Running Scared

By JON D. HULL/HOLLYWOOD

The first time Christine tried to sell her body for money, she was chased away by the prostitutes on Sunset Boulevard after just 20 minutes. "They told me to go home, said I was too young," says the short, thin, green-eyed girl with brown hair. Christine is not her real name; and she has no home, not anymore, certainly not on Sunset. Home was once a neatly kept two-story house in a middle-class section of Louisville, Kentucky, with Mom and Dad and a little sister. Home was also screams and broken glass and calls to 911. "My mom and dad fight a lot, and I just couldn't stand it anymore," Christine says. "So I made it my New Year's resolution: No more fighting." On Jan. 2 she slipped out the kitchen door at 5 a.m., with $144, two cans of Diet Coke, six cans of Star-Kist tuna fish, a jar of Skippy peanut butter, her diary, some clothes, a pocket knife and a photo of her eight-year-old sister. She paid $68 for a bus ride to Hollywood. "I sort of figured that anybody could get by in Hollywood. Lots of freedom and good weather and stuff."

A week after failing to sell her body, Christine tried again. She walked up and down Sunset Strip for four hours without getting a single offer. "I was wearing jeans, which were dirty, and I was carrying my backpack, so I guess I didn't look right," she says. Down to her last $7, she bought a doughnut for dinner and spent the night on a park bench. Unable to afford even a cheap miniskirt, she sat down in an alley and pulled out her spare blue jeans. After carefully marking off a line just below the crotch, she cut off both pant legs using the saw blade of her Swiss Army knife, a gift from her dad. At 9 that evening she was back on Sunset, peering nervously at each passing car while attempting to mimic the poses and gestures of other prostitutes.

Within an hour, a blue sedan pulled up to the curb. The driver, a heavyset man, maybe 60, motioned her inside. At a nearby motel, Christine was too nervous to discuss money; he just dropped a couple of bills on the bedside stand. "He said something like, 'That should do it,' " she remembers. Then he took off his pants. "I couldn't do it. I wanted to run. I just started crying," she says. "It was like the man was really, really embarrassed. He was older than my father even, and I couldn't stand it. He asked me to please, please stop crying, but I couldn't. So he just gave me $10 and walked out, saying he'd never touch a kid who was crying." Christine turned 16 two weeks later. Four days after that, she would finally turn her first trick, earning $60. The next night she would score twice. "At least it's better than living at home," she shrugs.

That's exactly what the 15-year-old boys who sell their bodies on Polk Street in San Francisco say. And the young pickpockets in midtown Manhattan. And the baby-faced heroin addicts panhandling in Seattle. In Miami. In San Diego. Sure, the streets are brutal, even terrifying at times, but let me tell you a few stories about my dad or my mom or the uncle who won't leave me alone.

Runaways. They are the refugees from a million private wars being waged across America -- a ragtag army of the abused and the ignored drifting aimlessly like flotsam out of sundered families. Each year as many as 1.3 million teenagers flee home, according to the National Network of Runaway and Youth Services. While the statistics are guesswork, social workers on the front lines perceive a worsening problem. "We're finding that the numbers are going up and the kids are getting younger," says Sister Mary Rose McGeady, president of New York City-based Covenant House. "In Houston the average age is 15. When I was there a year ago, the average age was close to 17." Covenant House workers from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to Anchorage, Alaska, have made similar observations. Last year there were 1,459,717 phone calls to Covenant House's hot line (1-800-999-9999), up 15% from 1992.

Runaways. Some are missing, their earnest young portraits splashed across flyers distributed by desperate parents. Many aren't missed at all. Most youths simply exchange one hell for another. Says Roger Hernandez, outreach coordinator for the Larkin Street Youth Center in San Francisco: "You can literally watch them age, week by week." And die. Living on the streets and on society's margins, runaways are the most vulnerable to the pestilences that kill America's teens: alcoholism, drugs, AIDS, homicide. About 20% of new cases of AIDS are among young adults in their 20s. Given the virus' latency period, that means most were infected in their teens. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month released a report saying the annual homicide rate for men ages 15 to 19 jumped 154% from 1985 to 1991.

And still the children run. Seattle, San Francisco and New York City are among the top destinations. But Hollywood is ground zero. Experts estimate that 10,000 homeless youths are on the streets on any given night in Los Angeles County, maybe 3,000 of them in Hollywood alone. They are lured by the persistent myth that Hollywood is where the rainbow touches down; they remain because it does offer a few shelters and services to the thousands of homeless youths seeking miracles there. For the nation's runaways, Hollywood is like a ) huge electric bug zapper that can't be unplugged, attracting and then destroying thousands and thousands of children.

One Saturday night in an abandoned building in Hollywood, Aaron tried to kill himself again. He drank cheap vodka and then, after smashing the bottle, used a shard to hack away at his wrists. Maybe he was too drunk; maybe he didn't really want to die. But the effort failed, just like the six other attempts he says he has made. In fact, no one even paid him any attention. "I can't even kill myself," he says. "I walk into traffic, and the cars miss me."

Known by his street name, Beavis, the 16-year-old escaped from a youth center in El Monte, California, in June with a 15-year-old girl who calls herself Rainbow. A former ninth-grader at Antelope Valley High School who was just learning to play electric bass guitar, he was put into the center by his mother, he says, because she and he didn't get along -- at all. Though he misses his three-year-old brother, Beavis vows never to return home. "It's too awful there," he says. Instead he'll live on the streets until he's 18. "Then I'll get a job." Doing what? "Something that pays good so I can settle down."

Three weeks on the streets and Beavis is slipping fast. On a Wednesday, another homeless teenager rapes Rainbow, who is one-month pregnant with Beavis' child. On Thursday Rainbow breaks up with Beavis. On Friday she takes two hits of acid. That evening she miscarries in an abandoned building. By Saturday Beavis is self-destructing again. "I did acid for the first time, plus a ton of orange juice and some vitamins because I really wanted to fry and have my eyes and hearing be more powerful. Then I huffed on rubber cement for three hours."

The next day Beavis put a knife to the throat of the boy who raped Rainbow. "I couldn't do it," he says. "I couldn't slit his throat." So the boy pulled out a can of Mace and sprayed Beavis in the face. He blindly stumbled out into the night, hands tearing at his face, eyes and lungs burning.

Mornings are quiet; like all teenagers, homeless youths sleep in whenever possible. Then they wander to youth centers like My Friend's Place in Los Angeles, which offers food, showers, friendship and counseling. "You've got to look beyond the drugs and the prostitution and see that these are just kids, kids who should be taking driver's ed right now or worrying about which corsage to wear," says executive director Steve LePore. Behind him, several , youths in worn clothing lie on the floor asleep.

Afternoons are spent panhandling the tourists, especially around Mann's Chinese Theater and the Walk of Fame. When night falls, the tourists disappear and the city becomes hell's Disneyland. Hollywood Boulevard is popular for hanging out, usually at the corner of Cherokee, while Sunset Strip features straight prostitution and Santa Monica Boulevard specializes in the gay sex trade. Abandoned buildings serve as "squats," the makeshift homes inhabited by as many as several dozen youths. Entombed by the thick plywood nailed to the windows and doors, the youths live with drugs, rats and human waste.

Green (her street name) is tripping again. The 16-year-old girl took two hits of acid at 3:30 p.m., and now, two hours later, she can't stop laughing. She sits on the floor of a barren room in a Hollywood squat, giggling and staring at the flicker of a small candle. Her boyfriend, Troll, a 23-year-old from Dallas who has been homeless since he was 17, lies on the floor asleep. They met during a food fight at a local youth center. "I need a beer," she says. "Does anybody have some beer?"

Green stepped off a Greyhound bus from Houston in June with $100, some clothes and a camera. Another homeless youth quickly stripped her of her money and camera, and now she survives on food from the youth shelters, money from tourists and whatever Troll can offer.

She might be running from her parents, or she might just be running from herself. She won't really say which, referring in broad strokes to a middle- class background, private schools, piano and trumpet lessons. At 13 she modeled for a local hair salon. "I had such beautiful long blond hair," she says. Now her hair is cut short and tinged with purple dye. She wears a small silver ring in her nose, combat boots and a white T shirt on which she has written with a marker a message to the tourists she panhandles: I'd rather hear "no" than nothing at all.

On the streets just two weeks, the child is still visible but fading fast. "I miss my mom," Green confesses, biting into a slice of pizza along Hollywood Boulevard. A 16-year-old girlfriend who calls herself Turtle hisses: "What do you need your mother for?" Green stares at the remains of her pizza, which she has consumed ravenously. "What scares me is when I get older, I want to get married and have an apartment," she says. "I don't want to be panhandling." Turtle shrieks in disgust, alarming passing tourists. "F & ---marriage and f--- apartments! Squat forever!" Green grimaces. Continues Turtle: "We can get drunk and really depressed and go stomp off somewhere!"

In the weeks that follow, Green grows thinner and dirtier, and her head is partly shaved in punk fashion, straight up in three rows of spikes. "You get used to the smell," she says as she enters her squat from a garbage-strewn alley reeking of urine and feces. A broken metal railing suffices as a ladder to a boarded-up window 8 ft. off the ground. The plywood pulls back, and Green slips into the darkness, dropping down into a bathroom. The bathtub and toilet are plastered with more human waste. The stench is suffocating. Then into another darkened room, furnished with a single chair, and she is home.

The building was abandoned just after the big earthquake in January. "That quake was great for us," says Troll. "It freed up a lot of housing." In the room where Green sleeps, a refrigerator still contains the contents, now blackened, from that early January morning. The door is kept shut, but somehow hundreds of flies and maggots get in. And out.

A small opening in the wall connects Green and Troll's room to the rest of the squat. They keep it covered with cardboard and lined with a row of Jack Daniel's Down Home Punch bottles to sound an alarm. The police have not raided the four-story stucco building, home to dozens of teenagers on any given night, for several months. Whenever police do appear, the youths simply move elsewhere for a while before returning to pry open the plywood again. A graffito on one wall reads, Save a donut, kill a cop.

Green shuffles through the litter as she walks down a long, dark hallway and up a wobbly stairway stripped of its railing. Turtle and a 17-year-old girl named Peanut can be heard outside in an alley, laughing as they shoot up speed. "Don't step on any old needles," warns Green, kicking away garbage. In one room, a girl, maybe 18, is slumped against a wall, her head tipped unnaturally sideways. This is where the tweakers -- as everyone calls the speed freaks -- live. They and the crack addicts are the most dangerous residents. Says Green: "Sometimes they'll crawl along the floor through the garbage looking for drugs." A young tweaker, her head partly shaved, stumbles down the hall wielding a small metal bar. She jabs the bar repeatedly into the walls, lurching back and forth. She has the sunken, frightened eyes of a laboratory animal.

% Next room: a 16-year-old girl named Jean, up all night on speed, paces back and forth, desperate for a cigarette. A tall, green-eyed blond, Jean ran away from Minneapolis, Minnesota, six months ago with $50 in her pocket and a fake I.D. She left a suicide note on her bed. "Let's just say my family really sucked," she says. "I can't say who I hate more, my mom or my dad. God, I need a cigarette!" One of the tweakers tumbles into the room to announce she has just found a small fragment of a cigarette. Elated, Jean follows the tweaker down the hallway.

This is what the kids call hanging out. Green watches intently. In the smoky darkness, she sees friendship and adventure, like kids gathered around a campfire, giving and getting what many never had before. Asked to describe her room back in Houston, she squirms, then whipsaws back to present tense. "I wanna try heroin tonight," she says matter-of-factly. "A friend says she'll shoot me up, but I'll need to get $10." Troll doesn't do drugs. "Why do you want to do that?" he asks. Her reply: "I just want to see what it's like."

Once the knapsack from home is empty, there are four basic means of survival: charity, meaning the small number of soup kitchens and shelters that cater to the young; panhandling; prostitution; and drug dealing. Hunger is the least daunting problem. In both Los Angeles and San Francisco, any youth who doesn't mind a lot of walking can find at least two free meals a day at various youth centers. And even the unluckiest panhandlers can make enough for a meal; at Taco Bell on Hollywood Boulevard, for example, a burrito costs only 59 cents. Then there is "table scoring" at fast-food restaurants: snatching unattended food from the tables before it is thrown away. Those with stronger stomachs engage in "Dumpster diving" for meals.

Temporary shelter is harder to find. Stephen Knight of the Los Angeles Free Clinic estimates that there are fewer than 200 shelter beds for youths in all of Hollywood. For every kid accommodated, another is turned away. The alternatives are grim: squats, park benches, alleys, an adult theater that allows youths to sleep in seats for a few dollars if they can bear the noise.

In the predatory world of American cities, runaways are near the bottom of the food chain. Some are ruthlessly abused; others become urban survivalists, displaying remarkable stamina and cunning. The younger children face the longest odds. "You have people preying on these kids from the minute they arrive at the Greyhound station and the train stations," says Barry Fisher, program director at San Francisco's Huckleberry House. "I remember one 12- year-old girl who was quickly scooped up by a pimp." AIDS is especially devastating: of 12 youths from a Hollywood squat tested last year, half were HIV-positive.

At the Los Angeles Free Clinic, former runaways are employed to work the streets, offering help, defusing tensions and trying to rescue the newcomers. "You can tell them by their clean shoes and backpacks and that scared look on their faces," says an outreach worker named Seven. In San Francisco, the Larkin Street Youth Center served 2,000 teenagers last year, 80% of them from out of town. Once the youths are lured in the door by free food, a friendly atmosphere and a no-questions-asked policy, counselors try to find them shelters, drug treatment and job training. More than 60% of youths ages 12 to 17 who seek help at the center are diverted from the street. At Options House, a shelter in Hollywood, 40% of youths counseled are reunited with their families. But family reunion is not always desirable. Says executive director Leslie Forbes: "Sometimes we'll call the families, and they'll say, 'So you've got the little bastard? Well, you can keep him!' " That leaves group homes, foster care or the streets. "Either they get connected to a service quickly, or they get connected with other hardened kids," says Michele Kipke, director of adolescent medicine at Children's Hospital in Los Angeles.

Runaways who really don't want to be found quickly adopt street names, often such crude synonyms as Lunatic, Fury, Speedster or Dopey. "Never tell anybody anything, that's my rule," says a 16-year-old from Ukiah in northwestern California. The slim, blond youth -- call him Billy -- says he spent a year living in a stairwell near the Scientology center on Hollywood Boulevard after his parents kicked him out of the house: another story of drugs and alcohol and late-night fights. On a good day, Billy earns $10 panhandling; he stuffs the money in his shoe. That is where he also hides a stolen, neatly folded birth certificate from Texas that he says a friend gave him, along with a Social Security card. "I want to use these to get some credit and a driver's license, but I'm worried the guy may be dead," he says. A manager at a local Denny's lets him use the rest room once a day to clean up. That was the first place he went after he hustled his body on Santa Monica Boulevard, earning $60. "You don't know how scary that is," he says, avoiding eye contact. "You don't know if you're going to be shot, stabbed or taken to Mexico."

Billy sits perfectly still for a minute, then pulls out a wallet-size photo from his pocket and stares at it. It is a picture of his two-year-old son Matthew, dressed in a red plaid outfit and sitting in front of a Christmas tree, cheeks rolled back in an explosive smile. The child is with Billy's former girlfriend back in Ukiah. "Isn't he the cutest thing you've ever seen? I'm going back to him just as soon as I can get it together."

It is the loneliness that hurts most for the kids. Holidays are especially cruel. Haunted by advertisements celebrating family life, many youths venture home in December, hoping perhaps Dad isn't such a beast after all. "They end up fighting over the holidays, and by January they're off again," says Knight. "I know three kids who got on the bus on New Year's Eve."

In San Francisco a 15-year-old boy named John curls up under a big oak tree in the panhandle of Golden Gate Park whenever he has to cry. It is usually about once a month, late in the evening after too much cheap wine. He pulls his black leather jacket over his head and presses his knees against his chest, under cover because he cannot be seen crying in Golden Gate Park. There are too many other homeless people looking for any advantage.

"It's like you gotta be so strong all the time, and always watching out for everybody because everybody wants to hurt you somehow," he says, sitting on the grass in Buena Vista Park just off Haight Street. "So I got this secret place I go in the park when I'm really upset."

John ran away in May. "But I'm not really a runaway because nobody's looking for me," he says. "Before I left, we had this big fight, and the next day I came home from school and Mom had thrown out all of my stuff." He has been talking for two hours straight now, and his breathing is fast and shallow. "For certain, there are some things about home I miss a lot, like my room and my clothes and my sister."

His knuckles, marred with scabs, whiten as he squeezes a silver Zippo lighter, which looks large in his small and fragile hands. He snaps open the lighter with practiced precision, then lights a Marlboro and sucks it furiously. "My sister turned seven in April. Do you know what we did for her / birthday? Nothing! Mom was in Vegas. I coulda killed her."

John disappears into the woods briefly to retrieve a large bottle of King Cobra beer. He pitches it back, finishing it off with a trademark belch. He is now out of beer as well as cigarettes and money, and there is nothing to distract him but the cold sea breeze. He searches each pocket twice, the first time slowly and then frantically: only a pocket knife, his lighter and a hairbrush. Then he sits, arms wrapped around his knees, head turned away, his small frame shaking slightly. "This is bull ," he says in a whisper. He says it again, then again, each time softer until he is inaudible.

Slowly rising to his feet, he sways as he struggles with his jacket zipper. Then he shoves his hands deep into his coat pockets, wheels around and disappears into Golden Gate Park, heading for the place where he can curl up and cry.

In the weeks since this story was reported, Beavis moved to the Harbor View Center, a residential treatment facility in Long Beach, California, for emotionally disturbed adolescents. Green went home. Troll and Rainbow are still on the streets. Christine, Billy and John have not been seen.