The Real Disturbed Child in the Teenage Wasteland

The short story “Teenage Wasteland” explores the insecurity of an adult whose selfish desire for acceptance causes him to separate families and to ruin the lives of innocent, unsuspecting teenagers. When we first meet Cal, we want to believe that due to his ability to connect with teenagers will be able to help Donny. Even though Donny’s mother while “passing the living room [] winces”, the reader do not initially interpret this as a foreshadowing to the rest of the short story (38). We are even given hope when his attitude in school improves, but soon after we begin to see Cal’s true colors.

From the moment Cal suggests looser rules for a child already in a lax family, the reader realizes Cal wants not to help Donny but rather feed his selfish need for acceptance. Instead of acting like a mentor, he acts like a friend to them due to his childish desires and therefore disregards the children’s real needs. He uses his authority as an adult to override the parent’s own judgment and rightful authority over their own child. At one point in the story, Daisy begins to realize his overly pretentious attitude towards her and her husband when she says “The tutor had set down so many rules!” (39) Unfortunately she does not act off her frustration so the cycle continues. Daisy is incapable of escaping Cal’s spell, because of the false hope that somehow he will help her otherwise seemingly hopeless child. Her fear of him having the same “miserable adolescence…[that she] had always sworn no child of hers would ever” have causes her to disregard her instincts (38). He completely separates the family by taking control of Donny’s life and in turn creates his own family.

Cal’s lack of a support system and family cause him to steal the families of others. He is a child. His history of being controlled, by figures such as his wife, cause him to reach out for understanding by building a network of those who feel equally controlled by their parents. He helps them escape and bonds with them over their mutual pain. His mental level being that of a teenager for the most part the only eligible candidates for such a job were teenagers. Everyone realizes Cal wasn’t “like a grown-up at all” but few realize the consequences of giving such a mentally unstable “teenager” the responsibility of a child, in fact multiple children (41). Cal even possesses the responses of a child, the inability to blame oneself or one’s friends as a means of self-preservation and protection. He almost has a fear of getting in a trouble, a natural reaction among preschoolers but generally not adults. When Cal gets kicked out of school, instead of blaming his buddy Donny, he blames the school, the obvious innocent party in the incident, adding an equally obvious lie to reinforce his blame. He lives through his children, yet each individual means nothing; only the entire “family” he has created has meaning to his cold heart. As long as he is surrounded by acceptance, he could care less about the individual pain or desires of his patients. While they exist in the family, they are his friends. When they are gone, the relationship is likewise terminated. When Donnie leaves the program, Cal “does not object. He admit[s] he’d made no headway with Donny and said it was because Donny was emotionally disturbed” (42). He is unable to accept a failure and therefore blames the failure on the child, a past friend who no longer exists in his shallow world.

Donny is sucked dry of all desire to live and function as a community member when he loses the artificial family he had depended upon for all those months. Cal takes all he needs for Donny and leaves him cold and alone upon his departure. Donny’s parents, or rather Daisy, do not realize the effects of Cal on their child until Cal has sucked all the elements vital to survival from Donny’s system. First he builds a trust with a child that no force can break, leaving them untrusting of the rest of the world, and when he is gone from their lives they are lost and have inwardly disappeared from the world even before their physical disappearance. Cal has “a smile of hunger” both “feverish and avid” devouring the souls of the children he destroys, leaving them alone and trusting of no one (42). Cal’s desire to fit in kills children like Donny, showing that indeed he is the child in need of help. (764)