17. Ronny Peck’s Go-Kart

Everyone knew Ronny Peck was a geek, a feeb, a loser. He lived in the older section of the block, the ugly flat ranch houses that had been built years before the real development houses, back in the fifties or something. Ronny had a thick, chubby face with little eyes and spoke in a thick, syrupy voice. He was at least a head taller than the rest of us, but even so was terrible at basketball. He would come and hang around sometimes, during the games we played afterschool in the back of Mark Callaway's house. With his height he could practically dunk—the hoop at Mark’s wasn’t a full ten-feet high, more like seven or eight, which we liked because it was easier to score—but we still only let him play occasionally, when there weren’t enough other people. He had the weirdest shooting motion, where he sort of pushed the ball up from his chest with two hands, which meant his shots got blocked most of the time despite his being so much taller. There was no way to be nice about it, Ronny was hopeless, and we didn’t try to be nice about it.

Then his parents bought him a go-kart. It was a beautiful machine: red, with a big black seat, big wheels with bright silver spokes, a flame painted along the side. We heard it before we saw it. We were playing one of our marathon basketball games at Mark’s house, four on four, first one to get to fifty baskets wins—we rarely finished these games—and we heard this sound that was a combination winding and roaring. We asked each other what was that, but just in passing. We were only at like 30 baskets to 24 baskets. There was a lot of game left to play. Then we heard it again a few minutes later, and a few minutes later again. We called the game a draw and went up to the street to investigate.

It didn’t take long for Ronny to come ripping by again. He had probably been purposefully going back and forth in front of Mark’s house, hoping to get us to come take a look. He slowed to a stop right in front of where we were standing at the top of Mark’s driveway. He took off his helmet, which was purple and sparkly, like looking into outer space.

“Where did you get this?” someone managed to ask, while the rest of us gazed in awe.

“My father gave it to me for my birthday,” Ronny said, in the thick voice we’d often made fun of, often right to Ronny’s face.

“Are you really allowed to drive it on the road?” someone else asked.

“Yes, my father said it was okay.”

“How fast does it go?”

“I don’t know. Probably 20, 30 miles an hour. But it feels like you’re going so much faster, because you don’t have a car around you.”

“Is it hard to steer?”

“Not too hard. You just don’t go too fast at first, until you get used to it.”

“Could I take a try?”

Ronny stared over our heads for a long time, or what seemed like a long time.

“Please? Just a quick ride?”

“Okay,” Ronny said. “Just a quick ride.”

From that afternoon on, that’s what we did, instead of playing basketball. Right after school, we would gather at the top of Mark Callaway's driveway, and wait for Ronny to come by with his go-kart. Then, we’d wait our turn to take a ride.

You would have thought someone who’d been a geek, a feeb, a loser, that this person when he finally got a chance to be the center of attention would remember what it had felt like to be humiliated, pushed around, and would try not to do it to others. That this person would at least realize this was his chance to make people see he was an okay person, not the jerk we’d always treated him like.

Not Ronny. He became more of a jerk, though a different kind. He loved being the center of attention. He loved his new power. Even more, he loved abusing it. He ruled the turns on the go-kart on whim. He would ask “Who’s next?” and if too many people raised their hands he wouldn’t let anyone have a turn. Or, he’d look out over the crowd of us sheepishly raising our hands and count off five at random, and say those were the only people who could have a turn that day. If you didn’t do exactly what he asked—which was, drive halfway down the block, slow down for your turn, come right back, always remaining in sight—he wouldn’t let you take another turn, sometimes for days. Any time Ronny decided he wanted to take a ride, he would just go ahead and do it, even if he’d promised someone else a chance. He would go the whole way around the block, one, two, three times, while we sat in the grass and waited for him to get tired of riding and give us our turns.

It was worth it, though. Driving the go-kart, even to go down the road a little way and then turn around, was the coolest. Ronny was right, maybe you were only going 20 miles per hours, but being totally out in the open made it seem like it was so much faster. If you hit a bump you’d pop off the seat and come back down with a thud that rattled your teeth. We all learned, we all taught each other while we killed time sitting in the grass awaiting our turns, that what you had to do was brake really hard going into the turn, and then when you’d just about straightened out press down as hard as you could on the gas pedal. The gravel would go flying.

Donald Rogers was riding the go-kart when it exploded. It was late on a Thursday, the last ride of the day. Already some of us had been called home to dinner to by our mothers. Donald had been waiting patiently for his turn, although that guaranteed nothing. “Okay, last one,” Ronny said, his thick voice now sounding like the voice of a teacher or parent, a voice telling us what a pain in the neck we were and how much easier things would be without us.

Donald put on the purple helmet. Ronny’s father had made Ronny promise that anyone who took a ride on the go-kart had to wear the helmet. It smelled of sweat and, we all agreed though none of knew why, farts, but again it was one of those things you had to endure for the fun part. Donald was younger, Ronny’s age, and didn’t drive as fast as most of us did. We were watching him puttering along in the twilight when we heard the bang. The go-kart rolled to a stop, and Donald jumped off and started running fast up onto Mark Callaway's lawn, like he really did think it was going to explode.

Ronny had no such fear. He ran straight to the go-kart as fast as he could. Ronny ran funny, too, in great heaving steps, almost like the top part of his body went forward before his legs did.

“What did you do?” Ronny screamed, when he reached the go-kart.

Donald came forward a few steps. “I didn’t do anything. I wasn’t even going very fast.”

Ronny looked like he could kill. “Help me,” he demanded. “All of you. Help me push it home.”

We all did. The go-kart smelled like gasoline and burnt matches. We kept trying not to look at the big black hole in the engine.

The next afternoon, Ronny came down to Mark Carmody’s a little later than usual. “Where’s the go-kart?” we immediately asked.

“Getting fixed. It should be ready next Tuesday.”

But next Tuesday Ronny said it wasn’t finished, there was another part they needed and it would be on Friday instead. Then on Friday he said the part still hadn’t come in but was on the way. By midway through the next week when Ronny didn’t say anything at all we realized he was never bringing back the go-kart. The repairs must have been too expensive, or maybe there really was a part that was impossible to find.

He still kept coming around, though, hanging at Mark Callaway's while we played basketball, not talking much to anyone. I wondered what it must have been like for him, to have been the center of attention and lost it. Did it making being a feeb and retard and loser easier, or harder?

“You want to play, Ronny?” someone occasionally would ask.

“Sure,” Ronny would answer.

“Sorry. We already have enough.”

He fell for it every time.

16. Ouija Board

I didn’t even know why we’d gone to this dinner party at the Wilhelms. We weren’t really friends with them. They were new people, had just moved into the Nobles’ house a few months ago when Carolyn and her family moved away to Florida. I’d been pretty good friends with Carolyn back in kindergarten, the way all of us around the block were friends, since we lived close together and had the same teachers at school, but we’d gotten split up in third grade and I hadn’t spoken to her very much since then. I didn’t really care when she moved away.

I think my parents went to this party just because it had been such a long time since we’d been invited to a party. When we’d first moved to the neighborhood, there used to be parties all the time around the block, especially in the summer, big outdoor shindigs where everyone was invited. They were always fun, lots of kids, and there were usually hot dogs and hamburgers, something you’d want to eat.

At this party, there had been nothing that kids would want to eat, only adult food, some kind of twisty pasta with white cheese on it that smelled like socks and salad that was almost all lettuce so I couldn’t pick out just the tomatoes like I usually did. I’d eaten a few mouthfuls of the pasta just because my father had given me one of his looks. I doubted he liked the food any better than I did, although I had seen my mother go back for seconds on it.

There wasn’t even anyone to play with, since my brother and I were the oldest kids there. The Wilhelms had a baby, a two year old girl they let walk all over the place, oohing and ahhing about how cute she was. The other people they’d invited mostly had babies, too. There were a few older brothers and sisters, but I was 11, and they all seemed like little kids to me. We didn’t know any of these other people. They weren’t from around the block. 

It was strange, being in the Nobles house without the Nobles there, going to a party on the block but not seeing anybody else from the block, eating weird food and being surrounded by babies. It was like going back to a place we’d already been, but didn’t belong anymore.

After dinner, Mrs. Wilhelm brought out a ouija board. She made a big production number out of it, saying things like, “Okay, everyone, get ready to invite the spirits into our house to tell the future!”

Mrs. Wilhelm was flashy, loud: when she’d brought in the pasta she’d yelled “Okay, everyone dig in!” and then she’d totally dominated the dinner conversation talking about some foreign movie she and Mr. Wilhelm had gone to see. Mr. Wilhelm—a short, muscular man, with bushy eyebrows and a slight hunch that made him seem a little ape-like—hadn’t said much, but looked on with a look of attention and love.

All the lights were turned off in the living room, a candle lit, and the kids were herded into the kitchen with a babysitter the Wilhelms had hired. I wanted to stay with the adults, but it didn’t matter, since the babysitter let us all sneak over to the door and watch anyway. A group of five or six or the adults sat down at the table and put their hands on the ouija. Mrs. Wilhelm dared anyone to ask a question, again with lots of talk about not offending the spirits. No one said anything at first, but then one of the men asked if the Mets would win the World Series. There was total silence as the adults waited for something to happen. It was a little spooky that first time when, from where I was watching from the kitchen, the ouija began to move.

“Sorry, I think that’s a no,” Mrs. Wilhelm said, in her brassy voice.

It got silly after that, people trying to coax Eleanor Roosevelt from the spirit world and asking questions like at what age they’d become a millionaire and if they’d get lucky that night, which I figured from the way the adults all reacted had something to do with sex. They’d all had a lot to drink. I kept waiting for my father to say something silly himself. He loved parties, this type of situation was usually right up his alley. But when his turn came on the ouija board he let someone else ask the question. He also seemed to me to be more sober than he usually was at this point in a party. 

The ouija board fun only lasted a half hour or so, and then the adults began to drift off, and the party went back to becoming a regular party. But as soon as the last adult left, a few of the kids ran in and took seats around the ouija board. They kept the lights turned out, and began acting just like the adults, trying to contact spirits and ask questions. They didn’t know what they were doing, though. They didn’t realize you were supposed to let the spirits move the ouija, so they were pushing it around themselves as they asked stupid questions about whether they’d get their favorite toys. They were laughing, having a good time.

I stepped back into the shadows, just on the threshold of the kitchen. No one could see me from where I was standing. I could still hear the kids in the living giggling, moving the pointer all over the board, calling out the letters in their little kid voices. “Whooo,” I whispered into the dark.

They all got really quiet. “What was that?” one of them said.

“Whoo,” I repeated.

“It’s nothing,” one of the slightly-older girls said. “Whoever’s doing that, stop. It’s not funny.”

I did it again, lower this time, more menacingly.

One of the little kids started crying. “Stop it,” the same older girl said. But it wasn’t anger I was hearing in her voice anymore. “Just stop it.”

“Whoooo,” I said.