"... my underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around my legs..."

I thought you'd enjoy this taken-out-of-context sentence from "The Great Gatsby":

The prolonged and tumultuous argument that ended by herding us into that room eludes me, though I have a sharp physical memory that, in the course of it, my underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around my legs and intermittent beads of sweat raced cool across my back.

U've got to run... out into the Wisconsin snow... which was the subject of another post about a "Gatsby" sentence weeks ago.  No time to venture my comments about the damp snake and all that. So have at it. I'll join you later. 

ADDED: Herding, eluding, climbing, racing. Very active, especially the underwear, which was so memorable compared to the substance of the argument. There was a big argument, but it eludes him now. The argument ran out of his memory even as the running, racing, sweat and the climbing snakelike underwear wormed their way in.

The snake is so entrancing that it seems wrong to get to the introduction-to-creative-writing purple-prose "intermittent beads of sweat raced cool across my back." What's the point of "intermittent"? Why tag the trite "beads of" onto "sweat"? And "cool" as an adverb seems so twee. Perhaps all that verbiage was necessary to make it okay to talk about his underwear and to say snake. Damp snake.