Getting Ahead

Gary Soto

A college job was standing
In shade with a rake,
Another was pulling weeds
By the fistful-bitter tufts
Yanked with the chant,
She loves me, she loves me not.
I had both of these jobs
In junior college,
And one Cinco de Mayo limped home
With a stone in my left shoe.
My brother had the better job
Of painting numbers on
Curbs. I clopped home,
Lame as a burro,
And floated in water,
Me a geography major
Without one turn in the Seven Seas.
I rolled in the bathtub
Like a whale and got out
Dripping. My hippie brother joked,
Oh, geographer, where didst thou go?
I answered, O, Picasso of stencil-numbered curbs,
To the depths of our one-foot tub.
We ate Top Ramen
And looked from our balcony.
The whole town needed a raking
And numbers on the curbs.
We were getting ahead. In Economic
Geography, we took field trips,
Once to blink at blinking chickens
And another to a garment shop,
Mexican women like our mothers,
The voodoo of pins jutting from their mouths.
This didn't make me happy,
Nor did the trip
To a small airfield.
When the crop duster pilot cranked the propeller,
The wind of its blurring spin


Pulled homework from our arms-
Binder paper beating like gulls.
We screamed, laughed, and tiptoed for the homework,
For the B's and A's dancing above our heads-
That day, in propeller wind,
The true case of inflated grades.