by Gary Soto
For months, I stared at the phone whenever it rang. Stared and let the message machine kick in. Did this book — this author — really deserve such over-the-top outrage? What nerve had I touched?
Eventually, someone came to my defense. In my files is a story published by a Sun-Times columnist on April 1, 2006. “Why shouldn’t a fictional character in someone’s book be allowed to say whatever they like?” the writer asks. “Frankly, the only one who comes out looking good here is American Girl Doll’s owner Mattel, which, in a rare moment of corporate courage, didn’t simply give in to the extortion of demands (15 scholarships, plus jobs programs, plus more — I’m surprised they didn’t ask for ponies, too) but stood by its author and its book.” [Note: The previously mentioned students also asked for donations to their school.]
I received a message from a professor at Loyola University inviting me to come and debate the issue. Wouldn’t that be loads of fun? Fly five hours across the country to be tarred and feathered and shipped back as cargo? I stared at our answering machine, the number of messages mounting like the daily murders in Chicago — teenagers shot right out of their shoes.
I kept quiet. I kept to myself. At night, we unplugged the telephone.
Marisol, the Girl of the Year, aged very quickly; she was gone after the Christmas rush. I have one doll on a shelf in the garage. A collector’s item, she never sits up from her coffin-like box. Now and then I visit her, viewing her face through the cellophane window. She sleeps and sleeps, but when I stand the box up she awakens and opens her eyes. She doesn’t accuse me at all. She’s a cute doll with a carrying case over her shoulder.
* * *
In 2005, Marisol, the sixteen-inch doll shaped from plastic, was a ten-year-old. She looked lifelike, a prepubescent girl like any other. If she had been real, as in flesh-and-blood real, she would now be eighteen, grown to five-foot-seven, a freshman at the University of Chicago, majoring in psychology, with a secret desire to write poetry. On a Saturday in October, she would be hurting from failed love. I picture her, our bereted beauty, at a used bookstore. In the poetry section resides a columbarium of dead and living poets, all unread. Once poetry books are shelved in a used bookstore — whether remaindered, resold, or given away — only would-be poets visit them. If these visitors fan the pages, they cough from the dust. I see Marisol reach for my poetry collection, A Simple Plan. It was published three years after Marisol and received no attention, not a single review. The book sold 327 copies then went out of print.
Marisol picks up A Simple Plan and thumbs through its eighty-eight pages until she comes to “Bean Plants.” She reads it, sighs, and re-shelves the book. She opens another book, then another — more sighs through her pliable mouth, not the plastic mouth of a doll that couldn’t speak for herself. If only flesh-and-blood Marisol could have told the outraged in 2005 to mind their own business. Because her family wanted to move, they just packed up and went, watching Pilsen get smaller and smaller in the side mirrors of their rental truck. The neighborhood became a memory, a place once called home. Marisol gave up dance shortly after the move. She mourned her cat Rascal, probably struck by a car. Her new best friend was Guatemalan, and another was Illinois white. When the phone rang in her new house in Des Plaines, she would run to get it.
Marisol returns to A Simple Plan. She opens it again, reads another poem, and sees enough there to take it to the front counter. The young woman takes my book home, me the lost father who brought her to life.
* * *
I have stopped writing children’s literature. At my age, it’s become too dangerous.
PLAY GOING
That was me at sixty-two, an old guy with satchel-like cheeks from the gravity of age and sadness. And this also was me, a gentleman bucking the trend of inelegance. I was off in Ferragamo brogues, worsted wool pants, a checkered pink shirt with a blue tie, and a cashmere sweater. The pants were usually closeted, upside down like a bat, while the sweater lived in a drawer with its arms folded, as if mad.
Midway through the first act of this heralded English play, I had already completed my yawns and finished scrubbing my eyes. To keep alert, I frisked my pockets. For a second, I confused a button for a breath mint. The Kleenex, ready for a good cry, would remain unused.
I studied the six other theatergoers, all with half-light on their faces as if they, too, were part of the drama onstage. The scuffed furniture was more moving than the actors — but what should I have expected from a half-priced matinee? I left at intermission, blinking under an overcast sky, and walked three blocks through the Tenderloin, where drama lives in every other doorway. When someone sang, “You’re a dog,” someone else responded in castrato, “Yeah, but what kinda dog?”
Now there was a line to remember. And here was an actual line at Glide Memorial Church, with men the color of pigeons waiting for the soup kitchen to open. I hurried by — and fast — when a brother crushed a beer can in his fist and sneered at me. Wisely, I unknotted my tie and pocketed it — why be colorful in a discolored neighborhood? For a daring second, I imagined this brother and me as the leads in a one-act play, something like The Odd Couple. I would be the debarred lawyer (insider trading), while he would be a former body builder (wrecked by steroids).
I found my car keyed — a long line across the driver’s door. Urban terrorism, I thought to myself, grateful that I had brought our older — and discontinued — Saturn. I should have stayed home to finish reading that book on Wittgenstein, a philosopher of wishful thinking and a nasty colleague in departmental meetings.
I drove away from that uninspiring afternoon with the phony playwright and reflected briefly on my own phony years. When I wrote poems without heart and plays with characters that sounded as if they were screaming through toilet rolls — they were that hollow. I remembered a few of the bad lines from my absurdist play, Space Junk.
MICHAEL (reads from textbook very slowly): George Washington cut down a cherry tree on the side of his log cabin. Later, he freed the slaves.
MISS GRIFFIN, TEACHER: Very Good. Now, Madison, you continue.
MADISON (reads slowly): Benjamin Franklin wore really neat glasses. He saved a lot of pennies in an old sock. He was married and sometimes lived in France.
I winced at the memory of these lines — what had I been thinking? It was me who was absurd, not the play.
It began to sprinkle as I neared the freeway entrance that led to the Bay Bridge. When an outright rain blurred my windshield, the wipers came on with the beat of a metronome. I wasn’t happy, figuring myself a failure who couldn’t even choose his entertainment correctly. I drove east and contemplated tossing my watch into the bay. I was done with time, and done with out-of-fashion plays, including my own.
In slow traffic, I listened to a soft rock station, hearing the word “love” uttered twelve times in the space of four minutes. I watched two gulls hang in the air, their wings flapping now and then to keep themselves afloat. Then another song on the radio recalled a line uttered by a friend from the past: “Love is eternal . . . as long as it lasts.”
With the traffic now moving, I shifted from second to third gear, and then risked fourth, the most dangerous act I would make all day. The traffic cameras, mounted every hundred feet, eyeballed me as I sped through the S curve at sixty.
At home, I read more on Wittgenstein and learned that academics were able to whine in several languages. They were a nasty, pipe-smoking lot. I began to believe that the best way to get through life was by the Golden Rule. I petted my cat, a remarkable creature in his tenth life who once climbed trees just because; now arthritic, he can’t even climb into my lap. I lifted him up and confided into his much-bitten ear, “I went to the theater today — not good, little fella.”
The rain stopped and the gutters ticked. Evening arrived early, but I left the blinds open — let those on a walk mull over a man with a cat in his lap. The cat eventually meowed to be let out, but not before I stroked him three times and patted his head twice.
I drank a fairly cold beer and reflected on how I would never be like that brother on the street, so strong he could crush his can and blow it back into shape with one long breath.
If only someone like him could have breathed life into the characters of that heralded one-act play.
* * *
I left the Phoenix Theater and a gasping 1950s existential play in which a teenager strikes out on her own for New York City then returns home, disenchanted by the Big Apple. Her splashy artwork had failed to supply enough tortured drips on triangle-shaped canvases — or something like that. My bones moaned real pain from sitting on an unpadded folding chair. My eyes seeped and my tongue, like a small whale, rose and fell inside my closed mouth. In short, I was bored. I couldn’t grasp the play’s absurdist intentions, though I had donned my thinking cap and devoured a Milky Way bar at intermission — the sugar had sped through me like a drug, forcing me awake.
In the night air, I was depleted of yawns, both real and not real. I wasn’t fond of the young actor in the play and believe that she didn’t think much of us theatergoers either — not once did she cast a glance at the dozen-or-so of us. Now there was absurdity. You memorize your lines and go twice weekly to rehearsals, all for an audience of empty chairs? I could recall such indifference myself, of course, having read my poetry to both padded and unpadded chairs. I’ve even done a reading where the host of the reading series tiptoed away before I could finish the last poem.
I trekked toward Sutter Street and my car, which was neither absurdist nor existential. In fact, my car was a vehicle with scratches, dents, and a little more than half a tank of gas, with tires that had rolled thousands of miles over bumpy roads, and insects that had paid dearly in the grille. I’m alive, I brayed inside. A pulse jumped in my wrist every living second and my heart churned blood, one cycle, then the other. I was a realist: in ten years I might be dead. In fifteen, that possibility was even more likely. And in twenty, a stone rests on my chest and I’m down below, dressed in any of my English suits. I’m a shoeless cadaver, with no place else to go.
Plays would still go on, however, with or without people in chairs.
At that misty hour, the homeless were real and with us. Some tottered solo on gimpy legs, while others maneuvered in pairs. Some were drunk or, if not drunk, impaired by real infirmities. In a doorway, a trio argued the merits of a high school diploma over a GED. When they spoke, cigarette smoke poured from their mouths — or was it cold breath?
I was approached by a woman with a disfiguring hump on her back — no, the hump was a cat on her shoulder. I was not in the least surprised when her wicked smile displayed only two or three teeth, none of them front teeth. Her hair was like a disheveled wig and her shoes were splayed at the tips. She stunk at the distance of five feet. The poor woman, I suspected, had been injured by drugs and drink. For a second she reminded me of Janis Joplin, that raw singing talent of the 1960s. Where would Janis be now other than in the shape of a woman turning her face from me? The cat on her shoulder was fast asleep.
At another corner, with one arm deep in the sour contents of a garbage can, was a Jerry Garcia look-alike, including a beard tinged with gray. “Dude,” I could have whispered. “What happened?” His pants were the color of ash, and his jacket was inside out. For warmth, he wore a second pair of pants inside the first; still, the outer pair hung off his butt the way teenagers’ jeans do. I couldn’t help but recall the hippie bumper sticker of a cartoonish shoe and the nearly faded words “Keep on Truckin’.”
This was street theater, for which you paid next to nothing, coins only, maybe a dollar bill if you felt charitable, a doggie bag from your dinner at Lori’s Diner — that’s all, that’s all. There was Jerry, and Janis, and now Jimi Hendrix, intensely studying his grimy fingers at Mason and Bush Streets — all the lost souls of the sixties. This was my generation of burnouts pleading for their daily bread. If, in the city wind, a single sheet of newspaper flew down the street like a ghost, it would be filled with obituaries. Our names could be among them.
SHAKESPEARE & ME
The pen pusher with the doily-like collar, the forehead scrubbed bald from creative worry, the pointed nose sniffing for language both highbrow and low . . . he must have had help from others. The master couldn’t have written all those plays and sonnets, one brilliant work after another, with such an inexhaustible display of genius and commercial sense.
I dispute this rumor. I picture — through my own sepia lens — Shakespeare straining to write in a tavern by candlelight, backstage at the Globe Theater, or in rooms smelly with wet hay. I see him in his abode, indifferent to his urine (and his lover’s urine) in the corner pail. His quill busily scratches out lines on parchment. The ink is dark and his fingers are stained from his literary pursuits. I see the master sidestepping beggars and yokels, not in the least pained by the sight of a fluttering hen on a chopping block. He has somewhere to go and something to do. He must make his living solely by his wits. And let’s forgive him his indifference to family: in a thatched cottage in Stratford-upon-Avon, his long-suffering wife pokes at a fire. In the yard, his forgotten children play.
Some scholars attribute much of Shakespeare’s output to Francis Bacon, others suggest that Christopher Marlowe also came to the rescue. A fellow at Oxford argues that Sir Walter Raleigh penned his later works and that maybe, just maybe, the Countess of Pembroke was involved. I’ve even heard it argued that Queen Elizabeth was the playwright of the histories. Not true, of course. But, like Shakespeare, the queen was a wit — both on and off her throne. I recall her quip when a lady-in-waiting scolded, “Queen, your hands are so filthy!” Elizabeth might have turned her hands over for a quick inspection, or she might have kept them on her lap. Those details have been lost, but her words were recorded: “You think my hands are filthy. You should see my feet.”
All the world’s a stage, but some scholars should get off it and go home. Shakespeare was a genius who wrote his plays and verse. He also produced, bankrolled and, in a pinch, played minor characters. He lived, loved, and died, and his indisputable masterpieces survive for all.
I’m no Shakespeare. In fact, considering my difficulty in placing material in magazines, I’m not certain that I’m a writer at all. Nevertheless, I deliver a story here about an incident in which my own authorship was once called into question. It was after a night of drinking, a night when I resembled a Shakespearean fool among other fools. I woke to our landline telephone ringing. I stared at the scolding instrument, then picked up before the answering machine could click on. A woman on the other end whispered, “Gary?”
Depends, I thought in my heart.
Without other introduction, the caller said, “It’s me, Alma. Remember me?”
I replied without seriousness, “Alma, is that you?” Then I sat up in bed. I couldn’t locate Alma in the Rolodex of my injured brain. I should have stopped after that first six-pack of domestic grog.
“You remember?”
I couldn’t say I did, though I remembered I was home because my cat was looking at me. I answered, “Yeah, of course.” My old cat had mustered up enough leg strength to jump onto the bed.
“We were in the same class.”
Same class? The cat nudged my ankle, his engines of pleasure starting up. I gave him a scratch and got out of bed. I managed to shove my feet into my slippers and pad down the hallway in direction of the kitchen.
“You wrote book?” she asked. “You really wrote book?”
Wrote book? Must have been first grade, I reasoned, that’s why she’d left out the article from her inquiring sentence.
I told her that I had written several books and said that I couldn’t stay long on the phone. Unlike Shakespeare, I did not sleep with a pail in the corner and — though I didn’t say this — I had to relieve myself urgently in the toilet down the hallway. But first, I had to feed the cat.
“Why are you calling?” I asked, immediately wincing at this crude phrasing. What was wrong with me? O
h, yeah, I was hungover.
“My husband, he died,” she stated flatly.
Husband died?
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear this . . . Alma.” I moved the phone from one ear to the other, more attentive now, and worried. I did my best to conjure up her image — was it the girl with ponytails in business math, the class for those who couldn’t handle algebra? I had been one of the top students there because I used my fingers to count.
But Alma ignored my sympathy. She said that she remembered me from elementary school — and from junior high and high school — and didn’t believe that I could have written book. She remembered that I was sort of no good in school. She also remembered that I had been bullied by Bobby Lopez — did I remember him body-slamming me against the chain-link fence? Briefly, I revisited that fence, along with the playground where the bullying took place, then recalled that Bobby had shanked his brother in the garage while playing cowboys and Indians.
I couldn’t argue with her memories. I also couldn’t argue with her notion about my academic performance, seeing that I had flunked third grade. (I was back on track within a day, however, after the principal appeared in the doorway yelling that our desks were needed and we were now in fourth grade.) I had been a prominent member of the dumb row in sixth grade and eventually graduated from high school with a 1.6 GPA, starting my community college education in the lowest of English classes.
