As a child, you rarely appreciate interesting people. Entertaining people, perhaps, but interesting people, not so much. Interesting people often have a slowness about them that requires the young to stop and listen longer than they are otherwise inclined. But, in the journey to adulthood, like a first love or heartbreak, you never forget the first truly interesting person you meet. The first person who entangles your roving attention in their narrative yarns and inspires you to weave some of your own. For me, that person was a man named Errol Augustus.
Errol Augustus. It is not a name so much as it is a challenge. A moniker that demands bright pulp artwork of pirates and Martians and damsels in distress. When introducing himself, he would say “Errol like Flynn. Augustus like Caesar.” By then he usually had you hooked.
I met him through the Pentecostal church that my family attended and where my father served as a lay minister. Kind eyes were crowned with a shock of white hair. On his forearms, a few mismatched tattoos were barely perceptible as they faded into his black skin.
But it wasn’t his appearance that made his impact. It was his stories. To sit down with Mr. Augustus was to watch worlds be made. Woven into his anecdotes were some unspecified number of romantic relationships, children, skills, and careers. His stories hung in the air free of context or moralizing. So utterly beholden to the conversation that to give them broader life context or moral teloi would be to reduce them. To fact-check them would be futile. The truth of them was in their telling. Within the stifling waters of the early 2000’s evangelical culture war, where every story seemed to be a cautionary tale, the raw excess of life that saturated Mr. Augustus’ anecdotes gave me air to breathe.
In one story he was working in a warehouse for Victoria’s Secret, unpacking lingerie from overseas. Occasionally, he said, exotic creatures would hitchhike in the underwear, which once resulted in a tarantula terrorizing a young woman so badly that she quit immediately. In another story, he helped found a Mexican restaurant. Whenever he took us to it he would tell the waiter “I’ll just have my sandwich” (It wasn’t until years later that I realized just how bizarre it was to order a sandwich at a Mexican restaurant). He had advanced knowledge of sound engineering and supposedly had worked with some Motown legends, which would have been totally unbelievable if not for the gold and silver records on his walls. He claimed to have worked on movies briefly and once gave my family a bread maker that he said had belonged to a member of Nixon’s cabinet. His life seemed to be more episodic than serialized, made even more fragmentary by the limits of my youthful attention span.
But what calls him to mind over ten years since his death is, oddly enough, UFOs. As they have reemerged into the public conversation I am constantly flooded with memories from my formative years. I was obsessed with other worlds. I would stay up late to watch tawdry History Channel documentaries with committee-approved names like “The Nazi UFO Conspiracy.” I like to think I didn’t take myself too seriously in it but knowing myself I was probably an insufferable fount of questions on the subject. This united with the childish confidence to broach esoteric subjects with adults led to more than a few dead-end conversations and more than a few awkward talks with my parents as word came back to them that Austin was talking to people about UFOs again. But one day in the church gymnasium I asked Mr. Augustus about it. I remember his glassy eyes lighting up “Oh yeah, the government has made contact.” I can still remember the electric surge I felt in finally having some reciprocity from, not just any adult, but the coolest adult I knew. He went on to tell me of secret crashes and little green men preserved on military bases. I walked around the rest of the day in a semi-religious state of elevation. We were not alone. I was not alone.
We never talked about aliens again and the conversation was brief. And I will never know whether or not Mr. Augustus was merely amusing a talkative child. I really don’t think it matters. Something special happens when you meet an interesting person. But something even more special happens when an interesting person takes an interest in you. It makes you want to live a life worthy of their interest. When I was a bit older, I preached at a men’s breakfast and afterward, he told me “the Lord has something really special for you.” From anyone else, that small blessing would probably lose its potency. But coming from him, those words have retained their warmth amidst the winter winds of the intervening years. Mr. Augustus’ cancer diagnosis came as I entered high school and I did not spend as much time with him in those final years as I wish I had. Before he passed away, he attended my first high school play. Afterward, he gave me a copy of Phillip Yancey’s book on prayer. On the inside, he left me an inscription that I have always quietly believed is a subtle reference to our afternoon of cosmological musings.
“To Austin Kamenicky,
Watching you grow up reminded me of a new planet being born. Hidden beneath its formation are years to come of gifts that only God can give when he chooses you to feel his love.
With all my love,
Errol W. Augustus”
