Pops goes to see pretty witches and blood drawn while Jerry eats crackers; I play with my cane and enjoy cucumber water in final hours before summer blasts in & Chuckles gets hot shower

 

This is a 1983 picture of "Pops" or "Flapjacks," really, during his youth when he went to Hopkinsville and befriended The Lone Ranger. This has nothing to do with Jerry, aka "Chuckles", since he didn't go. My late brother Eric, late pal Scott "Badger" Shelton and my News Brothers co-founder Rob "Death" Dollar all went. Now "Pops" is a sort of nursing home Lone Ranger for his pal. Eric took this photo and also made me the cane I use to walk today. I miss Badger and Eric. And I also really miss Old Jerry.  Well, I still haven't gotten over the fact my brother, Eric, is dead, so I try to work him into my memories and adventures. He was a nice guy, who loved The News Brothers. 

“Pops” was back at the Shell station, and the pretty, young black woman was worried again as I was stocking up for my visit to see my longest-tenured newspaperman pal, whether he’d remember my visit or not.

Well, he’s no longer a newspaperman. Nor am I. Jerry Manley -- aka "Chuckles News Brother" (I am "Flapjacks," as you know) and I were stripped of that once-prestigious rank years ago. Age was the reason. Also, veteran newspapermen and women were sacrificed to make way for content creators, ideally those who also were willing backstabbers.

Anyway, I smiled across the counter to the kind, young woman at the gas station.

“You got this, Pops?” she asked  – I couldn’t see her nametag because I didn’t want to stare at her feminine accoutrements (I do not want to be a “dirty old Pops”), but I’ll simply ask her name next time. Quinccy, the manager, must be taking one of his four weeks of vacation. He got in trouble last year for not taking it. (“I like it here, being around the people,” he explained last December when I ragged him about not taking his earned days off. Then I remembered, I never took all mine off either, back when I loved my work. Before desperadoes like me and Jerry were kicked in the nuts and tossed to the curb. I don’t know where they kicked the newspaperwomen, but I’m sure it ached.)

“Yeah, I have it OK,” I told the lovely young woman as I picked up the plastic bag with its two packages of peanut butter crackers (per Jerry’s request, I opted out of the cheese crackers this week) and the last Diet SunDrop in the station’s wall-size cooler.

I paid her for the treats as well as $8 for gas – I have a 40-year-old Saab and try to keep the tank topped off, especially in hot weather, when vapor locks can screw up the fuel injectors – and turned to get to the door. A line of four Hispanic lawnmower fellers and a country club-looking white guy in an alligator shirt were waiting for me to get my limping ass out of the way.

Speaking of which, the young woman’s nicely proportioned hindquarters suddenly were in front of me, as she ran to hold open the door.

I may not always feel old, but I certainly look the part. It’s embarrassing, but when nice-looking young women like to tend to my needs, I’ve never sternly objected, ever, in my life.  I hope they help other old people, those who really can’t carry a plastic bag 50 feet.

I did my best not to brush against her as I stepped through the door and out to the pumps where the old Saab, as is per custom, was waiting at Pump No. 8. I’m a mysteriously superstitious fellow, and I always use the same gas pump. Although last week, a big box truck toting potato chips was in my way. So, I had to use Pump No. 6. I haven’t felt right about it ever since.

Outside the facility where Jerry likely is the youngest Memory Care Ward resident – the woman who walks the halls, complaining about the knuckleheads and other folks who live here, may be younger – two women in white summer dresses are leaning back in their white wicker chairs, sipping from glasses of water with cucumber slices.

On this portico, the nursing home has a huge pickle jar – the two-gallon size you see on a bar, generally filled with giant dills with slime covering the top of the brine. This one was sparkling clean, filled with ice, water and slices of cucumber. These women are enjoying it so much, I stop and grab a paper cup full. Getting gas on a 100-degree day makes an old, crippled man thirsty for cucumber water.

And crippled is what I am. I finally admit it. I am using my gnarled old cane -- the one my dead brother made from a lemon bush or something  like that when he was still alive --  most of the time I’m in public.

It makes it easier to walk and keep my top half from bending over and watching the concrete. A doctor wants to cut me open and fix my back soon. I’ll meet with him next week. Since my brother recently went into that same hospital for dehydration and came out as a corpse a month later, I’m not sure I want to get surgery there.  I’d rather not be dead, though, I suppose it would be nice to walk again without pain or the cane. As I tussle with it, I keep remembering the truth Eric taught me: Dehydration is not as bad as death. It scares me.

I lumber – literally, since the big stick with the Paul McCartney quote burned into it is a helluva thick piece of wood – through the front part of the nursing home, where “normal” people live, exchanging one-liners and dirty limericks starting with lines like “There once was a girl with a truck….” Or “There was an old maid named Venus ….”

These people on this day are having a discussion with the social worker about the importance of sex in a marriage and how attitudes toward sex have changed during the last century.

“I waited until I was 17, when I got married,” said one woman. “I got married because of the war (WWII? Korea? Even Vietnam?).  I didn’t see him for two years after we married.

“He was in the Navy, and he told me he didn’t have a girl in every port, that he was all mine.”

  “Young  people now just want it too soon. They need to wait until they find the right person,” added another older woman.

There was a lot of giggling among this group of probably 20, all-women, who are talking about their desires.  “Man, if I was just 40 years older,” I thought. Not really, but I figured I’d throw that in.

Vikki, the dietician in the “Memory Care Ward – attached by double security doors to the “normal” rest home – lets me enter the section where my friend, Jerry, will live until he dies, or so he tells me.

“Let me see first if he’s in here,” she says, ducking into the party room.

The folks gathered there, even my pal Milford/Bob and the guy with the Vanderbilt sweatshirt, are loudly singing some hymn that includes God, eternal joy, death and weeping willows. I don’t recognize it – I actually am pretty aware of classic hymns – but I am impressed by the joy and bluster.

Vikki steps away from good Rocky’s revival, or whatever is going on, and tells me “Jerry must be in his room.’’

When I find him, he is watching some sort of fantasy/horror film starring three lovely young women – “They’re all witches,” Jerry says, I think defining the women on screen, but perhaps speaking of the entire gender.  Actually, he likes women. Married a couple of them and even has a daughter, who, he says has not visited him in a long time.

“I didn’t even know last Sunday was Father’s Day,” he says, when I ask him if he heard from his kids (His daughter lives in Nashville, his son in the Houston, Texas, area).

Course, even if they had been here, he wouldn’t remember. Last week there were several greeting cards, most unsigned, on Jerry’s bureau.  One of the signed ones is all that remains, and it is addressed to “Stan” – a name unclaimed by both living residents in this room.

I glance at it to see if it applies to either Jerry or Bob. Nope. It’s a note written to Stan, and “Uncle Milt is out of the hospital and being taken care of by Aunt Barb.”

I sit down to watch the really stupid witch movie, letting Jerry enjoy.  

I do butt in to ask if anyone has visited him lately – other than his kids, who he maintains have not.

“No. You’re the last one I’ve seen. Only one who comes.  I think John Staed came by once, but that was a long time ago."

In recent weeks, Jerry has maintained that John has dropped by recently and maybe often. On this day, John’s single visit was a ways in the past, in Jerry’s mind. And since John – who really is a nice guy and was one of the less-famous News Brothers, sort of like Zeppo was to our Groucho, Chico and Harpo pack of (should-be) committed brothers – has never been here, his ghost visits have been the source of joy.

“I don’t remember. Maybe he comes by when he visits his sister,” who lives in Brentwood and like John tries to stay away from a place like this. I’ve visited a lot of nursing homes in my life – I used to write about the residents – and the one thing they have in common is that, while sparkling clean, they all smell like rotting leaves. Or flesh, I suppose.

While Jerry watches the witches cast a spell on him on TV, dietician Vikki – a really large and warm-hearted woman – comes into the room. She looks at the empty cracker wrappers and the almost-empty bottle of Diet SunDrop. She shakes her head at me for my contraband rules violation, but she smiles.

“I’m just glad Jerry has someone visiting him,” she says, slicing the end of his “fuck you” finger and taking a blood sample.

“Sugar’s a little high today. I’ll get you before lunch,” she says.

Before leaving the room, she reminds Jerry it is shower day.

“It’s always too cold,” he says.

“He always says the water is too cold, and so is the room after,” Vikki says, turning the room thermostat up to 84, “so it will be good and warm in here after lunch when you take your shower.”

Since I am susceptible to heat and it’s 100 or so outside, I almost pass out when the hot air starts roaring into the room.

“I need to go, now, Jerry,” I say.  “You make sure you let Vikki give you a shower this afternoon.”

Vikki tells him lunch is being served, so we begin walking, arm-over-shoulder down to the dining hall/party room.

Vikki leads us first into her office, where she gives him a half-dozen pills, some cranberry juice and a pair of insulin shots in his gut.

I walk Jerry the rest of the way to the lunchroom.

“Man, you should have been here back around 10:30 or so, they were singing hymns in here. Something about God and willow trees, or some such,” I joke my friend.

“I really don’t care that much about religion,’’ he said. “But I do like some of those songs.”

The stunning nurse with dreadlocks – I don’t know her name – lets me out the double-locked doors, while Jerry’s “please don’t go” eyes follow me.

“I’ll be back in a few days,” I say, after turning my head to see my friend watching my departure.  “Hey, it turns into summer at 3:50 this afternoon.”

“I didn’t know they actually had a time for it to start,” Jerry answers, seeming confused

Vikki grabs his left arm and leads him into the lunchroom, where songs about God and willows presided a while before.

The “normal” old people are eating some sort of meat and potatoes concoction when I pass them by.  Toothless gumming sounds replace all of the talk about sexual healing I’d heard awhile before.

Out on the porch, old Pops grabs one more paper cup of iced, cucumber water, and I hit the road.

    

     

Adria Petty charms an old, limping journalist who thinks her dead father, Tom, was and remains America's best-ever rock band-leader

Tom Petty and his daughter, Adria, who helps handle his estate and who I found charming.

After I told the young woman in the black, wide-brimmed hat how much I loved her father, her eyes moistened.

“Thank you for saying that,” said Adria Petty, her voice thickening a bit.

“You wreck me, baby,” I said in my head (I hope), as I held both her hands and – at the same time -- tried to fight away my own tears when talking about her father’s death.  

We spoke freely and openly, like old friends. I’m sure nothing I said was unusual to the kind and lovely managing partner of Petty Legacy, which oversees, as is obvious in the title, the continuing celebration of the life of the guy I contend was America’s top rock ‘n’ roll bandleader, musical poet and everyman.

Adria’s father, Tom Petty, died October 2, 2017, one of the heartbreaking events in rock music and on my life’s time chart.

I’ve long thought of Tom as being the greatest American rock star, and his death was something of a bleak surprise.

He died of an accidental overdose of opioids, which he had used as a way of dealing with serious ailments, including emphysema, knee problems and, especially, a fractured hip. 

If you are brave enough to watch his final performance, “American Girl,” which followed “You Wreck Me” as his encores of The Heartbreakers’ 40^th anniversary tour-ending show at the Hollywood Bowl on September 25, 2017, you will actually see the pain in his movement, his limping off the stage.

Just a week later, on the day he died, he had learned the fractured hip – which he’d traveled with for six months of shows – had become a full-on break, which the family surmised back then was the thing that sparked the deadly overdose.

America's best rock band-leader takes his final bow after ending his career with "American Girl." 

Enough about his death.  The fantastic body of work that he did as the leader of the Heartbreakers as well as his “solo” stuff and his role as chief henchman of The Traveling Wilburys is something I celebrate every day.

Tom is being saluted in “Petty Country: A Country Music Celebration of Tom Petty,” an album that played in the background during a release celebration Thursday night at The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

I don’t often get invited to events at the Hall of Fame. I used to, but I think I fell off the email list when my friend, protégé, pal and Hall of Fame hot-shot and most-human executive Peter Cooper died about a year and a half ago.  I guess he was the one who kept me on the list, although age and health concerns kept me away most of the time.

Fortunately, I remain on the mailing list for Tom Petty Estate and Big Machine Records, or I would have missed this one, too.

There was no way – not even the fact I need a cane to get around most of the time – that I was going to miss this event, which also included a peek at the new Tom Petty exhibit, a relatively tiny addition to the museum’s sprawling Western Edge exhibit.

I have to say this about that display: My friend, Peter, and I together “studied” Tom’s music, even writing – in Peter’s final weeks – some rather unprintable but fun examples of Tom and cohort Mike Campbell’s poetry and rhythm.  I believe firmly that the display would have been better if Peter had been kind enough to stick around and oversee.  But that’s a sort of Petty grudge; mainly because I miss my friend and the regular phone calls that we exchanged right up until the day that he suffered his fatal fall. Simply put, I miss my friend and I appreciate his expertise.  Whoever put this display together did a good job, so I’ll leave it at that. But I sure miss Peter.

But I made a new friend, CMHOF&M soundman Martin Frey, who took care of the music and the PA duties at the Thursday reception on the sixth floor of the museum.  I needed a place to sit down, as it was a standup cocktail-and-nibbles deal, and my back doesn’t handle those well.

So, a museum staffer got me a chair, which I put back by the wall near where Martin – former road sound man for Yes, Alan Parsons, Lonestar and others – monitored the music and then the microphones when the speeches began. He also is a kind gentleman, who insisted that I regard him as my friend (an honor), and he told me all kinds of road stories while also listening to my own tales of woe and frustration, a short essay on my career.

All of this is just background, though.    

My reason for going to the event was to be a part of the “nod” to Tom’s mammoth influence on American music.

Since there weren’t a lot of people there – I saw no recognizable CMHOF&M execs – I was especially proud to be a part of the crowd.

But my mission of expressing love for the man who was the very best that American music had to offer became even more personal, as I walked up to the charming woman in the black, wide-brimmed hat her father would have loved to wear.

“I love your Dad,” I told her again. “And that’s ‘love’ not loved. He’s gone, but his music lives on.”

I went on to say that the day Tom died, there was all kind of bleak news on our planet.  Everyone was reeling after a gunman took out a half-hundred spectators at a country concert in Las Vegas. An unbelievable horror, which has sparked absolutely no real change in gun-control laws in our country.

Suicide bombers in Damascus on that same day eliminated 15 innocent people.

A crazed knife-wielding terrorist stabbed two women to death at a Marseilles, France, train station.

All of those things affected me.

Tom’s death raised a few tears, though. In fact, for a few hours, it literally wrecked me. 

“I listen to your Dad’s music every day,” I told her, adding that the only other folks on that “I play daily” list are The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.

“You can’t get much better than that,” she told me.

But it was my proclamation that her Dad was the best band-leader America has ever offered that seemed to touch her most.

“Most people don’t give him credit for his stagecraft, so I really want to thank you for that,” she said.

“Some people disagree with me, say ‘What about Bruce?’ …. But I just shake them off. I love Bruce and his shows, but there is only one Tom Petty,” I added.

“And I love the guy.”

She held hard to my hands, then excused herself. “I need to go find my daughter. She’s somewhere around here.”

Adria still was looking for Tom Petty’s granddaughter as I made my way to the elevator.

Two American girls.

Oh, yeah. All right ….

   

    

  

Pops watches stupid tornado movie, sings Lennon, recalls Bill Wyman, sees smokin' old woman; Laughter, snacks for Jerry, no hungry monster

 "Nobody loves you when you’re down and out ….”

That John Lennon song was in my occasionally melancholy brain as I stopped in at my favorite Shell gas station to get gas and regular supplies for smuggling into the Memory Care Ward where my lifelong newsroom crony Jerry Manley sits and stares at a movie about a tornado.

“I don’t know if this is a weird movie or a true story,” he says to me, after I move his Rolling With The Stones book – by that band’s retired bassist Bill Wyman – so I can sit in the recliner next to his bed. (Wyman, by the way, really enjoyed a conversation we had 25-some years ago back when Davis-Kidd Booksellers existed. But that’s beside the point of this tale. I went to see Wyman with my friend and employee Peter Cooper, who is dead. He bought me a copy of that book for Bill to sign, which he did while joking around with me.)

Rob Dollar took this shot of me lecturing Bill Wyman at a bookstore a quarter-century ago. For younger readers, Wyman was a member of The REAL Rolling Stones. I skipped the offer of lunch with Wyman because my Aunt Rita needed to be picked up from the airport and make some meatballs for dinner.

Milford Brown, aka “Bob,” is in the chair next to me in the room he shares with Jerry. He also stares at the silliness on TV while snoozing and mocking the special effects. Nah, that was me. Except for the snoozing part.

It piques my interest that there are about a half-dozen greeting cards on Jerry’s bureau. “I don’t know who they came from or anything,” Jerry says, voicing surprise when I point them out.

“Maybe they are for Father’s Day,” I offer.  “One of them may be from your daughter, another from your son.”

I felt bad that I raised his expectations, though. I inspect the cards and find that four of them are blank and unsigned. Two of them are to someone named “Stan.”

“Does Bob go by ‘Stan’ sometimes?” I ask Jerry.

“No, I think his name is Milford or something like that. A horseman.”

So. the cards are not for anyone who lives in this room. Or perhaps they were for someone who did live here and, well, already checked out, making room for Jerry.

Bob puts on his LCP cap – I have no idea what the initials mean – and he moves over to the bureau, where he examines his faded Vols cap. His new bedspread is a UT end-zone checkerboard done in yarn and probably with either love or guilt as motivation. 

He looks at the Vols cap, holds it in both hands, and decides to leave it there, next to the blank cards and the two for Stan, and he wanders from the room.  He returns 15 minutes later, shuffles to the bathroom, turns on the light and leaves it on, while not using the facilities. He stops again to ponder the faded Vols cap before departing.

Jerry gets up and uses the facilities before he turns the light out.

My pal is actually having a good day, as far as I can tell, as he chain-eats the six peanut butter crackers and the six cheese crackers I brought, washing them down with his Diet SunDrop, all the while watching the door for an angry dietician.  I actually think I should just bring this stuff in a bag rather than sneaking them into the nursing facility in my cargo shorts.

They surely know what I’ve been doing every week, sometimes more frequently, since early December, when Jerry was brought here by family. Nobody’s shot me yet for the contraband smuggling. They always thank me for visiting Jerry.

Apparently. there are few visitors for any of the people who live here, which is why, I assume, most of the residents and nurses and guards armed with AK’s, black German shepherds next to them -- greet me with such good cheer. Kidding about the guns, guards and dogs.

The woman who lets me in and out of the double-locked facility is a strikingly beautiful woman with her dreadlocks, on this day, piled atop her head. I tell her how lovely she is, and I’m relieved that she smiles, glances slowly downward at me and thanks me. Never know these days if you are supposed to compliment people on their beauty. Could get a guy in trouble.

But she is pretty, my favorite sight, other than Jerry, Bob and the guy who usually wears a Vanderbilt sweatshirt when I quietly move through the carpeted hallways where these people will likely take their final breaths and steps.

“How long you been in here?” I hear a man ask a woman out in the “normal” nursing home section, where they are watching the tornado movie, too.

“Oh, about eight months,” she says, pulling her peach shawl tighter to rescue her from the chill of the 78-degrees thermostat.

“I’ve been here 80 years,” says the man. I don’t know if it’s a joke or if he’s confused. Eighty years ago, the land where this nursing home stands was a farm field. A massive stone mansion filled the middle of the acreage that was set off by one of those Civil War-era stacked stone walls. I always dreamt of buying that house, but it fell 20 years ago to progress. The nursing home, a physical therapy facility and a Neptune Society office fill that space.

That Neptune Society apparently is for people who have no religious beliefs but who want to be cremated, their ashes turned into Snickers bars or something unlike that.  I don’t know why this stuff keeps popping up. Crazy from the heat, as David Lee Roth titled his first non-Van Halen recording back in the early to mid-1980s.  “I’m just a gigolo,” he sang. “I ain’t got nobody….Nobody who cares for me.... I'm so sad and lonely, sad and lonely ….”

Forty years ago or so, I was looking for a different kind of music than Jerry and I normally listened to, so I bought all of Van Halen’s albums for us to listen to while we drank 16-ounce Natural Lights and smoked in my Clarksville basement. “Hot for Teacher.” “Panama.” “Jump….”  Yeah, go ahead and imagine me and my pal turning up the stereo at 3 a.m. and singing along. You gotta roll roll roll with the punches.

Another woman, with a hat and a flowered dress, is sitting outside the nursing home in a white, wicker chair. She smokes cigarettes.  I’m sure that’s not allowed here, but what are you supposed to do? Kill her? Nah, let her suck in those noxiously enticing strands of smoke. I nodded at her, wishing, briefly, that I’d not quit smoking 24 years ago. Hell, she smokes and she must be 90. I’m 72 and feel like shit.

My journey to the nursing home got off on a weird start when I made my normal stop at the Shell. After I paid for the crackers, drink and to top off my gas tank, the clerk says: “Anything else today, Pops?”

She’s not insulting in tone. As I limp around, I must remind her of her grandfather. Her whiter grandfather. Her Pops.

“Pops, you need any help getting this stuff out to your car?” she asks, when she pushes my bag of nursing home staples and shakes her ample frame and accessories to a Beyonce song blasting from the intercom.

“Nah, I can make it today,” I say, smiling at her.

“You be real careful, Pops,” she says.

My grandchildren do call me “Pops” – at least the ones who can talk. I imagine the clerk’s grandfather is my age.

I straighten up, forcing myself not to bend over like an old man as I walk out to my car. I look back and see she is watching me, likely worried that I’ll fall down, dead, on the concrete surface near the pumps. Yeah, go ahead and jump. Pops.

I flash her a smile and continue on my journey to see Jerry.

I’ve kinda backed into this chronicle this week.

“This is a movie, not a news show,” I tell Jerry as the tornado whips through the local high school and leaves an amorous young couple hiding in the destroyed “old paper mill.”

We watch the movie for awhile. The pretty girl in the carnage has a badly cut leg. The boy doesn’t know what to do.

“I always hated covering tornadoes,” I tell Jerry, my half-century news colleague.

“Me, too,” he says. “Too much damage. People losing all they’ve got. So many killed. Too sad.”

“I much preferred covering a murder,” I say, and he laughs.

“Me, too. Unlike a tornado, only one person is killed, and he probably deserved it,” he says, allowing just a smidgen of his old newspaperman’s cynicism to sneak out.

I tell him about the John Lennon song that has been in my head all day, and he smiles, as if he remembers the song.

But suddenly, I ask a question, and it sparks an answer that does show there’s someone alive inside his head.

“You remember the pie fight?” I ask, referring to the great old movie “Flapjacks: The Motion Picture” and its climactic police chase, followed by a pie fight.

Actually, and I have lied before about it, the pies were made of frozen pie shells in their tins, filled with shaving cream.

“Aren’t many grownup people who can say they’ve been in a real pie fight,” I say.

He laughs. “I remember Ricky (Moore, sports editor/aka “Dumbo News Brother.) He couldn’t decide who to throw his two pies at, so he just hit himself in the face with both of them,” Jerry says, pantomiming Dumbo’s actions, forever captured on film.

Dumbo Moore ponders whether he should hit himself with two pies. He did.

Flapjacks and Death, who financed the motion picture epic, sort out copyright details in the train yard. For most people, it's a lifelong dream to have a pie fight. Fairy tales come true for News Brothers.

“Making that movie with you, well, it was fun,” says Jerry. “And I remember the gunfight scene, where we killed Harold Lynch.”

In our takeoff on a spaghetti Western fight, me, Jerry, Dumbo and Rob Dollar squared off against Harold -- aka “The Stranger’’ -- in front of Clarksville’s City Hall.

Dressed in full cowboy regalia – he had been a rodeo rider and a daydream believer – he drew first and shot, but he was off target. We gunned him down with our squirt guns, and he collapsed on the cobblestones. As Harold lay dying, I used my powers to resurrect him, giving him a fresh pair of shades and helping him to his feet. Bless you my son. You are healed.

He rode off on a stick pony I’d provided. Every grown man needs to possess a stick pony, by the way. I also dig a moon dog.

This is a picture of Jerry Manley taken the Monday after I was "bought out" from a newspaper where we worked. Jerry was my last boss. Rob shot this in 2007.

This is a freeze frame from "Flapjacks: The Motion Picture." Harold "The Stranger" Lynch was gunned down in the famous spaghetti Western scene. Flap resurrected him from the dead and gave him a stick pony for his escape.  Flap digs a pony.

The fact Jerry remembered all that pleased me. “Mostly all I can remember is who I am,” he says. “And I’m not always sure.”

The fact he couldn’t recall even what he had for breakfast or the last time anyone other than me and John Staed visited troubled me.

Staed, a good guy and long-ago newsroom colleague who played the bit part of “Street” – a worthless drifter with a green Volkswagen Rabbit – in our movie, supposedly visits Jerry every week.

Always for the first time.  “He hadn’t been here before. He lives down in Birmingham. Good to see him. I think he has a sister in the area.”

Indeed, John does have a sister in Brentwood. Just as true is the fact that old Street has never visited Jerry in the nursing home.  But when Jerry describes those ghost visits with John, it always makes him feel better. So, thanks, John.

“Glad he visited. Mostly who I see is you," Jerry says. "I’m glad you keep coming. You don’t have to.”

Except really, I do.

The dietician comes down to the room to get him to go down to the party room for lunch.

“I don’t want you to turn into a monster, because you haven’t had your lunch,” she says to him, while pinching my butt.

“He’s been my friend for 50 years, and he’s never been a monster,” I tell her.

“You wait and see him after he misses a meal.”

She sits him down in the dining hall, where she tests his blood, gives him a fistful of pills and puts a pair of insulin shots in his gut.

“Nobody loves you when you’re down and out,” I sing to myself after the beautiful young woman with dreadlocks lets me through the double-locked doors when Jerry begins his lunch.

“Thanks for coming,” both nurses/dieticians say, as I slip from Memory Care and try to remember my way to the parking lot.

In the “regular” nursing home, it looks like they are having Hamburger Helper and burned toast. But they seem to be enjoying it.

The woman who snuck a smoke an hour-and-a-half before is no longer outside, though aroma clings to the thick air.

I replayed the morning’s adventures as I climbed into my old car.

I look back at the facility where my old friend is whiling away his life while watching stupid movies and “Gunsmoke” reruns.

“Everybody loves you when you’re 6 feet in the ground,” I sing the end of the Lennon song that has been on mental replay all day.

 “C’mon, Pops,” I say. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

 

      

 

 

A tale of loneliness, love, death, missing friends and how 55 years ago, Jocko and Champo (or Champion) roamed the prairies and pubs

Half-century-plus friendship with Jocko included a weekend at the farm. Jim is at left, me in front. In the doorway, partially hidden, is our farm host John "Titzy" Nitz. Leonard "Nardholm" Sandholm is the guy in the doorway with the curly hair. That's Ivan Tos behind me. The other guy must have been a friend, too, but I don't remember his name.  

 There aren’t a lot of pictures of me and my best college friend, football player Jim Mraz, when we were young guys, roaming free, the farm fields, taverns, the parties.

Pretty much impossible, as we never stopped long enough for photos. We were too busy having fun and, of course, studying diligently at Iowa State University. Well, there may be mugshots someplace, but that's another issue.

We’ve been replaying those memories in many phone calls in recent months and years. And the end result is my side aches with laughter. It’s nice to be reminded that life really can be fun, if you give it a try.

We were young, wild, silly and – most important – we were kind to others when we roamed wild, the guys who led others to parched-eye dawns and lived to relish our all-night adventures over free eggs and bacon at all-night diners and truck stops.

And, as I’ve mentioned earlier in my writings, Jim and I were the “cooks” during hog-cutting weekend at the Nitz farm in Cherokee, Iowa. One of our greatest adventures, though we did feel bad for the hogs.

And the world-famous Viking Fest. Someday I’ll write about that, but it really was the best-ever party I’ve been to …. Jim and I were the hosts. We roasted the turkeys and cooked the pheasant stew (Nardholm, who fell to cancer a few years ago, but who I really loved) killed the birds.  All Jim and I had to do was take the bird shot out of the meat and throw it into a steaming pot on Gomez’s stove.  I’ll have to tell you about Gomez some other time.   He was in charge of our dormitory, all eight floors. He reached out to me and Jim, I think, because he thought it was better to keep the troublemakers close.  Gomez was a helluva guy.  His name was/is Ed Norton, like Art Carney on The Honeymooners. But he looked like the patriarch of The Addams Family. (An addendum: Jocko tells me Gomez's last name was Nunnery, as in "get thee to the nunnery," and time and the internet have failed to prove either of us right or  wrong. Regardless, he was Gomez.) 

Such a deep friendship as mine with Jim is more important than ever to me now. Stupid stuff, life etc., got in the way, sporadically, but our friendship never ceased beating in our hearts.

Jim, aka “Jocko,” as I nicknamed him 55 years ago or so, and I both have the afflictions of old men.  Some maladies worse than others. We talk about those, but we know that’s all part of the walk of life.

I really don’t have many friends, living, at least.  Too many of them, like Peter Cooper, have checked out early.  Our phone conversations, several a week for 20 years, were critical to me, and – I think – to him.  His ashes are up at Spring Hill Cemetery, where he is in the same mausoleum wall as our mutual friend, Mac Wiseman, the great flattop guitar player who used to call me regularly from his spread out in L.A. (Lower Antioch, in the southeastern section of Metro Nashville.)

If you read my most-recent book – Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes – you’ll come upon a huge lineup of my friends.  Most are gone, and I miss them.  You should buy the book, though. It’s available at amazon.com and you will relish the anecdotes and quotes and fly-on-the-wall observations.

I cherish folks like Bobby Bare, who is always there when I need a friend. My book traces that friendship for the last 52 years. Fifty-two more would be nice, but kind of unlikely. You don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, as Dylan said. It'd be nice to go back on the same train that brought me here before, but time goes forward. 

My other constant phone calls from the basement office I call home included a few a week with my big brother, Eric, who died a couple of months ago.  I still want to call him so we can share memories only siblings have. He was the only one left who was there from the start of my 72 years.  Some say, I’ll see him again someday. Hope they are right. I believe I’ll see him in my memories, at the very least, as I travel deep into the golden years his body didn't allow him to experience.

He was a big man, with a big laugh, and lot of love.  Nicer than me.

I have other friends I stay in contact with, like Tom “Carpy” Carpenter, a distinguished retired veterinarian who golfs almost every day at the links by his desert home outside Las Vegas and goes to see Brooks & Dunn or Adele at night in the casinos.  He was Jim’s roommate, and I know hanging around with us helped his academic career.  The first time he met me, I was surfing down the Hanson House hallway on an ironing board. Catch a wave, indeed. I truly was sittin' on top of the world.

Politics separates me from another great friend, though we converse on Facebook, and we know we are there for each other.

I have a great friend, also for 50 years or so, who is in a nursing home, fighting dementia. I see him frequently and love him. Vice versa. But they don’t allow phones, so I have to go to the nursing home to relive our memories. Or relive mine and try to revive his.

A lot of other guys don’t have time to return phone calls to an old derelict in his basement, and that’s fine. O-bla-di, o-bla-da, life goes on, bra….

More than a half-century ago, if you really wanted some fun in Ames, Iowa, well, my friend, Jim, and I, were the ones to call. Or tag along with and hope the police or campus security remained blissfully unaware.

The late Tony Durr, a great friend and lazy editor, long ago told me that if you are lucky, you will have had enough true friends in your life to fill the fingers of one hand. He assigned me mine. I assigned his.

Problem is that, if you are lucky, you will outlive most of those fingers.

Jocko, my friend, Jim ... well, he occupies the index finger that makes me laugh, cause trouble, curse, and participate in what we called "rolling" after doing quarters at Tork's.  (You had to be there, and if you were, you remember us. We were the guys in the pink-dyed long john's and bunny ears that you saw on central campus at midnight. My butt hung out slightly, because a girl named "Blondie"- or maybe it was "Red" -- tore off my cotton tail. Jim and I were on our way to study at the library.)

 

 

'Oh, Lucy!' 'Oh, Ricky!" ... Ricardos bring Buffett with me to visit a shorn Jerry, who doesn't have a Pencil Thin Mustache. Relishing when he and Andy Devine were damn nice sidekicks

“I wish I had a pencil-thin mustache, the Boston Blackie kind, a two-toned Ricky Ricardo jacket and an autographed picture of Andy Devine….”

This song was pounded from my brain’s rotting interior when I entered the nursing home where an “I Love Lucy” marathon was playing full-blast on the TVs (all of them) to drown out the drills and sledges of the ongoing “modernization” of the facility where my longest-tenured friend, Jerry Manley, lives in self-enforced isolation.

The residents are always glad to see me when I arrive. I get enough hugs and back-pats from the guys – and sweet, semi-lewd looks from the women – on my visits to make me feel pretty upbeat at first.   Jerry, however, mostly ignores the other dwellers in the Memory Care Ward, perhaps for emotional rescue or self-preservation. No telling when these folks, mostly “old people’’ in their 80s and 90s, will check out, so why become emotionally invested? It’s not a bad point of view, I suppose.  But I’ve become so familiar here, there are many – Jerry included and especially – who I’ll miss when they’re gone. Or I am.

In fact, on every visit to Jerry’s room – at the end of a long hall – I take a deep breath before stepping through the doorway, anxious about the state of the bodies inside.

Jerry was fitfully napping on this day. Roomie Bob, aka “Milford,” a horseman who really likes me and my company, was sleeping like a dead man.  When he finally rolled over to get his Tennessee Vols hat and head out on his morning rounds of the ward I realized, gratefully, that Bob was all right. “I love the dead, before they’re cold; their bluing flesh for me to hold,” as sweet, old Alice Cooper, another random friend, sang as the final track on his 1973 “Billion Dollar Babies,” must-have rock album.

But old Vincent Furnier is going to have to populate my battered -- by space, time, football and random acts of self-abuse -- brain another day. (Perhaps I'll write about the day in 1974 or so that I walked with Alice while he competed in a pro-celebrity golf tournament in Nashville. Other sports writers and journalists stayed close to Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford. I did meet them, but their inebriated mumbling and the suck-up nature of the pack of scribes made me think I'd get a better quotes from Alice. We drank beer and laughed. Welcome to my Nightmare.) 

On this day, my whole visit to see Jerry was conducted to a mental soundtrack of Buffett’s 1974 lament for days of innocence long-past: “Pencil Thin Mustache.”

Lucy and Ricky Ricardo made sure of that when they triggered those lyrics in my head while doing their insipid comedy show on every TV – from the one right by the nursing home entrance into the section where the “normal’’ old people live to the one in the party/dining room behind the double-locked doors to the Memory Care Ward, where I am obviously loved by all these people who are losing their minds.

It even canceled out the John Kay and Steppenwolf music that had occupied my mind after I got gas, cheese and peanut butter crackers and Diet SunDrop at the Shell Station where I normally stop before going to see my old friend, Jerry.

“Living in a nursing home is like being in prison,” says the station manager Quinssy, who knows why I always buy these snacks.  “Worse….

“It’s good that you go see your friend, though. I’m sure mostly people are put in those places and forgotten.  You’re a good man, old friend.” Perhaps it’s bull shit, but I choose to believe it.

The Steppenwolf music was blasting from the open-air sound system of some large Japanese bike that was as close to a real man’s bike as the skinny teenage boy and girl pilot and passenger were to being bikers.  Captain America, Billy and even George Hanson would have been sent into rollicking laughter to see these Brentwood kids on their $50,000 toy.

I figured John Kay – who is a friend of sorts, allowing me long ago to be the first and only journalist to enter his secluded compound just off the Natchez Trace, where I spent two or three days  – and his band’s music would stick with me all day. “Sookie, Sookie, Sookie, Sookie, Sookie, Sookie, Sue.”

And that would have suited me fine. I’m more Born to be Wild than drunken three-piece-suit Parrot Head in my soul.

But, with Ricky Ricardo’s agonizing “Oh, Lucy!!,” on TV, Steppenwolf’s mental discography was supplanted by Buffett’s “Pencil Thin Mustache” as soon as I was immersed in this headquarters of the living dead just outside the outskirts of Nashville.

I’m not a huge Jimmy Buffett fan, believing that he played too hard to please the idiot Parrot Heads who drank rum concoctions enough to puke and tried to live like Caribbean pirates after finishing up their latest case files and stock deals before driving their Infinitis or BMW SUVs to the arena.

Jimmy Buffett infiltrated my mental jukebox with his lament for Boston Blackie and Andy Devine and Ricky Ricardo's jacket

Thing is, Jimmy was better than that and allowed his songs to turn him into a caricature of the fine young songwriter I saw at the Exit/In a half-century ago or at the Sunset Ceremony at Key West in the early 1980s.  It’s a regular evening carnival down in that straight, gay trans or whatever you wannabe slice of paradise.  I had enough Sloppy Joe’s slushy rum drinks to puke, but I didn’t, and I really enjoyed it when the fine troubadour and songwriter strummed and sang solo as the sun slipped into the Gulf of Mexico.

Jimmy used to do that regularly when he was just a regular cheeseburger in paradise, before he became a huge star and belonged to the world of pirates and starched-collar pirate wannabes and other assholes ...and became really, really wealthy.

Lucy continued being stupid and Ricky aghast on the TV in Bob and Jerry’s room in the dormitory of dementia.

Jerry sat up and reached for the contraband food and drink I had transported into the nursing home in my cargo shorts.  He chomped into the crackers, one after another, quickly, crunching like he was running out of time, pausing long enough to wash down a double mouthful with the SunDrop. I shoulda lined the crackers up like cocaine to make his fast-paced consumption easier.

Just before fleeing town, Tony Durr, little asshole with beard in yellow jacket, posed with his best friend, me, and fledgling News Brothers. From left, Chuckles, Dumbo, Little Asshole with Beard, Flapjacks, Death, StrawBilly Fields and Street, who has the great role of visiting Jerry without being there. 

“Hi, Tim!” said a fellow who usually wears a Vanderbilt sweatshirt as he and his wife (who is a non-resident and is just visiting for lunch) walked past the room and saw me sitting next to Jerry, as Lucy and Ricky ranted “comedically” on the TV.

“Nice haircut,” I tell Jerry, asking if perhaps his daughter cut his long brownish hair into a butch and trimmed his lush beard to stockbroker-appropriate precision.

She did cut it a few months ago, but the nursing home did it this time.  “I haven’t seen her in a long time,” he says of his daughter. “She’s really busy. I guess.”

Course, she could have been here recently, and he just doesn’t remember.  “I don’t remember anything,” he admits.

“You remember the first time I really got in trouble with Luther?” I ask Jerry, who was with me at the time, 43 years ago or so.

“Wasn’t that right after we got those computers?” Jerry asks.

I set the story up in his mind by describing when The Leaf-Chronicle switched from old-fashioned manual typewriters to electric ones.

“Remember, we kept our manuals in the wells of our desks, and anytime the power went out, we’d pull out the manuals to finish that day’s newspaper.” That actually happened so often – perhaps the new gizmos overloaded the circuits – that the quick swap became routine, almost choreographed.  We hardly missed a word in the quick typewriter reinforcement ballet.

I was a simple sports editor without a lot of love for authority when the company bought Harris computers to use in writing and assembling the paper. We got an editor in the deal. Harris troubleshooter and bull-shitter Tony Durr came up from Florida to help us with the transition to his company’s computers. Luther liked the concept of having a computer expert guide his young newsroom, so he hired Tony as editor.  Great guy, lazy editor and one of my life’s four best friends, Tony finally left town, a defrocked editor, in the middle of the night a couple years later.

A group of newsroom grunts who my friend, Rob Dollar, and I dubbed “The News Brothers” threw Tony an all-night farewell party, but he and his girlfriend and soon-to-be his fifth or sixth ex-wife, left at about 2 a.m. He was still wearing the shades and half-tuxedo he’d worn to the party as he drove toward Riverside Drive.

I’m reminding Jerry of all of this to lead up to the fact that there was a bank of the computers set up in the newsroom, and Luther came up to instruct us to practice on them – they were not connected to composing etc. yet – so we’d be ready when we made the switch. We all were required to participate in these between-editions training days.

The little, short asshole with a beard from Harris computers hovered around the newsroom in case we had any questions. I should add that I’m just being honest about Tony, but I loved him as a friend and a dreamer. As far as his managerial duties, once he was hired away from the computer company, well, most of those fell on me.  And I leaned on Jerry and the copy desk and “newspaperman Wendell Wilson” to do their jobs so the paper would get out even while the editor was out chasing rainbows and unicorns or playing golf. Wendell last was spotted in public sitting on hay bales and protesting the death penalty in Arizona, his home state, where he retired.

“StrawBilly Fields,” Jerry inserts when I’m talking about the golf. StrawBilly, who no longer is “the big fat kid”  of Jerry’s faded memories, was taken away from his reporter’s duties to play golf with Editor Tony Durr often.  It was then that Billy likely realized that his greatest successes would come by kissing up to his bosses, which – in addition to his brains, personal loyalty and charm -- is perhaps why he had a long and spectacular career as a good ole boy East Nashville insider in Metro Nashville Government. His last Metro duty, if I remember correctly, was to oversee the party buses and wagons carrying at-least-half-naked bachelorettes around the Lower Broadway tourist district. He would use his short, hand-held ruler and tell the girls if their panties or privates were being displayed to drunken conventioneers. I may have that story wrong.

I actually think Billy is one of the nicest guys on the planet.  And, he never acted otherwise. I’ve known him since he was a student athletic trainer at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, where I’d chain smoke with head football coach Boots Donnelly every afternoon while I covered practice for the newspaper. Billy didn’t smoke, but I’m sure he’d have taken it up if I’d told him to. I think his main job was to make sure his balls were clean and inflated. I mean the footballs, of course, that he would distribute to the Governors football players. 

Finally, I’ll get to my first nasty encounter with Luther, the first time I was told to sit in a chair facing his desk and listen.

Publisher Luther Thigpen had encouraged us to write whatever we wanted as we learned the new computer system.  I reminded Jerry, when telling the story, that the Big Guy did not tell us he was monitoring us from a master computer in his office.

“It was announced today that Tim Ghianni has taken over The Leaf-Chronicle in a bloodless coup,” or something similar is how Jerry began his shakedown story-writing practice. He went on to explain, in the story, that the newsroom, loyal to me more than to the newspaper (true), had supported me in the bloodless takeover from publisher Luther.

Jerry inserted a quote from me about the future and the types of real news stories that would be our focus. And we’d also begin a steady stream of stories about The Beatles and Muhammad Ali, or something like that.

I think the story ended with “former publisher Luther Thigpen could not be reached for comment at presstime.”

All good clean fun, until my phone rang. “Uhh, Tim, I need you and Jerry Manley to come downstairs.”

It was Luther, and I really didn’t know why he called …. Until he held up a copy of the story he’d printed off the computers upstairs.

“Fellows, because Tim’s name is in this, I think you wrote this,” said Luther, scratching his nuts, turning his head to the left and coughing.

“But if not, then I know it’s got to be from you, Jerry, because you are Tim’s closest friend and would support such a coup.”

He moved his hand into his pocket and began jingling change as his face reddened. “Tim, did you write this?”

“No,” I said. “But it’s a pretty funny story. People are just up there having fun with the computers. That’s what you told us to do.”

Luther again poked at his pocket, where dimes collided, and added: “This is not fun. This is disrespectful. Do you know who wrote it?”

For the first and last time, I lied. “No,” I said. “But I really don’t see it as a big deal. It’s just funny for anyone to think I could be a publisher, since I hate the Chamber of Commerce.”

The Big Guy nodded in agreement and pointed his moist finger at Jerry: “Mr. Manley did you write this?”

“No,” Jerry said. “But it’s just fun. Someone having a good time while practicing.”

Once Jerry added that he had no idea of who wrote the story, Luther huffed slightly, then smiled, recalling, at least briefly, that he blazed his corporate path as a legitimate newsroom editor before he moved to Clarksville.

“I know newspaper people have fun, but I’m reading what you are writing, and don’t do this again.”

So, it’s obvious he didn’t believe our story. As I’ve said elsewhere, the more and more I became the true heart of the newsroom, Luther would call me downstairs for interrogation. I actually liked the guy.  Conflicted corporate bastard.

Sitting in the dementia dorm room, Jerry and I laughed at that story, shenanigans that predated my helping turn the newspaper on its ear with my News Brothers cohorts. Jerry “Chuckles” Manley, Rob “Death”  Dollar and Jim “Flash” Lindgren were my chief co-conspirators.  Others joined up when their wives allowed them to put their incomes on the line for a few pressure-releasing laughs.

That latter group included Ricky G. “Dumbo” Moore and John “Street” Staed. Harold “The Stranger” Lynch literally killed in the gunfight scene. And John Glenn, Jimmy Stewart and Skipper were funny as hell in the resulting movie Flapjacks: The Motion Picture. We screened it at the Roxy Theater in downtown Clarksville and could have raked in thousands of dollars for local charities.

I am Flapjacks, and it is my life story. Later, our dear friend, radio newshound Scott “Badger” Shelton assumed a prominent role when Flash moved to Indiana, a generally thoughtless and ill-fated decision.

Curiously-- though “Street” had the least screen time in the movie for reasons unknown, foreign and domestic -- Staed has been much on Jerry’s mind as he whiles away his nights and days, watching “Gunsmoke” and History Channel offerings and “I Love Lucy” in his dormitory of dementia HQ.

Every time I visit – once or twice a week -- I ask Jerry who has been to see him recently.

“John Staed came by the other day,” Jerry always says. “It’s the first time he’s been here. It was good to see him.

“We went out for a drive, all over the place. We went to eat in a little café. I can’t remember the name or what I had to eat.”

Jerry tells me similar stories of John’s first visit every week. Problem is that John, while a damn nice boy, has not visited Jerry.

Those rambles are only in Jerry’s dreams and wishes. And it doesn’t hurt anything.

I have asked the nursing home folks, and Jerry is not only not allowed to go out for a ride, he has to stay behind the double-locked, guarded doors to the Memory Care Ward.  Only his daughter can take him out of the ward, and then, it’s no farther than the game room, in the back of the regular old-folks dwellings. That’s where a family member and an inmate can put together jigsaw puzzles. Before it rains any more.

“I didn’t know anyone could take you out of this place,” I say, gently, to my friend.

“Yeah. All you gotta do is promise to get me back here.”

Maybe, when he sleeps, he pictures himself in a boat on a river or perhaps he and I are going out for a drive, too. Perhaps he’s reliving the after-midnight adventures of our relative youths, like when he pulled up to my Clarksville house in his blue Honda Prelude.  I was standing in the driveway, smoking, regretting the most unselfish but dumbest of my life choices. I had a bottle of Scotch with me and a six-pack at my feet.

Jerry rolled into my driveway, smoke billowing through his sunroof. Bruce Springsteen was wailing away on “Glory Days” on the stereo.

“Hop on into my pink Cadillac,” said Jerry.

I did and the next five hours took us to country roads, with a swing through Guthrie, Kentucky, where my friend Thomas Warren (Robert Penn’s brother) ran the town grain elevator.

Sometimes at night, I too recall those days and how my friend and I, connected like brothers, tried to have fun while negotiating the traitorous ways of life and newspapers.

On this day, I walk Jerry down to the dining hall and sit for a while, until one of the residents needs my chair.

“I Love Lucy” is blaring from the TV set.

And again, I think of that Buffett tune, a fine song that really is aimed at Baby Boomers who wish they could go back. Course, we can’t. We just die.

That's why I wish I had a pencil-thin mustache
The "Boston Blackie" kind
A two-toned Ricky Ricardo jacket
And an autographed picture of Andy Devine….

You likely don’t remember Andy Devine. He played “Jingles” on The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickock TV series and Cookie in a series of Roy Rogers films. He was fat and had a high-pitched laugh. I met him once at the Michigan State Fair when I was a little kid. He and Wild Bill castmates were riding horses and giving out miniature loaves of Wonder Bread. I do not have an autographed picture, though I did see a two-headed cow.

Andy’s Hollywood niche was as the consummate sidekick, kind of like the fellow I left in the lunchroom, where he was asking if he could have bacon and eggs instead of a sandwich for lunch. 

Andy Devine was a great sidekick. In this picture he could be mistaken for StrawBilly in his younger days. Billy, a great guy, really is quite trim, in comparison. In our pre-News Brothers days, Jerry easily assumed the role of sidekick to me.

“You’ll get your bacon and eggs in the morning,” says a strikingly beautiful dining worker, as she brushes her long dreadlocks out of her face.

“Cranberry juice tastes like water, and my legs hurt,” Jerry says in some sort of reply as I get up, and the lovely dining worker lets me out of the Memory Care Ward.

Lucy Ricardo is now screaming about something else on the TV set as I get close to the check-in/check-out station.

“You have a nice time playing spoons?” asks the receptionist, which startles me until I realize she’s talking to one of the “regular” nursing home residents, who is behind me.

“Spoons? What’s that?” the older woman queries.

“That’s what they had you playing all morning,” answers the receptionist.

“I don’t remember that,” is the reply. They continue to talk about that game as the receptionist pushes the button unlocking the two sets of front doors for nine seconds. Enough time to get out before the locks automatically secure.

I walk to my old Saab, with Buffett holding a “Pencil Thin Mustache” accompaniment in my head.

Yeah, but now I'm gettin' old, don't wear underwear
I don't go to church and I don't cut my hair
But I can go to movies and see it all there
Just the way that it used to be

I crank up my old car and drive away from the prison quickly.

'I Love Lucy,' a show I don't respect, conquered the nursing home TVs. As for me, well, I wish I had a two-toned Ricky Ricardo jacket.

 

  

 

Old Flap's going "Crackers" after day of sharing contraband, CTA songs, John Glenn memories, today's date with Jerry; both of us wishing there was some way we could travel back to the day we drained the keg with a little help from our friends

“Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?”

The lines from the band Chicago’s one great record – Chicago Transit Authority – played in my head when I was sitting in the tidy dormitory of dementia room occupied by my longest-tenured friend, Jerry Manley, and by Milford “Bob” Brown.

Both men were sleeping when I slipped into their Memory Care Ward room in the late morning, maybe an hour before lunchtime.  I really like Bob, and I didn’t want to wake him up, so I softly nudged the knee of my friend, Jerry.

“Mr. Jerry’s got a friend?” an incredulous nurse said later in the day when I was walking with my pal, formerly “Chuckles News Brother,” a nickname earned in some 42-year-old shenanigans. I was “Flapjacks News Brother,” Rob Dollar “Death News Brother,” Jim Lindgren “Flash News Brother” in the main News Brothers planning and execution of merriment and news in Clarksville, Tennessee. 

Others who played roles in what not only was a “Hard Day’s Night”-style movie sendup of the city and pop culture, but which also raised more than two grand for local charities, included John “Street” Staed and Ricky “Dumbo” Moore.  Larry McCormack, a good Christian boy who should have known better, did a scene or two typecast as “The Photographer.” His reward was to get smothered by a storm of thrown whipped rotten egg pies as he lay, innocently, in a boxcar. We tried not to hit the movie camera he was using, primarily because it belonged to my dad. (StrawBilly Fields had already sold his body to public relations and corruption-busting by the time we made the movie. He's never seen it.)

And, perhaps the strongest, most-violent scene was the gunfight on Public Square in which our old friend Harold “The Stranger” Lynch – a semi-reformed rodeo cowboy who liked his beer cold and his women to be his wife – was gunned down.  In fitting with the near Biblical preposterousness of our film, Harold was resurrected from the dead, given a new pair of shades (I always had spares) and sent galloping on his stick horse while Quicksilver Messenger Service played “Happy Trails.”  Harold survived the gunfight, but not cigarettes.  A few years later, it broke my heart to hug his frail body one last time after we had strawberry pie and coffee in a “farewell” at a Shoney’s.

“You go ahead and smoke,” he told me, leading the way to the restaurant’s smoking section (back when such things existed). “I’ll be dead soon, anyway.” I offered him one for the road. 

Anyway, back to the nurse in demented dormitory who was so surprised – even though I’ve been to see Jerry once or twice a week for the last six months – Jerry had a friend.

“You know him long?” she asked.

“We’ve been hanging around with each other, making people happy, for a half-century,” I told the woman, who shortly would take his blood sugar (“it’s a little high”) – perhaps because of the two packs of Ritz crackers – peanut butter and cheddar – that I’d brought into the nursing home in my shorts. I also had a bottle of Diet SunDrop for him.  I sneak this stuff into him, because he can’t get junk food “inside.” Also, it seems like I’m getting a wink and a nudge from the nurses, who come into the room while Jerry is snacking and divert their attention to my crotch, as is the case with most women.  Then they fill his gut with shots of insulin and his mouth on this day with eight pills.

“He’s a little high today,” the nurse repeats when I ask about the huge amount of diabetic medication. When he gulps down the pills, it reminds me of our occasionally refueling in the newsroom on a Saturday morning after the night before a half-century ago. I tell her that if she thinks "he’s a little high today," she should have been around us on our 30^th birthday weekend celebration, 42½ years ago.    

Jerry and I laughed about that party – many of the substances were street legal – and how we tapped the keg I bought at Pal’s six hours before the party started.

“We had to make sure it was good beer,” I remind Jerry. He laughs. We drank several Solo cups worth, washing down a bag or two of chips, and took naps on the party room couches, preparing for the onslaught by Rob Dollar, John Staed, Tony Durr, Ricky G. Moore, Greg Kuhl, Wendell Wilson and several semi-nude women. Kidding about the women, but even so, I didn’t see my apartment for a couple of days. Couldn’t.

I look him squarely in his ever-fading eyes and say: “I think we should begin planning our 73^rd birthday party for November.” Our birthdays are the 9^th and 18^th, so Jerry is older and should know better than to hang around with me.

He starts laughing at the notion. “We’ll get all these old people drunk,” he says, as he laughs.

“Be good for them. Those who survive,” I counter.

“Yeah, might be a bad morning here,” he says, gazing at the semi-lucid and the less-so.

This conversation is held in the lunchroom/social room, where I went with Jerry after we’d viewed some old News Brothers movie footage on my telephone down in his room, while he ate the snacks.

“You gonna drink all that?” asks a man at the lunch table where I sit with Jerry. “I’ll drink it.”

The man – I don’t know his name – has been babbling a bit incoherently at the end of our table, and it seems liked he wants to take part in the conversation. He’s simply unable to form most words.

“Marijuana. Weed. Marijuana,” he says, or so it seems, following up on one of our discussion points.

“Man, I haven’t smoked pot in a long time,” says Jerry. He’s not sad. It’s just a grim realization that time has passed. Believe it or not, he’s been in this nursing home for six months.

His pot-smoking days were 40 years before that, by my reckoning. Or maybe five.

The befuddled old man is trying to bum what is the second half of Jerry’s cranberry juice. Jerry is slow in drinking it. The nurse says it’s good for Jerry’s kidneys. My long-time pal does not mind helping his kidneys. And, he says, the cranberry juice is the best thing they give him to drink there.

“But I am glad you bring the Diet SunDrop.”

The old man down the table does not get any of Jerry’s juice, though the nurse does bring him some unsweetened iced tea. No replacement, but at least it gives him enough strength to click his teeth and add, incomprehensively, to the conversation I’m having with Jerry.  “WEEEEED.”

The lunch on this day – I stay for the hour it takes for it to be consumed – is roasted chicken, broccoli, rice, fruit, cole slaw and a nice piece of carrot cake.

Jerry eats most of the plate, but can't get down the broccoli and fruit. “I’m so full,” he says.

The nurse hears this and looks at me, a visual tongue-lashing for the fact I sneak “good stuff” into the building. (Earlier, back in the room, she scolded me, even though I wasn’t caught red-handed.  “He says he’s not hungry now. You must be bringing him stuff.” I admit to nothing, though Jerry, unaware of the conversation around him, picks up his Diet SunDrop and drains it.)

“Man, I could use some dessert,” says Jerry after he demolishes the carrot cake.

“You already had some,” I say. “Looked pretty good.”

He says he doesn’t remember that, hoping for another chunk that never arrives.

 Then he looks to one of the windows, where the last of the 2024 cicada invasion is evident in the secret, fenced garden, where folks like Jerry are allowed to roam free. It’s kind of like the prison yard in Shawshank Redemption, except there are butterflies and daylilies. And most of the residents – like Jerry – have no idea of how to get out of this place. Maybe I should put a Raquel Welch poster on Jerry’s wall, so he can scrape away the sheet rock and escape to Zihuatanejo, where we can work on some shabby, old boat.

Jerry’s been in the joint for a half-year, and he has yet to venture outside. He didn’t know such a possibility existed until I asked the nurse if I can get him some fresh air, and she tells me we ought to get ourselves back to the garden. Jerry adds “Only if the weather is nice.”

He tells me the last time he’s been outside the joint was “When John Staed came to see me. He took me out for a drive. All through the country.”

That thought – a false memory, as John hasn’t been here nor is Jerry allowed to pass through the security checks to get outside – makes him smile. Staed, who was a good reporter, horrible sports editor (he thought “strikes” were only in bowling and “spares” were backup offensive tackles) and an excellent editor later in his career, seems to occupy some of Jerry’s considerable daydreaming time.

“Cicadas come every 17 years, don’t they?” Jerry says, as one of the red-eyed beasts bumps against the window outside the dining hall. Of course, I’m not sure if this is the one, seven, 13 or 17-year breed, but I agree with him.

“Must be something to be buried for 17 years and then come out to the daylight,” Jerry muses.

“I wish we could come back 17 years after we are buried,” I say and Jerry bursts into laughter. “But it’s not going to happen.’’

“What year did you say this is?”

I tell him it’s 2024, and he begins the count from his birthday to come up with how many years have passed. “Almost 73,” he says.

“What year did you say this was?” he asks almost immediately. “Is it 2023?”

I’ve been answering that “what year is this?” question since about 10:30 this morning. It’s the first thing he says to me when I wake him up.

Then, despite the clock by his bed, he asks me the time.

“I’m really tired,” he says, rolling his head back onto a fluffy pillow, while Bob springs from his queen-size bed and goes skipping down the hall like a magic leprechaun. Nah. He’s pretty slow, but I really like the guy. Today, it seems, he’s wearing his teeth, so it must be lunch time.

It’s about that time Jerry asks me the year again -- adding “Man, it doesn’t seem like it’s been that long” -- that the old CTA song plays in my head, getting stuck there for the day. (Author’s note, today I pulled that old album out and thought about how good Chicago was before Terry Kath, like Richard Cory, went home one night and put a bullet in his head.)

“Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?” I semi-sing to Jerry, my gritty, old-Dylan-on-Freon voice likely tickling all the loose screws.

He laughs.

“We’ve been friends for about 50 years. A half-century,” I say to him.

“It just doesn’t seem that long,” he near-repeats. “It’s not fair. We were young.  And then I can’t remember anything. I do remember working a little bit at a newspaper.”

Actually, my friend was a great newspaperman. All he wanted to be. And he was great at it. But other than “I was on the copy desk a little while,” he doesn’t remember.  

Apparently, the only constant in his life, these days, is me. When I describe to him his 40-year newspaper stint, he shakes his head.  “How could it have been that long? I don’t remember anything.

“What year did you say it is now?” he asks.

He looks around his room. “I don’t have any idea how long I’ve been here. Seems like yesterday. I don’t know where I am or why they put me in here.”

For a few minutes, he looks at a bit of News Brothers video on my phone. This one includes our meeting with Great American Hero John Glenn.

Simply put, “The Stranger” was dispatched by me (the associate/Sunday editor) to go out to Outlaw Field, the curiously named Clarksville airport, and interview John Glenn when he landed. He would only have a few minutes, as John Glenn – pondering a presidential bid – was headed to a Democratic fund-raiser in Clarksville. 

Top shot is of John Glenn orbiting the Earth in a NASA photo. Second is a screen grab from Flapjacks: The Motion Picture of Glenn, me, Rob Dollar, John Staed, Jerry Manley, Harold Lynch and Mayor Ted Crozier holding off Secret Service gunmen.

Jerry, Rob and John Staed (in one of his cameos in the heralded film, Flapjacks: The Motion Picture) climbed into the backseat of my old Duster, and we drove out to the airport, determined to meet him.

Glenn’s plane landed and a beige limo showed up to transport him to town. “The Stranger,” in coat and tie, wandered through the unlocked runway gate behind the limo.

And the other four of us all ran in behind.

Secret Service agents were about to shoot me and Rob, when I stepped into the doorframe of Glenn’s limo, blocking him from getting in the car.

“Leave them alone,” the first American to orbit the globe barked at his crew of white, gun-toting hooligans. “I want to talk to these young fellows.”

That’s a shortened version of the story that also included Clarksville’s Mayor Ted “Wild Turkey” Crozier – a retired colonel who flew helicopters in Vietnam – endorsing me for his job.

“Tim Ghianni for Mayor” read his lapel pin. If there is one political figure I loved in my life, it is Wild Turkey, who was propelled by vodka and lemonade and loved the News Brothers and who I regarded as a dear friend. I left Clarksville, basically in silence after 14 years, back in 1988.  Wild Turkey and Chief Sheriff’s Deputy Eddy Patterson both called to lament my departure, ask me to stay and wish me well. I guess everyone else in Clarksville didn’t care.

Patterson, I should note, saved my life one day.  An unidentified briefcase was found in the courthouse across the street from the newspaper, and Eddy led the bomb squad in dragging it safely outside to the middle of Commerce Street, where they were going to detonate it with explosives. 

Curious about the activity outside my window, I walked out onto the street just before detonation – “Tim, get out of there, quick,” Eddy yelled. By the time the empty suitcase was blown up, I was tucked behind a fire department pumper truck.  

I told Jerry that story – I believe the random briefcase was found in the courtroom where Kathy Jane Nishiyama’s kidnapper, rapist and murderer Eddie Hartman, who had been a Dickson County Jail Trusty when he went on his bloody stalking and killing mission – was being sentenced to death. He died of lung cancer on Death Row, where he had been training a pet mouse. Well, that’s half-true.  The mouse was in The Green Mile, filmed at the old Tennessee State Prison’s Death Row.

“So who are you?” the nurse asked me, early in the day, when Jerry was swallowing his SunDrop and dreaming of phantom visitors.

“I’m Jerry’s friend. We’ve been close for a half-century. Started out in newspapers together.”

She shook her head.

“Mr. Manley doesn’t have any friends. People will try to talk to him, and he’ll ignore him. Even when his roommate reaches his hand out to shake, Mr. Manley just pushes the hand away.”  

“Well, I’m his friend,” I say, proudly, but growing mentally weary.

“What year did you say this is?” Jerry asks me again. It’s question 67 or 68 for the day.

Top photo is of CTA founder Terry Kath, before he accidentally killed himself, forever leaving unanswered the question "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is." Bottom photo is a 1982 grouping of felons and the like, the lively News Brothers: Jerry "Chuckles" Manley, Ricky "Dumbo" Moore, Tony "Little Asshole with a Beard" Durr, Tim "Flapjacks" Ghianni, Rob "Death" Dollar, StrawBilly Fields and John "Street" Staed. We knew we had time enough to die. Jim "Flash" Lindgren was not here for this shot. He was practicing his light-saber moves and translating the AP Stylebook into Swedish. 

“I don’t know why I’m here. How I got here. Where I am," Jerry says. "I don’t see anybody but you, and I’m glad you come by to talk to me. I know I don’t talk, but it’s good to listen to you. I appreciate it.”

“Do you know why you are here?” I ask, again.

“Mental illness, I reckon.”  We talk about his family to see if anyone else shares this malady. “Maybe my Mom, some.”

He looks again out the window.  “I guess I’m never getting out of here. I’d love to go home.”

That thought seems to cheer him, so I talk a bit about his nice house in Lewisburg and “I’ll bet you’d love to see that white dog you named ‘Snow,’” I say.

He sits upright. “I thought that was your dog.”

I get outside of the secure facility and to my 41-year-old car, and I find on my phone that old Chicago song that has been haunting me for several hours.

“We’ve all got time enough to die,” I sing along as I begin driving away, dreading leaving Jerry inside the confines where he is spending his life. 

My favorite picture from my newspaper career is a 3 a.m. Sunday shot of Rob, Tony, me and Jerry on the curb outside the Roxy Theater in Clarksville. And, to think, we were at work the next day to tell stories of blood, gore and simple human kindness in The Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle, back when it was a newspaper. We were finally catching our breath after all-night screenings of our charity film, financed by me and Rob, that raised hundreds and hundreds and hundreds for local charities.