Street Survivor’s Writing Helps Heal the Wounds

Gar Caswell has worn toughness as armor for so long that it is hard now to cast it aside.

You need a rough exterior when you are a 15-year-old girl homeless on Hollywood Boulevard. It is easier to keep thugs and predators at bay when you close-crop your hair, camouflage your girlish curves with military fatigues and act louder and meaner than anyone else on the block.

But you also know that deep inside there is a tender spot, a well of hurt that cannot be capped forever.

Caswell, now 19 and struggling to get her life together, has begun to mine that source, using writing to excavate the layers of damage inflicted by an abusive childhood, estrangement from her family and a youth spent on cold pavements in Hollywood and elsewhere.

To her surprise and that of others, she has exhibited a talent for writing. This week she wrote the cover story for LA Youth, a bimonthly newspaper written by and about Los Angeles teenagers.

Caswell’s essay was for her a catharsis, a way to shed the skin of tough waif and perhaps find her true self.

And for LA Youth she provides a distinctive voice, that of a young woman who has experienced more of life

than many adults.

“They say each year you spend on the streets adds about five years to your life, and I feel like a 40-year-old woman,” says Caswell with just a hint of a smile.

She is sitting in jeans and a T-shirt in a small apartment in Visalia, where she has come to live with her boyfriend and his two young children.

Caswell is small. Compact. Pale. You wonder how she could have survived on the Hollywood streets for four years. Her hair is cut like a boy’s but she has pronounced lines of black mascara extending from her eyelids.

Peeking from under her sleeves are tattoos, a pentagram on her right arm and an iron cross on her left. The latter, she says, reflects her pride in her German heritage.

But the total picture can leave another impression. Is she a skinhead? A metal head? Or are these trappings a reflection of the need to fit in with the fraternity of homeless squatters she took up with?

What is to be made of a young woman who has adopted a shortened version of “gargoyle” as a first name?

But her voice, soft and vulnerable, is hardly militant. The impression is of someone still navigating an identity. Strong, vulnerable; girl, woman, even she is not sure.

“I feel like a little girl that never had a childhood,” she says. “Inside, I’m very loving, sweet and gentle, but not a lot of people see that.”

There are thousands of youths on the streets of Hollywood who, like Caswell, having decided that life in Tulsa or St. Louis was intolerable, were lured west by warmth and glamour and now make up a subculture, according to Heather Carmichael. She is clinical director of My Friend’s Place, a Hollywood drop-in center that provides food, clothing and counseling to those youths.

But despite the harsh reality, most of the runaways are surprisingly resilient, she said.

They have a circuit, “spanging,” as they call it, spare change on Venice’s boardwalk, Santa Monica’s Promenade and Hollywood Boulevard, finding shelter in abandoned buildings. Caswell’s main squat was a loading dock at the Egyptian Theater, when it was undergoing renovation.

“I curled up in a little ball and was safe there. The police never found me,” she says.

It was into that world that Caswell fled at 15. She describes growing up with an older brother diagnosed with cystic fibrosis who consumed most of her family’s attention, a stepfather whom she could not stand and a mother whose temper was taken out on her.

She says she had run away a year before, but was found. Along the way, she became interested in paganism and wanted to hang out with friends who were into the Goth scene.

Her family, she says, thought she was crazy and checked her into a mental hospital. Her life was was no better after she returned home. One day, fearing the reaction to a bad report card, she left for good.

In her essay for LA Youth, Caswell recounts her first homeless Christmas, waking up behind the Egyptian, being “insanely tired,” with her stomach growling, yet still thinking she’d rather be anywhere than at her Utah home.

She writes: “In our house, holidays usually came and went with gifts, arguments and isolation; a strange combination. We’d eat Christmas dinner at my grandmother’s house with my relatives, who thought I was weird. So I kept to myself and listened to my Walkman.”

The streets of Hollywood did nothing to improve her mistrust of people. She slept with her back to a wall, with a knife at her side, and stealthily guarded her food.

“There is such a desperation in that city,” she says of Hollywood. “People come there hoping for something and they keep hoping all of their lives.”

If Hollywood’s denizens did not impress her, she impressed some of them.

“She could [write] beautifully; she could take an interest in something and become quite literate,” said George H. Derby, retired manager of Panpipes Magickal Marketplace, a Cahuenga Boulevard shop specializing in the occult. Derby, a father figure for runaways, took Caswell under his wing.

Caswell, he said, was an easy mark, naive and vulnerable. She was better than most at bumming money. But 20 minutes later it would be gone, given to or taken by her friends. He is sure she was abused. She came into his shop a few times with black eyes.

Caswell said she later lived on the streets of New Orleans and Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. She spare-changed her way through Switzerland, Austria, France and Germany, the homeland of her natural father. She does not know whether he is alive or dead.

She admits to taking LSD, smoking pot and drinking beer, but says she never did harder drugs because she saw what it was like to be a junkie.

But after returning to Los Angeles she was desperate to get off the streets. She entered Covenant House, a program for troubled youths that offered “the first time for me to be an adult.” The high school equivalency diploma she earned while there is a cherished trophy.

Sue Doyle, 31, associate editor of LA Youth, met Caswell while visiting a poetry class at Covenant House. She was looking for writers for the nonprofit paper, which has a subscription base of 100,000. The staff of 70 students are volunteers.

“I thought we tended to attract a certain type of kid: academically strong, can’t wait to do more homework, that type,” she said. “I thought there were more voices out there that needed to be heard, kids who haven’t had as much nurturing, haven’t been always told that they’re smart.”

Eliciting Caswell’s story, the molding and shaping, the setting down on paper, was as emotional for Doyle as for Caswell.

“When she was writing the essay, she would send e-mails saying she was unearthing all these dormant feelings and crying and she’d ask how do you make it stop,” Doyle recalled.

Tucked into a corner of her couch, Caswell brings out a card she recently received from her mother, with whom she is trying to reforge a relationship.

On the card next to the letter O is written, “This is a hug,” and next to the letter X, “This is a kiss.” “Wrap this O around yourself and put this X where it hurts.” Then her mother writes: “Things will get better, it just takes time.”