A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about the uplifting and relaxing experience of taking my son to court for truancy. Brief recap: In Texas, if, say, your seventeen year old child, who lives independently, takes care of himself, buys his own food and gas and concert tickets, owns his own car, and demonstrates daily acts of thoughtfulness, compassion and general total-duded-ness, decides that having to attend chemistry first period is not part of his Desired Life Experience, and if, say, he does this forty-seven times in a row, there’s a very good chance that you, the parent, will find yourself in a court case titled State of Texas vs. Henry’s Mom.

Your child won’t believe you when you tell him this will happen, because teenagers, like two-year-olds and men having midlife crises in little sports cars with trophy girlfriends, believe themselves utterly bulletproof. Oh, you can wave the stack of notices at the child, the ones that arrive like clockwork saying You better make your kid go to school or else. And the kid will just change the subject and talk about some show at Emo’s or his latest “public art” project.

Anyway, so we went to court along with a room full of other parents and their truant children, and like characters in a Russian novel, we sat and suffered endlessly, lectured in English and Spanish and hearing just how stupid we all were.

Then the judge told my son he better quit fucking up and that he had to show up again in a couple of weeks whereupon his attendance record would again be reviewed. So, yes, I got to go to court again.

image from rbrwebdesign.com

As we sat in the little waiting area outside of judge’s chambers, we got to play a guessing game: Guess What The Group Exiting the Courtroom Was In There For. (Apparently they call in defendants en masse, grouped by offense.) Hen takes one look at a spray-tanned, perfectly pedicured Sorori-slut and mutters, “Drunk driving.”

I chastise him. “Son, don’t be so judgmental. You don’t know what she’s in for. And you know, I used to drive drunk and my toenails never looked that good.”

Then I eavesdrop as the girl goes to the front counter to pay her fine. Drunk driving.

My boy might not know calculus, but he does know people.

Next, a young woman exits the courtroom and she, too, approaches the clerk to pay her fine. We listen in—not difficult as she is neither discreet nor, apparently ashamed—and learn she has been summoned to court for public intoxication. We hear the clerk tell the girl, “You must pay your fine, stay out of trouble for six months, and do twenty hours of community service.”

She responds, “But my twenty-first birthday falls during that time. What if I want to go to Sixth Street and do shots and get really really drunk again? Cops don’t give tickets on your birthday, do they?”

You have to love a city where people are so comfortable with law breaking that they casually discuss their plans for future cop run-ins with a court clerk.

For our part, we got to go in after a long wait and, for the second time in a month, feign reverence for a man who clearly likes to hear himself yap. But before the lecture kicked in, he looked at my son’s attendance record and dramatically shook his head back and forth back and forth back and forth like the one tardy he had on an otherwise perfect record was akin to having anally raped a pack of disabled Chihuahaus just prior to driving his Cadillac through the front of a nursing home.

“Well,” he said, at last, “I guess you did show some improvement.”

Then he began his lecture, a variation on the one he’d offered us the first time. In this lecture, he tells my son that he’ll never get to college if he keeps this up, and what a tragedy that will be and yadda yadda.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I loved college. I had to run away to college when my father informed me that, despite the fact I graduated in the top five of my high school class, that I was not allowed to seek a higher education. I was a girl, and girls got married and had kids. I had to fight for an education, and I did, and my English degree made me a very entertaining waitress for a very long time. And if my son wanted to go to college—he’s not sure yet—I would sell my house to send him there. So I’m not dismissing college as an option.

image from opi.com

But this is Austin, people. There’s not a better city in the world to give a kid the message that you can totally get by without a degree. And, with the University of Texas being the biggest academy in the known universe, there’s also not a better place to observe a couple of other key points, a big one being that trust funds and daddy’s money, if you happen to have these things, means that, conversely, you can get a degree and never have to use it.

When I first moved here, Henry was a little baby. I wanted to stay home with him. So I wrote term papers for these rich kids. I totally undercut myself and barely charged them at all, thinking my $60 fee was outrageous, not knowing they spent that much on breakfast every day. I was a great paper writer, my main struggle being how to keep a paper at a B or C, because even writing other people’s papers, I wanted an A. When I finally quit, the students panicked. One pulled up in his brand new Saab and $300 sneakers telling me he’d pay me whatever I wanted. Another asked me to move to Chicago with him for grad school, and told me his father would set up an account to pay me to get him through.

My kid, not having the benefit of family money, and being raised by a single mother who further assured a poverty lifestyle by insisting on being an artist, learned different lessons than the rich kids. He learned street smarts and strategies and how to hustle. He was my partner in a pet sitting and house sitting operation that kept us fed while I struggled to get my writing on the map. He was co-raised by a group of nutty artists and a pack of wild gay men who demonstrated the meaning of alternative lifestyle. He figured out how to crash concerts and get on guest lists, keeping his expenses down.

pack of wild gay men image from www.brightonlife.com

Along the way, courtesy of the friends I keep and the assignments I got, he came to meet members of Austin’s creative class and musical luminaries and successfully self-employed—folks like the Soup Peddler, James McMurtry, Jon Dee Graham, Molly Ivins, Genevieve Van Cleve, Guy Forsyth, and a million other people who demonstrated you certainly can make it without succumbing to some middle management trap and dreams of a house in Round Rock.

image of soup peddler from www.juicythis.com

Back when he was in seventh grade, wanting to trade out the violin for electric guitar, he informed me that his music teacher wouldn’t sign the paperwork to let him drop out of orchestra. The man, an arrogant jackass, informed my child that guitarists are a dime a dozen in this town and he’d never make it playing the axe. Because, you know, violinists have a much better shot of hitting it big.

The letter I wrote that teacher is lost now, but it was, I recall, long and biting and I informed him that if my son wanted to sit home and play Norwegian Wood on a loop for the cats and never make a dime at it, then fuck that teacher for trying to squash his dreams. Whatever happened to passion? Apparently for that guy, it got lost in the frustration of not making it big with his fiddle, a frustration that left him picking on little kids with big dreams.

We get to go see the judge again in June. If the kid manages to keep a good attendance record, we avoid the fines (each of us can be fined up to $500) and the case against me is dropped. Henry gets the seriousness of this— I don’t mean a seriousness of early morning calculus but the importance of flying beneath the radar from now on.

Which didn’t stop him, as we left the courthouse after being informed to stay out of trouble, from flipping open his phone and getting on the horn with his band mates to schedule his latest post-curfew, public trespassing performance, a gig that required planning, marketing, organization, and musical expertise. Nothing, I think, they teach him in school.

Spike Gillespie puts on The Dick Monologues and blogs for LaunchPad Coworking and for her own amusement at www.spikeg.com. She knows who you are.