2021-09-01 - 5:14 p.m.
When I was new to college, country boy flirting with the city, the dominant type of boy and to some extent girl was the suburban kid messing with being tough. These were mostly kids from DC's fringes, your Beltsvilles, your Bowies, but not your Potomacs, not your Rockvilles. Middle-class kids, raised on MTV but rap and blunts when out with friends.
My overwhelming memory is of driving out from campus, trying some quiet street parallel to the beltway, roaring traffic just over there but inside those cars all Pharcyde and Tribe if they were sensitive types, Wu-Tang if they were trying on the toughness pretty hard. And blunts and blunts. Me, dropping out of the conversation pretty quick, space-stoned, nervous, trying hard to hide my jeans from the JC Penney, my shoes from the Payless.
Back then, 19, 20 when it seemed so wise, these sons and daughters of Hyattsville, they seemed so tough, so cool, like nothing fazed them except the next track, which was always turned up loud, too loud, loud enough so that nobody cared that what I was trying to say came out as nothing much at all. I wonder if those kids, bored, stoned, worried about girls, ever dropped the act. Or if they were ever any kind of tough at all.
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