by Dan Jenkins
I almost took a look inside the topless-bottomless club because of its marquee, which said:
Now appearing:
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.
"When there's a bigger crowd I do a longer act," she said. "I left out the rosary tonight and a thing I do with a rhinestone cross. This jukebox isn't great, either. It's mostly country. I don't think God is opposed to country, but I seem to reach more souls through old-fashioned jazz and big-band sounds."
I asked Kim how she had gotten along with Shake Tiller.
"He's a very devout person," she said.
"Yes, I know."
"I cried when he told me the story about the crippled nuns. How they changed his life?"
"The who?"
"You were there, he said. The time you were little kids and skipped church to play touch football on the lawn by the convent? And it caught on fire?"
"Oh, yeah, that's right."
"That was so heroic," said Kim. "Not many kids would have gone in that burning building—and you weren't even Catholic!"
"Shake did it all. I just turned on the garden hose. It's so long ago, I can't remember how many nuns he saved."
"Ten."
"Well, I'd have said six. The old memory sure plays tricks on you."
"Six were in wheelchairs."
"Right. It's all coming back to me. The flames were terrible. Some of those poor nuns were flying out of the windows like bats."
"God repaid you. He persuaded you it was all right to play football on Sunday. You see? Help others and God helps you."
"Shake spoke to God, I didn't. But I guess getting the word from a holy person like Shake is the same thing, isn't it?"
"It is!" said Kim, still rubbing her knee on my leg. "I transfer goodness and I receive goodness in return. My boyfriend in Dallas says he can sense the vibrations in the audience when I'm stripping for God."
Jim Tom backed off his barstool. He took Brandy by the arm.
"I'm outta here, Billy Clyde. I've had eight dozen Scotches and four million Winstons. I've had it."
"I didn't know you came in here to try to quit smokin'," said Brandy.
"See you next trip," I said to Jim Tom. "When Kim and I get settled in our mobile home in Bakersfield, you'll have to come out and visit."
Stretching his right arm and massaging his shoulder, Jim Tom wobbled behind Brandy and they went out the door. I turned to Kim with a yawn and patted her hand.
"It's not easy for me to confess this to a Minister of Mystical Theology, but I'm an atheist, Kim."
"That's not true."
"Also, I'm a happily married man," I said. "And...I have an early flight in the morning. Today, I mean."
"Happily married men are the only kind I know. My boyfriend's married."
She ran her fingers up and down my thigh.
"It's been fun, Kim. You took my mind off the Middle East... Afghanistan... inflation... unemployment. Should I thank you or God?"
"Take Communion with me."
She put my hand on one of her 44s and held it there.
"God is good." She smiled sweetly.
"I don't see how I can take Communion with my leg in a cast."
"There's more than one kind of Communion, Bozo. Ever heard of Oral Roberts?"
"Uh... where do you generally hold Communion?"
She dumped her vodka into a plastic cup for the road. "I'm at the Holiday Inn on University. Pay up and let's blow this pop stand."
There were two versions of what happened next. There was mine, which was the truth, and there was Shake Tiller's cynical fantasy, which was guaranteed to get a laugh from the guys in the bars.
Kim's motel was on the way to the Hyatt Regency downtown. I did follow her car, a new Camaro, but I left her with a friendly honk as she turned into the Holiday Inn. Fifteen minutes later, I was tucked under my Hyatt Regency covers with nothing but three Anacin.
The way Shake liked to tell it, J&B had grabbed the steering wheel out of my hands. J&B had tracked Kim's turn signal like radar, parked the Lincoln with great haste, yanked me into her room, and made a $100 donatio
n to her church.
Articles of clothing had then gone sailing in all directions, and I had quickly found myself pinned down on a motel bed listening to Kim's little exclamations of relish as something damp traveled toward my pelvis.
How a close friend could accuse a mature, responsible person like myself of such wretched behavior was beyond my comprehension, but of course I had learned to live with other vicious rumors about my character.
The next morning, curiously enough, I was surrounded by Shake Tiller as I limped into a gift shop in the D/FW airport. Shake's book, The Art of Taking Heat, was displayed everywhere.
I bought a copy to take on the plane to Los Angeles. I needed it for a prop.
I slumped into the seat I always requested—6B, aisle, smoking—and opened Shake's book to let the dry-wall salesman sitting next to me know in a pointed way that I would be unable to chat during the flight.
WHAT IS HEAT?
Heat is shit—and we all take it.
We take married heat, kid heat, boss heat, car heat, bank heat, credit heat, political heat, IRS heat, health heat, appliance heat, and every other kind of heat you can think of.
And all it ever does is make us grumpy and irritable.
But we can't talk about it until we start calling it what it is.
Shit. It's important that you get used to the word. It's more descriptive than heat.
It would have been in the title of this book if I hadn't taken some shit from the publisher.
The point is, the shit-givers of this world think that giving you shit helps you become a better person.
Well, we all know they're full of shit, don't we?
Shit-givers come in two basic categories. There are those who don't know they're doing it, and there are those who give it to you on purpose.