ONE LAST out-of-town couple had to be nailed down before I declared victory. That was Jim Tom Pinch and his wife, the former Iris McKinney, a good old Texas gal who could pass for saucy. Jim Tom, as I’ve mentioned, had become a sportswriter in New York City with all of the stripes, braid, and badges that came with it.
He had spent fifteen years writing for The Fort Worth Light & Shopper, a newspaper born in 1922 but the first daily in this modern age to be shut down overnight. The grocery ads couldn’t keep it breathing forever.
He escaped ahead of the paper’s collapse. He’d sent samples of his work to the editor of The Sports Magazine, the powerhouse sports weekly, and was hired. He moved to Manhattan and in no time became one of SM’s most reliable writers.
Jim Tom and Iris met and were stricken in Gully Creek when he was there to do a piece on the Tornadoes. Iris had been brought on board from her accounting job with a concrete company by her friend Kelly Sue Woodley. Iris was hired to help out in the front office when Billy Clyde was the general manager.
She and Jim Tom had lived in the common-law world for a while—Iris was against marriage.
Iris said as she had observed it, “Marriage is for people who like to argue about shit.”
But she gave in one day and they made it legit.
Jim Tom was holding onto the competitive drive that living in Manhattan stirs up in people. Or so I’ve heard. He laughs at the stroke his national byline wields amid the agony and ecstasy of the sports world.
“If I’m not at the Super Bowl,” he jokes, “they cancel it.”
There are drawbacks that didn’t exist in his early years at the magazine. His reliable editors were more helpful then. They handled his copy delicately when he was on deadline on the road, and his piece would come out reading like it hadn’t been nibbled on by squirrels.
Today Jim Tom is forced to get along with a collection of ambitious young editors that were schooled by academics, none of whom had worked a day on a newspaper or magazine with deadlines. The academics replaced the professionals who were talked into taking early retirement or buyouts when the publication went on a cost-cutting binge.
Jim Tom referred to the new breed of editors as “the egg whites.” He claims they are known to lapse into severe depression if they lose a comma war to a staff writer like, for instance, him.
There was one good friend and editor left on the staff. That was Reg Blake, a seasoned vet at the magazine. They had fun arguing politics—Reg the Red Menace, Jim Tom the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.
“If it gets serious,” Jim Tom says, “we settle it at ping pong.”
He was considering taking early retirement, becoming a contract writer, and moving somewhere easier on his whip-out. Somewhere affordable other than an Eskimo community in Siberia or a village of pygmies in Uganda.
He said, “You can’t buy a broom closet in Manhattan for less than two million dollars today. Our apartment rent has ballooned to six thousand a month because there’s a working fireplace in the living room.”
On the side he’d written two autobiographies of sports heroes that flirted with best-sellerdom. One of course was with Billy Clyde. The other was with “Rats” Keener, the basketball coach at Kentucky who won five NCAA championships with teams on which you couldn’t find a player who spoke English.
Jim Tom spent the first couple of years celebrating the fact that he’d made it to the bigtime. He’d become part of everything New York City represented. The skyscrapers, Times Square, Rockefeller Center, the Plaza Hotel, Yankee Stadium, Broadway, Sardi’s, “21,” P. J. Clarke’s, Saks Fifth Avenue. One of the first things he did was find out where Tin Pan Alley had been. He’d seen enough movie musicals to make him curious about it.
He found out it had been a stretch of West Twenty-Eighth Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue. But he also discovered that popular music had since then moved to the Brill Building at Forty-Ninth and Broadway.
As the magic began to wear off, Jim Tom next found himself hopping from one deadline event to another. Which brings him up to date where he’s finding it harder to live comfortably in what he now calls “the Manhattan money funnel.”
On the phone, he said, “Tommy Earl, when I came to New York a cab to LaGuardia was six bucks. Now it’s fifteen dollars to go six blocks in Manhattan, and the guy at the wheel is an illegal from Bangladesh who not only expects me to speak Bengali, he’ll have no understanding of what a red signal light means.”
Then there were Iris’s wishes to consider.
Iris is a likable redhead if you don’t count off too many points for her mouth. If anyone could drop more four-letter words than T. J. Lambert in one conversation, it was Iris. And if anybody disliked New York City more than Big Ed Bookman, it was Iris.
The magic that Jim Tom once felt about Manhattan never gripped Iris. Her take on the Apple:
“I’m supposed to appreciate the culture this city offers? What culture is that? The insufferable traffic? The head-throbbing congestion? The brain-crushing noise? The outrageous cost of everything? It’s a melting pot, all right.”
She would tell you, “You want to make me happy? Plant my butt someplace like Sag Harbor where I can breathe fresh air, not get pushed off the sidewalk by a Center of the Universe, and be forced to stand in line for thirty goddamn minutes to be honored with a seat at a lunch counter.”
Iris enjoys telling about the evening when she was verbally attacked by a white chick social worker, but one who lived in a five-million-dollar penthouse apartment on Park Avenue.
They met at a dinner party in the social worker’s home. Iris and Jim Tom had been invited as a couple—the social worker was a Boston Red Sox fan. But Jim Tom was out of town on assignment, so Iris went alone, mainly to see what a Park Avenue penthouse looked like.
The thing that set off the exchange was Iris letting it be known that she was a native Texan.
The social worker said, “Oh, my. Then I must ask you how you’re dealing with your ‘whiteness?’”
Iris fired back with, “How do you deal with yours, honey? Do you keep it under control in your Vuitton handbag or your Gucci purse?”
Iris heard gasps as she stormed out.
Jim Tom confessed they were looking forward to the reunion. It would be a welcome break from the inconveniences of life.