Everyone has an eccentric neighbor, but when I lived in Summit Park I was literally surrounded on all sides by odd balls. My next door neighbors, an elderly couple from Louisiana called Bob and Inez had a fully loaded apocalypse bunker dug into their backyard, complete with a 3 foot antenna sticking out of the ground so they could stay informed on the state of the rapture via AM radio. Bob in particular scared me to death, mostly because he was the type that threatened to shoot a couple of ten year olds who had jumped his excessively high fence to retrieve a wiffle ball from his backyard and, apparently having made a similar threat many times in the past, quoted the New Mexico State Legislature verbatim that would allow him to do so legally. Our neighbor on the other side was an ancient woman who I knew only as "Sissy," who, while well intentioned, also scared the bejesus out of me. She really was a sweet old lady, often inviting the other neighborhood kids and I into her house for a piece of candy. Nevertheless, I always got a weird, creepy vibe each time I would sit on one of her antique rocking chairs and take a piece of butterscotch  from the mouth of her candy jar, a disturbingly racist caricature of a black man’s face.

Other than my next door neighbors most of the residents of the Summit Park Neighborhood were very similar to my own family: middle class, white couples with children in elementary school, and because of this I had plenty of friends. There were my best friends, Max and Keenan, there was Savannah, whom we all had a crush on, as well as a whole cast of characters who filled out our evening soccer games, scooter races and lightsaber duels. Then there was Weird Ben, not be confused with his next door neighbor normal Ben. In all honesty I don't know that much about Ben, I didn't  know his last name, thus the nickname Weird Ben, nor do I recall ever seeing his parents, the inside of his house or any of his personal belongings. All I knew was that I despised him. He lived in a two story house on a corner lot along the all important route between my house and the local Walgreens, where many a week's allowance was blown on Icee's and baseball cards, and he used his perfect strategic position to reign terror on my friends and I, often setting up shop on his roof with a BB gun and some TNT firecrackers to pick us off as we rode our bikes along his street, into his line of fire.
As a kid I was loved with sports, and in particular I was obsessed with baseball. Growing up a Yankee's fan during the height of the Derek Jeter era meant that I was absolutely fanatical about the game, collecting baseball cards, memorizing stats and even winning my dad's office pool fantasy baseball league, of which I was the youngest member by at least 20 years. So, needless to say, when the summer of my tenth birthday rolled around and I was finally eligible to play real baseball, not tee-ball, in the local little league, I was extremely excited. When the team roster was E-mailed to my mom she informed me that my best friend Max was on my team, I was ecstatic. What she failed to mention, what I would only learn at our first practice, was that Weird Ben was also on the team.

We were the Lobo Little League Pirates, we were coached by Mel Gonzales, and we were awful. Still, I didn't mind, no amount of strikeouts, fly balls and losses could dampen my enthusiasm, after all I was playing shortstop, just like my idol Derek Jeter. The only thing that soured my mood was the omnipresent, ceaseless strangeness of Weird Ben. He refused to wear the baseball pants included in the uniform, preferring to wear his usual camouflage cargo shorts to every practice and game, he failed to field simple ground balls because he had filled his glove with skittles while sitting in the dugout and didn't want to spill them on the field, he drove me crazy. He drove our coach crazy too.

Mel Gonzales was the kind of authority figure that as a child you have no choice but to respect, a sort of hispanic version of Coach Buttermaker from the Bad News Bears, stern, short tempered and not very well suited to be around children. We were to address him as Mr. Gonzales, Coach Gonzales, or simply Coach. Calling him something else, failing to be silent while he was speaking, or in any way disobeying him would always result in the offender running a lap, no questions asked. Weird Ben ran a lot of laps. At one of the final practices of the season, Weird Ben, as he quite often did, pissed off Coach Gonzales and was running the ensuing laps. It must have been particularly irritating to our coach because Ben had been running for quite a while, and was noticeably slacking off, lumbering along at barely more than a walk. As he rounded third base and was nearing our coach, Mr. Gonzales said something to the effect of, "Run faster Ben." Ben continued to run at the same sluggish pace, when he got to our coach he stopped, looked him in the eye and yelled,
"Shut the f*** up Mel!" before sucker punching him in the crotch and calmly walking off the field and out of my life forever. We were stunned. It was the only thing he ever did that I admired.

Weird Ben did not attend any of the remaining practices, the final game of the season nor the ensuing pizza party. The next month we moved and I never saw Weird Ben again. I wouldn't have wanted to see him go out any other way, after all, as the Neil Young wrote, "It's better to burn out than to fade away."