Back in reform school, Frank learned how to pick locks, rob stores, and make and use various drugs. He was freed at fourteen to attend public school where he was more comfortable, he says, “because everyone carried knives.” He quit at sixteen though, and his father kicked him out as a bad influence on his younger brother and sister. His mother and sister sneaked him into the basement to sleep during the cold months, however.
“She’s a pistol,” he says of his nine-year-old sister, smiling at the recollection. “A real beautiful little girl. Always was. She wanted me to take her wherever I go, but I had to stop going there because she would start crying every time I saw her.” That’s when he took a bus to New York City, but without any experience, the best work he could find was pumping gas.
Teddy
AT A SOUP KITCHEN ONE NIGHT, FRANK MET TEDDY, A SOFT-LOOKing young man of seventeen with glasses and sad eyes, and took him to the hole. Teddy is quiet and articulate, with clean-cut, almost preppy features. His father was killed in a car accident on Christmas Day when he was three years old, and his mother, he says, died “a violent death” two years ago.
“He’s never told us how she died exactly,” Frank says. “But I think it had to do with some boyfriend. I think Teddy saw it all, too.”
During the day, Teddy walks the streets, sometimes selling books and magazines for homeless entrepreneurs who use the operation as a front for dealing drugs. Teddy, himself, is very honest. “The only scam he’ll run is telling a storeowner that the soda machine took his money,” says Frank.
“I usually get something for that,” Teddy admits with a shy smile. “It’s an advantage I have, being white and looking the way I do. People tend to believe me. But I don’t want to abuse that too often, only when I really need some money. Once I went up to a lady on the street and told her I was new to the city and someone had stolen my money, and I was trying to get enough together to get back home. She gave me fifty bucks. She wanted to give me more, but I couldn’t let her. I spent most of the money on myself and felt rotten to the core, so I gave the rest away. I just couldn’t do that again,” he says contritely.
Teddy did well in school. “I was what they called a ‘gifted child,’ which of course means worthless on the streets. What makes you smart in school has nothing to do with the outside. I never realized how dumb I was until I met these guys,” he nods meekly toward the other boys in the hole. “Someday I’d like to go to college, though. I’ve been trying, but I can’t seem to save money. I need someone to keep it for me, not give it to me.”
Most of the community are undisciplined in keeping schedules. After waking with the others, Teddy leaves to buy coffee and, if he has enough money, a piece of pizza as well. He wanders for the rest of the day, looking for odd jobs and each day foraging a bit farther out, but by dusk, at least so far, he’s back in the hole.
“We have to stick together at night,” he says, clearly frightened at the prospect of not returning in time. “Anything can happen when you’re alone.”
The veterans in the hole community are protective of Teddy. “He wouldn’t leave for days when he first got here,” Felicia remembers. “We had to bring him food, but he wouldn’t eat. He’d just sit there,” she points to a corner, “and he’d cry. He’d stare at the wall and the light coming down and just stare and stare. It was the saddest thing I ever saw. Frank finally just carried him out, took him for pizza. I remember he said: ‘You haven’t lived until you’ve had New York pizza.’
“I didn’t think he should do that, pick him up and all. I mean he’s fully grown. After that, Teddy goes out most every day. He’s always back about sunset. But every so often he still stares at the walls for hours, like before.”
Teddy is upstairs in the park, staring vacantly at autumn’s changing leaves. “I dream a lot,” he says. “It’s like thinking for me.”
Jimmy
“TEDDY WILL TOUGHEN UP,” JIMMY ASSURES FRANK. JIMMY’S A TRUE street kid and proud of it. He frequently spends the night in the runaway hole, but will often disappear for weeks.
“I know everything there is to know about this city,” he boasts, hands on hips.
Which is the Empire State Building and which is the Chrysler Building?
“Everything important,” he amends, undeterred. “Everything important about surviving in the city. All the scams, drugs, people. You wouldn’t believe the people I know. I won’t tell you, but they’re big stars,” he smiles as if excited at the thought of really knowing the rich and famous.
Whatever his contacts, he has more energy than any two or three other homeless kids here. He wakes early, buys a cup of coffee and some candy bars, and leaves the area to “visit friends,” as he puts it, on the streets in other areas of the city. When he runs low on cash, he says, he visits tourist spots where he can pick pockets. Times Square was once his favorite. “It’s no good there now,” he says, “too many plain clothes cops.” So he prowls Penn Station.
“I like to steal, too,” he volunteers boldly. “It makes me feel productive.”
Jimmy’s story is a poignant variation of the others. At fourteen, he “took off” from a home where there were six children “and more on the way,” he says. “My father drinks more than he works. Comes home just to lay my mother. I was another mouth to feed, and there wasn’t much money, so I left. I still go home sometimes to visit, you know. I usually bring a turkey home for Thanksgiving.” He gives a bright, lively laugh. “Now that’s hard, stealing a turkey, and one big enough to feed all of us.”
Dolly
DOLLY CAME TO THE COMMUNITY WITH MONICA. MONICA HAD JUST finished work and found Dolly on the streets at 2 A.M., wandering around, a disoriented fourteen-year-old. She still becomes disoriented, and sometimes Monica wishes she’d leave.
“She’s full of herself sometimes,” Monica says. “Always talks about how men can’t stop touching her, and how she hates men. Then you see her on a park bench all over some guy. I told her if she doesn’t talk to them, they won’t come after her. She just says she’s too pretty; they’d come after her anyway.”
Dolly paints her huge, doll-like eyes with heavy black eyeliner and mascara. Her face is round, as if she still has baby fat, but her small body is shapely, and she wears tight jeans and a too-small T-shirt that accentuates her figure. She worries almost as much about her hair and makeup as she does about men.
“I tried to kill myself when I was ten,” she says, showing her scarred wrists. “I fell in love with my stepfather and he raped me. I’ve been drugged, raped, molested, and abused so many times by men at parties that I want a sex change operation so men will leave me alone.” She hates sex, she says. “But men love me for it. That’s what I got.”
Dolly was the only member of the community who agreed to go with me to Covenant House. Others encouraged her, and we set a date and place to meet, but she never showed up. She hasn’t returned to the community.[5]
EACH UNDERGROUND COMMUNITY IS DIFFERENT, BUT ANGER, SADness, and often hopelessness pervade most of them. The runaway community is unique, with its mutual caring and the atmosphere of hope that the future will be better. Like any family, they fight among themselves, but they also protect each other. When a regular customer at the Mister Donut began to harass Felicia, Frank and Jimmy showed up for a few words with him.
5
The runaways brought me into their group as a peer rather than as an adult. They were perhaps the most trusting and open community I met in the tunnels. There were no status lines to break through. They saw that I was like them, only they were on their way to doing what they wanted to do, and I was half a step ahead in doing it. I never had the “adult authority” to take them anywhere.