A ring on my cell phone interrupts this tirade. It’s Felipe, and he must be in big trouble if he’s calling me instead of his mamí.
His school is only a few blocks away, so I can fit it in. I head over on foot, crossing under the El tracks as the train rattles by, thinking about the changing seasons, time passing, and my own parental obligations. Yeah, my generation was supposed to be different. I never thought that my daughter would be growing up in an era when rock stars are dying of old age, or that I would come to know the joys of having a teenage daughter who goes from manic to suicidal on an hourly basis. It all started a few years ago when she was in eighth grade. We had ten minutes to get to some school function, and Antonia was in the bathroom putting on makeup. I asked her, “Do you want to take anything to eat? Some fruit? A sandwich?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I don’t have time,” she replied, in that universally adolescent don’t-you-know-anything whine that drives parents up the wall. And I knew right then that my daughter had reached the age where makeup is more important than food. God help me. And after all these years, I can still recite Green Eggs and Ham word-for-freaking-word.
Every school cafeteria in the country smells the same, a uniquely American blend of rotten apples and plastic, evaporating floor cleaner, ripening half-pint cartons of milk, and other food garbage. No wonder the kids all live on chips and soda.
The halls are filled with thirteen-year-olds plugged into the current fashion of low-slung jeans and hip-hugging thongs. I never thought I’d use this expression, but in my day, it took some work to see a girl’s panties. Now it’s pretty much on display, and all I can say is that, fortunately, pimples and braces are God’s way of saying you’re not ready for sex.
And you know you’re in a public institution when you pass a classroom with a sign taped to the blackboard saying, Do Not Tape Anything to This Blackboard, which is clearly a test of the logical skills needed to survive in the absurd bureaucracies of the information age.
Felipe is sitting by himself in a tiny interrogation room in the assistant principal’s office.
“Are you his guardian?” asks the secretary, whose plastic ID plate says her name is Evelyn Cabezas.
“I’m the person he called.”
“Do you know why he’s here?”
“No, but I’d like to hear it from him first.”
She makes me sit across from Felipe like a court-appointed lawyer with a three-time loser, then she leans on the doorframe with her arms crossed.
“Dime lo que pasó,” I say.
Ms. Cabezas interrupts. “I’m sorry, but we’re not allowed to speak Spanish to the kids inside the building.”
“Why not?”
“The principal sent out a memo saying that the under- achieving students bring our test scores down and we’ll lose funding. So, no Spanish. English only.”
“What about the parents who don’t know enough English?”
“Hey, I just do what they tell me, like when they had us opening the mail with rubber gloves during that whole anthrax scare.”
I don’t push it. I just ask what happened.
“I didn’t have my homework,” he says.
“You didn’t call me in here for that.”
“Yeah, well, it’s the third time this week.”
“And now you’re in trouble. Tell me why.”
“I got mugged.”
“Mugged? A couple of hard cases said, ‘Forget the cash, we want the English homework’? Try again.”
Same sentence, he just changes a crucial verb: “Okay. I didn’t do my homework.”
“Why the hell not?”
He gets all tight-lipped, like he’s taken a vow of silence, but I’m not the one looking at serious detention time, so I just sit there letting the emptiness fill the silence until he says, “Ray Ray and his crew was hanging with his primo who works at the gas station, gearing up for some mad viernes loco action.”
He means those crazy Fridays near the end of the school year when kids push their parents’ tolerance to the limit.
“You know Ray Ray, he got that pretty-boy face, always looking all ghetto fabulous. He’d go up to Deirdre, the boss, and just put his game on her fat, ugly self. Yo, we be doin’ some crazy stuff.”
“Keep talking.”
“Man, we be a-capellin’ and buggin’ out. He had us laughing up a lung, smoking the sheba with his primo.”
“You were smoking in a gas station, pendejo? Let me get this straight. You went out and partied with your friends the night of your brother’s funeral?”
“Well, Ray Ray had a game that day. And we always party after a game.”
“So it’s sort of like a tradition.”
“Don’t tell my mom, okay?”
“Don’t put me in that position.”
“I mean, this is like confession, right?”
“Go on.”
“Ain’t that what Jesus said?”
“I’m thinking Jesus would be kicking your ass right about now.”
“It don’t say that in the Bible.”
“Sure it does. Check out chapter forty-one, verse three: And thou shalt kick the asses of all those that offend thee. So what did you do next?”
He tells me they went on a shoplifting spree and got away with a few bags of chocolate chip cookies, a six-pack of Bud Light, and a couple of sixteen-ounce bottles of Coke, which proves what a bunch of idiots they are. I mean, if you’re going to boost the merchandise, at least grab something worth stealing.
So he didn’t do his homework because he was busy emulating Ray Ray, and he doesn’t want to roll over on his cousin and — at this point — his primary male role model. What am I supposed to say? Some platitudinous crap he won’t listen to? Still, it falls to me to be el malo de la película and teach him a life lesson. So I tell him, “Listen chico, you better not do anything that freaking stupid ever again. And if you’re going to hang out with older kids, you better make damn sure you do your homework first, you hear me?... I asked if you heard me.”
“Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“Yes, I heard you.”
“Good, because you’ve still got a lot to learn, hijito, and dropping out of high school is a joke in a world that has no sense of humor, unless you’ve got some rich celebrities in the family I don’t know about. You think the cops are going to give you some special treatment when you screw up? Let you off with a warning?”
“Hey, you got Ray Ray off.”
“Is that a reason to start a Juvenile Offender record? ’Cause maybe the judge won’t be so kind-hearted next time. And I’m going to give your mamí the same message. After that, it’s up to her. I’ve got my own kid to raise.”
I’ve also got to have a little chat with the pride of Corona.
But all that has to wait. Something was clearly hinky about the pharmacy with the faded-yellow antibiotics. It takes a couple hours of expensive online searching, billable to my deep-pocketed clients, but I find it. Late last year, a sixteen-year-old boy died of septicemia — a galloping blood infection that rode right over the diluted antibiotics the curandera bought for him. At first, the cops thought it was a drug overdose, but the autopsy didn’t turn up any known street drugs in his system. By all accounts, he was a good kid who studied hard, kept his grades up, and made the varsity wrestling team. He lived about three blocks from the pharmacy. There’s no visible connection, but a dead teenager gives me all the motivation I need to stop playing nice and kick it up a notch or two. This goes way beyond watered-down baby formula.