These Jeans Ain't Made For Walking

Fall 1999 Collection

  The price one pays for living on a hill…

Why is it that every redneck in this godforsaken town’s car has to break down in front of my house? I often hear the put-put-put jerking sounds of their old, shuddering vehicles straining to make it up the hill in front of my house and then a sudden, deafening…

Silence

Wait for it…

Wait for it…

Bam! Bam! Bam!

There. Damn, I knew it!  Some dirty, snaggle-toothed Billy Bob is on my front porch, banging away on my door because:

1. He wants to use my phone to call for help because he doesn’t have a cell phone or he couldn’t afford to re-up his TracFone this month.
2. He wants to use my bathroom while he waits for a tow truck or his wife Tammi to pick him up because his breakfast burrito is “doing a number” on his stomach.
3. He wants to know if I have jumper cables and wouldn’t mind jumping him off.
4. He wants to know if I’ll run him to the Walmart or AutoZone to get a new battery.

I’ve done 1, 3 & 4 many times but never 2. I know it sounds mean, but I’m not letting a stranger into my house in the first place and I'm surely not going to let them in to take a colossal dump in my toilet. I mean, come on, that’s just gross. Instead, I hand them a role of toilet paper and point them to the forest beside my house.  

My friends say things like, “God, Ken, I just wouldn’t go to the door!” 

or 

“I’d call the police on them if they came on my property!”  

or  

“Answer the door in the nude and shake your wiener at them, that’ll scare them off !”

But, let me tell you a story…

Picture it

 1999

Early one morning (and oh God, not a drop of coffee in sight), hung over and still wearing my wrinkled clubbing outfit from the night before, I did the walk of shame and left Charlotte to head back to my hometown in western North Carolina. The last fifteen miles of my journey are on a barren, four-lane highway that cuts through the middle of nowhere and nothing. Before you get on this highway, if you have half a brain cell, you check your gas gauge because there is absolutely nowhere to stop for gas or to get help if you run out. Well, as I said, I was hung-over, wanting to wash the stank of last night’s crummy sexual encounter off me and goddamn, I wanted some coffee in the worse way and so… I did not check my gas gauge.  I Know, I know...dumb. The state of North Carolina needs to put up one of those "Last Chance For Gasoline" signs by the Highway 321 exit. I blame them !

My little Miata sputtered and stopped on the side of the freeway about 8 miles from home. I was out of gas. Damn. I saw a sign stating that a community named High Shoals was nearby, so I decided to set out walking but oh God, I was dressed in a pair of very tight, Tom Of Finland jeans, a mesh wife-beater and flip-flops.  I had to hold my breath to even put these jeans on in the first place and now I had to walk through redneck central looking ... so... gayed-up. I was surely going to get the shit beat out of me or at the least, robbed. 

 Because the flip-flops were so loose, I decided I’d be better off walking barefooted, so I took them off and hadn't gone two steps before the jeans were already chafing, pinching my nuts and rubbing me raw. I seriously thought about taking the fuckin’ things off and just walking the rest of the way in my tighty-whities but hell, I didn't want to get arrested too. The cops in the South ain't too fond of gay boys.

Two miles later, I found a closed filling station with a phone booth (this was pre-cell phone days, remember?). Naturally everybody had decided to be good little Christians and go to church that morning and so, no one was at home. Shit. On the way back to the car, I cut my right foot on a broken Milwaukee's Best beer bottle and had to limp the rest of the way, leaving intermittent bloody footprints on the steaming pavement. Finally I made it back to the car and peeled those hateful jeans down to take a look at my blistered and bleeding legs and tried to clean up my bleeding foot. I was just sitting there feeling hopeless and miserable and not knowing what to do next, when this old, banged-up truck pulled in beside me and a hillbilly jumped out with a gas can.

“I saw you walkin’-a-piece back and knew you must be a stranger out of gas in dem city clothes.” He stated matter-of- factly and told me to pop my gas tank open. 

Before I could say a thing, he’s emptied the large gas can into my tank, told me where the nearest gas station was and left before I could pay him one red cent for his kindness. About 100 cars had passed me on the freeway while I was sitting here and it was his old, humble redneck that stopped and helped me and not some prep dressed in J.Crew and driving the latest Land Rover.

So, that’s why I help those irritating people that bang on my door.