To Have and Have Not

When I was eleven, I went to visit my two girl cousins -- one a year younger, one a year older -- in Kent, Ohio. My aunt and uncle took us to the A&W drive-in, to a water park and to play mini-golf; in the backyard, we played wiffleball and stayed in the kiddie pool until it was dark, at which point we went inside, built forts and played dare-free games of Truth or Dare. Until then, I had never quite experienced wholesomeness. When I returned to Manhattan's East Village, where I had grown up reading Russian novels and stepping over bums on my way to school, I, so the story goes, bitterly greeted my parents by saying, "You didn't tell me that was going on."

This week, I went back to Northern Ohio for the first time in many years, to see if I could figure out what was going on at Timken Senior High School, where sixty-four of the 490 female students are pregnant. The numbers were teeming with potential: male students impregnating for sport, girls in a pregnancy cult, fertility drugs in the water.

A crotchety August 21 editorial in the Canton Repository started the media frenzy, condemning "faulty priorities." CNN found one girl who said that she knew about birth control, but just wanted a baby. A local Christian radio station, The Light, urged teenagers to keep their sexual feelings "asleep" by listening to gospel music rather than romantic pop songs. One of the station's personalities is the author of a book called Kissed the Girls and Made Them Cry: Why Women Lose When They Give In. The fact that an abstinence-only program is reportedly in place at Timken has not stopped such virginity promoters from pushing their own versions, which have names like "Stay Strong."

The principal of Timken Senior High School, Kim Redmond, announced that she had "no idea" what had contributed to the extremely high teen-pregnancy rate at her school. Naturally, websites from Daily Kos to Drudge pounced. "Maybe that's part of the problem," dozens of bloggers snickered. "Maybe those teen girls could show her."

It's been a national running joke for days. There was the too-perfect matter of the school's team name: the Trojans. Someone's already floated the idea for an "I couldn't get laid at Timken High" T-shirt. When I told the gawky young rental-car counterperson why I was in Ohio, he put his hands up and said, "I didn't do it." The more you look, the more accidental jokes there are. My favorite was the sermon title on a church sign directly across from the school: "The Nature of Doing it Again ... Again."

Canton is a third-tier industrial city that was briefly successful decades ago. The downtown area is decrepit and vaguely dangerous. On the main street, there are boarded-up buildings, stretches of trash-strewn grass, gas stations (Regular costs $3.09 a gallon), fast-food restaurants, churches and car dealerships. During the day, only a few people are walking along the main street at any time, and menace hangs in the air. During my three days there, men followed me through the streets several times. One pursuer stopped cold when he saw my notebook and asked if I was a caseworker. When he found out I wasn't, he hit on me.

Timken is one of two large schools in the city; the other is McKinley, which is set in a cozy tree-filled suburban neighborhood, right behind the Football Hall of Fame. Timken is set in an imposing, Germanic-looking building on the main street that runs through downtown. There are multiple outbuildings, including one very shiny new one.    

Tuesday was the first day of school. Roughly half black, half white and most relatively poor, a crowd of students poured into school wearing their best jeans and T-shirts (one showed a cartoon squirrel and had the caption "Protect Your Nuts"). Since the principal hadn't returned my calls or emails, I stopped by to see if I could make an appointment. I caught a glimpse of her practical haircut, matronly glasses and administrator jersey tucked into pants just before she started yelling at me. "I want this whole thing to be over!" she said. "I'm not going to talk to you, and I don't want you trying to talk to any of our students on the way out!" She then picked up the phone and spoke with someone about having me removed from the premises.