Teenage Wasteland
It doesn’t matter what time it is. Do you know where your children are? If you live in Plano, one of Texas’ toniest suburbs, they may be strung out on heroin somewhere. Or on trial for distributing it. Or dead.
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For Sergeant Paul, whose team of undercover officers has worked hard to keep the threat of heroin at bay, such numbers are dispiriting. As he drove me through the streets of Plano to the house that serves as home base for the city’s undercover cops, I thought of news footage I had recently seen: shots of uniformed federales brandishing sticks in the poppy fields of southern Mexico, swatting at the crimson-colored flowers until their petals fell to the ground, and I wondered if he too was fighting a losing battle.
PLANO WAS NAMED FOR THE PLAINS, THE RICH BLACKLAND prairie of cotton farms and alfalfa fields that once rolled out beneath the sky toward Oklahoma. In 1960, when it was still a quiet, mostly Baptist farming town, it had only 3,500 residents, and the bulk of its land was owned by the Haggards and the Harringtons, two local families who had been there since the 1850’s. Plano was dry then, and there wasn’t much to do on a Saturday night other than tool down a country road with the radio on or maybe head over to Lake Dallas for a six-pack. Even as recently as the late sixties, it had little more than a Dairy Queen and a pharmacy for landmarks. But in the sixties and seventies, expansion of Central Expressway turned the two-lane ribbon of blacktop that ran through Plano into one of Dallas’ major urban arteries, quickly transforming the town into a bedroom community. By 1981, with the construction of the Collin Creek Mall, then the largest mall in North Texas, and the relocation of several Dallas businesses, it had become a full-fledged city. Within a few years most of the prairie land had vanished, swallowed up by rows of strip malls, office parks, and cul-de-sacs. In the tony Willow Bend neighborhood, the towheaded prairie grasses have been tamed into polo grounds.
Although Plano begins east of Central Expressway—where modest frame houses lie near its former business hub, an unhurried street of antiques shops that dead-ends at the rusting railroad depot—the city has grown rapidly westward. These days, the heart of Plano lies on the other side of the expressway, where six-lane boulevards slice the city into a grid of disorientingly similar streets. Locally owned businesses are rare in this land of high-end franchises and upscale chain stores; even the French restaurant is part of a national conglomerate. A ready-made community for newcomers, West Plano seems designed to feel immediately familiar with its man-made ponds, newly planted saplings, and sod that is kept a vibrant green under the spray of a thousand sprinkler systems. This is where the city’s subdivisions and gated communities lie, their streets lined with ordinary split-level homes as well as what residents jokingly call “tract mansions”: enormous redbrick houses that can be differentiated from one another only by tiny regal flourishes—an ornate brass knocker, a stained-glass window above the entryway—that look like developers’ afterthoughts. Many of these neighborhoods are only partially built, bearing signs (“Homes Beginning at $400,000") that attract buyers while buzz saws hum in the background.
Plano no longer has a downtown. Legacy Drive, where the city’s ambitions are proudly displayed, is the closest thing to a town center. Ross Perot bought a large spread of land in West Plano’s northwest corner in 1982 and built the monolithic, reflective green-glass bunker, surrounded by a chain-link fence and barbed wire, that now serves as headquarters for Electronic Data Systems. EDS, like other corporate headquarters along Legacy Drive, is a small civilization unto itself, with its own auto repair center, a 60,000-square-foot health club, even a sunken lake and waterfall to contemplate while eating at one of its three cafeterias. It is a place of surprising uniformity—until this past fall, male EDS employees were required to wear ties and white dress shirts—and its design reflects a rigid hierarchy; its elevated executive suites, which soar over the two-story-high palm trees of its central atrium, are referred to by employees as the God Pod. Each EDS entrance has its own armed guards, surveillance cameras, and tire shredders to help fend off terrorists and corporate spies. Farther down Legacy Drive are the headquarters of Frito-Lay, Dr Pepper/Seven Up, Fina Oil, and a host of other companies, each one a sleek monument to corporate efficiency. The low-slung headquarters of J. C. Penney—which has its own jogging trails, day-care center, and robots that sort the mail—would be a one-hundred-story tall skyscraper if turned on its end.
This is a community of strivers—of people who came here to further their careers or improve their standard of living—and the burden of their expectations often falls squarely on the shoulders of their children, who are meant, without exception, to excel. Averageness is not looked kindly upon. There are cheerleading classes for toddlers, SAT prep classes for students who have barely begun high school, and a dizzying array of extracurricular activities that promise to give kids an edge over the competition. Plano Senior High reminds students of what is at stake with a map that hangs near the cafeteria; it tracks where seniors are heading to college with brightly colored thumbtacks, the plastic nubs clustered around the country’s finest universities. Plano’s senior high schools are among the most rigorous in the state and consistently triumph in any sort of achievement that can be ranked, scored, or tallied. They have some of the highest SAT scores in Texas and the second-largest advanced-placement program in the country, and they have won dozens of state athletic championships. A preoccupation with being number one is the unofficial reason that Plano Senior High and Plano East Senior High, both of which educate only eleventh and twelfth graders, have had unusually high enrollments, with 3,336 and 2,336 students respectively, giving coaches large pools of potential players from which to pick winning football teams. This fall a third senior high will open.
In general, teenagers in Plano are less anxious about fitting in than they are about succeeding. The pressure they feel to live up to their parents’ expectations takes an extraordinary toll; high school students speak not only of insomnia and eating disorders but also of stress-related hair loss and ulcers. Disappointment over grades was commonly blamed for the spate of suicides that began in 1983, a phenomenon that first illuminated for parents a level of teenage despair that seemed at odds with the community’s middle-class comforts. What local teens nicknamed the Death Club began inauspiciously enough on February 23, 1983, when a sixteen-year-old whose best friend had just been killed in a car accident was found in his car dead from carbon monoxide poisoning as Pink Floyd’s “Goodbye Cruel World” played on the tape deck. Six days later, an eighteen-year-old killed himself, also by carbon monoxide poisoning, and that spring a fourteen-year-old shot himself with a .22-caliber rifle; both suicides, it was speculated, were the result of the pressure to get good grades. In August came the suicides of seventeen-year-old sweethearts who couldn’t bear to stop dating as their parents had ordered. Later that week, an eighteen-year-old died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds, distraught over breaking up with his girlfriend, and the following February a fourteen-year-old shot himself with a .357 magnum after having his teeth fitted with braces. More than a dozen other Plano teens tried to kill themselves. Some ransacked their parents’ medicine cabinets for pills (Valium, Tylenol, Anacin, Sominex, even Alka-Seltzer) that they then took in great number. Others slashed themselves with razors, and one teen used a pair of scissors. One boy tried to hang himself with his shirt.
Then, as now, national headlines resounded with the same question, Why Plano? Some blamed the city’s rootlessness, others its high expectations; the Centers for Disease Control investigated and found no particular cause. With the exception of the high school sweethearts, none of the teens wrote suicide notes, leaving parents with the unhappy task of examining why their kids, who had been given everything, chose to throw it all away.
Parents would grapple with the same question more than a decade later when heroin first made its presence known, and they would find themselves similarly unprepared. Belita Nelson, formerly the debate coach at Plano East Senior High, told me about the day she found needles and a syringe in her house. “My first reaction was, ‘Who do they belong to?’” she recalled, “because I knew they weren’t Jason’s. He had just finished a summer program at Dartmouth, he was making A’s and winning debate tournaments, he never came home late, he was dating the right girl. This was the kid at the doctor’s office who would scream bloody murder when the doctor got out the needle. We think we know our children so well.”
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