My plan for him

When he turned 17, I took my son to Santa Barbara for a month. 

He was smoking too much weed. His GPA had dropped from 

4.0 to point 0. His clothes got baggier, his thick chestnut hair got shorter. 

A goatee and mustache grew on his perfect chin line. 

No more football, soccer, tennis, just boxing matches in parking lots with gang bangers and gang banger wannabes like him, 

just a lot of posturing and fierce staring, and angry rap music 

and where there once was warm, cheery chatter between us, 

there was now a great wall of silence. 

Maybe if he got out of Dodge. Met some new kids. 

Experienced a mellower life style. 

If he did better there, we could stay there so he could finish high school.

I rented a condo then called his teachers and explained. 

They let him fax assignments every week. 

On the drive down highway 5, he slept all the way. 

Sometimes I looked at him and wondered, do I still know him? 

This is not the 10 year old who walked the 9-mile Tomales Point Trail 

with me and on the way home cried out, “That was a fun day, mom! 

I wish we could rewind it!” 

I woke him up. Hey, we’re here. 

I bent over and shook him. Wake up. It’s dinner time. 

Slowly he pulled his skinny body upright in the seat and turned his head 

to the window. His eyes quickly focused on the parade of beautiful young women strolling down State Street, how they seemed to sing to each other, 

the joyful shrieks, their white short shorts and pink flip flops, 

and the young men too, just as lovely in their sea-side casualness, 

riding skateboards and bikes, jogging. 

My son plugged in his iPod and turned up the volume on the car speakers, 

yanked off his shirt as if it were on fire, and rolled down the window. 

When I stopped the car at a red light, he crawled out, head first. 

The light changed and my car continued to roll with my son 

now sitting in the window, his feet on the passenger seat. 

What are you doing? I demanded. 

His hands were drumming on the roof of my car in time to the music 

as he called out to everyone Yo! Yeah! Ain't nobody home tonight! 

Woooooooo!

Oh my God, stop! I screamed! Get back in here! 

I wanted to speed away but that could knock him out.  

So I continued driving and he continued drumming and whooping and yelping

as if he were sitting on a float in some Fourth of July Parade. 

This was the first sign my plan was not going to work.