Authors: Gary Soto
The youth group rented the Fresno Convention Center. We were greeted by some very happy college students in red jackets who went around shaking everyone's hands. They shook mine, and I got sort of sick because their hands were moist. What I remembered most of my Catholic school education was that Sister Marie had said, “Evil dwells in moist places.”
I let the thought go. After the five-mile walk, we were glad for the cool air. We found seats. I was amazed at how many teenagers filled the auditorium. It was the most ironed shirts and dresses I had ever seen.
When the lights dimmed, everyone found a seat and became quiet. A well-dressed man, the minister, appeared in the spotlight. His head was bowed, and when I looked around I noticed that everyone's head was bowed. He said a prayer, each phrase sounding like the end of something very sad and final. Then a youngish man appeared with his guitar and sang Christian songs. The first guy returned and spoke on the subject of invisible faith. He seemed pretty serious, and I thought that at any moment he was going to cry and embarrass the crowd.
Toward the end of the evening, the happy college students who greeted us at the door came out on the stage. They were still happy. They held up computer cards and fanned them like decks of playing cards. The teenagers in the bleachers nearly stampeded for them, and would have except we had to say more prayers about good, clean fun. Then the cards were distributed.
I was anxious. While the minister said prayers, Scott and I walked up and down the aisles looking at the girls. Some were attractive, and some were OK. Only a few were really ugly. We also noticed that there were more girls than boys, and that most of the boys wore crooked glasses on the ends of their noses. We snapped our fingers and said, “What luck!”
We licked our pencils and answered questions like: What is your nationality? What is your goal in life? How often do you go to church? How much do you weigh? Who is your favorite actor/ actress? What is your favorite food?
The food question was easy for Scott, but I spent a lot of time worrying about how to spell spaghetti since the red pencils didn't have erasers. Instead of risking poor spelling, I wrote in capitals, MEATBALLS.
We sang more songs, then hurried away without shaking anyone's hand. On the way home, we talked up a storm because we didn't have to worry about spoiling our breath. We didn't have to worry about perspiring either, or about accounting for our time because we had had good, clean fun.
The next day Scott and I sat near the fountain and argued over the nationality question. Scott had written, “White.” I argued, “That ain't a nationality.” He said nearly a hundred times that it was and that I was jealous because there were no more than nine Mexican girls at the Christian youth group convention and three were too large to fit in a car. We got in a fight and stayed away from each other for two days.
But by the weekend we were friends once more. We decided not to return to find out who we were matched with. Instead, we drove to the levee, where we watched a horn of moon hang over the canal water. We were more lonely than ever. We talked and talked because it didn't matter if our breath stunk. I showed Scott where my first tattoo would goâa panther on my bicep, and he showed me the place on his chest where a naked lady would stand. We drove back to town and spent the rest of the evening revving the car up to sixty on quiet streets and braking as hard as we could without our faces going through the windshield. The evening, bad as it was, was not worth dying for.
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I
T HURT
to be pinned in twelve seconds in a non-league wrestling match, especially at the end of the 1960s when, except for a few dads and moms and the three regulars with faces like punched-in paper bags, the bleachers were empty of spectators. It hurt to stand under the shower looking at fingerprints still pressed in my arm where my opponent, whose name was Bloodworth, gripped, yanked, and with a grin on his face threw me on my back. The guy next to me had fingerprints around his wrists and arm. Another guy was red around his chest. His eyes were also red. We lost by plenty that night, but coach wasn't too mad. He beat his clipboard against his khaki thigh and joked, “You were a bunch of fishes,” by which he meant that we were an easy catch. He pretended to be upset, but we knew that it was the beginning of the season and there was still hope.
I showered and dressed. My best friend Scott was waiting in his Ford Galaxy. He was throwing corn nuts into his mouth, churning beautifully on the taste of salt and roasted nuts. I told him that corn nuts were not good for him, and he asked how that could be, because they tasted good. That night we drove around for a while before he dropped me off at my house and asked me for a quarter. Gas don't come free, he said. It costs money when you lose before you get started.
I wrestled that year and needed to be driven around because I could manage only three feeble wins against nine losses. Driving around Fresno was therapy. We took the corners sharply and felt the give of Pep-Boy shocks, which for me was the most exciting discovery since our biology teacher made a pretty girl kiss a petri dish and three days later, fungus climbed over the sides. We cornered so that the tires squealed and the inertia pulled our saliva from one side of our mouths to the other. I liked that feeling, liked how Scott would be talking about an episode of “Bonanza” or “Gunsmoke” and suddenly brake hard so that we had to brace ourselves against the dash. Sometimes it hurt, and sometimes it felt just wonderful to lift from the seat and almost smash into the glass.
I had taken driver's ed from my coach, and on the second day of class he said, “Don't be scared but you're gonna see some punks getting killed.” The film was called something like “Red Asphalt” or “Blood on the Pavement,” but I remember a narrator with a crew cut and a neck as thick as a canned ham. When he spoke while holding up a tennis shoe, the muscles in his neck jumped around. He said, “The boy who wore this sneaker is dead.” He held it up, and the camera moved in close on the high-top, then flashed to a freeway accident as dramatic music started along with the title credits.
It could have been my sneaker because, like the dead kid, I liked high-tops. It could have been Scott's or any other boy's. The film was meant to scare us, but most of the boys enjoyed it. The girls looked away when the film showed six seconds of a car wreck from different angles. The sound of metal and glass breaking made us listen up. It stopped us from chewing our gum or slipping a corn nut into the inside of our cheeks. Then all was quiet. A bird pumped his tail and chirped on a chain link fence. The narrator came back on. He was standing on the shoulder of a freeway, his tie whipping in the wind of traffic. He warned us that during a headon collision, your clothes rip off: shirts, skirts, shoes, the whole worksânaked as you were born, only you were dead.
I recalled Bloodworth pinning me in twelve seconds and suddenly realized life was getting shorter: a car wreck could kill you in six seconds. It was tough luckâonly half the time for the kids in the film. I watched the film, then watched coach laugh along with the boys and turn on the overhead lights, jumble the dimes and quarters in his deep pockets, and slap his clipboard against his thigh. His neck was thick like the narrator's. His hair was a little longer and shiny as the black industrial shoes on his feet. Right in drivers ed, among the idiot boys smelling of sunflower seeds and corn nuts, I realized that wrestlers went on to do more than slam people into mats.
I was a junior that year. During my senior year I was so lonely that I needed to drive around Fresno. Scott was at the wheel, more lonely than me, more desperate because a girl said no, then yes, then finally no again to a Halloween date. It was no for both of us. We had no choice but to drive around corners, the centrifugal force pulling us one way, then another. We had no choice but to throw bottles from the car and sneer at old drivers in long cars.
We often parked at the levee and looked at the water. I said things like, “Scott, I think I've lived before,” or, “Scotty, do you ever feel that someone is gripping your shoulder and when you turn around, no one is there? It's spooky.” I could still feel Bloodworth's grip on my arm, and would feel it for years.
I didn't like high school. Coach knew only so many words. The dean's hand trembled when he touched door knobs. Our teacher kept repeating that a noun was a person, place or thing. She stood at the blackboard, lipstick overrunning her mouth, and said for the thousandth time: Elvis is a noun. Fresno is a noun. Elvis's guitar is also a noun.
The water in the canal was quick as a wind-blown cloud. The 1960s were coming to an end, and the first of the great rock stars were beginning to die. We were dying to leave home, by car, thumb or on water racing west to where the sun went down.
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S
COTT AND
I traveled by Greyhound up highway 99 with its splattered dogs and wind-hurt oleanders, through valley towns stinking of gasoline and rage, and up the Tehachapi, which from far away was purple with shadow but up close was yellow from the death of tiny flowers. We traveled six hours to Los Angeles, walked four miles, and leaned from 7:30 to 9:30 on someone's Dodge Dart in Hollywood. Rod Stewart and The Faces was playing, and although we didn't have the six dollars to get into the Palladium, we liked the thought of being close to a band that was so loud it was great.
Because we were seventeen, something had to happen. There were mobs of young people in leather vests, bell-bottoms, beads, Jesus thongs, tie-dyed T-shirts, and crowns of flowers. Almost all of them had long hair that smelled of cigarettes and burgers. We were surrounded by pachouli oil, sweat, Red Mountain wine, incense, and a lot of beautiful screwing, we supposed. We leaned against the fender of the Dodge, which was like my stepfather's car, only the trunk was pleated from being hit. I thought of giving a peace sign to some hippy-looking guys, but I felt too foolish, too out of it because my pant legs were too straight and my wrestler's haircut showed blue knots on my head. We risked sitting on the fender, though, and tapped a beat on our thighs. We rocked our heads when we heard a car radio. We smiled at three girls, but they looked straight ahead as they walked by holding sticks of incense.
We had a lot of fun just looking. I was so happy that I bought a bootleg LP of The Faces with only four songs and a poorly printed cover with the word “Live.” Scott was happy, too. He bought a burger with a Coke that was mostly ice. The two of us sucked on toothpicks as we walked around feeling less embarrassed about giving the peace sign. When we asked for directions to Maywood, where my Uncle Shorty the foundry worker lived, a guy with a roach-clip earring said it was farther than we could walk. He pointed to the corner and said if we stood there a car would pick us up and drive us part of the way.
It was true. We were picked up and after a crazy freeway drive we were let off at the Slauson exit. Only after the car sped away, its one working taillight blinking as the car turned recklessly back onto the freeway, did we think that we were finally learning how to live without worry.
The street was a four-lane river of black asphalt hardened by junky cars and diesels. Steam rose from a manhole cover. Glass sounded under our shoes. The one gas station was either closed or abandoned. We knew this place, but from where? We brought out our map, and Scott's dirty finger, then my dirty finger, crawled around the streets until we found Slauson, then Atlantic Blvd., which my uncle, who at that moment was getting off the night shift, told us to look for. We started walking west, up Slauson, and in less than a mile the place was so dark that a few stars came alive above the occasional streetlight.
We walked three miles, covering block after ugly block stinking of machinery and oil. Our loneliness was as deep as oil. Scott said that by next year he would be in the army. I said I'd be there with him, and the only thing that could kill us in Vietnam was a bayonet. We would live a long time. We could hide behind trees. Shrapnel had only one way to go and that was up, and the way we were going to fight was to hug the ground and shoot only when others told us to shoot.
We talked about not dying. Few cars traveled up the street, and when they did, we ducked behind one thing or another. Our breathing quickened and we felt excited at the fact that we could hide in such a large city. That's how it would be in the war, we told ourselves, and wondered if our eyes reflected light, like a cat's. We talked about our eyes and family until we came to a canal that nearly stopped our breathing. It was wide but dry, nothing like the canal back home. While ours was made of sand, reeds, and feeble fish stunted by the chemicals from agricultural runoff, this canal was made of mangled bicycles, tires, chairs, pissy little puddles, and winos washed downstream to settle on rafts of cardboard.
But it was no canal. Under an orange streetlight, our map said it was the Los Angeles River. We leaned over the side and spit into that fishless, waterless river. We were learning. Scott said that he knew for sure that we would live a long time. I said that I couldn't believe I was seventeen. We spit some more and looked at the skyline of power lines and industry. Turning away, we walked over the viaduct, our shoes ringing on the cement, and this time we didn't duck when a car passed, its sweep of headlights glittering the richness of shattered glass.
We made a bed of two blankets on my uncle's floor that night. Some white light from a twenty-four-hour Safeway came into the front window. I thought of Braly Street and family, some of whom were now dead, and how when Uncle returned from the Korean War, he slept on a cot on the sunporch. We had only the floor. We had yet to go and come back from our war and find ourselves a life other than the one we were losing.