So I’m eleven years old and there are three of us camping out. Elbows and knees bulge the orange canvas triangle of cast-off scouting tent pitched crookedly in my friend Louie’s backyard. Along with the double D cell flashlight, which we will take turns through the night positioning as an oversized penis, we’ve also snuck in a sizeable transistor radio.

Once the lights are off in the house—an entire forty feet away—the outlaw mystique fixes to us tight as last fall’s clothing. We are boys without supervision. We are talking shit about students and parents and teachers, everyone we know. We are flipping through rumpled issues of *Playboy*, stained from being hidden outside rather than in. We are clever. We are fearful. We are listening to the Charlie Daniels Band.

Propelled by rapid-fire fiddle licks and beguiling electronic squonk, their crossover hit, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” fills our listing tent four or five times through the night on different AM stations. We search the dial for it and each time it plays, we yell along, hamming up the lyrics, especially careful not to miss a chance at belting out, along with Mr. Daniels, the words, “son of a bitch” at its swaggering coda. By the end of the night we are running through its narrative even when the song isn’t playing. Its Faustian message, flush with bravado and fatalism captivates, us like the suicide doors on Louie’s drag racing Uncle Robin’s track-modified Lincoln.

The reason I’m sketching this scene is twofold: one—I’m the only who really who knows the song’s lyrics. I can recite them from memory almost effortlessly after the first time we have heard it. I lord my mastery of this over my two tent mates. It will always be this way with me. Holding up bits and chunks of knowledge, no matter how recently gained, of no matter how dubious value as obvious evidence of my mental superiority. Some part of me will always be looking to Johnny as a pole star, his cavalier appetite for risk, his overriding confidence in his abilities, and his staggeringly lack of consequential thinking.

Two, the fucking song is “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” We think this song is COOL. We are hicks. Worse, we are hicks and don’t even know it. I try to keep both these facts in mind whenever (and oh, sweet Jesus, is it often) I find myself growing too big for my britches. No matter the number of premieres I’ve attended at the Metropolitan Opera House or designer suits lining my closet, there will unfailingly be no shortage of moments like the one in a recent Beverly Hills elevator where I mispronounced loudly and in front of a trio of predatory co-workers the name of the French department store where I purchased my tie. It is inescapable; this utter and complete hickdom is where I came from—and the boy could who could outfiddle the devil is who I aspired to be.

Damian Dressick was nominated by Vestal Review for a 2007 Pushcart Prize and recently won 1st place in the Appalachian Writers Association’s Harriette Arnow Short Fiction Contest. His fiction either has appeared is slated to appear in McSweeney’s (online), Vestal Review, Caketrain, Flashquake, 3711 Atlantic, Contrary Magazine, Word Riot, The Kennesaw Review, The Worchester Review, Ghoti, The Loyalhanna Review and Storyglossia. He teaches creative writing and literature at Robert Morris University and at the University of Pittsburgh through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and coordinates Pittsburgh’s UPWords Reading Series.

© 2008 Laura Hird All rights reserved.