A hard-boiled, pulp-fiction preview of Ole Miss at Texas A&M: The Thicc Man

We traditionally do a Faulknerian preview in this space in advance of the Texas A&M game, but your favorite writer TwoYards is out this week. Jim is going to fill in as best he can with a film noir preview post for Ole Miss at Texas A&M. All managing editors have signed off on this experiment.

The mayor was rich, because he was the mayor, and he was the mayor, because he was rich. Those in town didn’t really think too much about it, because nobody ran afoul of the mayor. Especially not in College Station, Texas.

The name “Jimbo” didn’t come along until after he’d shaken down Baton Rouge’s lesser underworld figures and earned the nominative. He liked it, and he kept it. The particulars of that shakedown remain murky, but a sudden and dicey import/export job in 2007 resulted in a lucrative change of fortunes that relocated him to Tallahassee, Florida, as Robert “Bobby” Bowden’s chief hatchet man. He was next in line, and next in line he became.

Those days in north Florida were not unproductive. Tallahassee helped funnel Jimbo’s war coffers into a lucrative enterprise. He stole from Gainesville, stole from Tampa and Orlando and Miami, and he put those spoils to best use he could in Tallahassee. It worked for a time — the scam was on — but he lost interest in the endeavor and north Florida dried up so that he had to look elsewhere.

That’s when College Station, where real money can be stolen, demanded Jimbo’s services.

South Louisiana’s pulmonary system energized a non-native son all the way from panhandle Florida to east Texas, yes that Texas, and in east Texas he earned his money. In east Texas, Jimbo looted his venal friends and sat mediocre besides. At least at first.

Jimbo was charming and manipulative in his own sort of way, cannabalizing the interests of those who trusted him, beginning from his handsome days as quarterback at Salem College in West Virginia through his coaching days among the muggy southeastern US, where fat fires keep rat-sized mosquitoes at bay and the likelihood of an automobile incident with a deer is higher than that of a successful marriage.

Jimbo found his throne in College Station, though. Jimbo consolidated 10 years’ worth of the state’s money into $75 million, and he went to work. it was slow going at first, and then Jimbo killed a man.

Jimbo killed a man because that man insulted JImbo’s wingtip shoes in public.