Cottonmouthed

It was the telephone jerking him out of it in a cold dry trembling cottonmouthed panic, gray light just beginning to show in the window across the hall outside his bedroom as he reached the instrument from its hook and put it against his ear as much to shut off the terrible head-cracking sound as to perform the proper reflex and say thickly, “Yes?”

It was Billy Mitchell whose deep, wildly slurring cottonmouthed voice brought off the song, cut in April 1954, that stands as the Clovers’ masterpiece, “Your Cash Ain’t Nothin’ but Trash,” written by the great Jesse Stone (doing business as Charles Calhoun).

He was doing a lot of coke and getting cottonmouthed and very slobby.