Conversations in my head...
[This is an edited re-post from a prior Substack post on October 10, 2025.]
If you use any of what I’m about to say against me in a court of law, as evidence that I’m wrong in the head… I might agree with you.
I recently came across a wire-story, a reminder piece about some murders in Austin, Texas in December 1991. Now, Wait! Don’t jump to conclusions! You know I’m from Austin (hence, “Austin Chambers”); but I was on deployment to the Persian Gulf that month, as witnessed by at least one crew full of drunk sailors. That story had resurfaced because DNA had finally confirmed conclusively that the long-dead suspect was the murderer.
I slid into the internet’s DMs looking for a refresher, and realized that the yogurt shop murders of four teenage girls had occurred about two golfball drives away from the mall I worked in as a teenager just a few years earlier. Modern satellite maps and street-view technologies are pretty good at showing us the scraggly “old man hairs” on our eyebrows and other such oddities. Like these fine folks in Japan:
 |
Anyhow, as digital tools, they’re a great way to go look at areas you want to reminisce about. So I scoured the map after a moment of silence for the slain teenagers, looking at what used to be Northcross Mall nearby. It is now several things, the largest of which is a Super Walmart, which is good—the world could definitely use more of those, am I right? 🫤
Northcross Mall was about 3-4 miles from the house I grew up in. In those days, kids could walk or bike miles away from home, and our parents didn’t care as long as we were home in time for high school graduation. Which was important to them, because it was also the day we were expected to move out.
At the ripe age of 15 years, 10 months, I got my third job at the Chick-fil-A in Northcross Mall. I say third, because I was mowing lawns for cash at 12 or 13 and had a bicycle paper route at 14 and 15. Buckle up, because we’re finally getting to the exciting, action-packed part of this story—brown polyester pants.
See, like every other fast-food chain in America back then, Chick-fil-A required employees to wear a uniform designed to ensure they never met a romantic partner while on the clock. Not kidding. And just who was designing these uniforms? I feel like it was probably someone they rescued from that giant pit-prison in “Batman Begins.” Someone who had eaten four grains of rice in the prior year, and was hell-bent on unleashing their wrath on the free world, one article of itchy clothing at a time.
Back then, with the exception of the O.G. restaurant (“The Dwarf House” near Atlanta), every Chick-fil-A restaurant was in a mall. Every. Single. One. Malls ruled from the mid-70s to the mid or late 90s. After scouring the map, I went to “the Tube” and found this news report on my old mall, which seems to be from the very early 2000s.
 |
If you watch that video, you’ll see the ice rink I learned how to “hockey skate” on. Can I play hockey? Absolutely not. But I did master that thing hockey players do where they slide to a stop, sideways, from a starting speed of roughly 561 MPH, and spray the friend who just fell with sheets of shaved ice aimed directly at their face. Priorities.
Back to my pants. Chick-fil-A provided pants, shirt, bow-tie, apron, and name tag. The shirt was a cotton-nylon blend; everything else was woven from the hairs around Satan’s bunghole. And I agree with what you’re probably thinking—“Hairs Around Satan’s Bunghole” would make an excellent name for a punk-rock band. But the point I’m pounding is that the clothes were not comfortable; almost to the degree that they did it on purpose.
Fast-Food Industry: “Look, we don’t need an IT coordinator. Because it’s 1985 and Information Technology is still Top Secret. But can you sew?”
Escaped Pit Prisoner: “I once use a strand of my own thigh muscle to stitch up the maggot-encrusted wound of Bruce Wayne.”
FFI: “Sounds legit. What’re your thoughts on fabric?”
EPP: “I found sun-baked canvas tarps provided the best overall durability for my pit-prison poncho.”
FFI: “Perfect. Except we’re thinking ‘polyester,’ which is Latin for ‘Many Esters.’ How about design? Can you make patterns for Pants? Aprons? Bow ties?”
EPP: “No. Could I please have a chicken nugget? I haven’t eaten in three months…”
FFI: “Great! You sound perfect for the job!”
Chick-fil-A had this thing called “sampling” back then. They don’t do it now, because they saw the error of their ways and started getting out of malls about a decade before the malls started becoming concrete & glass ghost towns. But sampling was this thing where—in your 💩-brown pants, striped apron, and 1920s bow tie—you took a plate of cut-up chicken on toothpicks out to the mall and offered it to shoppers. I’m not sure who invented this, Chick-fil-A or Costco, but it’s the exact same thing. It takes full advantage of those people who ignore the rule to never go shopping while hungry. When I go to a Chick-fil-A now, I look scornfully down on the smiling, perky teens, knowing they’ll never know TRUE, character-building shame…
What Chick-fil-A didn’t realize—or didn’t care about—is what this absolutely horrifying process was doing to my “game.” As in the hunting game. As in trying to meet the ladies. Which in hindsight, was totally a reflection of my own insecurity. I remember when the store hired “the good looking” guy. He had no problem using this process hated by the rest of us to ice-break conversations with lots of “chicks.” In fact, it might’ve been him who taught me, “Don’t be sexist. Chicks hate that.”
The mall reminded me of the itchy brown pants. And those reminded me of just how badly damaged my psyche had already been by my frugal parents. They were born in 1928 and 1938 and were definitely more thrifty and resourceful than the younger parents of all my friends. Before going back to college, my mom worked at Sears and got a discount. Where everyone else was wearing Izod or Polo, I was wearing “Braggin’ Dragon.” 🐲 But the worst were the red pants around 4th Grade. She made clothes for us: church suits, school clothes, etc. But one year, she must’ve found a giant roll of material on sale. My wardrobe had several sets of homemade polyester pants. Talk about being a Chick Magnet. But only if you define “chicks” as laughter and insults from the “cool kids.”
Despite all that, I look back onto those years at the mall fondly. Willie Nelson once shot a movie called “Honeysuckle Rose” locally. In that movie, a scoop of mall ice cream fell off his mall ice cream cone and directly onto the mall ice rink where I learned to skate just a few years later.
Another strange story tied to that mall hails from my Navy years. My ship was at pier in San Diego. Every ship on the pier had to supply one or two sailors for the roving patrols and security guard station at the pier’s head. This sonar tech named Wayne something-or-other, who was part of my ship’s crew, started staring me down and grilling me with questions. “You from Austin? I’m from Austin, too.” I found it hard to believe, until, “You worked at the Chick-fil-A at Northcross Mall, didn’t you?”
Me: “How the hell did you know that?”
Him: “I worked there, too. You don’t remember me?”
Me: “During the school year, my parents only let me work on Friday night and Saturdays. Are you sure we were there at the same time?”
Him: “I’m sure. You were a crew leader” (true story) “and kind of stressed all the time.” (Also true.) “But I only worked there a few weeks…”
Me: “Huh.” I was flabbergasted this guy could pick all that out of the air, and I had no idea who he was. Then he said something, and I knew he was telling the truth.
Him: “I quit before they fired me. I refused to go out into the mall and do that friendly (NOT the actual word he used) sampling in those friendly brown pants and bow tie.”
I look back on the irony of that scene, now. Two sailors wearing old school dungarees, which were bell-bottomed prison uniforms, complaining about the Chick-fil-A uniform. I mean, our Navy uniform pants literally had square back-pockets where the front pockets were supposed to be. They were identical to the clothing in Brubaker or Sawshank Redemption. I suppose the lesson here is—never underestimate the power of crappy pants to unify wounded souls. And next time, break a seamstress out of the pit-prison, instead.
