Chapter 7

Dear Jimmy,

You know that issue of Sports Illustrated that comes late in the winter, February usually, the one with all the skinny girls in skinnier bathing suits or parts of bathing suits at least? Well, they hired one of those girls as a reporter, SI did, at least that is how it looked to me. And to a lot of the other guys, too. She is a dish, a looker, a babe - whatever the current slang is.

Her name is Donna Newby, and she is about as tall as I am and wears awful short skirts. Yeah, Newby, honest. Like most of the other reporters, she carries a tiny tape recorder and a folded notepad. She wears glasses, big-framed glasses that slide down her short nose, and she looks as serious as anyone can who is that pretty and long-legged. I have no idea what color she thinks her hair is. I think I have seen trucks that color but not any human hair before hers.

She showed up in Pittsburgh. By the way, did you know that they blew up Three Rivers Stadium? I sure didn't. Goes to show how much I got out of touch while working for good old FedEx. They've a TV tape of it that I saw, of them blowing the place up, in slow motion. Their new stadium is fairly small, compared to some, and there is a big yellow bridge just beyond the right field fence. I am not sure it is going to stay yellow.

So anyhow, the good thing is that they have grass on the new field, real grass, and I hear that there is something of a trend of getting rid of the artificial turf. I can't remember who said he would not play baseball on anything a cow wouldn't eat, but it is a good rule. Whatever that game is they play on a rug, it ain't baseball.

So this skinny young woman with the big eyeglasses came up to me while I was sitting there in my knee pants and undershirt, dragging off my socks, and she asked if she could talk to me. Sure, I said, not being as stupid as I might look, and she sat down right beside me with these legs that are about two yards long. She hooked one ankle behind the other and stuck her feet under the bench. The Cubs' locker room has a bunch of plastic chairs but it also has some rather old-fashioned benches alongside the locker spaces themselvers. She was wearing New Balance running shoes I noticed. That's not all I noticed if it's any of your business.

Now there are two dozen large, smelly men all over that locker room in various stages of undress, coming in and out of the showers wearing a towel or sometimes less than that, and this girl - I have no idea how old she is - is sitting there with her little tape recorder and her green note pad, licking her lips and batting her eyelashes, and saying things like, "How does it feel to be back in the game?" and "What do you think of Buzzy Harder?" and stuff like that.

I was trying to give her short but honest answers that would not get me in trouble if they were printed. Neither the smell of the place nor all the stuff that was going on with TV lights, post-game radio broadcasts, boisterous horseplay and that sort of thing seemed to bother her. After a game, most locker rooms are sort of a combination car wash and tin can factory with techno-rock playing from somebody's boom box.

Then Bigger Johnson came out of the shower rubbing his head with a white towel and plunked himself right down beside me. I do not know if he even saw the reporter until he sat. The towel he was rubbing his mostly-bald head with was the only thing he had in the way of clothes. And Bigger is big, really big.

The reporter blinked twice when he sat down because Bigger is a very large and very black man, and when he sits on a bench, or anything else, he moves it. There was no way not to notice him after he bounced her an inch or two off the end of the plank she was sitting on and nearly made her lose her grip on her little recorder.

"You know Bigger Johnson?" I asked her.

She blinked at him and opened her mouth to ask him a question and, for some reason, nothing came out. She cleared her throat as Bigger dropped his towel in his lap and smiled at her, showing his gold teeth.

"So how's he doing, Mr. Johnson?" she squeaked as a bright pink color rose up her neck and quickly reached her cheeks. Little bubbles of sweat appeared on her face. I guess she was wearing some kind of make-up since little muddy trails soon streaked her cheeks and forehead.