Agent Ernge - A Story of My Old Life

Agent Ernge

            My sister tells me that if I say Agent Ernge, nobody’ll get it. She’s right as she is about most things, but on this I don’t care. I don’t care if nobody gets it. It’s important that I get it and maybe three other people. If I’m real lucky, her, Gary and maybe, Toby will get it. My dad would get it, but he probably will never read it, anyway.
            I’ve always loved orange. I love orange juice very much and up till now, mostly preferred the concentrate over the fresh squeezed. I live in California and here it’s harder to find the concentrate than the fresh squeezed, so I went over to the other side finally. I remember back in the seventies when Anita Bryant was the spokesman for Florida oranges. That was before spokesmodels and before her big hoorah over the gay business. She was an Oklahoma girl and I always believed had more than her own share of male hormones. Just look at those eyebrows, for instance.
            It was right after the seventies and I was going to UT in Austin. I loved it there. I was in my own element, whatever that ever was. I didn’t even know it, but I would never again in my life be in a surrounding more befitting my own personality, my own cosmic consciousness and my own personal when the stars are in the same place at the same times harmonic conversion. It had just turned 1980 and times were strange and hard. Reagan had just been elected for a second term and the night he was elected, I had gone to see Gang of Four at Club Foot.
            Austin’s something people don’t get, either. They’re starting to get it now, like the computer

people and fringe dwellers, like Sheryl Crow and Sandra Bullock who moved there and started helping to ruin it. The sad thing is the Austin they helped to destroy is the Austin they never could have enjoyed. When I was there, a computer took up a whole room and it took a team of Budweiser Clydesdales to haul one from one place to another and Sheryl Crow couldn’t have gotten a job anywhere in town singing anything except maybe out in North Austin if she took her top off to do it. And there weren’t any multiplexes, so there weren’t any Sandra Bullock movies and even if there were, Dobie Theatre or the Varsity Cinema on Guadalupe wouldn't probably screen them. At least, I hope not. The Dobie Mall and Varsity theaters are gone now, but thankfully they weren't divided up into a multi-plex and showing Sandra Bullock movies. They would rather have taken a match to them before loading them on a projector rendering them a crisp melted and beautiful fiery orange.
            My sister and I went to a lot of movies then. There was a movie everywhere and just about

anytime you wanted to go, you could literally walk over and go to a movie. Every other building at UT housed a theatre or a makeshift one with some old dead hall filled with old timey student deskettes that were all shoved together. I saw Singing in the Rain one night in one of these rooms and all the students and teachers poured outside in the dark nighttime after the show singing the title song, Singing in the Rain. We were all dancing around the campus in the glow of the orange light from the tower made so famous by Charles Whitman and it began raining on us all, just like the movie. That was one happy night.           

I worked at a place that was famous for its hamburgers and had been open and running since 1937. My friends had bought the place and done the gutting and work it needed to get it up and going again and it’s still there and they’re still there. They had music just about every night of the week and a jukebox with songs like A-1, “You’ve Got to Live, for Yourself, Yourself and Nobody Else” by James Brown or whatever the name of it was. I also wound up getting to go see James Brown at the same place where I had seen Gang of Four and that had been Crazy Bob’s Saloon when I had first moved to Austin and had that manager who loved to eat pussy (all night long!) and then make you wait on him the next night while he romanced some other girl. He drove an old white Chevy pick-up, I believe a ’65, and lived off Mo-Pac. He had long wavy blonde hair that picked up the sun’s orange highlights on a warm Texas morning.

            I was real boy crazy when I lived in Austin which was fine, because there was a lot of crazy boys there at the time. There was a guy that I worked with at the hamburger place, a weird bartender. I’m trying to remember him as hard as I can, but I can’t. My sister can’t believe it, because she says I remember everything. She and I would go there at night when we weren’t working and dance like fools. We had always gone out dancing after we worked at restaurants.
          When we worked at the Black Eyed Pea in Beaumont, we’d go dancing and do the two step at Lady Long Legs like that one night when she was real tired and that old cowboy asked her to dance. She told him no, that she just was tired and wanted to drink her cold beer, but he threw over the table and with it her cold beer and said, “I guess I can tell by the tension in the air what a sorry son of a bitch everybody thinks I am!” Then there was that night at the Cricket in east Beaumont off Concord where Randy McClain and the Apple Creek Review played. I had a crush on Randy McClain, his stage name. He was also a body builder who drove a ’63 maroon and white corvette and could only wear these gray polyester Harrah slacks because his thighs were so large. My sister was appalled at my crush and subsequent affair with him, but I told her I was researching a book. I guess it was this I was trying to research, who knows?
            She liked his brother, Hank, who played the drums but had a different name, because Randy, not his real name, didn’t want their public to know they were brothers. One night, my sister was there after work and she got up to dance with one of the customers. Old Hank would laugh every time my sister would peek at him out of the corner of her eye. She was being demure which we used to try to do a lot, both of us. Some girls can do demure real well, but neither of us were very good at it, although we gave it the old college try, boy. He finally got to laughing so hard, he could barely keep the beat and my sister started to question her tactics. When her partner moved in to re-up his dance grip on her, she saw what had Hank laughing so hard. Instead of regular hands, her partner’s hands were each made like two large fingers and a thumb, what they used to hawk at the sideshows as a lobster boy. She finished her dance like a lady and it didn’t bother the guy much at all. At the Cricket Club, all the guys were after only one thing as fast as they could get it before they went on home to their old ladies and then back to the oil refineries for the day shift.
            Later on, the Apple Creek Review lost their gig at the Cricket Club and started playing at Talk of the Town in the Rodeway Inn on IH-10. They played there seven nights a week. The band before was a blind man who played keyboards and his wife who played the sax and who’s specialty was “Don’t it Make Your Brown Eyes Blue." I had a steady after hours gig myself by that time with Randy, himself. When I’d walk into the Town after I’d gotten off work, he’d break into my favorite song, a cover they did of Conway Twitty’s, “Now I’m Lying Here with Linda on my Mind” only he’d change Linda to Cindy. I was finally what I’d always wanted to be, a groupie.
            This guy that worked at the hamburger place had fiery red-orange hair, charred and crisp, and the temper to go along with it. He’d been to Nam and supposedly had been exposed to Agent Orange. He absolutely hated my guts and I, it seemed, had rather cultivated that dislike to a form of torment. I was a waitress and unless you’re a waitress who’s sleeping with the bartender, it’s usually an oil and water situation. These are the times when memory fails. I could blame the sweet B & B I’d drink for a sore throat tonic and whatever else ailed me, but I can’t for the life of me really remember him too well.
            My sister tells me there was this one night when Tex Thomas and the Danglin’ Wranglers featuring Ms. Chris O’Connell formerly of Asleep at the Wheel was playing and just about everyone was drunk, staff and crowd alike. It was one of those nights like when Jerry Lee Lewis played at Manor Downs and my favorite band, The Fabulous Thunderbirds opened for him. He’d just gotten out of the hospital for something serious to do with his stomach or heart and had to cancel the rest of his tour after that show because he’d played so hard, he’d undone something they’d just fixed at the hospital. I had seen that show along with the T-Birds who’d made $4,000 to open and by the time they wound up at the hamburger place at the end of the night, they had to open a tab, because they’d already spent the $4,000 they’d just made. At least, that’s what I’d heard.
            People were more passionate back then. It seems like now, the only people who let themselves show passion are some of the hip hoppers and basketball players. Anyway, I was ordering drinks for all my customers and I’m sure driving that poor man with the red hair and beard crazy behind the bar. At one point, he threw his left hand on the flip top section of the bar between the wait-station and bar itself and prepared to jump himself over that piece of wood and come after me. He said he was going to do it, he was going to kill me, right then and there.
            Chuck went over to him to try and talk some sense into him, but Chuck was like me a bit. He was interested in the drama side of life and also a bit of a psychologist. He asked the guy why he hated me so much. Now here’s a guy who’d been to Viet Nam and sprayed with Agent Orange and God knows what else and is in heavy kill mode in a hugely crowded bar where everybody is either drunk or high or both. Tex Thomas is screaming out that they’re going to play some of their hits and my sister yells out when, because she’s been hearing that all night and didn’t love them as much as I did and didn’t recognize any of their songs as hits. Then he yells out they’re going to play some hits when their songstress, Chris gets her ass out of the bathroom. Then Chris O’Connell starts cussing him out from the bathroom, saying she’ll come out and sing some hits when she’s good and goddamn ready and Chuck goes back to interviewing Agent Ernge to find out just why he wants to kill me. He starts to break down, not knowing whether to cry or get angrier and tried to tell Chuck why he wanted to kill me, but my sister tells me that nobody could get to the bottom of it. He didn’t even know. He finally just told Chuck that he just hated Texas girls like me who got you all fired up and then let you down. That was something that messed with his head and he just couldn’t take it and wasn’t about to start now.

             I used to go to the Tavern at UT and drink coffee in the morning before my classes. They had the best Columbian coffee, better than you can even get in Columbia where Columbians can’t even afford to drink their own coffee. I would meet Newgene there, this guy from class who looked amazingly like the guy who got Jennifer Jason Leigh pregnant in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Orange County. He invited me to a party one night and he had a girlfriend in every single room and they kept playing “Pearl Necklace” by ZZ Top. We ended up doing some of my coke and sleeping together in someone else’s bed. I saw him again across the street from my friend, Biscuit’s house hanging out at a weird gas station and my friend, Toby started yelling out, “Newgene!, Newgene!,” like Jerry Clower yelled on his New-Gene Ledbetter record. We hid in Biscuit’s living room while Newgene kept looking around to find out who was fucking up his name. My sister told me that this girl who worked at the Tavern’s boss told her to go upstairs to fold tee shirts and then went up there and raped her. Now, I can’t drink their coffee ever again. It’s ruined for me there as I imagine it’s ruined for her, too.

            My friend Gary and I were talking about people like Agent Ernge and that song by the Highwaymen which is Johnny Cash, Waylon and Kris. It’s mainly Johnny’s part when he’s singing about this old girl who’s brain’s scrambled up from drugs. Gary told me this story about when he was growing up in East Texas and went to get his hair cut at his Uncle Malcolm’s barber shop. He was four, but remembers it really clear like you do when you hear something you’re going to use the rest of your life in your memory base. When the man ahead of him left, Uncle Malcolm told Gary to get on up in the chair. It was summertime and real hot like it gets in East Texas. You have to grow up there to stand it. People can’t just move there and adapt to it. In the chair was a pool of water and Gary said, “Uncle Malcolm, his chair’s wet”. His uncle told him not to mind it and said, “that’s because he was on that dope.” That’s what they called it then, dope. That’s when dope was dope, strong and addictive and produced in a nice, clean pharmaceutical lab. It’s not like this shit people take today that is mixed up in someone’s filthy bathtub.
            I saw A Clockwork Orange at the Jefferson Theatre in downtown Beaumont. That was the theatre that had the orchestra pit with a giant white organ that rose out of the floor. I saw that movie first run as I was tripping on Orange Barrel Sunshine and it was during the time that people also knew what they were doing in the LSD department. Once they got over to the blotter stuff, you heard more and more about the bad trips and who knows what they’re passing out today. All I know is that the movies and the acid were better then. The movie helped to change my life and my outlook and Malcolm McDowell is an actor who still sells me on the picture.
            My sister saw a movie I have never been able to see. It’s not available anywhere for me to see. It was helped financially by Matthew McConaughey, who actually lives around Austin, but it’s ok because he is actually from Texas and helps Texas films get made that ought to be made. It’s called Hands on a Hard Body and my sister swears on it. It’s about all these people at an East Texas mall who are trying to win this car by keeping their hands on it the longest. My sister’s favorite part is when this old senior citizen finally caved in and said he just had to go have him an ernge. That’s another thing you have to be from East Texas to get.
            There’s this joke that I used to tell Gary about this Aggie who was parking with his girlfriend and they get to going at it real hard. She can’t stand it anymore and tells him to go down to where it stinks and he tells her he’s sorry, but he don’t have enough gas to get to Evadale. Gary used to get me to tell that joke to people we’d meet in San Francisco, but they just never either got it because they weren’t from East Texas or they just didn’t like the joke like we did. It always makes us laugh. It’s kind of like that girl in Return of the Secaucus Seven telling her friend that it’s good to be around people you don’t have to explain the joke to. Yeah, that and John Sayles teaching himself how to edit on a moviola standing up the the whole time since he's missing two discs in his back. That's what I'm talking about. Moviemaking.
            My daddy used to drive an orange school bus when I was in the first grade in East Texas. My
mom was in the kind of hospital Johnny Cash was singing about with The Highwaymen, so my dad would load me up before it got light and I’d kiss my dog, Gipsy, bye and we’d go to Johnny and Jack’s for pancakes that stuck to your very gut the rest of the long ass day. My dad would always stop and buy me a bright apricot orange Nehi Peach soda on the way home from school. And, then there’s that UT ernge.