Every week @f3nix posts an incomplete story and challenges commentors to contribute other half. This is my contribution to the challenge.
What the fuck is doing a punk-rock band like the Tortillas de Pelo – a bunch of idiots who think a jam session is a type of orgy –in New Orleans, the homeland of jazz? You won’t believe it, but this is the simplest part of the whole story.
There’s no doubt that the Tortillas play like dogs. The fact is that "play like dogs" is still too euphemistic to describe the kind of noise that this band of demented produces: a concoction between an alpenhorn’s bellow, played by a crack whore, and the fornication of a pigeon with a dying elephant.
The only consequence can't be other than their chronic broke-ass status.
The money made in Saint Judas was drying up faster than their beer reserves and they quickly needed an idea, before their musical independence was jeopardized. In case the band couldn't self-sustain anymore, the alternative would have been to go back working as clerks in the filthiest sex shop of all New York, property of a third cousin of Machete.
That’s why - in front of the chance of a payment that, for once, was not limited to the booze during the concert - Mendoza did not hesitate to sell the Tortillas as refined jazz musicians and to conclude an engagement for a wealthy cocks’ private party in Louisiana. This was not before having sold to the organizer, a certain Madame Laveau, a whole amount of references, later confirmed by an old alcoholic xylophonist in debt with Mendo for a couple of favors.
After all, what did it take to learn a bit of fuckin’ jazz? They would have had plenty of time during the long trip aboard their rusty van to try something.
The Chevy left The Big Easy behind, spinning along Interstate 10 as a suppository stuck in a well-oiled colon. Mendoza stood thoughtfully at the back of the van, laying his back on his Marshall tube amp and using a tangle of wires like a pillow. From the window, the monotonous landscape did not show much of the bayou beyond the trees, beckoned only by a group of herons.
The singer thought back to that absurd weekend, all those hours of travel just to be thrown out from the sumptuous farmhouse immediately after their first song "Spiderman has hemorrhoids". He did not understand: the arrangement in a jazz fashion should have worked. Fortunately, they had not left empty-handed from that party of pricks. Machete had stolen a strange mask that had all the appearance of being ancient and very precious.
In fact, readily resold in the French Quarter, the mask had yielded them a nice nest egg. Everything that had happened after the sale of the object was very confused in his mind and had to do with Cajun boudin and cracklins, sailing in rivers of Brandy and Gin. He also remembered anatomically confused female details and, in the chaos, the blissy and sweaty face of Tres Culos, who was watching him clinging to a huge seventy-year-old-heavily-made-up lady like a lemur to a baobab.
He smirked… this was part of a true punk-rocker’s life, too. The fresh air filled the van and laid a regenerating feeling of unrealized adventures on his tired face and... fresh air?!
" Billy... for the dangling Jude’s nuts! Tell me that TC is there in front close to you"asked the singer, his voice imperceptibly trembling.
"What the fuck are you talking about, Mendo? Isn’t he there with you, farting as usual? " In answering, the drummer's voice had lost courage and momentum while something was becoming clear even for a Machete in the grip of his obsessive-compulsive riffs: Tres Culos was missing.
The sound of the nailing Van recalled a moan. The same prolonged moan that, at that moment, not far from the interstate 10, filtered through the basement of an old ruin among the cypress trees of the bayou.
"Are you fuckin kidding me? TC have gone missing up the arse of that fat hag. We need to go back and bring him." Mendo exclaimed. "If he's still alive."Machete weighs in. "Why would you say something like that? You twat." Mendoza responds in almost a whiny shaking voice. Either he was having a singer's breakthrough of sensitivity or it was the drugs having a go at his emotional centers. Machete tries to defend himself "All I'm saying is if TC missed the Van, which he never does.." " Will you two shitstains shut up back there" Tìo Billy takes charge in commanding voice as he starts the engine and turns around and drives back. Both of them shut up and besides the periodic screech of something gone wrong with the van, as TC used to put it all could be heard inside it was a periodic up tempo "fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck" out of Mendoza's mouth which had a clearly worried face attached to it.
They arrive at the town. "You two go up the crack house alley and split up at that fucking underground whorehouse that ripped us off, I will look around the streets in the van." Tìo Billy lays out the plan and the three split two ways as Machete murmurs under his breath to Mendoza "I didn't mean it okay, now calm the fuck down." "I'm calm" answers Mendo quietly. He clearly wasn't. Both of them pace to the crack house alley checking out bums and homeless giving them a mix of expectant and worried looks shivering in ever present nightly winter around this place. "No wonder prick around here came up with Jazz, only the soulless could bring forth something as soulless." Mendo breaks the silence of the night filled with clinking and clacking of poor and unlucky trying to survive. "HEY! what the fuck you chiming on about, now stop reading shakespir and look for TC." Machete shouts at Mendo and immediately realizes that Mendo's still high and he shouldn't have done that and follows his response with a gentle "Please". As they arrive couple of yards away from the underground whore house with a huge board of a laundromat service, Machete orders Mendoza to go in and then around and ask around for TC and meet them back by the crack house. He looks at Mendoza a little concerned as he always is for him but, quickly turns deciding that if TC, an absolute lunatic no one human can like can be fine around here so can Mendo.
Meanwhile, Tìo Billy is driving around aimlessly about the streets listening to periodic clicks and screeches the van is making, attentively surveying the road like a flightless hawk but, in a van. The van comes to a screeching halt. "Not this again." Tìo Billy cries in an anger and despair as a mother who has had to watch her child through symptoms of flu for the second time in same season. Machete run across the van at this very moment and immediately asks "Any sign of TC?" "No! but the fucking engine is doing that thing again. Go grab a wrench from the back end" Tìo Billy shouts out of the window and quickly moves towards the front end. Machete pulls open the back doors of the van finds behind the stacks of amps and gears and road signs, covered in pile of junk TC crawled up in fetal position. Machete exclaims in panic and a moment of release of it: "God fucking damn it, Tìo, TC's fucken here having a nap, isn't he? I'll go get Mendo." and leaves. "Oi! jackass, where's the fucking wrench?" shouts Tìo Billy to no avail as Machete had already left as a wind. Tìo Billy himself fetches the wrench and with great difficulty fights the urge to bash TC's head in with it. Machete arrives at whorehouse and find Mendo un-stabbed and having a filling chat with a homeless man in his 50s. "Time to go buddy" Machete gently grabs Mendo's attention and bring him back to van which by coincident was just starting. The two get in the van and Tìo Billy drives on back the road they came. TC wakes up in a moment to Machete's punches.
Good luck on this week's Finish the Story Contest @figuringoutsrn
Thanks @wonderwop.
Wow, Mendoza lost his shit over the "loss" of TC! The next adventure for this band might need to be to a detox. tip! The underground whorehouse detail was a nice touch and sent my mind squirreling into dirty 'laundry-themed' jokes. 😎
squirreling ahahaha
[@brisby had a squirrel as profile picture at the time this comment was posted.]
Ahahahah! Good! The poor Tortillas shit in their pants thinking they lost their friend, but they were all too stoned (TC included) to realize the banal truth!
I now know better than to kill the characters. ;)
that was a good spin.
glad you enjoyed
Fucking hell! This was such an awesome punk mood!
Ah! the legendary bananafish has visited us.
Him in person, all banana, fins and shiny eyes.
Hi @figuringoutsrn! You have received 0.1 SBD tip from @brisby!
Earn daily income on steem: @tipU distributes 100% profit + 60% curation rewards to all investors.
Thanks @brisby for the tip. It means a lot.
Week #14 is out! Don't miss it, the earliest you post, the more bananafish blessings!