Redneck!
The Redneck is being made into a pop figure, romanticized and defanged. That may be just a tad premature.
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We hated the Townies who cat-called us as Shitkickers . . . Plowboys . . . Luke Plukes. We were a sneering lot, victims of culture shock, defensive and dangerous as only the cornered can be. If you were a Townie you very much wished not to encounter us unless you had the strength of numbers: we would whip your ass and take your money, pledging worse punishments should the authorities be notified. We hated niggers and meskins almost as much as we hated the white Townies, though it would be years before I knew how desperately we hated ourselves.
In time, deposits of ambition, snobbery, and pride caused me to work very hard at rising above common Redneckery. Not being able to beat the Townies, I opted to join them through pathways opened by athletics, debating, drama productions. It was simply better to be In than Out, even if one must desert his own kind. I had discovered, simply, that nothing much on the bottom was worth having.
I began avoiding my Redneck companions at school and dodging their invitations to hillbilly jam sessions, pool hall recreations, forays into the scabbier honky-tonks. The truth is, the Rednecks had come to depress me. Knowing they were losers they acted as such. No matter their tough exteriors when tormenting Townies, they privately whined and sniveled and raged. The deeper their alienations, the smaller they seemed to become physically: excepting an occasional natural jug-butted old boy, Rednecks appeared somehow to be stringier, knottier, more shriveled than others. They hacked the coughs of old men and moved about in old men’s motions somehow furtive and fugitive. I did not want to be like them.
Nor did I want to imitate their older brothers or fathers, with whom I worked in the oil fields during summers and on weekends. They lived nomadic lives, following booms and rumors and their restless unguided hearts. It puzzled me that they failed to seek better and more far-flung adventures, break with the old ways and start anew: I was very young then and understood less than all the realities. Their abodes were tin-topped old hotels in McCamey, gasping-hot tents perched on the desert floor near Crane, a crummy tourist court outside Sundown, any number of peeled fading houses decorating Wink, Odessa, Monahans. Such places smelled of sweat, fried foods, dirty socks, the bottoms of the barrel, too much history.
By day we dug sump pits, pissanted heavy lengths of pipe, mixed cement and pushed it in iron wheelbarrows (“wheelbars”), blistered our skins while hot-doping new pipeline, swabbed oil storage tanks, grubbed mesquites and other desert growths to make way for new pump stations. We worked ten hours; the pay ranged from 70 to 94 cents for each of them and we strangely disbelieved in labor unions.
There was a certain camaraderie, yes, a brotherhood of the lower rungs; kidding could be rough, raw, personal. Often, however, the day’s sun combined with the evening’s beer or liquor to produce a special craziness. Then fights erupted, on the job or in beer joints or among roommates in their quarters. Few rules burdened such fights and the gentle or unwary could suffer real damage. Such people frightened me. They frighten me now, when I encounter them on visits to West Texas beer joints or lollying about a truckstop cafe. If you permit them to know it, however, your life will become a special long-running hell: Grady, let’s me and you whup that booger’s ass for him again. Often, in the oil patch, I acted much tougher than the stuff I knew to be in my bones. It helped to pick a fight occasionally and to put the boots to your adversary once you got him down. Fear and rage being first cousins, you could do it if you had to.
But I can’t tell you what it’s really like, day to day, being a Redneck: not in the cool language of one whom time has refurbished a bit, nor by use of whatever sensibilities may have been superimposed on me through the years. That approach can hint at it in a gentlemanly way, knock the rough edges off. But it isn’t raw enough to put you down in the pit where only the fittest survive: let you smell the blood, know the bone dread, the debts, the pointless migrations, and purposeless days. So I must speak to you from an earlier time, bring it up from the gut, use the language, warts and all—the way it was spoken and the way it was perceived.
You may consider this next section, then, a fictional interlude . . . voices from the past . . . essence of Redneck. Whatever. Anyway, it is something of what life was like for many West Texas people in the late 1940s or early 1950s; I suspect that even today it remains relatively true there and in other sparse grazing places of America’s unhorsed riders: those who fight our dirtier wars, make us rich by the schlock and drek they buy and the usurious interest rates they pay, suffer invisible rule and stew in their own poor juices. It is, at once, a story that didn’t really happen and one that has happened over and over and over. I am trying to impart, dear reader, something of the constant confrontations, challenges, and survival techniques of white niggers who live on the fringes out near the very edge.
Me and Bobby Jack and Red Turpin was feeling real good that afternoon. We’d told this old fat fart bossing the gang to shove his pipeline up his ass sideways and then we’d hitched a ride to Odessa and drawed our time. He was a sorry old bastard, that gang boss. He’d been laying around in such shade as he could find hollering at us for about six weeks because we didn’t pissant pipe fast enough to suit him.
This happened in the morning, just before we would of broke for dinner. Red Turpin was down in the dumps because the finance company had found him and drove his old Chevy away. We tried to tell him not to sweat it, that it wasn’t worth near what he owed on it, but that never wiped out the fact that he was left afoot.
The gang boss had been groaning and moaning more than usual that day. All at once Red spun around to him and said “I’m ona git a piece of yore ass, Mister Poot, if you don’t git offa mine.” Well, the gang boss waved his arms and hollared that ole Red was sacked and Red said, “F—- you, Mister Poot. I was a-huntin’ a job when I found this ‘un.”
Me and Bobby Jack was standing there with our mouths dropped open when the gang boss started yelling at us to git back to work, to show him nothing but assholes and elbows. He was jumping around all red in the face, acting like a stroke was on him. Bobby Jack said, “Shit on such as this. Lincoln’s done freed the slaves,” and about that time he dropped his end of that length of pipe and told the gang boss to shove it. “Sideways, Mister Poot,” I hollered. And then I dropped my end in the dirt.
Mister Poot squealed like a girl rabbit and grabbed a monkey wrench off the crew truck and warned us not to come no closer. Which would have been hard to do, fast as he was backing up. So we cussed him for seventeen kinds of a fool and peed on the pipe we’d dropped and then left, feeling free as blowing wind.
Out on the Crane Highway we laughed and hooted about calling that old gang boss “Mister Poot,” which is what we’d been calling him behind his back on account of he just laid around in the shade by the water cans and farted all day. But finally, after four or five cars and several oil trucks passed us up, we kinda sagged. You could see down that flat old highway for about three days and all there was was hot empty. Red got down-in-the-mouth about his old lady raising hell soon as she learned he’d cussed his way off the job. Bobby Jack said hell, just tell ‘er he’d got laid off. “Shit,” Red said. “She don’t care if it’s fared or laid off or carried off on a silk piller. All she knows is, it ain’t no paycheck next week.”
By the time we’d signed papers and drawed our time at the Morrison Brothers Construction Company there in Odessa, and got a few cool ‘uns down in a East Eighth Street beer joint, we was back on top. We played the juke box-Hank Williams, he’d just come out with a new ‘un and there was plenty of Tubbs and Tillman and Frizzell—and shot a few games of shuffle board at two-bits a go. It was more fun than a regular day off because we was supposed to be working.
Bobby Jack danced twice with a heavy-set woman in red slacks from Conroe, who’d come to Odessa on the Greyhound to find her twin sister that had been run off from by a driller. But all she’d found was a mad landlord that said the woman’s sister had skipped out on a week’s rent and had stole two Venetian blinds besides. “I called that landlord a damn liar,” the Conroe woman said. “My twin sister don’t steal. We come from good stock and got a uncle that’s been a deputy sheriff in Bossier City, Louisiana, for nearly twenty years.”
Bobby Jack had enough nookie in mind to buy her four or five beers, but all she done was flash a little brassiere and give him two different names and tell him about being a fan-dancer at the Texas Centennial in 19-and-36. She babbled on about what all she’d been—a blues singer, a automobile dealer’s wife, a registered nurse; everything but a lion tamer it seemed like—until Bobby Jack said, “Lissen, Hon, I don’t care what all you been. All I care about is what you are and what I am. And I’m horny as a range bull with equipment hard as Christmas candy. How ‘bout you?” She got in a mother huff and claimed it was the worst she’d ever been insulted. When Bobby Jack taken back the last beer he’d bought her, she moved over to a table by herself.
A fleshy old boy wearing a Mead’s Fine Bread uniform straddled a stool by us and said, “Man, I taken a leak that was better’n love. I still say if they’d give the beer away and charge a dollar to piss they’d make more money.” We talked about how once you’d went to take a beer piss you had to go ever five minutes, where you could hold a gallon up until you’d went the first time.
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