Where I grew up, belief in God, a stiff pair of Wranglers and beer from a can was the benchmark by which all people were judged. Stray from that well-worn formula in my little country high school and you were likely to reap ridicule and ostracism from the folks who attended there. If there is one thing that rural Tennessee high schoolers strictly adhere to is conformity. The more alike, the better. And so, as a consequence, rowdy rednecks were goddamn everywhere.

They were easy to spot. The dress code was simple, both for boy and girl rednecks. First of all, boots were mandatory. In the parlance of the region the proper term is "shitkickers."  Boots worn sometimes varied from the traditional sharp-toed cowboy boot, often replaced with a soft, tan workboot. On occasion a pair of hiking boots would traipse into the picture. Pants were blue jeans, Levis or Wranglers only, starched and stonewashed or creased and indigo blue, never in between. They were always tight and always tapered. Belts were a must, worn with large brass buckles that said things like "Jack Daniels" or "Southern by the Grace of God." Shirts varied some–mostly t-shirts, sometimes knit and short-sleeved, but mostly they were the colorful Garth Brooks-inspired Western jobbies with pearl snaps instead of buttons. If it was time to go out line dancing or to the local football game, no look was complete without a crisp, speckless black cowboy hat. The chicks’ hats were their enormous bangs.

After the girls polished off a bottle of hairspray and the boys used up a whole can of car wax on their trucks, they’d often head to the Square, park in front of the county’s tiny courthouse and drink beer and holler. Other activities included scheduled fights at the Sycamore Rec or, my least favorite, field parties.

I’m not sure how many of you know what a field party is, so I’ll give you the best description I’ve got. Usually some kid’s family owned 75 acres of woods and open plains behind their home. When that kid got the urge to kick it, he’d invite his freinds to drive far, far out into the woods to sit on hay bails and build a bonfire and drink canned beer. Some guy would open up his truck’s doors and blare some Alan Jackson while people got really drunk and yee-hawed. I wish I was kidding.

You can’t blame them too much for the choice of extracirricular
activities. It was either beer bongs in a field or participate in a
D.A.R.E. dance troupe/sketch team that performed brain-numblingly trite
songs filled with misinformation about drug use to elementary schoolers
who’d just graduated from the D.A.R.E. program.
Myself a member of this D.A.R.E. acting troupe I performed a dance to
Bonnie Tyler’s "Total Eclipse of the Heart" wherein dancers wore
t-shirts reading COCAINE or TOBACCO. I would hug each dancer to
symbolize I had used the equally harmful cocaine and tobacco then,
literally, spin out of control. My God. You can see now why most of the
students chose to booze it up rather than humiliate themselves in such
a manner.

Even though I taught the dangers of drug use to little kids, I still
attended the dark gatherings in the woods. I just never drank. I would,
however, get a little thrill when the police (inevitably) showed up watching drunk, nightblinded teenagers running from blue lights
into a pitch-dark forest. I remember one unlucky young man running fulltilt into a barbed wire fence.

What I hated most was the rampant racism and ignorance. Confederate
flags (always called "rebel flags") draped a lot of the town. They were
made into hood adornments, headbands and even swimsuits. Hoisting huge,
billowing rebel flags on one’s enormous truck (often with the exhaust
modified to be even louder) was very common. Every morning coming to
school looked like a fucking Civil War pride parade.

Eventually the flag (or any racially-"motivated" clothing or
accessory) was banned from school’s campus after the seven or so black
kids in school finally spoke up about how offensive it was to them.
This happened at that year’s homecoming football game where both white
kids and black kids whipped out firearms to make their points. No one
was shot or even shot at, but after that night the administration took
the racially charged atmosphere at my school very seriously.

And I’m not exaggerating about the number of black kids that
attended my high school. There was only one Asian kid in my whole
grade, on she was only half Asian and had one of the thickest Southern
accents I’ve ever heard. Foreign exchange students–who must have been
heartbroken to learn they’d be attending school in the sticks of
Tennessee, not LA or NYC like they’d asked–were treated as if they’d
just slithered off a space ship. In truth, the kids at my school were
very kind and generous to our imports, but they riddled the Spanish girl
with questions like, "Will you teach me to speak Mexican?" Or they’d
ask the German guy if he was a Nazi.

Anyone who dyed their hair an unnatural color was automatically a
huge freak, unless they were also a guy, in which case he was also a
cocksucking faggot. Speaking of which, there wasn’t a single openly gay
student in the entire 1,000 student population. I now know, almost 10
years later, only one kid I grew up with that is now out. Of course, I
don’t so much keep up with my old classmates.

My fondest memories, though, of growing up in a rural nowhere town
are of the roads. With not so much as a single movie screen to occupy
our time, cars were our escape. Whether I was driving myself or riding
silently with friends, I very much liked whipping down the endless
winding roads down by the river where the streetlights ended and the
stars began. We’d coast over the bridge and out to where the trees
bowed to autumn’s gusts with the radio off, windows down, the smell of
poplars and hickory trees almost as loud as the sounds of crickets and
tires on gravel. We would travel the bended roads singing songs or
telling jokes while pastures and steeples flew past us to reveal more
of the same.

My ten year renunion is this year and I’m not sure I’ll attend. That
time and place seems farther away than even a decade. Maybe if we all
piled into the bed of a pickup and set out to relearn the roads we
memorized in our youth I’d be more inclined to attend. Somehow I imagine
there will just be a bunch of beer in cans and a bunch of yee-hawing.