What Happened To These People

I kept a list of CDC residents from when I was there -- about 46 teenagers. Tony was one of the boys I liked best from CDC. He hooked up at my house, I hooked up at his house when we could get permission (hooking up was the facility's term for visiting each other) -- we’d stay up all night drinking coffee and talking teenage deep, wearing our army jackets to the center the next day. He held some particular piece of nonsense guilt for me (and he was seriously doing the program) that he knew would’ve been blown out of proportion and gotten me into so much CDC trouble and I’ve been grateful ever since. His mother, shocked, wary when I tracked her down and reached her (who are you, how'd you get this number) told me Tony had been in and out of programs and jumped off a bridge in 1992. 

One resident was back in the program as an adult for night groups; one was in NA for a cocaine habit; one was in and out of drug programs; one is in prison for pretty much the rest of his life; one is said to be psychotic; one’s supposedly in and out of psychiatric hospitals; one did the program like a zealot, fell, and now embraces AA with all the fervor that he once embraced CDC. One’s doing fine, credits the program with saving his life and thinks the place has turned into a joke nowadays.

T was a sweet,  caring, introverted fifteen-year-old from Levittown who was constantly being told by staff to take her long brown hair out of her face.  She had smoked a little pot and was put in the program because three of her brothers had been residents and her mother was scared. 

I used to spend hours talking to her as we scrubbed floors together on our knees; she used to "drop concern slips" for me in group; it was her name I’d give when they’d come around and ask us who we had eyes for (a crush on) for their records -- yeah they did this too. That girl is gone. 

Fifteen years later and she refuses to really remember me or talk about the program. When I met her she was on and off again homeless, sleeping on the streets of the Lower East Side, eating out of dumpsters.  She had a serious drug problem and serious psychiatric problems, a hardened version of a fifteen-year-old CDC girl still trapped in a fifteen-year-old girl world: her mother threatening to throw her out of the house, she pleading with me to give her a ride to the city to buy dope, pleading with me not to tell her mother that she bought pot. 

I spent 8 hours following her around the city in the freezing cold as she ran around like she was possessed, falling to her knees and hugging homeless men she knew, running around trying to find blankets or clothes to warm them. She was also on a mission, running around the streets and subways of New York City obsessed with pulling the plastic covering off of baby carriages, to save the children from suffocating.  She already served a year in Rikers for this, but she won’t stop. 

I chased her around begging her to let me drive her back home, trying to get her to reminisce with me.  I don’t think she even recognized me.

We parted  in Penn Station with the requisite CDC hug which felt unusually meaningful, it was the only connection we made all day and she spent the night somewhere outside and I went home.  That night I received a call from her mother worried because her daughter hadn’t come home again. T was eventually arrested and spent three years in jail on vague kidnapping charges (trying to save those suffocating babies). She said I couldn’t write about her but in 2005 she was on the front page of the Village Voice; feature article about a troubled girl - - no mention of CDC. I don't know -- she was a good friend to me back then, the two of us all alone scrubbing the Long Hallway on our knees all the time, punished.

I found out my program quasi-girlfriend, L, lives five minutes away from me and is doing fine with a year old baby after a few years of crack, needles, self-abuse, spousal abuse. She still hates the place. The girl she split from CDC with is dead. The boy from CDC she dated attempted suicide. I walked around a few times with her and her baby and tried to be as close as we were in there, she tried too-- brothers and sisters, that TC automatic intimacy and Total Honesty -- and we managed for a little bit. But with her, with some other residents, for me, that memory is almost over, it’s harder and harder to get it to still mean anything anymore.

 

Prisons, Death, Programs

And there was J (don't use my name) a wild, fearless, athletic, crafty daredevil - - "the sickest kid you knew in high school," his lawyer told me (CDC once dressed him as Dennis the Menace as a punishment).

I visited him in a penitentiary in upstate New York where he’s now serving a 32 to 64 year sentence in prison for two counts of attempted murder (his parents), two counts of assault, robbery, and grand larceny. He's also already made two suicide attempts.

J made the front page of Newsday in 1989 for engineering a fairly ingenious, complicated jailbreak with two other inmates -- one, a murderer by the name of Shi Fu Huang; he appeared on an episode of America's Most Wanted. As of 2009, Huang is still at large.

J tells me that during Monday Night Football they used fire hoses to rappel down the side of the jail. Shi Fu said " Sayonara motherfuckers," while climbing down.

They dropped Shi Fu in Manhattan.

"He was like, 'Thanks, man.' I was like ' Take it easy'... " J said.

"I knew he would never get caught, his people, his connections were too good, he was fucken out of the country within the day."

J was supposed to meet with one of Shi Fu's brothers to get money, but tells me he doesn’t want to get into that.

 

 

“That [CDC] was the beginning of the downfall I think," J said. "I think that made me worse because I had to live up to the reputation that everybody’s expecting me to be…I think that their hearts were in the right place, they meant to help everybody, I just think that that tough love concept works with older people, but not with kids. Tough love kids get rebellious…I used to be petrified of them fucken people up there, I hated going to that place. I used to have a knot in my stomach constantly because you never know when you’re gonna’ get in trouble for something, even if you try to do your best you’re gonna’ get in trouble for something.

“See, they never knew how I thought because I was like the only person in that place that never talked to them and they fucken hated that, they hated me for that. I never spoke in a group. Never. And they used to try to get it out of me and I’d be like, ‘I got nothin’ to say’.

“It’s not a way to deal with people. I’m still traumatized from that shit. I should sue,” he said and laughed.

There was Nina (L's friend) the central casting rich girl from Great Neck who's dead now -- a car, Quaaludes and telephone pole. 

And Steve, the coolest craziest resident who everyone wanted to be like, now said to be psychotic and dangerous. 

And Brian, my Orientator, who’s spent the last ten years drinking and failing and is now back in the same program for night groups with a wife and four-year-old child.

 

The closest thing I had to a best friend in Yorktown, Russell, is also in a New York penitentiary, bulked up, covered in tattoo ink, arrested a few years ago on his way to Sturgis. Dealing, bikers, shooting up, in and out of prisons. He said his latest brush with rehab was in prison where they made him watch the movie Rudy over and over as part of a mandatory DWI course. He was telling me because it was as ridiculous as he and I though saying "Good Morning Family, my concept for today is… "in Yorktown when we were teenagers. He’s my age and gets out in a few months. 

Smart, kind of quiet, dirt bike gear head from upstate, Phoenix House was the first time he was in New York City and he didn’t quite fit into any Yorktown stereotypes. 

He hated Encounters. For 20 years he’s been in and out of prisons and jails and he still says Phoenix House was his worst experience. To him it was a “group home without cops” with some silly brainwashing that he never bought. That’s basically what I thought -- but it was a place for me to escape and treatment took place hanging with Russ or talking to my roommate at night as we lay in our beds after lights out. You were never lonely in there.

Lee was a black teenager from Harlem who I met in the Bronx facility of Phoenix House and we buddied around together. He did short stints in two TCs and spent three years in Phoenix House over a cab driver robbery with a rusty gun. He’s now seven years into an 8 to 16 year sentence for burglaries. He’s got a lengthy rap sheet, his arm is mangled from a car accident, he became a drug dealer, suffered from depression and finally, developed a crack habit for a little while. His father doesn’t take his collects anymore. A couple years older than me he says he’s tired and worn out.

 

Back Home

I went up to Yorktown today and wandered the halls going in and out of rooms with a group of teen-age residents. Not much has changed. A couple residents bored out of their minds playing cards (What do you do all day? This.) Boys in the room cliquing up by ethnicity playing dominoes; sleeping in the middle of the day; an adult resident in the courtyard cursing like mad at the air; a younger resident talking melodramatically about splitting; a couple of residents saying they lied about having a drug problem, just trying to beat prison, beat a case; a forty-something female “retread” (TC term for residents who are in and out of rehabs) uncomfortable among all the hyper teenagers, sent to Yorktown because she was sexually acting out in another facility; a group of good kids earnestly trying to do the right thing with 18, 20, 24 months in the program.

You gotta’ meet ’Caine, Kev. You know why they call him ’Caine? Kev, is it the same as when you were here? Kev, did the program help you? Did you want to leave when you were her ? How’d you handle staying here? Did you get sick of it? Was it hard for you when you got out? Kev, did you have a nickname when you were here? It’s good to see someone made if from here. Is there anybody else from here who made it big? You really inspired me, Kev.

I hugged and hand shook like I was back in a program.

The director, who was in Phoenix House as an adult resident when I was there, asks me if I want to give a seminar (the seminar is a TC staple) -- basically give a speech to the House. I kind of jokingly say, "But I’m a splittee." 

He kind of jokingly agrees.