Thoughts of Jerry and Eric, two good men who should have been drinking beer and tossing firecrackers, but for different reasons cannot

This is my brother, Eric, who should not be dead  

Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose, as my friend (he really is) Kris Kristofferson wrote and sang 50-some years ago, back when my brother, Eric, and pal, Jerry and I enjoyed life's fireworks.

Our nation celebrated freedom a few days ago, with fireworks, DUIs, domestic gunplay, mass murders, deadly vehicle crashes and musical presentations on television that attempted to make me stand up and sing “it’s a grand old flag.”

Rather than shooting bottle rockets at my rivals while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and getting drunk, I was focused on my longest-tenured newspaper friend, Jerry Dale Manley, and also my brother, Eric Anthony Ghianni, who loved the holiday more than any other person I’ve known, celebrating his passions for cold beer, hot dogs and warm place to watch colorful explosions.  All the while, Old Glory standing watch, 24 hours a day, on his front porch.

This is Jerry Manley, back when he could embrace all of life's explosions

As Kris would say, both men have nothin’ left to lose. Eric died at the end of March, something that I’ve not gotten over. Instead, my mental state is not getting better all the time. Can’t get much worse.

I’ll get to more on Eric soon, because he’s always on my mind, and the Fourth was an M-80 dud without him.

But on the Fourth, my thoughts also were on Jerry, aka “Chuckles News Brother,” with whom I celebrated most holidays, usually working together or at least in the same skewed field, newspapering, where we worked all night until almost-closing time, or came in at 4:30 a.m. and worked until mid-to-late afternoon. Holidays were just like any other day, though on Christmas, we did enjoy a bit of my brandy in our coffee or pay a visit to composing room foreman Glover Williams’ top desk drawer.

If it was the Fourth, it meant crawling through the ceiling trapdoor in The Leaf-Chronicle composing room and climbing out on the roof, three giant stories above the intersection of Second and Commerce to watch the displays from the whites-only (unless you are O.J. Simpson, the whitest black man I’ve ever befriended and a vicious killer to boot) Clarksville Country Club or from Fort Campbell.

Later, when I worked at 1100 Broadway, for the excellent old Nashville Banner and later when I toiled on the bottom level of the corporate caste system at the morning newspartner, I would take the stairway to a door that opened up on the roof of the building.  Later in my 20 years in that building, a string that ended in directed humiliation that could not kill my pride, they closed the access to the roof.

But, back in 1988 or 1989 or so, a guy could climb over the fence that was supposed to keep you contained to a roof patio smoking area and walk out to the roof edge. Looking around the ugliest building downtown, where the Baptists got their scripture-skewed marching orders, you could see the fireworks at Riverfront Park. That was decades ago, of course.  That view long has been completely obliterated by skyscrapers as Nashville has deteriorated into a wannabe Los Angeles, without the palms and as much body art. And the newspaper building, a historic structure representing (at least under the late John Seigenthaler) First Amendment freedoms and racial/social equity, has been blown up to make room for condos and a Gen Z-oriented grocery store. 

I wanted to talk about those old fireworks days, the glorious Fourths we spent together and our days of beer-soaked laughter  when I dropped in on Jerry in his Memory Care Ward room he shares with Milford/Bob – “I’ve never talked to him,” Jerry says, expressing surprise that Bob and I had many good conversations until the last couple of months, when he has turned into a foot-dragging, emaciated bag of bones who scarcely acknowledges anyone. His day consists of putting on his flannel shirt and jeans, his Tennessee Vols baseball cap, and wandering the ward, looking for someplace to eat or sleep or use the toilet.

“No telling where he’ll end up,” says Jerry, who often has come back from mealtime to find Bob sleeping in his bed.  “He’ll sleep anywhere.”

When I entered the Memory Care Ward, in fact, I noticed that Bob was sleeping in a reclining chair near the large lunchroom television, where on most days – including the day after the Fourth of July – the nauseous escapades of Lucy Ricardo, her philandering husband Ricky, fat old Fred Mertz and his machine-gun cussing dirtbag of a wife, Ethel, are engaged in pure nonsense.

I guess the low-brow scheming and sleazy escapades are just right for the folks in the Memory Care Ward.  I think they should step it up a notch, intellectually, and find a station that plays “Green Acres” or “The Beverly Hillbillies” so the inmates could be cognitively challenged.

Regardless, I’m losing track of what brought me this far. Jerry Manley has, as Kris sang, perfect freedom. He’s got nothin’ left to lose.

A pal for more than a half-century or less, Jerry is snoozing noisily when I slip into his room. The television is off.  The thermostat is set to 86 degrees, which is comfortable for Jerry on what will be weekly shower day.  He freezes when he gets out of the shower, so the nurses crank up his thermostat for a few hours before bath time.  Since it is 100-plus outside and I’m sitting in a room that is almost as hot and filled with farts, I’m uncomfortable.

“Saturday, cutting farts, sounded like the Fourth of July,” I sing in my head an old version of one of the band Chicago’s early and few great songs. My college pal, Jim Mraz and I would sing -- at any bar, any party, any social gathering or by ourselves -- our skewed versions of popular songs. For example, we did The Doors’ “Touch Me” ( “Touch me babe, can’t you see that I am not afraid….”) as “Fuck me, babe, can’t you see that I have not been laid….” We were very popular, legendary indeed on a campus of 30,000 scholars that we’d have to pass through en route to Tork’s Pub.

But this story is not about Jim – who did text me our old version of “Saturday in the Park” early on Independence Day. I’ll write about Jim in other places, perhaps taming down our youthful hijinks a bit.  We both have grandchildren.

This blog is first about my holiday-themed visit to Jerry, whose mouth gaped open while he snoozed in the recliner in the steamy room. I hit him gently with my walking cane, fashioned by my brother just a few weeks before he died.

For the first time in the last seven months -- I have visited him at least once a week since he was dropped off here by his family just after Thanksgiving -- I had decided not to stash the weekly junk food contraband in my clothing when I entered the nursing home.

It is my normal supply of Ritz peanut butter crackers – Jerry has requested them – and a pint bottle of Diet SunDrop – his favorite beverage.

As usual, I had bought them at the Shell station at the edge of Brentwood, Tennessee, where I always top off my tank at Pump No. 8 and then buy my treats for Jerry, who is mostly living on pre-digested turkey livers and snot, or whatever it is they feed the inmates. With carrot cake for dessert if blood-sugar allows it.

On this morning, my favorite gas station manager, Quincy (his nametag used to say Quinccy, but the spelling has been corrected in the last week), is back from a vacation in Puerto Rico.

“I really liked it down there. A lot of pickpockets, worse than I’ve ever seen, but most of the people are nice, the food is good, and we loved the beach at San Juan.”

He tells me to go visit the 51^st state if I can find a good deal. The buxom Black woman who aways worries about me toting my bag of snacks out to the car is off this day – perhaps in Puerto Rico? Or, more likely, the Virgin Islands. Or North Nashville.

But I’ve known Quincy for years, and he has had a weekly, at least, view of my physical deterioration.   

“If you need help, let me know, old friend (he doesn’t call me ‘Pops’),” leaving that term of endearment to his kind, absent, sidekick. “But you should be able to get this bag to your friend.” He knows my weekly journey is to visit Jerry in the Memory Care Ward, and he endorses this mission, telling me that where Jerry lives is “worse than prison.” But the bars, in Jerry’s case, are dementia, and the guards don’t carry machine guns. Though, they sometimes bring sugar-free pudding or Goldfish to the walking dead in the cellblock.  

I’ve grown tired of sticking crackers and soda in my cargo shorts or – during cooler months – in the lining of my jacket. So, since this was an Independence Day weekend visit, I decided to be free of the burden.  I just carried the plastic sack filled with contraband into the front of the nursing home, figuring that if they confiscated it, the Shell is two minutes away and I’d simply turn around and go get my pants refilled before coming back. 

Instead, they didn’t even question me, so I discreetly carried the sack with me through the “normal people” section of the home – where I listened to two old (even by my standards) women use profanity-laced language to discuss their lifetimes as teachers.  Perhaps the profanity was in my head. It often is.

No one inside the secure, double-locked doors into the Memory Care Ward even looked at my sack of contraband.  The pretty woman with the dreadlocks – Aliya – greeted me with a smile and told me “Jerry’s down in his room.”  I have told Jerry that all of the nurses and most of the residents know his name and really like him, but he shakes his head. “I don’t try to learn their names, wouldn’t remember ‘em.”

 I’m only sure about half of the time that he remembers my name. I know he recognizes me as his longtime friend – “We used to make movies together and drive around and roll on the ground,” he’ll say, when I ask his favorite memories in his generally good life.  But I’ve only heard him use my name once in seven months, and that was when he feared I was going to leave him while the nurse gave him a pair of insulin shots in the gut, a sight that gives me chills.

Jerry is sound asleep, even after I give him a damn good whacking with my cane. It takes a while for him to stir.

On this day, he has no words to spare.  I cover my normal topics – the murders we covered, Big Jim at Trice’s Landing, and the great movie we made, his fabulous vegetable gardens, the highlights of many summers, and our surprise at where we find ourselves now. Not regret in my case. In Jerry’s, considering where he finds himself if at all, regrets may abound.

“I’d sure like to see that again,” he says, after I tell him I need to get the DVD player hooked up to his TV and play “Flapjacks: The Motion Picture,” a great and crude social satire starring me as Flapjacks, Jerry as Chuckles (even though he hates the name, he’s stuck with it), Rob Dollar as Death and Jim Lindgren as Flash.  Others in the film had nicknames like The Mayor of Clarksville, The First American to Orbit the Earth, Jimmy Stewart, Charles Lindbergh, The Stranger, Dumbo, Street, Skipper, StrawBilly Fields, The Photographer, Danny Beaste, Porkloin and Dicksnot. (Scott Shelton became one of the most loyal of News Brothers after he was invited to join. He actually covered the world premiere of our movie as a nationally respected broadcast journalist.  As Badger News Brother, he participated in all of our follow-up films and adventures, including being on-hand when The Lone Ranger pledged his friendship and allegiance. Like so many I've loved, Badger is dead. And so is The Lone Ranger.)

 “I’ll try to do that next time,” I say, getting up to check the inputs on the large television to see if I can play "Flapjacks" in this steamy room.

Then I direct the conversation to the time – my final days in newspapering back in 2007 – when the assholes tried to get me to quit by assigning me to become night cops reporter, all but abandoning my cherished time with my wife and kids. They figured my goal for domestic comfort would force me to resign rather than work nights and weekends.

That is generally a rookie position, but I didn’t quit. I embraced it. Jerry was my boss, since he was night editor.

“I wrote so many cop stories every night, I got you in trouble,” I remind him.

He was told to “call off the dogs,” aka ME, and not have me turn out so much breaking cops news, because it “isn’t what our demographic wants.”

I never did let off the gas. In fact, I remind Jerry, I broke some national news when the cops caught a truck driver/serial killer, who took truck stop prostitutes, used them and then killed them. It was a Nightly News story the next day.

Jerry remembered none of this. In fact, even when I was trying to get him to respond, he kept dozing off in his recliner.

He was snoring long and hard when it became noon, and I knew it was time for him to get to the cafeteria for his cucumber sandwiches and tea, or whatever the menu called for (with carrot cake, as noted earlier).

He didn’t wake up. I gave him another damn good whacking with my cane. He still didn’t stir. I touched his chest to make sure he was breathing, and he was.

So I rubbed his arm and quietly left his room thinking that this could be the lasting image I’d have of him. After a half-century of fun, newspapering and roughhousing in bars and on dancefloors, chasing legs and distributing exploding cigarettes, my lasting memories could be this image: Jerry Manley, legs pushing the arms of his recliner, sound asleep, a tiny bit left in the Diet SunDrop bottle propped against his left thigh, empty cracker wrappers in his lap.   

I ducked my head into the lunchroom, where the folks were claiming their chairs, awaiting what the dietician described as “today’s surprise” for lunch.

“Make sure somebody goes down to Jerry’s room and gets him for lunch,” I remind one of the nurses. “He’s sound asleep, but I know he’ll be hungry.”

They promise to do so, and I escape into the normal part of the nursing home, stopping on the porch for a cup of icy cucumber water.

My July 5 visit and the empty feeling it left came on top of my daydream memories of the day before, as I watched fireworks on TV and washed it down with sparkling Italian mineral water, the kind Tony Soprano drank.      

My brother, Eric, along with Gene Chapman or maybe Jimmy Hart threw Black Cats at each other and laughed.

Hell, we weren’t even drunk. Too young, I think. Though we weren’t above buying cooking sherry in the grocery store. Tasted horrible. We also occasionally would trek up to Highwood, Illinois, where soldiers stationed at Fort Sheridan would – for a couple bucks profit – secure us whiskey, wine, beer, whatever.

Such adventures were not without potential pitfalls, like the night the cop stopped us at the entrance to the beach. He wanted to know what we were doing in Highland Park at such a late hour.  My answer had me spewing whatever we drank out the window of the passenger side of the old Falcon.

Rather than nab us for underage drinking, the cop told us where – down by the bathroom at the beach parking lot – we could locate a water hose to rinse off the car. I thanked him. The last good cop, perhaps.

Just thinking of glorious and inglorious Fourth of July memories, the first such explosive holiday I’ve experienced since my brother died in March. He was only 74, but apparently his body was older.  He went into the hospital suffering from dehydration and came out dead a month later.

I have a doctor who wants to do back surgery on me at the same hospital. I’m hesitant, as I do not wish to join Eric. If there is such a thing as a heaven, well, he was a good man and he’s obviously made the grade. I’m not so sure about Old Flap.

I’ll withhold judgment for I hope 20 more years. For a guy who spent his whole life among the cynics of the newspaper trade, such a thing as heaven would be a wonderful surprise, showing that something indeed does happen to you after the undertaker puts pennies on your eyes or throws you gleefully into the blast furnace, guts exploding.  

One Fourth of July, almost 50 years ago, found me and Eric and Gene (and maybe Jimmy) tossing the basically harmless firecrackers at each other or throwing them at cars whose drivers were foolish enough to ride down Ellendale Drive in Deerfield, Illinois.

It was “our street,” where we played stickball and football – sometimes the full-tackle version. In the wintertime, we’d pummel cars with snowballs. Autumn time, when the dads were done with their leaf-raking for the day, leaving piles of them smoldering in the street gutters, we’d wait until dark and kick the burning piles in the paths of oncoming traffic.

Probably illegal, but then so is filling a small, brown paper lunch sack with dog poop, lighting it on fire and leaving it on the front porch of the neighborhood grump.

Ring the bell and run like hell.

Pretty harmless stuff.

To get fireworks, then one of the few things illegal in the Chicago area, you had to go to Wisconsin, maybe an hour away.

The bonus to that trip was that Wisconsin was an 18-and-over drinking state for watered down beer, so by the time I turned 15, I was of age.

One Fourth almost got us in jail. The three (or four) of us were done shooting bottle rockets at each other and into traffic when we set off through the neighborhood, a bag bulging with Black Cats, or Lady Fingers, whatever the brand of those little, basically harmless explosives.

Eric particularly enjoyed lighting them and throwing them at our feet.  He just loved fireworks and firecrackers all of his life, indulging in explosive escapades even in his usually quiet street off Harding Place back when he was still 73.

Anyway, this is making me sad, so I’ll try to wrap it up.

We made it down to the local elementary school, which had a tunnel-like entryway leading to the front door.  Seemed like a great place to light our strings of hundreds of small firecrackers.

Nothing was damaged, but the blasts echoed all the way across the nearby Briarwood Country Club – the actor Bruce Dern, a friend, once told me he played golf there as a youngster growing up north of Chicago, but that’s another story.

It also was late at night, and the lights began blinking on in the densely populated neighborhood, where I’m sure phones were dialing for friendly coppers to come out and get the lousy little bastards.

We did run like hell, but slowed down when we saw cop cars, with blue lights and sirens, coming off Lake-Cook Road and barreling down on us.

We knew it was going to be one of those classic hoosegow holidays, but we suddenly heard Mom, hollering “Boys, come here.”

She had my dog, Misty, on a leash and was just posing as a neighborhood woman taking her dog out for a late-night stroll. In reality, she knew we were the culprits, and she got out there to rescue us from the long arm of the law.

“Boys, just get down here, on the sidewalk, and pet Misty. They’ll think you are with me.”

We did that, and watched the cops look quickly at us and wave at this great All-American tableau.

“Now, follow me back to the house,” she said.   

We stayed in and snuck cans of Meister Brau for the rest of the night.

I actually was going to spend more time reflecting on Eric and his passion for fireworks and the memories he left behind as an explosives-loving patriot.

But I really can’t go on. Too soon to reflect ….

As I write this, just after the Fourth of July, neighborhood firecrackers and fireworks are going off.

I have long thoughts about my dead brother and how gleeful those sounds were to him, particularly if he was doing the lighting.

I think of Jerry Manley, living in a void, not even knowing the Fourth that we so drunkenly celebrated decades ago, is past.

I asked him if there was any patriotic activity, perhaps with the mindless populace marching up and down the hallway, beating on cooking pans and singing “Yankee Doodle.”

Nope. Nothing like that. Not even hot dogs on the “menu” that day, he said, between his snoozes.

I let him sleep until I knew it was time to go. That’s when I gave him the damn good whacking with the cane my brother made for me and which I depend on now, at least until I allow the doctors the chance to gash me open and “fix” my back or kill me. I may just stick with the cane, since it can be used to club people to death or whack them to life.

I stood outside the nursing home.  Police sirens were signaling the arrival soon of friendly coppers along Granny White Pike.

I dosed myself with the cucumber water they put out there for residents sitting on the porch playing the license plate game.  

It’s not my favorite drink. “Better than nothin’,” I laughed to myself.

Nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’ but it’s free.

 (Copyright July 7, 2024, by Tim "Flapjacks" Ghianni. Cannot be shared or copied without serious legal repercussions.)

 

Didn't anybody tell him? Didn't anybody see? Milford recreates Goldilocks offense and gets away with it while Jerry laments life's emptiness

 

Jerry "Chuckles" Manley, second from left, gets interviewed by the future Scott "Badger" Shelton during the world premiere night for "Flapjacks: The Motion Picture," Tim Ghianni's autobiography.  Also in this picture are the other two primary News Brothers, Rob "Death" Dollar and Jim "Flash" Lindgren. I am the fine young man trying to keep ET from phoning home. The movie was our way of dealing with our daily newspaper coverage of the murders of Kathy Jane Nishiyama and Rodney Wayne Long.  This was November 12, 1982. Any innocence we had died with those young people. Sadly, Scott, who we all loved, died 12 years ago. I don't know what happened to ET, since he got out of jail. Jerry remembers nothing after this night. Rob, Jim and I are getting so old you could figure our ages by counting the rings in our underwear. 

Leaning on my cane while “I Love Lucy” blares red-haired nonsense from the TV, I ask Jerry if he wants to stand there, stupefying or if we should go back to his room for a while.

I tell him I’ve even discovered a high-walled, secure outdoor compound and ask him if he wants to go outside. He declines.  Seven months without fresh air and sunshine apparently haven’t troubled him. He was surprised to learn about that concealed compound, though. Maybe, if we’re alive, we can go out there in the cool of autumn, I tell him, adding. I think it’s good bet we’ll make the fall, whether he knows it or not.

“I feel empty,” he answered, as Lucy wailed, and we stood in the nursing home’s Memory Care Ward TV, dining, singing and dancing hall. “I feel empty. Empty.”

I looked into his nearly vacant eyes, and I could see that emptiness.  Tombstones in his eyes, as my old friend John Kay put it in song a half-century ago. Speaking of eyes, that Steppenwolf leader is legally blind, so I’m not sure his is the best illustration.  God damn the pushing man, though.

The dieticians and other care workers were in the kitchen giggling and getting lunch ready for these lovely, confused, mentally absent or empty people, in the Memory Care Ward.  

Residents had been gathering here for a half-hour or more, many offering open-mouthed reactions as a color episode blasted Lucy referring to Ethel as an “older woman” in an effort to pull off one of her pitiful scams.  “Oh, Ricky!” “Oh, Lucy!” The snappy dialogue continues its mind-numbing progress. Perfect and non-challenging for this roomful of folks gathering for one of their day’s three, semiconscious highlights: Lunch.

Because so many inmates were jammed in the lunchroom – they’d been singing hymns this morning when I showed up at the home -- anxiously awaiting their deep-fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches as noon ascended, there was no room for me and Jerry Manley to sit and wait. 

The aroma of the food being prepared indicated it contained broccoli. Or something dead to be fed to these men in khakis and golf shirts, women in full makeup and dresses. The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd, I say to myself, invoking Old Broadway for my amusement or simple distraction.  

It certainly isn’t like the deep-friend peanut butter and banana sandwich smell that filled my kitchen one New Year’s Eve, 40 years past, when for some reason Jerry and I got uncommonly hungry, and the pickled pigs’ feet weren’t sufficing.

Former Clarksville Mayor Jim Durrett presents a certificate, a ribbon uniform decoration and other honors to retired Montgomery County, Tennessee, Detective Cliff Smith. This was more than 35 years after Cliff, then slim and cool, with the dandy beard and shades, came in through the bathroom window to capture the vile killers of Rodney Wayne Long.  

“Let’s go back to my room,” Jerry suggested, turning away from the crowd. “I feel like walking, anyway.”

That’s what we’d already been doing this morning prior to this trip to the room where a crowd of emptiness and empty bellies engulfed him and his mood: We’d been walking the long hallway of the Memory Care Ward.

In fact, that’s what Jerry was doing when I said the day’s secret password – “succotash” – and was admitted through the double-locked doors separating the dementia-laden patients from the mentally “aware,” who occupy the big chunk of the nursing home on the other side of those doors. 

The “regular” residents can come and go. In Memory Care, they can stay and die.  In fact, when I parked my 40-year-old Saab out front, I almost was run over by a bright, red EMT truck, the driver vaulting out with a heavy bag of life-restoring tools over his shoulder.  Or maybe it was a case of Natural Light and pickled pigs' feet. He was already deep inside the nursing home by the time I got through front-door security and used my haggard face to “sign in.”  The facial recognition machine obviously knows me and its screen reads: “C’mon in, Pops, manley’s waiting for you.” Yes, it always prints manley lower-case.

I had my normal Shell station stash with me, but I had been disappointed that the woman who calls me “Pops” and wants to do all she can to make me happy, was off work on this day. Her stand-in was lovely and kind, but she didn’t offer to lighten my load by grabbing my sack and carrying it to Pump No. 8.

While I walked through the “regular” section of the nursing home, it was noticeably empty. Usually by mid-morning, the geezers – folks my age and older -- who live here are involved in games of bingo, strip poker (most wrinkles wins), craps, Monopoly or cornhole, all the while cheered on by the social workers.

If you’ve never seen people pitch their bean bags in heated cornhole competition while sitting in their wheelchairs, you’ve missed something.  Sometimes a mobile teammate will push the wheelchair-rider forward, giving him or her a bit of momentum leading to the underhand pitch. Of course, if that teammate doesn’t pull back on the handles, the wheelchair rider crashes into the Bozo the Clown cornhole goal.  Sometimes they play “show you mine….” Or spin the bottle.

On this day, however, the “normal” section was empty, except for a lone gentleman, dressed from cap to trousers in University of Tennessee orange.

“I guess you’re celebrating the big national championship earned by the Vols in the World Series the other night,” I said to the man. “Pretty good games. Congratulations.”

“Where are you from?” said the man, who identified himself as Stockton Davis. I think he thought I was a new neighbor, as I look the part. But I had to disillusion him.

“I’m from here, not this nursing home, but from here in Nashville.  House, five, six miles from here,” I answered, giving him my name and showing off my walking stick with a Paul McCartney quote burned into it by my brother, Eric, who I loved and who is just recently dead.

“You live here?” I asked Stockton.

He pushed back the bill of his Vols’ baseball cap and smiled. “Now I do, but I’m from Obion County (Tennessee). Right up at Reelfoot Lake. I kinda miss it.”

Not caring for snakes nor swamps nor aromatic fishermen stomping around with fish guts on their boots, I am not a Reelfoot fan. Course, I didn’t tell Stockton that.

“How long you been living here, in this rest home?” I asked.

“Ten years. I really like it here. You’d like it here.”

I told him that I visit at least once a week, and that my main purpose is to see my longest-tenured newspaper pal, Jerry “Chuckles News Brother” Manley, who has lived here since just after Thanksgiving 2023. I told him we used to make newspapers and movies together and we drank too much, smoked too much, every blessed thing too much. We joyfully danced close to the fire, getting singed by life’s more-sober realities a time or two.

Perhaps our lifestyle 30-40-50 years ago has some bearing on my friend’s dementia. But, so far, I’m OK. Walk like shit, but I get around, ‘round, ‘round, I get around.

I left Stockton and ambled -- which I can do with the cane made for me by my big brother not long before he left me in a sleep-deprived rain of nightly tears -- to the double-locked doors into the Memory Care Ward.

Typically, I have to hold the waist of my cargo shorts with my non-cane hand. My pockets are loaded with packs of Ritz peanut butter crackers and a pint bottle of Diet SunDrop, the contraband I’m smuggling in for Jerry. If I let go of my waistband, the contraband would pull down the shorts. I look good in boxers, but save that exposure for Sunday mornings when I watch “Meet the Press.”

“Come on in here,” said a nurse I’d not seen before, after I rang the doorbell to ask for admittance into the world of the absent-minded, confused, forgetful and walking dead.

That’s when I hollered “succotash.” She shook her head and looked toward what some claim is heaven.

 She knew who I was and who I regularly visited. “He’s not in here (the lunchroom near the security door). Probably down in his room.”

“Shall we gather at the river,” the folks in the party room sang, directed by a chubby visiting pastor, his hands swaying to the tune and promising glory.

I scoped this nurse up and down, and I turned to go down the hallway, only to come upon a heavyset fellow – the medical staff is pleased he has gained two pounds each week since he’s been here – in a sweatshirt and pajama pants. One of the things they most worry about dementia patients is that they forget to eat and then die. Jerry’s certainly not at that stage.  Yet.

Damage from the diabetes that almost cost him his foot a year ago is evident in the stained and bruised big toe protruding from his “walking socks.”

Since he’s having such a difficult time walking down the hallway, I give him a brutal shove, and he falls, like mortally wounded King Kong, onto the paint-spattered carpet.

Of course, that’s not true. I love the guy, and I’m happy to see him on a day when he’s trying to be active.  I sidle up to him and let him know I’m here. I put my arm over his shoulder to steady him a bit. Course, I’m not so steady myself. I’ve lost much of my mobility, but my brain still is at its peak.  

“Man, it’s good to see you,” Jerry says, focusing tired eyes. “I’ve been walking a lot. I think it’s probably good for me, but I don’t know.”

He tells me there are no doctors here to check on his rise and decline, and that pisses me off. Course, he can’t remember much that’s happened since 1982.

We do a couple of lengths of the hallway before he turns into his room, near the hall’s end.

Then he kind of laughs and apologizes in the same breath. 

“Old Bob is sleeping in my bed,” he says, gaiety dancing in his voice, as if he’s about to repeat the Goldilocks and the Three Bears tale.

But he’s not joking. Bob is right there. The small and thin fellow, Tennessee Vols cap by his side, is sound asleep in Jerry’s bed.

“Just come on in, man,” Jerry says to me, a bit quietly so as not to disturb Milford/Bob, who probably is 95 and very tired, apparently.  He’s not actually “in” the bed, as he’s on top of Jerry’s bedspread and sheets, but he is using Jerry’s two pillows – including the faux-furry one he likes -- and sleeping the morning away.

“Go ahead and sit in his chair,” Jerry says, pointing me to Bob’s spit-stained recliner. Each of these men has a bed and a recliner, so Jerry drops into his.

For the first time in the seven months I’ve been coming here, the television is off. I have asked before if it stays on all night, and Jerry “reckons so,” but here it is, off and quiet.

“Down in the dining room, ‘I Love Lucy’ is on, but the volume is off. They are singing church songs again,” I tell Jerry, who hadn’t noticed that even as he walked past that dining hall several times. Gimme that old-time religion.

“I hate ‘Lucy,’” vows Jerry.  We’ve always pretty much agreed on issues of war and peace, beer-drinking, smoking, politics, women, old dogs, children and watermelon wine. Well, mostly our wine was cheap Dago Red, by the gallon or sometimes two. “Just hate Lucy. Hate her.”

“Yeah, I always hoped Ricky or Fred Mertz would kill her,” I say, and Jerry laughs. “It could have been in one of those Lucy Goes to Hollywood episodes. Rock Hudson could have been the guest star who decapitated her by accident at Disneyland. Ricky would laugh and say ‘Oh, Lucy!’ and use her head as a bongo.”

Jerry nods at my creative vision.

“Does Milford, or Bob, sleep in your bed a lot?” I ask, pointing out the frail elephant in the room.

“Yeah,” Jerry says. “I’ll go out and come back and there he’ll be, sleeping away.”

“Can’t you do something about it?” I ask, as I watch the motionless old man and wonder if he’s dead. All those pony and horse riding and raising ribbons on his wall won’t mean a thing when he’s knockin’ on heaven’s door.  

“What can I do? Nothin’,” Jerry says, no anger in his voice.  “Let him sleep.”

I’d guess that Bob weighs less than half of Jerry’s 244 pounds, but he’s very break-able-looking. Kind of like a little porcelain doll in flannel and jeans. Jerry’s not going to risk hurting him or his feelings by lifting him up and telling him “Get the fuck off my bed.” (Long ago, I once told a job applicant in Clarksville to “Get the fuck out of my chair,” and he later decided not to take the job offered by Max Moss. He’s likely gone into the insurance industry or other Korporate Amerikan pursuits, thanks to me. I should point out in fairness that I was just coming to work on a Saturday morning, it was cold outside and my first action on such days was to put my yellow fedora and Deerfield High varsity jacket on the chair where the surprised kid was seated, before putting the exploding cigarettes on my desk. I’m a creature of habit, obsessive about doing things in proper sequence. And I hadn’t yet properly placed the rubber vomit before the news meeting.)

Jerry looks at the tiny man who’s been sleeping in his bed. “He gets up eventually, and I get my bed back. I never get in his,” he says, nodding toward Bob’s bed, draped in a UT Vols checkerboard end zone comforter.

I ask Jerry what he knows about Bob’s giant display of horse and pony ribbons on the wall near the door.

“I didn’t even know they were for horse-riding. I’ve never looked at them, and I’ve never asked Bob about them.

“We don’t talk very much. But you never know where he’ll end up sleeping,” he says.

The same could have been said about me and Jerry 50 years ago.

For the next hour or so, I deliver pretty much a monologue featuring our personal and professional adventures, trying to draw some memories out of Jerry.

“You remember the Rodney Long and Kathy Nishiyama murders?” I ask, repeating a query I’ve made in the past.

 The stories tore into our souls. Rodney, 18, was a college football player abducted by a pair of burglars running from the police. David Frey and Stephen Drake abducted him and executed him, hollering “Good Shot” as the gun barrel sat against his skull when the trigger was pulled. They killed him for his car, and escaped to New Jersey.

Kathy, 16, was kidnapped, raped, decapitated by Eddie Hartman, the pride of White Bluff, Tennessee. A Dickson County Jail trusty, apparently tired of bending over in the jail shower, he took a squad car up to Clarksville, hungry to get his rocks off before or after killing a beautiful young woman who he’d made stop for him by flashing his blue lights.    

The day after Kathy went missing, a friend of mine in Dickson told me that the authorities down there were covering up the fact that a broken, gold necklace was found in the squad car Eddie was driving.   I called and asked the Sheriff’s Department, and listened to their lies. I even asked the sheriff himself.  More lies. The CYA theory of law enforcement.

Anyway, long newspaper stories -- primarily put together by the team of cops reporter Rob “Death” Dollar, me “Flapjacks” doing human-interest stories about grieving parents and towns and editing Rob’s copy, and old “Chuckles” doing the final edit, layout, design and writing headlines --resulted.

At night, those deaths still wake me. (Or they did. In recent weeks it’s been Eric’s death that shakes me to my nightmare core. I can’t seem to recover, though I’m hoping not to reunite with him anytime soon.)

The fact that Jerry, Rob and I handled those stories concurrently led to a fine bit of madness among us, and that’s why we made a movie called “Flapjacks: The Motion Picture” and gave ourselves those nicknames. Other newsroom staffers who admired our sense of justice and fashion similarly got nicknames like “Dumbo,” “StrawBilly Fields,” “Street” and “Dicksnot.”  Me, Jerry and Rob adopted a fourth main News Brother, Jim “Flash” Lindgren, who worked with Jerry on the copy desk and who tells me he still has night sweats about his decision to throw his lot in with the likes of us. Radio newsman Scott “Badger” Shelton, who covered those same stories in newsbreaks between “Jimmy in the Morning” and his early morning spins of stacks of wax, eventually joined us. He’s dead now, too, and I miss him. “Jimmy in the Morning” died after being forced out of radio and into the world of air-conditioner repair. As good as any national deejay, Jimmy was fond of scotch and bought a lot of it for me, Rob and Jerry and friendly coppers.

Not a day goes by that I don't think about the murders of two beautiful, young people, Kathy Jane Nishiyama and Rodney Wayne Long. Those murders inadvertently launched The News Brothers on their quest for self-destruction, whiskey and fun. 

James "Jimmy in The Morning" Baird, who is dead, was as good an A.M. disc jockey as could be found in America. He also liked scotch, The News Brothers, friendly coppers.  He left radio to repair air-conditioners. He really was a damn nice guy. 

“Didn’t they find out that the same person committed both murders?” asks Jerry now, 42 years after a dog carried Kathy’s skull out of a woods line.  Witnesses thought Bowzer was simply carrying an empty gallon milk jug.

After I explain it, again, to him, he remembers.  “That was a tough time for all of us,” he says.

“How’d they catch them?”

I explain the circumstances. Eddie, an inmate, was suspect No. 1 from the day of the murder.

The two fugitives who killed Rodney were located in a house in New Jersey, their home state, where everything is legal as long as you don’t get caught.

“Montgomery County Detective Cliff Smith went up there from Clarksville, and he caught them when he entered the house. He came in through the bathroom window.” I do a snippet of my famed Joe Cocker impression.

Jerry laughed.  “Man, I love The Beatles. Their music never gets old.”

Unfortunately, he has no source for music here, only hearing it on television specials and the like. He also has no phone.

 “I wonder why they won’t let you have a phone?” I ask.

“I suppose because they don’t want us to call anybody” is his no-nonsense response. That rule makes it impossible for his son, in Houston, Texas, to talk with his dad.  His daughter in Nashville, too. And he’d likely get calls from News Brothers and family in Lewisburg that might stimulate his brain. Instead, he sits lonely, waiting to die.

As far as he remembers, I’m the only one who visits. Though again, he brings up the vision of John “Street News Brother” Staed visiting from Birmingham, Alabama. An axed newspaperman and respiratory therapist, John has not ever visited Jerry here.  But he has in Jerry’s mind, and it makes him smile.

“It was a couple of weeks ago. He looks like he always did,” Jerry says of the man he really hasn’t seen in more than 40 years. Most of us don’t look the same now.  I’m not even a replica of old Flapjacks. I look better, but I look very old.

“I need to get a DVD player in here, so we can watch our movie,” I say, nodding to the empty TV screen. “Or we could play it on the big TV set in the party room, and the whole floor could watch it.”

Jerry nixes that idea, thinking the movie might confuse the already mentally feeble or absent among his neighbors. Suicide might result.  I know it came close in my case, part of the reason we made a movie.

“Hell, Jerry, they might be the first audience we’ve ever had who understands the movie,” I say, and we both laugh.

A stunning nurse, the one with dreadlocks, comes into the room to round up the residents for lunch.

“Milford. Milford! Milford!!! Milford!!!!” she says, volume escalating. “What are you doing in Jerry’s bed?”

Bob doesn’t answer, as Aliya, the beautiful nurse, gut-laughing, helps the almost lifeless former horseman get off Jerry’s bed.

While he puts his Tennessee cap on, she gets down on her knees in front of Jerry, helping him get his shoes on, so he can eat in the dining hall. (Her position would have delighted the old Jerry.)

“No shirt. No shoes. No service,” is a mantra the residents must use when they enter the lunchroom. If they’ve remembered their shoes, they can line up at the trough.

Aliya holds Bob on his feet, helping him move his legs, guiding him down the long hall to the lunchroom, where he sits with the guy with the Vanderbilt sweatshirt and a newcomer I don’t know well.  Jerry will sit with “the guys,” according to Aliya.

I have seen Bob deteriorate much in seven months. Now he no longer smiles. Just stares. And sleeps in Jerry’s bed.

I put my arm over Jerry’s shoulders, explaining I’ll leave as soon as he gets settled with the guys at a lunch table.

“I wish you didn’t have to do all the talking when you visit, but I really can’t remember anything,” he says. He then repeats that whole sentence as if for the first time.

Then he adds that “I wish I could come out to your house and see you, but they won’t let me out of here. Guess I’ll die here. At least I get to watch TV all day and sleep when I want to.”

He looks toward me, those tombstones finally allowing some light to sneak from his eyeballs.

“I feel empty. Empty,” he repeats. “Not hungry. Just empty.”

I look away briefly, seeing Lucy still doing stupid stuff on the lunchroom television.

Jerry turns and starts toward his spot at the table. Then he stops, looks at me.

There’s no room for me to sit with him at the guys’ table, though I’m certain there soon will be an opening.

(Copyright, July 1, 2024, Tim "Flapjacks" Ghianni)

 

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.)