Hillbilly

“Call me Hillbilly.”

Hillbilly sits under a shade tree at a mall parking lot in Mississippi with coffee, ice water, cigarettes and a small radio playing classic rock. Four days a week he watches the drop off box for a thrift store where the proceeds go to veterans. Being in the Army gave him a bad leg and a few benefits.

With a deep narrator’s voice that sounds like Jerry Reed in “Convoy,” Hillbilly tells of helping a woman in a motorized wheelchair chase down a robber in the parking lot and of his 15 years as a truck driver. A job he loved because he got to see the country and he never knew where he was going after he “got empty.”

He says the hardest part of driving a truck was staying awake and crack and meth kept him alert and driving four or five days in a row with no need for sleep.

“I would drive from Miami to Washington, Oregon, or Wyoming. If I left Miami this morning, you could bet your last dollar I would be in Seattle 71 hours and 45 minutes later. If I wasn’t able to stay awake and drive for days without sleeping, I couldn’t make money. I could have worked at McDonald’s for that.”

He says truck drivers call crack “go fast” and cocaine “Lucille.”

“We used to say ‘I ain’t got no Lucille, she went to Mobile with Mary Jane’.”

He saw wrecks on the road and reported DUIs. The darkest day was when his CB started squawking while he was crossing from Texas into Louisiana.
“Are you eastbound?”
“Yes. Come on.”
“You had better back it down. There is a parking lot at the state line.”

The parking lot was a wreck involving a church bus and van carrying children. They were both flipped over and it wasn’t good. Hillbilly parked his truck on the side of the road and cried.

The scars on his hands are from second and third-degree burns from a collision with another truck. He misjudged, pulled out, and remembers waking up in an ambulance. The heat from the colliding truck’s radiator ruptured his fuel tank and the explosion burned his arms and hands. He admits that day he was “high as a Georgia pine.”

The wreck shook him up and he “quit cold turkey,” switching to coffee and cigarettes. Hillbilly kept driving until 1999 when his body couldn’t take it anymore. Some days he is still tempted by something stronger but the scars on his hands are a reminder of where his addictions got him and who he used to be.

“I am not ashamed to say that on June 13, 1991, I gave my life to Christ and I didn’t give up. When you give up, you are telling the devil, ‘Come on, I am through.’ Don’t ever give up because the devil is already defeated.”

Hillbilly is not defeated and says he is on his way back up. He rides the bus every day, saving his money for another “set of wheels.”

“I used to wake up every morning with a joint in my mouth. I don’t need that anymore.  I am going to be okay.”