Redneck Games

Long before there were official “Redneck Games” there were just plain rednecks and the games they played for fun. The more violent and risky, the better: involving motor vehicles or weapons, the best.

An essential part of a young redneck’s driver education is how to do the 180. Driving in one direction, you pull on to the shoulder at high speed and with careful application of brake, steering wheel and accelerator you spin the car around 180 degrees and take off in the direction from whence you came. This is also known as a state patrol turn. Do it wrong and you can “turn turtle” and make the Lord’s ceiling your floor.

A less risky version of the 180 can be done with a Volkswagen Beetle just after a rain when the highway is slick. Pop in the clutch, pull up the emergency brake and give the wheel a little turn to the left and you will neatly swap ends. Now release the emergency brake and drop the clutch and you are moving backwards down the highway coming to a slow stop with your wheels spinning. This maneuver is so easy that Grandma can do it although you will need to increase her psychotropic medication to talk her into trying it.

My friends and I used to rationalize our “spinning a bug” by saying that it could save our lives in an emergency one day. It was one morning. We were sleepily cutting across a foggy grass field on the way for another day of work in a tobacco patch. We were munching on honey buns and cinnamon rolls with milk cartons and Yoo-Hoo in bottles when suddenly an irrigation pipe loomed up out of the cow path headed straight for us at fifty miles an hour. Allen quickly did the 180 and we spun up to the pipe in reverse and smacked it with the rear bumper in a low speed thwack. We had a hard time making out the fresh dent in the bumper from the old ones. The exhilaration of having cheated death was made all the sweeter by the vindication of our rainy day 180 training.

After a hot day in the tobacco patch, nothing cools you off like a Watermelon seed spitting contest. This is best done naked standing on the shallow side of the river off a sand bank. Take a huge chunk of ice cold watermelon and cram it into your mouth so hard that the rind rolls over your eyebrows and the loose parts slide down your wet body into the water. Slowly chew your cud until only the seeds are left. Now spit them at your partner. Ideally you are standing upriver from your partner so you don’t have to have his watermelon spit swirling around you. Extra points if you hit him in the eye.

So many redneck games are just target practice. Take the simple act of tossing your empty bottle o’ bud, co-cola, or belly washer out the window. This mundane littering of the landscape is much more fun when you have something to aim at like a stop sign, road sign, or mail box. No, you do not stop to toss the bottle at the stop sign you dumb Yankee — you run the stop sign at night at 70 miles per hour with your lights out because it is easier to see oncoming cars if the lights are out.

There is more than one way to toss your bottle. Showoffs sit on the windowsill with their body half out of the car. Purists keep their seat. Passengers either hang their right arms out of the car window dragging the bottle as close to the roadway as possible and flick the bottle up or they put their elbow on the windowsill with the bottle in their lap and flip it out. Drivers usually drag their left arms out the window and toss over the car or flick it out the passenger side window. The second method is if you really love the good old boy sitting in the passenger seat and want to show him how much you care.

Timing is essential and requires finesse. Do it right and you hear a clanging, metallic, dopplered, thwack as the sound tries to catch back up to your speeding ear. On occasion the bottle shatters. Should the bottle hit the top bolt on the sign and the bolt give way and the sign end up swinging upside down reflecting your red tail lights in your rear view mirror you have accomplished the one-in-a-million shot and can now honorably retire..

You can cheat. Stand in the back of a pickup truck and toss larger items like Gatorade bottles full of piss or watermelons or a borrowed trash can weighted with sand or water. Things blow apart in lovely ways and the randomness of it is intoxicating and addictive. Wise old rednecks create their rural mailboxes of concrete or pig iron.

All of this target practice prepared me for life as I found out when I was really broke and desperate and took a job delivering afternoon newspapers on a motor route for the Valdosta Daily Times. I have never truly forgiven them for hiring me.

They gave me a book of yellow cards with each card a subscriber’s permanent record and desires. Page after page of admonitions about where to put the paper. Porch, Porch, Porch, Porch and Driveway — avoid the puddle. In the golden tinged days of the 40’s, tidy young men would ride up and place the paper gently on the porch, but this was the 70’s and it was all about me.

My subscribers got a battled beige Volkswagen Beetle roaring down the street at forty miles per hour because the law spots you five mph over the limit. Hand and eye keenly trained from years of bottle tossing at 70 miles per hour and I was in the zone with everything moving in slow motion. I drove with my knees while popping each paper up against the steering column and rolling it tightly. The rubber bands clung to the cigarette lighter knob on the dash because I didn’t want to disturb my dial position on the radio. The Jeff Morgan show was on Tiger Radio 1450 WVLD complete with spring reverb backing each song and a gong sound every time Jeff gave the time. I listened to bubble gum, chewed bubble gum, and spat papers over the roof and out the passenger window.

Toss a paper straight from a car and there is that timeless period when it moves along with you as it fades away towards its destination. Each perfect throw is a ballet of trajectory. A throw begins in the middle of the next door neighbors yard. You throw it straight, not tumbling and you fly along with it on its path to the target. There are blind throws when you approach the porch from around a corner or the paper has to clear a hedge before rumbling to a stop in front of the door. There is a way to hit each porch and you find that way with daily practice.

Not every throw was perfect. The imperfect ones, though, stay with me like so many upside down swinging signs glowing red in my mirror. There was the paper that hit the chain holding the hanging pot and the pot landing squarely on the rail. There was the blind throw that revealed an entire row of rednecks rocking on their porch in Remerton. The paper flew at eye level down the line and the last person reached out and caught it. There was the house on the curve with a young girl sitting sweetly on the step when the paper came flying out of nowhere and hit her in the crotch. I stopped collecting at that house because her father took to stepping out on the porch and shaking his fist at me.

Collections was a bother. My route was through the poorer parts of town and I was always being stiffed by my customers and, in consequence, in hock with the newspaper. I lived off of cash flow, not profit. Along with the mounting debts were the rising complaints about the paper landing on porches so firmly that it shook the house. There was the cop who made me go back and apologize to the old man who took a shot between the eyes when I missed his postage stamp sized porch and he stepped out from the wrong side of the house at the wrong time. .

I had to take out a loan in order to quit. It is amazing to me that liberal, self righteous, institutions like newspapers take such advantage of young people. A paperboy is an “independent contractor” who earns no benefits and pays all his social security. The Times kindly sells him the papers and allows him to take the hit if the subscriber doesn’t pay. If it rains, he buys the bags. He is even forced to buy the rubber bands. This teaches him about life. It teaches him that employers, and especially newspapers, will screw you if they can.

I had to quit because I found a job and my past was catching up to me or because my past was catching up to me and I needed another job. I sold the Volkswagen to the circulation manager and, out of loyalty to me, it tossed a rod on the way home. That was just a down payment as the Times and I are still not even.

Redneck games prepared me for working as a newspaper boy. The newspaper gig prepared me for modern corporate life. I can now talk on the Sprint phone, look at my palm pilot, and take notes while zipping from place to place pell-mell and productive. Who would have thunk it? Redneck games prepared me for life.

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Tagged as: Cars, Rednecks