On Mardi Gras, Fats Domino offers hope, pounding piano and friendship from a city I fell in love with when I killed Jesus in Lower 9th

The first time I was in New Orleans I killed Jesus.
That’s a long story.
Now whenever I think of that city, I think of Fats Domino.
Of course, the two incidents and the two main stars in my New Orleans dramas aren’t the same.
Fats helped invent rock ‘n’ roll.
Jesus, of course had plenty of other accomplishments, what with the water into wine and the other miracles of faith.
But I think the ignorant white trash who burned Beatles albums back in the 1960s call rock ‘n’ roll “the Devil’s music.”
Course it’s not the Devil’s music that came from my friend Fats down in New Orleans. It was equal parts tabernacle and temptation, boogie and bordello stomp, sung by a man with the voice only an angel could emulate. Or was he a devil in disguise?
Many have laid claim to “inventing” rock ‘n’ roll. Little Richard. Chuck Berry. Ike Turner. Sam Philips. Elvis never claimed he invented it, even after he was crowned king.
Carl Perkins’ role in the “invention” of the music is under-appreciated, at least in part because he was seriously injured early in his career, allowing Elvis to leap frog. And in another part because Carl was humble.
Well, Carl said that Fats was the one who kept the rock flame burning while all others extinguished. His flamboyant showmanship didn’t become a self-indulgent caricature. Instead, the Fat Man just kept on making music.
And, as for the Devil’s music, well in one of the interviews I’ve been fortunate enough to do over the years, Fats said he was “lucky” that songs like “I’m Walkin’” and “Blueberry Hill” and “Walkin’ to New Orleans” allowed him to make a good living while still allowing him to stay true to his gospel and family roots. Not just in spirit but by living in one section of town, he hoped, for his whole life.
“Nobody lives forever,” he told me once. “Stay as close as you can (to the teachings in the Bible). That’s the main thing.”
A bit of Fats on the CD player (for I still listen to music that way) I was thinking about the day I killed Jesus and about the great and humble rock pioneer Tuesday, Mardi Gras, so I picked up the phone to call Fats to wish him a happy Fat Tuesday. After all, if anyone should enjoy Fat Tuesday, it should be Fats Domino.
Fats lives not too far from the Lower Ninth Ward, where he lived with his family in a colorful compound virtually forever, until Katrina. In fact he never would have left if it hadn’t been for that disaster.
It was his home, his part of town.
People who had all but forgotten about him were reminded first when authorities said they thought Fats and his family were among those washed away, and then later when Coast Guard boats rescued the whole clan from the second floor of the house.
While cultural historians have helped to restore the old office of the man who took New Orleans funk to the people, it is still in a desolate and unfortunate part of the city. The surroundings show the disgrace of abandonment, of ignorance and neglect of those who have been in power since and before the Hurricane.
Now, back to the first part of this New Orleans love story. How did the guy who loves and has befriended Fats kill Jesus in New Orleans?
Well, first of all I was still a juvenile, so it can be forgiven this “sin” that took place in between a couple of hours of jump jiving gospel music, chicken and sweet potato pie at a church in the Lower Ninth.
I was there again as something of a rebel. While I was good about attending church, I was (and remain) a “non-joiner.” So, I didn’t participate in the youth group activities, other than the night The Byrds played in the teen nightclub in the church basement. Our own cellar full of noise, I suppose.
Oh sure, I was a good student. And I was a good usher in the early service, primarily because the offertory came pre-sermon. We could collect, go downstairs and count, put it in the safe and head to the kitchen for donuts and coffee.
Yes, sweet caffeine. So while they were upstairs singing the praises, I was double dunking and enjoying the fruits and bounty. My Sweet Lord indeed.
The problem was that, despite my misgivings, the youth minister wanted me involved. There was a choir trip coming up around Easter time and she wanted me to try out for a play that was going to be the centerpiece. I looked at the script for “Christ in the Concrete City.” I still have it around here someplace.
Basically, the stark play put Jesus in a modern environment. The four –person cast had multiple roles.
I was typecast from the outset: “Tim, I want you to play Judas, Pilate and the Roman soldier who nails Christ on the cross,” said the preacher.
OK. Other people got to play Peter, Paul and Mary or whatever. I get to be the combination of history’s greatest villains. Appealed to the side of me who enjoyed breaking noses in soccer games in p.e.
Course, if you see me, you’ll notice I had my share of busted noses as well. Two in football and probably two or three playing soccer. Pleased to meet you, I suppose. And we all shine on.
Anyway, I won’t bore you with details, as this really is about New Orleans, but the play was presented throughout the South, in urban, black churches. We stayed in those churches and enjoyed the best food they had to offer.
My favorite performance was in New Orleans, as a matter of fact. For when I came to the line where I actually nailed Christ to the cross (he wasn’t played by anyone… merely a holy air space we played around), my line was “Down goes the hammer!” and I was supposed to drive my right arm down, invisible hammer driving invisible spike into invisible savior’s hands and ankles.
Well, the church kneeling rail was right up next to where I was killing Jesus, and as my arm went down, I caught the underside of my forearm on the rail. It cut my shirt and arm. Blood came rolling down my arm. Peter, Paul and Mary came over to look at me and see if I was all right. It had been an awful sound after all. I don’t think I cursed.
“Just got some of Jesus’ blood on me. It splashed,” I adlibbed, quietly.
Play was almost over.
Anyway, that was in New Orleans. I’ve been back plenty of times, though seldom have killed the savior again.
I’ve been there when I slept in my car next to the Mississippi and spent another night sleeping in an all-night showing of “Live and Let Die” in one of those old theaters on Canal.
Been down there to cover sporting events, like Muhammad Ali and Leon Spinks’ prizefight in 1978.
Taken other business trips there and even have taken to enjoying family vacations there….. The last one, though, came about two weeks before Katrina.
I have no great claims on the city, other than that it is probably my favorite city in North America.
Of course it has had its problems, with violence and corruption. And it has been ignored. Many thousands who fled in the days after George W. Bush and the Corps of Engineers exercised due diligence in saving the city, have not returned.
Many more people died.
And now, much of the city remains in ruins.
So it cheers me to see that it is Mardi Gras and that the people down there are celebrating again. Of course the skin tone of celebrants is increasingly white, since large black sections of town were obliterated by the storm. Never to return.
Still it is Mardi Gras. The big blast before Lent.
So, I called Fats and asked what he’s been doing lately.
“Been playing a lot, you know, keeping fingers loose,” he said, with a laugh.
He also likes to watch TV, sleep and visit with his family and friends.
He’s got new songs he’d like to record, but, since he just turned 83, he may or may not have a chance.
Still he was glad to hear from me. “You call any old time,” he said.
“You going to party today, since it’s Mardi Gras?” I asked.
“Believe I’m just gonna lay down on my bed,” he said, again his soft laughter rising. “You call again, Tim. Anytime.”
On Mardi Gras, the great rock pioneer set down the phone in the city where I killed Jesus. And he went to bed.

Night of neon, Shel memories, smiling with squeezebox queen and savoring Don Kelley & Dave Roe while young cowboy dreams

The kid with the Brad Paisley Stetson caught up just as I stepped past the statue of Elvis on the sidewalk and kept going straight, glancing, as I usually do, up the hill at the Ryman and remembering when I used to sneak in the alley door into the Opry every week. “Man, they won’t run over both of us, I hope,” said the kid as he and I stepped --- with the little green-dude walk signals – in front of disobedient traffic and across Fifth Avenue. We both were bound uphill. He for the Masonic Lodge parking lot – where his band’s van was parked – and me to the old white Saab parked on Broadway in front of that monument. “Me and my band are playing at Cadillac Ranch and I gotta get the van with the instruments in it and pull down there for a minute,” said the kid. “We been playing together awhile. Mostly down in Alabama, but now we’re working hard to make it here,” said the kid. I stopped so I could turn to him and extend my hand, introducing myself. After all, he and I had just completed a death-defying act in the middle of lawless Nashville, where red lights are mere bothers. Stewart Halcomb laughed, easily, and met my firm handshake with his own. Sensing he might be a musician, though – although not just musicians wear cowboy hats on Lower Broad – I didn’t tighten the throttle on my hand-grip. I reserve a slightly softer shake for guys who use their hands to play guitars and for prizefighters. I remember one of the times I hung out with Muhammad Ali, he winched when I shook his hand. Course he’d spent the prior evening beating up Leon Spinks. All I’d done was write about it and hang out with Larry Holmes, Joe Frazier and the really pretty woman who’d stepped into the ring naked. The young cowboy and I began the gentle uphill stroll in front of the urban atrocity that is the convention center. If this one’s bad, what’s the next one gonna look like? Anyway, he went on to talk about the hard life he and his band mates in The Springs had chosen, but how they were chasing the dream that had lured so many country acts to Nashville over decades. Yep, Hank done it this way, after all, I shrugged. Stewart added that his band was still smoothing its edges and that, while there’s a CD out, I shouldn’t judge them by that. “We like to play live and we really don’t know yet how to record right,” said the affable kid, the leader and songwriter of a band that is aged 19-22 and that plays most nights down in Nashville’s Disney World. I call it “Nashville’s Disney World” because it’s not the Lower Broadway that I first fell in love with 40 years ago. Course I had dark hair and a less-firm grip on reality back then. This was going to be a town that I’d write about for life. The musicians, the dreamers, the whores. It was in a time when Roger Miller still could be found sipping coffee in an all-night diner and Shel Silverstein and Bobby Bare would stop to help a young guy rescue old bricks from a road that was being “resurfaced” to asphalt. I’ve told you about that. They even helped young guy load the bricks in the trunk of the ’65 Falcon. Same car took me all over the country for awhile. Spent a lot of time sleeping in it in the streets of New Orleans, San Francisco, San Antonio, Kerrville or next to it out at Joshua Tree. Course Wizard traveled with me. I wonder what happened to the Falcon after the engine blew? Sought out Wizard once on the internet a year or so ago and made contact. Realized then there was a plenty good reason we weren’t friends any more. No need to go into them here. Too many a--holes in the world would be offended. But then that’s a side story for another day. Right now, I’m talking about Stewart, the nice kid with the dream. He didn’t talk just about his dream, though. He asked about mine. Yes, I still have some, even though the booger-eating Ghadafis of Korporate Amerika tried to beat them out of me… but failed. Anyway, we talked about songwriting and people writing, about guitars and Tennessee Titans while we walked to our vehicles. I told him I’d hit his bar one night. I don’t drink nor do I ride mechanical (or even real-life) bulls anymore, but I’d like to see this kid. It’s nice when hope and optimism brighten a young guy’s face. I had gone to Lower Broadway as a part of a magazine assignment that has taken me to music venues all over the city in the last week or so. As I’m old and don’t drink beer, I tried to hit the places relatively early, before busy bartenders tired of offering up icy glasses of free water to the guy with the pony-tail and wearing a 25-year-old Bob Dylan concert T-shirt. That came from when he was touring with G.E. Smith. Horrible show, but I love Bob. I actually go to Lower Broad fairly frequently. Sometimes it’s just for a walk. Sometimes it’s to relive memories. Sometimes it’s simply to wonder where I been since the days when this was my turf. Back then it was sticky-floored peep shows and propositions from working women to join them “upstairs,” someplace above the row of neon buildings and souvenir shops that now offer up a G-rated version of Nashville for mass consumption by tourists and hockey fans. Before the city’s real flesh was covered by Chamber of Commerce boosters and the like, a cigarette smoking writer could easily jaywalk from the Wheel to Tootsie’s, as long as I didn’t trip across some stoned loser or Willie Nelson sprawled in the middle of the street. Tootsie’s back then was a favorite, because the Opry stars used to hang out upstairs, near the back door. I’d get there early enough to drink beer at the table next to Lefty, ET, Cash, Porter and even old Mooney. Now, of course, it’s different. City planners helped the once run-down area get “pasteurized.” Souvenir shops and Elvis statues. A huge hockey arena and a convention center. Family restaurants even. Wouldn’t have taken a family down here 40 years ago, I laughed as a group of Japanese smiled at me when I rubbed the nose of one of the Elvis statues. I wonder if anyone’s heard the news that Elvis actually was from Memphis? He just recorded here. His last few visits to Nashville, he stayed at the old Sheraton on Harding Place at Trousdale – about a mile from my house. What used to be a top-quality hotel and small convention center became a seedy Ramada before being torn down to make way for a CVS. “Nashville: Where there’s a church on every other corner. A CVS or a Walgreen’s is on the other.” A part of my mission the other night was to check out an old friend and his outfit. The Don Kelley Band is, for my money (freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose…) the best country cover band in a city overpopulated by country cover bands. But while guys like Stewart in the Springs are busy writing their own material and trying to bust into the bigs and outlive Luke the Drifter, Don is not following that dream. Decades ago he began playing at Robert’s, not singing his own songs but the songs made famous by ET, Cash, Waylon, Tom T., Willie, Marty, Roger and even Patsy. A good soul, he always surrounds himself with the best musicians, many of whom advance into the ranks of elite touring bands or session pickers. Don’s not that kind of guy. He likes a steady job, a good girlfriend, his house way north of the city and his motorcycle (although he tells me he’s getting too old to ride it). “I’m not a great singer,” Don will say. “But people kind of like what I do. I can do those Tubb and Cash songs pretty good.” His current lineup … or really, the lineup during my visit, because it has changed … was him on the bulk of the vocals and rhythm, JD Simo on lead guitar, Dave Roe on slap bass and vocals (have you ever heard a better version of “Pretty Woman” since Roy Orbison died?) and Artie Alinkoff on drums and vocals. It was among Roe’s last performances with the band. “I’m going to start having the weekends off,” he said, between sets, after he passed the tip jar around the house and sold and autorgraphed CDs “I like this job, but it’s every Wednesday through Saturday, 6:30 til 10 and it’s time I did some other things. I’m gonna freelance. Like you, Tim,” said Roe, who used to play slap bass with John R. Cash. I first met him back then. I told him he’d probably have more luck in the freelance world than I, as he’s a much better bass player. But it was good for the ego – and I admit I enjoy a nice stroking now and then (but that’s another story, too) – when Artie, Don and Dave all bragged from the stage about my writing. “You’re brilliant man,” said Artie. “Really cool.” Kindred spirits, I’m sure. They must toil hard to make a living out of tips and CD sales – I did buy a copy of their "best of" album. It’s not John Lennon or Johnny Cash. But it’s not supposed to be. It’s a great cover band singing other people’s songs. It makes me smile while I sit here and think. After a couple of sets, I had to move on. I was going to a bar in East Nashville, where my favorite squeezebox player and Earl Scruggs’ grandson were playing with Paul Burch. Great show there too, though the highlight for me was – again between sets – standing out in the cold and semi-dark of East Nashville and talking to that squeezebox player. Very few people try as hard to stay solemn when playing, only to bob their heads and smile like Jen Gunderman, who handles accordion and keyboards by night and teaches rock ‘n’ roll at Vanderbilt by day. “I used to think I needed to be, you know, a surly rocker chick,” she said. “But I really love playing. I’m so lucky.” I wound my way out of East Nashville, trying not to run over crack dealers and prostitutes on Main Street, and pondered the evening. Pretty enjoyable, thanks to the kid with the musical dream and the band that never stops and the squeezebox queen And that’s despite the fact I spent a good part of the evening in Nashville’s Disney World, the now brightly lighted section of town that’s featured on Chamber postcards and marketed on "Monday Night Football" and the like. Tootsie’s long ago was a treasure. Now it’s just a joint. And Tootsie herself is long dead. (I’ve paid my respects at her suitably simple and modest grave before, as she was an interesting woman.) Sure, I love this new Nashville, even though I can’t find an orange neon glow proclaiming “Possum Holler” – Jones’ old club – anywhere on the skyline. But I guess I’m a relic. I kind of liked it better when a guy could buy coffee and chat with Roger Miller, turn down the advances of the whores and scoot past the peep shows for fear of catching some sort of air-transmitted sexual disease before dodging into a club where Tom T. Hall was singing for beer and laughs with the house band. Shel Silverstein’s dead and Bobby Bare is now one of my  best friends.  And the bricks, well they got displaced during the storms of life. Still I felt energized, by the kid. Stewart Halcomb. I don’t have his CD yet, as I haven’t been to Walmart since that night. But after a life of writing about those who chase dreams, whether as musicians, athletes, women and men of the cloth or just plain old church janitors, I’ve often had to chronicle how those dreams fell short or ended tragically. Here’s a kid who says, with a lot of work, he’ll make it. And Nashville’s Disney World will have a brand new star. I had the urge to go back down to the strip on my way home, buy a pack of smokes and go back into the bars. Course I didn’t . First of all, I quit smoking 11 years ago. Besides that, I think smoking is illegal down there in Nashville’s Disney World. It’s just running red lights and almost killing old guys with pony-tails and young cowboy singers that’s still legal. As long as  you don't get caught.  

Savage murders of teenagers, memories of friends past and lost and the April 1 miracle battle with fear inside the ferocious MRI tube

Visions of two teenagers, savagely murdered, stung my brain as it was being magnetized and resonated and otherwise probed by kindly science wizards and their crypt-like device.
Perhaps those memories, which danced with other flashbacks good and bad, were set off by that MRI’s sounds, the incessant beeping, thudding, growling, crunching noise – robots dancing in the dark -- crushing my brainwaves. And what could I do?
The sounds surrounded me, as my head was locked dead-still in a device that seemed like a hockey goalie’s helmet. My only view was the top of the tube in which I was being tortured… or examined … just inches from where the tip of my nose would be had it not been smashed inside the goalie’s helmet.
I thought about those dead kids. But other things flooded my mind. I smiled when I thought about Charlie Chaplin in “Modern Times,” and the cacophony and confusion of the industrial revolution in that old B&W flick. Saw that movie in Dr. Perkins class at Iowa State University, circa 1971. “Damn near publishable in academic journals,” he wrote on my term paper that compared the movie “M*A*S*H” with the Marx Brothers’ “Duck Soup.” Did I ever tell you I met Groucho Marx? Another story, another show. What’s the secret woid?
After film class, I’d go take a steam and then allow myself to be the “dummy” – literally and figuratively -- that Olympic gold medal wrestler Dan Gable, then a workout chum, would toss around the mats. Nope, never beat Dan….
The dead teenagers came back to my mind briefly.
But then, as the magnets ripped into my brain, I was adrift in waterfalls of color, reminiscent of the night Smokin’ Joe and I went to see Leon Russell and the Shelter People after hitching from Ames to Iowa City. Freddie King was the opener. Watch out now…..
The fact that I kept thinking about Rodney Wayne Long and Kathy Jane Nishiyama, the two slaughtered teenagers, isn’t surprising. When my mind wanders, taking inventory of my life and where I been, those handsome faces often reappear.
As do the faces of friends, a diminishing list, either due to age, death or, far too often, corporate fear.
In a phone call not long before he killed himself in a lonely Coast Guard barracks in Alaska, Tony Durr, who really was among my truest friends – oh, he lied, but he loved as well -- told me this truth.
“Tim, if you can make it through life and look back and have enough real friends to fill up the fingers on one hand, you’re lucky,” or something like that. When he emptied the pharmaceutical bottle, I lost one finger, I guess.
Anyway, I couldn’t help thinking about friendship and dead teenagers … two topics which seem to coincide in my sometimes blood-spattered life … when I was in the MRI the other day. This was the most recent reminder of the summer that won’t go away, the summer of 2010, when I lost half my house to a flood and then, before it was even finished being rebuilt, was T-boned at an intersection.
For a day or so I stumbled around, like my closest pal, Champo, used to do back in his college days as dawns approached. He and his friend, Jocko “the hippy hippy shake” expert, had good times chasing windmills and damsels who would be in distress. Of course, I was and remain Champo, though you may call me Flapjacks.
Course, I don’t drink anymore, so the stumbles bothered me. I went to the doctor last July and he said “man, you have one effin’ bad concussion, Flap, old boy.”
I said “doctor, ain’t there nothing I can take?” But there wasn’t. Time heals all wounds, even badly concussed noggins.
It was checking up on the healing process all these months later that had me jammed into the MRI the other afternoon at one of our finer Nashville hospitals and legal drug dispensaries.
I am a claustrophobic, which may account for aspects of my life, the seemly and the less-so and my reactions to smothering authority of all stripes. The likes of Shotgun Dick, Korporate China (owners of the land of the free), George W. and “Big Mac” USA Newspaper Giant – all who/which think Amerikans should be happy with “special sauce” rather than substance … almost as bad as those who allow them to continue to run the country without question.
Hell, I get almost as angry when my basketball-playing pal the Big O says he’s going to cut the budget by taking away heating supplements for the indigent, allowing old people to freeze in order to please the likes of Mr. Bean or whatever that worthless Joker of the House calls himself. Doctor, doctor, ain’t there nothing I can take?
Claustrophobia in the little tube for a half-hour is only easy with eyes closed. But to keep the thought of where I am from turning me into someone resembling the mentally twisted who think it was good to get rid of Mubarak, but we ought to back up the crown prince/emperor/torturer of Bahrain… could it be oil? Black gold? Texas tea? … Well, the first thing you know, old Jed’s a billionaire…. And there’s blood on the sands.
But the bouncing magnetos kept bringing me back to the two teenagers. Murdered. Their deaths scarred me as I orchestrated coverage for the newspaper up in Clarksville. My boss at the time was Tony Durr, by the way.
Three decades have passed since Kathy Jane and Rodney Wayne were killed by the slugs who populate society’s darkest underside. I learned, first-hand about that underside.
So, the two dead teenagers often visit me when I’m just sitting there watching the wheels go round and round. Or, perchance, if I’m lying in a contraption that’s taking magnetic images of the brain of a man who has seen too much and forgotten too little.
Fortunately, the deaths also bring back images of my closest friendships, the News Brothers, a gang of hard-smoking journalists who, by fate, had to cover the two murders as they unfolded and were solved and tried at almost the same time.
Then, as I lay there, trapped in this chamber like some sort of Michael Jackson wannabe, the brain-crunchers not only squeezed my head but began lifting my fillings … nah, I made that up …. Just my ‘magination, runnin’ away with me.
Anyway, my thoughts about the dead teenagers led me to my thoughts about that April 1, 1982, when my co-conspirator, cops reporter Rob “Death” Dollar, co-founder of the News Brothers, and I dropped our pants in the newsroom while the whole building watched.
Well, at least that’s what everyone thought was going to happen that day in history.
The word had spread, Lord knows how …. that the two young men, the associate editor and the cops reporter, were going to bring their nighttime, do-anything-as-long-as-no-one-gets-hurt, frivolity to daytime. Were these boys ready for prime time?
In those days, the hundred-plus in the building believed that we, indeed, would do anything to perhaps take the edge off what had become more Korporate-style management. My pal Tony had disappeared to San Antonio (the scene of one of his many marriages and career stops before he killed himself), Max “the Silver Hammer” Moss – a damn nice guy and great editor -- was sort of shuffled off to a second-in-command role.
Korporate crackdown had brought a new tone, where an editor, whose introductory words to the staff included “reporters are a dime a dozen” would complain that “you boys need to cut your hair” (I didn’t, of course) and perhaps we should join the Chamber of Commerce. Nothing wrong with the Chamber, but when I was back there in journalism school, they put forth the proposition that you should never be a member of a civic organization if you are a journalist. Fear of conflicts of interest. Lots of publishers and editors are Rotary and Kiwanis presidents and Chamber board members these days.
All of these stories are told more in a book I’m trying to write. And, of course, the adventures of Flapjacks and Death are spoken of, softly, whenever unemployed journalists gather over canteens of white lightning in train yards and a toothless man with one leg blows on his harp while his blue-tick hound barks and the wind begins to howl.
Anyway, back to our story: The two News Brothers, it was said, were going to come into the newsroom at 2 p.m. (the official start of our workday) wearing only boxers with hearts on them.
I don’t know how the rumor started. Of course I do, as we had assistance. Still, people believed. Perhaps even hoped, that this would happen. Some wanted it to be the act that would lead us to the door. Others wanted to just be there to witness this strange chapter in the history of two good journalists who did anything they could to get the story.
And even more than anything to try to both celebrate and forget the two murdered teenagers.
Anyway, there’s more to it. But everyone from the Big Guy, our publisher, to the composing room crew to the ad department to the circulation and press room guys showed up at the precise hour, lining the newsroom, looking in the windows from the hallway.
Fully clothed in our high school letter jackets and jeans, Rob in a top hat and me wearing my yellow fedora, we just walked through the crowd, looked at those gathered, shrugged and lighted up our smokes. We sat down at the computers and began to write stories before looking up and saying “April Fools.”
I’d like to say the event ended this way, with a subtle dash of cool. But suddenly two friendly coppers burst into the newsroom with a warrant for my arrest on charges of, I believe, “failing to amuse the public.”
I was hauled off in handcuffs and all who gathered were stunned as the squad car whipped away from the curb.
Actually I hadn’t been in on that part of the gag. Rob had arranged for his friends in the department to come and “arrest me” as the clincher on the joke. (I was glad the gag didn’t include the one cop we liked who enjoyed back-shooting fleeing felons and singing “Happiness is a Warm Gun.” Again, another story.)
A few minutes later, after my release a half-block away, I strode back into the newsroom and saluted my comrade for getting the better of me.
And I waited. … for hours … for retribution …. You see, sometime in all the commotion I had stuck a “load” in one of his Kools….
So well into the evening, that cigarette exploded and my pal dropped from his chair.
We laughed. It had been a good day. For a few hours we had forgotten the faces of those dead teenagers.
Then we went back to work. Hoping the day would end so we could get to Camelot where the chief deputy would buy us drinks and spill his guts about crimes and about why he hated most journalists.
The only problem with having memories like these playing in your head while you are being scanned for brain damage is you wonder perhaps if the images will reflect years of wear and tear … and even show pictures of the dead teenagers.
The scans, surprisingly, showed I’m "normal." Doctor, ain’t there nothing I can take?

Champo and Jocko: A tale of friendship, chasing the devil in pink long johns and bunny ears and, surprisingly, reaching age of replacement parts

Four decades ago, when he stood on his head, among the shards of broken whiskey bottles that had been tossed against the wall, he probably never even thought he’d be at the point where he’d be getting a new hip.
When we slalomed down the steep hills at The Ledges, Jack Purcell’s or Chuck Taylor's for skis, coming precariously close to the edge of the bluff over the Des Moines River, I don’t imagine his hips even bothered him.
Of course when the floods came from the spring thaw, we couldn’t slalom any longer. We just would find the closest cliff from which to leap into the churning, angry brown water, enjoying our favorite compound or concoction … and drift away … bound from Boone to Des Moines in our boxers and Hanson House T-shirts.
I think it was around that time Nardholm discovered the top of a chimney, protruding from a burned-down log cabin, made a dandy outdoor toilet. A conspicuous throne, high above the woods.
But this isn’t about Nardholm, although I sure like that guy. I’ll call him a kid, as the last time I saw him he was a year younger than me. I understand he still is.
Nardholm, Titzy, Carpy, Capt. Kirk and before them Dennis Eggers, Schultzy, Jay-Dub, Hondo (aka Creamjeans) and Dogshit joined our adventures. Mule. I think even Wizard and Holtzy were involved sometimes. In fact, I may have ridden with them to Juarez, where I got lost in the rain when it was Christmastime too.
Occasionally Uncle Moose would join in, too, although he was mostly down on the farm in Red Oak, because his dad was dead and he needed to tend to the critters and the corn on weekends. Damn, though, he was a tough hombre when it came to full-speed, aerial chest-butting. Now he’s fighting cancer. That’s another story.
This one’s really about the reason I was in Juarez and why I was slaloming down hills in that altered state of Iowa.
For Jocko and Champo (me), life was not to be savored like fine wine but gobbled like a dozen 10-cent greaseburgers. After all, there was a war out there those days. And some day we were bound to grow up. Perhaps I still will.
Jocko did, though. Kind of.
While I’ve been a journalist and continued my allegiance to life’s sometimes tattered edges as well as The Beatles and Stones and international adoption, Jocko has been a successful inside salesman for a couple of companies, beginning with Rapid Roller, the Chicago company across the street from the bar where I watched the Cubs beat the Pirates in 23 innings one day.
He moved on to EverPak or something like that in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, decades ago, but we had mostly lost track of each other, life got in the way. There were reasons. But no use crying over spilt Mad Dog 20/20.
I sure wish I’d been there when his Granny died. She’s the one who made us some Bohemian Rhapsody fried chicken the morning or early afternoon when we reappeared after sleeping in a boat … don’t know whose, but it was handy up in Antioch, Ill., the summer or two before he got married.
And I wish I’d been able to turn to him when similar sadness and personal and professional disasters hit my life. But while we weren’t together, I know we always loved each other.
It was telling that when I took him to see 'Easy Rider' – I’d already seen it a half-dozen times – he came out imitating Jack Nicholson and I had memorized the Dennis Hopper lines.
Now he’s gotta get a new hip.
I’m worried as well as more aware of my own mortality. Fact is, I’m going in for an MRI this week to check out the after-effects of a wreck last summer on my still-concussed brain.
Who would have thought the two young men – Jocko and Champo -- who greeted countless dawns with parched eyeballs focusing on test patterns while waiting for the morning farm report or Howdy-Doody reruns -- would live long enough to wear out our body parts?
It’s not too surprising that death reunited us a few months ago. His ex-wife, Nola, who I remember as a beautiful, leggy pompon girl for the Iowa State Cyclones, died after a horrid battle with cancer.
I contacted Jocko to express my remorse and, in the process, help him laugh. I did, too, as we talked about how we prepared for the wedding ceremony all those years ago.
I was the best man and he was the groom, of course. By the time we got there, I guess it’s good Nola could tell us which was which. For some reason Jocko and I had arrived a bit, shall we say, dazed by the hours of preparations. Lotta stress, man.
During the laughter and tears of that telephone reunion, Jocko told me he was getting his hip replaced in the middle of February. So, as time has gone by, I’ve picked up the phone and called. He doesn’t answer. One trait we shared was that while we both ran with the devil – sometimes wearing pink long johns and bunny ears -- and generally made our friends laugh, we were highly private people, in a peculiarly public fashion, confidantes to each other and few outsiders.
I’ve been calling a few more times in recent days. He’s not answering. Why would you want to hear from people who are calling to make fun of you for being old?
But each time I dial, I think of the two of us, walking into parties, where people would instinctively put on that old Carly Simon song. Yes, we watched ourselves gavotte.
Hard-core scholars at Iowa State University, I remember Friday nights. Saturday nights. Usually Thursday nights were reserved for our favorite team sport. We called it “Rolling.”
With a simple hand-over-hand motion, I would signal the night adventures should begin. Pretty harmless adventures, at that. Beer occasionally played a part. By the way, Sundays were reserved for pizza crust soup -- my personal specialty -- and warm Van Merritt beer while watching Maverick reruns.
Heck, guys like Sly Stone and Dennis Wilson and Mike Love even played roles in our adventures. Too many tales to tell.
I was kind of the Rolling Team captain. This wasn’t an approved intercollegiate sport – Jocko couldn’t have participated if it was, as he was on a football scholarship. No. 63’s biggest accomplishment was breaking up a fight involving Tommy Nobis of LSU and some scurrilous Iowa State Cyclone back during the 1971 Sun Bowl, in El Paso.
I was proud ... and lucky … to see him perform so honorably. I had been released by the border guards in time to see the game. To this day, I can’t figure out why every time I crossed the border from Juarez into El Paso, I was detained by the guards. They always apologized afterward. But it did make the border crossing a hassle and kept me from getting to the Sun Bowl with much time to spare.
The fact I was toting a black velvet painting of Jimi Hendrix I bought for $2 in the market outside the donkey show joint slowed me down further.
Probably the greatest and still under-known anti-war protest ever staged at Iowa State came on the Sunday we were recruited to play Viet Cong for full-scale ROTC maneuvers. Seems a massive blizzard had kept the scheduled foes from making it from Iowa City (where the University of Iowa is located), so the top enlisted ROTC man on campus, “Admiral Bruns,” asked me if I could round up a few fellows to be the enemy.
I went two doors down, carrying a bottle of Gordon’s completely dry martinis, to hold under Jocko’s nose to stir him awake. Then we rounded up our comrades, a gang of reckless Cong, ready to die to train Uncle Sam’s next crop.
The maneuvers – observed for the record by real-life Army guys -- were and remain top-secret. Even 40 years later, all I can tell you is that if snowballs had been hand grenades, those gun-toting ROTC men were just so much body fluids and bones along the creek bed.
Sadly, some of those ROTC troops soon found out that the real Viet Cong had more than snowballs in store for them.
I salute and remember the snowy battle we waged and their final bayonet assault on our snow tunnel whenever I’m at the Wall in D.C. I remind their ghosts that I sang Beatles songs at them as they plunged their fake bayonets into my heart. I guess I should mention that the contingent of Cong that day dubbed themselves "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." I'll tell the rest of that story one day. It was wonderful to be there.
Here is where I should get more into the adventures of two young men who didn’t mind wearing tie-dyed underwear on their heads to impress the ladies.
But I’m getting tired. I mean I’m not young any more. My old running buddy’s getting a new hip tomorrow morning.
Soon, we can go slalom out at The Ledges again. At least in our dreams.

Life's lessons aren't always pleasant: A final conversation with a good newspaperman discarded after loyalty went unrewarded

A few months ago, as a way of expressing sorrow at the death of a former colleague, I wrote this blog. I didn’t post it at the time because I wasn’t sure it was appropriate. But today, as I sat in my basement, I decided that the fellow would have liked this. I will refer to him as “Kevin” in this dispatch. May he rest in peace and make sure St. Pete sticks to deadlines.

At the time, I wasn’t sure why I was meeting the former colleague.
It’s not that we’d been particularly close for some time.
And I feared that he was going to try to sell me one of his phone plans, as I‘d heard that was one of his enterprises since he was shooed out the door by the newspaper to which he had given his life.
I was aware that he had personal problems, at least one of them unfairly publicized. Nobody’s really mentioned that in all the wonderful things they’ve said about him in the days since he dropped dead of a heart attack. But we all have personal problems.
Those who know me best know I’ve confronted many a demon and have come out the better man on the other side for the most part. I “swapped” demon stories with Kristofferson once and I think even he was amazed.
So Kevin’s more recent problem certainly wasn’t something we’d talk about unless he asked for advice, which I didn’t anticipate to be the case.
I had no interest in it and I’m nonjudgmental unless you are preaching the virtues of bland, uninspired, bottom-line information sharing (I believe that is a form of what once was referred to as journalism) or if you shoot somebody more than once in the head and then gut him, sternum to scrotum. I’m not sure which of those types of people ranks lower in my esteem.
I viewed my departure -- from the newspaper that Kevin loved and lost -- as perhaps one of those innocent Iraqi civilians probably felt after a few hours of water boarding by some of my Green Beret friends. I’d embraced the freedom, despite the big question marks about the future. I knew I had to feed a family and pay bills. I no longer felt like I was suffocating beneath a tsunami of dishonesty and the back-stabbing disrespect of even people I thought had once been good journalists… friends even.
At least I got out with a modest buyout that enabled me to go about getting established as a freelance writer and a part-time college educator.
It was our difference in opinion as to our employer, or at least some of the people and policies, that perhaps drove me and the guy I’m calling “Kevin” here apart years ago. He was so loyal that he was blinded and eventually blindsided by that employer. I think that broke the heart that eventually ceased beating a week or so ago.
But one thing I always liked about Kevin was his interest in music, a passion of mine, and his love and depth of knowledge in some types of the art form that exceeded my own by a long ways. He also had an affinity for the work of Elvis’ original guitarist, Scotty Moore. And since Scotty had become a friend of mine over the years, that was one thing Kevin and I could discuss. I also was a friend of Bobby Thompson, Vassar Clements and Josh Graves, all of which I guess raised me in Kevin’s rankings.
It was his love of music that brought us back together, almost three years after we’d had any contact other than an occasional e-mail.
I’d read his blog about country music and sent him a note saying I enjoyed an entry. He responded with a request for coffee sometime.
OK. The last time I’d seen him, we weren’t necessarily friends. I was being held up as the poster boy of the kind of journalist no longer wanted. And I had politely, always, resisted what newspapering had become while I continued my refusal to partake in the back-stabbing and bending over that it apparently took to succeed any more. I may be right, I may be crazy… Actually, I guess there’s little doubt as to both of those qualities.
I’d been in newspapering for almost 35 years and if I had anything to show for it -- other than slow aches in my heart when I thought of some of the stories I covered, bodies and splattered brains seen, innocents and innocence lost -- it was that I could sleep at night, at least when the caffeine wore off. I tried to treat people fairly.
Kevin instead had chosen to embrace, for the most part, the newspaper. Now I’m not saying he was wrong. He had his motivations. And besides that, from where I sat, at least he had earned his spot on that up-elevator through hard work and misplaced loyalty.
And while I’m not sure if he fully bought into what had become of newspapers, he represented that hellish and heartless descent to me.
He also shaved off his beard, wore ties and pretty much excused or made excuses for the hierarchy. And once, when an otherwise good employee used profanity, in exasperation, in an e-mail about a story running late, Kevin exploded and said he was going to report that to the big shots. Let me be specific here: The big shots in this story are not the big shots, necessarily, still involved at the unnamed newspaper. They’ve either moved on, been farmed out or been decapitated while, out of corporate habit, bending over.
I knew Kevin was a better man than that and that he knew better. But he loved his job, for the most part. And that is to be admired.
I had loved my job sometimes during my life.
And he loved the newspaper. I wish I had that same love for the newspaper at which I was his colleague, but it didn’t deserve it. It did deserve loyalty from me while I was employed there, though. Loyalty and respect are not the same thing. But I would never bad-mouth an organization and still accept their paychecks.
Where in the past we could discuss things as more or less equals, he became, to me at least, the voice of rigid authority.
I do not like rigid authority. So, as is my nature, I rebelled in the only way I could. I did the right thing, at least as I perceived it, whether it bothered anyone or not.
I tried to work hard, earn my pay and as much as possible steer clear of the man who actually loved the newspaper that was losing its spine after long losing its soul. I do not back talk my bosses unless they are attacking someone I love or someone who is my charge. I must amend that to add that I do back talk my boss now and my son keeps telling me to quit sitting in my office cussing at the guy with long, white hair.
After the early years, in which I called him Kevin, I began to call him “Mr. (Insert last name here).” Sometimes I called him “Boss.” It was not said sarcastically. I just couldn’t call him Kevin any more, but as I was collecting a paycheck, he was one of the bosses and I did as I was told, at least most of the time, unless someone was going to get hurt. Or I had moral objections.
So, when I left my final shift in corporate journalism, I shook hands with Kevin, kind of like Jake saying goodbye to the prison guards while being released at Joliet.
The phone call from Kevin came about three or four months ago or so. I do keep a fairly busy (thankfully) schedule, so it was a month or so before we could get together.
He was going to be in my part of town after some sort of job-search seminar.
You see, perhaps two years after I left the newspaper, more or less on my terms, he had been escorted to the door. It was a part of a purge of many of the old hands, a talented and loyal bunch who’d invested their lives and hopes and dreams at that newspaper.
I much preferred my prior newspaper locales, but I actually had dreams at the newspaper where I worked with Kevin, too. Until one of the bosses, similarly put to pasture, told me my dreams and goals “didn’t matter.” I also had been told I was “too old.”
As for Kevin’s job loss, well, I’m not sure if his problems had anything to do with it. I doubt it. For all I could find out, it was a simple matter of streamlining, of cutting out the people with institutional knowledge in favor of the younger people who matched, more perfectly, the demographic. Upper middle-class white shoppers who like second-hand lace panties and Taylor Swift music seemed to be the target.
But even though I didn’t have a lot of affinity for Kevin at the time I heard he had been let go, I viewed what happened to him as a betrayal by his “family.” Here was a good man who had sacrificed, perhaps even bent over a little too much, because he believed in the ultimate product.
He believed in putting out a good newspaper with correctly written headlines and good attributions.
He believed in working hard to make sure that happened.
Yes, I regarded him as a corporate guy, but his elevator to the top already had begun its descent by the time I left. If he couldn’t see it coming, I could.
Still, he believed in the product. And he believed in treating people fairly.
Pretty good traits for a guy who I had come to regard, at least for a time, as just another corporate puke.
Well, there’s not a lot of sense in dwelling any longer on this.
When he and I met, it was over iced coffee at a local bread shop. We joked a little about the days we’d worked together.
Then he said “Tim, I think it’s probably my fault for the fact we somehow drifted apart. I did and said things, or maybe I didn’t say things when I should have. But I’m sorry. Really sorry.”
That’s really all it took. It’s not like he was the epitome of what had happened to my beloved newspaper industry. It was just a guy who said he had made some bad choices. Heck, I’ve done that myself.
And I really felt badly that he had been betrayed by something he believed in.
So we finished out the long afternoon drinking iced coffee and talking about Scotty Moore.

Retired fireman Neil Starke, 90, offers words of encouragement and kindness from the North Woods while vile cretins fan flames of hate

Neil Starke has no idea how much it mattered to this cynical and sometimes sour soul that he wrote that note.
Constant blood-drenched, hate-filled news reports have me mentally replaying the too many times when I have seen bodies on the ground, bullets in the head.
Or bodies of young women I knew burned up in a car, the only thing that didn’t turn to black ash was a Bible.
Or a teenage murder victim in a casket while a mom who remains my friend, these almost three decades later, wails so hard my heart still hurts to think of it.
The day the Klan protested the newspaper I worked at and I had to interview the puss-filled venomous Imperial Lizard or whatever.
Or picking up a phone at 4:30 a.m. and hearing James Earl Ray, calling from Brushy Mountain Pen, wanting to talk with one of my reporters. “Charlie’s not in yet, you ignorant, murderous asshole…” I’d say. Or at least think. It was 13 hours until I’d be home and be able to wash away the filthy leavings of speaking with this vile slug. I think of those frequent, not-brief-enough conversations with Dr. King’s killer often, even more frequently as the day that honors the preacher who changed the world approaches.
We Shall Overcome?
Maybe. The hate in our country flared up in Tucson the other day. Pure horror. The fruit of a country teetering on hate’s brink where people believe they have the constitutional right to violently disagree.
A land ruled, apparently, by the spiteful, soulless principles of Beck, Limbaugh on one side and the increasingly irrelevant posings of Olbermann on the other.
I got nasty habits. Take tea at 3, but I don’t watch that crap. Why does anyone? Perhaps because they need to know how to think?
The hate is growing in this country where a future wannabe president espouses the targeting of certain states and congressional districts – like Gabby’s in Arizona – for “takeover.” Of course, Sarah says it’s the media’s fault.
Perhaps, in most fetid fashion. Because “the media” nowadays is not the media of the Huntley-Brinkley-Cronkite-Sevareid bunch or the many fine newspaper reporters. Remember newspapers? Used to be the source of information rather than maps and diagrams and internet links to bra sales.
Guys like Seigenthaler, Battle, Russell – and, I flatter myself, Ghianni -- staked their reputations on what was in newspapers.
Of course that was before editors began having their reporters “tweet” at their readers (or is that twit on their readers?) to make flimsy publications lively. Before shopping for shoes, finding the best price on third-hand edible underpants, the best worm-free sushi and viewing Nicole Kidman’s breasts became the morning’s dose of “reality” delivered in a plastic sack.
OK. Gone off track again. But back to the subject of dumb twits (or words that rhyme), return with me now to the thrilling paragraphs above and the discussion of the gun-toting moll of hate and division whose very white followers and her own ghost writers want to take back this country from the likes of you and me. Yes, I thought this land was my land… Not anymore, eh, Chico?
Oh yeah, I’m white enough. But, you know, I’m no WASP. Too many vowels in the wrong places. (Talk about wrong places, let me tell you where I’ve been in my life and what I did there. Nah, not today.)
I used to think the followers of the shotgun-toting reality star and John McCain’s gift to America were restricted to WWII veterans, the so-called Greatest Generation that as they enter the doddering years have turned out to be the Gang that Can’t Think Straight. A deadly mob of faltering heroes in stained trousers, pulled up over their bellies, who wear flag lapel pins and believe this woman is “smart.” (I actually believe it’s a hankering for the return to their testosterone-fueled days of five-day passes to Tokyo bath houses and Brussels brothels.) She would have been a hot commodity in those joints. Right at home, too.
Anyway, I felt horrible last week when I heard the news about the shootings in Tucson. But I felt more horrible that it didn’t overly hit me in the gut.
Sad, sure. Vile. For sure. A product of the hate in our land fueled and fanned by the few who are ruining what the country was supposed to stand for. Remember that old “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave” thing? Don’t you think that 9-year-old girl had a right to grow up and flourish in this country?
But then again, what about the boys and girls, perhaps twice her age, who occupy those caskets that roll down the cargo belt at Dover AFB? Give Peace A Chance? Yeah. Sure.
Another story, of course. But dead is dead. A bullet to the head is just as deadly when fired by some wacko in the wild, wild (radical right) west as it is when coming from the rifles of Osama’s Pakistani pals.
Anyway, I lament the fact that the news out of Arizona didn’t bother me so much. It has come to seem almost routine in this cruel divided and divisive land.
Of course, my own senses are somewhat numbed because of a life spent as a newspaperman. Before the corporate slaughter, I may have been the last one left… I don’t know.
In my life, there are faces and places I remember. Rapists. Murderers. Burned corpses. Plane crash victims. I’ve been to the field where bodies lay. The killing fields.
One of my reporters once wrote a story about how a murder victim was skinned. Another story revolved around the sexual assault and murder of a young woman … and the tools for the assault and the murder were, respectively, a wooden mixing spoon and a steak knife.
I’ve stepped, or so I was told by police, on the brains of a wreck victim at 3 a.m. on the bypass. Which bypass? Doesn’t matter. The bypass from life?
I have held the moms of teenagers who lost their lives senselessly. I’ve described the scattered bones of a beautiful high school junior as they were dragged out of the woods by blue-tick hounds.
And these things don’t turn me cold. But they make me put up a barrier, a way of dealing with calamity as only newspeople (remember them?) do. Perhaps there was laughter when the exploding cigarettes filled the newsroom with smoke and noise. But there were tears later, over a long, deep breath of nicotine while watching the bats converge back into the downtown church steeples.
And I’ve written before about my personal mood of late. And it’s not that good.
The economy.
“Friends” who don’t come through when I need a pal or a plate of eggs.
Wars that I abhor and don’t understand. Big O: please explain this “floating” promise to bring the troops home.
The “holiday” experience of my friend Rob Dollar’s 4-year-old great-nephew who was hospitalized for ear infections and for a time was in dire straits (the condition, not the Knopfler band).
The cancerous bladder and kidney of an older fellow (yes there are some older fellows left) I like to joke with when they occasionally find me in church. I’m easy to spot: the nice old man with the pony-tail and the Jerry Garcia necktie.
The fact that some kids are mean to my own kids, partly, I believe, because my children came from Romanian orphanages where the closest thing to silver spoons were the fingers with which they ate their nasty, slushy meals.
The list goes on. I was reading a book recently where a guy I admire described one of the worst events in his life that occurred when he fell off a tree while vacationing in Tahiti. He suffered a concussion and other injured-noggin woes.
Hell, I can’t get to Tahiti. I’m still suffering from the concussion and related noggin woes caused by the famous T-bone a mile from the place I like to call home.
All of this leads up to why I’m so glad (I’m glad, I’m glad, I’m glad) I have made a friend in the Northern Woods, a 90-year-old retired fire investigator named Neil C. Starke. Remember him? He was at the top of this story.
One of my regular delights each year is to write a story for a well-regarded national magazine about the kindness of people who, through simple, heart-driven acts, help others. We’re not talking about lung transplants here, but simple random acts of kindness.
Folks nominate others and then I track down those who did a kindness. It is heartening. Here is part of the tale that I wrote about Mr. Starke:
When the phone rings at the 90-year-old retired fire captain’s house in rural Wisconsin, Neil C Starke answers, smiles and, when he hangs up, counts his blessings.
“I have several neighbors living within three miles of my home. Every day I get a call asking some question of me or telling me about something or someone.
“They’ll ask things like ‘what did you have for breakfast?’ Or they’ll call when they are on their way to work to say ‘Just wanting to make sure you didn’t oversleep.’ ”
Starke, who worked for 34 years as the captain in charge of the Oshkosh Fire Prevention Bureau, began getting these calls not long after his wife of 57 years, Gladys, died in 2002.
He says Randy and Becky Gramse and Jon Barthel, are the ones who most frequently call his house that’s 12 miles outside Wautoma.
Starke, who spends some of his free time trying to lift the spirits of area nursing home residents, can’t overstate how important those calls are and that he even looks forward to them.
Without saying so, he knows what they are really doing is checking up on him, making sure he’s OK. But since he’s an independent sort, they don’t want to put it in those terms.
Course, he’d be disappointed if he didn’t get those calls now.
“I think they know I’m onto them now,” he says, as he prepares to sample a bit of the strawberry pie brought over by Donna Goldsmith, another neighbor.
“You can’t imagine how good I got it,” he says. “People are always talking about how good heaven is. I feel like I’ve had a little heaven here on earth.”
The editors, top-notch pros, cut some of that out for the magazine – I always write long, as you likely notice today --but they left the heart of it in.
And when the edition of the American Profile magazine came out, I was asked to send e-mails, including the link to the story, to the seven different subjects of the acts of kindness to make sure they’d seen the magazine.
Problem is, of course, most 90-year-old retired firemen living in the deep woods don’t spend a lot of time on the internet.
So I called Mr. Starke (pronounced “Starkee,” kind of like Richard).
During the course of the half-hour that followed, we talked about many things. I told him about my family and my dreams. He talked about his most recent visits to the nursing homes, to cheer the old people. He talked about the dreams he already had fulfilled.
He had remembered I had just had a car wreck before our last conversation. He asked about that and the flood.
And we talked about the Wisconsin Badgers – one of the players, I can’t remember which – began as a pee wee player on the firefighter-sponsored team in Oshkosh and Mr. Starke used to go to all the games.
I told him I was pulling for his Packers this year. And also described my own ramblings across Wisconsin, either to baseball games in Milwaukee when Henry Aaron played there or to football camp in Eagle River or cruising through the Dells with my mom and dad and my big brother, Eric. (He is much nicer than I am in general -- even if the girls always liked me better, for good reason.)
I smiled so hard during our conversation that my dimples, which disappeared in recent weeks due to frustration, deepened and ached.
I told Mr. Starke that I wished he was 10 minutes away instead of 10 hours. I’d be over for a piece of pie and a cup of coffee.
He told me the same, adding that the fact I wrote about him in a national magazine was the highlight of his year, among the highlights of his life. People from all over the country who had forgotten about him as their lives progressed, had read the story and called.
“You made my 90th year,” he said.
“You made my 59th, Mr. Starke,” I said.
“Neil,” he said. “My name to you is Neil. Mr. Starke was my dad.”
A few days later, a note arrived in the mail.
It included the letter he put in his annual Christmas card that listed among his year’s highlights the phone call he got from a nice young man at a magazine and his hopes that a story would appear soon.
He had forgotten my name at that point. And when he saw the story, after he began getting the calls, he wondered how to get in touch with me.
And then, in the handwriting of an older, established citizen, he wrote an addendum on that Christmas letter:
Dear Tim,
Your call was answer for what I was searching for. How to contact you and express my thanks.
The Lord provides all for me. It was a pleasure visiting with you.
Again thanks, Neil.
It was my pleasure. Thank you, Neil, for allowing me into your life and reminding me that most people -- despite the hate and rhetoric and handguns -- are, indeed, good.

Skipper and Rick Nelson help me say farewell to a difficult year that was no 'Garden Party'

I don’t think there are any pictures left of the New Year when my old friend, Skipper, appeared as both the Baby New Year 1983 and Father Time.
Nor do I have pictures of the last meaningful night I spent with Skipper. It, too, was a New Year’s Eve, but it was the end of 1985.
Ricky Nelson’s “Travelin’ Man” was playing on the radio in Skipper’s Royal York Hotel apartment/room as we packed.
The great and under-appreciated rock singer – who has been bestowed posthumous News Brothers honors largely because of my memory of that night and the 80-plus-year-old man I was helping – had just died that day in a plane crash. (In his final show, Dec. 30, in Alabama, Rick and the Stone Canyon Band ended with Buddy Holly’s “Rave On.” As he left the stage, he hollered to the crowd: “Rave on for me!” – a plenty good “final words” sentiment to earn New Brothers status.)
On that New Year’s Eve, Skipper was going to move out of his room and, eventually, into the first of many nursing homes he’d occupy until he died and donated his gnarled body to medical science.
He’d been keeping the room in the Royal York for the better part of the last two years without ever really living in it. He’d been staying with his wife, Rose or Onion or Jasmine, some such name, out in the Clarksville, Tenn., projects. I called her “Mrs. Skipper.” Nice woman.
When they married, she kept her apartment and he stayed at the old hotel. He would usually go see her on Saturday nights and stay until after Sunday dinner. That was about all the domestic bliss he could stand, I think. Her too, I imagine. I think it also had something to do with her having approval to only have a single person living in the cramped government flat.
It also was easy for him to walk to and from docs and the pharmacy at the Royal York. And besides that, the damned old flop had the aroma of busted dreams and stale testosterone … or was that rotting flesh? … from all the old guys who lived there.
Anyway, as countdown continues on this year -- and I will be glad when it’s done -- I stop to remember Skipper. Oh, the old arthritis gnarled former Merchant Marine and carny -- who claimed to have served spaghetti to Al Capone and to have witnessed the attack on Pearl Harbor from his apartment terrace -- has been a part of many adventures.
There were times when the News Brothers needed an old salt to take with them to Camelot, where cops could be plied for information over drinks and then began buying drinks for us so we’d keep them company. Skipper sometimes was there with us when we got plenty of good news stories from loose-lipped lawmen.
We’d get off at maybe 1 in the morning and go get him. Call a half-hour before. Usually we’d make these arrangements a day or two in advance so he could rest up for what would be a 3 a.m. or later night. I remember he always had his black wingtips glistening for those forays into the night.
Anyway, this is supposed to be about New Year’s. Not much really to say about the Father Time/Baby New Year photos, other than that they likely provided a lot of good cheer for people in Clarksville who had come to look up to Skipper as something of a celebrity after I had the good fortune of becoming his friend and writing about him occasionally. Perhaps he felt he too had the good fortune of meeting me and my buddy, Rob “Death” Dollar. But the pleasure was mine. I loved the little guy. I still miss him all these years after that final donation to medical science, that strange fraternity where docs and insurance co-ops play dice to see who gets the most money out of Americans. Snake-eyes for me.
Back to Skipper.
Sometimes, if I was going out in pursuit of a column or just going for a ride, I’d pull my old Duster with its bad brakes to the front of the hotel and ask him to hop in. Took him to Guthrie, Ky., to meet Reuben Toliver, preacher and barbecue king. Drove out to the Mennonite bakery for donuts and apple pie.
Took him down to the river where he and my pal, Rob, and I liked to skip rocks. We called him Skipper because he had been an old salt and he was covered with tattoos of naked women and snakes. Actually, age had distorted those tattoos. They could have been pictures of all the dead presidents for all I could tell.
But I’ll tell you, if you ever bet on rock skipping – and there are few people who ever have – Skipper earned his nickname name.
Little fellow, probably 4-10, could flat-out SKIP those rocks, particularly if we took him to the shallows of the Red River, over near Port Royal. If he wasn’t wearing his teeth, he’d tease us with the Andy Griffith theme.
The wagers were usually small, a pack of menthols or a pot of coffee. Sometimes it would be eggs over-easy from Raissa’s café, in the lower level of the Royal York.
When I made mistakes in life, and I have been known to do just that, Skipper was usually the first one to console me: “It’s too damn bad. But I knew you shouldn’t do that in the first place. Just didn’t think I was the one who should say that. We all need to make our own mistakes.”
Talk about a shoulder to cry on.
Anyway, I’ll write more about Skipper some other day if I haven’t already. But on the last meaningful day with him -- for he was going to share a room with his wife, Rosie or Pearline or whatever her name was -- at the nursing home once they cleared out a corpse or two – I took my dinner break and shuffled through the light snow from the newspaper building in downtown Clarksville to the hotel.
A life in four small boxes. He had a little black-and-white TV with tinfoil subbing for rabbit ears that he used to watch baseball and Matt Dillon and Death Valley Days reruns.
He had seven pair of socks and seven white T-shirts, for that’s what he wore most of the time. He had two pair of well-pressed trousers, including the ones he was wearing. He had sweaters he wore over the T-shirts in the winter. He had an old pea-coat Rob and I bought him at the Mustard Seed. One blue Hawaiian shirt.
He had a stack of Zane Grey westerns as well as a copy of Ginsberg’s “Howl” he liked to read out loud. He said he met Ginsberg and Kerouac at City Lights out in San Francisco when he was working out of that port. Truth? Didn’t matter. Ever. Just the love.
Skipper had a few other things, like a few News Brothers pictures, including the ones from the New Year’s paper of a couple years before. A yellow alarm-clock radio played Ricky Nelson songs while we packed and talked.
We hauled the boxes down and into the elevator and out to a car, where a kindly fellow was picking him up to run out to Opal’s place for the night. The nursing home check-in would come first of the week, contingent on the right combination of people dying.
“This will be it, Tim, son,” Skipper said, as he hugged me. “Won’t ever be the same again.”
And it wasn’t, although I admit there was the one time Rob and I borrowed Skipper from the nursing home, without permission, and took him back down to Camelot. One last ride to beat the devil.
Anyway, I think of Skipper today because he was like the grandfathers who had long since died. He was full of tales, both tall and short. He doubtless stretched the truth, if there was any to begin with. For all I know his worldy adventures of warring and whoring and praying to outrun the devil occurred in his head while he spent his whole life in the hotel. Didn’t matter to me one way or the other. I believed him. Sometimes you gotta believe in something. Or serve somebody.
But he loved the News Brothers, particularly me and Rob, because we loved him. No question about it. In fact, when I moved from Clarksville a few years later, I made one last stop.
I visited his final nursing home destination, and rolled him out into the common area, where we smoked and tears streamed.
“This is goodbye, Tim,” he said, or words similar. “Thanks for being my friend. Now you go out and have a good life.”
And it has been. Skipper is long dead. But he’s with me always, like so many of the great and warm-hearted people who have shared my life.
I am just thinking of him today because the New Year’s Eves with Skipper were some of my life’s best. They weren’t wild celebrations of parched-eye extremes and “how’d I get here?” awakenings.
I guess I’m thinking of those New Year’s Eves with Skipper to cheer me, because 2010 has been the worst year of my life.
Oh, there were more traumatic years, with the deaths of loved ones.
But from start to finish, this was a year of horror and despair. If it wasn’t for my memories of Skipper, my long-time friendship with Rob, who would listen to me rant, the kindness of my old managing editor Tony Kessler (perhaps the nicest bald distance runner and hockey dad you’ll ever meet), the loyalty of the musician (and sometimes reporter) Peter Cooper and my family, I don’t know if I could take it. Oh yeah, bless the rest of the News Brothers and a few special Facebook confidantes, for they have done me more good than they know.
There actually have been many who have expressed concern and kindness, so I don’t want to run a list of names. They know who they are. The ones who really didn’t and don’t care know who they are as well. And they have their reason.
And, thanks to this social media crap – and I am a believer and avid user – I was reacquainted with my old college running mates.
Captain Kirk, the Vietnam Navy veteran who played professional softball and hustled pool to pay his way through Iowa State, has been with me in almost daily dispatches since we “rediscovered” each other. Cappy almost got me killed when he hustled a heroin dealer one night after I had served as the set-up guy at the pool table. I think that incident occurred at the bar where mentally challenged twins – back then we called them retarded, with no ill intended – wore cowboy hats, plucked on Gibsons and sang Hank Williams songs every Tuesday night.
Carpy, the famous veterinarian who shared some college adventures, is now practicing in Southern California where he has perfected the art of running long distance races while neutering prairie dogs. He’s a good guy. Although I think of him as a good kid, as he was and I suppose still is, four years younger than me.
And Jocko, well, he’s Jocko. Killing animals, drinking beer and laughing during our phone conversations while he relaxes in the farm country of Iowa. His ex-wife, and I was their best man, died this year. I let time get in the way of saying goodbye. You can read about these people and more by going back through my blogs of this horrid year.
It’s been a year in which I felt like my old friend Muhammad Ali, in his later years. Didn’t matter which way I turned: I was getting clubbed, figuratively and literally, by luck, by the economy, by friends who really weren’t and have subsequently lost that title for good by simply not caring. (Note: You can crap on me a few times, but if you crap on my family when they need help, you are scratched from the list permanently. Dead to me). Other uppercuts and low blows came from the whims and rages of nature and by a Scion that ran a red light and left me still concussed.
And then there is the fact I’ve been underemployed and fighting for pennies in a cruel economy. There are the Bulls and the Bears. And then there is this economy, which could be described by what bears do in the woods.
So, in a random manner, let me start by saying that the first part of the year was OK. Oh, I’d lost another part-time contract job, but that wasn’t new. The economy is that way. And I’ve been fortunate enough to find other jobs, thanks to people I respect and who apparently respect me.
Then came May 1-2, 2010, the days that changed my attitude about people and nature and along the way came to despise the Corps of Engineers (“hey, if we just go home and sleep, maybe this flood won’t happen, so we don’t need to monitor the dams,” is the way it seems to have occurred.)
Anyway, my little house is far from the dams. But the weather guys said that 24 inches of rain fell in the 36 hours or so in my neighborhood. When they showed the instant maps of neighborhoods on TV, you could almost see me and my family bailing out the house.
Of course I wasn’t alone. And though the total repair and replace cost was insurmountable, we were able to get back into something of a lifestyle relatively quickly. It was a lifestyle cluttered by piles of books and CDs and albums jammed into every available space in the upstairs of the house.
You may have read it before. Here’s a brief summary of the events.
“Dad, I’ll get the records first!” said my daughter, Emily, as she sloshed through the rising water in the basement – which actually was the living room, my office, library and the music room as well as utility room and garage – and grabbed armloads.
She is my daughter, damn the Romanian passport and parliamentary adoption decree, and she wisely started out with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones as she began clearing the shelves. Next came Dylan, Cash, the Dead, Neil Young, Tom Petty, Kristofferson. Hell, by the time she was done, we’d even rescued Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. Met Herb once when he came to Nashville. Good guy.
That was just the vinyl. I didn’t raise stupid children. I mean, they may not always be perfect, but they know their old dad -- a very old man – loves his vinyl albums.
The CDs and then the books followed, with an assembly line rescue that began with Emily and then went to me, to Joe and to Suzanne before settling in on the main floor of our home.
I didn’t even lose many. I mean there may have been a random Los Lonely Boys or Tracy Lawrence CD that got too wet to salvage, but most recordings – I keep about everything, as evidenced by the fact I still had Tracy and Los Lonely Boys to lose when the water rose – were OK. There were a few hundred cassette tapes that got water-logged and tossed.
The books came next. A few had to be thrown out, soaking wet. But those that survived were carried upstairs and stacked around the living room, where peculiar combinations like Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” rested atop a copy of the Associated Press Stylebook, the Bible and the Qu’ran or Koran…. I should probably look in the stylebook for preferred spelling.
I could continue to tell you about the flood, about how I coped with it by writing nightly blogs that included my own regular basketball adventures with The Big O while Bob Dylan and Magic Johnson watched.
Or I could talk about the huge pile of furniture and floor, carpet and drywall and appliances that had to be torn out and left in the driveway. The whole basement had to be gutted, as the water wicked up the drywall.
I could talk about the limp-handed insurance company that tried to sell me flood insurance, after collecting premiums for 20 years and declining to help at all in my family’s recovery.
And then there’s the great work of FEMA and how it has restored my “faith” in government.
Yeah, Uncle Sam: Thanks for the $400 or whatever I was allowed to pay for the lost clothes dryer. Surprised you could spare that much to help me when you are busy killing civilians in foreign lands. I think you could have spared one burst of ammo into an empty building and helped me more than that.
But I’m OK. I do understand, though, the bitterness of the real and still homeless and hopeless flood victims. Every time the Big O’s boys make an air strike on civilian populations in Pakistan, that’s several million dollars less for the good of the country itself. Oh well, at least you haven’t declared “Mission Accomplished,” Big O. And you may not like country music, but could you please help Nashville? There are rows of homes in North Nashville and Bellevue that are still unoccupied. I’m OK, though I could likely fuel many fires with the amount of paperwork I had to file in quintuplicate in order for each appropriate official to have copies on which to stamp “No.”
Ahh, but that’s enough about the flood. I’ve tried to move past it. Well, actually I was forcibly moved past it by a dozen feet or so when a car ran a red light at full speed and T-boned me as I was making a pleasant little turn on the green arrow after returning some flood recovery rental merchandise to the Home Depot on July 4.
My car was totaled and I’m still suffering from the after-effects of the bad concussion. Almost no money changed hands so far thanks to the diligence of the insurance industry.
Dizzy, bad headaches and sudden bursts of anger at the establishment are some of the symptoms. Well, those angry bursts were part of the deal before the year I hate took place. You gotta serve somebody.
I could go on, but it would bore you. Also, I’d prefer you read my blogs. For example, I could have easily lived with the physical destruction of the flood and even the wreck if it hadn’t been for the fact my cat, Pal, died.
Yes, I’d rather have the one little cat than all of the material stuff that I lost.
Oh he was old and he had cancer and he had earned the right to die. But I held onto him as he went on. The only good thing about the flood is that his litter box had been moved from the old former basement/utility roof to my bedroom during the course of repairs.
Pal didn’t have to struggle downstairs in his last few months. And he could easily get onto the bed and talk to me.
Damn, though. I wasn’t ready for him to die. I don’t want any more pets. They break your heart.
I have to admit that I was far better off than many of you out there who had to deal with the flood. At least I could get to the upstairs, where the kitchen and bathrooms and bedrooms are. And my family was safe.
I didn’t need help. I’m OK. But there are so many who did and do. I’ve been wondering when they are going to get some of the bucks from the fund-raising concerts.… I mean, how much did anybody get from shows put on by good-hearted souls Vince Gill, Keith Urban and Garth Brooks? I don’t know anybody who got any help to speak of. I’m sure there are happy stories out there. But no one has told them to me. I guess the people who could afford to pay the scalpers’ prices of $500-$1,000 for the $25 Urban and Garth shows have plenty to be happy about.
People, my family included, learned that the only aid we can rely upon lives inside our four walls. It’s a wonderful life if you have family to depend on.
But I am lucky as I face down this horrid year. I do have a loyal family and friends. And I do have my pride and my honesty and my ethics.
I am sure the next year will be better for a lot of us.
I don’t fool myself that the war will be over and that cancer will be cured.
I do not believe that the Big O and the vile bastards of Congress will go dancing hand-in-hand through the Rose Garden for the good of the American people.
I do believe, however, that the good guys will win, eventually. And, as my long time friends know, I am a good guy. I befriended both John Glenn and the Lone Ranger. John Wooden thought of me as a grandson. John R. Cash liked me enough to give me his final interview slot, except he died before he made it home from the hospital.
No, I’m not perfect. Skipper would tell you that.
But I’m pretty damned proud to have made it through this year -- and the almost six decades before -- by staying true to principles that would have held back so many korporate ass-kissers from reaching their levels of success in journalism, my profession, and elsewhere. At least I can sleep at night.
I always kidded Skipper that he reminded me of “Popeye,” you know the sailor man who ate spinach and hollered “I yam what I yam.” Me too.
So, as this year of the damned passes, I think again about that New Year’s Eve when I loaded up Skipper’s belongings in his Royal York Hotel room.
Rick Nelson’s hour of death tribute was in full force on the radio. And the deejay – it may even have been Jimmy in the Morning working a late shift -- cued up “Garden Party” with the line:
“But it's all right now, I learned my lesson well.
You see, you can't please everyone, so you got to please yourself….”
I smiled, unplugged the radio and helped my old friend down to the car that was going to haul him toward eternity.