, I know that it’s nasty, it’s nasty for sure,” as Frank Zappa told me on the first Mothers album.)

“Here comes Bob now!” said Jerry, as the roommate, a 90ish-looking fellow in a yellow running suit, entered the room.

“Hello, Bob,” I said, as the roommate sat down in his recliner, about six inches to my left.

Jerry and I didn’t let that stop us, as we talked about all the great beer and otherwise altered adventures we had. How I had developed a particular love of Scotch and pretty much drank it by the fifth or even quart back in those days.   

“Remember, you used to come to my house every Sunday midnight and we’d drink 12 pints of Natural Light together as we made mix tapes til dawn?” I asked. “We’d go to work the next day. I don’t remember ever having a hangover.

“It would kill me today,” I said, adding I’d had a mostly dry existence for the last couple of decades.

‘’I suppose we must have had hangovers,” Jerry said.

“We just sucked it up and went to work,” I said, though I really don’t recall many hangovers. The ones I had, I usually cured with a quart of beer in the morning.

It was at about this point in the conversation that I noticed that every time I said something, Bob was breaking into sustained laughter and even slapping his hand against his armrest.

I showed Jerry a video Rob Dollar had posted, a clip from “Flapjacks: The Motion Picture,” that captured me, Rob, Jerry, John Staed and Harold Lynch out at Outlaw Field in Clarksville.

Hell, even Mayor Ted Crozier was there, wearing a “Tim Ghianni for Mayor” button. Ted loved me and we remained friends until his death a few years ago.

The basic scene has The News Brothers going out to the airport because America’s first man to orbit the globe, John Glenn, was flying in.

I was The Leaf-Chronicle’s associate editor, in charge of Sunday papers, and I had sent Harold, who was the government reporter, out there to interview the great astronaut on that Saturday morning.

The night before, I suggested (or maybe it was Rob) that the rest of us go out to the airport in the morning – we didn’t go to work until afternoon – to meet the astronaut, a senator who was in town to raise money for a potential presidential run.

He didn’t get to the White House, but as I’ve noted in previous dispatches, he really was a good sport, glad to meet The News Brothers.

Jerry laughed. But Bob, well, shit, he wailed. It was the funniest story he’d heard in years, I suppose.

I got the same reaction when I started reminding Jerry of our Chico the Monkey coverage, something that got me summoned to my fairly regular upholstered hotseat in the publisher’s office. Publisher Luther Thigpen didn’t think the pun-filled streaming-headline tale about deputies looking for an escaped monkey in St. Bethlehem was worth the play I gave it.

Luther, though, liked me. He smiled as I told him I’d do it again the same way. “We’ll just have to agree to disagree,” I told him, or some such.

“What was Luther’s last name?” Jerry asked.

Bob laughed when I said “Thigpen.”

He continued laughing when Jerry and I agreed that Luther, despite his faults and Chamber of Commerce mentality, at least had spent his formative years as a newspaper reporter and editor, so he – in hindsight – was the best publisher I’d ever worked for.

Jerry agreed.

Bob continued to laugh when Jerry asked: “Whatever happened to Chico?”

“He got eaten by dogs a couple of months after his escape,” I replied.

That threw Bob into writhing, almost-tear-laden laughter.

Jerry laughed, too.

Since I’d spent a couple hours with Jerry, and inadvertently driven his roommate into great curtains of laughter, I figured I’d better go home.

I pulled myself to my feet again, using the cane for support.

“Damn, I didn’t think we’d ever get old,” Jerry said, as I squeezed his shoulder and then made my way to the door to the hallway.

“Wagon Train” was on the TV as I left the room. I was tired and it was a long walk down the hallway, so I was leaning heavily on the walking stick.

An attendant, who reminded me of Nurse Ratched, came up to me and asked if she could help me.

“Are you looking for someone? Where’s your room?” she said, all-business.

“I don’t live here,” I told her. “My best friend, Mr. Manley, lives down at the end of the hall.”

I think she was pondering calling the big, black offensive tackle of an attendant when she saw my visitor badge. She reluctantly pressed the button that let me free of the very secure doors.

After I left the memory care ward, I wandered through the “normal” nursing home.  A guitar-strumming visitor was singing Ray Price and Sinatra songs, and some of the old people were clog dancing.

 One man was dancing as if he was holding tight to an invisible partner.       

'Simple Motion' should have been a classic Brace-Cooper-Jutz album, but death forced Peter's heartbroken amigos to push boundaries with masterful duet country-folk album

 My late editor-pal Tony Durr was editing one of my columns 40 years ago, when he looked up at me, caution in his voice and on his face: “You wear your feelings on your sleeve. It’s what makes you a great writer. It’s also what will kill you,” he said, then pretty much repeated himself: “But, it does give you your greatness.”   

“Greatness” is only a perception of the audience, of course.  And it’s why I can unabashedly boast that two of my friends, infused a dash with the spirit of a mutual friend whose illness took him too soon, have made a masterpiece. Greatness on display for all to hear.

Simple Motion, the new album by Eric Brace and Thomm Jutz, fit my generally melancholy spirit well the first time I decided to listen to the whole album, in sequence. And I played it again on my daily trek on my recumbent exercise bike.

I’ll first say that this is a masterful album, the best yet from the evolving outfit of musicians.

A decade or more ago, Brace teamed with Peter Cooper to make music and mix in highly tuned mirth.  Both had been music journalists. Both had been raised around the great D.C.-area folk/musical godfathers The Seldom Scene.  They both idolized the story songs of Tom T. Hall, as well as worshiped in person at the altar that was Fox Hollow, the Hall estate where I too was a regular visitor. (This isn’t about me, but I was a close friend of the late Tom T. and Dixie Hall, primarily because Dixie loved me and vice versa. I have a carved, Jamaican wood angel looking at me to prove it. Plus a heart that still feels that love.)

Anyway, both Cooper and Brace had other musical outlets and solo prospects in which they turned out what, to my biased mind, were Sunday-afternoon-mood classics.

But there was a certain chemistry between the two that made for great music. Cooper, the dearest of my friends in the music business and on a personal level, and Brace not only recorded duet albums, they began playing live, first at places like Nashville’s Station Inn, but on the road, from Kingsport, Tennessee, to pubs in England, Ireland and on the continent. Sleep in the bar’s backroom, wash out stage clothes in the bathroom sink.  Have a drink. Start over again.

Early on, they acquired a producer and guest guitarist in Thomm Jutz, one of Music City’s best guitarists and a German expat, lured from the Black Forest of Germany by Bobby Bare (long story, look it up in my book Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes, which you should read, anyway) to U.S. citizen, dwelling and music-making in Southeast Davidson County. A scholar, kind soul and mammothly-talented picker, he set up a studio and honed his guitar-playing abilities to the point where he might be the best of the thirteen-hundred fifty-two guitar-pickers in Nashville.  (That number comes from one of my friends and heroes, John Sebastian, leader of Lovin’ Spoonful and singer of “Nashville Cats.” The song was written in the 1960s at the Holiday Inn Vanderbilt, where the Spoonful stayed after a concert in Municipal Auditorium. I always make John tell me the story again when we talk.)

Anyway, it wasn’t long before Thomm not only played as a guest onstage and on-album (while still producing), he eventually became the third member of the band. Brace-Cooper recordings and performances were supplanted by Brace-Cooper-Jutz.

They are marvelous recordings and I am blessed that – thanks to my loyalty to Peter, who was among my life’s favorite people and one of my few confidantes – I went to performances consisting of all of those configurations, along with some of the best sidemen (steely Lloyd Green and Steve Fishell and Pete Finney, bassist Dave Roe, the miracle that is Rory Hoffman) and sidewomen (see Andrea Zonn, fiddle, and Sierra Hull, mandolin, who both own pieces of my heart. Andrea, in particular, makes me melt with her bow).   I even met and befriended wonderful and kind Jerry Lawson, the best and most soulful voice of the old Persuasions, thanks to these guys. Eric “rediscovered” his doo-wop hero and made a record filled with Nashville Cats.  The debut was at the Station, where, due to mobility issues, Jerry asked me to help him on and off the stage.

Those Station Inn shows, (one or two per year) were some of my happiest evenings.  Heck, I even took my son, Joe, along with me five or six times. The B-C-J song “Hartford’s Bend” is Joe’s favorite song. Mine is “Strawberry Fields Forever,” but that has nothing to do with this tale.  But, let me take you down, indeed:

Something happened just before the pandemic settled in on America.  Peter got sick. It was an illness that kept him from going on the road (though, everybody eventually stopped going on the road because of COVID.)

Eric and Thomm, though, tried hard to keep performing, while lamenting and saluting their friend, praying to the gut-string gods that they could be a trio again. His health deteriorated.  They missed him a lot as they tried to live up to his expectations while he stayed here in Nashville, writing songs and sometimes calling me at night to sing them. Eventually that illness caused Peter to fall, hit his head and die. He’d been reciting lyrics to me that very morning.

That last sentence was difficult for me to write, because normally, most days for the last 24 years, I’d be calling Peter, sick or not, and we’d laugh (he was funny, I profane) and sometimes even make up vulgar songs.

Those soul-lifting – for us both, I believe -- conversations ended when he died around the 2022 holiday weeks, and there remains a void and even a bit of bitterness and plenty of melancholy loneliness (self-pity at having someone else die seems selfish, but I yam what I yam, as Tom Petty used to sing with Howie.)  

The other day, a part of the void was filled when I listened to the first song to be released by the new duo configuration of that same group, Brace and Jutz.

It was a great song about “Nashville in the Morning,” a somehow optimistic portrayal of a city (my home for a half-century) that is choking in its own progress and gagging over its national identity crisis and stumbling over the promise of three pair of boots for the price of one. Their song’s focus is on the dewy beauty that remains here, just past dawn, before bachelorettes and California-bred carpetbaggers line the streets with drunken silliness and reckless driving and projectile vomiting.

I actually agree to that beauty, as the great John Partipilo shot the cover for my book at 5 a.m. on a brisk morning when the streets were empty even as the neon still danced on Lower Broadway.

Simple Motion is a giant musical and journalistic step forward, a vocal and guitar delight filled with imagery and life. Also, what’s missing in this album is the third voice, the higher-harmony of Peter Cooper, his contributions on rhythm guitar, his sarcastic worldview.  No “Grandma’s Batman Tattoo” --a crowd-pleasing romp written by Peter and my pal Tommy Womack -- reminiscent stuff in this set.

Peter’s missing, of course, because he’s dead. Damn it (not him).

But he’s on Simple Motion in spirit. In fact, he appears, or at least his spirit does, in a few of the songs. I’m not going to tell you which ones, but if you knew Peter, you’ll recognize the hat-tips, the bridges and flowing water, name-check and life boundaries offered by the still-living duo of musical partners in that fabulous trio.

I am not a music critic. I am, foremost, a music fan but mostly a lover of humanity, with thousands of pieces of recorded music. I generally draw from only a few artists for my daily listening. Seldom the day goes by when I haven’t listened to John, Paul, George and Ringo for at least an hour.

Petty, Mick and Keef, Kristofferson, Dylan and the Wilburys make up most of my daily soundtrack.

I do pull out one of my albums by Nashville’s best country singer, Jon Byrd (I only have two of his, as I am poor, but I do love his music.) Mac Wiseman gets his spins.

And always there’s the work of my favorite local musician and his amigos.

Peter gave me copies of all the albums he did as a solo artist, and I have wrangled up most of the B-C and B-C-J albums.  Being an almost-never-paid freelance writer and author (my book, Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes, continues to sell, but there’s not enough sexual fantasy, dysfunctional incestuous royalty nor exploding massive reptile penises in it to make it a top seller.) In truth, it’s a pure-as-country-water look into the lives of many of my best friends, most of them dead, in the music business. Speaking of my too-often dead corps of pals, Peter wrote the Foreword and also edited each chapter as I finished it. He was my biggest cheerleader. “Only you can write this book,” he’d say. “You have to finish it.” I did. Then he died.

Sure, I miss him a lot. And he should have been producing great music for years to come. He should be the third voice on Simple Motion.    

But, you know, as you listen to this absolutely fabulous album, likely the best put together during all phases of this group’s existence, he’s still there.  No, you can’t hear his voice in the magnificent harmonies, but you can feel his heart.

Eric Brace and Thomm Jutz have many different musical endeavors. Eric has the great band Last Train Home and Thomm is an award-winning, Grammy nominated bluegrass music writer and picker, almost to the point where they will put a “national treasure sign” on his battered Fedora.

Eric -- whose voice and songs, themselves, have matured -- startles and cajoles.  A comparison to Gordon Lightfoot is warranted, but I’m not sure it does Eric’s booming vocals justice.

Thomm’s matured. He’s not much like his hero, Bobby Bare, but his soft, pure vocals and sure guitar are reminiscent of “Fire and Rain”- era Sweet Baby James.  Like James Taylor, his pure tales have teardrops in them, even if the subject evokes smiles. Or perhaps a comparison to John Denver, a too-often-disregarded poet of fire and life and sweet home, is warranted.

They also are really nice guys who stood by their friend during his illness, decline and death and who kept him in mind as they carried the torch forward.

I still will listen to Peter’s Opening Day solo masterpiece, if I’m able.

 But Peter’s participation in “his” group’s musical progress will, by tragic necessity, lessen.  Brace-Cooper-Jutz will forever be just Brace and Jutz, B-J.

 Ghosts don’t make for good sidemen.

But there is hope, depending on your beliefs. For example, I speak with my old editor, Durr, regularly, even though he died alone and lonely long ago.

Spirits -- at least by my reckoning as I sit here with emotions dancing on my sleeves -- live forever, kept alive in the souls of those who loved the deceased: guys like Eric and Thomm, who are loyal to the trio in its latest two-voiced incarnation.   With Simple Motion.

 

     

Best friend, office assistant, warm encourager's death blackens 72nd birthday ... Even though our chair feels empty, Champ's forever there for me

 “You are my best friend,” I said, fighting to keep my voice from shattering as my writing partner looked at me, a moment before his heart stopped.

It was about 12:30 a.m. on November 18, 2023 … a half-hour into my 72^nd birthday, one that will never be remembered for candles and cake but rather always carry heartache and hints of hurt … until my own journey into the blackness into which my best friend would embark.

“You’ve always been a good boy,” I said, stroking Champ’s head. “Beautiful boy. You’ve been my best friend for a long time now.”

Even though blindness had accompanied his downward spiral in recent months, accelerating as autumn chill had settled in outside the French door where he would let slanting sun warm his frail body, the light disappeared from his eyes quickly as his heart stopped on what will forever be my most somber birthday.

My wife -- who never minded that I referred to my office assistant as “my best friend” every night before he settled down on my chest … or simply when he vaulted into my lap here in my office, as I began my daily quest for words to string together -- stroked his back and told him “We love you, Champ. You’re a good boy.’’ If she was trying to hold it together for my sake, she failed. “You’re such a good boy, Champ.”

Champ had always sought out Suzanne when he needed comforting, whether in a thunderstorm, when neighborhood scalawags celebrated July 4 or the New Year with bottle rockets or when workmen cursed and slung hammers against nails during various renovation projects.  Champ had lived through many of those in our home, a 1956-model brick rancher in Nashville’s Crieve Hall neighborhood.  Other than his annual physical or the occasional visit to the heart specialist to monitor an eventually mortal defect, he’d never been anywhere else.

In the hours before his death, he laid, gasping, on Suzanne’s outstretched legs and lap. He would try to purr. But then he’d cry, a soft, cat whimper. It was time, we knew. All three of us. We wanted that journey to begin and end at home. But that bad heart, his long-ago forecast fatal flaw, struggled to keep him going, faintly, in fits and stops, as fluids filled his lungs. He was struggling, even as he spread his love.  

Champ had been with us almost 12 years, after I picked him out of a Nashville Humane Society cage.

Everyone else in the cat room that winter’s day was playing with and adopting kittens.  It was the full-grown fellow, at least 2 years old, that I pulled from his cage.  He was happy about that. Me, too. I had called the Humane Society to see if any of their population already had been declawed. I didn’t want to do that to a cat, but if the deed had been done, I wanted him in my house rather than with someone else, who might let him wander, defenseless, as so many cats do. Too many coyotes and vermin around the woods behind my home.

“We’ve got one older cat here who’s been declawed,” I was told. “His name’s Mike.”

I asked for them to put a “hold” sign on his cage while we trekked the 20 minutes from what was to become Champ’s lifelong domain.

On that long-ago December 29, my daughter Emily, and my son, Joe, sat with Suzanne in the glass room where you “try out” cats. They’d all been looking at kittens, while they waited for me. Their eyes sparkled when I entered the room with the tabby in my arms’ crotches.

“This is the one I was telling you about. His name’s Mike, but that’s no name for a cat,” I said, handing the handsome eight-pounder to Suzanne.

The beautiful cat began campaigning for adoption, wandering around the little room, spreading purrs and rubbing against legs. He didn’t know the decision had been made as soon as I made that phone call, less than a half-hour before I lifted him from the cage and he purred, contentedly.

It was the birthday of my late mother, a cat-and-dog lover named Dorothy Champ Ghianni. Suzanne suggested we call him “Champ.”

It fit. I didn’t know at the time that he would become my office assistant as I wrote my yarns, mostly melancholy ones. My name’s Timothy Champ Ghianni. Jocko, or maybe it was Nardholm or Carpy… maybe even Uncle Moose … dubbed me “Champo” in college. Those from Hanson House who survive continue to call me Champo.  It’s been a life full of nicknames. There remain a few who call me “Flapjacks,” a name I earned during caffeine and nicotine-fueled newspaper deadlines, back in my favorite professional days. That’s another story. There’s a book about those days if you are interested.

When we got the former Mike to our house almost 12 years ago, Champ immediately strutted, calmly through his home, the place where he’d reign. He found the litterbox in the utility room and his food and water dishes at the kitchen’s edge.  

He was sweet and happy, immediately.  Suzanne took him to the vet in the next day or so, and the doc was concerned. He sent Suzanne and Champ to the specialist who detected the major flaw in the cat’s heart. “He’ll only live six more years, at the most. If he’s lucky.”

We were the lucky ones, as he spread love and devotion in our house for 12 more years.   

Quickly, Champ learned how to chase the melancholy from my soul – admittedly it sometimes ends up in my dispatches as I continue a life of chasing away the black dogs of depression – just by his presence.

My newspaper life ended in 2007.  That’s another story, and it can also be found in that book I referenced earlier.  It’s a story about personal ethics versus corporate tyranny. And it doesn’t have a happy ending. The scars exist still, and Champ, when he joined us, helped me cope with that still, long-lingering pain.

That’s all beside the point of this little tale, other than to note that on December 29, 2011, when Champ first moved into what became his house, the beautiful cat learned that a great place to spend the days was in my lap as I sat before my computer. Soothing any sourness in my soul as I composed news and feature pieces, class lessons, blogs and authored five books.

His calming attitude worked well, as I typed my way through a jumbled career that included freelance work (sometimes for free if I thought it might help my friends in music or the arts…. My heart and personal loyalty long has outpaced any push for riches, which is fortunate.)

 I also wrote for a major news service for a decade, a job I lost in the heart of COVID and when Reuters began trimming its part-time freelance staffers.  An every-other-week, slice-of-life-and-news, people-focused column I had written for a decade for Nashville Ledger similarly died of COVID cutbacks. Champ also sat on my lap as I worked hard to prepare writing and stylebook lessons and quizzes for my journalism labs at a local university.  When all those long-running jobs died at about the same time, ending consistent income, Champ sat in my lap and purred. Sudden loss of even minimal income wasn’t important to him. Or to me, thanks to Champ. 

Life cannot be bad when you’ve got a cat who loves you unconditionally in your lap and a great family around you.

Champ was with me from about 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, seven-days-a-week while I wrote my latest book, Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes.   He was there when I called friends like Duane Eddy, Kris Kristofferson or my dear pal Bobby Bare to talk about what I was writing.

He was with me when my best human Nashville friend, Peter Cooper, who was editing the book for me and who wrote the foreword, spoke to me about what I’d written during that year of typing and remembering. “Change nothing,” he’d say as he concluded each chapter, suggesting only minor grammatical or punctuation changes. “It’s beautiful. It’s written only as you could write it, Timmay.” (That was another nickname I earned, one used only by Peter. I also had been dubbed “The Dirt Man” or simply “Dirt” by my friend, my long-ago Tennessean entertainment staff gossip columnist Brad Schmitt, who continues at the paper, where he provides good-news and tasty filet/buttered biscuits tales…. Back in high school a bloodthirsty football coach dubbed me “Brahma Bull,” but that tale is long, painful and is in another of my books. My head still hurts, though.)

In 2019, when my Dad succumbed to his World War II-age and corresponding maladies, I would spend quiet time, mourning, with Champ on my lap. Dad used to watch Champ when we went on our seldom vacations, and I think Champ likely knew his “Grandpa” was gone.

Champ climbed in my lap each day last December when I’d get back from the hospital where Peter Cooper lay dying after damaging his brain in a hard fall a year ago Friday, December 1. He died five days later, and I miss him and our almost-daily phone conversations. 

My office assistant’s soft purring helped me survive those blackest days.  I cried, while Champ nudged his face against my own, calming if not fully chasing away the tears of heartbreak over a beloved friend’s too-young exit. Champ’s purr and his gentle head nudges were his way of saying “I love you. Everything’s OK.”

 I wish Champ’d been able to calm me the other night, early on my 72^nd birthday, as I wiped the tears and petted his still body.

“He’s still beautiful,” Suzanne said, as she battled her own heartache. Her lap of solace for Champ would forever be empty now.

A major reason for our own love story, dating back into the 1980s, was Suzanne’s love of animals matched my own. To many, pets are for entertainment, accompanists to neighborhood struts. And that’s fine. As long as they are loved.

To others of us, they really are family members. There is incredible weight in this attitude, as we know they will only be with us an abbreviated amount of time.

Of course, Suzanne really is my best-best friend, she is a former lifelong journalist who loves animals. Fact is, our only real difference is that she turns to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John; while I find my solace in John, Paul, George and Ringo.

My mother -- or maybe it was James Thurber, James Herriot or cat-lovers Ernest Hemingway or John Lennon -- said long ago that the greatest gift pets give us is they prepare us for death. If we can say goodbye and not totally break when a pet dies, then perhaps we’ll be able to handle the deaths of parents, grandparents, best friends, work colleagues and Beatles.

True enough. But then, what prepares us for the death of our pets? One who is a best friend? I know the writing rules call for pets to be “its” and “thats” and only humans dubbed “whos,” but that’s heartless and complete bull shit.

Every year, near but never on my birthday, I write a column or a blog. I write it for me, soothing or cleansing my brain... It’s sort of a State of the Union, or a State of Old Timothy Address, a rundown of my thoughts. Generally melancholy, as I am, I run through what I’m thinking, what I’ve accomplished and how I’ve failed in the previous year … and then reflect back on the now 72 years since I was born in Saint Joseph Hospital, a dandy Catholic joint, in Pontiac, Michigan.

I often don’t publish it. It’s just for me, a way of busting through the cobwebs of death, disappointment and defeat that have been spun during the previous year/years. Oh, I do celebrate the triumphs, too, like the success of getting a major book publisher to take on my recent book about the Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes I had befriended.

I never published last year’s for example. It began with a litany of bad things that had accompanied my year and the good things, like my grandson (I now have a granddaughter, as well), my children’s successes and my spiritual bond with Peter. Before I could post it, Peter fell, hit his head and died. I rewrote that year-in-the-rearview meanderings to reflect that loss – but I never published that 2022 State of Timothy Address. Too damn sad. I did write and post a separate piece about Peter, as I thought it might help the many others who mourned him.  And writing always has been my own salvation.

Last I looked, the 2022 State of Timothy Address was about 15,000 words, as long as a novella. Perhaps if I ever do a collected works, weird scenes inside the goldmine that is Champo/Flapjacks/Timmay/the Dirt Man and Brahma Bull, I’ll include it. I’ll give you a hint: Nobody wins.

I read through that unpublished 71^st birthday declaration again as I was thinking about Champ’s death on my 72^nd birthday. There are several mentions in that one of that wonderful cat and how he helped me cope.

For example, near the end, I say:

Now, I am fortunate. I have a nice, little house in a prime Nashville neighborhood. I have been married 30-plus years to my best friend. And I have two kids and a grandson.  

And a cat, who helps me write this stuff. 

Again, that was just over a year ago, on my 71^st birthday.

That cat isn’t around to help me on this one. He died and there was no cake. Just tears.

One thing Champ had to endure over the years was my love of music. For years now, I’ve been pedaling my recumbent stationary bike daily for miles to nowhere in my basement. That bike sits right next to my office door.

Sometime, usually in the mid-afternoon, I put on my favorite music – The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Tom Petty, The Traveling Wilburys, Bare, Kristofferson, Dylan, Cooper, Brace, Jutz, Byrd and death-era Cash.

At least 60 percent of the time, it’s The Beatles, as a group or separately.

And I begin the daily toil designed to keep my own heart healthy. I pump ‘til I sweat, climb off to arrive where I began.

Champ, who always claimed my office chair as his own as soon as I ducked out from beneath him, would just sit in the chair – he frequently spent his nights there in recent weeks, I guess because it was comfortable, smelled like me and he could find it in the darkness that had become his worldview.

He’d watch through the office door as I pedaled. Or at least look toward the sound.

Last week, in the days toward his decline, Champ heard an awful lot of Beatles. For some reason, I’ve been exploring the outtakes from John Lennon’s Imagine album package of a few years back, seeking answers or just smiles. Champ always seemed to like John’s voice.  I’m sure he was particularly fond of John’s description of life’s peasants in “Working Class Hero.”

 If I was playing The Stones, for example, he might get down and wander upstairs and jump in Suzanne’s lap to avoid the Crossfire Hurricane.  Jumpin’ Jack Flash may be a gas, gas, gas; but it’s difficult on feline ears.

Lennon, whose voice soothes me as well as provides heartache because of the fact he died more than 40 years ago when he could still be making music, seemed to be a favorite of Champ’s.

Course I don’t know that. I just know Champ sat quietly in my office chair as John sang by himself or with his Scouse cronies on my old stereo.

I’m not sure what was the last song my beloved office assistant heard. It could have been “Imagine,” “Crippled Inside” or a long piano solo from those Imagine outtakes, that to me are better than the finished album.

Thinking back to that day, as I write this, though, I’ll wager it likely was a “new” song – The Beatles’ hit record “Now and Then” – that I’ve been playing several times a day that Champ last heard.     

It’s John Lennon’s voice from the grave, an old cassette demo that was brought back to life by Paul McCartney, Ringo and Giles Martin.  A dead George Harrison plays guitar and harmonizes.

Some say, and I am among them, that the cassette left behind by John was a sort of love letter to his life’s best friend, his truest companion on the road through life, Paul. The two boys from middle-class Liverpool changed the world, with the help of a couple other Scousers. Some are dead and some are living.

Truly, the last music my beloved Champ likely heard included John’s purified voice singing: “Now and then, I miss you.”

It’s very true that Champ helped me write stuff all of these years.  Often, I wrote through too many disappointments, deaths and betrayals. Champ calmed me with his purr or head nudge, triggering emotional rescue. Then, and I’m thankful, my words would smile.

Accomplishments, like having a book published that was praised by Kris, Peter, Bare and more, also were put into perspective by his steady support and encouragement. Keith Richards got a copy of the book in trade for loaning me a couple of photos published inside, and I hope, even though it’s not only rock ‘n’ roll, that he liked it.

Sitting here in Champ’s office chair, thinking of the huge hole in my heart and the shock-induced nausea and diarrhea as his death exacted a physical toll on Champ’s favorite writer and best friend, he’s still here with me in spirit.

My lap is empty, and it’s colder down in the basement without Champ.

I keep looking at the chair when I come down to the office.

Champ: Now and then, I want you to be there for me.

Only in memories and warmth in my soul.