Country life in Arkansas is one of limited adventures and all sorts of trouble. Too poor to work, too young to collect welfare. Dang I wish I wasn’t a boy. The girls collect them checks for not knowing who their baby daddies are. My youth was a time that I remember with fondness. Alright not my youth, but a friend of mine. He recalls and I embellish.

When I was of the age of about sixteen, I had an addiction to trouble of all kinds. I was a rambunctious teen and always found trouble. Whether it was smoking, drinking, driving, or having dirty fun, I was the one kid that was always in the midst of trouble. I was one of the usual suspects. Needless to say, I was used to being in trouble being in a small town of five thousand people. 

One night, me and my buddy, Chad, traveled to El Dorado, the nearest large town. I call it a large town because it had several stoplights and supposedly twenty-three thousand people. Now the big city folk might say that that amount ain’t nothing, well I say that we see twenty thousand every year at the annual Civil War reenactment and BBQ. So El Dorado may not be really big but we have heart that many of them city folk have forgotten that they may have. When ten thousand men can don the gray colors and purposely lose every year, those men are the most excitable and joy filled men. 

Now two sixteen year olds, with a car and no parental supervision, in a big town, we were the kings of the road. At every stoplight, we’d be hooting and hollering. The road was our kingdom and the people next to us were fellow royals. Every man, a king. Every woman next to a man, a queen. Every boy, a rival. Every girl, a princess. 

We went hooting and hollerin’ enjoying life. We treated every stop light like a NASCAR Green light. Chad floored the gas pedal to the ground and redlined the engine. At one such stoplight, an old man in a good ol’ boy truck was stopped next to us. Chad and I were laughing and waiting for the next greenlight. 

This good ol’ boy in his rusted out pickup truck, with the Dixie flag in pristine condition on the hood, handed Chad a freshly popped Bud Ice. As if it was a freaking Coca-Cola commercial, except that the polar bear was a drunk, glassy eyed, snaggle toothed HillBilly.

Chad accepted it laughing and we all went our separate ways. Chad enjoyed the taste of that Bud Ice so much that he brought a case of it wherever he went for six months solid.