by Shey Stahl
I may not have been tied to just one girl but I did give them what they deserved and wanted. I was always honest up front and some didn’t like that but I never disrespected them. I also never touched them until they understood what it was that we shared, something I learned from Ryder. And I also never talked about what I did with these girls, even with my cousins, it was always kept private because to me, that was disrespectful to the girl I was with. If she talked about it, that was her deal but no one would get it out of me.
I did get the rap in high school as an asshole or a player but one girl defended me, Delaney. She was a freshman when I was a sophomore and I liked her a lot. She was sweet and didn’t have many friends so naturally Arie and I befriended her. She was better friends with Arie and then soon I got to know her well since she was at the house a few times.
She took interest in me, flirted, I flirted back and soon I had her in my room. She had told me she was a virgin and up until that point, I hadn’t been with a virgin.
I told her that we couldn’t because her first time should be special and not with a guy that wouldn’t commit to her. I ended up just showing her a good time in other ways that day but later she came back and said she wanted it to be me.
I took it into consideration and then asked Arie what she thought about it. She was always who I talked to about that sort of thing.
Arie said to me, “Casten, taking a girl’s virginity is not something that should be a game to you. If you’re considering it, make it special to her. Delaney knows what you’re about but that shouldn’t stop you from making it special. Treat her the way she deserves to be treated.”
Eventually I agreed to it but I made that night with Delaney probably the best night of her life. She knew I wouldn’t be her boyfriend nor would we be dating. But I did spend the entire day with her, took her to dinner and then back to my parent’s condo in Jacksonville Beach where I showed her what her first time should be like with candles and music and soft touches.
I did things like that. That’s who I was. Like I said, I treated them like the treasures they were and Delaney deserved that.
The next morning when I took her home, she said to me. “Thank you Casten. I know you don’t love me and that wasn’t about that but...thank you for making feel like you loved me and I was special to you.”
I gently kissed her forehead and said, “You are very special to me and I do love you, just not in the spend-the-rest-of-my-life-with-just-you way. Does that make sense? I don’t mean for that to sound badly. I really do care for you.”
She laughed. “Actually, up until last night I would have said no. But now, after what we shared, I do understand what you mean.”
That wasn’t the last time Delaney and I were together physically either. When she needed me, I was there for her in any way she needed. High school and life is hard enough, why not just have one thing in your life you don’t have to think about? It’s just something natural that two people are sharing. That’s the way I looked at it at least.
Anyways, I was called an asshole at lunch one day because I wouldn’t date the head cheerleader of our school. Frankly, she scared the shit out of me and though I messed around with a handful of girls at school, I didn’t mess around with just anyone. I had some standards and the cheerleader wasn’t an option.
Delaney stood up and said, “He’s not an asshole or a player. Yeah he sleeps around but I assure you the girls that he’s been with have never felt more precious and more comfortable in themselves than they do with Casten.”
I was sitting there when she said it, I winked up at her and she smiled back.
It was the truth though and I was thankful girls like Delaney understood that.
I never had to break up with a girl or have the awkward conversation of, “Will you call?”
I always called. I remained their friends and provided them with what they needed and when it no longer worked, it was usually mutual. As I said, they knew up front what it was so I never regretted being that way. I knew that eventually if it didn’t work for me and I found someone that I only wanted to be with them, then that’s what would happen but I wouldn’t force it.
The summer I graduated, my sophomore year because I’m pretty much the smartest person in my family, I decided to go spend some time with my brother and the sprint car boys as that was the time my dad was getting back into sprint car racing too. I always had a good time when I was on the road with them. I had more fun with the atmosphere of racing life rather than the act of it.
That few weeks we were all together we acted like normal kids. I think Axel sometime forgot he was still a kid himself so we, as in Willie, Tommy, and me, felt the need to remind him.
One night when we were in Lernerville after a long string of broken parts and blown motors, Axel won his one hundredth USAC Sprint car race so we partied. A tradition we’d been doing for years was any time Axel won a feature race; we played the same song in his hauler when he drove up, Knock Knock by Mac Miller. You could hear the song carry throughout the pits and soon everyone would start humming along to it before he got out of the car, including Axel.
He loved that shit.
As soon as he pulled himself from the car, we were all dancing around.
That night in Lernerville for his one hundredth win was a huge party that even Axel partook in.
Tommy, who had some liver problems, no doubt from the years of his frequent drinking, was debating whether to join in the fun. When a group of girls approached Willie and asked if we could show them a good time, Tommy gave himself a speech that all of us will remember as the “Liver Speech”.
He sat there in his chair beside Axel’s hauler in the pits, looked at the bottle of Jack Daniels in his hand and said, “Listen to me,” he said to his liver while pointing to his heart. He was no anatomy specialist. Ask him anything about the setup of a sprint car and he’d rattle off what it was but not his body. So there he sat pointing to his heart causing Willie and me to crack up. “Liver, I’ve supported your ass for forty-three years. Pull your own fucking weight for one goddamn night!”
Tommy was so wasted that night we found him the next morning passed out inside Axel’s hauler curled up with a pine tree he’d up rooted from somewhere. Didn’t know Pennsylvania had pine trees but he found one.
“What’s with the tree?” Axel asked once we got him outside. He had passed out in the hallway of the hotel wearing a princess crown, one shoe and a Mohawk.
Willie smiled at Axel eyeing his new haircut in amusement. “Tommy said it needed an air-freshener after he puked in it. He couldn’t find one so he thought a tree would work to.”
It was a clever idea. I would have done something like that as well. And that right there was a true testament to Tommy and Willie’s maturity levels if a sixteen-year-old was equally as mature. At least there was hope for me. Tommy and Willie were screwed.
After Ryder died when I was eleven, my focus was lost with racing. Ryder was killed in Perris California not long after the loss of a few of my dad’s team members.
Losing Ryder left me with little drive to actually race any more. I did it for fun and it was no longer fun for me to be on a track inside the car, so I quit. Everyone understood and never questioned why. I think most knew why but never said anything.
Life around the track changed considerably without my counterpart but Tommy and Willie were still good fun. All the guys with JAR Racing were role models to me and my brother and in a way, they played a big part in who we were as much as our parents did. So it wasn’t nearly the same anymore without Ryder but they were all there to make sure we were all right.
When I was fifteen, my grandpa was taken from us. I wasn’t there that night and I was glad I wasn’t. It seemed hard enough for my brother, Axel, who saw the entire wreck right before his eyes. I saw the video later and again, I was glad not have been there. Not only was grandpa killed but also my dad was in the worst wreck of his entire life that day. It was touch and go whether or not h
e would survive for a few weeks but he pulled through. I honestly think if he wouldn’t have, the loss for us would have been too much.
I believe it would have destroyed my mom. It’d be hard for a kid like me to explain but I knew enough that she couldn’t lose him.
Our family was forever changed after that day in Knoxville.
The way we moved on was simple, we just did. It wasn’t like us to dwell on something we couldn’t change, or at least it wasn’t like me. I took to showing my grandma what she needed to live for. I couldn’t help but want to help her when I found her crying one morning when I went to check on her. From then on, I took her to breakfast every Saturday morning and every Wednesday we had movie night. Eventually Arie, Lexi, Lane and Cole joined in but Saturday morning breakfast was all about us. We never told anyone we did it but we did. And over time, she told me her entire life story. I learned a lot about our family through her and while it was interesting, I also learned new inventive ways to fuck with all of them. It was all in good fun and my sixty-three year old grandmother had a blast finding ways to prank our unsuspecting family members. Each week we had a new target and when we ran out, it was a random draw.
I couldn’t be a normal person to pull her out of her depression she’d been slipping into nor was I that great of a listener but apparently, I was what she needed.
I think that’s what describes me, while I was independent in my own ways, I was what a lot of what people needed. Whether it was my family needing a good laugh, a lonely freshman wanting someone special to take her virginity, or my grandmother needing someone to show her how to laugh again, I was just simply myself.
I had no direction and I had no real purpose for anything I did, just that I did it because it felt natural to me. And none of these people ever tried to mold me to be something I wasn’t, they let me be me and move independently.
Books by Shey Stahl
Racing on the Edge (Happy Hour, Black Flag, Trading Paint, The Champion and The Legend
Delayed Penalty – Coming soon!
About the author:
Shey Stahl lives in the Pacific Northwest with her family. She enjoys motorsports of any kind and can usually be found at a dirt track somewhere. When Shey is not writing, she is spending time with family and friends more than likely doing something that involves racing.
Her next project is a book about an NHL hockey player that’s set to be released late March of 2013.
