by Gary Soto
She left me to my own devices, one of which was to become a school cadet. On Fridays I wore my uniform that was clearly meant for an adult. My pants legs billowed in the slightest wind; the shirt pockets came down below my ribs almost to my belly button. Whereas Mary had become stylish and popular, a darling among the Chicana cliques, I drifted in the opposite direction to become a hall guard who paced up and down the corridor during lunch time. For a year’s service, I earned a green ribbon that I pinned proudly to my shirt pocket that sagged like loose skin. I also earned sergeant stripes that year.
The next year, as an eighth grader, my love took a different turn. It was Judy Paredes, daughter of a wealthy baker in town, whose brother Ernie was in my platoon. As a squad leader I marched my line of men about the school yard: behind the backstop between basketball hoops through the sand of the track pit to behind a row of bushes, where I stopped the squad and ordered Ernie front and center. He walked stiffly up to me, his eyes unblinking but moist from the cold. I looked over his shoulder to the squad and barked an about face command: aaabbaht fah! I turned to Ernie, who had begun to blink and wrinkle his nose, and asked him if Judy liked me. I had gotten wind of this possibility from a girlfriend of a girlfriend of Judy’s.
Ernie, whose face was marked with acne, stared straight at me until I couldn’t stand it. I had to look away and my attention fell upon an old man working his way up the alley that ran the length of the school. He was pushing a shopping cart filled with cardboard and bottles. I looked into Ernie’s face, bravely: “Does she like me?”
He had known what was coming, so his response was quick: “Yeah, I think so. I saw her hugging her pillow just the other night.” He stopped, looked down at his shoes, and then back up to me. “She called your name.” Then he rushed intimate detail that I hadn’t even asked for. “You should see her on the speedboat. You should see her stomach. It’s flat, real flat—like an anvil!”
My hair lit up. My underarms went moist and I could feel a thread of sweat lengthening. I looked away and again turned to the old man in the alley turning over in his hands a shiny object. So she’s hugging her pillow, I thought. A clear sign. Surf’s up. Groovy. Outta sight. Papa’s got a brand new bag!
“Aabaaht fah!” I barked. Ernie returned to the squad, which I marched from the bushes to the track pit between the basketball hoops behind the backstop and back to the central campus where we were assembled into a platoon and the period ended with three rings of a bell.
That night I, too, hugged my pillow that I had dimpled with punches, soft punches, that made a face of sorts. I whispered to it; I spoke hushed secrets—that once I wanted to be a priest; that I stole from my mother’s purse, dimes only. My brother, who was in the bunk above me, yelled at me to stop muttering. I slept with a big grin on my face.
The next day was a Friday, I remember, because I wore the cadet uniform my mother had bought for me at Walter Smith’s after much snivelling and whining on my part. I wandered through central campus before first period looking for Judy. It was cold that morning but I hadn’t worn a jacket because I wanted to display my two rows of ribbons: hall guard, leadership, parade, armory, and conduct. I also wanted to show off my staff sergeant rank, with my color guard cords looping my shoulder and dangling handsomely almost to my elbow.
I searched for her among the colonnades where she often whispered with a girlfriend. No luck. I stuck my head into the foyer where the girls hung out to gossip and trade sandwiches and to tease and poke at one another’s stiff hairdos. Again no luck. From there I went to see if she was already standing at her first period door. She was there, in a furry white jacket that had been in style the previous year but was quite acceptable a year later. I wet my lips as I approached her slowly, but the words—the thick note pad of love I had composed the night before—failed to flutter open in some great wind at the back of my brain. I walked past her to the end of the hall to rethink my crippled plan. I looked over the balcony. There was Scott, my best friend, in his black stretch jeans and maroon socks that beamed brightly in the gray morning. He saw me and called to me to come down and trade sandwiches. I pretended not to hear his shouting and bent down to tie my shoes, after which I waddled a few steps on my haunches because I didn’t want to explain to Scott what I was up to. While waddling, however, Judy turned to look at me as she was about to go into her class. Her face was indifferent to me, even in the awkward position I had dropped into. Soto the penguin. She didn’t laugh, smirk, or raise an eyebrow in interest but only opened the door of the classroom and entered, leaving me, the penguin, at a standstill. I got up, embarrassed and shaken at finding myself so foolish, and ran down the stairwell to search out Scott.
At lunch there was a dance in the auditorium. An arena of students looked dully on, hands in pockets and cradling stacks of books, as three or four couples dazzled everyone by turning tenderly in a slow dance with their eyes closed. For slow music there was the Righteous Brothers, The Drifters, Mary Wells. For fast dancing there was the Supremes, The Spencer Davis Group, James Brown, Martha and the Vandellas, and the Kingsmen with their Louie, Louie. Then there was surfer music: The Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, the GTOs, but these groups were seldom played because they weren’t revved up with brow-sweating soul. The Beatles and Herman’s Hermits were also considered surfer music.
I went to the dance and threaded my way through the crowd in search of Judy. When I spotted her with a girlfriend, both of them hugging their books, I turned around and walked back to the door to collect my thoughts. What was I going to ask her? Should I be blunt and ask her for a dance? Then, suddenly as a baseball through a window, I realized that I couldn’t dance. I had never danced, though I had studied the spastic quiverings of those couples on American Bandstand. But could I do the same? Fear caught like a chicken bone in my throat as I walked back to where she was standing. But she was gone. Another girl, a cafeteria-helper type, stood in her place. There was nothing for me to do but to watch those on the dance floor wheel to James Brown’s It’s a Man’s World, since I didn’t have the energy or right words to search out Judy. I stood there, thinking that I at least looked dazzling in my uniform, and let her go for that day.
And I let her go the next day, and the next day, because I found out it was Gary Perez the baseball stud, not Gary Soto the cadet, who made her hug her pillow and say crazy things. An innocent mistake, no doubt, but still I had to beat up her brother Ernie for pulling the moveable strings of my heart and making me look like a fool to myself. Punchpunchpunch during cadet period, and I was demoted to a private again because the teacher caught me stuffing leaves inside his shirt behind the bushes.
It’s just something you have to do.
Saturday with Jackie
I remember one Saturday being chased from the house by my mother. She had asked me to empty my pants pockets of Kleenex and I wagged my head while reading the morning comics, telling her that I would. But I didn’t. An hour later when she tugged her first load from the washer, she found it flecked with bits of Kleenex. She screamed from the garage and I hurried outside, remembering too late about cleaning out my pockets. When I looked back halfway down the street, she was standing on the porch with a pair of my jeans in her hands. I jogged looking back because my brother Rick had come to stand with her and I thought that maybe she was going to send him after me.
I sat at a curb at the end of the block peeling an orange when Jackie, a school friend, turned the corner with a rattling shopping cart. I called him, and he maneuvered toward my direction, squinting at me as if I were a fire. I got up and approached him with my hands in my back pockets and my jacket zipped to my throat and almost hurting.
“What’s up?” I asked, as if I didn’t know. On our street it was a practice to collect Coke bottles that could be traded in at liquor stores at a nickel apiece.
“Making money,” he answered, simply.
We stood in the street talking nonsense for a few minutes before I asked if he wanted to walk downtown. He l
ooked at his cart, which gleamed like stolen goods, and pursed his lips, looking worried.
“I shouldn’t but let’s go anyhow,” he said. But first he rolled his shopping cart home while I waited at the curb. When he returned he was smiling because he had sold the Coke bottles—twelve of them—to his mother for four cents apiece, and jingled his pockets like a big spender. We started up Angus Street, looking around without talking. If we did talk, it was not in sentences but single words or phrases.
“Look,” I said on Washington Street, at a cat curled like a stone in a pile of grass clippings. Jackie threw a chip of bark and the cat turned on its side, stretched, and yawned like death.
“What the …!” Jackie said on Orchard Street, to a parked car with one of its doors missing. We looked in to find stacks of newspapers bundled and piled to the ceiling.
We walked without saying too much because talking ruined the joy of noiseless minds. Jackie understood this, I understood this, so we walked looking around like television cameras, catching families sitting down to breakfast, a dog biting fleas from his paws, a grandpa raking leaves, pomegranate trees almost ready to steal from. We looked around while that endless film wound behind our eyes.
At Rontell’s Volvo on Divisadero we stopped to run our fingers slowly across the shiny paint jobs and gawk at the instrument panels of Jaguars. Since it was early, we tried opening doors but they were all locked.
“This one’s for me,” Jackie said, pointing out a Jaguar with gas caps on both back fenders.
We left there impressed, our minds racing with cars, and made our way up Mariposa Street where we stopped at “the nun’s place.” I told Jackie that when I went to St. John’s Catholic School I often passed the convent and, for my own reasons, imagined the nuns, after a day of teaching and threatening kids with erasers in firing position, would come home, pray, and head to the backyard to play soccer with the altar boys. I would stand at the fence, which was eight feet tall, and hear sounds like balls being kicked, followed by restrained laughter.
From there we checked the telephone booths and Coke machine for change at St. John’s Cathedral, climbed into a tree and threw rocks at the Southern Pacific, and dodged cars on “L” Street on our way to the Fresno Mall. Not yet ten o’clock, the mall was quiet with only a few merchants hurrying, in a sort of panic, to their businesses; their faces looked waxen and their suits were bright as the toys at Woolworths. There were a few hobos, some kids like us, a man refilling a newspaper rack, a lone mother whose coat was like a soiled rug on her shoulders.
We ambled on, occasionally stopping to gaze in store windows, especially at clothing stores where we grew dreamy as incense looking at shirts, pants, belts, loafers—those wonderful things that were as far from us as Europe.
We bought doughnuts at Hart’s Restaurant and ate them in silence at an outdoor fountain, with the film behind our eyes picking up speed when the stores began to open and mothers and daughters in colorful dresses hurried, almost in step, with big purses looped on their forearms. We ate the doughnuts, then bought popcorn at Penney’s, and returned once again to the fountain where there were now more mothers and daughters, with an occasional son in clean clothes who looked stupid, and probably felt stupid, while his mother warned him with a stern finger not to get lost or fool around.
We looked at each other, wagged our heads in disgust, and called him in low voices, “sissy boy.” Getting up, we walked up the mall toward the north end that was under construction with new stores coming up—clothing, import, jewelry, record, and china. We stopped in front of a boarded-up building, which was ready to be torn down to make way for offices, as the sign posted in the front said. There were few people shopping in the area, so we pried and pushed at the door until we could squeeze inside. Once inside, we looked around like astronauts on the moon. A shaft of sunlight, with its orbiting dust, shone from the roof and ended in a seizure of light far on the other side, where we made out desks, chairs, counters, an open elevator, and a broken mirror on the wall, its crack running like the border between Mexico and the United States. We made out mannequins, a hatrack, a pile of curtains, some empty boxes, and the octopus of a tangled chandelier resting on the ground. We took a few steps, with the film behind our eyes turning slowly, as we wanted to touch the mannequins. We walked carefully because of the dark. Broken glass crunched under our shoes; dust, thick as the first minute of snow, made us sneeze. We sensed spiders but we didn’t find any swinging on their trapeze. We sensed mice but the only noises were from those things we knocked over. We walked like blind men, hands out and feeling the air, until we reached the mannequins and started back, each of us with one of them under his arm like a surfboard. Jackie fell once, so that a finger chipped off, but mine was intact and even smiling when I squeezed it from the door into sunlight.
“It’s a guy,” I said to Jackie. “He’s got a mustache—and check out the muscles.” The mannequin was tall as Superman and his face looked like a composite drawing of Dick Tracy and Fabian.
Jackie brought out his mannequin whose wrist was limp and whose eyes were painted with feathery lashes. A merchant, who was standing at his window, winced in our direction. We pretended nonchalance and walked slowly around the building before running up the mall into an alley, where we hid behind boxes breathing hard and smiling from our adventure. When no one came to get us, we shouldered our mannequins and walked away, thinking that we could sell them. When no one came to mind, we decided to make them fight.
“You’re an idiot,” I screamed at his mannequin.
“You’re a double idiot,” Jackie said. He held his mannequin like a club and smacked mine right in the face, which cracked and chipped. I swung mine, and his mannequin’s head fell off.
“You’re a triple idiot,” he threw at me, swinging his mannequin so that it thudded mine in the chest, almost knocking me down. I swung, then he swung, and I swung again and again, and he swung again and again, until only the arms were left, which we used as swords in our fight all the way back home.
The Small Faces
I was sixteen and unable to find a summer job, so instead of moping around the house I volunteered to become a recreational assistant for the City Parks Department. I had read about the need for volunteers in the Fresno Bee. I called a phone number, left my name with a woman, and waited several days before my call was returned by the same woman who lauded my goodheartedness before she came down to business.
“Young man, there are a number of schools and parks. Take your time and just tell me which one sounds nice to you.” She read down the list and I almost shouted when she said “Emerson Elementary.”
“Emerson. I want to go there!”
“That one is still open,” she said, and I could hear a pencil scratching an imagined index card. The woman gave me the name of Calvin Jones, the recreation leader, and said that I could start Monday at six if I liked. She again thanked me for my goodheartedness, asked me to spell my last name, and hung up.
That Monday, after dinner, I walked the four miles to Emerson, across Belmont, Tulare, and Ventura Avenues, where the houses, poor and dilapidated, slowly gave way to industry and shops—bakery, auto parts stores, a tire company, machine shop, and the import car dealer, Haron the Baron. There was a house for every vacant lot, a working car for every car that was rusting on flat tires. So this is what it’s like, I thought. I walked in wonder and in quiet happiness because this was the area where I had spent my first six years. My entire family, including aunts, uncles, father, brother, and even little sister, had gone to Emerson Elementary for at least one year. I walked through the vacant lots that gleamed with glass, burst mattresses, gutted refrigerators, a TV like a large one-eyed robot without legs—all the wonderful treasures that kids like.
As I slowly approached Emerson I made out the screaming of kids at play. When I got closer I could see a line of them, wet and with their hands pressed together as if in prayer. They were shivering but anxious as they waited their turns at the �
�Slip & Slide,” that long runway of plastic, to dive onto, chest first, its surface of beaded water. To my surprise the coach was a black man—surprise because, aside from garbage men, I had never seen a black person employed by the city. He was leaning against the chain link fence, gazing almost in wonder at the grass at his feet. I approached him and he looked at me slowly and without response. Smiling, I told him who I was, a summer volunteer. He wrinkled up his face: “Summer volunteer? No one said anything to me.” He played with his chin, rubbing and pinching at his fuzzy goatee, and again gazed at his feet. Realizing that his welcome was unkind, if not rude, he burst out a hearty, “Well, it’s good to have you here,” and touched my shoulder. We exchanged names and bits of information, like I was a high school student and he was a college student.
We looked up together at the kids, all of them Mexican, all shiny in the twilight. One looked at me, curious about who I was, but the others had their eyes locked on the “Slip & Slide.” I watched them for a while until I became uneasy at having nothing to do. Calvin stood watching the kids, though I sensed his thoughts were elsewhere. His brow lined with worry, then relaxed, then lined again, while his mouth, slightly puckered, moved as if he were getting ready to say something. But we leaned against the fence in silence, hands behind our backs holding onto the fence. After a while I braved a question. “What kind of programs do the kids have?” When I was their age, between five and eleven, my playground had crafts contests and baseball games, as well as swimming lessons.
Calvin pursed his lips, sighed, and jingled coins and keys in his pockets. “Well, Gary, we play a lot of dominoes.” He pointed to a green shed, which he said was the game room. “We play over there.” I followed his pointing arm to a picnic table. Next to the table stood a tree, thin as a hatrack, with only a few of its leaves moving in the breeze. But most were wilting and pale. I scanned the baseball field, the bungalows, and the school building itself. Even in the early evening the place looked dry and abandoned. I squinted hard and saw someone walking toward us, a girl about fourteen who was dressed in a T-shirt and cut off jeans. She stared at me and I stared back, unsmiling but interested because she wasn’t bad looking. She clip-clopped in rubber sandals toward the line of kids where she bent to talk to one who seemed to be her younger brother. She looked up at me—or maybe Calvin—and several of the kids turned to look in our direction.
