Pickup Trucks

When I was little, we lived in Chesterfield. After my parents got divorced and my mom remarried, we moved to Prince Edward County. I was going into the 4th grade, and I felt like I had just left the planet Earth and traveled to some far away planet where there was nothing. Everything was different in Prince Edward. The people, the personalities, the county, the schools. My mom remarried a guy she had gone to high school with, and he was a state trooper. He never really got over the fact that it was a package deal. Buy one, get her daughter, too. If I don't ever get remarried, it will probably be because of my baggage and scars from my mom's first remarriage.

We lived out in the country, as most people in Prince Edward do. My mom got divorced from him over 15 years ago and moved away, and now I have no reason to go back. No family, and I hated the stepfather and his inbred ass family so much that I never really made any lasting connections with them, other than to visit the local cemetary at the family Methodist church to try to figure out exactly where all of their inbred asses would eventually be planted. So no reason to go back. I roll back through periodically, every few years, just to see where I grew up and to see what's changed, what hasn't, and what probably never will change. I suspect that there are a few pockets of developed little country-suburbia neighbhoods out there now, but there was nothing but country back then. It was so country, yeah, like how country was it? It was so country that when we first moved, you only had to dial the last four numbers on the rotary phone to talk to someone if they were in the same first three digit exchange as you.

We had a pickup truck, and on Saturdays and Sundays when the weather was nice, we'd go riding around the county visiting and doing nothing. We'd pick up step-cousins and nieces and nephews and other kids along the way, to deliver here or there, and eventually there would be about six or seven kids piled in the back of an open pickup truck with a cooler full of Coors and maybe a few Milwaukee's Best that had been discovered in the old 1960's refrigerator down in our basement. This was back in the day before Coors Light hit Virginia, so it was just Coors in the yella cans. It's not yellow in the country, it's yella. As for the MB, those would be the beers that would get hot and cold and hot and cold because that fridge only worked sometimes, and that would be the beer that would get thrown in the cooler that you'd pawn off on one of the dumbass alcoholic neighbors when you pulled up in the yard to drop a kid off, pick another kid up and discuss who had just taken the pole position in the Martinsville race and who got arrested the night before at the local bar.

So we'd be rolling down 460 through the county, wind whipping everyone's hair into their faces and every now and then an arm would snake through the back sliding glass window of the truck cab, dropping an empty beer can in the bed of the truck, and motioning the kid closest to the cooler to reach in the cooler and pass a fresh one through. Sometimes it was my mom and stepdad in the truck, and sometimes I was with some other distantly related person, because everyone at that point was very distantly related in some kind of inbred Ozarks way. If the race wasn't blasting through the push button radio, then it would inevitably be some old ass country music, Kenny Rogers before his face got melted into his skull, Hank Williams, George Strait, Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn, the like.

The six or seven kids in the back of the truck would ride along in harmony and middle school trash talking, impressing the younger kids, and then the scheming would begin. Because there would undoubtedly be one or two bad kids within that group. I am of the opinion that any time you have four or more kids together, one of them will be the bad kid. I don't care how wonderful little Skippy's manners are, he's the same kid who just two weeks ago pulled open the underwear drawer of his best friend's mother and jerked off into it. So there would always be one or two bad kids in the back of that pickup truck, irregardless of whose truck it was and irregardless of which kids were in the back of it. Quiet discussion would take place about how a beer or two could be consumed by those kids without the adults knowing, and which other kids were the diversionary crew, and which kid would be the lookout. The lookout was always picked because they were the next baddest, the bad kid in training. This is the kid least likely to tell, and the kid had personality enough that could either bully or manipulate the rest into not telling. It helped if the lookout kid had some dirt on another non-bad kid in the back of the truck, too, because then the rest of us would feel cowed into going along so that one non-bad kid who had done something moderately stupid wouldn't get in trouble. Since the wind was whipping us at about 45 to 50 miles an hour, and some old ass country music was blasting and the grown-ups were half ripped at this point, having consumed about a 12 pack or so, it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure this was going to be pretty easy.

Here's how it always happened. Wait until a fresh one is passed through the window to the driver, and check to see what the passenger is doing. Just for good measure, pass a fresh one into them, too. Be prepared for the passer of fresh beers to be complimented on being such a well-mannered young man or young woman, and at least yo' mama taught you right. At this point, the cooler is slid around ever so slightly so that the one or two bad kids can slouch all the way down under the window so that their heads can't be seen in the rearview mirror, if there was one. If there was no rearview mirror, you actually had to slide a little lower so that just the very tip-top of your head could be seen in the event that the driver or passenger turned around to make sure all of the kids were still in the back of the truck. After the slouching positions had been taken, the lookout kid would very surreptiously pop open the top to the cooler and take inventory. You never drank the Coors. You only took the shit beer because that's what wouldn't be missed and someone could always claim the can bounced out of the back of the truck should a can accounting ever occur. It didn't dawn on any of us that a can accounting would never occur because the adults in the front were generally half-shitfaced and they didn't really care, as long as a fresh one got passed over when the arm reached out the window and made a grabbing motion. The lookout would dig out a Beast, and pass it to a good kid to open, because the lookout could be seen from the rearview mirror because they were sitting on the tire well. And, if you got a good kid to pop the top, now you've sucked them in and they really can't tell. They have been drawn into the conspiracy. So the top is popped and it's passed to the one or two slouchers, who guzzle this horse piss tasting beer whilst trying not to squench their faces up, because, really, it did taste like horse piss. But you lose face if you squench your face up. You've got take it like a 12 year old because that will give you bragging rights on the bus the next school day. So the beer will be passed back and forth if it's two kids, or alternately guzzled and nursed if it's one kid. The lookout kid is watching, the rest of us are watching and trying not be noticeably impressed, but still kind of thinking about how cool it would be to be the bad kid. How cool it would be to have those bragging rights the the bus.

I only write this because I think a lot about the experiences that my children will never have in life, experiences such as this. First, allowing kids under the age of 16 to ride in the back of an open pickup truck has been (rightfully so) outlawed in the state. Second, I don't generally drink around my kids, and besides, nowadays if you get caught drunk driving with your children you don't just get hemmed up in a DUI, but you also face felony child neglect charges. My children will never know what it's like to roll down a highway at 50 or so miles an hour in the back of an open pickup driven by some half drunk asshole, while the wind swirls your hair around your face and you watch single wide trailers and shitty little hardscrabble farms fly by. They will never know what it's like to learn how to drive for the first time on a tractor sitting on a feed bag with wood blocks tied to the pedals because you're only in 6th grade. They will never know what it's like to drag your tired ass out of bed at 11:30 at night the day before exams to get the cows in because they broke through that section of fence that never got repaired. They will probably never know that the best night crawlers come from the pig pen. They will never know the unending hell of feeding a woodstove and keeping the woodbox full. They will probably be some part of a larger kid-conspiracy that involves drinking beer, but it will most likely never be in the back of a pickup truck. I am doing the best I can by my children, and providing them the best life I possibly can here in suburbia, but sometimes... sometimes... I wish they could have bits and pieces of my childhood.