The Blue Devils of Blue River Avenue by Poe Ballantine

[Tristan Riesen]

            Poe Ballantine’s The Blue Devils of Blue River Avenue is a short story written in a coming-of-age form which I really enjoyed.  The narrator is a small town kid, growing up a working class neighborhood of San Diego during the 1960s.  He battles with class, race, sexual frustration and individual discovery. 

            I really liked some of the repetitive images and themes within the story.  To start with, the religious context which kept popping up put an interesting spin on the story.  Religion is first brought to the reader with the Thriftimart that sits behind the Jack-in-the-Box with a “colossal red neon T…  It was like a crucifix….”  I think Ballantine was toying with the idea of what people at the time were placing their trust in.  Today we live in such a self-conscious time period.  Everybody knows what is bad for you – which is just about everything.  It’s rare that a friend asks me if I want to go to a fast food restaurant to eat, and it’s getting more rare to be going to a QFC/Safeway instead of a Whole Foods Store or the local co-op.  The idea of consumerism is highly prevalent in the story, “The cows are all gone,” Ballantine says, “we ordered them through the clow and ate them with Thousand Island dressing.”  Which he later says took them years to realize this ‘secret’ sauce.  Religion is later brought up when the narrator has dinner with Homer and his family, who were Catholics.  The narrator says he had never known any Catholics before, and that they were what a family should be like.  Yet, once the story fast forwards and we find out about the narrator and Homer growing up, they don’t seem like what kids should be like at all.  They’re against everything that most kids are for, and in turn they and their families seem to ostracize themselves.

            By the time the narrator becomes the opposite of who he was when he hung out with the Sambeaux’ and the Carrs family, the story is at its end.  Because of this I think the narrator kind of devolves more than he evolves.  Instead of pushing further into the kind of life he lives with the Sambeaux’ and Carrs, he goes backwards and looks younger.  The argument could definitely be made – who knows where the narrator would have ended up if he had continued to hang out with that group of kids, but to me he still became kind of odd for a kid.  Every decision we make is an experience we gain, but it is also an experience we lose, and I can’t help but wonder who the narrator would be had he continued life with the Sambeaux’.