Living Up The Street

Soto opens the story with an introduction of the playground’s beauty contest: “It had been a sticky and difficult week of two nose bleeds from bigger kids when Karen, the coach at Romain playground, announced that there was going to be a children’s beauty contest” (41). Soto wants to participate, but the coach says he’s too old. Instead, he enrolls his little brother, Jimmy: “Strong build, a chipped tooth, half Mexican and half white—he might win, I thought” (41).

Soto trains Jimmy, who is just shy of 4 years old, how to strut like he’s on a catwalk, and feels confident that he will win. The day of the contest, Soto, Jimmy, and the other camp kids watch the kids and their families coming in for the contest: “[A]lthough none of us said anything we were awed by the blonde and fair-skinned kids in good clothes. They looked beautiful” (43). The beauty contest begins, and the little girls and boys parade awkwardly in front of the judges. As Jimmy walks, he “looked left, then right; he smiled like he was going to eat chicken, pulling back his lips to show his tooth” (43). Jimmy doesn’t win the contest, and Soto is disappointed. 

Soto discusses his disappointment in never playing league baseball: “For three springs my brother and I walked to Romain playground to try out for Little League, and year after year we failed to impress the coaches” (46). Soto and his brother Rick once again try out for Little League. Although Rick does really well during tryouts, they “didn’t make Little League that year, but [they] did join a team of school chums that practiced at Hobo Park near downtown Fresno” (50). Soto describes his new coach, whom he reveres:

Manuel was middle-aged, patient, and fatherly. He bent down on his haunches to talk to kids. He spoke softly and showed interest in what we had to say. […] We all knew he was good to us because most of the kids on the team didn’t have fathers or, if they did, the fathers were so beaten from hard work that they never spent time with them (51).

Rick quits the team early on because he gets a girlfriend, but Soto gets decent at playing ball. The team has their first game against The Red Caps, a team of West Fresno boys: “We lost nineteen to eleven and would go on to lose against the Red Caps four more times because they were the only team we would ever play” (55). The team fizzles out as more boys stop showing up, and then eventually Manuel stops participating as well.

Frankie T. is the school bully and simultaneously tries to befriend and scare Soto:

“A cold day after school. Frankie T., who would drown his brother by accident that coming spring and would use a length of pipe to beat a woman in a burglary years later, had me pinned on the ground behind backstop, his breath sour as meat left out in the sun” (59).

Soto describes how Frankie intimidated the school: “Frankie scared most of the school out of its wits and even had girls scampering out of view when he showed himself on the playground. It he caught us without notice, we grew quiet and stared down at our shoes until he passed after a threat or two” (61). One afternoon, Frankie T. calls their teacher, Mr. Koligian, a bad name, and Mr. Koligian throws Frankie against the school building. Despite that everyone is terrified of Frankie and dislikes him, they feel their teacher’s treatment of Frankie is unfair: “We knew the house he lived in: The empty refrigerator, the father gone, the mother in a sad bathrobe, the beatings, the yearnings for something to love” (62). 

Soto recounts his experiences at summer school: “The summer before I entered sixth grade I decided to go to summer school. I had never gone, and it was either school or mope around the house with a tumbler of Kool-Aid and watch TV, flipping he channels from exercise programs to soap operas to game shows until something looked right” (63). Debra goes to summer school, too.

Summer school functions like normal school, with homeroom and various classes that serve as electives. Soto chooses to take science, history, German, and square dancing. While he enjoys all his classes, square dancing is his favorite: “It was in that class that I fell in love with my corner gal who looked like Haley Mills, except she was not as boyish” (66). He quickly gets over his love, and summer school ends with a talent show. Soto wants to be part of it, but he can’t find anyone to be his partner, so instead he just watches the show from the sidelines.

Soto, on the cusp of adolescence, details his experiences with girls: “I suppose my desire for girls was keenest as I approached adolescence. These feelings were tender, like rope burns, and the slightest suggestion from a girl had me drifting about the school yard with great yearning” (70). Mary Palacio, a “skinny-legged Chicana with braces who had liked [him] in the fifth grade” (70) is his object of desire. They are in the sixth grade, and Soto becomes a school cadet, unlike his crush:

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 (72).

By eighth grade it’s clear that he has no chance with Mary, so he turns his sights to “Judy Paredes, daughter of a wealthy baker in town, whose brother Ernie was in [his] platoon” (72). He asks Ernie is Judy likes him, and Ernie replies that she does. With the confidence of knowing that Judy likes him, Soto tries to muster up enough courage to talk to her but can’t. There is a dance, and he again fails to talk to her and to ask her to dance. Ernie had misspoken, and Judy didn’t like Soto. She had been crushing on “Gary Perez the baseball stud, not Gary Soto the cadet” (75). 

Soto’s mother chases him out of the house. She had asked him to empty his pockets of Kleenex, but he didn’t, and little scraps of tissue littered the washing machine. He finally gets his mother off his trail and sits on the “curb at the end of the block peeling an orange when Jackie, a school friend, turned the corner with a rattling shopping cart” (76). Jackie had been collecting Coke bottles to cash in for nickels. Soto suggests that they should go downtown, so the two friends make the long trek that way. Once downtown, they eat doughnuts and stare at a fountain. They sneak into an abandoned storefront:

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 (79).

They take mannequins from the room and fight each other with them outside in an alley.