The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

very poor. There wasn’t much palpable tension between the races, but there weren’t many deep cross-racial friendships, either. We went to the same school, but lived in different worlds.
    The social universe of white kids was roughly divided into three cliques: preps (middle class to upper middle; drug of choice: alcohol); potheads (working class; drug of choice: marijuana); and nerds (everybody else; drugs of choice: anxiety, Dungeons & Dragons). There was overlap, of course, and a number of kids—like, well, Mike and Ruthie—who wouldn’t have identified as preps but still hung out with them. To be sure, despite the fact that some of them wore argyle socks and Izod shirts, none of the kids we all called preps would ever be mistaken by actual preppies as one of their tribe. Plenty of so-called preppy guys drove pickup trucks and listened to country music. No small number of girls in those preppy circles had bows in their big hair. “Preps” was the day’s catch-all term for socially engaged white kids who didn’t smoke dope (or at least much dope), some of whom thought of themselves as elites.
    It was common in those days for teenagers to have after-school jobs, and there was no question that Ray Dreher’s kids would work tomake their spending money. Ruthie spent part of the salary she drew as a clerk at Boo Bryant’s pharmacy on Hank Williams Jr. cassettes. One year she had tickets near the front row for a Hank Jr. concert in Baton Rouge. Wound up and possibly under the influence of Tennessee’s finest sour mash, Ruthie took off her bra, whirled it around her head several times like a lasso, taunting the chortling band members, and threw it onstage. Hank put the garment on the neck of his guitar, raised hell, and tossed her a drumstick after the song.
    If there wasn’t a concert or something else going on in Baton Rouge, teenagers didn’t have much to do on the weekends. In the seventies there was a local pool resort called Bikini Beach, and a burger-and-pinball place called the Redwood Inn (which boasted the first Pong game in town), but by the early 1980s, when Ruthie and I were teenagers, both places had closed. The only fast-food joint in town was the Chicken Shack (the sun-bleached yellow plastic sign out front said “Log Cabin Fried Chicken,” but nobody called it that), in a gravel lot off Highway 61 next to Choo-Choo Bennett’s Gulf station. There was no place to sit at the Chicken Shack; you’d drive up, wait for the cashier to open the mosquito screen on the right side, order a hamburger or box of fried chicken, then wait in your truck until the mosquito screen on the left side opened, and someone barked out your name. It was a great day when the Chicken Shack installed a bug zapper the size of a mop bucket from the overhang in front; it meant you had something to do while you waited for your order.
    It was that kind of town.
    For a couple of years Boo Bryant, the pharmacist, spun records at Catholic Hall for Catholic Youth Organization dances, which were a lot of fun, and gave awkward seventh and eighth graders, smelling of Sea Breeze, Love’s Baby Soft, and Brut by Fabergé, practice in the art of slow dancing.
    With nowhere to hang out, West Feliciana teenagers took their partying to wherever they could park their pickup trucks. In Ruthie’s highschool years that place was typically the parking lot of the new Sonic Drive-In on 61 or down by the Mississippi River.
    Sometimes the gang gathered down by the ferry landing where Bayou Sara empties into the Mississippi. There were rusted hulks of cranes and other abandoned heavy equipment. On other occasions teenagers drove down a gravel road that ran along the riverbank and parked in a semicircle in a clearing in the woods two miles out of town, overlooking the water. It was secluded and far from adult eyes. Unless they built a bonfire, the only lights were the moon, the stars, and the glow from the Big Cajun coal-fired power plant on the opposite