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D R A M A_ Q U E E N
- - - - - - - - - - T A B L E_ T A L K Are faith healer parents guilty of criminal neglect? Talk about parental values and kids' rights in Table Talk's Mothers area ___________________
R E C E N T L Y Time for One Thing: Marked-down memories What I learned from my breakdown Drama Queen: The worst toys ever Sleeping in One mother's gain BROWSE THE SECOND THOUGHTS ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Mamafesto
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EARNING CREDIT IN THE STRAIGHT WORLD | PAGE 1, 2
That Backman perhaps wanted and expected to get caught is obvious. He chose to hide in the town where he'd lived as a young man, invited discovery by enrolling in a school where a lot of the faculty might have remembered him (and even took some of the same classes from the same teachers). His picture in the 1986 yearbook was the clue that convinced police of his real identity. Backman hasn't said much -- only that he wanted a chance to start over somehow, and that he thought he could do that if he went, literally, back to where his trouble started. He told the police he'd hoped that this time, he could go to college instead of into crime. It's not clear when he planned to start this new life -- he "transferred" into Grant with high-quality forgeries of transcripts from Beverly Hills High School, which are now the subject of yet another charge against him. He didn't fool around, either: These were the transcripts of a student with a sterling GPA and a star position on the basketball team. A woman who claimed to be his guardian (and had forged papers to prove it) helped him enroll. Backman managed four months at Grant without a whisper of suspicion. The girl who had the locker next to his said later that the only strange thing she noticed about him was that he had a bit of a bald spot. He told a few tall tales, the big one being that he was Diana Ross' nephew. No one really believed him, but neither did anyone think it very strange for a high school student to tell stories like this. High school's tough; making friends sometimes requires desperate measures. Like the brand-new red Camaro Backman drove -- everyone noticed that car. (It turns out that one of the ways Backman's been making money in recent years is by buying sports cars with fake credit and then selling them in Canada for a tidy profit.) Apparently, no faculty called his "guardian," no one visited his home -- he was doing well in school, after all. The homework was coming in on time, he didn't miss classes, he didn't get into fights. That day, we wondered if it was a screenplay, a novel. We imagined planting spies. What a great way to get a little peer pressure to work on your teenager: Plant an adult at the locker next door, someone who seems young and in the know, who can drop the occasional comment about drugs, sex, homework. Not spies to bring classified information to the parents, but to take the parents' hard-won wisdom to the kids: That's not the most flattering haircut. Cleavage does not make you look older. Do your homework. Be nice to your mother. The truth is, I think Backman had the right idea. As with all the other mistakes he'd made, he went about this in an unfortunate way. But he'd taken a wrong turn in life, left high school with the wrong attitude and walked a twisting path. One small crime, one little fraud, led to another -- and another. And so our lives go; every adult can look back over the last few decades and see misbegotten choices, wonder how each turning took place, what were we thinking at the time. Perhaps Backman really did figure out that things were going the wrong way and he returned to the biggest crossroads of his life just to get a look at the road signs again. Whether he is sincere or not, I do not know. Whether he understands the irony of using fake documents to get out of a life of lies -- I don't know this, either. But I think he had the right idea. Parents and faculty, of course, are concerned now that this so-called career criminal has somehow poisoned the minds of his high school friends, started to pull them down the same road. But perhaps the opposite was true; perhaps a few months spent with forward-thinking, excited young people with big dreams has changed Michael Backman. What if we sentenced other nonviolent criminals to do precisely this -- repeat high school? Offer it as an alternative to prison, even to community service. And I don't mean a separate "adult" high school or a community college diploma mill. I mean the whole enchilada: U.S. history at 8:15 a.m., too much homework, pep rallies, the daily droning of announcements while your neighbors throw spitballs at your head, the good teachers who make you think and the bad ones who bore and wound you, the social rejection and the unexpectedly successful date, the truancy officers and vice principals and term papers. High school is a place of few choices and many choices, narrow options and endless possibility. Perhaps we should take all the Michael Backmans, all the bright ones marching down the wrong roads, and let them start over in the same messy postadolescent intersection of paths, where road signs abound.
High school is way cheaper, too.
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