Living Up The Street

Soto reflects on his childhood and the inclination toward fighting: “As early as kindergarten I had to bob and weave through fights—some I won and some I had to escape holding my nose like a doorknob” (93). He talks about the elementary school rivalry between the “Mexicans” and the “Surfers” (94), two gangs that formed with the sole purpose of beating each other up. Soto is the leader of the Mexicans, and his brother Rick sided with the Surfers, “who were as poor as us and probably had never seen the ocean in person” (94). Soto ends up getting in trouble for being the ring leader:

Hard times. All through elementary and junior high school, it was bob and weave, jab and stick. Only in high school did I get a chance to rest between rounds. I was amazed at the calm, almost pastoral, atmosphere of Roosevelt High and, for a while, was pleased to hover over tuna sandwiches during lunchtime without the worry of being jumped from behind (95).

Soto ends up missing the “good times” of getting into fights, so he joins the wrestling team (95). He wrestles for “three years at the one-hundred-three weight class and [his] record was not particularly sparkling: Twenty-four wins, eleven losses” (96). On the night his mother comes to see him wrestle, he’s up against Bloodworth, “the city champion prone to head slapping and smearing his opponent’s face into the mat before he turned him over to show him the ‘lights’—the overhead lights we’d look up at as the referee counted” (97). Soto’s mother cheers him on, but he loses to Bloodworth.

Soto watches the movie Gandhi and thinks about the connections between the people in the film and his family. Particularly, he thinks about his grandma who came to Fresno from Mexico:

She worked in the fields around Fresno, picking grapes, oranges, plums, peaches, and cotton, dragging a large white sack like a sled. She worked in the packing houses, Bonner and Sun-Maid Raisin, where she stood at a conveyor belt passing her hand over streams of raisins to pluck out leaves and pebbles. For over twenty years she worked at a machine that boxed raisins until she retired at sixty-five (102).

Soto works with his mother picking grapes for the summer. The work is physically demanding, and they get paid according to the number of pans they fill with grapes. At first, Soto daydreams about “mak[ing] enough money to end [their] misery and even buy her a beautiful copper tea pot, the one [he] had shown her in Long’s Drugs” (103). However, after a few days of grueling yet boring work, Soto realizes his dream is unlikely to come to fruition:

I worked less hurriedly and with less vision. I no longer saw that copper pot sitting squat on our stove or Mother waiting for it to whistle. The wardrobe that I imagined crisp and bright in the closet, numbered only one pair of jeans and two shirts because, in half a day, six cents times thirty-seven trays was two dollars and twenty-two cents. It became clear to me. If I worked eight hours, I might make four dollars(109).

Soto loses his hope of making their family wealthy and instead begins to resent the hard work. He hates picking grapes so much that he decides not to one summer. Once the school year starts, he realizes it was a mistake not to pick grapes because he wasn’t able to buy clothes and so has nothing nice to wear. This prompts him and his brother to pick cotton, which attracts a diverse group of people all looking to make quick but difficult money. Soto and his brother wait for the cotton-picking bus next to “winos, toothy blacks, Okies, Tejanos with gold teeth, whores, Mexican families” (107).

Cotton picking is physically demanding, but Soto accepts the position: “My arms ached and my face was dusted by a wind that was perpetual, always busy whipping about. But the work was not bad, I thought. It was better, so much better, than picking grapes, especially with the hourly wage of a dollar twenty-five instead of piece work” (109). 

“There are two kinds of work: One uses the mind and the other uses muscle. As a kid I found out about the latter” (115). It’s the summer of 1969 and Soto is 17. He has run away from home only to find himself in Glendale, California, and working at a tire factory. For the first part of the story he’s homeless, sleeping on lawns and in unlocked cars, but once he starts making money he rents a room from a couple.

Like Soto’s previous jobs picking grapes and cotton, the work at the tire factory is physically demanding and exhausting. Soto must load and unload tires every day in the California heat. Although the work is difficult, the job attracts men because of the money and the fact that they don’t fire anyone: “Most of the workers were Mexican or black, though a few redneck whites worked there. The base pay was a dollar sixty-five, but the average was three dollars” (119).

The job bores Soto: “The days were dull. I did what there was to do from morning until the bell sounded at five; I tugged, pulled, and cussed at tires until I was listless and my mind drifted and caught on small things, from cold sodas to shoes to stupid talk about what we would do with a million dollars” (123). The job is so boring and tedious, in fact, that he can’t understand how some men have stayed here so long: “How we arrived at such a place is a mystery to me. Why anyone would stay for years is even a deeper concern. You showed up, but from where? What broken life? What ugly past?” (127).

Scott tells Soto that his sister is out of town and that they should steal her stuff and sell it:“I marched through life in evilness, and perhaps a low point that will surely send me tumbling into hell was when Scott, my best friend and still another lover of cantaloupe and gravy, begged me to break into his sister’s house with him” (127).Soto feels bad and thinks about how he would never steal from his own family, but Scott is adamant that his sister won’t miss the stuff because she and her husband are rich.

Soto and Scott live in a “small room in a boarding house” and live modestly:“We each had a bed, a chair, and one wobbly table where we fixed our meals. We lived like monks with bad eating habits” (128). Although Soto is getting 90-dollar checks from social security each month, money is tight, which is why he agrees to rob Scott’s sister alongside Scott.

As they are about to leave, their friend Ronnie shows up and begs to come along. They finally let him, but immediately regret it once they’re inside Scott’s sister’s apartment. While Scott adamantly tells Soto and Ronnie to only take what they really need, Ronnie gets greedy and wants to take too much. Soto and Scott leave, having taken big items such as a television and stereo, and Ronnie stays behind.

Back at their house, Soto and Scott are frantic, feeling guilty for what they’ve done. They think about selling the items, but instead decide to leave town. They go to the bus terminal, but back out at the last minute and ultimately decide to return the stolen items. Afterward, Soto suggests that they go eat since they won’t be able to sleep that night. While sitting in the car Soto, invites a stray dog into the vehicle and feeds it his tuna sandwich. The dog ate it “with more manners than most people [he] know[s]” (137).