Tater Toes of Austin

I have lived in Austin Texas for most of my life, and as a result have met some very strange and interesting characters. I believe this might be something else entirely. Within the last couple of years a strange rumor has been circling a lot of late night conversations with the locals. People I have known for a very long time, and even some that I've never met. I personally have been witness to these events multiple times. This is meant to be a record of the most pivotal accounts of these events that I've heard so far.

Tater Toes
The first time I had heard mention of "Tater Toes", I was at a local dive on East 6th in the fall of 2018. I was bar hopping with a buddy of mine, and we had stopped to grab a beer and figure out where our next stop was going to be. The two other patrons at the bar appeared to be a little older than us, but not by much. As we sat down we could tell they were in the heat of a deep conversation. So much in fact that the bartender had trouble pulling himself away from it in order to serve us. Typically we have a knack for striking up conversation, but the bartender seemed way more interested in getting back to what the other two gentlemen were talking about. So as we took our first drink we heard an audible guffaw come from the bartender, this immediately tuned our attention towards what they were actually talking about. "He called himself Tater Toes" I heard one of them say with pretty obvious hesitation. When the bartender repeated this back to them a little louder than they had anticipated "Tater Toes??" the two men darted their eyes around like they had just been caught stealing something. At this point they noticed my friend and I listening in, and the guy closest to us told the bartender to forget about it. My buddy who is a pretty friendly and extroverted person, and was also several beers deep, immediately latched onto this phrase and blurted out "Who's got tater toes?!?". The two men flinched, and the one sitting furthest away darted up from his stool and blurted "He'll put you to sleep!" waved us away with his hand, and stumbled towards the bathrooms.

Since that night, it had become sort of an inside joke between my friend and I whenever we would be out late at night. When we found ourselves alone on a street and we saw someone walking in the other direction, one of use was bound to whisper to the other "Watch out Tater Toes is gonna put you to sleep!"

Around a year later, it was actually this past New Year's Eve 2019, we were both at a friend's house who had been throwing a party. Between 1 - 2 AM in the morning, most of the people had left and the rest of us stragglers were hanging out on his back porch. We had been talking about the aforementioned strange characters some of us had met in Austin, our friend was in the middle of of telling us about a time he had been chased by two little people wearing a Batman and Robin costume (which is another story altogether) When all of the sudden my friend blurted out "Tater Toes!". Everyone understandably looked confused, so my friend began to recount the experience we had at the bar that previous year. As he got deeper into the story, I began to notice that another guy we work with started to look extremely pale and nervous.

Maybe it had been from the entire night of drinking, but it didn't seem to take much prodding for him to tell us about his experience. He told us that he had been walking home late one night after a long shift a few months before, and as he rounded a corner a few blocks away from the office he noticed a man sitting on the side of the road, with his head rested in his lap. The man had long scraggly hair and appeared to be wearing what looked like a dirty burlap overcoat. He didn't really pay him much mind at first, as we have a pretty active homeless community in this city. But as he got closer he noticed something stranger than usual, the man's feet were buried in the ground beneath him. And it was at that point, when he moved his gaze from the man's buried feet back up to his head, that the man was staring right at him. He said that was the last thing he remembered before being jostled awake by one of his neighbors. Apparently he had been unconscious for about an hour and half before someone noticed him. The man he saw with the buried feet was gone, he still had his wallet on him, but he remembered the distinct taste of starch in his mouth. He said he hoped he would never see those eyes again, and now takes an Uber home whenever he has to work late. "So that's his name" he concluded, "Tater Toes"

My friend and I don't really joke about it anymore. And I really hope this is all just rumor. Has anyone else in Austin ever heard of this guy/thing/whatever?

Written by WaxTadpoles