I don't live in Boston anymore, and only come through five or six times a year to see my family and friends and ride the swan boats, so sometimes I forget just how many incredible assholes our city produces. I don’t even mean this in a bad way. Boston is my hometown, and I’ll defend it to the death, but we also happen to have an exquisite number of Hub-specific jerks, who can be infuriating and horrible, but also make me kind of homesick. So here they are, in a somewhat specific order:

The Brahmin Asshole

As seen at: The Union Club, The Country Club, 75 Chestnut, J. McLaughlin, behind the wheel of various '90s model Saabs & Volvos

The key to the Brahmin Asshole is in the subtlety of their condescension. When you see them on Beacon Hill driving around in their ’94 Saabs, wearing their tattered Murray’s Toggery Nantucket Reds and old Sperry’s and rumpled J. Press blazers, you can’t help but feel like you’re witnessing a real life Smithsonian Natural History Museum exhibit.

“Look,” you’ll shout to your friend as you walk down Mount Vernon. “Did you see that? I think it was an Adams, or an Appleton, or a Bacon, or a Bradlee, or a Cabot, or a Chaffee, or a Choate! Or maybe a Coolidge, or a Cushing, or a Dudley, or an Emerson, or an Eliot, or an Endicott! Or chances are it might’ve been a Gardner, or a Holmes, or a Lawrence, or a Lodge, or a Lowell! Or perhaps it was a Lyman, or an Otis, or a Peabody, or a Phillips, or a Putnam. But it definitely could’ve been a Quincy, or a Saltonstall, or a Sargent, or a Thorndike, or a Tudor, or a Weld, or Warren. Kinda hoping it wasn’t a Winthrop, though.”

What you may not realize is that they’re ever-so-cautiously gawking back at you. Because they can’t believe you aren’t appreciating the fact that the very cobblestones you’re walking on were laid in the ground by one of many Irish people their family briefly employed generations ago. So try and show some respect, Sudra.



The Townie Asshole

As seen at:Every Faneuil Hall bar, ever.

A stereotype within a stereotype. Though commonly believed to be from Southie, in reality, 95% of Townie Assholes are actually from a town that is not, in fact, Boston. Be it Chelsea or Quincy or Revere or Norwood or Weymouth or any of 20 other towns with men’s league hockey games that end in parking lot fights one out of every two nights.

When they do pile onto the Red Line to come into Boston for a night on the town, they inevitably end up at the same Faneuil Hall bars they've been going to for the past 15 years. At said bars, they will be loud and aggressive and sloppy and play up their Boston accents for the tourists, and inevitably end up fighting a group of gentleman who are exactly like them, but maybe from North Quincy instead of Quincy. Said fights break out like clockwork around 1:45am, right by the sausage vendors as the cops look on with minimal interest. It wasn’t until I moved to another city that I realized this was very much not a normal thing.



The Taxi Cab Asshole

As seen in:Um, taxi cabs

We get that, thanks to Uber and Lyft, your entire industry is dying and medallions are shrinking in value. And that fills us with empathy. Which is why we opted to flag you down rather than pushing a button on our phone, which is way fucking easier to do than flailing around for your attention. But do you think the logical response to our somewhat charitable choice is to ask us where we’re going before you unlock the doors, ALWAYS say your credit card machine is broken, and pretend you have no idea how to get to Coolidge Corner, even though we’re on Beacon St right now?!!?