The kids in this neighborhood. Too much free time, is what my Gran’dad used to say.
They come down the street, leaning on their horn, laughing and hanging out of windows in that golf cart. Some kid’s dad bought them one of those air-horn locomotive whistles, you know the type. The horn starts off pretty piercing. They tear past in a rush of giggling, and it burns off down, deeper and lower behind.
It’s only on Saturdays, and only when the kids have been drinking some. They ain’t bad kids, they’re just kids, I guess. Kids that got too much free time.
Not that we was saints, though. We tied one on, time to time, I suppose. Never had a golf cart, but times is different now. My buddy Ernie Miller had a little hand-crank siren, and mounted it to his BMX. He got a couple of small beers in him, went wobbling down the sidewalk cranking that handle and howling along. Every dog in the neighborhood started in from behind fences and out living room windows, and we all just busted up there on Mama Jean Fuselier’s lawn.
Mama Jean used to not mind us sitting on her lawn. We used to bring her around bread or a half-gallon of the beer Ernie’s dad would brew or something neighborly like that. She had to move after that slick sunuvabitch salesman scammed her out of her pension and she went broke.
People used to go broke cleaner back then, too. Just lose everything and up stakes and run like a tent in a hurricane. Didn’t take much; we was mostly broke all the time, really.
Everybody’s still broke, but it’s a richer kind of broke, got better stuff and more of it. Still no money, but a hunderd computers each, right?
Need a computer to do work anymore. These kids’ll go their whole careers and not touch a pencil. Might be we had better luck, back when I got started working, we all carried a little bit of wood around with us all the time. I guess I ain’t sharpened a pencil in a couple a years, thinking about it.
Here come them kids again, made the block and rolling around through, one more time. Buzzed on some kind of clear malt liquor they steal out the Circle-K. I guess there’s always something the clerks don’t watch as close as they should. We used to get 2% beers, drinking that, thinking we was grown.
Here they come again, that piercing noise, then the giggles, then the drop.
Wheeeee-hehehe-ooouur.
Those were the days.