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

breath.
    If only someone like him could have breathed life into the characters of that heralded one-act play.
    * * *
    I left the Phoenix Theater and a gasping 1950s existential play in which a teenager strikes out on her own for New York City then returns home, disenchanted by the Big Apple. Her splashy artwork had failed to supply enough tortured drips on triangle-shaped canvases — or something like that. My bones moaned real pain from sitting on an unpadded folding chair. My eyes seeped and my tongue, like a small whale, rose and fell inside my closed mouth. In short, I was bored. I couldn’t grasp the play’s absurdist intentions, though I had donned my thinking cap and devoured a Milky Way bar at intermission — the sugar had sped through me like a drug, forcing me awake.
    In the night air, I was depleted of yawns, both real and not real. I wasn’t fond of the young actor in the play and believe that she didn’t think much of us theatergoers either — not once did she cast a glance at the dozen-or-so of us. Now there was absurdity. You memorize your lines and go twice weekly to rehearsals, all for an audience of empty chairs? I could recall such indifference myself, of course, having read my poetry to both padded and unpadded chairs. I’ve even done a reading where the host of the reading series tiptoed away before I could finish the last poem.
    I trekked toward Sutter Street and my car, which was neither absurdist nor existential. In fact, my car was a vehicle with scratches, dents, and a little more than half a tank of gas, with tires that had rolled thousands of miles over bumpy roads, and insects that had paid dearly in the grille. I’m alive , I brayed inside. A pulse jumped in my wrist every living second and my heart churned blood, one cycle, then the other. I was a realist: in ten years I might be dead. In fifteen, that possibility was even more likely. And in twenty, a stone rests on my chest and I’m down below, dressed in any of my English suits. I’m a shoeless cadaver, with no place else to go.
    Plays would still go on, however, with or without people in chairs.
    At that misty hour, the homeless were real and with us. Some tottered solo on gimpy legs, while others maneuvered in pairs. Some were drunk or, if not drunk, impaired by real infirmities. In a doorway, a trio argued the merits of a high school diploma over a GED . When they spoke, cigarette smoke poured from their mouths — or was it cold breath?
    I was approached by a woman with a disfiguring hump on her back — no, the hump was a cat on her shoulder. I was not in the least surprised when her wicked smile displayed only two or three teeth, none of them front teeth. Her hair was like a disheveled wig and her shoes were splayed at the tips. She stunk at the distance of five feet. The poor woman, I suspected, had been injured by drugs and drink. For a second she reminded me of Janis Joplin, that raw singing talent of the 1960s. Where would Janis be now other than in the shape of a woman turning her face from me? The cat on her shoulder was fast asleep.
    At another corner, with one arm deep in the sour contents of a garbage can, was a Jerry Garcia look-alike, including a beard tinged with gray. “Dude,” I could have whispered. “What happened?” His pants were the color of ash, and his jacket was inside out. For warmth, he wore a second pair of pants inside the first; still, the outer pair hung off his butt the way teenagers’ jeans do. I couldn’t help but recall the hippie bumper sticker of a cartoonish shoe and the nearly faded words “Keep on Truckin’.”
    This was street theater, for which you paid next to nothing, coins only, maybe a dollar bill if you felt charitable, a doggie bag from your dinner at Lori’s Diner — that’s all, that’s all. There was Jerry, and Janis, and now Jimi Hendrix, intensely studying his grimy fingers at Mason and