Boys of the Night Everybody sees the young men on Pacific Street as they climb into waiting cars. But who are they? What are their stories? D.L. Groover spends some time on the streets with the boys for sale. by D.L. Groover

Under the streetlight at Pacific and Hopkins, the young man poses near the curb. If it's hot enough or late enough, his shirt may be off, slung over his bony shoulder. His pants ride low on slender hips. A car approaches down Pacific from the west. It stops at Hopkins, enough time for both to eye each other. Wary of undercover cops, the young man doesn't move from his spot, but his eyes follow the slow-moving car as it passes. If he's hungry enough, the young man might risk rubbing his crotch or his chest. The car stops. With three quick steps he's at the passenger-side window. Negotiations are fast, rudimentary. After no more than 15 seconds, the young man gets in the car.

Directly across the street as the car drives away and turns off Pacific, another shadow emerges out of the darkness. Had the car stopped on his side of the street, he'd be the lucky one with 40 or more bucks in his pocket an hour later. But the stream of cars is endless on this hot summer Montrose night. He gets picked up before the taillights of the other car disappear around the corner.

This is the ritual of Pacific Street, 24/7. This, Hyde Park, and surrounding blocks are the cruising grounds for these boys in the shadows. The gay bars are steps away, and the clients who pick up the hustlers are countless. Pacific Street is favored for its heavy traffic, as well as for its unobstructed views east and west. A police car is easily spotted and the hustler can move on and not be picked up or hassled for loitering. If a street kid is sober enough, or reckless enough, or hopeless enough, he'll be out in the early morning and may land a quickie with a businessman off to work. Then at least he'll be able to drink his day away, or have a Lucky Meal from McDonald's, or shoot up so he won't have to think about the passing hours before he's back again on the night streets.

This endless brutal cycle of boredom, sex, drugs, and sporadic violence knows no season, no time, and, certainly, no respite. It's a horrific downward spiral, and not many have the fortitude, skill, or just plain damned good luck to escape its pull.

It should come as no surprise that the kids working the streets are not prostituting themselves because they want to, or even because they like it, but because they have to do something just to survive. Cigarettes are a luxury, to say nothing of a complete dinner or a roof over their heads. More likely, their expenditures run to deadening alcohol and the forgetful haze found through drugs. Crystal meth is a particular favorite at the moment. Because of their drug abuse, most, sadly, are HIV-positive. At their age, late teens/early 20s, sex is the easiest, quickest, most efficient way to earn good money, whatever their health status. Debasing themselves for a quick paw by a "greasy old geezer," as one of them said, means no more to them than they mean to society.

What they do have on their side is the power of youth, however illusory that may be. The johns find this transitory attractiveness impossible to resist and the accessibility of so much willing flesh impossible to ignore. They are drawn inexorably toward youths' flame and are willing to pay quite handsomely to possess it in any fashion, be it hand job, unconsummated sleepover, or ultimately becoming a temporary sugar daddy to their street sugar baby, if only until a new baby comes along.

Homeless street youth is, by no means, a uniquely American problem; it's global. England calls them "rough sleepers." India's Voluntary Association for Health estimates a shocking 44 million homeless youth in that country; while the truly destitute of the destitute, the homeless pre-teens in the slums above Rio de Janeiro, have been snatched off the streets by paramilitary forces and systematically killed in a fiendishly inhumane attempt to reduce their numbers. Every major city in the world, from Egypt's ancient Luxor to the mean streets of 1840s New York, has had homeless youth prowling, marauding, and selling themselves, but only in recent years have the industrialized countries begun to confront the issue with a somewhat compassionate social-consciousness and focus. In the latest figures available from the Department of Health of Human Services (1999), the total number of homeless youth in the U.S. is estimated at being anywhere from 500,000 to 1.3 million. And, unfortunately, being homeless all too often means prostitution. In its most current report, the National Coalition for the Homeless states that "many homeless adolescents find that exchanging sex for food, clothing, and shelter is their only chance of survival on the streets."

January 2002 saw the reauthorization of the federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, which entitles homeless children to a "free, appropriate public education," and it requires schools to "remove barriers to their enrollment, attendance, and success." There are numerous federal and state grants available in increasing frequency for the many coalitions, 501(c)(3) organizations, and local youth drop-in centers that have arisen in the last 10 years to deal with what our Congress calls "an immediate and unprecedented crisis." For these plans to work, though, the kids have to come into the light, so to speak, and that's always been the caregivers' most difficult task to accomplish.

Ruth Wright, program manager of Youth Empowerment Advocates of Houston, a branch of Houston Area Community Services, which runs the drop-in center on Pacific Street, cuts through the statistics into the heart. "If you have problems in the family, you're going to have kids who are homeless. Everything starts in the family. If you fix that, you'll see changes."

For someone who's not had love, security, or basic human kindness ever shown to them throughout their formative years‹and by all federal and local statistics, that's most of the runaways and throwaways‹life on the street is dreadfully seductive. It sucks them in with startling vengeance. Out there they find instant family and oftentimes make their first real friends. The freedom from control, from school, from abusive parents, is more intoxicating than the consequences of reality. Of course, out there they invariably become addicted to drugs, get AIDS, lose their looks, wind up in jail, get beat up, prostitute themselves. Mistrust of authority, which usually means most adults, keeps them bonded to this false romantic notion of being masters of their own fate.

Much later, if they're still here and cognizant, the lucky few realize they've squandered their youth and had better do something, anything, for their future. That's when the social workers step in. They can't perform miracles, but if‹out of the scores that pass through their hands‹they help three or four rejoin society in small steps (getting their GED, weaning them off drugs, finding a job, getting them off the streets), that's a success rate they can live with.

ZipDrive (his street moniker) is a typical street youth here in the Montrose. Twenty-one years old, he's lived on and off the streets ever since he ran away from home at 16, "just to be a dumb ass, for attention as much as anything." His mom "kidnapped" him from the Montrose and brought him back home to Cleveland, Texas, but she died soon after. For a short time he lived with relatives. "Most of my family was, you know, 'Go away, we don't want to have anything to do with you.'" He quit school and decided to make it on his own. "I had nowhere else to go, so I came back."

He knew a street kid here from his previous runaway attempt and hooked up with him. His friend introduced him to "the life." A coffee shop owner became ZipDrive's first trick. "He paid good and didn't want too much."

Young, cute, and gay, he realized his earning potential. "It seemed like a good way to make money. Drugs just come with the streets, that's all there is to it; it's part of the life. It makes fun of all the drama, it lets you forget for a while and just have fun. That's what I did it for. The longer you can stay awake, the more money you can make. But once you actually come down and wake up, you realize you haven't made as much as it was worth.

"At one point, if I had less than $1,300 in my pocket, I considered myself broke. But those were the good times. It has its up and downs."

For a short time he lived with a crack dealer who supplied him with all the free drugs he wanted. It didn't matter which drugs. "With me, whatever was there, whatever could be cheapest, or free. I can't smoke pot, which sucks, it gives me migraines."

ZipDrive is HIV-positive, though he says not from shooting drugs. He thinks he got it from his wedding vows, sharing needles during a pagan blood ritual with a former boyfriend. "You know, you share blood in one form or another. We did it junkie-style, used syringes to share blood. I knew he was positive, and I was on a suicide mission at that time. No matter where he's at or where I'm at, I still feel him. I feel what he's going through."

Does he tell his johns his HIV status? "It's an occupational hazard. Most clients when they pick you up look at it as, 'I don't care if you do or don't. But I'm going to treat it like you do. Like paramedics.' Any client that don't probably has more shit than me and half the world put together.

"A lot of them are really nice. They're just lonely. They have something I need‹money‹and I have something they want. It's just like selling a drug. The one bad thing about it is that you usually drop every moral fiber that you have. Some of these people want you to do some pretty weird things. I've only recently become versatile, you know, whatever goes? Before, I wouldn't even let nobody touch me behind my hips. But now, you give me a good shot of crystal and I'm a bottom from hell. I throw my legs up so fast you'd think they're spring-loaded. Most of them are groovy with it. Most of them only want head. It's the safest thing you can do. It's just the fact that they're not going to the bars, not having to sit there and buy drinks and hope the person's coming home with them. I'm guaranteed.

"'How much?' is what they usually throw out first. I'm like, 'First of all, what the hell do you want to do?' They tell me, and I tell them if I do it. And then you negotiate a price.

"Some people go by the hour. I go by how much effort I got to put out. If you want me to do all of it, you're gonna pay at least 100. It all depends. If all I gotta do is lay there, you might get off with 40. If they're cute, I ain't gonna charge them that much; they don't have to be picking me up. It all depends on desperation, if I'm desperate for money. I call the shots. It's all negotiable."

Like most homeless youth, his life's been transitory. He left Houston for greener pastures in Los Angeles and San Francisco, only to return when the sweet life turned sour. He hustled in L.A. and found a sugar daddy, but when he was arrested for possession of crystal meth, he ran to S.F. where his hustling money paid for computer school. He's a wiz at fixing and programming them, which started when he was a kid at home, but says he can't get a job here because of his fears of those outstanding California warrants.

Now that he's back in Houston, he dances on the weekends at a local boy bar when the owner calls him. It pays okay, but not nearly what he makes hustling.

"I'm ready to find a husband and settle down and become an old widow-maker. Some people get stuck in that survival mode. A lot of them don't want out. They see the easy money, the glamour. It's not always like that. Once you're stuck, it's a bitch to get out. I've lost friends because of it. But I always had fun. And I don't regret it. I feel that my experiences have done nothing but give me more wisdom towards life, at a lot more early age. I've done the drugs, I've done everything I've wanted to. What I foresee in the future is happiness and wisdom to not do the things I've already done."

There is no quick fix to any of this, and happy endings are few. Every day brings more homeless youth onto the streets. If they're not helped immediately, they will very likely be lost forever. They disappear into another city, get sicker, waste away through drugs, commit suicide, or are murdered. The root cause‹unanimously stated by every local social service organization that helps street kids find their way back to society‹is a dysfunctional family. One mired in poverty, sexual abuse, drug dependency, or plain neglect of their children.

In the car, the young man knows he won't be "couch surfing" for a place to stay tonight. Now he'll have enough money for a burger and a hit of crack later. Tomorrow he'll go to the drop-in center on Pacific to wash his clothes and take a shower. They might have donuts if he gets there early. He's tired and not feeling good. He needs a refill on the pills he lost last week. What he really wants is money for that bus ticket to San Antonio. He wants to get away from here so bad, where nobody knows him, where he can be the new kid on the block and start over. It's still early, he can be done with this guy and back here before the bars close. Just one more trick, he thinks, and it's a whole new life. Just one more.

This article was compiled from interviews with street kids, members of the Houston Police Department, and social workers from Covenant House, Houston Area Community Services, the Center for AIDS, and Montrose Clinic.

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