Hot links, global warming link considered

Above Photo: Hot links are available throughout the Geezerplex. Check your yellow pages or just ask at the gas station.

From The East Texas Journal, February 1995

By John DeWitt, Journal Columnist

Who can resist a free lunch?

Certainly not someone who makes the kind of money I make.

Certainly not when it’s your boss making the offer.

Funny how married men and employees learn to tell little fibs about food and hunger. I guess I’m pretty good at it. I’m married to one and work for another.

“Yes sir, you bet. Why I’m so hungry I could eat a hedgehog, and I love hot links. Why I believe that a lot of the county roads in Heaven are paved with Hot links.”

Hot links.

A mixture of some kind of ground meat, funny tasting bits of weeds, salt, and pepper all wrapped up in a piece of gut. You bet, my favorite food. Probably you eat the things with mayonnaise on some sort of whole wheat roll with a bunch of rabbit food stuck in with it.

Now fried chicken, that’s lunch.

A hamburger? That’s lunch, too.

But mystery meat stuffed into a length of gut? I love my job.

Of course, I’d never really tried the things.

I believe most people are smart enough to figure out whether or not they should eat something without actually eating it. I see no reason to eat an earthworm just to know they aren’t tasty. Why eat a hot link? I mean, face it, they look like what they look like.

I do my share. I eat enough Jimmy Dean sausage to fill seven normal people. At least he doesn’t use gut. Heck, there isn’t that much gut.

The folks in Pittsburg claim they invented hot links. The folks in Mt. Pleasant claim they invented them. At least two informed people in Longview claim they were invented there by an old man who made fiddle strings and was trying to figure out something to do with the factory seconds.

I wish that I had been the one who invented pressed wood, or chip board or whatever you call it.

I don’t remember what Geezerplex restaurants looked like inside before they invented it.

It does have one advantage. You cannot see the nail holes when they remove the old license plates to clean it every few years. At any rate, I reckon the fellow who invented it is sitting pretty today.

I’ll bet he isn’t fixing to sit down to a plate of steaming hot links.

The restaurant was packed. There were people everywhere I looked and all of them appeared happy. Must be other stuff on the menu.

There wasn’t.

I became the proud owner of a half-pound mound of hot links (you could choose from either light brown with tan splotches, solid brown, or nearly black); a large bowl of chili (sans beans), an order of French fries (fried in real grease, not some health freak light oil), and a styrofoam cup of Dr Pepper.

The chili looked great. The fries looked good. The Dr Pepper had plenty of ice an syrup. The mound looked like a bunch of stuffed four-leaf clovers that had been run over by a bale buggy.

The chili proved to be as good as it looked — no broccoli or spinach here. Pure meat and spices. Unabashedly Geezerplex.

I ate all my chili and began to look at everyone else’s.

The fries, hot and slick, slid down like they were born to it. Honest food with no pretense of upscale or gourmet. I managed to get into the boss’s while he went to refill his tea glass.

Finally, I made it to the mound. One young man in our party, Geezerplex born and bred, was completing number 14 of 24 by this time. The hot links did smell great.

They still looked like what they looked like.

The knife sliced right through them. I willed my fork to pick up a piece and I ate it.

All right.

Surely the second bite would not be as good as the first.

I resolved that the third bite would not be as good as the first tow.

Half an hour later I resolved that my third half pound mound would be my last — for the day.

I was wrong.

As usual, the people of the Geezerplex were correct. Folks over in the Zoo may keep looking for the next quiche or croissant high, but the real food of Texas was born and bred here.

Hot links are good.

I believe they make you younger and more virile.

I still don’t know who invented them first, or where. I can’t tell you what the weed bits actually are.

And, like others, I don’t care anymore.

If you haven’t tried hot links, do so. If you eat a pound and a half at one time, be prepared to burp a little. Maybe it was the quart of chili and three Dr Peppers I washed them down with.

A guarantee that the small amount of methane you release as a result will not contribute to global warming.

Enjoy.