A memory from the other side
When I was in college -- and when I was supposed to be in college -- I lived in a really awful house on the, um, rougher side of Anytown. A friend of mine owned the house; actually, his parents owned it, free and clear, and charged him $100 a month to live there. Mark turned around and charged his friends $100 a month to live there. Whether there were two of us or five of us, it was $100 a month per person. Pretty good racket for Mark, I'd say.

Anyway, the house was an absolute shithole. Conjure the worst image you can of a place inhabited by men in their early 20s, and make it about five times worse. We once had a 400-cubic-inch Trans Am engine torn down in the living room. One really cold night, we parked our motorcycles in the house. The bathroom was so gawdawful, I wouldn't even use it. I took showers at school or at the health club.

Most of the time, we were too drunk to notice. And when you had 30 or 40 people in the house, as we did on most weekend nights, it was hard to see the crud.

When you have 30 or 40 partyers, it's impossible to actually know all of them. You start with your core group of friends, then a few of their friends show up, then a few of their friends show up, and before long, we were among people who were five or six links removed from us. Occasionally, one of the five-or-six-removed would drop by on Sunday morning, after the revelry died down; or one would show up to a subsequent gathering, despite the fact that his or her original link wasn't there.

That's a really long way of saying I don't know how I met Lee Ann. I have no idea what my original connection to her was. But one day in the spring of 1989, she called our house. She asked for one of our friends who didn't live there. Then she asked for Mark; he wasn't there either. "Then I guess you'll do," she said.

She was stranded somewhere and needed a ride. I said, "Well, OK. Do you mind riding a motorcycle?" She said that was fine. I strapped the extra helmet to the bike, picked her up from wherever she was, and took her to wherever it was she needed to go.

She began showing up to our parties without her original links. She wasn't really becoming one of us, however; she was a few years younger -- I think she was 17 in 1989 -- and, while none of us were exactly Rhodes scholars, she was really not the brightest bulb. Mark took to calling her "Box o' Rocks," as in "dumb as a ... " But she provided us amusement, and that was usually enough to get a beer from our refrigerator. She wasn't particuarly attractive, but she was attractive enough that one of our friends dated her a few times. She kind of merged into the crowd.

She began calling me quite often that summer when she needed a ride somewhere, and if I had nothing better to do, I'd provide. One night, in mid-August, she called. "I need a ride," she said. "Not on the motorcycle, though."

"OK." I found the key to my truck, somewhere, and went and picked her up. She lit a cigarette, and put it out.

"Seems like a waste of a good cigarette," I said.

"I'm pregnant," she said.

Oh. I put out my cigarette, out of courtesy. Waste of another good smoke.

"Um," I said. I knew Lee Ann hadn't been with any of us, but I wasn't sure if that made the answer to my next question any more or less my business. "By whom?"

"Sugar," she said.

"I'm sorry," I said. "Who's Sugar?"

She explained that Sugar was a guy she met at some party. He was going to be a pro boxer someday; he had been a Golden Gloves champion or some such back in Arizona. He also was on probation in Arizona, she said, which made it kind of tough for him to get a job in Anytown, because technically, he was supposed to be in Arizona, not in Anytown. And, oh, by the way, Sugar's black, she added.

In Anytown -- not the most racially diverse place in the world -- it was necessary to point this out. This made everything different, even in 1989. This made her situation, as a white girl in Anytown, even more delicate.

I wondered, for the 4,231st time in my life, why it was that I was tagged with the "Everyone will bare his or her soul to you" designation. I really didn't want to be everybody's confidant; it just happened that way. On that night in August of 1989, I was driving around with a 17-year-old pregnant girl I barely knew, and suddenly I was going to be the person to help her figure out what she needed to do next. I knew then I wasn't going to like where this was going.

"Well, um, what do you do next?" I said. "Are you going to marry Sugar?" You could count the number of interracial couples in Anytown -- a city of almost 135,000 at the time -- on the fingers of two hands. I knew what the answer to that question was going to be.

"I don't know," she said, looking out the truck window. "Probably not. I'm going to live with him, though."

I realized at this point I hadn't asked where I was taking her. I asked. "I don't know," she said. "Sugar's going to be home at 3," meaning 3 a.m. "You can take me there then, I guess."

It was a little after 1. I drove her around Anytown for a couple of hours, listening to her life story. She was living with her grandmother. Her mom was an alcoholic. Her dad lived in St. Louis or Kansas City or somewhere. She had actually been a decent student and a freshman cheerleader at a high school across town, in a particularly affluent area. She decided she didn't fit in, moved in with her grandmother, transferred to a school on the north side and dropped out. It was already clear that she was probably going to function at the level of a high school freshman for the rest of her life.

She was going to keep the kid. She was pretty sure of that, she said. Beyond that, she didn't know.

"When are you due?" I asked. "March," she said.

"Are you seeing a doctor?" I had never used the words "prenatal" and "care" in a sentence at that point in my life, but I knew that a pregnant girl needed to be seeing a doctor. "No," she replied. "I don't have any money."

Nor any insurance, nor anybody to make sure she was seeing a doctor. There wasn't going to be a lot I could do about it at 3 a.m. on that night in August. I took a deep breath and wanted to know if she was ready to go home, wherever home was.

She gave me directions to a place in the really, really bad part of Anytown. "I don't think I'm going to stay here tonight," she said, noting a party was still raging. "But I don't know. Wait for a minute, and if I don't come back out, I'll talk to you later."

I waited for about 10 minutes -- long enough for a violent fight between two young black women to break out in the front yard. One girl's shirt was ripped, revealing that she was braless. The other had a kitchen knife. At this point, I decided Lee Ann was staying. My 21-year-old mind had made itself up -- her situation, it told me. She got herself into it, she can get herself out. She's a big girl. Wasn't going to be any chivalry here. I knew when I was in over my head.

I started my truck, lit a smoke, and left as subtly -- and as quickly -- as I could. I stopped at a nearby Git-N-Go and dialed 911 on a pay phone. I told the voice on the other end that they might want to go check out the melee on Scott Street. I hung up. I went home.

I thought not at all about Lee Ann for about another month and a half, until she called me needing a ride to work. She was living with a friend in a two-room apartment that had seen its better days about 40 years previous. I knocked on the door and let myself in when Lee Ann didn't answer.

I found her curled up on the floor in her work uniform, heaving. Morning sickness at 5 p.m., apparently. Her eyes were bloodshot, her normally pale skin had moved a few shades down to pasty. "You need to see a doctor," I said, stating the painfully obvious.

"No," she sobbed. "If I don't show up today, they'll fire me."

"Come on," I said. "Let's go."

"Just leave me here," she said. "I'll be fine. I'll call and tell them I'll be late."

I helped her up and took her to a walk-in clinic, which was getting ready to shut down for the night. "She's really sick," I said. "I don't know with what. She's pregnant."

The receptionist looked at me. "She's just a friend," I said. "Not mine."

Mollified, the receptionist gave me a clipboard to fill out. Lee Ann, slumped in the seat, helped me fill it out as best as she could. Under "Emergency Contact," she listed her grandmother's name. "I don't know her phone number," she said. "Any chance it's in the book?" I asked. "I don't know," she said. I went to the receptionist and got a phone book. I located her name and address. "This her?" I asked. "Yeah," she said. Yay. An emergency contact number.

The doctor called her back, checked her out, deemed her OK and sent her home with instructions to take better care of herself. Said the kid looked fine.

I wasn't sure what to do at this point, until we saw the receptionist again. She certainly knew what to do. "Forty-five dollars," she said. I looked at Lee Ann. Her face said I don't have it. I wrote a $45 check to the walk-in clinic. I made a mental note to figure out another way to get food and beer that week.

I took her to her workplace -- by now she was two, maybe three hours late -- and asked her if she had a ride home. "I can get one," she said. "I'll pay you back next week for the doctor."

"Whenever," I said. "Get better."

Summer became fall, which became winter. I moved out of the shithole house and moved in with my mom, needing to get my finances back in order after a several-month just-turned-21 drinking binge. The day after I finally got my checkbook back up to zero, I received a call.

"It's Lee Ann," she said, weakly. I hadn't spoken to her since that day in the walk-in clinic. "I had my baby. It's a girl."

"Congratulations," I said, not really enthusiastically. It was Saturday morning, four inches of snow were on the ground, and it took me a minute or two to remember who "Lee Ann" was.

"The doctor said I can go home," she said. "But Sugar's working. I need a ride."

I got in my truck, backed out of the driveway, and realized there was no way I could put a baby seat in my truck. I went back in, told Lee Ann's story to my mom in about a minute, and asked to borrow her car.

"I wonder sometimes how you get yourself into these situations," she said.

"At least I'm observing them from the periphery," I reminded her.

"That makes me feel a little bit better," she said. "I think."

I drove my mom's car to a south-side hospital. It was just Lee Ann and her baby. No boyfriend, no other family. Just the two of them.

I greeted Lee Ann and looked at the baby. At that point in my life, the little girl was the youngest person I had ever seen. She had a full head of wiry hair, and her skin was a light coffee-with-cream color. She still had the scrunchy baby face, and was opening her eyes only briefly enough for me to determine that they were big and brown and beautiful.

I looked around the empty room. No balloons, no flowers, none of the accoutrements I always imagned a new mom's room would have. Little girl, I thought, you have no idea what you've gotten yourself into just by being born.

A nurse was walking out as I was walking in. "Hi," she said, perkily. Then, more of a question, "Congratulations ... ?"

No, I said. Just a friend.

I helped Lee Ann with the paperwork the nurse had left. "What's her name?" I asked.

"Keisha," she said, smiling weakly.

Keisha. I looked over the paperwork Lee Ann had already filled out. "Keisha" on one page, "Keshia" on another. "How do you want to spell it?" I asked.

She looked at the two pieces of paper. "Which one do you like better?" she asked.

I haven't spoken to you for five months, I thought. Now I'm naming your kid. "K-E-I-S-H-A," I said. "Less likely people will mess that up."

When she received the official OK from the nurses, I helped Lee Ann buckle the kid into the car seat the hospital mercifully provided. We wheeled her to my mom's car. The nurse showed me how to strap in the car seat. "Congratulations," she said to Lee Ann.

"Thanks," she said weakly.

I took Lee Ann to yet another residence, a duplex on the north side. "It's only $199 a month here," she said. "We're sharing it with Sugar's friend and his girlfriend. They have a 2-year-old. Keisha can play with him."

I wished her luck. I wasn't sure what else to say. She went inside, and I went home.

Later that night, I found myself in the baby aisle at the grocery store. I didn't know what any of the stuff was. I knew even less what a 2-day-old kid would need. I finally settled on buying a big package of newborn-sized diapers and a six-pack of baby formula. I took it to the duplex. I knocked on the door. I heard a TV going, but nobody answered. I left the stuff by the front door and drove off, slowly, wishing I was intelligent enough to know what I really should have done in that situation. Wondering what I should have done for a girl I hardly knew.

I heard from Lee Ann one more time after that, in about August or September of '90. She called me at work and left a message with one of my co-workers. I called the number she left. The voice on the other end of the line answered with the name of a local, notorious "companionship" service.

Um. I said I was returning Lee Ann's call. The voice hesitated, and said, "Just a minute." I heard her put the phone down. After a few minutes, she came back. "She'll be here in a minute," the voice said. "Next time you call her here, ask for Brandy."

Brandy. OK. Lee Ann came to the phone and made small talk. "I'm engaged," I said. "Getting married next month."

"Good for you," she said. "I've done nine tonight. Nine!"

"Look, you know I don't judge anybody," I said, "but ... never mind. Where's your kid?"

"With my mom," she said. "Or my grandma."

"DId you need something?" I asked.

"No," she said. "I was just calling to say hi. I gotta get back to work."

Yeah, I said, me too.

Little Keisha was born on Feb. 28, 1990. Wherever she is, she'll be a teenager very soon. I think about her about once a year, when it gets really cold in late February. I think about her and I wonder how it is that some people can view human life as so disposable, how parents can just abandon their kids, and how the cycle will continue forever unless somebody way smarter than me can figure out a way to make it stop.