- - - - Copyright 2003 Chicago Sun Times
- - - - How street kids live ; Rising author Stephen Elliott knows what life is like for 214 kids missing from the DCFS system. And he knows why they run away. Eighteen years ago, he was one of them. - - - - Authors: Mike Thomas Pagination: 20 Personal Names: Elliott, Stephen Abstract: It is [Stephen Elliott]'s favorite stopover in town, and he returns faithfully on every visit to catch up with friends and chat up locals. Just blocks away, near the L station on a dark, litter-and- liquor-bottle-strewn side street that, Elliott remarks, turns rough when the temps rise, is another Heartland property, the No Exit Cafe. In less joyful times, Elliott read poetry here. Angst- ridden, depressive stuff. He was, after all, just coming off his worst year ever. He spent three months there before shipping out to another facility, which, he says, was only a minor improvement. Its halls teemed with violent offenders fresh out of jail. Elliott, never the toughest kid on the block--far from it--got his ass kicked on a regular basis, got up-close views of knife blades (somehow avoiding slashings and stabbings), even got tattooed one drunken night by a bunch of Vice Lords, his bunkmates. The big blue ink dagger they etched one dot at a time into the flesh of his upper left arm is barely visible through a newer image, a wizard and some other swirly stuff that's too obscured by hair to make out. (Someday, Elliott jokes, he's going to shave every strand of body foliage so as to better show off the tats.) There's more art on his thigh, Salvador Dali's "Persistence of Memory," the famous one with the melting clocks. It was done by a professional, a pal of his. He got a good deal. Stephen Elliott, perusing Belmont, revisits the streets of the North Side he once called home. Now he writes eight to 10 hours a day in San Francisco and has a fourth book on the way.Elliott passes by the Berlin nightclub on Belmont where, 10 years ago, nearly anorexic and sporting a six-pack, he stripped for tips.Elliott, under the L tracks in the 3300 block of North Sheffield, got straight A's after turning his life around.Elliott once read poetry, fueled with angst from his mother's disease and a falling-out with his father, at the No Exit Cafe at 6970 N. Glenwood. See also related story page 20. Copyright Chicago Sun Times Feb 16, 2003 Full Text: Like most humans, Stephen Elliott shivers when he is cold. And possibly when he's running a high fever. But that's about it. He used to shiver all the time, and for no reason. An illness, he surmises. An involuntary all-over body twitch born of too many nights unsheltered, too many successive days and weeks hunkered in doorways and on rooftops in below-zero temps, trying like hell to stave off the chill and make it till tomorrow. It is tomorrow. He made it. Then again, he almost didn't. Elliott, a Chicago native and literary player on the make, is one of them. Correction: was one of them--a homeless child, a ward of the state, a lost boy. But for a bit of luck and considerable pluck, he may well have been lost for good. As the Chicago Sun-Times reported earlier this month, the state's Department of Children and Family Services has trouble keeping track of its charges. At last count, 214 kids were missing in action, most of them runaways from group homes and foster homes. DCFS was the same agency running the show 18 years ago when Elliott bolted from his Rogers Park home and took to the streets. Like those 214 kids, Elliott was lost to the world. 'I was gonna bolt' On a bitterly cold February evening, the prodigal son, a San Franciscan of nearly five years, returns to former stomping grounds in "the greatest city ever." He is 31, genial and impressively well- adjusted. His laugh is easy, his manner chipper and humble. He talks quickly, earnestly, occasionally employing surferesque terms like "awesome" and "dude!" and "sweet!" as well as strategic F-bombs and assorted other blue mots. He wears white leather Nikes, baggy jeans and an ecru V-neck sweater over a red shirt over a checked one. (All true Chicagoans know about layering.) Each ear is pierced six times, though only three of the holes presently bear metal--newly installed copper studs and hoops. Atop his head rests a thatch of hair (including Elvisian sideburns) that'd make Rogaine mavens plotz. Brown and curly, it is mussed and tangled, like tumbleweed. Now the Truman Capote Fellow in the nationally esteemed Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Program at Stanford University, Elliott, the author of three books (most recently What It Means to Love You, a Chicago-based fictional tale of youthful life on the edge, published by MacAdam/Cage), spends his days doing what he does best, what he's always loved most: putting poetry and prose to paper. Best- selling memoirist Dave Eggers, he says, will publish a few of his short stories in a forthcoming edition of McSweeney's Quarterly. Eight hours a day, sometimes 10 or 12, he's click-clacking away on a laptop in various cafes, and at his small, no-frills apartment next door to a transient hotel in an especially seedy pocket of San Fran's Mission District. Newspaper editorials, magazine pieces, journal entries, revised chapters of a fourth book--out they pour like water, like blood. And when he's not writing, which is rarely during waking hours, he's chilling, playing poker, biking, rock-climbing, downing beers. Or--and he really loves this--he's talking about writing a la Hemingway-in-Paris with a circle of like-minded pals, smart, upwardly mobile folks who thrill as he does to the written word. In short, life couldn't be sweeter. And now he's back in Chicago for the first time in a while, roaming past youthful haunts, past Dunkin Donuts on Clark and Berlin nightclub on Belmont, where 10 years back a near-anorexic, six-pack- sporting, image-obsessed version of himself stripped for tips and self-esteem. Mostly tips. Just about no one's out tonight. No trannies in plastic high heels, no doped-up hookers, no tripping, sallow-faced teens--the types that populate his autobiographically infused novels. They're around, of course, but hidden, trying, no doubt, to keep warm. Shivering even if they are warm. In Lake View, he ambles north on Clark Street, east on Addison, south on Halsted, ducks under L tracks and through alleys where even rats are scarce due to numbing conditions. And he shivers not once (not visibly), which is more than can be said for his Popsicled companion. Instead, he tugs a dark blue Ford Racing winter hat over his ears, jams gloveless (!) hands into side pockets of a puffy white winter coat, which looks toasty but "it's crap, actually," and trudges onward, just glad to be here, where it all began, where, more than once, it almost came to a screeching halt. Up in Rogers Park, he sips pale ale on the corner of Lunt and Glenwood at the Heartland Cafe, a crunchy, dimly lit neighborhood gathering place. As a teen, he bused and waited tables here. A narrow general store, attached to the bar and restaurant, stocks what is surely the oddest inventory in Chicagoland, including coffee beans, running shoes and novelty "chattering teeth." It is Elliott's favorite stopover in town, and he returns faithfully on every visit to catch up with friends and chat up locals. Just blocks away, near the L station on a dark, litter-and- liquor-bottle-strewn side street that, Elliott remarks, turns rough when the temps rise, is another Heartland property, the No Exit Cafe. In less joyful times, Elliott read poetry here. Angst- ridden, depressive stuff. He was, after all, just coming off his worst year ever. In the early 1980s, his mother lay dying of multiple sclerosis and his father (a writer who eventually segued into real estate) flew into continuous rages. Elliott, who had a severe falling out with his father but has since made partial amends, decided to scram, take his chances on the outside. He was 13. It didn't happen right away, as mom made it abundantly clear that his leaving would only hasten her death. And what 13-year-old, even the most miserable 13-year-old, wants that on his conscience? Not Elliott, that was for damn sure. So he stayed a while longer. "She'd been pretty point-blank that if I left, she'd die," Elliott says later on in the evening, between bites of marinated meat cubes, lentils and other Ethiopian delicacies wrapped in spongy flatbread at Mama Desta's Red Sea Restaurant on Belmont, an erstwhile hangout of his. "She knew I was gonna bolt. It didn't take a genius, I guess." She passed. He left. Ensuing months proved hellish. Wandering Rogers Park and other slivers of Chicago, he fell in with the wrong crowd, drank heavily, smoked loads of pot and, when he could afford it (which wasn't often), dropped acid. Basically, just anesthetized himself into oblivion, devouring any substance set before him, doing "so many drugs I was talking backwards." Heroin would come years hence, as would a near-fatal overdose. 'I crawled into a hallway' One particularly bleak day in August of 1986, there was, he recounts, "an accident." "Actually, what happened is I slit my wrists wide open, and I just crawled in to a hallway," Elliott says, grinning and chuckling as if telling an amusing anecdote. "I was fed up, it was over. It was game over." A resident of the building found him "bleeding in the entryway," he remembers, again with a laugh. Cops were called, questions asked. Cops: Where are your parents? Elliott: I don't know. Well, that wasn't exactly true. He knew where one of them was. But his father-- no clue. He'd up-and-moved without leaving a forwarding address. The state took over, made Elliott its ward. Initially, when asked at court hearings, he told of his constant verbal thrashings. No one listened. So he got yelled at. So what. Then he brought up the chained-to-a-pipe/head-shaving thing. That got their attention. After fruitless court proceedings, he got tossed into the first of many so-called "group homes" he'd inhabit, crucibles of juvenile thugs, mentally ill orphans and abject hopelessness. So there he was in this youth shelter. Thirty kids to a room, a "gladiator arena." No one could tell him where or even if he'd get out, so after a week he beat it, ran away. Next came a mental health shelter, where he languished amid other wards of the court, "forgotten children," "schizos" banging their heads against walls and crapping their pants. No soap, no towels, no doors on the bathroom stalls. For weeks, he says, he was locked inside this barely heated, feces-smeared prison surrounded by Thorazine-zoned inmates. The confinement sucked, yes; but at least it gave him time to think. He'd never really had time to think. He spent three months there before shipping out to another facility, which, he says, was only a minor improvement. Its halls teemed with violent offenders fresh out of jail. Elliott, never the toughest kid on the block--far from it--got his ass kicked on a regular basis, got up-close views of knife blades (somehow avoiding slashings and stabbings), even got tattooed one drunken night by a bunch of Vice Lords, his bunkmates. The big blue ink dagger they etched one dot at a time into the flesh of his upper left arm is barely visible through a newer image, a wizard and some other swirly stuff that's too obscured by hair to make out. (Someday, Elliott jokes, he's going to shave every strand of body foliage so as to better show off the tats.) There's more art on his thigh, Salvador Dali's "Persistence of Memory," the famous one with the melting clocks. It was done by a professional, a pal of his. He got a good deal. A lucky break Elliott spent months fending off bullies in less than stellar dwellings, doing drugs, shirking school. Then, out of nowhere, the Jewish Children's Bureau came calling, took him in. That, he says, was "like being picked from junior college and accepted into Harvard." Turned out the rabbi from a synagogue he'd attended weekly, not so much for religious enlightenment as for the post-services smoking klatch (smoking wasn't allowed at his group home), had put his name in the hat. It took a while and a couple of JCB foster parents, but finally he decided to shape up, clean up, resume high school (at Mather on Lincoln Avenue), the latter of which he crammed, in order to graduate on time, into two years. He'd made the JCB principal an offer he couldn't refuse: Send me to a normal school, and I'll razzle-dazzle you, score top marks. He did just that. Straight A's all the way. Elliott, you see, is no dummy. Not by a long shot. It's just that he'd never applied himself. Every day and in every way, things were getting better and better, Elliott was starting to thrive. As a result, helping hands came fast and furious. "There's a lot of funding for people who are doing well," says Elliott of his sudden support network. Following high school, he got a full ride to both undergrad at the University of Illinois and graduate school (for film) at Northwestern. "I always try to tell kids, 'If you do well, people will help you try to do well. There's very little support for you if you're not doing well on your own. You have to do it.' I tell them that. But then when I'm talking to adults, I'm telling them a very different message. I'm saying, 'You have no right to expect anything of these children who have no support, whose moms are not waking them up to go to school in the morning. [There's] this whole Republican thinking of, 'Pick yourself up by the bootstraps.' And these people have the nerve ... to say I'm some kind of poster child for them. That's deeply insulting, because my friends are in jail. People smarter and better than me are in jail and shouldn't be." "A lot of these kids," he adds of those in the same broken system that almost swallowed him whole, "are black, and people don't care as much about poor black kids as they do about rich white kids, you know? "How many lost kids are there? Two hundred twenty-one?" he asks, overestimating by seven but still in the ballpark. "Imagine 221 white kids missing from Evanston. I mean, think of that. There'd be an uproar! You would never, ever hear the end of it. It'd be the defining event of our generation." Ultimately, though, the core issue remains: They're lost. Kids. Period. Black, white, Hispanic--they're lost. But how? Why? "It's not, Why are they lost?" Elliott says. "It's, Why does nobody care that they're lost? That's the real question." Answer the one, he says, and you've answered them both. Stephen Elliott, perusing Belmont, revisits the streets of the North Side he once called home. Now he writes eight to 10 hours a day in San Francisco and has a fourth book on the way.Elliott passes by the Berlin nightclub on Belmont where, 10 years ago, nearly anorexic and sporting a six-pack, he stripped for tips.Elliott, under the L tracks in the 3300 block of North Sheffield, got straight A's after turning his life around.Elliott once read poetry, fueled with angst from his mother's disease and a falling-out with his father, at the No Exit Cafe at 6970 N. Glenwood. See also related story page 20. - - - -
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