A New Jersey high-school friend and I were hitchhiking south, heading for Miami. We were somewhere near Jacksonville when a guy pulled over, told us he was heading all the way to Key West…great! But I couldn’t let well enough alone. For as soon as we jumped in I decided for some adolescent jerkoff reason to pretend to be a southerner, adopting a fairly broad yokel accent.
It was experimental theatre — I was portraying some shitkicker from Georgia or Alabama or southern Texas (I didn’t know the difference) with a hope of getting away with it. Something about persuading the driver that I was in fact an Okie from Muskogee seemed enticing. I guess it made me feel like Slick Willie, like an operator of some kind.
[Click through to full story on HE-plus]
