Living Up the Street (11 page)

They played without once looking at me. I could have continued bouncing the ball, calling out, “It’s high as a kite—get it,” but the game had grown tiresome and I wanted another chance to play dominoes with Roberto, who was taunting me and chewing his gum loudly. I bounced the ball to Marsha, told her to play with her brother, and, rubbing my hands together, told Roberto he was in trouble, that he was dead, that he was going to be sorry that he ever came to the playground. Smiling, he made his own predictions, which were truer than mine. Again he won by luck and my mistakes. He rubbed his hands together, mocking me. Instead of playing again, I
shoved the can to Roberto’s friend, made a feeble joke, and joined Esteban and Marsha.

“Let’s play some more!”

Again we played our made up game while I cried out, “It’s high as a bird—get it,” until Calvin walked slowly from the school building clapping, “Closing time.” Marsha and Esteban ran to the gate on their way home, but this time Marsha didn’t turn to look back with that wide-eyed look of “Who are you?” She crossed the street into the house with an orange tree and a dirt yard. When I passed her house that night I could make out a TV and a person I imagined to be her father, his face blue from sitting close to the screen.

The next day Calvin brought magazines for cutting out pictures to paste on milk carton collages. Only Marsha, Esteban, and Alfonso joined us. Trying to make them like me more, I again passed out chewing gum and Life Savers, which they cheered over and sucked with pleasure. Calvin refused these treats with a “no, no,” and sat apart wearing his sun glasses, and thumbed through a magazine, stopping at ads for cars.

I worked with Marsha, helping her dot glue on the pictures, and turned to Esteban’s collage to suggest that his needed some blues, maybe a sea or a picture of the sky. We found a bathtub, skyblue, with a little girl shampooing her shaggy dog. “This is funny,” he said, and snipped it very carefully from the page.

“That’s a good one,” I beamed at him. I dotted glue on the back and held the clipping up like a fish for him to grab. He pasted it on the milk carton, stared at it, and made a half attempt to smile like the girl shampooing her dog.

I turned to Calvin. “What do you think?” He looked up slowly and smiled slowly. “Esteban, you’re too much.” We worked on the collages that day but on the next I brought a bag of pinto beans, which I spilled carefully like
diamonds onto the table. I handed out chewing gum and jaw breakers as I explained that we were going to write out our names using beans. They sucked, chewed, rolled their gum and jaw breakers; they considered the beans, then my moving mouth, then the beans again.

“What for?” Alfonso asked.

I was caught off guard by this question. Almost laughing, I said, “Just to see if we can do it.” I searched their faces, again almost laughing. “It could be fun—don’t you think?”

They worked diligently as they glued the beans in the shape of their last names on cardboard. When they finished I asked them to dab each bean a different color of poster paint, delicately so the beans wouldn’t fall off. Marsha and Esteban worked in silence although Alfonso whined that it was boring. But after awhile even he had grown absorbed and quiet as the other two. When Calvin, who had been hitting fly balls to Roberto and Danny, returned to the table, Alfonso was the first to point out his creation. Calvin smiled wide, like a light turned on, and said “That’s beautiful, man.” He ruffled Alfonso’s hair and called him Picasso.

The next day I brought spray paint, some cans, and a box of macaroni shaped like wagon wheels. I poured the macaroni onto the table and explained, with animated enthusiasm, that we were going to make pencil holders from the cans; that we would spray-paint the cans, glue on the macaroni, and paint each macaroni with water colors.

The following day I brought coloring books which my stepfather, a warehouseman for a book distributor, had given me. But there were no crayons in the game room, so we looked at the pictures—Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, Felix the Cat—and chewed our gum. The next day I sneaked my little brother’s crayons from the house and brought sheets of my sister’s typing paper to make airplanes. We folded, drew snarling tiger mouths at the nose,
and let the planes fly from our hands, all the while making the sound of jets.

In my third week at Emerson, Calvin was transferred to another playground, and William, a young white man in a bright yellow shirt and Bermuda shorts, stood in front of us saying that he was the new coach. He smiled at us for the longest time, hands on his hips, and then screwed up his face at the baseball field, the bungalows, and the school building. I was going to introduce myself as the recreational assistant, but knowing that he would say, “a what?” I said nothing and joined the kids at the table, where they were pounding their fists and singing, “We want dominoes, we want dominoes!” Trying to be friendly the new coach smiled, unlocked the game room, and clunked around. He returned with the coffee can and a football.

“How ’bout some catch?” he asked me, and I told him that it was too hot to play. Roberto and I played the first game, then Alfonso took my place. I took out jaw breakers from my pocket and offered them around, including to the coach who declined with a shake of his hand. We played dominoes while William hovered over us, one foot on the bench and arms crossed, and kept asking our names—Roberto, Alfonso, Danny, Marsha, Esteban, Gary.

Tired of winning, Roberto asked William if we could put out the “Slip & Slide.”

“Slip & Slide?” he asked, as if surprised.

Roberto showed it to him in the game room, and together they tugged the “Slip & Slide” and the garden hose across the field to the strip of lawn between the bungalows. William stretched and smoothed it flat while Roberto connected the hose and sprayed in our direction to keep us at bay because he wanted to go first.

We jumped back, laughing. “We’re going to get you,” I yelled and he mocked me with my own words. William
stepped aside, still smiling as if someone were ready to snap his picture, and Roberto sprayed the “Slip & Slide” while looking over his shoulder to keep us back. But Alfonso ran, arms out and making plane noises, and he skidded across the plastic. Danny followed, with Marsha and Esteban skidding on their knees right behind him. I pulled off my shirt, flipped my rubber thongs at Roberto and buzzed low toward the plastic. When I skidded Roberto sprayed my face and yelled, “You’re dead and wet.” I glided across the plastic to the end, shocked by the cold water but happy and thinking it wasn’t so bad.

A
s early as kindergarten I had to bob and weave through fights—some I won and some I had to escape holding my nose like a doorknob. My first loss was in first grade over a red crayon. I was busy coloring flames on a neat four-sided house with a crooked chimney when a boy tried to pull the crayon away from me. I shoved him away, called him
menso
and proceeded to slash red flames at the house. But he came back with a girlish over-the-head punch that thudded on my back and, for a moment, stunned me by knocking the breath out of me. But I recovered quickly, turned around, and stabbed his forehead with the crayon, which left a small, red nick and made him run to the teacher, Miss Sue, a Chinese woman who consistently referred to me as “You, you.”

Irate, because I had been a nuisance all week, Miss Sue shook me like a wet umbrella and pulled me toward the front of the classroom where she ordered the class, busy coloring, to return to their desks. Pushing her hair from her eyes, she asked, “How many of you want Gary to go to the principal’s office?” I had been tugging to get free, but stopped when I saw all the hands leap up like flames into the air, even my girlfriend Rhonda’s and my best friend Daryle’s. I was shocked, then mad. My girlfriend! My best friend! So off I went screaming “No one likes
me!” and, in the principal’s office, could only think how I was going to beat up the whole class.

And I did, sooner or later, between second and third bases, in the bathroom while they stood at the urinals with their flies open like sails, and after school when I chased them home with rocks and bad words. So it went year after year, and perhaps my peak as a fighter came one week in spring the year I was a fifth grader when I was reportedly the gang leader of Mexicans who had beat up the Surfers. The Surfers, who were as poor as us and who probably had never seen the ocean in person, were sixth graders—and one of them was my brother Rick. I didn’t find it strange because we often fought at home over the smallest thing, like a glass of Kool-Aid or a misplaced pencil, so when we met on the lawn one afternoon during lunch period, I had no bad feelings about trying to hit my brother in the nose. He made the decision to stand with the Surfers, and I made the decision to stand with the Mexicans. (I think it’s something like becoming a Democrat or Republican—there are really no hard feelings if a relative belongs to a party different from your own.)

We met on the lawn and taunted them. “Hey, how’s the surf. Your little deuce coupe,
ese
.” They came back, “Eat your tacos and throw up,” At that we lunged at them and sadly, since we were only fifth graders, we went down one after another from their sixth grader punches, holding our jaws and wiping our hurt noses. Lucky for us, I suppose, a teacher was walking toward the knot of onlookers; and the Surfers scattered while we ran to the jungle gym where we bared our teeth at one another to see if they were all right.

After lunch, while Mrs. Sloan read us
Pinocchio
and the class grew dreamy as we listened with heads pillowed in folded arms, I was called by the loud speaker on the wall next to the flag. The speaker crackled, buzzed,
breathed hard, crackled some more, and finally spoke: “Please send Gary Soto to the principal’s office immediately.” I raised my head from my arms, looked around as everyone looked at me, and left the room wondering what I had done wrong. At the office a mother was there with one of the Surfers whose eyes were red from crying, and as I stepped into the principal’s office, scared at the possibility of a paddling, the Surfer cried out, “That’s him. He’s the leader.” Mr. Buckalew, usually so kind, frowned at me as the Surfer went loose-lipped; the mother wrung her hands and told Mr. Buckalew that her son had a heart condition, that any day he could die. I listened without saying anything but thought we were going to have to whip this “fink.” After the mother and son had gone breathless from complaining, the principal turned and asked me if any of it was true.

“They’re lying,” I lied, with a generous wide-eyed innocence. “Really, Mr. Buckalew.”

But in the end I leaned against his desk for a paddling, and the Surfer transferred to another school district when we chased him home for being a fink.

Hard times. All through elementary and junior high school, it was bob and weave, jab and stick. Only in high school did I get a chance to rest between rounds. I was amazed at the calm, almost pastoral, atmosphere of Roosevelt High and, for a while, was pleased to hover over tuna sandwiches during lunchtime without the worry of being jumped from behind. During the three years there I would only get into eight fights—the strangest one was with a 1963 Ford Falcon that tried to run me over as I crossed the street on my way to school. I kicked the car door, then the driver when he got out of his car, before I ran away to look for help.

Longing for the “good times,” I joined the wrestling team to exercise my combative genes. Wrestling is a difficult sport that demands top notch conditioning, followed
by speed, desire, and tooth-grinding meanness. During the first week of training we ran miles, did push-ups and sit-ups until we hurt, and practiced take-downs and half nelsons. We worked out in the “oven,” a fifteen by thirty foot padded room, in which an overhead heater was turned on so we could sweat to lose weight. By the end of a two-hour workout, the room was puddled with sweat and so fogged that it was impossible to see across the room. We practiced with the intention of hurting each other, and Coach DeCarlo made no bones about it.

“When you get in there, don’t be a damned fish. You’re men, now. When you get him down, throw your chin into his back. Hurt him—or don’t come back.”

We all came back, either as victors or losers, and, if the latter, practiced even more fiercely to prove ourselves the next time. We wanted to hear the coach call us “animals,” and smile with pride.

I wrestled for three years at the one-hundred-three weight class and my record was not particularly sparkling: Twenty-four wins, eleven losses. Just an average wrestler. I earned three letters but no ribbons or pins to dangle from a letterman’s jacket. Still, I was loyal. I worked hard. I ran the miles, did the push-ups and sit-ups until I hurt, and by the end of the three years of wrestling I was in the best condition I would ever enjoy. If I lifted my shirt at my brothers, I could blink a row of taut muscles—blink, “Don’t mess with me,” or “Stay back, Jack.”

One night, in my third year, my mother decided to watch me wrestle. My family had taken little interest in my athletics and, in fact, had discouraged me from going out for the team because it meant expense: Insurance (five dollars), a check-up (seven dollars), and one knee pad (two dollars and fifty cents). Then there was the doctor bill of ten dollars for the blood poisoning I got from a scratch while wrestling. With the last, my mother kept saying, “No, it’s nothing,” even when I showed her a tangle
of red veins that ran from my hand to my chest. I went to bed thinking about Jesus, but when I woke the next morning I was thinking of Dr. Welby, Dr. Kildare—anyone! I showed my veins to Mom again, and she said, “Well, OK, if we have to.” She put down her coffee cup, dabbed lipstick on her cheeks and lips the color of my veins, and drove me to the doctor’s. When I took off my shirt, his brow went dark with lines as he said, “This one’s a dilly.” He probed my armpit until it hurt and then set a row of injections on a stainless steel tray.

The night my mom decided to watch me wrestle, our match was with the perennial powerhouse, Madera High—and that night I was to face Bloodworth. His name was appropriate, since he was a city champion prone to head slapping and smearing his opponent’s face into the mat before he turned him over to show him the “lights”—the overhead lights we’d look up at as the referee counted.