Teenage Runaways Find an Alcoholic Haze in Haight-Ashbury

His name is Will, though he calls himself “Shwill,” a joking reference to his main object in life: getting drunk.

“You know,” he says, giggling and putting an imaginary glass to his lips. “Like ‘shwill’ a beer.”

On this day, it’s not beer. The 22-year-old from Fresno and his scruffy band of younger friends have panhandled enough money to buy a half-gallon of cheap rum and a two-liter bottle of root beer.

The drinking routine is simple. Take a gulp of rum, chase it with a swig of root beer and hand the bottles to the next thirsty soul.

“Drink and pass!” yells 20-year-old Axe, the impatient, self-appointed spokesman for the group.

They sit in a semicircle in a hidden corner of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, on top of a crumpled bedroll where some of them slept or passed out the night before. Nearby, a tattered copy of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” flutters in the wind, surrounded by leaves, spent cigarettes and the occasional condom packet.

Thirty years ago hippies flocked to this same park--probably this same patch of dirt--in San Francisco’s famous Haight-Ashbury district to celebrate peace, love and getting high.

Today, alcohol, marijuana and speed live on. But idealism among the young people who escape here--they often call themselves “gutter punks” or “dirty kids”--is as dead as Jerry Garcia.

“I don’t want to live to be old,” says Kid, Axe’s 15-year-old brother.

“Old,” he adds, “is 30.”

Jason Bishop, a 27-year-old youth advocate who spent most of his teenage years and early 20s on the streets, hears that kind of talk all the time.

“You hear people say, ‘Well, kids feel like they’re invincible.’ But for every kid that has that outlook, I’ll give you another one or a handful who don’t want to live,” he says.

Often changing their names, these kids are vagabonds, hitchhiking and hopping trains across the country in search of their next high. Many of them roam the “Western circuit,” which ranges from Seattle and Portland, Ore., to San Diego and Tucson, Ariz.

San Francisco, historically a haven for youth, is the honorary hub.

“The Haight has that mystique that, ‘Hey, I’m free as a bird,’ ” says Sgt. Mark Porto, a San Francisco police officer who has patrolled the neighborhood for 24 years.

In the last few months, he has noticed more young people, from age 13 to their early 20s, sleeping in the park and panhandling on Haight Street.

“It’s a trendy sort of thing to do,” Porto says. “It’s still that freedom, that idea that I don’t believe in the police and I don’t believe in the Bank of America.”

Suggest that Axe should get a job, and hear his sneering reply: “I refuse to be a sheep. I do whatever I want, how I want, when I want.”

Axe has a line of symbols tattooed on his forearm.

“Nomad, anarchy, equality,” he says, pointing proudly to each one.

Nicole, 19 and originally from Seattle, wears a button with the anarchy symbol on her jacket. “Libertad o muerte,” it reads.

“I don’t really consider myself an anarchist because I’m too lazy,” she says. “But liberty or death--that sounds good to me.”

But why?

It’s a question that has to be asked several times to get an answer. Finally, after a long silence, 17-year-old Shyla shakes her head and speaks.

“Almost everything I see makes me really sad, and I don’t ever want to be part of it,” she says, sitting on the sidewalk on Haight Street.

Like what?

“Like way too many greedy, rich people and way, way, way too many people who don’t have anything,” says Shyla, who is from the small Minnesota farm town of New Ulm.

Axe--her boyfriend, at least for now--reminds her that there’s always alcohol.

“Even that doesn’t make me happy,” she says, picking at the remnants of glittery-blue nail polish on her fingers.

Porto, the cop, doesn’t buy this world-weariness. He’s tired of the attitudes, the car break-ins, the drug dealing and the urinating on the street.

“I have more of a sympathetic feeling for the homeless,” he says of older people who live in the park.

Porto softens a bit when he looks at a bulletin board in the lobby of the police station next to the park.

Every few months, he removes the posters to make room for a new batch of fliers from parents from all over the country who are searching for their runaway children.

“The poor parents,” Porto says. “These kids aren’t homeless. They just have no direction.”

Bishop, the caseworker, sees something besides a bad attitude when he looks underneath the grime, the piercings, the mohawks and half-shaved heads.

“I don’t think young people leave home for no reason,” Bishop says. “These kids have been exploited; they’ve been traded for sex and dope; they’ve been hit and lied to.

“Of course, there are exceptions to that. But pretty much the attitude is, ‘Yeah, it’s bad out on the street, but it’s safer for me there than it is at home.’ ”

That may be true of Will--he says his mother first shot him up with speed at age 12--or Nicole, who won’t talk about her family. Axe and Kid were split up when their parents divorced--one lived in Arizona, the other in Holland, and they found each other on the street three years ago.

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Shyla is an anomaly. “I love my parents,” she says. “Their only fault is that they worry too much.”

She is the only one of the five who spends most of her time at home. She hits the streets sporadically, almost as if it were a vacation from her life.

“I was the most popular girl in the seventh grade,” Shyla says. “I know what that’s like. And I never want to go back.” She claims that her high school principal kicked her out of school for dyeing her hair strange colors, even though she had a 3.7 grade-point average.

When she returns to Minnesota, she plans to get her GED and go to college--but on her terms. And she has no plans to give up life on the street.

“Of all the friends I’ve made, I’ve made better ones traveling. It’s totally like a family,” Shyla says. “I just think there’s a lot more honesty out here than anyplace I’ve ever been.”

Will shares the idea of a street family, or a “tribe.” He says he has cirrhosis of the liver; he plans to die drunk.

“What’s the point of being sober and dying of cirrhosis?” he asks. “I may as well enjoy myself and kick it with my brothers and sisters.”

He is giddy and drunk now. But a few hours later, a friend will find him collapsed and crying on Haight Street, his hand extended in search of change as people pass by.

The friend picks him up and carries him back to the park to sober up.

A few hours later, still groggy, he returns to a Haight Street corner. Again, his hand is extended.