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Man who became father in his teens: My son ‘changed my life’

The day begins, as it often does, with a tiny voice insistently calling, “Up, up.”

Alexis Tellez rolls over and lifts Tonny, 2, out of the crib inches from his bed, carrying him to the bathroom, then kitchen where Tellez cooks them chorizo and eggs for breakfast. On this morning at least, the young father can be grateful his son didn’t wake him by climbing out of the crib and diving into his bed.

These quiet moments with his son in their family’s Brighton Park two-flat are special to Tellez, 20, who was a junior in high school when his girlfriend at the time surprised him with news she was pregnant. She showed him the positive test in a FaceTime call to prove it after he thought she was joking, he said.

Tellez’s parents were furious at first but grew supportive as their son — listening to advice he received from them, his principal and social worker — decided he wouldn’t drop out of Curie Metro High School but would finish and began looking for work.

“I was scared about it and I wasn’t ready to be a father,” Tellez said of the moment he learned he would be a dad.

“Now I have to be a man to take responsibility for my son,” he said. “It’s a lot, but I have to accept that. I wake up in the morning, go to work and I do it again … I gotta do what I gotta do to make money for my son.”

Tellez is the first-ever father in the teen-parenting program run by One Hope United, a longtime social services agency, and has sole custody of his son. The agency’s Wings program is designed to help young parents understand their baby’s behavior, nurture their child and cope with challenges. He also in some ways represents the new face of fathers in Cook County, where nearly half of child-custody cases now involve unmarried parents, officials say.

A soft-spoken but prolific talker who loves to joke, Tellez has already overcome a lot, including a childhood illness that took much of his hearing. He wears hearing aids in both ears and endured years of bullying growing up in the gang-infested neighborhood.

“You never know what’s going to happen,” he said. “I have to accept the way I am — I’m happy to have the hearing aids.”

Although he says he once hung out with gang members, Tellez long ago traded the lure of the streets for family life and uses the money he earns from two food-service jobs to help pay for family expenses like groceries and car repairs along with his son’s bills. Tellez knows he’s lucky to have a strong family support system that allows him to work while his mother cares for his son.

On this Father’s Day — which Tellez, who works every day except Monday, will be working — he has three dreams: to buy his own car; get certified as a forklift operator; and perhaps, one day, move with his family to a safer neighborhood on the North Side. “I want my kids to be happy,” he said. “Play outside, go to school.”

It took more than two years of scraping by on part-time work — just two to three shifts a week at an Englewood Church’s Chicken — before Tellez finally found a full-time job as a banquet server at the Hilton in Oak Lawn this spring. He learned he had been hired at about the same time a Cook County judge formally awarded him custody of Tonny (pronounced Tony) after the boy’s mother didn’t participate in the case, court records show.

All the unexpected good fortune left Tellez, who prayed frequently for these things at nearby St. Pancratius, a little thunderstruck. His boss at Church’s had a similar reaction with Tellez told her he wasn’t quitting — he still wanted to work one day a week.

His boss at Hilton had a similar view of Tellez. “He’s a hard worker,” said Clemente Zavala, 38, who started at the hotel 20 years ago speaking almost no English and now is the Hilton’s banquet supervisor. “I gave him the opportunity and he did a great job.”

“He told me he’s a father. He said he wants to do better for his son. I said, ‘Show me that you are a father.’ When we’re working we have to focus on what we’re doing. He’s doing a good job,” said Zavala, who recently assigned Tellez to work as a captain supervising other servers at a dinner. “Every day he’s learning something.”

Twice monthly, Tellez meets with One Hope United social worker Deborah Bashir, who chats with him about raising his son, building the boy’s vocabulary, knowledge and fine motor skills. She usually brings books, puzzles or toys. The social services agency first connected with the family after a referral from the hospital where Tonny was born.

Tellez is an unusual client, not only because he’s a father, but also because he’s working two jobs yet is there for every appointment with her. “I think he’s doing a really good job (as a parent) — he’s very nurturing, he’s very patient,” Bashir said. “All of my primary caregivers are female, so it’s a little different to see the father take on that role.”

“He does what he does because he loves Tonny and he wants what’s best for him. I tell him it’s the biggest, hardest job but it’s the most rewarding raising children.”

Bashir lately has been working with the family about the tantrum stage Tonny is going through and also encouraging Tellez to get Tonny, who still mostly uses one-word sentences, to talk more. Tellez speaks to the boy in English and Spanish and sometimes uses sign language. She’ll work with the family until next summer, when they can enroll Tonny in a Chicago Public Schools preschool program.

In addition to getting some help from the social service agency, Tellez said he was lucky to have role models in both his parents, including his father, Ismael who works 12 hours a day, six days at week at two jobs as a repairman. His father also helped him and his brother find jobs at the Hilton — he put out word his sons were looking for work, and a co-worker related to Zavala put them in touch.

Also living in the family’s two-flat are Tellez’s mother, Evangelina, his older brother, Julio and a younger brother, who is just a year older than Tonny.

His mother has made it possible for Tellez to work, relieving him of the burden to find child care by watching Tonny herself while his father is at work.

Still, Tellez remains concerned for his family’s safety. Last month, his working-class Brighton Park neighborhood, a former enclave for Eastern European immigrants that is now predominately Hispanic with a small but growing Asian presence, had the city’s worst mass shooting in almost four years.

Police said two gunmen with high-powered rifles opened fire on mourners at a memorial for another shooting victim, part of an ongoing gang war in the neighborhood. A brother and sister were killed and eight others wounded.

On an afternoon earlier this month, a man talking through an open van window to his girlfriend and their two young children was shot in the head despite pleading, “I’m with my kids!” to two teens who asked about his gang affiliation.

In February three men were killed inside a home not far from James Shields Elementary School in what prosecutors later said was a drug deal gone bad. Two white crosses along with about a dozen candles remain outside the front door. The two-story home is on the route Tellez walks with his son each day, past a colorful corner store that closed soon after the February murders.

Most days at midmorning when Tonny is getting restless, Tellez suggests they take a stroll. He walks backward down the flight of stairs from their second-floor apartment guiding Tonny, who takes the steps two feet at a time.

On a recent day, Tonny steps through the front door blinking into the light, breathing in the smell of fresh-cut grass. He turns immediately left, clutching his father’s pinkie with his hand, his footsteps twice the speed of his dad’s.

There’s so much to see. Brighton Park is a different world at 10:30 a.m. Tonny walks by a woman watering her roses, neighbors cracking jokes on the stoop, a woman and her daughter tending to the potted plants on their front steps.

Some things make Tonny stop in his tracks — the man pushing a car tire down the sidewalk, a big pickup truck and a street vendor pushing his elotes cart down the street. He picks a green leaf from a budding plant and shows it to Tellez.

But he doesn’t notice the police cameras or the signs on home windows that reads “Never mind the dog, beware of owner” and “We call police.” The neighborhood is too dangerous to let Tonny be outside except in the morning, Tellez said.

He doesn’t let his son play at the parks but sometimes Tonny and his uncle play in the backyard under a fruit tree their grandfather brought back from Mexico years ago.

Tellez scowls as he recalls the day a Gangster Two-Six Nation member flashed gang signs at him as he walked on Albany Avenue with his son. “I told him how can he do that in front of my son?”

Tellez never joined a gang, he says. But for a time in high school, he hung out with Latin King gang members, staying out late and worrying his parents, Tellez told the Tribune. But eventually he chose family over life on the streets. When he was a sophomore, his mother became pregnant with his youngest brother and Tellez began coming straight home from school each day to help take care of him.

Back home from their walk, Tonny enters the apartment to find his uncle and cousin shouting into plastic cups as “Curious George” — Tonny’s favorite TV show — plays on the television. His grandmother Evangelina has made pasta for lunch and Tonny takes small bites, picking up bits of noodles he finds unsatisfactory and returning them to a napkin she’s holding.

“He’s a fussy eater,” Evangelina Tellez explains with a smile.

She watches Tonny for hours while her son is at work. One day Tonny jumped in his crib as his father got dressed — strapping on a Velcro back brace and putting on a black dress shirt and pants. Tellez kissed his son goodbye, left home and got into the passenger seat of the family’s trusty Honda Accord as his brother Julio drove them both to work at the Hilton in Oak Lawn.

They drove past Tellez’s old high school as they made their way to the banquet hall, which was hosting the Little Village Lawndale High School prom. The brothers arrived at work early and clocked in, and Tellez began sorting silverware for the dinner service, instructing a new hire — a close friend Tellez had recommended — how to properly shine each piece.

Back home late after work, Tellez walks past graduation photos of him and his brother up on the wall near a porcelain angel that reads “Devote Yourselves to Prayer with a Thankful Heart” then enters his room, where Tonny’s baby prints hang on the wall.

Tellez still gets emotional thinking about the April day in 2015 when his son was born. He rushed to catch a series of buses and broke down when he held his 5-pound son for the first time at Mount Sinai Hospital.

“I started crying and I told him, ‘Welcome to my family,'” Tellez said. “He changed my life. I’m not thinking about myself anymore — I’m thinking about my family.’

sschmadeke@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @SteveSchmadeke