The Dirty Looks of Tom ‘Bad Mouth’ Smith
Tom woke up way past noon with a blazing headache. Scratching his blossoming beard, he got off and reached for the painkillers on the small table next to his blood-spattered bed.
Removing the cap with his steady left hand, he fished two pills out using the three surviving fingers of his right one and swallowed them with the few remaining drops lingering in the bottom of a whisky bottle he feasted on a few days ago.
Waiting for the painkillers to make their way to the receptors in his brain, he tried to recollect his memories and figure out what went so wrong at the JiveHive yesterday night.
How the hell did it go so wrong? Why his life has been such a series of big screwups lately?
It was supposed to be a sweet night with a sweet, nice-looking girl. He was not a handsome guy. Far from it. If there were a scale for handsomeness with 1 being utterly ugly, 5 fair and 10 beauty God, he would score a 2. That, added to the way he dresses, his subpar education and his short, violent temper should drive away any decent girl with half a brain. Still, for all his defects, Tom has an unparalleled skill. He was most certainly the best dancer of the East Coast. Actually, he was so good a dancer that sweet, nice-looking girls would ignore his ugly face and the bad, bad words spurting from his equally bad mouth and let him take them on a wild ride.
If plastic surgery existed and an impresario was paying enough attention to take notice, Tom would be a good-looking, rich man by now. But plastic surgery was still uncharted territory and no sane impresario would enter the kind of dumps he attended to hone his dancing skills.
So here he is, getting off his beat-up car. Smiling, he looked at his reflection in one of the chattered glass windows of the JiveHive and entered the bar.
His eyes took a few seconds to adjust to the dim light filled with smoke then he looked for Carole. He met her last week and made her dance like she never did before. She was all laughs and smiles but then she had to run somewhere he didn’t quite get, promising to come back tonight.
He walked toward Slow Joe, the imposing bartender, to catch one of those God-knows-what’s-in-there cocktails only Joe can make and wait for the girl. Halfway across the room, he sighted three badass cats looking at him. A girl was in the arms of one of them and he could only see her back and her neatly combed hair but it was enough to know that it was Carole. He approached the group. The man holding the girl suddenly freed her from his embrace. Indeed it was Carole. A crying, bewildered Carole. “IS THAT HIM?” the man screamed.
Carole nodded and then all bets were off.
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Essay’s tracklist available on Spotify:
- Run Around, the Cave Dwellers
- I’ve Got a Feelin’, Big Maybelle
- Hit That Jive, Gramatik
- New Bon Ton Roulay, Clarence Garlow (sometimes it is spelled New Bon Temps Roulet)
- Miss Orangatang, Lincoln Chase
- I Done Done it, Amos Milburn
- Georgia Slop, Jimmy McCracklin
- Rosemary, Dislocation Dance
- I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More, Kellee Patterson