Hanging with the "townies"

(Jason, Brian and I at Cloud 9)

My hometown bar is a quirky place. On any given night, one can expect to see horses tied up out front, a grown man riding a tricycle around the bar, a marriage proposal, or a prostitute peddling her wares for an appreciate audience of 60-year-old Air Force veterans. Cloud 9 is a Fairfield institution, and it is one that I've been proud to be a part of for five years.

On Saturday evening, we met a group of newbies chugging Coronas at the bar. They stuck out like a sore thumb, with the wife dressed in sky high heels and a grotesquely short, glittery sequined dress over her rather round and stocky figure. Her husband wore what I refer to as the "yuppie uniform," consisting of a black North Face shell jacket and expensive tailored khakis. Compared to us locals who rarely wear anything but jeans, they looked better suited for a night in the Marina district of San Francisco.

I should have realized that speaking to them would go downhill when the wife said something to me along the lines of, "We thought it would be so funny to stop at this little shack while we were driving home from the city." Big red flag.

Brian befriended them after they'd had a few drinks, so I suppose that the following conversation was tainted by one too many truth juice concoctions. Still, when Brian relayed what they said to me, I couldn't help but want to punch their self-righteous faces. It all started like this:

Yuppie Husband: So...you guys are from Fairfield?

Brian: My wife was raised here, and I went to Fairfield High briefly too. We live over in Concord.

Yuppie Husband: Oh! Okay, so you're not locals then?

Brian: Well, we still like to consider ourselves local even though we're all grown up with big-kid jobs. (He said this sarcastically, sensing that the guy was going to disparage us)

Yuppie Husband: Really! Gosh, I was worried that you guys were like those sad losers who never leave town and work in dead end jobs. My wife and I are professionals, and we make a lot of money.

At this point, my brain had short-circuited and I tuned out.

Obviously, it is never good to remain stagnant and satisfied with mediocrity. It is important for people to go out and see the world, to earn an education (even if not a formal one) and to form a sense of individuality apart from one's home of record. I understand the Yuppie Husband's sentiment that people should never become complacent. There *are* plenty people at Cloud 9 who have never really left the town in their whole lives.

On the other hand, I feel very strongly that it is healthy to embrace one's roots. I have heard so many former friends from my hometown act superior and smug because they went off to expensive colleges or moved out of state with the military. How exactly does one's location imply a sense of privilege?

Personally, I think it means a lot more to come from "nothing." Our high school had a high drop out rate, only 20% of its graduating seniors went on to college when I graduated, and we were all about as blue collar as they come. I'm proud to be from working class roots, because it means so much more that I've built myself up from there.

When this total stranger walked into MY hometown bar to tell MY husband he was glad he wasn't a "loser," I wanted to walk up to him and say something like this:

"We may be wearing jeans and ball caps, and we may be singing out of tune rock ballads while drinking cheap beer out of plastic mugs. We may not look like the picture of success, but we are good-hearted people who welcomed you into our home. We also happen to have fancy jobs and master's degrees, but that shit doesn't matter here. Welcome to Cloud 9."

Instead, I politely informed him that his trashy wife was exposing her vagina to the bar by sitting with her legs wide open and not wearing any underwear. Apparently, "professionals with a lot of money" don't have much class.