“Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle!” That thought brought me an uncommon smile after leaving Jerry in the dining hall and then being let out of my temporary incarceration in the nut house.
Just joking about that last part. These folks aren’t all
nuts, many of them, like my old friend, are just half-peeled bananas as they go
about their blank-eyed days in the Memory Care Ward.
The beautiful and kind nurse got me thinking that way with a
stirring “You his uncle?” inquiry just as she pointed to Jerry just before I turned
to escape the cuckoo’s nest …
“Uncle? Like a monkey’s uncle?” I asked myself, still smiling at the thought as I continued my painful, cane-aided trek past the “normal, old people” who were spooning what looked like eggplant parmesan casserole loaf from their white, maybe-even china plates. This is a swanky joint that often has cucumber water out on the front porch for residents to sip as they wonder what goes on in the world at large, just beyond the hedges. And, I’ve been known to sip it myself before escaping to the world outside the hedges.
The “monkey’s uncle’’ thought stuck in my head, becoming – after
my emotionally exhausting visit to my old running mate -- the day’s highlight.
It led me to memories of Chico, the squirrel monkey whose Steve McQueen-like
escape from cage confinement in Clarksville, Tennessee’s Swan Lake area led the
front page of my newspaper, under my watch …
We’ve talked in this space about Chico’s escape and how we
covered it with gusto. I’ve also written about the shrug of anger, frivolity
and disbelief displayed by Publisher Luther Thigpen when he looked at the front
page with the 90-point headline “Deputies Go Bananas: ‘Monkey At Large!’” Jerry, me and police reporter Rob Dollar, who
gathered the facts and compiled -- with all of our pun-filled minds in full
gear – the lead story. We teamed up for Jerry’s headline that made national
newspaper history. After 40-plus years of dedicated research, I have determined
that our Sunday edition was the only time a serious newspaper has led with a tale
of an escaped monkey and the panicked deputies worrying about potential carnage
released on the community.
Broke my heart when Chico was eaten by dogs a few weeks
later.
I wrote about that in my nationally honored “Calling Card”
column. “I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,”
Luther reportedly screamed at the Multimedia corporate meeting when that final
chapter in the Chico tale was discussed among newspaper publishers. “I told Flapjacks not to ever do something
like that again, after the first story. Darn him.”
That was decades ago.
Maybe I’m just Uncle “Timmy,” the name Jerry Manley often
used for me when we both were somehow impaired – or perhaps at work in the
newsroom where exploding cigarettes were as common as rubber vomit and coffee-flavored
nicotine breath almost a half-century ago.
Or maybe I’m Uncle Pops? Pops is, of course, the name the
lovely and top-heavy young woman calls me when I stop into my favorite Shell
station to get my tank topped off and grab supplies for my regular assault on
the asylum, the nursing home where Jerry is living and dying, not in
three-quarter time, but full-speed ahead.
Uncle Flap? The News Brothers’ co-founder?
Hell, I don’t know. All I know is that on this day I
purposely chose my “Magical Mystery Tour” T-shirt from a closet filled with
perhaps 20 Beatles shirts, three Stones shirts, a couple of Who shirts, an Ali,
Led Zeppelin, Kinks, Hendrix and even a Steppenwolf shirt the “Born to Be
Wild’’ writer and singer gave me perhaps 20 years ago. That was back when I was
gainfully employed by a publication that – by that point – was only faintly trying
to be a newspaper, while the Korporate devils purposely induced its death swirl,
like blue water, down the toilet.
Sometimes, like The Beatles’ famous bus tour, these visits to Jerry are dying to take me away. Take me today. And I only breathe free again after I slip from the front door, hit my last number and walk to the road.
Jerry was my last boss, by the way. He was night editor at The
Tennessean when the front office assholes began chopping away at me and
eventually made me night cops reporter. They wanted me to leave, but I stayed
in that spot for almost a year, writing about murders, drugs, prostitutes,
lawyers, guns and money with something like relish. Or brown mustard.
Those quick, deadline crime stories were my “fuck you”
pieces of journalism. They had put me on
night cops to get me to resign to be with my young family, two children adopted
from Romanian orphanages, my wife, Suzanne, and my best friends, Buddy, the Big
Brown Dog, and Pal, the Pinkish Runt Cat with albino eyes.
Instead of fleeing with no severance pay or pension, I dug
in next to my boss, Night Editor Jerry Dale Manley, and I was quickly the best
night cops reporter the paper had ever seen, so productive and blood-spattered
that the assholes up top told Jerry to rein me in. He tried, half-heartedly, because he was
having so much fun working my stories, he couldn’t or wouldn’t stop me from
writing them. Just quit leading with them and began tucking them in on B-3 or
the obit page (back when newspapers recognized local deaths as news).
Anyway, when I finally was whacked and sent, with armed
guards helping to carry my stuff out to the parking lot, Jerry hugged me and
cried. We’d been comrades for so long, from the Chico stories to the Rodney
Long and Kathy Nishiyama stories to the Klan rally against our paper. Hell, we
even clenched hands (mine deep-tanned and his redneck-Irish pale) for the
hand-shaking logo to the Clarksville paper’s “Neighbors” good-news story that
was cycled among reporters and mandated to appear on the front page every
Sunday. It left me less room for stories
about dead monkeys and human butchery.
“I think that (the Klan march against the paper) had
something to do with our coverage of Black soldiers at Fort Campbell,” Jerry
reached into his deep state of mind to rescue that old occurrence.
It was one of two
times The Leaf-Chronicle was picketed by the Klan, during my 14 years at
the Clarksville newspaper. I believe my writing and editorial guidance fueled
the fire. Speaking of fire, the late
Greg Kuhl, a nice former vegetarian and great reporter who began eating
hamburgers and ran himself into an early grave many years ago in Calgary,
Canada, once went, with my encouragement, to cover a Klan rally at, I believe,
Trice’s Landing. That was the park later made infamous by Big Jim and his pals
and a professor who fell/jumped off a cliff. If you don’t know the story, I’ll
let it go, this time. It made me sad, and I was interviewed, sometimes scolded,
about that coverage by national publications. “It was news, and we covered
news,” was the point I made. Nowadays such an explanation wouldn’t hold water.
Greg went and wrote the Klan story. I think he or Harley-riding photographer
Kathy Cobble snapped a picture of a flaming cross. Greg wrote a colorful and fair story. As fair
as you can be when writing about men in white sheets who kill Black people and
who use their tiny penises to rape their own little boys and girls after too
much Peppermint Schnapps.
It was primed to be our front-page centerpiece. Until Luther
Thigpen … fuck, it could have been pre-Luther and by some meaner, misogynistic,
racist and semi-literate executive, korporate cheese or even the Clarksville
Visitor’s Bureau … pulled the plug on the story.
Big shots inside and outside newspaper walls didn’t want the
Klan cross-burning published because it would look bad for the city’s image. (At
the time, Clarksville was growing, but in 2024, it may well be like other “boomtowns”
and suffer floppy-dicked, big city-envy, with the same set of good old boys or
their descendants in charge. I hope that’s not true in Clarksville, but
Nashville’s the same way as its corps of Good Ol’ Boys strives to create a
little L.A., but mostly draws national attention for drunken and drowned frat
boys or semen-drenched bridesmaids with neither pants nor hope in party buses.)
At least that’s the way Jerry remembers the Klan wienie roast and its premature death. It’s the same mindset that had Luther, jingling his change/scratching his scrotum, used when telling me years later that we would run no more car wreck pictures. Made the city look undesirable. Especially after W.J. took the red Teddy bear and tricycle out of his trunk and placed them, randomly among the fatal wreckage. And who was going to stop him? After all, he drove tanks in WWII and taught me about F-stops, lens speed and developing film and photos. And the best thing about W.J. was that he was not turned on by others' private tragedies or lives. Some photographers can become voyeurs. Not W.J. He just did his job.
Jerry remembered the Klan and little else when I sat in his
room after I corralled him, walking down the hall, saying, “I’m hungry” to
anyone who might listen. “I can’t remember if I ate breakfast this morning.
Can’t remember anything.”
When prompted, he did remember Jim "Flash" Lindgren, who was his righthand man on the copy desk in Clarksville.
He plopped in his recliner – I sat in Milford/Bob’s chair.
“I don’t know where Bob is,” said Jerry, noting that Bob, the much-awarded
horseman of some sort, was liable to end up sleeping in someone else’s bed or
using someone’s toilet.
I had not seen roommate Bob in the lunchroom when I passed
on my way in, after I greeted, happily, my Big Orange-clad friend, Stockton
Davis, as he waited for lunch in the normal people’s section of the nursing
home.
I had been glad to see Stockton, as he watched,
passionately, a Bingo game involving perhaps 30 of the nursing home’s citizens. The young woman calling out the Bingo
selections was indeed beautiful, a frisky, brown-eyed social worker who winked
at me. Or maybe she was making fun of my cane. Or, like so many women, wanted
to grab it. Or, more likely, her eye itched.
The activity by Stockton, my new friend who has lived here a
decade after spending his first 65 years at the edge of Reelfoot Lake, and the
Bingo ladies provided rapid relief from the worry of a few minutes before: As I
pulled up at the nursing home, a man in a flannel shirt and khaki trousers was
leaning back in a wheelchair, with both legs suspended by the limb-lifting machinery. Waiting for the sun.
I spied a cucumber-water pitcher and another of pink
lemonade on the porch, near him, so I asked if he wanted me to get him some. No
answer. How you doing, sir? No answer. His eyes were focused dead ahead. Clearly, he was somewhere other than on the
grass in front of a nursing home in Middle Tennessee. I thought later that he
may have even been dead. But surely someone would notice. Especially if he
missed lunch.
So, I went on in, my bag of two packs of peanut butter
crackers and a pint of icy-cold Diet SunDrop in my cane hand. Complete
contraband in this diet-controlled compound. In my heart I was “daring” the
guards to take my stash from me. After all, inmates are only supposed to eat
what the dieticians supply. Not junk food from a gas station toted in by a
crippled old man with shaggy hair and beard and a Magical Mystery Tour shirt (I
also wore short pants, underwear and shoes that day.) But no one stopped me, and the ladies all
seemed to be admiring my sack when I walked past their Bingo game.
T’Alijah -- the
pretty, dreadlocked nurse, who I have been calling “Aliya,” let me into the
Memory Care Ward. I have to say that her
name, when she says it, has a soft/silent “T” and the “J” is silent. So. it’s
not “Aliya.” It’s (t)Aliya.” Nonetheless, her kindness and good bedside manner
with my friend in recent weeks has earned her a spot in my heart. She was the
one who started the uncle stuff later on, but I didn’t get angry. I gave her a
big, old uncle hug instead.
Get to that later, as the crow flies. I do have to say that
when I stopped at my Shell station for gas and nursing-home foods, my long-time
friend, Quincy, the manager, was happy to see me. He was a little darker than
normally, I noted, which forced him to smile. “I got a good tan down Puerto
Rico,” he said, adding that he’d only been down there “a little past a week,”
as he told me last week. “Beautiful
place, beautiful people,’’ he said. “But it was too hot. I’m going to go back
in the fall.”
He rang up my purchase, adding “So you’re going to see your
friend in the nursing home today? That’s good. Those places are worse than
prisons, as I told you. You are a good man.”
I long ago learned that the most-sincere compliments come
from people who work for a living more than from the Good Ol’ Boys who kick us
in our nuts or the blossoming female equivalent and tell us “you really ought
to love this” as they jam corporate shit down our throats. And then “buy us
out” – the nice way they term firing, like mine almost 17 years ago.
Which is one of the things Jerry and I talked about. Well,
really, it was me doing most of the talking and I peppered the really hot air –
obviously this is bath day – with thoughts that might inspire response or some
kind of mental “click.” These two-hour
monologues are exhausting, gratifying, filled with love and it takes me 72
hours to recover, as my brain is not as rubbery flexible as it was back in my sleepless
boozing and smoking days.
After Jerry sat down in his chair, I noted that the nursing
home had put a really large, new TV in his room. He knew that. “But I don’t know how to turn
it on. One of those remote controls, I guess.” He looked at the three little
black rectangles but made no attempt to retrieve one.
I rescued the three remotes, and punched different buttons
to turn the TV on, fiddle with the volume, find him something decent to watch.
He settled on “Ender’s Game,” starring Harrison Ford and Ben Kingsley with a
young fellow, Asa Butterfield, as Ender Wiggin. It is loud and pyrotechnic and seemingly
Ford and Kingsley needed paydays. “I’ve
seen this before,” Jerry says. “Leave it on, but first I need to figure out
what it’s about.”
So, while he washed crackers down with Diet SunDrop and
belched, he fixed his eyes on the movie.
No, he answered my first question. He has not seen his
daughter in a long time. Last week, I showed him a Facebook video of her in
class, she teaches special ed. She posted that she’s leaving the classroom to
become dean of special ed classrooms at her school. A great achievement. She’s
a nice-enough kid and very smart. I don’t know if she visits her dad or not. He
woudn’t remember. His son lives in Houston with his wife, and he hasn’t visited
nor called, according to Jerry.
Other than that, he’s only got a couple of brothers and some
ex-wives, at least one of whom is still alive, he reckons.
So, who would he call? “They don’t let me have a phone. I
guess they are afraid I’d run up the long-distance bill.” I didn’t tell him
that all calls generally are included in the phone plan and Ma Bell is dead. He
didn’t need to know.
I pointed out that he also had a brand-new dresser, a
vertical one rather than the long, massive bureau he had before.
“I didn’t notice that,” he said. It is the place where his clothes are stored.
“Did I tell you John Staed came by?” he asked.
I know John, a really nice fellow who lives in Birmingham,
Alabama, and teaches ill people how to breathe, has not been here. John’s told
me that.
Nevertheless: “John Staed and I talked about our time. I
think it was in Clarksville. He looks just like he did back then. He asked me a
lot about you.”
I asked Jerry if, indeed, John still looks like the guy we
knew back in the 1980s, and he says “yes.”
“He didn’t age like you and me?” I ask. “I mean, we’re old
fuckers and we look it, though I think I look pretty damned good. Can’t walk
worth a shit.”
“No, he looks just the same as he did back then. Hasn’t aged,”
Jerry said.
“Did I tell you Wendell (‘newspaperman’ Wendell Wilson) came
by the other day? He lives out west (Arizona, where he sits on haybales and
protests the death penalty). But he came to see me.
“We had a nice talk, but I don’t know why he came to see me.
I never really liked him much. Surprised me.”
Jerry’s “forgiveness” of Wendell and the fact the man with
three foreheads visited, in his dreams, is kind of surprising.
Jerry, none of us, really, liked Wendell, who was city
editor before he was demoted for being an asshole. When Tony Durr was editor, he promised Jerry
the city editor job, but gave it to Wendell instead.
“I moved on over to take over the copydesk, because I needed
more money,’’ Jerry says. “I know Tony was your friend, but I couldn’t stand
him. Bad newspaperman. Lazy.”
And that’s basically true. I loved Tony for who he was, a
little, short asshole with a beard who turned a lot of his editor’s duties on
over to me, so I ran what became a sinking ship, while we had loads of
ink-stained fun. Tony’s biggest contribution to the paper was promoting me,
which made sure that work got done.
He also neglected the obvious and didn’t promote Larry
Schmidt from assistant sports editor to sports editor. A stupid move he made so
he could hire some guy named George from Harris computers in Florida. Larry left
before George was fired for mistaking a basketball for a croquet mallet.
Tony also remains one of my life’s five best friends, and,
if lazy, he was kind and (when he wasn’t using his fiction-writing skills to
fashion a weekly “true” column) he loved me.
He was my houseguest many times in the years after he slinked out of
town in the dead of night over a health insurance dispute.
I always loved to see him, hugged him, almost kissed him and
maybe did, at least on the cheek.
“You are a lying son of a bitch, but you are my friend and I
love you,” I told him, many times. He never disagreed, but he relished my
nonjudgmental friendship and he liked to escape life by hiding out in my house
or apartment. I once had to tell him not
to visit, because I wasn’t sure when I was going to escape from my own life’s destructive
trap.
After six marriages and at least that many newspapers, Tony
joined the Coast Guard in Alaska. They found his body, his phone off the hook,
an empty pill bottle by his hand, alone on the floor of his quarters. His life
had been boisterous but filled with pain. Suicide, the old nursery rhyme goes,
is painless. It brings on many changes.
It cost me a best friend.
Jerry and I often talk about Durr, mainly so he can try to
digest why I still love the guy. He was a liar, but he did take many a bullet aimed
for me when I got in trouble with Luther for decisions I made while doing Tony’s
job. He also backed up tough reporting
by Rob or even the lurid news-fronts composed by Jerry. He wasn’t scared of
Luther. Just work.
It’s complicated. Life is what happens while you’re busy
making plans.
Other than maybe my brother and John Lennon and perhaps
Jesus (not necessarily the same guy), there’s nobody I’d prefer to hear from on
an especially long-distance phone call from above than Thomas Anthony Durr.
Still, the fact Wendell inhabited Jerry’s dreams and
hallucinations amazes me as I write this. None of us liked Wendell. I loved his
now ex-wife, Kathleen. She was homely, but was a great and kind reporter, and
she worked with me at the Nashville Banner before she and Wendell and
their kid -- Friedrich, Wilhelm or did they call him him Al? -- moved to Santa
Barbara, where they divorced.
I reminded Jerry that Wendell and Kathleen lived in the
apartment complex where I spent my only happy days in Clarksville. Then they
rented a house near Austin Peay State University.
They invited us all over for a BYOB party (it was our custom
then, since we all were getting by scrimping or selling our sperm or eggs to
pay for groceries.)
The most-memorable scene from that party came in the person
of Harold “The Stranger” Lynch. Whenever
one of us would sit down somewhere, putting our cans of beer on the floor or
coffee table, Harold, rodeo-busted back and all, would sidle on over and be
real friendly. Then, if we looked away to talk with someone, he’d reach down
and quickly guzzle our beer and put the empty can back down. I loved Harold.
Great man. Great reporter. I had the delicate task of sending him to rehab. I
also was one of the last people to hug him as lung cancer ate his organs.
Jerry laughed at that memory of Harold, a damn good reporter
even when he was drunk, and a far-nicer and more-honorable man than
“newspaperman” Wendell Wilson.
Maybe Harold will drop in to visit Jerry sometime in the
next few days. Even dead, he’d be a better companion that the guy whose head
looked like a bald death mask.
“Mr. Manley,” T’Alijah said, in her sultry voice, as she
strode her fine and pleasantly thick frame down the hallway. “It’s time for you
to come to lunch. And I’ll need to take your blood, so we’ll know how much
insulin you need.”
Jerry looked at me. “Let’s just wait a few minutes. I like
having you here. Only company I get, and I don’t know why you come. I can’t
think of anything to say. I wouldn’t come.”
We did watch as Harrison Ford gave a pep talk to the teenage
warriors at the heart of the B-grade Sci-Fi Movie.
But it looked like Jerry was going to nod off. Perhaps lack
of food. Too much junk food. Lack of insulin.
So, I got up and grabbed his hand.
“Hey, man, let’s get you down to get T’Alijah to take your
blood, and you can eat.”
We walked slowly down the hall, arm-over-shoulder, both
watching her retreat.
When we got to the lunchroom, she eyed me, foot to head, and
she smiled. It’s a great gift when a beautiful woman focuses her pools of brown
on me. Her agenda had none of the lust that lurked in my second-favorite
president’s heart when he was rabbit-hunting.
“Let me ask you. Are you Jerry’s uncle?” T’Alijah asked.
Jerry couldn’t laugh. I think he was pondering the
possibility that was true. Other nurses, wondering why I’m here when no one
else gets such a steady visitor, scooted up, wanting to hear my answer.
“No, T’Alijah, we’ve just been friends for about 50 years,
and I love the guy. He’s a brother, a News Brother, but that’s a long story.
“You think I look that much older than him to be his uncle?”
I pointed toward Jerry, who waited patiently for her to take a razor to the tip
of his fuck-you finger to plan for whether he could have carrot cake with his
lunch.
“Well, you do look older, maybe not THAT much older. But you
two kind of favor. He looks like you.’’
He is about a half-foot shorter and 60 pounds heavier and he
has no idea where he is. But yeah, in a lot of ways, maybe I am his uncle. Or
at least his big brother, though we both are 72, and he’s nine days older than
me.
She told me “You look good, really. I just know you keep
coming here to see Mr. Jerry. We don’t get a lot of visitors back here.”
I gave her my best “come-hither” smile and ran my hand along
her butt, pulling her close.
Nah. That’s not true. She’s a very nice young woman, and I
really do look old. “I’m a monkey’s uncle,” I whispered.
She let me out of the Memory Care Ward, pinching me in the
bottom swiftly (joking), and I used my cane to help me walk the long distance
to the front of the nursing home.
An ambulance was pulled to the front door and probably 10
people were loading personal possessions into the trunk of a car. Some were
crying. Others jumped from cars they had urgently squealed into the parking
lot. The lights on the ambulance
flashed. But no one seemed in a hurry.
I grabbed my last cucumber water and I walked to the road.
(Copyright Tim "Flapjacks" Ghianni, July 14, 2024. May not be shared or reproduced without legal penalties.)
