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% Next room: a 16-year-old girl named Jean, up all night on speed, paces back and forth, desperate for a cigarette. A tall, green-eyed blond, Jean ran away from Minneapolis, Minnesota, six months ago with $50 in her pocket and a fake I.D. She left a suicide note on her bed. "Let's just say my family really sucked," she says. "I can't say who I hate more, my mom or my dad. God, I need a cigarette!" One of the tweakers tumbles into the room to announce she has just found a small fragment of a cigarette. Elated, Jean follows the tweaker down the hallway.
This is what the kids call hanging out. Green watches intently. In the smoky darkness, she sees friendship and adventure, like kids gathered around a campfire, giving and getting what many never had before. Asked to describe her room back in Houston, she squirms, then whipsaws back to present tense. "I wanna try heroin tonight," she says matter-of-factly. "A friend says she'll shoot me up, but I'll need to get $10." Troll doesn't do drugs. "Why do you want to do that?" he asks. Her reply: "I just want to see what it's like."
Once the knapsack from home is empty, there are four basic means of survival: charity, meaning the small number of soup kitchens and shelters that cater to the young; panhandling; prostitution; and drug dealing. Hunger is the least daunting problem. In both Los Angeles and San Francisco, any youth who doesn't mind a lot of walking can find at least two free meals a day at various youth centers. And even the unluckiest panhandlers can make enough for a meal; at Taco Bell on Hollywood Boulevard, for example, a burrito costs only 59 cents. Then there is "table scoring" at fast-food restaurants: snatching unattended food from the tables before it is thrown away. Those with stronger stomachs engage in "Dumpster diving" for meals.
Temporary shelter is harder to find. Stephen Knight of the Los Angeles Free Clinic estimates that there are fewer than 200 shelter beds for youths in all of Hollywood. For every kid accommodated, another is turned away. The alternatives are grim: squats, park benches, alleys, an adult theater that allows youths to sleep in seats for a few dollars if they can bear the noise.
In the predatory world of American cities, runaways are near the bottom of the food chain. Some are ruthlessly abused; others become urban survivalists, displaying remarkable stamina and cunning. The younger children face the longest odds. "You have people preying on these kids from the minute they arrive at the Greyhound station and the train stations," says Barry Fisher, program director at San Francisco's Huckleberry House. "I remember one 12- year-old girl who was quickly scooped up by a pimp." AIDS is especially devastating: of 12 youths from a Hollywood squat tested last year, half were HIV-positive.