Second Negative

Tales of a small town gangsta

Although the town I grew up in had an actual name, I spent the first few years after high school telling people I grew up in the “Austin area” and avoiding further questions. It just wasn’t worth explaining where I was from, or how big the town was, or what my favorite sausage place was. For the record, it’s Crosstown. Southside sucks.

In my experience, there are two types of small towns. There are those, like my hometown that are close to a large city, and then there are those that, outside of other small towns, are fairly isolated.

Having grown up in the first type, I know that living close to a large city is almost the same as living in a suburb. As soon as we were old enough to drive, we would spend afternoons and weekends driving around Austin, going to the movies, and doing just about everything else that kids in Austin did. Nobody could have pointed us out and said that we didn’t belong. For the most part, kids in our town dressed and acted exactly like the kids in Austin. After all, we all shopped at the same stores, and MTV told us how to act like teenagers.

Then, there is the other type of small town. They filmed Children of the Corn in one of these towns. When I was 18, I dated a 19 year old girl from a blip on the map who had moved to Austin for college. During the many times that we visited her parents, I got a pretty good feel for the community. Weekends were filled with festivals, church lunches, dances, and weddings. The local kids were straight out of Footloose, and you could drive all over town and never find central air conditioning. In Texas. General Sherman didn’t say he’d rent out Texas and live in hell for nothing. It’s hot. Humid hot, not that bullshit they call hot in Arizona.

Like you might expect, the locals were a tad suspicious of outsiders, and didn’t mind sharing their opinion when something or someone didn’t quite fit in. I wore a pair of Nike sandals to visit my girlfriend’s relatives one summer weekend, and her young cousins laughed and called me a city slicker. Me? I’ll admit to loving the 24 hour convenience store phenomenon, but I’d spent summers locked outside with nothing but open pasture, and hay bales. Sure, I had a few liberal opinions, but it’s not like I staged a revolt in the middle of Sunday school. Attending a Catholic church after growing up Methodist was strange enough, so I kept my mouth shut and kneeled down with everybody else, while quietly wondering if the priest was speaking English.

The most memorable experience occurred during what was probably the last wedding I attended in the summer of ‘95. A friend of my girlfriend was getting married, and because their graduating class had no more than 23 people, the same group made up every wedding party. So, I’m at this wedding, and as usual, my girlfriend’s father is eyeing me suspiciously, the guys she grew up with are casting nasty glances my way, and I’m standing next to the bar staring at the bottom of my plastic cup. At some point towards the end, I went to change out of my slacks and tie because we were supposed to leave town afterwards. I put on jeans and a polo shirt, pulled on a baseball cap, and went back inside. I was dressed casual. Doesn’t everybody wear jeans and a polo shirt? The cap I was wearing was navy and made by Nike. It had a little white swoosh in the middle. You’ve probably seen them on Tiger Woods.

So, I walk back inside to grab the girl and get the hell out of Bubbaland. She’s standing in a circle of her old friends talking. I walk up and smile at her, and then perform the universal head jerk that indicates a readiness to depart. One of the guys in the group looks me up and down, and asks, “What are you, some kind of gangsta?”