“I could have lost my job!” Felicia remembers, wide-eyed. “They took him out behind the restaurant and threatened him. They said they didn’t care if I got fired, at least I wouldn’t get hurt.” Carlos or Frank also usually meet Monica on her way back from work late at night so she will avoid trouble on the way to the hole.
Being runaways themselves, the community is particularly sympathetic to younger kids on the run. “The best people to help runaways are those like us,” says Freddy, “and the best way to help is to be yourself. We know the emotions and we know how to make our way. We have the independence we couldn’t have at Covenant House or in a group home, and we’ve got real support from each other, not for just an hour from some social worker, but from people who really care and understand.”
These teenagers, for all their experiences, are frighteningly vulnerable. Hardly ever do I suspect they are exaggerating their histories, and their emotions are always ready to break the surface. Like the children they are, they cry one moment and laugh the next. Their wounds are still raw, and the pain is still fresh. They want more than to just survive. They aren’t living to die, and they don’t want pity. They aren’t looking for understanding, but they aren’t afraid to be understood.
“You ask me if it bothers me to talk about all this,” says Jeff, a seventeen-year-old recent arrival after he described his family and his own route to this place. “I dunno. I don’t think so, because I don’t see how anything you write could hurt me. They’re just words. My parents and I hurt each other pretty bad, far worse than any words. So, no, it doesn’t bother me if you write about me, because maybe it will help someone sometime. I dunno how, though, because we’re all so different. We all left home for different reasons. Me, because of the authority thing. I hate my stepmother. But maybe some kid out there won’t make the same mistake, won’t be so quick to take off, if you write about me. I hope so. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll pick up what you write and understand what’s going on here with me now.”
With encouragement from others, Jeff subsequently returned home after “patching things up” with his father and stepmother, I’m told.
Depression is a malady that hits all of the members of the community at one time or another, and shows up in different ways. Some cry; others are silently despondent. “The best way to deal with it is to help others,” says Felicia over a breakfast of Coca-Cola and last night’s leftover donuts from her job.
“Or to just keep busy,” adds Jimmy through the remnants of two chocolate-covered cream donuts he has just snarfed down.
“It’s my fear of death that pulls me out and keeps me going,” says Teddy, staring at a glazed donut that Felicia has just placed in his hand.
“I don’t know,” Jimmy muses, almost to himself. “I never let myself get that far down. I just gotta laugh when they hit me. I laugh all the time.”
“I still daydream,” replies Teddy, looking a bit embarrassed as Jimmy rolls his eyes. “And that helps. When things don’t look good, I can still dream and I feel good.”
Sometimes the depression can also become anger and take a suicidal or violent turn.
“I don’t know why,” says Frank, “but sometimes I feel like climbing the Brooklyn Bridge and jumping off, or getting a gun and going into a grocery store and blowing everyone away.” He has found himself walking toward the bridge in a melancholy daze, only to wake and go for his gun. “One of these days I’m gonna do something bad. I can feel it. Sometimes I hope they get me before I get them.”
One evening as the sun is setting we climb to a rooftop. Frank passes around a bottle of Johnny Walker Red. Within an hour, as darkness arrives, the group is pensive.
If you had one wish, what would it be? I ask them.
“I wish my mother would come back,” Teddy says immediately.
“I’d change the world so there would be a place for us,” Carlos answers. “A good place where we would have real freedom and not live in a hole.”
“I’d like to blow my head off,” says Frank, looking down between his knees.
Others object, and Frank is persuaded to revise his wish. “I’d change things in myself if I could. You go to prison and you get this ‘fuck you’ attitude, and it stays with you all the time. You resent every fucking thing in the establishment. You forget how it is not to be angry all the time.”
Someone points out that Frank has never been to prison.
“You ever been to reform school?” he demands. “That’s prison.”
Jeff joins the wishers. “I’d want to go back to when I was nine, and know the things I know now, so I wouldn’t make the same mistakes,” he says.
And I remember what Dolly once said: “I wish I’d never been born.”
Rather than leave it there, I ask them what’s the best thing about being on the streets?
“The freedom,” says Jimmy.
“Just being alive,” says Monica.
“Hope,” says Carlos, who after a moment tries to explain. “Sometimes I get on this depression-suicide trip like Frank. But then I think there’s a person I’m gonna miss if I leave now. There’s a place I should see that I wouldn’t see. There’s too much I want to do before I go. There’s someone I want to meet.”
“Sometimes I get on this depression-suicide trip like Frank. But then I think there’s a person I’m gonna miss if I leave now. There’s a place I should see that I wouldn’t see. There’s too much I want to do before I go. There’s someone I want to meet.”
THE RUNAWAY COMMUNITY DISBANDED SOON AFTER THAT. I DON’T know why. I found a handwritten note from Teddy under a rock, but the smudged penciling is illegible. The only other remnant was a tube of forgotten lipstick under an old chair. I went back to the rooftop where we had all watched the sunset, and I dreamed that they were all finding that someone or someplace or something better that they all hoped for.
15
Tunnel Outreach
IN SEPTEMBER 1990, THE METROPOLITAN TRANSIT AUTHORITY authorized funds for a program to provide outreach and referral services to homeless people living in and around subway tunnels and train tunnels. Among other things, the aim was to obtain information about the homeless in the transportation system of New York, and to improve the safety and cleanliness of the system. Preliminary estimates showed that 80 to 85 percent of the homeless were substance abusers, so the Metropolitan Transit Authority hired ADAPT (Association for Drug Abuse Prevention and Treatment), a nonprofit organization partially funded by the New York Health Department, to provide outreach in the tunnels of the Grand Central and Penn stations. After almost a year, ADAPT counted 6,031 homeless in the system, far more than any authority had anticipated, with one-third to one-half of them living directly under the Penn and Grand Central stations.
The following year, however, the Metropolitan Transit Authority went a different route in an effort to cope with the growing tunnel homeless problem. Instead of ADAPT, it contracted with the controversial Homeless Emergency Liaison Project (HELP), a mobile outreach organization that provides crisis psychiatric services to the mentally ill. Some studies have found anywhere between 25 and 60 percent of the aboveground homeless to be mentally impaired, but the ADAPT project reported that only 10 to 15 percent of those they encountered had mental problems. The Metropolitan Transit Authority’s choice of Project HELP (rather than continue with ADAPT) surprised many in the field until it was recognized that Project HELP offers a service no other outreach unit could provide. It has authority to physically incarcerate a mentally ill person if he or she is considered “imminently at risk to himself or others.” Those people can be taken to hospital emergency wards for psychiatric evaluation and held without their permission for as long as a team of psychiatric workers deems necessary.