by Gary Soto
This is my paraphrase of an essay no one will read, an essay from the 1930s by an author who never visited China but could see how the British used their military hardware to good advantage. It’s an old story: the strong lord it over the weak. I can’t think of one country that actually rules by wisdom. Force works — at least until the other side bulks up or goes underground. China bulked up by eating iron, a metaphor here but also, possibly, an actuality. Why the island country of Great Britain thought that the Chinese wouldn’t use their brainpower to grow strong is dumbfounding.
Think of the Palestinians. They are jacked around by the Israelis, who possess military hardware third only to Russia and the United States. Make no mistake, the Israelis are recognized bullies. They are after land and water and will get both. An illegal settlement lit at night is no beacon of knowledge when the sun comes up.
An olive tree planted in 2014 may still stand in a hundred years, when a marauding people will not.
COMMITTEE MEETINGS
I’ve done many sad things since burying my dog when I was a boy, but none sadder than when I taught at a university and occasionally had to raise my hand in committee meetings, voting for the firing of a scholar. My hand would go up and my head swing slowly around to see how others were voting. Yes, this scholar has shined on paper, the faculty would say, but, after six years, he has failed us.
One October, while raising a hand, I noticed a length of string on my sleeve. The string held meaning beyond the firing of a scholar on a day when the leaves were hustling down the street in the Santa Ana winds. I pulled the string from my sleeve, examined it closely, then left it on the shiny table in a little loop, like a noose. Shame on me, I moaned. I imagined my dismissed colleague at a table set with spoons, no soup rumbling on the stove’s back burner. How could I bury him in good conscience?
After dogs and cats are buried, they disappear into finite molecules and become good stuff for the earth. But we can’t keep the memories buried, the memory of raising a hand to tell another that he — always a he in my memory — is not one of us. I will see my colleague blinking in the hallway over the next two decades.
Q & A
After an evening poetry reading, it’s customary for the audience to ask questions that may further enhance the moment. An intelligent audience is curious, and an intelligent audience likes to talk after forced silence. As for me, I will answer three or four questions because often there are only three or four souls fidgeting in uncomfortable folding chairs. And since I write for young people, children really, I’m often forced to feign interest — forehead pleated with a semblance of struggling thought — before I answer questions such as, “Where do you get your ideas?” I’m politic and nice, though on more than one occasion I’ve belted out, “The salted rim of a margarita glass.” Or I get questions regarding educational reform and, particularly, about the blame that may lie with youth fucked up by fucked-up parents. If I had the answer to education’s most pressing questions, I would jet around the country to see that my strategy for a better educational system was implemented.
I recall a question posed to me in Santa Cruz, California — in 1987, I believe, a year in which my hair was longish and truly black. A bruiser of a guy stood up, anger alight in his flecked eyes. “With a name like Gary, how can you stand yourself?” he scolded, with force. That year, my forehead was not yet pleated from the onslaughts of age and worry. And my skin was wrinkle-free because I didn’t give a poop about a lot of things. “Sometimes I use crutches to stand up,” I answered. “That’s how I stand myself.” The guy was a Chicano who had changed his name from Alex to Xolotl. Like, wow, the dude’s name was like a license plate.
Fast forward to 1997, when my once-smooth forehead has become corrugated with worry. In that year I considered this question: “What’s the difference between Latinos and Hispanics?” I gazed down at the book I was reading from (A Simple Plan), then looked back up. With a straight face — or as straight as my face could get at age fifty-four — I answered, “Latinos vote Democrat, Hispanics Republican.”
Positioned at the podium, I have been asked: “Is it OK to beat up people?” “Do you have a personal relationship with God?” “How come your shoes are red?” “Are you in college?” “Can you come to our school ’cause, like, you’re a role model? You a role model, ain’t you?” “Have you ever had a beard?” “When did you first take drugs?” “Do you believe in circumcision?” I have listened to the public, nodding my head during these quirky moments, and have come up with polite answers. Inwardly, however, I have been worried about the mental health of our nation.
Time warp to 2013, to a library reading attended by seniors from a nearby convalescent home, where a woman gripping her walker asked, “How come Mexicans litter so much?” My forehead was really pleated by then. By all appearances, I had become a serious man, a diplomat for the boomer generation. I stood at the helm of a rocky podium. I sized up the woman — braless, slip peeking from her dress, road-weary Birkenstocks, a single rock for a pendant, gray roots visible under her long, dyed hair — totally Berkeley. However, I saw her point. I could picture Oakland’s Fruitvale district and the household debris that appears to have been washed up by a tsunami: tires, busted televisions, chests of drawers, paint cans, headless dolls, overturned shopping carts, more tires — not to mention all those mattresses thrown out, along with the no-good husbands . . .
My heart was heavy as a discarded car battery, for here was another question that was outside my area of expertise. Still, I came up with a smart-aleck answer: “Recycling! Mexicans are recycling — put it out on the street and your neighbor may find some use for it. Shoot, last week I found me a can of paint that I used to touch up the grilles on my windows. Next question.”
It’s customary after a poetry reading to lasso friends and head off to a nearby bar. Somewhere in the 1980s, I sat with a two-book poet in his Chevy Vega. The radio was off because the battery was low. This friend seldom drove if he could help it — gas was expensive, the tires bald, the engine a clunker that was responsible for climate change. But that night we sat in his ride, drank our drinks, talked our talk, and pissed our piss behind the car. My poet friend and I enjoyed our suds, each one warmer than the next, and talked shop in a way that can lead to private confessions. My friend, for instance, had a lot of girlfriends. Each one was like the others: sort of chubby but not really chubby; sort of crazy but not really crazy; sort of pretty but not really pretty. He was telling me about his last girlfriend, Jessica, when he suddenly stopped, squinted so that the nests of his eyebrows rose, then rolled down the window. Without a word, the poet got out of his car and walked until he had disappeared into the dark. I’d assumed he’d gone to take a leak until I heard a thudding stomp.
Had he tripped and fallen over? Had some night-owl thug jacked him up?
Then he came back, his arms at his sides.
“What was that about?” I managed. I was drunk but not really drunk. I was famous but not really famous. I was hungry but not really hungry.
“Seeing if those tires were any good,” he explained. “If they fit.” He started his reluctant Chevy, a sudden symbol (for me) of his own writing career. When he gunned the engine, the yellowish lights beamed onto a pile of three tires.
We’d had our powwow and it was time to get home. We set the empty cans of Negro Modelo on the ground outside the car. If the police stopped us, we didn’t want them to spot the gleam of cans on the floor. We were thoughtful citizens. We were recycling. We would let the early-bird scavengers take them away in the morning. And morning, like a cat, licked away the black, revealing the litter added overnight.
THIS BE LOVE
Out of the shower, I toweled off, shaved by rote in front of the steamed-up mirror, and combed my thinning hair. The mirror cleared from the center outward, which allowed me to appraise my face. Pretty good, I judged, for an old guy. That portrait made me recall the cheeky bank teller. Yesterday she’d asked, fanning out five twentie
s like playing cards, “Mr. Soto, do you still turn heads?” I’d chuckled and left the bank — not only with the cash in my pocket, but also with a spring in my shortened steps. But the pleasure of this memory subsided when I noticed a round, gray tag of skin on my chest. I touched it, wiggled it, pressed on it like a doorbell. Then I put on my glasses and ogled this, this, this . . . repulsive thing.
“Carolyn,” I hollered to my wife.
She was in the bedroom, going through my pockets, and yelled back, “Do you have some money — no, I found it.”
When I called again, she arrived with three of the twenties the teller had given me yesterday. The money was in her left hand.
“What?” she asked in the doorway.
“What is this thing?” I asked with a pinched face, pointing at my chest.
She leaned toward me and parted the unimpressive jungle of hair on my chest. Wincing, she said directly, “A tick.”
“A tick?”
I wished nothing more than to shed my skin and hand the old remnant to my wife. She’s a seamstress with clever hands. Wasn’t skin like a bolt of fabric?
“The cat,” she said, without explanation.
Our cat is an indoor and outdoor gentleman, dressed from birth in a furry tuxedo. Every month since we claimed him, fourteen years earlier, I have dutifully worked flea medicine into the scruff of his neck. Now here was a tick embedded in my own fur!
“Take it off!” I pleaded.
The phone rang.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “It’s my brother. I need to take it.” My wife had only wrinkled her face once upon recognizing the living object freeloading on my chest. To her, it was no biggie. How much blood could it possibly sip?
Was this my love of thirty years — or even longer, because I had pined for her before she even knew of my existence? Before I was a man, before I was a teenager on a skateboard, before I held a baby bottle, before stars and moons and cosmic dust? Couldn’t she sense the depth of my devotion?
“What?” I asked. “You mean — ”
But she was already headed toward the phone in the kitchen. With a towel wrapped around my waist, I followed her down the hallway. When I purposely let the towel fall, she wrinkled her face even more pointedly than when she had beheld the tick. The worm of sexuality was more disgusting than the button of blood-sucking nature on my chest.
I dressed but left my shirt open, like Fabio, the one-time eye candy for middle-aged women. Fabio had sported shoulder-length hair and a square chin dark with shadow. His teeth were even and his laughter deep. His legs were like trees and his waist like an ant’s. He could make his chest undulate with muscle! But his chest was nothing like mine, studded with a tick on bivouac.
Carolyn was on the phone for one minute, then five minutes, and then ten minutes. At twelve minutes, I took it upon myself to remove the tick with alcohol-cleansed tweezers — the same tweezers from under the bathroom sink that we use to de-tick the cat. I wouldn’t dare use our real tweezers; the blending of instruments wouldn’t be kosher. While Carolyn had been laughing on the phone, I’d briefly considered striking a match, blowing it out, then letting it cool for a few seconds, having read that if you pressed a hot match against a tick’s back, the critter would release its grip. Very soon, however, I’d begun to speculate on a possible life-changing mistake: my chest hair catching fire. I didn’t hanker to go that way: on fire while my wife was cracking up on the phone with her brother. Plus, there were no insurance policies for burned-up husbands.
The procedure was done in the bathroom. Using the cat tweezers, I grabbed the tick’s body and pulled gently, for I intended to get all of him, not just the fat part gorged on blood. I feared that his claws, or whatever was attached to my skin, might disappear into my bloodstream — it was possible. And then what disease would that bring me?
Eventually, my wife returned as promised. She sought me out in my study. By then my shirt was buttoned; after all, I am no Fabio. Most of my hair might be gone but, thankfully, it is not singed.
“You got it off,” she guessed. “I’m proud of you! You did something on your own!” She even remarked that I had dressed myself without her help.
I loved my wife before stars and moons and cosmic dust. I was her Fabio. I was her man. As a joke, she labeled the tweezers “Cat/Gary.” They rest under the sink next to the tick-and-flea medicine.
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA: GIRLS WITH GUNS
These self-described girls are not about to engage in an old-fashioned bank stickup or do mayhem with AK-47s in a community college classroom with dirty wall-to-wall carpet. They’re punk rockers who flaunt themselves in dresses — frilly tutus, sundresses with spaghetti straps, and tubular outfits that squeeze their breasts front and forward. Of course, in the San Francisco Bay Area, they could be guys in dresses, but they’re not. They are musicians, holding their own in venues like the Stork Club in Oakland. Their music is sort of punk, sort of happy-angry, and sort of camp — and they can get really loud. They are cute and they are flirty. When asked recently about their main themes, one answered, “Keep it simple, stupid.”
I could join this band! I’m able to strum five chords on my three-quarter-size guitar. Out of tune whenever I play, I could offer a primitive sound worth adding to the mix. Wasn’t it Woody Guthrie who said, “Anyone who knows more than four chords is just showing off”? If I joined Girls with Guns, however, my chord changes would be too slow. By the time I finished one tune, another speedy song would’ve already kicked in. Clumsy, I have to watch my fingers and remind myself, “Gary, you’re about to make a chord change — now!”
But stupid? I’ve done stupid, though not musically. Stupid is what I do with my finances and stupid is what exits my mouth when, in public, I drink too much. Stupid is getting on the freeway at rush hour. Stupid is adding bacon strips to one-third of a pound of fatso beef. Stupid is Birkenstocks and a suit (in any color or weave) at the San Francisco Symphony.
The band could have named itself Girls with Lipstick, or Girls in Heels, or Kung Fu Girls. These names would not describe them, though. The name is ironic, for they are not physically dangerous — unless you want to die in their arms as they lovingly stroke your hair. Again, they are flirty and they are cute. A four-piece outfit, they tote only guitar, bass, microphone, and drums — although the drummer does have her (sometimes his) sticks. When they make music, they also make their fans, including yours truly, smile. Admittedly, I’m out of place at the Stork Club; it’s for the young. Nevertheless, you can sometimes see me in the front row, and in the back row. Or at the bar, raising a beer in honor of their body parts — their short skirts are indecent this evening.
In an interview, they were asked how the Bay Area affects their music. One said that inspiration can come to her on a Muni bus: “It’s like being in a mental hospital without having to check yourself in.” I think she and I were on that bus together! But I was looking down — in order to avoid eye contact with fellow crazies — and didn’t recognize a member of my favorite girl group. Was it the girl biting the ends of her long hair? Was it the lassie with green fingernails on the 66, cutting down Market toward the Montgomery BART station? Or was that her on the 44, making its way down Van Ness toward Fisherman’s Wharf?
Their music is indeed a little crazy, a little tight (songs are seldom over three minutes), and a little old-fashioned. You should hear them belt out “Johnny Get Angry,” a sixties classic about an asshole boyfriend who has yet to learn anger management. You can dance to their sounds, and people do — they sweat and shine and feel loose.
For the moment, I’m jealous of the attention they’re getting and jealous of their chord changes. I could scrawl lyrics on the backs of parking-ticket envelopes. I could come up with lines that speak of irony — you know, like divorced men ironing their own shirts. I can locate inelegant chords on my guitar. But these days I’m a poet, mostly unpublished. I do own a pair of Bono-like sunglasses, however, and a beanie like the guy in that group — what’
s his name again? — the one who knows six, loud chords. And I do have certain talents. I think I could manage a ponytail, albeit a gray one, that the guitarist could twist into a lasso. Indeed, my rock name could be Lasso.
In the 1960s, the band names could sound religious, as in The Righteous Brothers and The Miracles, or speak of games, like The Four Tops. They also could recall the insect world, as in The Crickets and The Beatles. We even had a band, ahead of its time, with the name of a medical device: Gerry and the Pacemakers. But our girl groups had names like The Supremes, The Ronettes, The Blossoms, and The Shirelles. The singers wore dresses and heels, lots of mascara, and lengthy false eyelashes that I longed to feel tickling my throat.
I become nostalgic when I ponder the nice names of these sixties groups. The clock has moved its iron hands in favor of youth. The Stork Club has booked — or will book — groups with names like Everything is Dirty, Blind Pets, Secret Argyle, Buzz Kull, Psychotic Pineapple (I thought that was a power drink), Spider Game, and Wet Spots — all loud, all young, and all tattooed from top to bottom.
Girls with Guns peddle no merchandise, a sign of their bad business sense, I’m afraid; once drunk, partygoers will buy, buy, buy. Their music is loud and their chord changes rugged. I’m an old guy, an OG, who is fond of dresses that jump above the knees. If you look the band over, ogle them even, they will shoot you a smile.