The Jazz Cowboy

Through previous chapters you may have gotten the feeling that I am somewhat obsessive. I don’t think I am but my registration papers for a certifiable institution say that I suffer from this harmless disease.
I can’t help it that I love music. I can’t help that the deliverers of this music bring me so much joy that I need to attend their every performance available to the public. One particular band who are from Melbourne, but shall remain nameless while the lawsuit is pending, are the backdrop for this story. They have played various venues in our fair city and I have again, through my constant attendance, paid the wages for these boys through the cold winter months. Many of the venues are normal concert type facilities, which I thoroughly enjoy. I can thereby display my enviable dance skills whilst scanning the room trying to make eye contact with the gorgeous men surrounding me. I invariably meet the eyes of a stranger and then vanish to a dark corner with him and you know the rest…..my friends get in a panic wondering if I’ve ended up dead in a dark alley somewhere. But I digress.
One of the gigs we attended was not your typical concert style venue but rather a funky jazz bar in a laneway in the city. It was meant to be an intimate evening with the boys. Intimate it was, but not with the musicians who make my heart sore. Instead I became very close, too close, with a man and his wife who sat at my table, which being the size of a coke bottle lid, made for a very intimate introduction. So in the small confines of this space I, in my usual friendly way, started chatting to the couple. Oh what a mistake that was. Oh how I regretted it as soon as the man opened his mouth. He was perhaps in his 50’s wearing a wide brimmed black hat. (I’m not sure in what era that was considered acceptable.)
I felt like I had dived head first into a compost bin which had been festering for 200 years. The smell emanating from that mans mouth was enough to power Bangladesh for 10 years. But I had no where to go, no exit strategy. I was stranded on a tiny island with my head in a sewer. I tried to engage the wife in the conversation but she seemed to be the trophy wife, the handbag he took out with him. She was to be seen and not heard. And then, when I though it can’t possibly get any worse, he became so animated in the conversation that when he enunciated his words, large globules of saliva spear headed their way onto my already tense and thoroughly clean body. I couldn’t believe that not only was my sense of smell to be bombarded with the stench of hell but also my sensitive and supple skin was to be rained upon by missiles of germs and bacteria.
How could an evening with one of the greatest bands to have come out of Melbourne be ruined by a man who would have been evicted from a tip. Why, oh why, do these things happen to me????