Living Up the Street (15 page)

But this job at Valley Tire Company confirmed that there was something worse than field work, and I was doing it. We were all doing it, from foreman to the newcomers like me, and what I felt heaving tires for eight hours a day was felt by everyone—black, Mexican, redneck. We all despised those hours but didn’t know what else to do. The workers were unskilled, some undocumented and fearful of deportation, and all struck with an uncertainty at what to do with their lives. Although everyone bitched about work, no one left. Some had worked
there for as long as twelve years; some had sons working there. Few quit; no one was ever fired. It amazed me that no one gave up when the border patrol jumped from their vans, baton in hand, because I couldn’t imagine any work that could be worse—or any life. What was out there, in the world, that made men run for the fence in fear?

Iggy was the only worker who seemed sure of himself. After five hours of “junking,” he brushed himself off, cleaned up in the washroom, and came out gleaming with an elegance that humbled the rest of us. Few would look him straight in the eye or talk to him in our usual stupid way because he was so much better. He carried himself as a man should—with that old world “dignity”—while the rest of us muffed our jobs and talked dully about dull things as we worked. From where he worked in his open shed he would now and then watch us with his hands on his hips. He would shake his head and click his tongue in disgust.

The rest of us lived dismally. I often wondered what the others’ homes were like; I couldn’t imagine that they were much better than our work place. No one indicated that his outside life was interesting or intriguing. We all looked defeated and contemptible in our filth at the day’s end. I imagined the average welcome at home: Rafael, a Mexican national who had worked at Valley for five years, returned to a beaten house of kids who were dressed in mismatched clothes and playing kick-the-can. As for Sugar Daddy, he returned home to a stuffy room where he would read and reread old magazines. He ate potato chips, drank beer, and watched TV. There was no grace in dipping socks into a wash basin where later he would wash his cup and plate.

There was no grace at work. It was all ridicule. The assistant foreman drank Cokes in front of the newcomers as they laced tires in the afternoon sun. Knowing that I had a long walk home, Rudy, the college student, passed
me waving and yelling “Hello,” as I started down Mission Road on the way home to eat out of cans. Even our plump secretary got into the act by wearing short skirts and flaunting her milky legs. If there was love, it was ugly. I’m thinking of Tully and an older man whose name I can no longer recall fondling one another in the washroom. I had come in cradling a smashed finger to find them pressed together in the shower, their pants undone and partly pulled down. When they saw me they smiled their pink mouths but didn’t bother to push away.

How we arrived at such a place is a mystery to me. Why anyone would stay for years is even a deeper concern. You showed up, but from where? What broken life? What ugly past? The foreman showed you the Coke machine, the washroom, and the yard where you’d work. When you picked up a tire, you were amazed at the black it could give off.

W
hat evilness had risen from my hand? Once, when I and a neighbor friend, Rinehart, a true Okie and lover of gravy on cantaloupe, were on the front porch, a very drunk man in a brown overcoat staggered down our street in the middle of the afternoon. He reeled like those drunks in the afternoon movies—side to side, forward and then backward, all the while slurring words at himself and things that got in his way.

Rinehart and I watched him pass, thinking it was funny that he should have to lean against a car and hold on. Then the brilliant idea: Why not sell him a beer bottle filled with water? We beamed at each other and rushed off to find a bottle before the drunk escaped our scheme. Pulling one from the garbage, we filled it with water from the garden hose and then ran after the drunk who had not wandered too far. Rinehart was standing behind me, somewhat scared, when I yelled: “Mister, you wanna buy a beer? Look at this.” I held up the bottle like a chalice and pointed at it. He turned slowly to show us his watery eyes. His stare drifted, and out came: “Whaaaat?” It was an ugly sound that scared both of us. Still, when the drunk took a dollar from his pocket, I snatched it from him and then set the bottle at his feet. He tried to lunge at me, but I sidestepped him and he fell to the ground, tipping over the bottle. He looked at the bottle, then back at me, and
whined from some terrible cavity of the heart: “You’ll get yours, sonny.” The words scared me. I was Catholic. I knew right from wrong and what he meant.

The drunk rose to his feet with difficulty and then bent down to pick up the beer bottle and raise it to his mouth. As he continued down the street, we watched in silence as he crossed the street into the next block. I turned to Rinehart and tried to be funny by crossing my eyes but his face had gone slack from bad feelings. I suggested that we cash the dollar, but he didn’t want anything to do with it. He left me and went inside. What could I do? What was done was done. With the dollar I bought a Coke, potato chips, and a lemon pie, and rode my bike up and down the block, now and then staring at Rinehart’s house and feeling bad.

I marched through life in evilness, and perhaps a low point that will surely send me tumbling into hell was when Scott, my best friend and still another lover of cantaloupe and gravy, begged me to break into his sister’s house with him. She was on vacation in Yosemite, so it was a perfect time to undo a window screen, slither through, and come out smiling with the stereo, the color TV, the alarm clock, the antique silver, or whatever our hearts desired.

“Come on, Gar, no way are we gonna get caught,” he beat over my head all night. “We could put the stereo in the closet, and sell the rest of the stuff. Fifty-fifty.”

At first I was surprised at Scott. My mouth hung open, and when I closed it it fell open again. His own sister’s house? His recently married sister? I would never have thought of stealing from family or, for that matter, stealing period. I was Catholic. I believed in evilness.

But then, Scott’s arguments sort of made sense. Didn’t we in fact need a stereo and wasn’t it true that we were stealing from the rich? Surely no harm would result. His sister worked for the government and his brother-in-law
was employed as a surveyor. He made a killing, we thought, and there were benefits to boot.

“Gar, we could do it. No one will know,” he argued for hours before I finally came around to agree with him. We planned our break-in for the following night, and then sat back in our beds bragging about what we would buy: Vienna sausages, cheeses, and assorted packages of Lipton soup, our favorite. Our imaginations narrowed to Cokes, Cheez-Its, and puffed bags of Chee•tos. Okie Heaven, we laughed.

Our circumstances were laughable. Mad at my parents, I had said “shit” under my breath and had joined Scott in renting a small room in a boarding house. We each had a bed, a chair, and one wobbly table where we fixed our meals. We lived like monks with bad eating habits: For breakfast there were Froot Loops and Sonny Boy orange juice; for lunch we slurped up a bowl of Lipton soup, along with a thin sandwich of peanut butter and jelly; for dinner, which I ate alone because Scott worked the night shift at a box factory, I often opened a can of Campbell’s Manhandler. Great stuff, I thought at the time—a time when I was trying to become a poet. I had taped my poems (all three of them) to the wall near the window where I ate, re-reading them as I weighed each steaming spoonful of my Manhandler. When a breeze came in the poems fluttered and hung on the verge of pulling off the wall and coming alive. Good stuff, I thought, but the professor I would show them to that fall would think different. The poems died in his class, or limped like old dogs in the hallway, and when I tried to tape them back to the wall they slipped behind the bed where I left them, depressed.

Scott worked hard hours while I lived on social security. Ninety dollars every month. Thirty dollars for rent, twenty for food, and fifteen for gas. There were other expenses that might have amounted to five dollars, but I managed to save the rest for a rainy day.

But it was the end of a lean month, so we agreed to rob the house. The next night Scott called in sick and as we were about to leave, a friend of ours showed up. It was Ronnie in a baseball cap; Ronnie the biologist in lime green socks; the big creep who squeezed pimples at mirrors and laughed.

“Where you guys going?” he asked. “For a walk,” I lied. He followed us downstairs and the three of us walked one block, then another, and then still another. We returned to the house and at that point we told Ronnie what we were going to do. His face was like an orange moon when he asked if he could come along. We shouted no and then told him to get lost. And that’s just what he did. He got into his ’57 Chevy, a car only a Mexican or a redneck looks good in. Ronnie was neither.

Scott and I jumped into my ’49 Plymouth and raced to Scott’s sister’s place. By the time we got there Ronnie was waiting for us on his car hood with his long legs dangling and his socks showing under a street light. He called to us, and we shushed him.

“OK, you can come with us,” Scott told him, “but don’t be too greedy. Just take what you really need.” Scott explained to us that he would climb through the upstairs window that he knew was open. I drove my Plymouth into the alley behind the house; Ronnie parked his Chevy on the end of the block. By the time Ronnie and I returned to the house, we could make out Scott’s crouched figure waving for us to come in. We tiptoed past the spray of car parts and gardening tools, up the back porch, and into the house. In the kitchen Scott again warned us, Ronnie in particular, just to take things that we needed. He flicked on the flashlight and Scott and I went to the living room while Ronnie, who was offended by Scott’s warnings, went upstairs to search the bedrooms. A match lit the way for him.

Scott and I unplugged the stereo and detached the
speaker wires from the receiver. I cradled the speakers one at a time, like babies, to the alley while Scott propped the receiver and turntable on his shoulders and followed me. Together we carried the 19-inch RCA, dropping it once on the lawn and again in the alley when we tried to fit it into the trunk. When the neighbor’s dog snorted at the fence, we froze and tried not to breathe.

Meanwhile, Ronnie had brought down a tape recorder, some record albums, and a hat. “Don’t be stupid,” I told him in a low but angry voice. I slapped the hat from his hand and he said, “Oh.”

The three of us returned to the house where we searched for small things: Fountain pens, loose change, a wad of bills sandwiched under a mattress. Scott’s flashlight poked at the dark, and I followed it, looking desperately for something—anything—of value. Ronnie started upstairs to search the bedrooms again when we heard a car coming to a stop. The neighbors. We grew still and listened to the car door slam, a low voice, and then a hee-haw of laughter as they climbed their steps. This frightened me and Scott, but Ronnie remained indifferent. “Don’t worry.”

But we did. I could feel that Scott was scared out of his wits, so I told him to stay calm while I took one last look around the house. It was then that I found a plexiglas bank of quarters, dimes, and nickels. I weighed it in my palm: At least twenty dollars, I thought.

When I returned to the living room Scott was peeking out the window. He turned to me and his voice was full of panic. “C’mon, let’s get outta here.”

At the stairs I called up to Ronnie to come down, but, a true fool to the bone, he said no. I climbed the stairs where I found him in a closet searching on his knees among the shoes. I grabbed him by the arm, but he tugged away.

“You’ll get it later, punk,” I told him. My mouth was
puckered with meanness and instead of waiting for later I jumped into the closet to fight him. Scott came running up the stairs to break us up. When I got up my lip felt warm and my back hurt where Ronnie had pounded me with a high-heeled shoe.

“Let’s go, Ronnie,” Scott begged, but still he refused to leave. “Listen, just give me some more time. Just ten more minutes.”

We went downstairs without him and into the alley where we placed the stereo in the back seat of the car, jumped in, and began to drive slowly down the alley. A large branch, somehow stuck to the underbody of the car, scraped against the ground and got louder as we picked up speed. The neighborhood of dogs whined, then broke the night with barks, as a porch light came on. Out of the alley I drove madly hoping the branch would snap. But it didn’t. We drove all the way home with the branch screeching and in my mind I prayed to God and confessed our evilness. “Baby Jesus, get us out of here. Save our asses.”

Back at our room we sat on our beds trying to figure out the next move. Where would we sell the stereo? Sunnyside Swapmeet? Cherry Auction? Should we drag the stuff into our room? What if anyone saw us? We went round and round fluttering with fear like chickens. Scott paced the room, searching out the window now and then, while I lay on the bed, exhausted.

Then we made out the sound of Ronnie’s car in the distance. It got louder and his tires skidded when he turned the corner to our block. He stopped with the screech of bad brakes, revved up the engine, and then shut it off. He got out of his car and I could hear the flipflop of K-mart sneakers climb our stairs. When I opened the door for him he was holding a lamp with a torn shade. I couldn’t believe it. What had gotten into his mind to make him bring back a lamp?

Immediately we began to argue. I pushed him; he pushed me. I pushed him again and we started fighting, our arms flailing at one another as we banged against the table and the bed. Scott sat on his bed with his head in his hands and suffered in private shame, indifferent to our rolling about the room. A banging came from the wall, followed by a “Shut up in there.” Ronnie and I let go of each other and got up breathing hard and pressing at the hurt places throbbing under the skin. I looked into the mirror that showed a long scratch from Ronnie’s girlish fingernails.
Scarface Soto
.