"Flash" is disappointed, I'm drinking Diet Mountain Dew, missing anti-demented "Chuckles" and singing "CHICO and The Monkey Man"

 I finally got the top off the 20-ounce bottle of Diet Mountain Dew this morning.

It and the Ritz peanut butter crackers that it is washing down my throat for a healthy breakfast combo was supposed to be my weekly “contraband” snack that I sneak into Jerry “Chuckles” Manley in the Memory Care Ward.

I’m not a Mountain Dew – Diet or full-bodied – connoisseur.  But I’d already drained my morning pot of coffee while thinking about the sight of poor Milford/Bob curled up on Jerry’s bed, sleeping soundly. Probably glad he didn’t have to watch his back in the event of another roommate assault, as I surmised later.

Jerry wasn’t in the other bed – I don’t think he’d ever use Bob’s bed or chair – and I relive that grim realization today, as I sip on the Diet Mountain Dew. It was meant for Jerry, of course. I always bring him soda and a couple of packs of Ritz peanut butter crackers, which he lustily eats and drains as I sit with him, searching for words that might jiggle his brain out of neutral.

I’m pretty much done with the Ritz peanut butter crackers that tasted so good for breakfast that I had one more for dessert. If I ever see Jerry again, I’ll buy him some more.  If….if….

My long-time friend Jim “Flash News Brother” Lindgren, one of the four originals of our fraternity and a kind fellow who still worships at the skewed altar of a man we know and love as “Flapjacks (just kidding, he may be a Lutheran, and they don’t like pancakes) – had been worried, and he and his daughter, Jayne, drove down from Indianapolis.

"Flapjacks" and "Flash" get a preacher to snap their picture while Milford/Bob sleeps on "Chuckles''' bed.

He had two aims. He wanted to see Jerry, or the man masquerading behind a blank stare as Jerry, for himself.

And, just as much he was checking on me – I believe my lonesome ramblings and twisted wit about my visits to the Memory Care Ward, which has been Jerry’s “home” for three-quarters of a year – had troubled him.

Since I’ve been going at least once a week, occasionally twice if I have the stomach for it, I have been emotionally, physically even, affected by the ghost formerly known as Jerry “Chuckles News Brother” Manley. 

I look in his eyes, and he is in there, someplace.  He occasionally peeks out, then retreats inside his mental turtle shell.  Apparently, anger has begun to build inside this good man. Or what’s left of him.

Even in this condition, Jerry remains my longest-tenured newspaper friend, a generally kind, non-violent, jovial soul as long as I’ve known him. After all, even though he has never spoken to Bob/Milford, his roommate in the Dormitory of the Demented and Demi-Deceased and Dying, he never seemed to be upset when Bob would climb up in his bed, at as long as Jerry wasn’t using it (not that there’s anything wrong with it).

Bob/Milford, a much-honored horseman in real life – evidenced by all the horse contest ribbons, is a gentle fellow, as well. When I first started visiting Jerry here – I believe I am the only real company he gets – I would talk with Bob/Milford if Jerry was in the bathroom or if Jerry was staring, almost unconsciously at the flat-screen TV they share.

Bob/Milford must be the one handling the remote, as Jerry has not learned yet how to push the magic buttons that turn the TV on, change channels or adjust volume. Or maybe the nurses do that … or used to do that … when they’d come to razor-dribble some blood from Jerry’s finger for his four-time-daily blood-sugar tests.  Lately the result is he gets four insulin doses after each of those visits.

Last week, the television was set on one of those music channels, where the screen is filled with a photo of the artist/artists and some biographical info.  I’ve read that music is one of the best ways to break through the shell keeping dementia’s brain fog in place.  Perhaps one of the nurses, Kimmie maybe, had put the music channel on.  Music might bring a little light into the zombies’ eyes, about the only things Bob/Milford and Jerry have in common.  

I love Jerry and I’ve come to care about Milford/Bob – likely 95 years old and 75 pounds are my guesses – and our early conversations have degraded, from him talking proudly about his horses and assuring me that this is a great place to live and die to false-teeth clicks, grunts, huge smiles and some unintelligible words.  I still try to communicate with him. I’ve made a lot of friends in the cuckoo’s nest, and I count him among them.

My only clue to a crack in this Odd Couple’s living arrangements came about two months ago when I arrived at the door of the room only to find Bob trying to say “locked out ….Jerry ….locked out.”

I got the nurses to unlock it, and all was fine. I figured the lockout was an accident. But this week, after Jerry picked Milford/Bob up from his (Jerry’s) recliner, lifted him into the air and wrestling-slammed him to the floor, I’ve decided that Jerry probably locked his roommate out that occasion. And then there was Bob’s peed-on recliner. I don’t know who was responsible.  Perhaps that’s why Bob was determined to use Jerry’s and why Jerry reacted in this way.

Yes, I’ve buried the lead. But I didn’t want the image of 250-pound Jerry’s WrestleMania move on 75-pound Milford/Bob –  to be the only reason you read this blog. After all, this writing is copyrighted by old Flap and is restricted to a set audience, and I think most of you don’t read it. Even late-comers to the historic News Brothers community should read this stuff. Or else you are heartless fuckers who should resign your commission. Let me know if this story of the ranking News Brother struggling to bring some life back into a veteran newsman’s uncomfortably numb brain touches you at all.

I will say that the real Jerry is a kind and soft-spoken soul who generally doesn’t make it a habit to pick old people up and slam them down on the floor.

I did not want to tease the heartless among you into reading this report by starting with the image in my mind – as I was no witness – of the skirmish. The nurses described it from their view on the cameras  they keep in inmates' rooms.

When Jim aka “Flash”– who had come down from his job as a race-car breeder and horticulturist in Indianapolis to check on his old friends – accompanied me into the nursing home and attached nuthouse, he was a little nervous about seeing Jerry.

He was afraid Jerry might not recognize him and that he may have some sort of weird reaction. I told him that sometimes Jerry didn’t talk at all, just stared at the world’s reality that is on TV – from “Gunsmoke” to Neil deGrasse Tyson repeats to the latest episodes of “Perry Mason” – and that on those days I did all the talking. I’d generally try to raise a smile by talking about Chico the Monkey, who escaped from his cage and was pursued by terrified Montgomery County deputies, an event that was well-covered by The Leaf-Chronicle one Sunday morning 40 years ago.

The squirrel monkey’s demise – Chico roamed free for a couple of months near Dunbar Cave before being run to ground and eaten by neighborhood dogs – was handled in a personal column I wrote that began simply: “Chico is dead.”   Jerry always enjoys talking about the Chico story and my gory column obit follow-up, because the Chico pursuit – Deputies Go Bananas: ‘Monkey At Large’ -- is the only occurrence he remembers from his 35-40-year newspaper career. And that’s probably because I tell it to him often.

I also like to play to his “happy place” by talking about our charity fund-raising efforts as News Brothers, the most elaborate of which was our world-premiere screening of the timeless and twisted “Flapjacks: The Motion Picture.”

“I really liked rolling around on the ground with you and making movies,” he’s told me on more than one occasion. In addition to his KISS-like tongue-wagging, Jerry’s film persona, Chuckles, was something of an acrobat.  When we ran as a foursome in a scene, Jerry was bound to throw in a somersault worthy of Simone Biles’ most-ineffective student.  But it remains damn funny.

To prepare Jim, a 65-year-old youngster who in reality doesn’t breed race cars and hemp plants but was “bought out” (a cruel euphemism) from his job at an Indianapolis newspaper, I just told him to try to reach into his own pocketful of memories from the time he worked on Jerry’s copy desk and try to remind our friend of those events and, especially, of who he is. “Jerry was an imposing man,” Jim remembers.  “He was like a rock.”

“Like an i-i-i-sland,” I complete an old Paul Simon lyric.

 Jim’s had trouble visualizing his old boss and copyediting hero in the guy I’ve been describing for almost nine months in this space, so he wanted to come to terms with it personally.

I have said before that I have asked Jerry what his prognosis and diagnosis were, and he said “I don’t know. I never have seen a doctor.”  (He actually has, his daughter has had to take him for some appointments checking out the vanished or hibernated cancer in his colon.)

Now, I’m afraid he is seeing many doctors. And, perhaps, many more.  Makes me want to act like Chief Broom when I think of it. If you don’t know who that is, then you are too immature to be reading this blog about my flight over the cuckoo’s nest.

Anyway, Jerry objected when I asked if he had been diagnosed with dementia or Alzheimer’s Disease, the two reasons there are 40 rooms full of people in the Memory Care Ward, where he resides.

“No,” he’d say, a bit churlish. “I don’t have dementia or Alzheimer’s: I just can’t remember anything.”  

In fact, he wouldn’t remember things I told him minutes before. He would wonder how many months it had been since I’d been there (I’ve not missed a week, other than when I had Covid for a week after Christmas.)

He could remember nothing of his 30 years at the morning newspaper in Nashville – I wish I could forget my decade surrounded by the corporate anus-tonguers who told me I was a maverick “and we don’t have room for mavericks in this corporation.” You were supposed to moan and climax when the editors preached the company line. If you disagreed on the basis of intellect or morals, truth or, especially, personal sense of ethics, you were cut loose.

Seventeen years ago this week for me, the armed guards, who loved me and admired my courage and ethics, carried my stuff to my old Saab, hugged me and said goodbye. I’ve not been back in the building since.

In fact, the cause of journalism became so pathetic that they blew up the building, just like Springsteen’s chicken man -- to make room for condos and a hipster grocery. The morning "newspaper" staff, those who serve the 5,000 subscribers to the print product and the not brave, new world of clicks on the computer, now “lives” on a couple floors high on a low-level “skyscraper” in Midtown Nashville. Reporters, and there are a few, can keep track of the city by just looking out the windows. On warm days, the company brings an ice cream truck to the parking lot. A double-dip chocolate and maraschino cherry cone apparently does buy loyalty.  Hell, I wish they’d tried that on me instead of telling me I was too old and wrote too much about old musicians and Black people.  For that story, buy the book When Newspapers Mattered on amazon.com.

The book does not have a happy ending. But even co-author Rob “Death” Dollar had no idea of how sad and pointless life would become for Chuckles, one of our main comrades in the ethics war.

 Jerry made it for four more years than I in the Big G newsroom before they called him at the annual cousins dance-off-and-mate and melon-seed-spitting contest and pig roast – the annual weeklong family reunion in the urban Lewisburg/Petersburg cluster – and told him the box containing his pica pole and an empty pickle jar was in a box by the back door.  Of course, they always framed it as something good. “A buyout,” though is just a layoff or a firing when the bosses pay you pennies a day for years of service and kick you in the testicles. Or, less frequently but likely as painful, vaginas.  Both in some cases.

You are supposed to feel grateful for the pieces of silver and use your time to find another job. Anyone out there who is a 56-year-old white male can tell you my experience on the job hunt. The only boss interested in me when I was tossed to the curb included me. For semi-sanity – all I’ve ever aspired to -- I relied on my wife, Suzanne, and a few friends and my memories of Chico the Monkey.  Robert Penn Warren, Billy Joe Shaver and Billy Bob Thornton were among my many friends/admirers who couldn’t help.  I do think Robert Penn’s being dead was his main obstacle. The other two may have been drunk.

I was only at that newspaper 10 miserable years, mainly so I could pay off our adoptions of our two children from Romanian orphanages.

My frustration found a place in my writing.  Jerry was an editor, not a writer, and his frustration at not being appreciated after more than 30 years of service to the morning "newspaper" likely at least fueled his stark decline.  I actually think it’s been going on for years, but he was able to function OK. Until last Thanksgiving when they found him, unable to deal with life’s most-basic chores, in his home.

He’d been in and out of facilities before, but this time there was no “out.”

“I guess I’m here until I die,” an unusually cheerful Jerry would tell me when I’d visit him in the Memory Care Ward.

“A least you aren’t passed on the floor in your own shit,” I would counter, by way of cheering him up. I forever have been chastised for being an optimist.

Stopping now for another slug of Mountain Dew. “Do the Dew,” they say on commercials. Or is it Dew the Dew?  Do the Do? Dew the Do?

As usual, when I’m on my way to visit Jerry, I stop at the Shell station run by my friend, Quincy. I always top off my tank and go in to get the beverage and crackers – banned by the nursing home, so for months I snuck this stuff in my boxers. When I realized the nurses didn’t worry about the contraband, after all this guy’s gonna die of something, I stopped hiding it.

Quincy was saddened that the Diet SunDrop he special orders for my nursing home friend was not in stock. He helped me find my substitute, Diet Mountain Dew, and promised the Diet SunDrop would be there next week. 

I think he’ll be disappointed that I don’t stop and pick it up. Maybe I’ll take up lottery scratch cards so Quincy and I can have something to bond over. I’m certainly not going to keep buying this shit I’m drinking.

Anyway, after visiting with Quincy, I picked Jim up at a nearby Starbuck’s so his daughter, Jayne, would be occupied, and we went to the nursing home.

I should tell you here that Jim is fairly deep into his battle with Parkinson’s Disease, so he really didn’t think he could drive all this way from the Brickyard on his own. Jayne did some of the driving and kept her eye on her dad and the road.

Actually, Jim seems to do well with his Parkinson’s, and it’s obvious he’s a fighter. But it’s a damnable disease and there is no way out. You just fight your way to the end, and hope that end is many, many years in the future.

So, I should point out that there were five main News Brothers back in 1982-83, when we reigned. Me (“Flapjacks”), Rob Dollar (“Death”), Jerry Manley (“Chuckles) and Jim Lindgren (“Flash”) were the forces behind the movie we made and the fun we had that raised as much as $3,300 for local charities. I say five, because Radio Newsman Scott Shelton covered our activities for the radio and – when Jim went to Indy – “Badger” became our fourth News Brother.

It was kind of a Pete Best/Ringo situation, and Scott “Badger” really was a better drummer. He even had a full kit in the basement he’d turned into a Beatles shrine, even though he hated Ringo. That’s another story.

OK, of those five, let’s see their status 40-some years later. I am unemployed and write  books and visit dying friends and other lunatics. I also have trouble walking, even more laughing. Rob has two pig valves in his ticker and is unemployed and helping his hometown of Hopkinsville’s historic preservation. He also loves cats, writes books and is very tired. Jim Lindgren has Parkinson’s. Scott is dead after a valiant duel with cancer. Jerry may well be nuts.

In our visit to Jerry, Jim and I walked through the regular-people retirement center and through the double-locked doors into the corridor lined with rooms for the gang who can neither shoot nor think straight anymore.

We said our pleasantries to Kimmie, the head nurse, who just last week was attacked by a guy wielding a fork in the dining hall, and wandered down to Jerry and Milford’s room.

Jim stayed in the doorway while I checked. As I said earlier, Bob was in Jerry’s bed, but Jerry wasn’t in Bob’s. I checked the bathroom for a corpse or constipation. Empty.

I told Jim to wait in a little visitor’s area outside Jerry’s room, and I went down to the dining hall/social room and nurse’s office.

I looked around and didn’t see Jerry. I didn’t see the fork guy either.

“Kimmie,” I began, quickly drowned out by a woman sitting nearby. “Meow. Meow. Mee-owww,” the woman said.

Kimmie shook her head and told the woman her name was “Kimmie” and not “Kitty.”

The woman licked her right hand and “meowed” some more.

“I can’t find Jerry Manley,” I said to Kimmie. “He’s got a friend here who came all the way from Indianapolis to see him.

“Do you know where he is?” Since Jerry has no friends in the nursing home, I didn’t think he was paying a social call in one of the 40 rooms of the lunatic asylum.

“Ohhhh,” said Kimmie. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you when you came in, but Jerry’s not here. He’s in the hospital.”

I asked a number of questions, and she answered patiently since I am a regular in this place; and I really don’t think many people from the outside, not even relatives, visit.

“He was involved in a confrontation,” she said.

She went on to answer my questions, and it turns out Jerry was the one who did the confronting.

“He picked up Milford, who was sitting in Jerry’s recliner, and he threw him down on the floor,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

Nurses, who watch on closed circuit what’s going on in the rooms, observed the ruckus and ran down there, while others called authorities.

“I don’t think the police came to get him, but I’m not sure. At least they didn’t arrest him. The ambulance guys took care of getting him in a gurney and they took him to the hospital.”

I was stunned, but not really surprised.  He may not have dementia, but he sure acts like it, with his anger and this attack leveled at a little old man who simply sat in the wrong chair.

“I’m not sure what will happen. He may come back. They do bring them back sometimes after they’ve been in the hospital for a week or two. Sometimes.”

She added that the fork attacker also was sent down to Vanderbilt Psych last week, “and if they decide to let him back here, he could be in another week or so.”

Perhaps Jerry and the aspiring fork killer can become pals.

If Jerry’s not allowed back in?

Kimmie shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s still got his bed here.’’

I didn’t push it, but I thought that, even if he is deemed harmless, will they let him back in his room with Milford/Bob?

There aren’t any other beds here, other than the fork swashbuckler’s.

I went back down the hall to fill Jim in on what had transpired and that he had traveled, Parkinson’s dragging at his body, all the way from the Brickyard for nothing.

He was disappointed, but, of course, was happy to spend time with me.

As we got up from our seats in the visitors’ area, a preacher came out of the room across from us. He told us he had dropped in – for about 5 minutes –- to see his Mom. “She has no idea who I am at least half of the time.”

We asked him to snap a shot of the two of us, and he did, hurriedly.

Before we left, I wanted to check on Milford/Bob. And I wanted to introduce him to Jim.

The old fellow woke up and smiled. I asked him how he was, and he smiled. I said he had gotten into it with his roomie, and I hoped he didn’t hurt. He just smiled, gurgled something that may have been a line from “White Rabbit.”

“Hi, Milford, my name is Jim,” said my old pal from Indy. “It’s nice to meet you.”

Milford/Bob smiled again, and I told him to get back to sleep.

The preacher who had taken our picture was conducting a little service in the dining/commons room.  I didn’t know what he was talking about, which I’m sure is the case for most of his audience.  They’ve gotta do something to kill time between meals, and searching for an afterlife is better than watching “I Love Lucy.’’

Then he led them in a song about a river.  We listened briefly to the song, recognized it and – after all we were in a Memory Care Ward – we couldn’t remember the song’s title when we got back into the world.

I thought it was “Shall We Gather at the River,’ but Jim said it wasn’t a religious tune.

I do know the topic was a river, someplace. So, I’ve been thinking about which it may have been.

In the days since, I’ve decided that perhaps it was “Tweeter and The Monkey Man,” a song I generally sing by substituting “Chico” for “Tweeter”

“The undercover cop was found
Face down in a field
The Monkey Man was on the river bridge
Using Chico as a shield ….”

That really wasn’t the song, but it is one of my favorites. And it is not religious, so perhaps it fits Jim’s description.

I should note that I love Jim "Flash" and know how difficult it was, with his Parkinson's, to get down here. He had to plan, make sure medications were adequate and rest up, and his daughter Jayne had to get off work. He says he'll come back, once I find out whatever happened to "Chuckles."

Since our visit, I have tried to track Jerry down. The ambulance took him to Vanderbilt Medical Center, where he was waiting in the ER for placement, perhaps in the psych ward?  But, as of today, he’s “discharged,” according to the hospital; and “he’s not at the residence,” according to the nursing home.

I love the guy and I’m sure I’m going to miss him.

I’m about finished with the Diet Mountain Dew now. People must be fucking nuts to drink this stuff.  
   

 

Halfway down the long hallway of the damned and demented, Tim stops to talk with a nurse about "Where's Jerry?" Jim "Flash" Lindgren took this photo of me, who you can see, barely, in the hall. 

     

 (Copyright, August 18, 2024 by Flapjacks. Copying and sharing is prohibited.)

    

            

Gentle soul raises fork to counter-attack what it's like to be sad at Jerry's joint, where bizarre witchy woman spurs memories of when 'Tennessee' Williams stalked me with a spear and headress

Some of the crazy, old News Brothers are alive but not kicking like they sure used to. Here is a photo from November 12, 1982, hours before the world premiere of our classic cinematic newspaper lament Flapjacks: The Motion Picture. From left, Rob "Death" Dollar, Jerry "Chuckles" Manley and the ever-cheerful Tim "Flapjacks" Ghianni. The movie was a Beatles-style visit to our lives in the newspaper business. We raised as much as $3,200 for local charities. The film played all night in the Roxy theater in what then was a desolate section of Clarksville. We had to have police protection from the fans and others of society's dregs. Jerry never will be so free again. Tim and Rob aren't really doing all that well, themselves.

The fork flashed through the air, within inches of the more-than-adequate midsection of the nurse, who was trying to push the fellow – a nameless guy I consider a friend after my months of hanging out in the Memory Care Ward -- up to his spot at the lunch table.

“Don’t!” or something similar the man yelped, first pulling the fork back toward the table and then pushing it out toward the nurse again, with as much force as feeble, meatless arms can muster.

I don’t know this fella’s motivation for violence. He may not, himself.  I’m sure he didn’t remember afterward.

But this is the first time I’ve seen him in a wheelchair, a part of the continuing descent I see around me every time I visit the nursing home where men and women, including my half-century pal Jerry Manley, punctuate mental descent with physical rot. 

It bruises my soul when, as a frequent visitor to the nursing home’s Memory Care Ward, I witness these folks’ disappearance into themselves… . Some of the faces I grew accustomed to greeting have vanished. Life here is a guaranteed dead end. Of course, that end awaits us all. It’s just more poignant here.

Perhaps in what is left of his mind, the fork-slasher realized that from now on he is going to be pushed in his wheelchair to wherever the nurses want him and, of course, he must eat what they tell him to eat, a blandness universal in these diets. That combination may have sparked the rage. 

There is no such thing as freedom of choice in a Memory Care Ward.

All I know is that the man with the fork is one of the many folks in this ward who have “adopted” me as their “friend from the outside” in the eight months since I’ve been paying visits to my longest-tenured newspaper friend, Jerry “Chuckles News Brother” Manley.

All Jerry did when the guy threatened the nurse with a fork was shrug. Apparently, this stuff happens a lot among those relegated to this cuckoo’s nest. Like Jerry, who won’t fess to being a dementia or Alzheimer’s patient. In fact, he insists he’s neither: “I just can’t remember anything.” Like things I’ve told him three minutes before.

As I’ve noted in the past, Jerry hates the “Chuckles” nickname, but when my friend Rob Dollar and I were coming up with nicknames for The News Brothers 42 years ago, Jerry just seemed like a “Chuckles.”  His appearances on the screen – I’ve noted our 1982 film made for charity –just made anyone smile. How can you resist a guy who spends his main closeup showing that his tongue is as flexible and expressive as KISS tongue-man Gene Simmons? Neither of us were big KISS fans, but we did like to rock ‘n’ roll all night and party every day. Perhaps the reluctant “Chuckles” is paying for it now?

Ah, those names. I am “Flapjacks.” Rob Dollar is “Death.” Jim Lindgren is “Flash.”  The three of us and Jerry were the three main News Brothers back when we were almost fab and truly benevolent, making movies, healing hearts, aiding charities and, especially putting out Damn Nice Newspapers.

Back then, the 24,000-circulation Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle regularly pounded The Tennessean, Nashville Banner, the Memphis newspapers and Knoxville and Chattanooga as well in “contests” for best newspaper in the state, best special section, best columnist, best sports section, etc. We even were dubbed Best Paper in the Southeast.  And all that acclaim came because we put our real lives on hold and dedicated waking hours to committing great journalism. And drinking about it after.

Our professional lives were our personal lives, and some – like me and Jerry – pay for it in loneliness because we never spent time developing “social” friends. Instead of social graces, we developed nasty habits. Newspapers were everything. Now they are nothing.  And those of us who were newspaper-ink-bleeding castoffs, well … we’re old, dead or in The Memory Care Ward.

I believe The Tennessean, a now insignificant newspaper in Nashville, now wins most of the awards for newspapers with 5,000 circulation or less. I do cheer for my old friends who work there still.

Seventeen years ago they dared not cheer for me, when the lousy bastards made me give my regards to 1100 Broadway by taking a meager buyout package or wait for the layoffs in six weeks. The guards – the same ones who had protected me from Lee “Tennessee” Williams, a skateboard-riding scion of Clarksville society who spent his free time living in the streets of Nashville – helped me carry my professional remnants, pica poles, scale wheels and pictures of The News Brothers and my kids out to the parking lot.

Old Tennessee Williams stalked me from our days at The Camelot in Clarksville and from the day he took part in what should have been my fatal fall from the Leaf-Chronicle roof for one day’s filming of the sequel to “Flapjacks: The Motion Picture,” our “Hard Day’s Night”-like movie that we made to raise money for charity. That sequel footage never has been seen and the 8 mm film has faded into memory or not. “Flapjacks II: The Revenge of the Big Guy” was never finished. Too many firings and deaths left me with faded-out-film and devastated memories in a yellow Kodak box.

 Getting a little afield here, but I should say that one day Tennessee Williams came to the front of the old newspaper building on Broadway. He had painted his body red, wore an Indian headdress and was pointing a feathered spear at the guards, who tried to calm him down. The guards, steel-guitar Hall of Famer Johnny Sibert and his pals, would not let me out of the building to try to calm Lee down.  They told me he’d been there many nights, sometimes sleeping inside the back door of the newspaper when Johnny took pity on him on a cold night. Lee always was looking for me.  Johnny Sibert worried I had my own Mark David Chapman and always warned me to be careful when I left the building.

The day of his Indian attack, old Tennessee was hauled off by a police car.  I believe they took him to Cloverbottom, the state’s beloved looney bin.  The last time I saw him, though, came when I rear-ended a car at an Interstate exit when I sped to a hospital because my mom was dying. The car I hit took off. Lee stood there with a “World is Ending” type of sign and applauded.  My mom died. 

 Johnny Sibert, the protective guard, had settled into that line of business after a long career as a steel player with another now-deceased buddy, the great Carl “Hey Joe” Smith.

I was the last person ever to interview Carl, the first one in a few decades. That story can be found in my book Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes. The world had forgotten Carl, who basically invented the concept of country music television.

As far as I know, Jerry is the only News Brother in the cuckoo’s nest. “Flash” has some ailments, I can’t walk well, “Death” is tired and sore and sporting a seriously repaired ticker.  “Badger” – radio newsman Scott Shelton, who took over for “Flash” when George Martin said he wasn’t a good-enough drummer – died pushing 13 years ago. Fucking cancer. Actually, Scott had always been affiliated with us, but joined up full-time when “Flash” moved to Indianapolis to breed race cars.

It’s been a long, strange trip and, on this day, it finds me looking maybe nine feet to see the old fellow with the fork, again aiming it to the nurse’s belly as she tried to work his wheelchair close enough to the table so that he could eat without getting the Hungarian goulash on his nicely pressed khaki trousers.

She backed away, going to get her supervisor.  One of them took a picture of the poor guy, fork extended, I suppose to show to family or psychiatrist.  I’m sure there likely is a penalty for errant behavior in the cuckoo’s nest. But I’m not sure. Hot electric wire on his balls?

He put his fork down and then took a full-fisted swing at the nurse who hollered: “Don’t you hit me, you crazy mother-fucker” and slammed his head down into his plateful of food.

The guy just laughed, and used his fingers to eat the goulash that was on his face.  The face-in-food incident is of my imagination.  Up until that it was all true.

As was the long, low howling of one of the diners – I think she was the one who calls me and whoever gets in her way “knucklehead.’’  Jerry frowned at her, even though the fork attack didn’t bother him. Likely made perfect sense.

An hour earlier, this psychedelic nursing home visit began when I pulled my old Saab into one of the handicapped parking spots out front. As I’ve noted before, I have a hard time walking upright, so I asked my doctor, finally, to fill out my application for one of those crippled placards. One thing you can’t hide is when you’re crippled inside or outside. In either case, I had put off getting that placard until a couple of months ago, about the time my brother, Eric, who died recently, gave me the hand-carved cane he made for me. He had one himself. I thought he and I could hang around together, playing dueling swords with our canes and drinking his favorite Irish whisky. But God, or whoever is in charge of deadly injustices in the holy pecking order, took him.

Nothing sadder than a cane-wielding swordsman dueling into the empty air on the back deck while holding an empty glass, so I quit doing that last week, as my neighbors were beginning to notice.

As I parked, I saw a woman, really disheveled and witchlike in appearance, downing a glass of lemonade – that’s what the nursing home had on its porch for those who can go outside – and start walking around the long, circular sidewalk. Her crinkled and evil eyes were fixed on me as she walked past benches, lawn chairs and landscaping. Her evil demeanor reminded me of a legless gypsy I encountered on a sidewalk in Arad, Romania. She was a beggar, and, when my son, Joe, gave her a piece of candy, she tossed it away and laughed at him.

Course, this old lady had legs. When she stopped right in front of the Saab and stared at me, my first notion was to put my car in drive and run her over.

Finally, I shut off the car and got out. “Can I help you, ma’am?” I asked, a bit timidly. She began whistling and muttering a song of sorts and stood there staring at me.

Now, the most troubled of the folks at this nursing home are not supposed to be in the front section where they have access to the yard. She perhaps was just visiting somebody. Or perhaps she’s near the point where she’ll graduate to the Memory Care Ward. Or she’s an escapee.

“She said ‘I know what it’s like to be dead,’” I sang to myself. as she walked away from me. I may not be able to walk well, but I took the very long way around the front yard, so I could avoid her when I went in. “She’s making me feel like I’ve never been born.”

 After I signed in – the warden, Nurse Ratched, eyed my sack, but said nothing. I always bring Jerry food contraband that I get at my friend, Quincy’s, Shell Station. Generally, I pull into Pump No. 8 and top off my gas. Inside, I pick up two packs of Ritz peanut butter crackers and … there’s no Diet SunDrop in the cooler.

Quincy started stocking that beverage at my request, because Jerry said it was one of the things he missed “inside.”  On this day, I settled for a sugar-free Mountain Dew instead.

Quincy, who was outside emptying the trash containers between Pumps 7 and 8 told me he’d get the Diet SunDrop when his vendor comes in. “It’s a real good thing you’re doing,” he always tells me, adding that nursing homes “are worse than prisons.”

Anyway, I used to sneak the contraband in my clothing, but it was uncomfortable, especially in the summer, so I just carry it in in a sack. No one seems to notice or care. When people are dying or slipping into oblivion, why not allow them a few snacks to brighten their limited days?

In fact, once I got to the Memory Care Ward, I remembered that Quincy hadn’t loosened the top on the bottle, and it was impossible for me to open with my arthritic hands.

So, I asked a nurse – the one who later was attacked with a fork – to open it for me. “I’ll just open it and then put the top back on far enough, so it doesn’t leak,” she said, handing it back to me to take to Jerry, no questions asked.

Bob/Milford, Jerry’s roommate, is in a sitting room, a couple doors down, a place where patients and families can gather. Even go out through a door into an enclosed courtyard. Bob/Milford was sitting, quietly, staring at a black TV screen.

“I know what it’s like to be sad,” I said to Bob, who I consider a friend. “Why don’t you come back to the room?”

He clicked his false teeth and said “No. No. No. No.”

I patted his shoulder, and went on to the room where Jerry sat in his recliner, watching a music station on television. It’s just one of those cable stations, where they play music while a photo and facts about the artists are displayed on the screen.

“Indian Lake is a scene you should make with your little one
Keep it in mind if you're lookin' to find a place in the summer sun….”

I sang along with the second line. Before telling him “I went to see the Cowsills in 1969. They were on a triple bill with The Grassroots --“In my midnight confessions, when I tell all the world that I love you,” I sang.

“The top of the bill that night was, Guess Who, Canadians just then breaking in America,” I said before launching into the grunting prelude to “American Woman, stay away from me….”

I don’t think Jerry even noticed my miniconcert.  Perhaps he used his decline as an excuse to ignore it.

“I’ve just got it on this music channel because that’s where it was, and I don’t know how to change the channel,” was his sole response to my little performance. “Volume, either.”

The remote control sat by his bed, but after so many months, I no longer give forgotten-in-five-minutes remote control lessons.

“It’s better for you to listen to music than watch the news, like when Harrison Ford was trying out spacecraft,” I say, referring to a day a couple of weeks ago when Milford/Bob and Jerry both thought a sci-fi movie was real-life news.

The TV switches to Frank Sinatra singing “Something,” the George Harrison song that Ol’ Blue Eyes thought was the best love song of all time.

The sight of Old Blue Eyes triggered me to tell Jerry that it was 50 years to the day that Frank’s pal, Dick Nixon, climbed aboard Marine One after resigning as president.

“It doesn’t seem that long, but it does,” Jerry responded as he finished off the crackers and pint of Diet Mountain Dew. “This is really good for a change,” he said, adding he’d prefer the Diet SunDrop, but my replacement pick satisfied his soda-educated palate.

Brian Wilson, brothers Dennis and Carl, Mike Love and Al Jardine were singing “God Only Knows” on the TV, when the nurse came in and gave Jerry his blood sugar test – “254,” she said, looking at me and smiling. It’s supposed to be around 180, and perhaps my treats are to blame. She gives him a quadruple dose of insulin.

The nurse sees the empty cracker wrappers and Diet Dew bottle, but she doesn’t say anything about it.  Jerry’s smiling, at least, which I’m told is uncommon.

“Lunchtime,” she reminded him, so I wandered down the hallway with Jerry. Milford/Bob hadn’t moved from his spot in front of the black TV, so I called out and asked if wanted to join us. He just looked at me and nodded, but obviously his answer was “No. No. No. No.”

“I wish I could remember something, so I’d have something to say,” said Jerry, as I sat at his lunch table, where we listened to the woman howl and watched the fork man do his work.

“That’s’ OK, Jerry. They are going to need my chair now for lunch, so I’d better leave.”

He nodded. “Hey, how old am I?”

I told him he was 72, nine days older than me. “We always celebrated our birthdays together. Remember the 30^th? It was the best party ever.”

He looked blankly at me, then slowly smiled and nodded. “You be careful.” I think he was telling me to take care driving home. But he also may have been warning me of the fork man, as there was no way to leave this room without passing right by him. Easy fork range.

 This normally gentle man held his fork high, in his right hand, then put it down on the table when I neared.   

 “You are a lot more friendly than your friend,” he said – something he’s told me many times, always punctuating by nodding toward Jerry.

“Jerry’s an acquired taste,” I said, smiling. “It’s taken me 50 years to get used to him.”

The crazy old lady was not out on the front grass or by the lemonade table when I got outside, after stopping to chat briefly with Stockton, the guy who always wears Vols clothes and who is trying to talk me into moving here.

“Have a great day,” he said. “Good to see you, my friend. Where are you from?”

“Same as last time,” I tell him. “Nashville.”

I climb into my old Saab, maybe shaken more than usual, realizing that these visits are darkening my soul.

“I know what it’s like to be dead,” I sing to myself. ‘’What it’s like to be sad….”

  Copyright August 12, 2024, Tim Ghianni, all rights reserved

 

Jerry probably doesn't remember when our future was shiny as the seats of our pants are today, but he enjoys his crackers, insulin and an old, rambling buddy he sometimes refers to as 'Tim'

Once my future was shiny as the seat of my pants are today, till ol’ mother luck and all her daughters started ducking me.

Twenty-plus years ago, I was walking down Music City Row with my friend Kris Kristofferson when I asked him if he meant to use an “f” instead of a “d” on “ducking me” in his song “I May Smoke Too Much.”

The answer depends on how and to whom I’m telling the story.

Anyway, that was one of my anthems for decades, and my pal Jerry Manley and I – with or without audience (generally without) – would crank up that song on my record machine, put our arms over each other’s shoulders and sing. 

And I may smoke too much, drink too much
Every blessed thing too much
It's a low-down life, but it ain't gonna pass me by….

It pretty much justified our lifestyle and our choices, good or bad and generally hoping no one got hurt, back in the 1970s and 1980s and even into the ‘90s.

The song, by the way, is from Spooky Ladies Sideshow, a 1974 commercial flop, perhaps, but after The Silver-Tongued Devil and I, it likely is the Kris album I most played and pledged my allegiance to during my formative years and their sorry decline in the 17 years since I was “bought out” by what then was a newspaper. The armed guards, who loved me, helped me carry my stuff to my old Saab.

Both these guys were heroes to Jerry "Chuckles" Manley. This 21-year-old photo shows Kris Kristofferson and Tim "Flapjacks" Ghianni singing "The Silver-Tongued Devil and I" outside a Christian record label headquarters that stands where their old haunt, The Tally-Ho Tavern, existed. Kris now suffers from a form of dementia and Tim spends his free time hanging around the demented and feeding them crackers and memories. 

In these dispatches, I know it always seems as if Jerry and I rode through this life together. But there was a lonesome, for me, gap. After I was “retired” – I’d worked as Jerry’s night cops reporter for most of a year as the “newspaper” tried to force me to quit – I didn’t hear from him for most of the next four years. I really had been his hero because of my writing and my less-than-retiring professional behavior. It's OK, though. He was still clinging to his job, and I think he was afraid that my rather eccentric persona and truthful and profound retelling of my cruel demise might rub off on him.  He finally understood my bitterness when they called him at the annual Manley family reunion, cookout and cousins-are-OK-mates gathering in Lewisburg to tell him never to return to the newspaper.

I ought to note I hardly heard from anyone at the paper during that era.  Peter Cooper and I spoke regularly, daily even, as he made the transition from the newspaper to Country Music Hall of Fame high-staff.  I did feel let down by some folks, but I had other friends with whom I spoke regularly, like Clarksville's reformed radio newsman/electric company PR guy Scott “Badger” Shelton and Hopkinsville newspaper outcast/political insider Rob “Death” Dollar.

Peter and Badger long ago joined my top-heavy roster of dead friends. Rob and I stay in touch, though. There are a few others, some newspaper homicides, who I hear from, and I relish. It delighted me when then-food-writer Jim Myers would take me out to lunch so he could write his restaurant reviews and assure himself I was OK. He eventually got fucked as well.

Well, back to smoking too much and the like: For context, I should note that I began worshiping (with a soft “w”) Kris in the summer of 1971, when I first played Silver-Tongued Devil and I. When I got back to school that August, I bought the whole catalog, ordering them at a store in Ames, Iowa, where they also sold sleds, candy bars and records. A friend of mine, a Black Panther, smoked pot in the apartment above the next building.  He had a beautiful girlfriend, and hemp-woven rolling papers cost less than a buck a pack at the tobacco and cigar store at the corner at Welch and Lincoln Way. Iowa-grown pot, I am told, was $12 a lid (that’s an ounce). Many farmers supplemented their income by growing it between cornrows. Again, this is simple hearsay to me. Oh, and simple possession was a $5 fine, they say.

The other albums at that point were Kris Kristofferson (retitled Me and Bobby McGee after his lover Janis Joplin choked that out as a major crossover hit before dying with a needle in her arm) and Border Lord. It probably says something about me that when I had a young woman (always innocently) up in my dorm room, I would put those three albums on the changer.  Other fellas may have played Elton John or Paul “Love is Blue” Mauriat or even Sinatra. Me, I played songs about busted love, broken promises, death and beer.

I was thinking about Kris’ impact on my life and how Jerry and I had a mutual affinity for him, to the point that we learned the lyrics to just about all of the songs of the guy who is now my friend. We would sing them, damn the tomatoes, full speed ahead, when we were properly lubricated or lustily encouraged. Hell, we may have just been driving down the street, smiling at every girl we meet, and we’d sing about cigarettes, beer and loosened ribbons.

Jerry "Chuckles News Brother" Manley when he was free

Smoking too much and drinking too much were sports in which we gladly participated, perhaps to the point that Jerry now is in the loony bin in a nursing home near my house.

Well, that’s not fair. It’s a pretty nice place, a nursing home where most of the residents are just old and can’t properly care for themselves.  My pal, Stockton, who spent his life at Reelfoot Lake before retiring to this nursing home a decade ago, is a prime example. He’s a good guy, and he’s never to be seen without Tennessee Vols shirts, pants, hats, jackets or whatever. I like the guy, and he loves this nursing home, encourages me to give it a try.  Tells me the food is good and the women are better.

I try to say hello to him on every visit. He’s in the sane people’s lunchroom or perhaps watching “I Love Lucy” on one of the TVs in the common space.  “I hate this fucking show,” he’ll snarl. But the residents’ consensus is generally that this is the show to watch, because it reminds them of their youth.  I buy that reasoning, but I wish “77 Sunset Strip” was regularly broadcast on cable. Kookie, Kookie, lend me your comb.  

Of course, even the most disreputable nursing home would be better in my mind than Stockton’s beloved Reelfoot Lake. I’m not a fan of that place created when an earthquake fucked with a river or whatever the old ghost story. It’s a great place to see bald eagles, but I’ve got them in my neighborhood. And I can live without water snakes and West Tennessee.

A long, strange sidetrack there, but I’m just now – at this writing -- cooling off from my regular visit to my friend Jerry, aka “Chuckles News Brother” (a nickname he hates, but he should have spoken up when Rob Dollar and I were naming The News Brothers in the slim, shady summer of 1982.) 

I (“Flapjacks News Brother”) long-ago altered my lifestyle. I didn’t want to die (I can’t figure out why, though), so the all-night drinking and smoking pretty much were stopped, cold turkey.  Alcohol, save for an occasional holiday sampling, when I was 40 or so, cigarettes in the year 2000.

When I’m sitting with Jerry in the urine-flavored air of his 86-degree room, I wonder how come he’s trapped inside his head and apparently only occasionally allowed to peek out; while my oft-concussed (from football, fistfights and car wrecks) head still spews out thoughts, some inappropriate and ungentlemanly. Most kind and compassionate, which is my goal.

Jerry didn’t have much to say on this visit, when I interrupted him as he walked the long hall of the Memory Care Ward. That’s the section of the nursing home that is double-locked and sort of guarded, where Jerry, his roommate Bob/Milford, the guy who always wears a Vanderbilt sweatshirt and others whose names I don’t know always are glad to see me. They extend their hands, slap me on the back and offer up howdies.  I’ve never been as popular as I am among the cognitively deficient.

“It’s so good to see you,” said Vicki, the nurse who took Jerry’s blood-sugar just before lunch. “I want to thank you for visiting us.”

I ask if there are many visitors from outside the world of mental make-believe and near-comatose role-playing where she cares for these beautiful and sometimes blank residents.

“No,” she says. “That’s why we’re always glad to see you.”

The fact my gimpy presence, guided by a thick walking cane made for me by my recently dead brother, makes a difference in many lives gives me something to smile about.

After I interrupt his walk, Jerry and I scamper down the hallway to his room. “Scamper?” Hah, the last time I scampered was 5 a.m. Sunday in the early 1970s, when my friends and I bolted on our bill at a truck stop on U.S. 30 somewhere in Iowa. Jerry tells me he’s hungry. It’s quite a while until lunch, and he’s glad to see me.

He plops down in his recliner, next to the bed whose frame has been replaced after the old one broke – Jerry blames Bob – more than a week ago. For a while just the mattress and box springs sat on the floor. Jerry didn’t even notice at first that it was a far greater distance to fall at bedtime than it used to be.

The new frame, though, only lifts the bed a bit, perhaps 8 inches, a few less than the busted frame.

“This isn’t much better than sleeping on the floor,” he says, when I say how glad I am that he’s got a bed frame again.

I’d actually been hoping he’d sit on his bed, so I wouldn’t have to use the other recliner, ostensibly Milford/Bob’s recliner, that only a week ago bore a dark, brown stain most likely from one of these guys not making it to the bathroom 6 feet away. 

I touched that stain, to make sure it was dry, last week. But the aroma -- coupled with the heat in the room, these crazy bastards keep it in the 80s, and the nurses crank it to 86 on bath days – turned my stomach and reinforced my knowledge that the only one getting out of this room alive is me.

I sat down on the brown stain again on this visit, though --reminding myself that these shorts and my boxers were going in the laundry when I got home -- so I could hand-feed my friend.

First comes the Diet SunDrop bottle.  Sometimes when I get here, I cannot open the bottle. I have bad arthritis in my hands. I have started opening them as soon as I pay for them at Quincy’s Shell Station, where I top off my tank and buy treats for Jerry. If I can’t budge the bottle top, Quincy is glad to help. I then hand-tighten so they don’t spill while I’m finishing my delivery to the compound of cognitive collapse.

A pointless documentary about stones or dirt or oil or dinosaurs or Mars blasts from the TV.  Rather than ask that it be turned down -- Jerry does not know how to use the remote control – I raise my voice to a scream worthy of an alley in an Italian ghetto. I can say that because my dad was raised in an Italian ghetto, and my now-dead brother, Eric, and I would play in those streets when we were kids.  We tossed meatballs around and learned how to swear in Italian. Seldom did we pull out our six-inch razors.

“Seen anybody lately?” I ask Jerry.

He looks at me and nods in my direction. “You, man.”

Sometimes I am not sure he remembers my name, as he refers to me as “man.” That is the way we always conversed in our now-dead primes. But nowadays I call him “Jerry,” to remind him who he is. I think he appreciates the effort.

“John Staed came by,” he adds, of a mutual friend who has not made it by. As noted in prior transmissions, Jerry thinks John “Street News Brother” Staed has come by once, and it’s always “recently,” no matter the season.

“We didn’t have much to talk about though. Not much in common.”

I mention that his hair and beard look trimmed (as opposed to mine), and he looks at me as if I’ve insulted him.

“Really?” he says. “I didn’t know that. My sister comes by to trim it.”

He has told me other times that a staffer at the nursing homes does his hair and beard trims or that his daughter does.

“I don’t know much. Where I am. Where I been.”

I give him basic information that he’s in Brentwood, on which street, etc., in a nursing home and that it’s pretty close to where my Mom and Dad lived on the southern tip of Nashville. In the 1980s, when I was giving my life a necessary “restart” in order to avoid suicide, I lived with my parents for a year or so. I commuted to Clarksville for a long time and then moved to The Nashville Banner (a really good local newspaper and a far cry from the website that now uses its name but has nothing to do with anyone who was there when it was shuttered about 26 years ago.)

Jerry was a frequent visitor to my folks’ house, because Dad had a pool, and the booze was always free.  A time or two he brought along one of his wives who didn’t think farting in the pool was funny.  It was a Lewisburg bubble bath.

“So, your sister came by?” I ask, inspired by his tale about the hair trim, etc.

“I can’t remember,” he says.

“How about your daughter?” I ask.

“No, she doesn’t come here, but, you know, I’d kinda like to see her.”

I don’t know if she’s been here or not. Jerry wouldn’t remember, regardless. From what I gather, she has, at least to take him to medical appointments he doesn’t know occurred.

Jerry’s been using the Diet SunDrop to wash down the two packages of Ritz peanut butter crackers I brought him.  

“Man, these are good. I wish I had more.”

I tell him I’ll bring more next time, but he shakes off that suggestion as he pats his 250-pound belly.

“You ever see a doctor?” I ask. “Does anyone tell you what your condition is?”

He looks at the stupid documentary on TV while wiggling his feet and shaking his head. “No. Never been out of here,” he says.

“Have you been diagnosed with dementia or anything else?” I ask.

“No. I just can’t remember anything. I think I’m forgetful. Can't remember, though.”

Roomie Milford/Bob comes into the room and plops down on Jerry’s bed, rather than his own. I offer him his recliner, and he just clicks his false teeth and stares at Jerry.

It’s almost noon, and I realize that Milford/Bob has come to tell Jerry it’s time for lunch. They sit at the same table and stare into the same space together during meals.

Jerry excuses himself to use the restroom, and Milford/Bob continues to click his teeth.

“You raised horses before you came here?” I say, something I know is true because equine contest ribbons decorate the room.

He stops clicking long enough to say “Yes.”

“You were really good at it,” I say, and he says “Yes” again, then settles back down on Jerry’s bed clicking his teeth. Conversation obviously over.

Jerry gets done with his bodily chore, and the three of us begin our way down to the lunchroom.

“Jerry, I need to give you a blood test before you eat,” says Nurse Vicki, a kind woman who spends her life among these nearly departed.

Jerry asks me not to leave yet, so I stand there when she stabs his finger and looks at the test results.

“It’s 247,” she says, a tad of concern. “That means I’m going to have to give you four shots of insulin before you can eat.’’

Of course, I don’t know how much my treats have contributed to the reading, but according to the computer in my phone, that is in a high-risk number for diabetic ketoacidosis. The aim is to be around 180.

Anyway, this apparently is pretty normal for Jerry. I guess my contraband might be a factor, but the nurses all know I sneak this stuff in, and they wink at me.  Having a friend who administers crackers, soda and love is better than having no one, they reckon. No one gets out of here alive.

And, as Nurse Vicki says, most of these people have no one. That’s why they all brighten to see me.

As Jerry heads to his table, Vicki lets me through the security door and urges me to come again soon. Crackers, Diet SunDrop and all, it is inferred.

Women in wheelchairs fill the hallway, where a lovely young social worker is asking questions about taking tea at 3 and other errors among the social graces. I don’t pay much attention, although the women seem all-too-glad that I’ve arrived and enjoy it as I slowly pass through their cluster trailing a faint dose of stale testosterone.

When I get to the front door, I notice two cars are being unpacked. I open the front door for a man who is carrying an old lamp and a brand-new Target lampshade. Others are carrying clothes and incidentals.

A nursing home administrator is telling the family that she’ll personally make sure Granny’s well taken care of.

By the time I make it to my old Saab, the two cars have departed, leaving Granny to fight for survival in this facility.

I sit in my car for a second and remember when, 40 years ago, Jerry and I stood, laughing and drinking and swearing and singing “It’s a lowdown life, but it ain’t gonna pass me by.”

“It pretty much has, Champo,” I say to the old man who is me, wishing my parents still lived to the left, just down the road, and I could go use their swimming pool and their vodka and play with their dog, Flapjacks, who I rescued outside the Royal York Hotel in Clarksville at 2 a.m. one cold day. 

Old Mother Luck's been ducking me for a long, damn time, though.  So I turn right and go to the grocery store.

(Copyright August 5, 2024, Tim Ghianni)

Doo doo doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo doo; Suite Timmy Blue Eyes sees Jerry & Bob bewitched by Samantha, talks John Staed, helps old ladies cheat at Olympics game, referees invisible hide-and-seek

 It’s getting to the point where I’m no fun anymore. True enough, but I think I need to modify that Crosby, Still and Nash lyric a bit. Substitute “It’s” for “I’m” when I look at the steady regression amid strange and pungent scenes inside the Memory Care Ward where I’ve been a visitor for almost eight months.

I have just now crawled into my own back door, exhausted, smelling of urine or perhaps my soul’s murder most foul, and wondering why John Staed is on Jerry Manley’s mind.

I came into my office, looked at the wooden angel Tom T. and Dixie Hall gave me years after Dixie died (read my book, “Pilgrims, Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes,” if you are curious how a woman who died of brain cancer could, years later, give me a hand-carved Jamaican treasure that I’ve decorated with Mardi Gras beads and a Beatles COVID mask.  You should buy the book and read it, anyway.  Might learn something.  And loyalty does matter.)

“John Staed was here the other day,” Jerry said, just an hour or two ago, as I plopped next to him in the party room/dining hall of the Memory Care Ward of the nursing home where he’s lived since right after Thanksgiving 2023.

“It was the first time he’s come. Glad to see him. Looks just like he did when we worked with him.”

That “when” occurred at least 40 years ago. 

My lifelong News Brother Jerry Manley keeps saying that John Staed has "just visited" him in the Memory Care Ward and that John looks "just like he did" when we all worked together. I figured I'd investigate. Top photo is the original portrait of The News Brothers, from left: Jerry "Chuckles" Manley, Ricky "Dumbo" Moore, Tony "short, little asshole with a beard" Durr, Tim "Flapjacks" Ghianni, Rob "Death" Dollar, Billy "StrawBilly" Fields, and John "Street" Staed. That photo was taken in 1982, on Third Street, in Clarksville, Tennessee. Second photo, from John Staed's Facebook page, shows him and his wife at Mount Rushmore, apparently this summer. Look at the man on the right in both pictures and tell me they look alike. If you convince me they are, I'll move to the Memory Care Ward. Love, Tim  

I believe, as I said before, that John may likely have aged. Oh, he wasn’t really a ride-until-dawn News Brother, so he may have neither the scars of war around his eyes nor the battered soul of constant defeat. He was a more serious fellow who used to call in sick so he could lounge in the sun outside his apartment in the Belle Forest complex at what then was Clarksville’s edge.

 I can say this, because when I was associate editor and John – who did not know why some basketball shots counted three points and others only two – was “sports editor.” He only did it for the money, he admitted, when he called in sick during the high school basketball tournaments, forcing me to work both my day shift and his night shift for a couple of weeks. He waved at me from his lounge chair when I drove over to check on his health. I fired up a smoke and waved back. 

The “Clarksville’s Edge” noted above is not so easily defined now, as Clarksville basically has merged with the other “let’s grow faster than we can handle on our infrastructure” member of the Nashville Idiotic Metroplex.

Well, they have their own share of greedy and incompetent good old boys up there in Clarksville, but they all own memberships to the Nashville Symphony and enjoy looking up the skirts of the bridal party girls after they lose their panties to breathe free on the party buses. Fish-and-finger pie, indeed. The big shots from throughout this doomed Metroplex say their idea of fine dining is the Old Spaghetti Factory, or whatever the joint was called before the idiot detonated his camper truck while his hands melted on the steering wheel one quiet Christmas morn a few years ago.  I had to cover that explosion for Reuters News Service, which diverted me from my normal holiday gloom that year.

Anyway, the other point I need to make here is that John Staed, a really good guy, has not visited Jerry in the nursing home where he’s lived – if that’s what indeed you’d call it – for eight months.

I’d recommend John not visit, as he gets full credit for going, even though he never has. I mean, I’d stay home, too, as long as somehow Jerry thought I had been there. Course, he couldn’t get his two packs of Ritz crackers – one cheese and one peanut butter this time – and his pint of Diet SunDrop if I stayed home.

I told Jerry, as he stared at the stagnant TV, that his treats were down by his bed – I’d gone down there and left them there when I noticed he wasn’t in his room. His bed was busted, so I briefly thought perhaps he was dead.  He was only sleeping down in the party room.

“I could use some exercise, so let’s go down to my room,” he said in his subtle Lewisburg brogue.

“Man, I’m hungry,” he said, five minutes later, after devouring those contraband treats this visit. 

T’Alijah, the dreadlocked nurse, solid as a linebacker but lovely and kind, had gazed at my bulging sack of delights (the food and beverage, I guess I should note) as she let me through the double-locked doors to the Memory Care Ward.

“I really wish old Jeff Walter would come,” said Jerry, in response to my mention of the truly nice guy who met me for lunch a couple days prior at what has become my favorite local eatery.

I had the skinny omelette, by the way, which I’d recommend. Jeff, who paid (I always appreciate it when someone else does) had shrimp and grits.

Jeff, a singer-songwriter, a spiritual man, a father and grandfather and husband, who does copy editing on the side, had wanted to spend time with me (doesn’t everybody? No takers?) partly because I’m such an optimistic fellow.  “You are one cheerful fuck,” as my mother used to say to me before she died toward the end of the last century. May have been her last words.

Jeff, who worked under Jerry’s then much-thinner auspices at the city’s defunct morning newspaper, left the daily newspaper (it’s really not defunct, it just seems like it … pick one up, and it’s not even the skeleton of the paper my pal, John Seigenthaler – he really did love me and my writing and dedication to real journalism, as well as my charm and pony-tail – took such pride in.)

“It’s turned into a piece of shit,” John Seigenthaler told me one day while we munched on pastries and guzzled four hours of coffee at a Hillsboro Village eatery that no longer exists.  The 10^th anniversary of Seig’s death was recently, so our coffee marathon had to have taken place before July 11, 2014.

If you don’t believe he said that, then ask him in the next world, if, as the old myth in an embossed leather cover maintains, there is such.  I’ll be happy if there is, as I’d see my parents and brother while I’m looking for John Lennon and Jesus. They used the same barber. I believe in both of them, loved their music, lyrics and the water-into-wine/loaves and fishes routine.  The Rooftop Concert and Sermon on the Mount, as similar as they are, remain my favorite concerts.

All of this is to say that I had a great time with Jeff Walter the other day. One thing he asked me was if I thought it would be a good thing if he visited Jerry, in the nursing home maybe a mile from the restaurant.

Jeff had visited his old boss back during the holidays and wasn’t sure if Jerry even knew he was there.

I told Jeff to expect less this time around, but Jerry would be glad to see him.  Jeff did go, grew somewhat dispirited – I’ve seen the decline steadily, on a weekly, even twice-weekly basis, so it is not as jarring. The decline would be shocking if separated by six or seven months.

Jeff told me later that he stayed 20 minutes, but then left, as Jerry kept watching TV. The jovial host was watching “Two for the Road,” starring Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney, from 1967, according to Jeff’s follow-up report. Jeff said Jerry’s roommate, Bob/Milford, wandered in and “we exchanged pleasantries” and Bob laid down on his bed and went to sleep.

Days later, when I visit, Jerry says he wishes Jeff would visit. “I’d really like to see him sometime. Good guy. Haven’t seen him in years.”

So, in Jerry's mind, Jeff has not visited … but John Staed has. And the biggest newspaper asshole of them all, “newspaperman” Wendell Wilson even dropped in recently. In Jerry’s increasingly scrambled mind field of dreams.

When I first located Jerry in the party room on this visit, he was staring at a TV.  A “Greatest Hits of the 1960s” DVD was playing, and the screen was stagnant. Just a brightly colored listing of the songs and artists.  If your boots were made for walking or if you want your buttercup to fill you up, well, you’d have liked the music.

Me, I was glad he’d decided to leave “Incense and Peppermints” behind and walk on down the hall to his room.

As mentioned earlier, I’d actually gone to his room before I sought him out. It kind of scared me a bit, as his mattress and box springs were on the floor. The bed frame was not there. My first thought was that they likely were disassembling the bed because Jerry was dead.

“I didn’t notice that,’’ said Jerry, when we got back to his room and I pointed out that his bed is perhaps 18 inches closer to the floor than it used to be.

“I guess they’ll get me a new one,” he said, of the frame. “I don’t know what happened. Bob sat on it, and it broke.”

Bob, who is lying on his bed and watching a “Bewitched” episode where magic brought George and Martha Washington to Darren and Samantha’s suburban home, weighs at the most 75 pounds. Jerry is pushing 250. I do have my guess as to who broke the bed.

Anyway, I looked up and said out loud that I wish Elizabeth Montgomery would twitch something other than her nose. Neither of the gents in the room had any idea I’d even said anything.

I guess they were waiting for Esmerelda to reverse the time travel and send George and Martha back to the 18^th century.  Hell, perhaps they think this is a documentary, I reckoned. I remembered that a few weeks ago, the two watched a Harrison Ford sci-fi film and believed it to be a news report of things taking place in space that very day.

I mentioned to Jerry that former Leaf-Chronicle compositor-turned-computer chief Terry Vaughan had died. I always liked Terry. In fact, Staed recruited Terry to help him make a country farm shack livable. All the handyman’s work notwithstanding, the place was a hovel and John moved out when he realized the only heat was a wood stove and he had to collect the fuel himself. He decided to get married in order to stay warm back in the city. It has turned out to be a happy union. Most of us had at least one miss. Thank God, at least in my case.

Jerry couldn’t remember Terry.

Nor did he have any idea of what is going on in the world. He did know, last week, that Trump had been shot by an ear-marksman, another one of those American wackos who try to kill people from JFK to RFK to MLK to Gerald Ford to John Lennon to Ronald Reagan to Donald John Trump for the thrill of the sport and the recognition. Mark David Chapman ruined my world 44 years ago, another sad story.

As I told my good friend, Bobby Bare, the other day, I don’t think assassination has any place in American politics.  Seems like a brave and unique moral stand, doesn't it? Time and a mean nation have proven me wrong again, I must admit.

“Did you know that Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and that Kamala Harris is the Democratic candidate?” I asked Jerry.

“She’s a Black woman, isn’t she?” he asked, after admitting he hadn’t heard that news.

He laughed a little when he saw George Washington and his wife had gone back to their appropriate place in time, just before Barbara Eden brought “I Dream Of Jeannie” on the TV screen.  Another documentary for these guys.

I was growing uncomfortable in Bob’s recliner – Jerry was on his own. Before I sat down, I noticed a huge, brown stain covering three-fourths of the seat.  I touched it, and it was dry, and I couldn’t sit on the broken bed, so I sat down.

“Is this a piss stain on the chair?” I asked Jerry, as I stood up to show it to him.

 “I don’t remember that, but it sure could be. I never really know,” he said.

It did smell, though, and as I sweated more in their 86-degree room, that aroma began to cling to my clothing, hair, even my thick whiskers began to fall from my beard because of the stench.

“Let’s get you down to the dining room,” I said, as the world turned in my stomach. “It’s about lunchtime.”

“Damn I’m hungry,” Jerry added, forcing himself to his feet.  

He was plenty wobbly, but I’m no agile prize myself, though I do have a dandy cane my brother made for me before he died recently.

Jerry laughed a bit, mentioning the Chico the Monkey story, one of the climaxes of The News Brothers’ reign of good journalism.  The story of the police search for an escaped monkey, as I’ve noted many times, led the front page one Sunday morning.  As the editor in charge of that tale and its lead-story play, I got in trouble. Again.

It’s one of the few things Jerry remembers about his 40-year newspaper career. I’ve told the story many times here, the gist of it is that we led the paper with Rob Dollar's pun-filled story about the terrified deputies’ search for the errant squirrel monkey, who breathed free a couple of months before he was eaten by dogs.

It had all the elements of a good story: slapstick comedy, terrified deputies, laughing dispatchers, drooling newspapermen guffawing with each scanner transmission. It began with good humor and ended in death.

We may have celebrated with supplies from composing room foreman Glover Williams’ desk.  Jerry doesn’t remember Glover anymore.  Glover was Terry’s supervisor.

Of course, we ended up at Camelot, where Jimmy in the Morning, the alcohol-calmed deejay, slumped down on his table and bought us drinks. Chief Sheriff’s Deputy Eddie Patterson and County Detective Cliff Smith also shared drinks with us.  We didn’t like it much when friendly copper Sgt. Mike Barrett came in, slapping his holster.  “Happiness is a warm gun,” we’d all sing when Mike came in. Long story about Mike. Mostly, bang-bang, shoot-shoot. In the back.

I tried to direct Jerry to a new experience the other day: The world. Since it was a bit cooler than normal on this day, I pointed to the door to the outdoors courtyard, enclosed by a high fence Tom Sawyer would envy.  “You want to go out there? You haven’t been outside since the end of November,” I said.

He declined. “I don’t want to go outside. Don’t need it.”  He’s one who never sings “Here Comes the Sun.” Never sees it, as the blinds are always pulled shut in the room he shares with Milford/Bob.

Anyway, we got to the lunchroom, where people were beginning to gather.

“I’ve got to get to my table,” Jerry said, pointing to what the nurses call “The Guys’ Table,” where the four men, incarcerated here among a host of women, eat.

I followed him. And he sat at the wrong table, shocking two women who already were seated.

“Do you mind if we sit here?” I asked one woman, who looked at my John Lennon shirt and smiled.  “I like the Beatles, too,” she said, giggling.

The other woman just looked blankly at Jerry, wondering, likely, how he could have missed his regular dining table so easily and what was the big stain covering his gray sweatpants.

“I’m looking for my daughter and granddaughter,” said the first woman just before I thought she was going to launch into “Helter-Skelter.”

 “I know they are here, but they are playing hide-and-seek,” she said.  “They play hide-and-seek all the time here.”

I looked around and saw neither daughter nor granddaughter, Just T’Alijah with a big pitcher of cranberry juice.

“Did you know my granddaughter won her game Monday?” the woman said. She moved her two arms in a motion that indicated the girl was playing either golf, tennis, baseball, softball, football, croquet or field hockey.

“Yes, I heard that,” I told her. “That was something. Great victory.”

She smiled. Jerry finished his cranberry juice and stood up.

I’ll come back when it’s lunchtime,” he said. It was about five minutes to noon, when lunch is served.

The kind woman giggled but kept on looking for her scampish daughter and granddaughter, who were playing hide-and-seek.

We walked all the way to Jerry’s room, and I sat back down in the stained chair.

Jeannie was in her skimpies on the TV and she was using her magic to clean the uniform of Lieutenant Dan, or whatever character J.R. Ewing played in that show.

Jerry stood up with a jolt after about three minutes.

It suddenly was lunchtime, he realized. 

He walked unsteadily down the hallway and I, too, wondered why his clothes were so stained.  They supposedly do his laundry regularly here. He must’ve thought these gray sweatpants were clean. Perhaps they were at the beginning of a very long day.

I looked behind us, and Milford/Bob was following us to the lunchroom. I did not want to go back in there, see the empty eyes and hear the senseless giggling. It was hot and I was tired.

I was so glad that T’Alijah stepped from the lunchroom to welcome Jerry.

“God, you are a sight for sore eyes,” I said to the lovely woman, who somehow can smile even while lives glimmer around her.

She loves these people.

I do, too, of course. Especially Jerry, who I tap on the shoulder.

“I’ll see you in a few days,” I say, as he turns, slowly, into the lunchroom.

“I’ll let you out,” says T’Alijah, turning toward me.

She punches in the code and holds open the double-locked door. I pass through.

On the way through the “normal people” part of the nursing home, a really attractive young social worker is asking Olympics trivia questions to about 20 women.

“True or false: The Olympics include softball and baseball this year?” she asked, flicking her hair from her face in girlish TV commercial slo-mo.

A couple of the women look at me, and I mouth “False!”

They smile and take the subtle clue and get the answer right.

It’s hot outside when I get there. But the air doesn’t smell like urine and death.

That Crosby, Stills and Nash song still played in my pained-by-melancholy head as I put my dead brother's hand-honed walking cane on the passenger side of the Saab.

I stared back toward the front door of the nursing home and thought, briefly, about how much fun and for how many years Jerry and I ran free, as News Brothers. Doing great journalism of the type that no longer exists in this mother-clicking era.

I am sorry
Sometimes it hurts so badly I must cry out loud
I am lonely

Doo doo doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo