Runaway Kids Have Nothing to Run to

Michelle will be 14 years old next month. It isn’t working at home. It’s never worked, she says. So she left. She probably will again.

Michelle begins to tell me the story of her life.

“It started at the hospital, where I was born,” she says. “My mom ditched me there. She just walked out.”

Michelle is not really this girl’s name, this girl with the braces on her teeth, with the straight blond hair framing her face, with the adoptive parents who she says don’t care when she comes home--or if she comes home at all.

“It’s like, ‘Thanks, Mom. I see you care so much about me,” Michelle says.

There is a group in Washington, D.C., the National Network of Runaway and Youth Services, that tries to keep track of children like Michelle. The network estimates that between 1 and 1.3 million American children run away from home each year.

Most of them take to the road, floating around places such as Southern California or San Francisco, Seattle and New York City. They get by any way they can.

That makes running away sound kind of romantic, I think, like some sort of Huck Finn-ish tale about jumping on boxcars, or sticking out a thumb, sowing wild oats and ditching school. That is fiction.

Kids today are running away from nothing-to-go-back-to: drugs, abuse, and indifference at home. Or maybe they aren’t running. Maybe they are being dumped, like puppies that have grown out of cute, or maybe into strays that snarl when a hand comes too near their face. Then they get hit harder for that.

I met Michelle, and other children like her, at the Casa Youth Shelter in Los Alamitos. I could have met them, too, in Huntington Beach, down by where the tide meets the sand and the endless hours of just hanging out, or at the video game parlors, or in the streets.

They are lots of other places too. These kids seem like any other, until you begin to recognize the look. It is skin-deep tough, scraggly, hungry and deep-down scared.

The cops say they can’t do much, not until there is a crime. And there usually is, somewhere along the line.

Axl, 17, got on a bus in Cincinnati a few weeks back, taking his girlfriend too, headed for Anaheim. She has relatives here, people she thought would take them in. Axl just wanted to leave home.

“This may sound kind of weird,” he says. “But my mom wants to kill me. She’s chased me around with rolling pins, baseball bats. It’s not really her, I don’t think. I think she’s crazy. I usually just try to stay out of her way but I got sick of it.”

Axl--a pseudonym that this slight, red-haired boy suggests I use because Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses is somebody he’d love to be--says that a lot of his problems have to do with him. He says he could obey more. And his mother hates heavy-metal music, calls it a sin.

Once, he says, he was taken to a church, tied down, and the devil was ordered to relinquish his soul, NOW! “I was never possessed,” he says. “But I played along.”

Axl says he quit drinking eight months ago. Still, there are too many fights at home.

“She’ll call me names and I call her names,” he says. “I called her a bitch once. That’s when she came after me with a knife.”

Casa Youth Shelter is one of five temporary homes where runaways in Orange County can catch their breaths, get some sleep, and food, and maybe a foot up on solving some of the problems that landed them here. That’s 38 beds countywide. That is not enough.

Plans are under way for another shelter in Huntington Beach, which is good news. In a way. More kids can get off the streets, at least for a while.

The bigger news, however, is bad: The need for more shelter is great. To a child saturated with society’s ills, running away can seem like the only way out.

A 15-year-old runaway I’ll call Rusty talks about a kid’s view of grown-up problems in modern times.

“When I was 8, my parents separated and all my mother would do is cry and cry, all the time,” he says. “My brother was already staying with my aunt, and it was just me and my mom, all alone. We moved here when I was 12 and then we moved 14 times after that, every two months. We didn’t have money and we would get evicted from apartments. I had to try and make friends every time.

“Then when my brother came back, my mom hit him in the eye, over Nintendo. He had to go to the hospital. Then when I went to stay with my aunt, she threw me out. She said I was tormenting her.”

Rusty started doing drugs: marijuana, acid and mushrooms. “I just didn’t want to deal with anything,” he says. The adults in his world didn’t seem to care.

“If they talk to me, it’s like I’m second class,” Rusty says. “They don’t take anything I say into consideration. It’s like I don’t count.”

I am hearing this a lot--no one to talk to, or at least no one who cares enough to listen to what these kids have to say. And I am hearing something else too.

These runaway, tossed away kids say they love their parents still. Which is why they hurt.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Rusty says. “I’m not going to treat my children the same way they treated me. I’m going to break the cycle.”

Dianne Klein’s column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.