Giving a Voice to Anonymous Youths

Jason La Ruth, 19, picks up his sheet of yellow legal-pad paper and reads to the other members of the writing workshop.

“When I was 16, I told my mom I was gay and she threw me out of the house. I had no idea where to go or what to do. I went to work as a hooker. But I know God did not make me to do that.”

He finishes and blankly looks over to instructor Paul Cohen.

Cohen nods without missing a beat. “Good. That’s very good.”

As the editor of Street Scene, a newsletter by and for homeless and runaway kids in Los Angeles, Cohen hears it all and more. In workshops at the city’s various youth shelters and drop-in centers, he elicits the youngsters’ stories of molestation, drug addiction, “survival sex” and violence. He does the same with their stories of love, longing, ambition and hope.

And he prints almost every word in the eight-page tabloid that circulates among the estimated 10,000 youngsters, age 12 and up, living on the streets, under the freeways and in the shelters of Los Angeles.

Here, in the October issue, 20-year-old Opie Cleveland describes himself: “There are two kinds of people in this world . . . and I am the third.”

Next to the clinic’s ad for free condoms and bleach kits, readers can also find Opie’s poem:

“I want to run . . . away from here forget every cry and every tear. I want to hide . . . from you forget your face and all the things you do. I want to kill . . . all the lies that fell from your lips the ones that made me cry. I want to pretend . . . .”

In an earlier issue, a teen-ager named Jenny writes about the day she left home: “Entering the room I can see their faces. Shame and disappointment fling through the air, and all right at me. ‘But Mom,’ I tried to plead. Confusion, questions, now I know . . . ‘I’ll be back for my other things later, I love you!’ Please please help me. Where do I belong? . . . I will always be your little girl, always!”

The Los Angeles Free Clinic started the monthly newsletter three years ago in an effort to involve kids in reading and writing about substance abuse issues and provide a resource guide for kids who are the most difficult to reach.

But Cohen, a playwright from Manchester, England, who took over the project in February, says he also wants to hear their voices. “It’s all about self-esteem,” he says. “So many people are anonymous. I give them back their individuality.”

In the workshop, he starts by asking them to name their favorite clothing, their favorite foods or a famous person they would like to be. Asked about their fondest memory from childhood, many reply: “None.”

Of the million runaways each year in the U.S., many, like Jason, have been kicked out by their parents. Two-thirds have reported sexual, physical and or emotional abuse either before or after they left home. Nearly half have lived in foster care.

Cohen, 29, says that in many ways his students are like teen-agers everywhere, preoccupied with love, with finding themselves, with wanting to belong.

Claudio Fernandez, 19, a recent arrival from Mexico City, comes to Cohen’s workshop at Hollywood’s Covenant House with his English-Spanish dictionary. He writes in Spanish: “You say I am not your friend? Because I don’t speak your language? Because I am not your color? Or because I was not lucky enough to be born in your country? I think the same way, and yet, I do consider you my friend!”

In a poem titled “Frustrated Love,” a writer named “Jonathan” asks: “Will you ever know my true feelings? How I yearn for your touch and acceptance. To know that I have the chance to truly love and take care of you. That’s all I ask is a chance.”

Other writings show these youths live in a parallel universe where they are equally familiar with hate, rejection, violence and lives lived so fast, they’re sometimes over before they ever really began.

Mimi, who entered gang life at 11 and by 13 had tried marijuana, cocaine, angel dust and barbiturates, writes: “I loved the high. . . . One day I got so loaded that me and the homegirls decided to do a drive-by. It was my first time holding a gun, and I was great at it. . . . Then at 14 I got shot twice. . . . One year passed and I waited. (The opportunity) came and I got back at them. Six months later I was shot 4 times and my best friend was shot 13 times. The last words she said to me were: ‘Get out and make your life longer.’ She died after those words.”

Sometimes, they’re bitter. One girl wrote an open letter to her mother that began “Dear Bitch . . . .” Cohen printed her letter, but said it was one of the few that he edited for language.

Many homeless youth come from other parts of the country, seeking the glamour and fame they mistakenly assume is Hollywood.

“I knew Hollywood was a metaphor,” Cohen said. “So many of them literally think they’ll be discovered in Hollywood.”

Some express their inevitable disappointment. Ramizia writes: “When I first moved to Hollywood. . . . I didn’t know what the hell was going on around me. . . . I started to use drugs; speed and crystal was my thing, and I hated and loved it at the same time. I seen things I had only read about when I was at home: People shooting up and women and men selling their bodies on Santa Monica and Sunset for a quick high. . . . I was sixteen years old.”

Cohen also interviews shelter workers who have been in the kids’ shoes. One, Ken Bernard, a 22-year-old peer counselor at Childrens Hospital in Los Angeles, talks about being HIV positive. “I always tell people that I have like an understanding with my HIV,” Cohen quotes Bernard in the newsletter. “We talk, and I let it know that if I die, it’s gonna die, so it’s like--we’re not going to go anywhere.”

Besides expression and catharsis, Street Scene also gives kids practical advice--warnings of people to look out for on the street and up-to-date resource numbers.

Mary Rainwater, executive director of the Free Clinic, said the youth are often offered incentives such as fast-food vouchers to participate in the workshops and contribute to the paper. Others are paid to help produce and distribute the paper--to hospitals, shelters or “squats”--group encampments under freeways. “Wherever we can find kids we take them.”

Street kids who go into the clinic for services sometimes say they learned about it from the paper, she said. “So it does work.”

Cohen also sees evidence of rising pride.

Opie Cleveland said he started coming to the workshops as a way of getting paid. Now, he said he writes poems on his own just to give to Cohen.

“A lot of people say, ‘Omigod, you’re Opie? You’re the one who writes in Street Scene? I love your stuff!’ That’s kind of cool, I guess.”

When Cohen distributes papers, he says kids approach him to ask, “Have I got anything in it?” And “just for a minute,” he says, “a light goes on.”