The street is what they have in common. Without that, they might not even get along.
But because of the street, they got high together, bled together, lied to cops together, stole together.
Also because of the street, they loved together, cried together, listened to Sublime together and stayed together.
They acknowledge, respect and fear the power of the street, the lure and pull of the street.
Even as they still call themselves “street kids,” though some have left the streets and many of them are hardly kids. And even as they try to put those streets behind them.
“There’s a lot I would happily leave behind at this point,” says Sam Condron, 28, who has been on the streets since he was 16 and who now lives in an informal village of tents and makeshift shelters not far from Sunset High School.
First on that list is his street name: “Satan.” Condron was proud of his street name once. Fought to defend that name and build it up.
Now he glares at anyone – closest friends included – who uses it.
“My name is Sam,” he tells them, softly but firmly.
Bespectacled, balding, thickly built, goateed and scruffy-faced –and with a fascination for pirates – Condron doesn’t like it, either, when one of his best friends tells him he isn’t as mean as he looks.
He still laughs at the recounting of some of his brawls and mischief and outright assault and robbery, but not for long. He’ll catch himself and look quietly down, waiting for the story to pass.
But it’s hard. He used to like those stories.
“When you get sober, you sort of allow yourself to discover remorse,” he says. “Would I trade those experiences? No. They made me who I am. But I would not make some of those same choices now. That’s not me anymore. I don’t want to be that person anymore.”
Given Condron’s past, he has much to overcome. His fight now is with the image of himself that he helped create and then willingly projected.
John Duke, clinic director for the homeless-outreach nonprofit Outside In, said the last thing to be with street kids is naive.
“Every individual’s story is tragic and beautiful, and some of what they say is very much true and other things are a complete and utter lie,” he says. “You have to get to know them –they have to let you get to know them – before you can decide for yourself what’s true, before they can prove to you what’s true.”
Some ‘kids’ are in their 30s
In Portland, about 1,000 people live outside, with no traditional home to speak of, according to several counts by the city and various nonprofits. Of those, maybe a few hundred call themselves street kids. Many, though by no means all, have committed crimes. Drug use is common, but not universal.
Street kids cluster together – age is no barrier; some are in their 30s and older – in “tribes” or “families” for camaraderie, for protection and often because they feel they have no one else to whom they can turn.
A few of the groups have names: Sick Boys, Nihilistic Gutter Punks, for example. Others don’t, just choosing to hang out together without branding themselves.
For Condron and many of his closest friends from the streets, life has reached a point of transition. They’ve experienced enough and have grown up enough to know this is not how they want to spend their lives.
Some already are off the street. Some are halfway. And others want out of that life but aren’t ready, sliding back into drug use and hiding from arrest warrants.
Condron says he is trying to put behind him convictions for assault, attempted robbery, theft and carrying a concealed weapon. He broke his meth addiction and is saving money to study to become a certified drug and alcohol counselor. His son just turned 7. He’ll be 29 himself in July. He is in line to get a subsidized downtown apartment in the next few weeks.
One of his best friends has been off the streets for more than a year. Heather Cramer, 27, answered to “Duckie” or “Pimpaduckie” when she lived outside. Slim and ethereally pretty in her days on the street, she has grown plump since she quit meth and jokes about it often: “I like cookies, OK? What? Don’t you like cookies?”
A supervisor for a cell-phone company, she rents a basement bedroom from friends on Northeast 74th Avenue. She has three children, two who were adopted away and another who lives with her mother. She and her mother get along well enough now to the point of having occasional “margarita nights” together. She has no criminal record.
Another friend, Malysa Olivas, 27, known as “Shorty” – she’s 4-feet-7 1/2 – couch-surfs among friends and works in a women’s shelter. She says she is a sixth-degree black belt and is in treatment for a cancer in her brain. An admitted former drug dealer, she pleaded no contest in 2001 to charges of third-degree assault and attempted kidnapping.
“My felonies won’t let me get an apartment anytime soon,” she says. “But I’m hoping. I’m just lucky I’m off the street right now. Lucky I’m getting my mind right, y’know?”
Ken Cowdery, executive director of the homeless-outreach nonprofit New Avenues for Youth, said there is only so much an agency like his can do. For someone under 21 with a misdemeanor record, they can usually help. Under 21 with a felony mark, less likely but still possible.
“And if you’re over 21 with felonies on your record, there’s almost nothing anybody can do for you,” he says, referring to housing and other services.
Many take street names
The street names come from a desire for anonymity. Most street kids couldn’t give up another’s legal name if they wanted to. Some of it, they say, is shame, or the desire to build a new identity, separate from whatever led them to live outside in the first place.
“There was a very, very long time when I didn’t want anybody to know my name,” Cramer says. “There was one day when somebody called me ‘Heather,’ and I felt shattered. I just felt so violated. I wasn’t ready for that.”
The separation also helps keep the cops at bay. No name can mean no arrest.
Rarely does anyone get to choose a name. Take “Muffin.” The 27-year-old carries at least three knives on him at all times.
“I can’t fight,” he says. “I know it.”
Muffin talks with evident reminiscent glee about some of the people he robbed. Condron reminds him that he probably shouldn’t feel so happy about it, but Muffin just shrugs and keeps telling his stories.
He wears an Iron Maiden belt buckle, Led Zeppelin T-shirts and black jeans.
It doesn’t have anything to with his legal name, Michael Runkles, so why the nickname Muffin?
“Because I robbed a Hostess truck when I was 13,” he says.
A friend called him Muffin after that, and Runkles punched the guy in the mouth, he says.
“But I lost that fight, so I had to keep the name,” he says. “Could have been worse, y’know? I could have been Ho Ho or something.”
But as street kids leave the street, they try to leave those nicknames behind, too.
Olivas’ brother, Tyson, used to be called “Imp.” They didn’t know they had the same father until the time Olivas recognized her own father in her brother’s photo collection.
“We always said we were family, but I didn’t know we were like blood family,” she said.
Just out of drug rehab, everyone made a conscious effort to call him by his given name.
“It feels kind of naked,” he says. “I’ve been Imp for a long time. But it’s time for me to be Tyson now.”
Runkles says he isn’t ready to leave “Muffin” behind. But he is ready for change. He is reading about Zen Buddhism and meditating to try to check his temper.
Groups get gang tag
The further they get from the people they were and the things they did, the more they want to be heard, the street kids say. To be seen for their deepest, true humanity.
Most of the time, they won’t show remorse for things they’ve done. Or much empathy for people outside their world.
But they say they’re trying to change. And that they are tired of being misunderstood and misrepresented.
As a gang. As full-time drug-addict drunks. As living outside because they want to. As amoral and violent.
“It all gets defined as what makes us, us,” Cramer says. “But in all honesty, the things we did – stupid stuff and not stupid stuff – is just a part of our lives. It’s not us. It’s not who we are.”
Portland police officially designated the Sick Boys as a gang earlier this year, the first time a group of street kids had been hit with that tag. They believed Condron was a member.
“Please,” he says. “Not only am I not a Sick Boy, which they got completely wrong, street kids are about as much of a gang as the Apple Dumpling Gang.”
The thought of a street kid gang, labeled as such by police, was almost too much for Cramer to take.
“The cops are a gang, OK?” she says. “They wear the same color, they rough us up, they take our stuff. How is that not the definition of a gang?”
Jacob Barrett, 25, tall, broad, powerfully built and handsome, is a founding Sick Boy known as “Door.” Among his 40-odd tattoos is one on the front of his neck that says, in martial gothic letters, “GET UP OR GIVE UP.” It covers up an older tattoo that said, “––––cut here––––.” He laughed at the idea of ritual initiations – a requirement for the police gang designation.
“If there’s any initiation,” he says, “it’s common misery.”
Such a state is usually a byproduct of how they found themselves on the street.
Condron became a street kid when a family member “tried to shove my face through a television set when I was 16,” he says.
Cramer says her mother, who had her at age 16, told her she was a “black sheep” after her younger twin sisters were born.
Olivas says a family member shot her full of heroin at age 6 and left her wrapped in a blanket in a Dumpster. She doesn’t know if he was trying to kill her or not, just that she wasn’t wanted.
Details of each kid’s past are impossible to verify independently. But to those who work closely with street kids, they’re familiar.
“What you have to keep in mind,” Cowdery said, “is that many of these kids made an intelligent decision that led them to live on the streets. They left something much more horrible behind by living outside. People have a hard time accepting that, but it’s usually true.”
Food isn’t hard to get
As much scraping by as they do week to week, cigarette to cigarette, shower to shower, don’t think street kids go for too long without food.
“You have to be belligerent stupid – belligerent stupid – to go hungry on the street in Portland,” Condron said.
The Sunday-morning breakfasts at O’Bryant Square, regular nighttime dinners with the Christians under the Burnside Bridge, all the various agencies and services that offer meals at one point or another. Street kids can eat better than the working poor.
Pioneer Courthouse Square is the epicenter of this world. Need to find somebody or get word to somebody, the best place to start is here. A close second is through the social-networking Web site MySpace.
Some crimes defended
Morality is a fluid concept in this world, unrelated to whatever laws are on the books. If an iPod on the front seat of a car meant dinner for four and a couple packs of cigarettes, guess which the street kids find more important. And if stealing your laptop meant their survival, that’s an even easier trade.
“There are times that it is simply a matter of life and death,” Cramer says. “Some random person gets inconvenienced, but I get to be alive another week. I’m not going to apologize for that.”
It’s the same reason some of them sell drugs.
“I could get an ounce of weed for, like, $260, break it down and sell it and get back $560,” she says. “The weed for me isn’t the important part, OK? It’s that I just got a week or two of hotel rooms and food.”
Crimes that involve other people – as opposed to just their stuff – are harder to explain. Condron’s assault conviction has become almost legendary: He beat a man with the man’s own cane. The victim said he was blind.
“That’s not the sort of thing you could say I’m proud of,” Condron says. “That wasn’t the best decision I could have made. I would make a different decision now.”
But he’s bitter about the story’s nuances being left out in retelling. The man tried to steal some of Condron’s clothes, he says, and roughed up his girlfriend.
“Not all blind people are blind, OK?” he says. “He ID’d me from over 60 feet away, so you tell me how blind he was.”
Because there are street kids who break into cars and sell drugs and assault people, cops are a constant concern, even to street kids who don’t. And they despise most cops.
One they like is Portland police officer Carrie Hutchison, on the force since 2003. She treats them fairly, the street kids say.
“I think I just see their humanity,” she says. “If they come to me and say they’ve been clean for a week, I’ll give them that praise, I’ll give them that support. Then I’ll ask what I can do keep them clean that next day, that next week, that next month.”
Which doesn’t mean Hutchison lets people get away with much.
“If you do something stupid, if you have a warrant, I will nail them on it,” she says. “But I’ll also talk to them about it. ‘What were you thinking? Why did you do that?’ A lot of times, these people don’t have anybody in their life asking them that, and it makes them think when they hear those questions.”
True friendships run deep
The street kids talk a lot about what they’re not. Less so about what they are, which to them is not something that has to be spoken aloud.
Loyal. Accepting. Protecting. Wary.
Perhaps the most important trait to them is loyalty.
They don’t often rat one another out to police and seem to trust someone only as a last resort, or as a reward for years of friendship.
To this day, Condron says he will only drink one specific alcoholic beverage – Pabst Blue Ribbon – in honor of Ty Hughes, a street kid called “Gwar,” who died at 21 in San Francisco five years ago.
“He’s the reason I quit meth, too,” Condron said.
Hughes is a mythic figure to these street kids. Charismatic, funny, smart – he was the street kid other street kids wanted to be, the one who made their world make sense.
Just recently, Condron went to get a tattoo of Hughes enhanced with more ink. He went with a woman universally known in this world as “Mamafairy” – Becky Sikes, 51. She was getting her own Hughes tattoo.
A former heroin addict whose son was a street kid – even she calls him by his street name, “Gremmlynn” – she brought more than 200 street kids into her home at one time or another until she moved several years ago from Portland to Seaside. She got her nickname from the kids she took in.
She had three rules in her house: “Don’t lie, don’t steal, and don’t bring the heat to my house,” she said, referring to the police.
They were broken once, by one person. Other than setting those rules down, she let the street kids be themselves.
“I had a stepmother who tried to make me someone I wasn’t for a long time, and I resented it,” Sikes said.
Without intending to, they created a family. They joke. They laugh. The sing on MAX trains.
One day, on the MAX, a few break into a Sublime song, “What I Got,” just because.
Some people on the train notice. Which is better than when people look away.
“Nobody should be below notice,” Condron says, sitting one afternoon in Pioneer Courthouse Square. “The most horrific thing I ever saw was I was sitting a few blocks away spangeing” – a street kid contraction of “spare change” – “and these people walked right by and covered their faces and said, ‘Don’t even look at him.’ ”
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