Why I Don't Write Children's Literature (3 page)

YOU WEAR IT WELL

This is me several years ago at the British-themed Jack Wills shop on King's Road in London. With sudden rain, umbrellas were thrust skyward, some like large bright petals and others black as funerals. Hurrying pedestrians knocked into each other. Rain drenched the public, even the stylish dogs in yellow slickers, and leaves choked the gutters.

We stepped into this clothing shop, where I shook my shoulders of wetness, while my wife pulled away to inspect the baggy pants, bright as toucans, that she had spied across the room. I was left to stand in the middle of the store, alone. I considered the displays mildly amusing. Every item seemed youngish, and the sales help were all young and bright as candy. The music from the speakers was a sort of electronic garble — the throbbing sounds that robots might dance to.

I found an old velvet chair, got comfy, and opened the program of Richard Bean's “English People Very Nice,” which we had just seen in a matinee at the National Theatre. It had been a memorable experience; the play is about Indian immigration to Great Britain and the racist comments uttered by the characters sometimes made me grip the arms of my chair. Overall, I thought the show hilarious and so touching that I expected to see it again. In the program, there was a cartoonish display of great moments in immigration, including a 1904 scene in which worshippers at an ultra-Orthodox synagogue (once a Huguenot Protestant church and later, after the synagogue years, a mosque) were pelted with bacon sandwiches by Jewish anarchists on Yom Kippur. I was imagining this moment of flying club sandwiches when my wife called, “Gary, come here.”

I stood up and looked about, ostrich-like, for Carolyn, who is short and can often disappear among the racks of clothes. When she called again, I got moving and found her on the stairwell, waving for me to giddyup. I followed with a hand on the rail for balance. Soon I was standing before a wall and asking, “What am I looking at?”

“The jacket,” she pointed.

Since there was a display of six jackets, I risked, “Which one?”

“The maroon one — get it down and try it on.”

The maroon jacket was made of heavy wool and had a school crest and brass buttons. I had to stand on tiptoe to reach it. The lining was yellowish from age. I put it on and shrugged at the cuffs.

“Look in the mirror,” Carolyn commanded.

I turned and saw myself, shoes splayed, jeans wrinkled, thinning bangs wild from wind and rain. The schoolboy's jacket was stylishly hip. I turned sideways, noting that my butt hadn't fallen all that far.
You could pull this off
, I told myself. I inhaled so that my paunch disappeared, a temporary liposuction that lasted no more than seconds.

I stripped the jacket off and handed it to my wife, who began to search for a price tag. Finding none, she walked upstairs with me in tow. She called to a young man in periwinkle-colored shorts, “How much is this?”

The young man wore bright red sunglasses on top of his head. He approached in leather boaters, wearing no socks; the cuffs of his trousers ended around the tops of his ankles. He took the jacket and hunted for a price tag, his face crumpling. The hunt ended when a clerk behind the counter hollered, “Scott, it's not for sale. It's display.”

The clerk's voice was high, as if on tiptoes. He was all of twenty-five and wore a boyish part in his hair. Nevertheless, he appeared to be the boss of the moment, the one who directed the even more youthful staff to go here, go there. He sent the boy with the boaters back to his station on the second floor.

“Not for sale?” my wife asked. She seemed bewildered at this piece of news. Like, what was the world coming to if you couldn't buy something that hung on the wall at a store!

“It's for display, ma'am,” the clerk explained. He was wearing orange-colored pedal pushers, and a striped T-shirt hugged his lean body. Unlike many of his generation, his throat was not inked with an undecipherable tattoo.

“Why?” Carolyn demanded.

He said that the jacket was intended to color the walls with a British sensibility, then remarked, with prideful confession, that the shop had previously sold only one of this jacket — to Rod Stewart. But he had let something out of the bag, and my wife was on it.

“Then why don't you sell this one to us?” she said, having already taken possession of the jacket.

The young man stalled. “Because,” he replied, blinking a set of pretty eyes at my wife. “Because, oh, how do I say this?”

What he said was that they had sold the same maroon-colored schoolboy jacket to Rod Stewart because Rod was a celebrity, hinting that I was just a man off the street, a husband and nothing more. Then he looked out onto that street, his attention captured by the toot of a taxi.

My wife jumped in. “But do you know who my husband is?”

His eyes moved slowly from Carolyn to me. He pondered me for a second before answering. “No, but I think you're from New York — am I right?”

“He's a famous writer. In America, everyone knows him.” She added that we were from California, but didn't mention that our second home was in Fresno.

I felt embarrassed, but also enlightened at the power of the human will. For the first time in our thirty-six years of marriage, I understood Carolyn as a true, go-for-broke shopper. But really! A “famous writer” was a dead person who has his or her sober image on a coffee cup. Whereas two of my recent books had already been remaindered, with the others, like lemmings, ready to follow them over the cliff.

The clerk gazed at me with eyes as clear as unpolluted sky. After a moment, he said, “I like novels if I can see the movie first.”

He pondered me for a few more hard seconds.
Maybe he is a writer of note
, the lad was thinking,
or perhaps he just resembles my gramps
. Finally he confided, “You know, sir, you have the same build as Mr. Stewart.”

Rod and me?
Remarkable.

“Let me check something. What is your name, sir?”

“Gary Soto,” my wife answered.

The young clerk turned away, walking briskly to the counter. When he opened a laptop computer, his face, already bright, brightened even more with reflected light. His fingers began to scramble across the keys.

Meanwhile, my wife and I cut across several islands of sweaters, long-sleeved jerseys with British overtones, then passed a table of impossibly slim-fitting jeans, stopping finally at a cubbyhole display of jackets. While I rummaged absently, an obvious novice, she speedily peeled away one jacket after another. She was now frantic in her quest to make me appear dapper (I was in my late fifties at the time) and also mad that my writerly credentials were suspect. It did not matter that she had described me to the clerk as a best-selling author, not a poet with a couple of lucky textbook hits that made a nice seasonable income. But even if I was not as rich as Rod Stewart, he and I shared the same build. Wasn't that worth something?

“I hope we get it,” she muttered at the rack of jackets, yanking at the sleeves, searching for the one that said
Gary
.

I spent my time ogling the price tags. The jackets were all wool, all 1960s retro, all damn expensive. I was pondering a tag marked down from 150 pounds to 85 pounds in vicious red when my wife said, “This is nice.”

I tried on the nice jacket. It fit, and I figured it would fit Mr. Stewart too. We were of the same build and almost the same era, though he was slightly older, of course. Despite his age, he was trying to regroup, to discover some new music. I had hair like his once, when I was in my early twenties. In those days, I had sported his trademark rooster look. But in that department Rod was now the clear winner: his hair, though dyed, remained much bushier, while mine went with the wind.

The clerk returned and said cheerfully, “I looked you up.” He halted in front of Carolyn but spoke of me. “He
is
famous. We can sell the jacket, I think.” The young man explained that he had to talk to the regional manager, who was not present, then left, flipping open his cell phone.

My wife veered off to the sweaters and began ripping through them, while I used the wait to pick up a pair of argyle socks. Priced at ten pounds a pair, no wonder the staff didn't wear them.

When the clerk returned, he informed us that, yes, the jacket could be sold. He and Carolyn haggled over the price while I drifted away to look at the sweaters that I would not buy.

In the end, we bought the schoolboy jacket with the crest and bronze buttons as well as the other nice jacket that my wife had located. We left Jack Wills, my wife going first. She is invincible when she sets her mind to shopping. We looked around, squinting because the sun had come out. The sky was as blue as that young clerk's eyes. It was humid, though, and late in the afternoon.
Time for a pint
, I thought, time for my mouth to pucker up with a proper drink. But Carolyn had spied a women's shoe store with a half-off sale banner across the street.

“Aren't you exhausted?” I asked.

“Exhausted? Yeah, but so?”

She told me to hurry up — the light was about to turn red.

I followed, a husband and nothing more.

A NIGHT OUT

My buddy David Ruenzel and I recently went to Cobb's Comedy Club in San Francisco and heard jokes from a flabby T-shirted comic like this: “The kid was, like, lonely, so lonely that he went into the jungle and came out with poison ivy.”
LOL
from the comic, chuckles from a party of three at a small wagon-wheel-shaped table. Two young men, tall as giraffes, got up to visit the john.

Jesus
, I thought,
we paid for this?
We finished our beers and left without pushing our chairs back into place.

Outside, the rain had become only slightly annoying, no longer the pelting anger we had faced earlier while racing up Columbus Street, awning to awning. Hunched in our jackets, we hustled toward City Lights Bookstore, our beacon and reminder that books were Good and comedy Bad. The evening had started off well, with hand-made ravioli and a shared bottle of Chianti Rufina at a small restaurant called Satchel's. We had been seated by the window, watching the office types hurrying home, the street lit with drizzle, an umbrella tumbling from a tall man's shoulders, so very much like a Hitchcock scene. While we ate, David and I had talked about
Madame Bovary
, our favorite novel of all time, and how we, too, sustained ourselves on the same blood as Dr. Bovary, the human qualities of ineptness, caution, domestic routine, and giddiness over small accomplishments — which included, for me, finding on-street parking! We both also were penny-pinchers — an embarrassing admission after the comedy club's feeble entertainment, our tickets bought half-price on Goldstar.

Now David and I were headed toward my truck. I asked him, a high school teacher, what he was going to do over the weekend. Grade papers, he answered, shoot rubber bands at the window, yawn, dap away tears of boredom. When he asked me the same question, I answered, “See if I can get up to two hundred sit-ups in less than five minutes.” I had been promising myself stomach dimples before it was too late — at sixty-two, many grains of sand had run through the hourglass. The alarm clock was ringing: Do it now! Get those dimples — and enlarge those apples in your biceps too!

We reached the truck; no ticket on the windshield. We headed off toward the Bay Bridge, both of us talking about how our wives love jewelry. “Carolyn has what she calls a bracelet trough,” I said. “Does yours?”

David appeared confused. “What?” he asked. “Man, I forgot to pee.”

“You know,” I began, “My wife likes her bling. Me, I prefer clothes.” I began to expand on this point, describing the recent purchase of a Paul Smith three-piece wool suit, nearly one of a kind, finely tailored, with a paisley lining, and a vest as snug as a scuba suit, which gives me a youthful, V-shaped appearance. With a shirt from Faconnable, and the appropriate cuff links, I was a seductive item for older women.

I halted my haberdasher's report at the sight of flashing lights, orange cones set in the street, and flares like bright Popsicles. I understood in a heartbeat.

“What's this?” asked David. “An accident?”

“Jesus,” I whispered — and meant it. I pleaded for our dear Lord to put down his management of the universe and come to my rescue.

Three
CHP
cruisers were idling on the shoulder. One officer with a wand-like flashlight was directing cars into a single line and making a centipede of all of us, car after car after truck. I kept a respectful distance from the Volkswagen ahead of me. My wallet was already on my lap, one finger scratching my driver's license from its assigned slot.
Jesus
, I called again,
I'll be good from this hour on
. I rolled down the window, wondering if the cab smelled of booze.

Then David grasped the moment. “Oh shit,” he said. The lights of the cruisers illuminated his face. He was in the limelight of a sobriety checkpoint.

A
CHP
cop motioned me forward. I allowed the truck to roll quietly into a chalked boxlike area, where I stopped smoothly, hoping to give the law a demonstration of my driving skills. I put the truck in neutral, hand brake on, engine still running.

The cop was at my window, his flashlight briefly frisking the interior of the truck. “How's the evening?” he asked.

“Good,” I answered, a clear, one-syllable lie — more words might indicate a slur in my speech.

The cop eyed both of us, then settled his attention on me, the driver. “You have any drinks tonight?”

“No,” I answered. That half-bottle of wine (11.5 percent alcohol content) and two weak-ass Stellas had flowed in a golden stream at least an hour ago. On most occasions I'm a law-abiding citizen, but not when a huge cop looms outside my car window. “When in trouble,” a friend once advised, “always lie.” Lucky for me I had mustered up that little adage. Lie, I instructed my inner self, and lie I did.

The cop looked me directly. “You sure?”

“I'm sure,” I reported, as straight-faced as a president on Mount Rushmore, and presented my driver's license. When he told me to put it away, I slipped it into my shirt pocket, just in case I was required to show it again.

The cop holstered his flashlight. He told me to follow his finger and look left, then right. This I performed dutifully, if not nervously, recalling an episode of
Cops
in which a middle-aged man, not unlike me, had walked not so successfully along a tightrope of a chalk line. My tongue was a dead mouse, thick and furry.
Get it right
, I told myself,
Get it right!
I let my eyes shift left then right as I followed that finger, until my
head
was wagging left and right.

“No, just your eyes,” he ordered. “Follow my finger.”

“Oh,” I said, though not too forcefully, because I didn't want the fumes of my breath to reach his face.
Do what you're told
, I thought,
a simple command
.

Again I followed his finger with my eyes, until again my head began tottering left, right, left.

The cop said, “No! Your eyes, not your head!”

Once more I instructed my head to remain still and let the eyes do the work. I started off nicely, eyes swinging in their sockets until,
ay, Dios mio
, my head began wagging.
This is it
, I moaned silently, preparing to step out of the truck and walk the tightrope. I was briefly glad that I had taken a longish pee at the club, where a plume of steam had risen from the cold urinal. I didn't have enough presence of mind to fully imagine myself in the city jail, but I was busted.

I was about to put the truck in gear, to creep over to the spot where two other cars previously had been docked, letting my buddy wet his pants from fear, when the cop shouted, “Now get outta here.”

I blinked in his direction, but he had stepped back and was already eyeing the car behind me.
Did I hear right?
I nearly sighed, visibly, then turned my attention straight ahead, debating for a second whether to swivel my head to the left and thank him. But I decided that my time with the cop was over. I shifted into first and slowly eased the truck away, my eyes on the rearview mirror, watching the past grow dimmer. The truck rocked from the shoulder to the pavement.

“Shit,” David said. “My teeth were chattering.”

We drove over the bridge, the rumble strips beating against the tires as the truck maneuvered through an S-curve. I drove within the speed limit, both hands on the wheel, thinking that every third driver on the bridge probably was buzzed.
Randomness
, I figured, then no — wait a minute — the dear Lord
had
put down his other duties and helped me out. Praise Him!

I recounted every detail of our near miss to David, particularly mentioning the cop's tired eyes. He couldn't have believed that I hadn't had a drink or two — not for an official second. But he had been tired and seen many weaselly men like me. Maybe my peepholes were full of sorrow, or perhaps he had recalled an uncle with a similar build and a head that went from side to side. Why bust a family member unless, of course, you hankered to see the sucker behind bars?

“You were lucky,” David remarked.

“
I
was lucky,” I snarled. “How were you going to get home?”

“Taxi,” he answered, smirking.

We drove in silence until I commented, “You know, I didn't like his tone — ‘Get outta here.' ” I too smirked and became snarky. I took a hand from the steering wheel and said, indicating a miniscule gap with index finger and thumb, “It was
that
close to police brutality.”

“Yeah,” David laughed. “You're right. But I think he said, ‘Get the
hell
outta here.' ”

And with that, I did as I was told, speeding along (within the limits of the law), using my blinkers every time I changed lanes. God, it seemed, had put his paperwork aside to peer down from heaven and rescue two older goofballs in trouble.

I made it home and, taking my shoes off at the front door, made as little noise as possible as I entered. I drank water, undressed, and drank more water. I discovered my wife asleep in a guiltless dream with her eyes moving, ever so correctly, from left to right.