By Caleb Slain
The church’s urban outreach program was called ‘Teen Night,’ and once a week they’d round up at-risk teens and give them a pool table and healthy Christian role models. My mom said I needed good role models. My dad worked on the road and had ‘turned his back on God,’ so Youth Pastor Jeff stepped in to provide adolescent mentorship and explain manhood and sex and masturbation when I was twelve. He also explained we needed to raise $500 to earn a spot building schools in Mexico.
One time this kid, Tony, pulled a knife on Jeff, and Jeff talked him down as if Tony was waving a pool noodle. Teen Night was Michigan’s impoverished youth: a hormone-shaped splatter of Black, White, and Mexican girls and boys without options. I was haphazardly poor and one of nine children. My parents were the rare story of downward mobility in America: middle-class kids who grew up to raise their own family in the hood. On my block, that made us lucky.
Jeff welcomed Tony back the next week.
No kid at Teen Night had travelled outside America. Many hadn’t left West Michigan. For us, the first chance to see the world cost $500 and meant building schools in Mexico or Guatemala on road trips that turned church buses into hotbeds for teen pregnancy. I never went on the trips, but I saw what caged and lonely kids will do to earn that slice of freedom.
The characters in R34L17y are based on real people. They hurt themselves and each other. They make us laugh and let us down. Like lush black-and-white memories of a soft-focus America, I remember more fondly than it deserves. When you grow up at Teen Night, the world beyond your neighborhood is a theory. You don’t know your life is tragic. You’re easy to judge, and we do.
Tony never brought a knife back on Tuesday nights. After a while, we became friends. As much as anyone could be friends with Tony. I remember he liked to ask new kids, ‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’
Think about it. Stop and think about it. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?
I dug a grave a week after my seventeenth birthday in the glow of a minivan’s headlights. I knew my girlfriend had been abused by her mom’s boyfriend before we dated, then one day I found out it never stopped. The adults she told didn’t believe her. Maybe due to his status, or hers. I’m lucky there were dogs at his house that night. I’m lucky that grave stayed empty. But what if one decision was all anyone ever knew about me? What if one teenage brain with no concept of consequence got life before learning what life is?
It happens in America. It will keep happening in America.
Tony went to prison a year later.
Caleb’s short film is available on request. The whole project includes 5 more parts, which we can share with you also.
