The Urban Appalachians

My office is in a questionable part of town. Occasionally there is the odd shooting or stabbing down an adjacent alley or inside the local bar. The local community is a blend of recent Hispanic immigrants, black people and the people I recently discovered should be called Urban Appalachians. Now when I hear that term, I think of a fashion movement like the Urban Cowbody Movement, except the fashionable sort in this part of town aren't wearing coonskin caps or over-alls. Neither are they filling their days moonshinin' or outsmarting the Revenuers. The only the thing vaguely Appalachian about these people is an accent and speech pattern that might have originated in the mountains, but on the way here was drug through several trailer parks and an Eddie Murphy special.

Regardless of what you call them, they do make for great people watching.

The window from my cube over looks a parking lot for a Check N Go, which must be some sort of rallying point for several of the local Urban Appalachians. Most days around 4:00pm, if I am lucky, I'll see a 12 year old Maroon Chevy Lumina, all beat to shit, with no hubcaps and a busted tail light .

The last time I saw it a few weeks back, it sat there idling with the windows cracked. I could see at least 4 people in the backseat, and two in the front, The girl in the front seat's probably 14 and she's bumming a cigarette from her mom. Everyone in the car is smoking in fact it looks like the car's smoldering from all the smoke wafting out of it. Up comes a two more people to the car, one on crutches. The passengers get out, more smoke billows from the doors, everyone but the girl is overweight, the women have terrible bad highlights. They look like a pack of fat hyenas.

To my surprise, they all try to pile back into the car. Now there's 5 people in the back seat, some one riding in the lap of the front passenger seat but they can't close the door because the crutches are in the way. Not to mention they're all sizable people.

So they pop the trunk, and the trunk is so full of junk that stuff literally springs out. Clothes, cans, pop bottles, paper. The wind catches a plastic Walmart bag and a few empty cigarette cartons and they swirl around the parking lot. Nobody makes an effort to pick them up. The injured party hobbles to the back, and tries to jam the crutches into the trunk. The girl, cigarette clenched between her lips, hops out with her school back pack and helps her force down the trunk lid. They all pile back in and lurch into traffic.

I often wonder where they were going. Why they all needed to go there, and why they all needed to be there at the same time. The bus stop was on the opposite corner. I'll tell you right now, if I walked up to that car, and it was my ride? No way. I be all like, "Look, there's already 4 of you fat bitches in this backseat. My ass is hurt. I'm on crutches. I don't need this shit. I'm taking the bus. I'll see you at Denny's in 15 minutes."

I wanted a image to go with this entry. By the way, you won't believe what comes up on google if you type in Fat White Bitches. I had to go wash my eyes. Now the images below, aren't what I wanted but you might need to see them