Whatever Happened to E.R. Shorts?

No matter how many splits he did onstage, soul-singing bass player couldn't shake his demons

In October 1990, a recent arrival from Houston named Ennis Ray Shorts stunned Austin by beating out such local favorites as Two Hoots and a Holler, Retarted Elf and Jimmy LaFave to win the first and only South By Southwest Battle of the Bands. The dreadlocked Shorts was Otis Redding and Jimi Hendrix rolled into Prince's sexy-short package, and when he hit the Palmer Auditorium stage, he acted like he was headlining the Erwin Center. As he sang “Good Morning Sunshine,'' which he wrote as a member of Ian Moore's band, the audience lifted its arms and swayed in unison. Shorts felt tears stream down his face.

E.R. Shorts gave so much of himself onstage that he'd frequently pass out at the end of sets. During the early '90s, he was the mayor of Sixth Street, out every night, slapping skin, spiking the energy level and sitting in with whoever let him. There was always a party when E.R. was in the house. Scene-watchers wondered how long it would be before the soulful dynamo took off nationally.

There was growing concern, however, about his offstage activities. He was often seen staggering drunk at clubs, and there were rumors that he had a hefty cocaine habit. Then, in 1995, he was arrested and pleaded guilty to burglary in exchange for probation. From then on, gigs were sporadic, and E.R. would not be seen for months at a time. Suddenly, the everywhere man was nowhere to be found. It was as if a letter on the local music marquee had burned out.

Then, in November 2000, a woman identifying herself as E.R.'s fiancee sent an e-mail call for help to several news organizations. Martha Melton detailed a Draconian ordeal that Shorts was going through with the parole system. Since checking himself into rehab in 1998, E.R. has been clean and sober, Melton reported. He had a good job as a supervisor in the shipping department of a research lab and was adored by his co-workers. What's more, he'd been raising his 16-year-old nephew since the court granted him custody last year. Still, because of four violations, including arriving at church 15 minutes late, Shorts was being held at the Del Valle jail awaiting transfer to a medium-security corrections facility for 90 days. “It doesn't make sense,'' Melton said. “They're sending E.R. to Houston for vocational training, and he's already got a great job."

How could this be happening? How could a man on the brink of stardom sink so low, pull himself back up and then wind up behind bars again because of a technicality?

An unlikely trio sat around a TV in far South Austin in early 2001, but then the magnetic E.R. Shorts has always pulled diverse personalities together. There was Tommy Claiborne, a retired postal employee with a thick Texas drawl; veteran bar-band drummer Paul Mills; and E.R.'s nephew, hip-hop fan Anthony Shorts. All of them were watching a Shorts video that was shown a few months earlier at a benefit for ailing Killer Bees singer Michael Johnson. “I'm off in Europe right now, out on tour, so I can't be there tonight,'' Shorts said into the camera, cracking himself up. The real reason Shorts wasn't at the Flamingo Cantina that night was because alcohol is the Cantina's main revenue source. As part of his parole, Shorts, once the most dynamic entertainer on the Austin music scene, isn't allowed inside nightclubs.

After the four songs were done, the tape segued into a home movie of Shorts, his nephew and two sons (visiting from Missouri City, where they live with their mother), at the Malibu Grand Prix Oct. 28, 2000. From the hearty laughs that ensue when the attendant tells E.R. that his time was the slowest of the day, you'd never know that this trip would be the last straw that would put Shorts behind bars.

Shorts, who had to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet on his ankle, claimed that he misread his parole schedule, thinking he had to be back in Austin by 6:45. He got home at 6:10, figuring he had 35 minutes to spare. In fact, he was due home at 5, which left him 70 minutes late.

A week later, Shorts's coworkers at Ambion Incorporated watched him being taken away in handcuffs.

”It's ridiculous,'' said Peyton Wimmer of the SIMS Foundation, the musician's assistance program that sent E.R. through drug and alcohol rehab. ``E.R. has completely turned his life around. He doesn't belong in jail, but with that electronic monitoring system, it's almost impossible not to mess up.'' Shorts' lawyer Burrell Johnston says E.R.'s parole officer simply overreacted. ``These are absolutely harmless violations,'' Johnston said, referring to the time E.R. came back to the house because he forgot his money, the time he left work an hour early to buy his son a birthday cake, the late-for-church incident and the Malibu mix-up. ``There's no public safety factor here. E.R.'s not trying to outfox the system, he's just made some human mistakes.'' The parole officer, Anthony Escobar, declined to discuss the case.

There were hearings on the previous violations, and Shorts' employer, Bruce Leander, was there to speak on E.R.'s behalf each time. ``E.R.'s a wonderful employee, a really great guy,'' said Ambion human relations manager Rebecca Edwards, who added that the company has delayed its Christmas party until E.R. returns. ``There are 132 employees here, and every one of them is heartbroken about what happened to E.R. He's touched us all."

”At times E.R.'s real confused, upset and angry about what has happened,'' said Claiborne, who became close to Shorts when they were admitted to the La Hacienda substance abuse rehab center within a day of each other. ``But the stuff he learned in treatment is really helping him get through this."

Paul Mills was E.R.'s roommate during some of the tough times when he didn't handle his despair so well. “He was going though a really messy break-up with his wife (in '93). There were a lot of mind games going on, and it was eating him up,'' Mills said. Shorts had married his childhood sweetheart, Sharon, in 1987, proposing by falling to one knee and singing ``Stand By Me.'' But the marital waters were stormy from the start. ``I'd come home and he'd be sobbing,'' Mills said. ``So one time, to cheer him up, I went in my room and wrote a song about his situation called 'I'll Find Another.' That got him out of his funk for a while."

A few months later, Shorts did find another -- a gorgeous young backup singer named Charity. In the liner notes of his fine 1994 album Texas Sunset, Shorts called Charity “the love of my life,'' and the two moved into an apartment in Hyde Park. After eight months of cohabitation, they broke up, only to get back together and break up again. At one point Charity decided to end the relationship for good, but in the early morning hours of March 26, 1995, an intoxicated Shorts called her and said he wanted her back. When she refused, he said he was coming over. He subsequently broke into the apartment -- Shorts says he used his key, police say he climbed in through a window -- which led to a burglary conviction and the 10 -year probation.

E.R., who admitted he was wasted that morning, said it was all a misunderstanding, that he just wanted to talk to Charity. Asked to explain the sworn statement Charity gave to police, which said Shorts put a knife to her throat and threatened to kill her, E.R. said yes, he had a knife, but only because he was carving up a rotisserie chicken he'd left in the icebox a couple days earlier. When an argument with Charity flared, he may have waved it around, he said, but he never threatened her with it.

Charity moved away soon after the incident, but the friend who stayed with her that fateful night is still in Austin and recalled the events differently than does Shorts. ``Charity wanted me to stay with her because she was terrified of what E.R. might do,'' she told me. “We deadbolted the door because he had a key and then we fell asleep. When I woke up, E.R. was standing over me, holding a knife and motioning for me to keep quiet. Then he pulled Charity up out of bed and put a knife to her throat. He threatened to kill her, and he threatened to kill me. It was terrifying.'' After a few minutes, Charity was able to calm E.R. down, according to the friend, who called 911 when the two went outside to talk.

Though the case never went to trial, since Shorts pleaded out, the sworn statements given by both Charity and her friend are included in his file. The parole board determined that E.R. was a suitable candidate for the Super Intensive Supervision Program when he was released from Huntsville in September '99 after serving a year for violating his parole on the burglary charge. The SISP required him to wear the electronic monitoring device and submit to around-the-clock visits from surveillance officers. Each Tuesday, he and his parole officer worked out a schedule that detailed where he'd be every minute of the following week.

”Basically, I have to be perfect 24 hours a day,'' Shorts said. “Name me someone who's never been late for work, who's never had to go back to the house because they forgot something."

Sitting in Houston's South Texas Intermediate Sanction Facility, E.R. looked different from the man who once ruled Sixth Street -- and not just because his dreadlocks were lopped off the day he arrived here. That crazy fire in his eyes is gone. The man who played the bass behind his back while standing on the bar is absolutely serene as he talks about his demons.

”I would get wasted because I thought that's how folks wanted to see me -- the crazy, wild, messed-up E.R.,'' he said. He recalled the time he was singing ``Brick House'' with the Bizness, and he was so drunk that he stumbled to the ground. ``I did a spin on the stage, like I had meant to fall down, and the audience just ate it up. But afterwards, (sax player) Kyle Turner took me aside and said 'What are you doing, E.R.? You're playing the fool up there.'“ E.R. says it especially hurt that a fellow musician had to set him straight, and his eyes welled up. “But after we talked, I just went down to the 311 Club and drank some more."

"E.R. Shorts was really his own worst enemy,'' recalled Sara Fitzgerald, whose namesake Houston nightclub started booking E.R. Shorts and his TFT (Thought For Today) Band in the mid-'80s. ``When you saw E.R. onstage you couldn't help thinking `that guy's got something.' But there was always so much drama in his life.''

During one break-up with his wife, Shorts stayed at Fitzgerald's house. He borrowed her van and disappeared for three weeks, without so much as a phone call. When Fitzgerald drove to Shorts' hometown of Richmond to look for her van, she had a better understanding of why E.R. Shorts was the way he was. “He lived on the wrong side of the wrong side of the tracks,'' Fitzgerald said, describing a neighborhood of dirt roads and shanties. “There were all these kids running around the house, all this chaos in the neighborhood, and it hit me that all the crazy situations E.R. was in were normal to him."

Family life took a tragic turn early in his life when E.R.'s blues guitar-playing father was disfigured in a chemical plant explosion in 1968. Charles L. Shorts, who was nicknamed Dino, would often take off in one of the Cadillacs he bought with his settlement money and be gone for weeks. Mother Emma, meanwhile, went off to work as a school bus driver every morning at 5:30 and often didn’t come home until after 8 p.m. from a second job cleaning houses. The couple's eight children were often unsupervised.

”There was a lot of pain growing up that I just didn't deal with,'' E.R. said. ``But then the first time I ever smoked crack, the pain just disappeared. I had a big void in my life, and for a while I tried to fill it with drugs and alcohol."

When it comes to addiction, every story is the same, only the details are different. After Shorts received probation in '95, his file started bulging with violation notices. He was jailed three times for a total of 25 months from '95-'98 for testing positive for drugs and alcohol. There was another warrant out for his arrest for testing dirty and failure to report to his parole officer when he turned to Wimmer's SIMS Foundation on July 10, 1998. “Peyton came by and picked me up and took me to La Hacienda that day,'' Shorts said. “And he basically saved my life."

Going to the rehab clinic in Hunt registered as yet another parole violation -- leaving Travis County -- so when the newly sober Ennis Ray Shorts stood before Judge Bob Perkins on Sept. 14, 1998, he received a six-year prison term, crediting him with time already served. “I thought that because I was now clean and had a good job, the judge would show me some mercy,'' Shorts said. Instead he was sent to a Texas Department of Corrections facility near Beaumont. After a year there, he was given a choice: go back home to Austin with an electronic monitoring device, or go back to prison.

”I don't like to use that `N' word, but I'd never felt like a nigger before until the first time they shackled me with that monitoring device,'' Shorts says. ``It's a real ugly, demoralizing feeling. I remember once I was on the bus, and I crossed my legs, and that ankle thing was showing, and I could see a mother across the aisle grab onto her kids, like I was some animal on the loose."

What especially rankles Shorts about his current predicament is that he wasn't given a chance to meet with the parole board and persuade them that he's a changed man. ``If they got to know me personally, I think they may have made a different decision.'' That the charismatic E.R. has always had a talent for turning threatening situations his way is borne out by a story he tells about being on the road with Ian Moore in '89. “It was late, and we were hungry, so we stopped into this redneck cafe in Orange, Texas,'' Shorts said. “I'm black, with dreadlocks and a nose ring, Ian's got hair down to his butt, and our drummer, Ian Bailey, had hair of some crazy color. When we walked in, everything in the place stopped. Ian (Moore) said, under his breath, `Let's go somewhere else,' but I said `No, man, I'm hungry,' so we went to a booth and we could feel every eye in the place following us. Anyway, the biggest, meanest country boy in the place was sitting about 10 feet away, and I noticed he was wearing a rodeo buckle, so I said, `Man, do you ride those buckin' broncos?' and we started talking about rodeo. Then, everything was cool.''

E.R. Shorts is someone you instantly like, someone you want to believe. Even Charity's friend, who called 911 the night he broke in, said she hopes he's able to put his life back together. ``He was just so (messed) up that night,'' she said. Told Shorts has been off drugs and alcohol for over two years, she said, “I hope that's true.''

E.R. Shorts photo by Martha Grenon

When E.R. Shorts strummed a guitar I brought him and closed his eyes in that windowless building in downtown Houston, it all came back, the good stuff. He couldn't quite get the garage-sale guitar in tune, but his voice soared above the imperfections on a new song called ``Where the Flowers Bloom,'' which is about using art to make sense of all the chaos in your life. This concrete room with steel doors, which so often echoes with fear and hopelessness, reverberated with a strength of spirit.

He introduced another new song, “The Man Behind the Mask,'' as the story of his life. He's already sequenced it in his mind's CD as the leadoff track. ``With a smile on his face and love in his heart/ You'd never know that he's falling apart/ He's the man, the man behind the mask,'' he sings, his voice warming like a filament at the end of the tunnel. “I have no doubt that I'm going to come back in the music biz,'' he said. “But this time I'm gonna do it the right way.''

There was a rap at the door, and through the sliver of a window a guard pointed to an imaginary watch. Time was up, but Shorts wanted to do one more tune. The guard tapped the door again, and E.R. ignored him. He put down the guitar and started singing an a cappella song, “Hold Onto Your Dreams.'' About a minute in, the guard, thrust open the door. ``Shorts!'' he said, but E.R. just kept on singing. His rich vibrato was lost in the words.

I saw E.R. one last time, in Sept. 2002, at the reopening of Steamboat at 110 E. Riverside. He was drinking water, but his eyes looked like he was high. Everybody was so happy to see him, he must’ve been hugged about 50 times.

I was thinking that now I’ll finally be able to see this local legend of live performance onstage, but I never got the chance. The next year I was writing his obituary after he died in his sleep at age 40.

"He was one of the few people I'd forgive over and over again because he was so talented and had such a big heart," said Malcolm Welbourne, who produced Shorts' lone album, Texas Sunset, in 1994.

Former club owner Danny Crooks, who booked Shorts into Steamboat every Sunday night in the early '90s, called the diminutive dynamo "one of my favorite people in the world. He's the only musician I ever let live at my house. But he had demons that he never could shake."