Life Its Ownself (14 page)

KIM COOZE

44-22-38

and

SIX ALL NUDE BABY SITTERS

Jim Tom Pinch was waiting for me at the horseshoe bar in Mommie's Trust Fund. The bar was already crowded with singles types. Rising young executives were deeply engrossed in conversation about commodities and tax-shelters with herpes carriers of all ages. They glowed beneath the imitation Tiffany lampshades.

I said hello to Jim Tom. He gave me a nod as he continued talking to the girl standing next to him, a retro gum-chewer in fishnet stockings and a pop-art minidress.

To the girl, Jim Tom said, "I'm lucky I inherited the same rod my daddy had. When he died, it took seven days to close the casket. That thing stuck straight up like this."

"I ain't heard that shit before, have I?" said the girl, sipping her strawberry Margarita and looking bored as she reached for a Vantage 100.

I demanded that Jim Tom and I take a table because of my leg, which we did. We quickly ordered three young Scotches apiece to save time and trouble for the ballet instructor moonlighting as a waiter.

"You wrote fast," I said to Jim Tom.

"Yeah, I just turned it over to Dexter and Vivian. Did the story on how good the Frogs looked, did the column on how bad Rice looked. Pure crap; don't bother to read it."

Jim Tom was the sports editor and columnist for
The Fort Worth Light & Shopper
, a man I had known since my playing days at TCU. He was the only sportscaster I trusted. Dexter and Vivian were Dexatrim and Vivarin, the caffeine bombs, Jim Tom's best friends in journalism.

"Saw you down on the field," Jim Tom said. "Why didn't you come up to the press box?"

"I figured Dexter and Vivian were having a spat."

Jim Tom was a twice-divorced man in his late forties. His hair ws speckled with gray, he was developing a paunch, and he moved his right arm with difficulty. Arthritis was setting in. He was as mentally whipped as any newspaperman his age, just as underpaid, resigned to staying one jump ahead of the creditors.

He was the sportswriter who had helped me write the book that I called an autobiography and Shake called a diary. I dictated it into the tape-recorder, and Jim Tom typed. Jim Tom thought up the title:
Semi-Tough
. Then I decided not to have it published. It would have embarrassed too many of my teammates.

It wasn't the first time Jim Tom had blown a shot at literary fame. He'd once been offered a job with
Sports Illustrated
, but he passed it up because he hadn't wanted to change his by-line to James Thomas Pinch and bemoan the fate of the otter. Jim Tom had been sentenced to the newspaper business for life, but he said he could be reasonably happy if he didn't lose his mind and get married again.

As we settled in for a long night at Mommie's Trust Fund, Jim Tom admitted that his sleepovers were even becoming less frequent.

The pain was getting to be too much trouble to explain. He referred to the pain that would go shooting through his right arm and up into his shoulder just as his guest was about to pleasure herself.

I asked him if it was the arthritis that had driven away his two wives—the ambidextrous Earlene, who could hurl a clock-radio through a windowpane with either hand, and the incomparable Dottie, whose dress always seemed to get blown up around carpenters.

"No, it's the hours," he said. "A newspaperman shouldn't get married. All he cares about is his work. We go through life bitching at retarded editors... having heart attacks because of typographical errors in our stories, like what we wrote in the first God-damn place was
Farewell to Arms!
We go home wore out with nothin' left to give anybody. All a newspaperman needs is a bar where he can sign his name, some friendly conversation, and a typewriter with a ribbon that'll reverse. It takes a saint to be married to a journalist. Women ought to know better. Women ought to marry estate planners."

On napkins, spurred on by the steady flow of J&B, we made a list of morning-after lines, things a man had heard— or would hear—from a shapely adorable or a not-so-shapely adorable who had taken him up on his drunken invitation for a sleepover.

In the Top Ten were:

•
        
"Hey, this is Saturday! I have the whole day free!"

•
        
"Are these clean towels?"

•
        
"That's a neat picture. Your wife is really pretty."

•
        
"It's actually in remission."

•
        
"You probably shouldn't drink so much. It would help."

•
        
"Oh, don't worry, I would never pick up your phone."

•
        
"What were you doing with that pinlight last night?"

•
        
"Is it hard to get back on the freeway from here?"

•
        
"Rich will answer if I'm not there, but it's cool, he's just a good friend."

•
        
"In the bar, I thought you were the most cynical person I'd ever met."

Mommie's Trust Fund was about to max out at a hundred guys playing backgammon and two hundred girls wearing straw cowboy hats, tight T-shirts, designer jeans, and brass belt buckles that had "BULLSHIT" engraved on them.

"Why do you go to places like this?" I asked Jim Tom.

"It's my neighborhood pub."

As another tray of drinks arrived, Jim Tom said, "A couple of friends may join us in a minute. You care?"

"I'm not leaving with one of 'em," I said with alarm.

"That's all right. I might do a quickie in the forecourt, two on one. Not that I can get it up. You know what I yearn for, Billy Clyde? Old age. I won't have to do anything but lay on my back and bat clean-up."

"I didn't know you have to be old to do that."

"Maybe I'll grow a mustache, hit 'em with the whup- broom."

I drew Jim Tom into a conversation about sports. He was always good for a few lines I could use at banquets.

Twenty years of covering sports events had left him with an assortment of prejudices. He had never been in the cheerleader class of sportswriters, anyhow. It didn't take long for him to unload on his pet hates, which included almost every sport but college football.

The mention of ice hockey got him started.

"Who's ever seen a goal?" he said. "Forget a fucking assist. It's a bunch of guys named Jacques. Know what ice hockey needs? A five-thousand-pound puck. Two teams, East Coast, West Coast. They play one game. That's the season. Whatever ocean the puck winds up in, you've got a winner. You're gonna be a TV announcer. You could stand there in Omaha and say, 'Hello, everybody, I'm here in Nebraska where the puck will be arriving almost any day.' Fuck ice hockey."

"I heard you went to Wimbledon last summer."

"The linesmen were all wing commanders, squadron leaders, and group captains. McEnroe shot down six of 'em. He should have worn a swastika on his arm. I never could figure out which Swede had the dirtiest hair."

"Did you watch the girls?"

"I watched 'em double-fault and frown at their mothers."

"I saw Uncle Kenneth yesterday. He's still fond of pro basketball."

"Oh, me, too. The fucking season's ten months long, four thousand teams get in the playoffs, and all the armpits look alike. I'd rather watch cross-country skiing."

"I didn't know that was a sport."

"It's not. Cross-country skiing is how a Norwegian goes to the Safeway."

"You like college basketball," I said. "The Houston Cougars."

"Only when the cheerleaders turn it into a disco. You can watch tits bounce while they drag the coaches off to an asylum. You're right. I like the Coug-roes."

"Is there a copyright on that?"

"I called 'em the Houston Coug-roes in print," Jim Tom said. "When the hate mail came in, I pleaded typo."

I knew how much he despised baseball. I asked him how often he went to a Texas Rangers game.

"I like it when they change pitchers," he said. "You get to sleep an hour."

"Sounds like golf on television."

"Golf is a good game to play—if you don't have to keep score. Nobody can identify with those guys on the tour. They all drive the ball three hundred yards. Some blond guy makes a putt. Another blond guy misses a putt. Golf was fun when Arnold Palmer sweated through his shirt and chain-smoked. But you could see the same thing at a Tennessee Williams play and not get sunburned."

I tried boxing.

"
¿
Habla espanol?"

"Shake Tiller's working on some kind of pro football expose," I said. "I don't know who he's writing it for."

"
Playboy
. Sounds like a hell of a piece."

"You know about it?"

"I've talked to him."

"Everybody's talked to him but me."

"He said he'll be in L.A. when you get there. He came through here on his book tour. We got drunk. I think he got laid. I mean, I don't see how he could have avoided it. You'll meet her. She's one of the debs I invited over."

I didn't like the playful look on his face.

"What have you got me into, Jim Tom?"

"It's just a family outing," he said. "I thought we'd go to Six Flags, put the kids on the log ride, stop off somewhere and bowl a few frames, pick up a barrel of Kentucky Fried, and call it a night."

We were both looking around the room for our ballet instructor when Jim Tom leaped to his feet.

He had seen the debs, his lady friends, coming up behind me.

He pulled two chairs over to our table. Not being an impolite person, I started to struggle up for proper introductions, but my shoulder gently bumped into Kim Cooze's awesome bosom.

"Oh, sweetie, do that again," said a husky female voice.

Exotic dancers did not have a track record of putting me into a state of euphoria, but I respected them as athletes. They were sometimes fun to talk to.

It was now after 2 A.M. We had moved our act to The Blessed Virgin, which was wholly disrespectful of closing times. Jim Tom and I each faced one of those medieval Scotches, the kind that looks more like rust than amber at that hour. We were sitting on barstools with the debs.

Kim Cooze was on my left and Brandy, a Baby Sitter, was on Jim Tom's right.

Jim Tom was in a dark lull, muttering that Vivian had let him down. Brandy, an eighteen-year-old ravager, was drinking straight shots of tequila and accusing the bartender of holding out on the dread.

"Ralph will be here in a minute," the bartender said.

"Yeah, he will," Brandy smirked. "Meanwhile, let's do some of yours."

"I'm empty."

"Uh-huh," said Brandy. "For somebody who's empty, you sure got a lot of snot on your sleeve."

Kim was an honest 44-22-38. She had short platinum hair done up in a Thirties look, large green eyes with false lashes that could have supported a string of Christmas lights, and makeup a half-inch thick. I estimated her age at somewhere between forty and Medicare.

Her awesomes were barely constrained by a scanty white halter. She wore black leather pants that fit like an oil-base paint. Her spiked-heel shoes had little pink bows on the instep.

I had caught her last performance of the evening, and couldn't resist complimenting her on originality. I had never seen an exotic dancer who opened her act with a brief sermon, and then dry-fucked a copy of the Bible.

"I'm an ordained Minister of Mystical Theology," she said. "I have a certificate."

Kim went on at some length about how we all reached God in different ways. I did it through football, she said. She did it by sharing her body and her beliefs with the world. Exposing your body was no sin, she said. She had analyzed her soul and concluded that she was mystically united with God. Her psychic dreams had told her to save the souls of others by reaching out with her extravagant body, which God had given her, and touching others.

I said, "Do you actually go so far as to fuck for God?"

"I don't like that kind of language."

I apologized.

"What's old Count Smirn up to?" Kim asked the bartender. "Better put two of him on the rocks for me."

The bartender slid her a double vodka.

Kim pressed her awesomes against my arm and rubbed her knee against my good left leg.