Free Why I Don't Write Children's Literature by Gary Soto

matinee? I left at intermission, blinking under an overcast sky, and walked three blocks through the Tenderloin, where drama lives in every other doorway. When someone sang, “You’re a dog,” someone else responded in castrato, “Yeah, but what kinda dog?”
    Now there was a line to remember. And here was an actual line at Glide Memorial Church, with men the color of pigeons waiting for the soup kitchen to open. I hurried by — and fast — when a brother crushed a beer can in his fist and sneered at me. Wisely, I unknotted my tie and pocketed it — why be colorful in a discolored neighborhood? For a daring second, I imagined this brother and me as the leads in a one-act play, something like The Odd Couple. I would be the debarred lawyer (insider trading), while he would be a former body builder (wrecked by steroids).
    I found my car keyed — a long line across the driver’s door. Urban terrorism , I thought to myself, grateful that I had brought our older — and discontinued — Saturn. I should have stayed home to finish reading that book on Wittgenstein, a philosopher of wishful thinking and a nasty colleague in departmental meetings.
    I drove away from that uninspiring afternoon with the phony playwright and reflected briefly on my own phony years. When I wrote poems without heart and plays with characters that sounded as if they were screaming through toilet rolls — they were that hollow. I remembered a few of the bad lines from my absurdist play, Space Junk .
    MICHAEL (reads from textbook very slowly) : George Washington cut down a cherry tree on the side of his log cabin. Later, he freed the slaves.
    MISS GRIFFIN, TEACHER : Very Good. Now, Madison, you continue.
    MADISON (reads slowly) : Benjamin Franklin wore really neat glasses. He saved a lot of pennies in an old sock. He was married and sometimes lived in France.
    I winced at the memory of these lines — what had I been thinking? It was me who was absurd, not the play.
    It began to sprinkle as I neared the freeway entrance that led to the Bay Bridge. When an outright rain blurred my windshield, the wipers came on with the beat of a metronome. I wasn’t happy, figuring myself a failure who couldn’t even choose his entertainment correctly. I drove east and contemplated tossing my watch into the bay. I was done with time, and done with out-of-fashion plays, including my own.
    In slow traffic, I listened to a soft rock station, hearing the word “love” uttered twelve times in the space of four minutes. I watched two gulls hang in the air, their wings flapping now and then to keep themselves afloat. Then another song on the radio recalled a line uttered by a friend from the past: “Love is eternal . . . as long as it lasts.”
    With the traffic now moving, I shifted from second to third gear, and then risked fourth, the most dangerous act I would make all day. The traffic cameras, mounted every hundred feet, eyeballed me as I sped through the S curve at sixty.
    At home, I read more on Wittgenstein and learned that academics were able to whine in several languages. They were a nasty, pipe-smoking lot. I began to believe that the best way to get through life was by the Golden Rule. I petted my cat, a remarkable creature in his tenth life who once climbed trees just because; now arthritic, he can’t even climb into my lap. I lifted him up and confided into his much-bitten ear, “I went to the theater today — not good, little fella.”
    The rain stopped and the gutters ticked. Evening arrived early, but I left the blinds open — let those on a walk mull over a man with a cat in his lap. The cat eventually meowed to be let out, but not before I stroked him three times and patted his head twice. I drank a fairly cold beer and reflected on how I would never be like that brother on the street, so strong he could crush his can and blow it back into shape with one long