At first glance, he may not have seemed any more deserving than the other lonely men drifting through Abilene at sunset on their way to someplace equally bereft of charm. In some ways, he looked like your garden-variety redneck, a prime example of Bubba Americanus, with his beard, his red trucker hat, and what I've learned is quaintly described as a "wife-beater" shirt. But there was something almost too cliched about him, as if he were trying a bit too hard to conform to his stereotype. A Confederate flag not only adorned his cap but "waved" proudly from a tattoo on his shoulder. With a cowboy's lope, his brown leather boots clopped on the asphalt as he strode from the convenience store to his red pickup truck, chugging from a can of Lone Star beer. Just in case it had escaped anyone's notice that he was a proud southerner, the outline of the state of Texas shone on the belt buckle that held up his faded Levi's.
But when you spend as much time studying humanity as I have, you become something of a Sherlock Holmes, learning to pick up on telltale clues that are more revealing than the subject realizes. In my experience, for example, most rednecks have stains of some sort on their "wife-beaters" -- dirt or liquor or blood -- yet this boy's ribbed white tank top was a crisp, freshly-laundered white, suggesting an uncharacteristic fussiness about his appearance. Similarly, his polished boots were unscuffed, showing no trace of mud or excrement of any kind, and his pickup was in pristine condition, its immaculately-waxed paint job gleaming in the late afternoon glare. His beard was not the haphazard scruff of a man who is too busy on the back forty to care about his looks, but neatly trimmed and uniform in length. Even his impressive top-heavy physique seemed less the byproduct of backbreaking toil on a farm or at a factory than the result of hours of pumping and preening at the local gym. All in all, his carefully-crafted authenticity was simply too studied to be believed.
I needed to find out more. But in order to do that, I found it best to stick to my general theory of hitching. Lurking unnoticed behind a diesel pump, I adjusted my appearance to create the most impact. All I needed to do was envision the end result and I could will my cut-off shorts to rise even higher on my gravity-defying buttocks or morph the comfy sneakers I had been wearing into high-heeled sandals that accentuated the length and tone of my deeply tanned legs. I transformed my easy-to-manage brunette bob into waves of scarlet tresses and swapped my sweatshirt for a cut-off tee bearing the words "Lynyrd Skynyrd" (which I had learned with some embarrassment some years ago was a band of southern American musicians and not a tiny Welsh fishing village). A strategic tear between "Lynyrd" and "Skynyrd" displayed my impressive cleavage. Even if my assumptions were correct, this boy would be unlikely to resist giving a lift to such a culturally idealized example of feminine pulchritude.