Saving Anthony

The angle at which he sat at a school desk: low and slightly back, not overly cool, pretty much what you’d expect from a kid with baggy pants and expensive sneakers. “I don’t mind following rules,” he said. “Unless they’re stupid.” If a teacher made him spit out his gum, he walked into her room the next day purposely chewing away, whether he wanted gum or not. He talked in class and rarely did homework.

And I was going to save him.

Give him pep talks and help with assignments, keep him from flunking out, get it into his head that he needed to think about the future, maybe even college. I was going to deliver as much salvation as could be wedged into one lunchtime a week.

That first Wednesday, we met in a bungalow at his high school, a room of browns and grays and pale white scribblings on the chalkboard. I glanced around at others who, like me, had signed up to help a struggling kid. They hunched over textbooks with their students, some leaning close, locked into serious conversations. Anthony wanted no part of it. He wanted to talk about the Lakers and Dodgers. When I asked about homework, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a carefully folded sheet of paper, a list of football bets he had made with classmates. He wanted to know what I thought of his chances.

It went like this every Wednesday for months. Sometimes I tried to force the issue. Sometimes I was hesitant, and there were awkward silences. By winter, his grades had sunk even lower.

If I were honest about what brought me to Anthony Reyes, if I pushed aside trite explanations, I would say that my wife and I were struggling to have a baby and I needed an outlet for unrequited paternal feelings. A sign outside El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills asking for mentors was all it took. The woman who runs the program nods her head when I tell her, three years later, that something felt wrong from the start. Fern Somoza knows the simple act of helping is not so simple at all.

Each fall, a handful of volunteers trickles into her office. Picture a casting call for a regional production of “To Sir, With Love,” a roomful of newcomers determined to lead wayward teens down the path to righteousness and a passing grade in algebra. Maybe they have seen a public service ad with some variation of “change a kid’s life,” a slogan that irks Somoza to no end. Her students have been designated “at risk” for good reason. They have signed up for her program, but often under duress from parents and teachers, and they are not the type to change easily. Somoza warns new mentors to be patient, let things progress naturally. Still, some grow frustrated and quit.

Given Anthony’s continued descent under my guidance, only one thing kept me walking into that bungalow each Wednesday: He kept showing up. This kid who thought nothing of ditching school to spend the day at Magic Mountain almost never missed our lunch. He began to open up, telling me about his mother and his aunt, about spending weekends with his grandparents north of the city. When my wife eventually became pregnant, I gave him weekly updates and he was among the first to see snapshots of the baby. We became fixtures in each other’s lives, if only for one afternoon a week. We became friends.

Along the way, an unspoken deal was struck by which we discussed school for a few minutes each week and he occasionally brought a sketch from art class or a poem from English. Anthony kept his end of the bargain, to my considerable relief, raising those failing grades to Cs and Ds by summer. But if I went on too long about school or his future, he shrugged and told me not to worry. I was still quietly embarrassed that other mentors might overhear us debate at length the relative merits of the Dodger bullpen. Not that I minded talking sports, but it wasn’t what I believed we should be doing.

This unease stayed with me in the way small worries do, forgotten at times, inevitably resurfacing, pestering. It got me thinking about the act of helping and, during the spring of our second year, I had a hunch. Call it a theory. Or an elaborate rationalization.

Every so often there is a story in the news about a government that builds a factory in some poverty-stricken village halfway around the globe where, it turns out, the people cannot operate machinery. Or a humanitarian group distributes condoms in a Third World nation where religion prohibits birth control. I talked to a man named Gerald Caiden, a professor of public administration at USC, who called this “the clash of values and priorities.” He told me to imagine a benefactor shipping textbooks to a country where the population needs medical care. The people say they must be healthy before they can study, Caiden said, “but the donor always assumes it knows better than the people themselves do.” That donor, that wealthy government--that was me.

Anthony knew better. Though the baggy pants and sneakers remained, he matured into a young man who stopped skipping classes and went to night school--even missed Laker games on television--to make up for failed courses. Though he still exasperated teachers, by our third year his report card included a smattering of As and Bs. Those grades do not begin to reflect the magnitude of his accomplishment: How many of us find the gumption to change our destinies? In June, he graduated.

But this story is not about his transformation. It is about mine.

Anthony taught me about casting aside expectations and finding a common ground, a tough lesson that I am not convinced has sunk in yet. To this day, I cannot help wishing he had been more passionate about his studies, had found something he liked about school rather than just slogging through. I wish he had learned that following rules once in awhile, even stupid rules, can save heartache. He shrugs and tells me not to worry. And I suspect this scenario will repeat itself, in various forms, with my son Zack as we engage in the inevitable tussle between father and son, me pushing him to fit an ideal, him pushing back. The cycle has already begun. Sometimes I want him to be the kind of toddler that plays quietly with his toys rather than the type that climbs on chairs and dives off. I try to keep in mind one of my final meetings with Anthony.

We were sitting in the bungalow, cleaning up scraps from a sausage pizza, when he announced his decision to give junior college a try next fall, just to see how it goes. I told him I was proud. Then I asked the question that had been in the back of my mind all along.

“Be honest,” I said. “Did I have anything to do with your becoming a better student?”

A curious look crossed his face. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, we never went over homework. We hardly ever talked about school.”

He said that if he had wanted help with assignments, he would have asked for a tutor. There were plenty of relatives, teachers and counselors to nag him about his future. He wanted someone to talk to, if only once a week, if only about Shaquille O’Neal’s aching big toe.

I then realized this wasn’t about what I expected. It was about what he needed.

*

David Wharton is a Times staff writer. He last wrote for the magazine about Salt Lake City.