The Suburban Hillbilly

Perhaps you’ve seen this guy. If you live in the suburbs, I know you’ve seen this guy. The suburbs are interesting melting pots of all types of people. The suburb in which I reside, for instance, consists of white, blue-collared workers, a handful of African-American residents, a sprinkle of other minorities, and of course, a number of what I call Suburban Hillbillies.

The Suburban Hillbilly can be easily spotted while driving down the road. His big black truck seems to always be propped up with oversized mud tires-despite the fact that 99% of the roads in the suburbs are paved- and it usually has some representation of a confederate flag; the flag may be on a license plate, bumper sticker, or on some occasions, flying proudly off of the bed of the truck.
So why care about this mudding, truck driving, confederate wannabe? Because occasionally, he does something so ignorant that I want to break his face for reasons other than the fact that he just looks really stupid. I’ll explain:
On Monday I was leaving work and my gas light came on, telling me that I needed to get my cheap ass to the gas station and stop trying to suck every fume out of the tank or I was going to be stranded next to the highway, forcing me to walk two miles with a gas can in my hand like one of those idiots I see every time I drive downtown. As I was filling up my gas, I realized that the salt on the roads was really eating my car alive, so I decided to buy a car wash from the adjoining automatic washer. This is where I ran into one of my favorite Suburban Hillbillies: the unnecessarily obscene Hillbilly (yes, there are many categories of Suburban Hillbilly).

As I sat outside of the automatic washer, I watched a young man (driving a pickup-go figure!) back his truck up and pull forward again about 11 times. He couldn’t get the washer to turn on, and in true hillbilly fashion, his solution was to simply keep driving back and forth until it magically turned on. Instead, a man who I assume was his father, with a cigarette in his hand and a flannel shirt barely covering his belly, got out and started kicking the machine to get it to work- another genius tactic often employed by the Suburban Hillbilly. After many failed attempts he headed towards my car.

“Damn things broke!” he said to me.

“Hmm, did you punch in your code?” I asked stupidly.

“’Course, I did,” he said, “not stupid.”

“Well, I don’t know,” was all I could think to respond.

Now, the next part is where this hillbilly really showed his true colors. The Billy, always assuming that everyone thinks like he does, simply looks at me and says,
“What these assholes need is some fucking retard out here pressin’ these retard buttons for us,” with a heavy emphasis on the retard.

This is a common hillbilly gesture: this man automatically assumed that I wouldn’t be offended by the statement of calling a car wash attendant a retard. But, in a way, I was.

Now, I’ve never worked at a car wash, but I do work with special education students every day, and since I started, I have become pretty cognizant of the words I choose to describe someone. For example, I obviously like to use the word “idiot” instead; I suppose it’s less offensive to the general public.

But the Suburban Hillbilly is in a class all of his own, caring nothing about the general public and its rules, norms, and general acts of integrity. Sure, I laughed inside when the man said what he said. But part of that laughter was because the man had a southern drawl even though he lived 20 minutes outside of Detroit. This bacci spitter obviously didn’t care what I thought, and thus said whatever he felt.

It is for these reasons that I hate the Suburban Hillbilly. The guy shouldn’t exist. I think he is one of the biggest idiots I’ve ever seen.