She's a slacker allright.

[I am a putrefying corpse.]

And a stoner obsessed with death.

[An apparition.]

And a flunkie and a felon crashing at her folks' place at the age of twenty-five.

[A dream.]

And that's not all.

[I am infectious.]

She has a cold.

[And I am infectious.]

Weaned on a devout Catholic education, Raquel Baker wears crosses because [religion is just so funny], and throws on a Malcolm X cap even though she can't stand racial politics. [It's just a movie prop, people.] She's also ashamed of her hair. And ashamed she's ashamed of her hair.

[Isn't that pathetic?]

But Raquel, a senior psychology student at San Francisco State University hellbent on ignoring her impending graduation, had to have done something right - something downright respectable - or else she wouldn't be here.

[I'd probably be on a milk carton.] She'd probably be on an expired milk carton, masking herself behind big black glasses and a well-worn cap. Call it bohemian grunge. She does.

From day to night to day, Raquel struggles to convince herself that she, [a lazy hedonist], can make a difference, [cliche that it is].

She's mastered that twentysomething trick of spiking social service with a healthy dose of frayed hopes, jaded expectations and [this is key] personal gratification - punctuated with an [oh, well] and a smile.

When she scrubs up for her weekly medical shift at the Berkeley Free Health Clinic, or trains future medics with six months of wing-it instruction, or counsels patients or answers the phone or takes out the trash throughout the week, Raquel seeks to [soften some of the blows leveled by capitalism], but she counts on nothing. She stopped counting when she turned twentysomething.

Most of the clinic's patients - a hodgepodge of students, stragglers, subsisters and the homeless stricken by a sexually transmitted disease - just want her to make the pain go away and don't want to hear about safe sex. They've heard enough from schools and spindoctors and from the streets, enough from the mighty power elite.

Raquel can relate. With a nod to the image of Christ bleeding on her T- shirt, she boasts a flair for the fringe and a vendetta against the establishment.

But first things first; fending off marginalization.

[It's hard to ignore the fact that the world is racist.] And tries to convince herself she's black, not Raquel. Black, not an individual. Black, not important.

[And the fact that my parents think I'm not black enough.] And rag on her for watching American Bandstand instead of Soul Train, weaning the African from African-American, and socializing with too few black friends even though she grew up in an almost all-white neighborhood.

[And then there's the fact that I'm a withdrawn loner who wears skulls on my T-shirts and has a lot of existential angst.] All the more reason to sock it to institutions.

Raquel's volunteering side lets her snub the status quo - even requires her to do so - with alternative-oriented free health care at the Berkeley clinic. The triple bill of busting a few norms, forging a collective structure and, [cliche that it is], making a difference swept her into social service.

There were other motivations, far less noble, like fleeing her house, appeasing her parents with the thought that [at least she's working], and earning a good grade in a summer class by reporting on a needle exchange.

But Raquel doesn't deny her indulgences; she indulges them. And none of them seem to interfere with her old-fashioned ethic of self-reliance.

[We try to empower people to have knowledge and control of their own bodies and not rely on some authority to tell them. I like my role as an equal, a member of the community just like they are - except capitalism hasn't forced me onto a park bench yet.]

Munching on a bagel from the clinic fridge, Raquel curls up on a couch, fixes on the television and dazes. The place is empty, closed for the night.

[In the sixties it was open all the time. It was on the cutting edge of social issues. Now people want to live their own lives. No one comes to meetings. We'll talk about doing something for the homeless, and then no one wants to do it.]

The clinic started in 1969 to treat people wounded in the Berkeley riots. Founded by Vietnam veterans who came home needing to heal and be healed, it merely flickers where it once flamed. Its alternative mission has floundered on all fronts.

Today's clinic, a skeletal swath of services, practices protocol medicine. Meting out mainly referrals and information, it treats about 50 people per day for minor ailments and sexually transmitted diseases.

Its power structure boils down to a committed leadership core and a nominal collective that [doesn't seem to care once the shift is over].

And its base of volunteers, once indivisible from the community, now consists of highly-educated, middle-class pre-professionals fighting hard to remember the clinic motto: It's not us telling them but everyone communicating with each other.

Raquel readily communicates her exhaustion. She snuggles under a sleeping bag, mumbles something about capitalism and explains why she shouldn't feel guilty ignoring panhandlers.

Just as the national anthem blares on television. Time to change the channel.

Better yet, time for bed. Two nights a week, Raquel sleeps at the clinic as night security. Anything to avoid going home.

[I'm actually kind of homeless. I don't even have a room at my parents' house. They didn't plan on my coming back when I went off to college.]

With a silent guffaw, Raquel seems to revel in the drama of her delinquency. [I wouldn't say revel.] She spills out her life in soft snippets and hard snaps and shrugs away any vestiges of Catholic schoolgirl piety. [It's all so mediocre.]

She'd rather reminisce about the time she got caught shoplifting costume jewelry and had her fingerprints taken at San Quentin, [it was so humiliating], or the time the cops stopped her [because I'm black] on her way home from work at Subway, or the ever popular [story of my parents' demise] - how her parents sold their suburban Bay Area dream house to pay for her Princeton education and she had a nervous breakdown and flunked out.

"It's all her fault," says her dad. "She never even said thank you."

"It's partly society's fault," says her mom. "But I don't understand how she could be so ungrateful. Her brother could have used that money."

[It's nobody's fault; it just is], says the daughter. [And I don't usually feel thankful when they're yelling at me, when their sacrifice has always been used to make me feel guilty!]

Tension, anyone? Raquel rolls along with her favorite and least favorite subjects: [Ridiculous] Dad and [Annoying] Mom.

[My mom teaches high school or something. I'm really not sure. We have nothing to talk about. My dad does some kind of computer programming. They both think I'm a freak who used to worship Satan. The truth is, I'm not stupid enough to believe in anything.]

But her parents, [always, always striving for upward mobility, until I ruined it], seem to embody all the beliefs she particularly can't stand.

Raquel blasts the American dream as an excuse to step on the little people, carps on the [racist] politics of racial unity and goes out of her way for shock value. If it's not off-kilter and at least a tad offensive, it's not Raquel.

And yet, her favorite television show is Beverly Hills 90210, the popular glam soap about very white, very rich, bratty, bitchy suburban highschoolers. Her best friend for the past decade-and-a-half has gobs and gobs of money. And, alas, her life has been a series of bad hair days.

[It's a generational thing.]

The hair, that is. The rest is anybody's guess. Raquel calls it the accoutrements of her class. Her parents call it assimilated hogwash. The rest of Danville, the nearly blackless affluent enclave where the Bakers live, call the cops when they see Raquel on the street at night.

Strip away a few Rolls Royces from Beverly Hills 90210, throw in a few trucks and a tree or two - pine, not palm - and you've got Danville. [It's a perfect statement of mainstream American values. I would even say documentary. The people are all self-centered and obsessed with being beautiful, and they don't listen to what the other person is saying.]

"Raquel's problem is that she doesn't listen," huffs her dad, downing a glass of Algerian wine, chopping away at the dead leaves on one of his plants.

"No she doesn't," agrees her mom, smoothing out holes in the carpet burrowed by two barstools.

"If she listened to us, she'd realize that this country is hostile to black people, and she wouldn't reject her culture like she has."

"If she listened to us, she'd have at least a few black friends. Her brother has almost all black friends. We just want her to be more balanced."

[I do have black friends, and I'm not interested in balancing anything.] Raquel outshouts the TV. [And I find it really offensive to have to make some kind of racial tally.]

Hits one and two. Long pause.

[If anything, my lack of balance bespeaks the way economic situations dictate values, whereby I would have similar values as people who tend not to be black.]

Raquel takes another hit of pot and shoots a fed-up stare into space. The cold clinic seems to match her mood, momentarily frozen in frustration. But it's not her parents, and it's not the pot that make her antsy. She has a term paper due the next day. Deconstructionism at the end of May. It can wait. It's chore time.

Down the hall, past the broken blue benches, safe sex signs and free clothes bin, the bathroom door won't stay open - just long enough for Raquel and a mop to squeeze in then slam! One hand grabs the garbage, another guides the mop, and another scrubs the commode. [It's all done with mirrors.] And a pinch of Ajax.

Then it's back to the books - the clinic's checkbooks. Raquel rifles through records, rips open envelopes, pores over purchase orders. It's her job. The only time she gets paid. The glamorless grunt work that gets her out of Danville.

And into solitude. Most of the bookkeeping burns midnight oil, when no folks can mess with her moping and mailing and munching. [No folks, meaning my folks.]

Lingering in limbo with respect to their daughter, Raquel's parents say they're proud, sort of.

"She's making a difference, no question," says her dad. "But she could make so much more of an impact using her mind. She's wasting her mind."

"I admire her volunteer work," says her mom. "I'm not the kind of person who could get involved with the homeless off the street. So wherever she gets that from, I think that's great. But she needs a little more of the capitalist mentality. She needs a master's degree and a PhD. We're not here to finance her."

[On the contrary], says Raquel. [I've never made enough money to pay the rent, so it's hard to see myself doing it. Besides, I don't like working. Eventually I might get some advanced degree, but for now I just want to live, and work at the clinic, and watch TV talk shows.]

And she is infectious.