Living Up the Street Read Online Free Page B

room where the coach sat on a stool behind a Dutch door thumbing through magazines. I looked up at her, smiling my happiness. She squinted and furrowed her brow when she saw my creation. “Ummm, interesting, Gary.” She took it and placed it on a shelf.
    The next day I made an ashtray. I rolled clay into a ball, pressed it out into a circle, and then raised the edges with a spoon. I made four dents where the cigarettes would rest, sticking colored buttons on each side of the dents.
    That afternoon I also attempted a lanyard, but my patience with “loop and tuck, loop and tuck” gave out and I threw it into the garbage can. “Damn thing,” I said under my breath as I walked to the game room to check out a four-square ball. I bounced it inordinately high in hopes of attracting the kids who were still working at their crafts under the tree. Few looked up and none left to join me; their dirty legs dangled motionless under the table.
    At dinner that evening my sister and I described to our mother the excitement of the contest, each sure the other was out of the running.
    “You should see my Frostie bottle,” I said to her as I ripped a tortilla and chewed loudly. “It’s beautiful—like gold.”
    Debra described the toilet roll she had painted red and black with macaroni glued in a spiral like a barber’s pole.
    “Mine’s the best, Mom!” Debra tore off a piece of tortilla and chewed louder than me, with her mouth open.
    “Mom, I can see Debbie’s food,” I pointed with a fork.Debra chewed even louder, mocking me with her eyes spread wide like a bug’s.
    “OK, you kids, behave yourselves.” Mom cleared the table as we scooted outside to play.
    The next day I made a drawing of a dragster on fire. I outlined the lean body carefully, deliberating on each feature from the spoked wheels to the roll bar, and then scribbled the flames a vicious red and black, all the while whining like a car turning a corner. Finished, I carried it stiffly, as if I were in a pageant, to the game room. I handed it proudly to the coach who asked what it was.
    “A dragster. That’s the engine.” I pointed out the eighteen pipes that hung on the side. I showed her the driver who had been thrown from the car. He was dead.
    That afternoon the coach announced a special contest in which we could do anything we pleased.
    “But it must be a secret,” she said. All of the kids huddled in the shade because of the afternoon heat that rose above a hundred degrees. We listened quietly as she explained that we had to do it at home with our own materials and that we should be original. And again we asked what “original” meant, and again she explained, “You know, different.… You know, unique,” with her hands flashing out for definition.
    Starry-eyed, my mind blazing with a seven-year-old’s idea of beauty, I ran home because I knew exactly what I intended to produce. From the garbage I pulled a Campbell’s soup can, ripped off the paper label, and in the garage painted it red with a stiff brush, the stifling heat wringing sweat from my face. I let the soup can dry in the sun, and that evening I glued rows of bottle caps that I had dug out with a spoon from a Coke machine: One row of Coca-Cola caps, then a row of Orange Crush, then one of Dr. Pepper, and so on. When I finished with this detail I packed dirt into the can, poked two pinto beans into it,and watered them carefully so the bottle caps wouldn’t get wet and fall off.
    I was pleased with my craft. When my mother came home that afternoon I took her by the hand to the back yard to show her.
    “Very pretty.” Her face was plain and unmoved, tired from a day’s work of candling eggs, but still I grinned like a cat, already imagining that on Monday when the judging took place I was sure to win.
    It was Friday when I finished the “special” craft, and I assumed that the next day the sprout of a pinto bean would break through the moist dirt. Nothing was there in the center of