Almost Lost: The True Story of an Anonymous Teenager's Life on the Streets

by Beatrice Sparks

  “I hardly noticed my transition from a middle-class, right side of the road, good student guy, whose English teacher had signed in his yearbook, ‘SAMMY: One of my most gifted, likely to succeed students. Nothing but the top of the ladder for Sam the ham.’ Now I was climbing the gang ladder. How much do you know about gangs?”

  “Not much. In fact I’ve never worked with a kid before who was more than a weekend wannabe.”

  “Well, actually, the whole gang experience was much more scary now that I look back on it. I can’t believe that I got so involved. But I was so depressed, so beaten. I felt like I was a ‘throwaway kid’ incarcerated in a deep, dark hole with no one caring, no one wanting to get me out. I was more lonely and desolate than you can ever imagine, suicidal to the degree that some days the only reason I didn’t do it was because I didn’t have the energy to take down Mom’s gun, find the bullets, and pull the trigger.

  “Actually I guess in a way I’ve gotta be thankful to the gang because they literally saved me from that. They aren’t all bad like some people think. They took me in when I had no one else. They shared everything they had without question. They were my family, my bros and my sisters. I liked their motto, por vida, which means for life. I felt safe, having the assurance they would always be there to protect me. But I guess I better go back to the beginning and not ramble so much.

  “Well, when Slice first said they’d jump me in I felt like a human being again for the first time in I don’t know how long. I know that sounds crazy to you, but I think kids often rationalize that it’s better to have a bad friend than not to have a friend at all. Do you think that’s possible?”

  “It’s not wise, but I suspect it happens a lot more than most people realize.”

  “You wouldn’t believe some of the kids on the streets in L.A. They aren’t dumb-asses like I was, who ran away from everything positive to everything negative. Lots of them ran away from violence and abuse, filth and vulgarity. Little Spider reminded me of Dorie in many ways, yet her mom was a crack-head hooker and her real dad was a pusher who abused her in every way that it’s possible to abuse a child. She lived all her life with drive-by shootings and rapes and muggings happening on every corner.”

  “I’m proud of you, Sammy, for being so sensitive and having compassion for the kids you met who might have done better if they had known better.”

  “A lot of them had kind, understanding hearts beneath the hard, cold protective walls they had to build around themselves to survive. Some were even elementary school kids.”

  “I, with you, hope someday we’ll find a way to get to the kids who are taught that abnormal behavior is normal. How can they possibly have any realistic concept of right and wrong?”

  “I think I want to become a psychologist, so maybe I can help them.”

  “Then I hope you do, Sammy.”

  “It’s so dark and dreary out there. Always so dark and dreary.”

  “You mention darkness a lot. When did it start taking over your life?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Do you think the concept of darkness affects most kids?”

  “Yeah, they talk about it a lot. Our music is filled with it and vampire books and other kinds of books like that are really popular.”

  “Have you ever heard of light therapy?”

  “Ummm, no.”

  “I think it is one of the greatest tools therapists have. What do you think it means, and how do you think it’s used?”

  “Well…I guess darkness is the absence of light, so maybe light is the absence of darkness.”

  “Oh, Samuel Gordon, you’re so bright. I want to screw off the top of your head and pat your brains!”

  “You’re embarrassing me.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah…but it makes me feel good, too. Do it some more.”

  “Did you notice the lamp I have on a swivel in the corner of the Listening Room?”

  “Ahhhh, yeah.”

  “You’d be absolutely amazed how, when you pull that strong light over the La-Z-Boy chair and turn it on, all the darkness in the room is pushed away, and try as hard as you can, even with your eyes closed, you can’t bring the darkness back.”

  “This I’ve got to see.”

  “Studies have shown that people react to light like flowers react to sunshine. We need it. In areas where there is little sunshine there is a higher rate of depression. When the depressed people are taught to sit under a two-hundred-watt light for twenty or thirty minutes a day, it relieves much of their dark, locked-in feelings of despair. I advise all my clients, including you, to buy an inexpensive metal clip-on lamp to use in their bedroom or wherever. When the night bogies start stealing in, it helps drive them away in a hurry.”

  “It sounds almost too good to be true…but I guess it makes sense.”

  “After we finish our session, why don’t you try it for a few minutes?”

  “I’ve been practically living in your Listening Room since I started coming here. I’ve used one of your little notebooks to write down the super stuff you’ve told me, and I’m trying to memorize and put all of it into my life. But you’re really dumping on me…good dumping though.”

  “That’s the way I work. I offer ideas to you, and you choose to use them in your life or not.”

  “I’m using them! I’m using them! And I can’t wait to try the light. I want to know more about that.”

  “Another day. For now you’re so bright and radiant that you’re hurting my eyes.”

  Sammy got up and gave me a high five. “You’re just trying to get rid of me. But I vill be back,” he said with an Arnold Schwartzenegger accent. Then his accent changed to Frankenstein. “After I recharge my battery in your light la-bor-atory.”

  SUMMARY OF SESSION

  Worked at putting Sammy’s past behind him. Showed him methods for not being a host to darkness.

  His personality and attitudinal set are blossoming. He is now an open-to-change-and-growth kid.

  Material covered: “Pos ’Tudes” and their helping, healing power, also light therapy.

  Samuel Gordon Chart

  Wednesday, August 10, 4 P.M.

  Fifth Visit

  SAMUEL (SAMMY) GORDON, 15 years old

  “Hi, Friend Sammy Gordon.”

  “Hi, Friend Dr. B.”

  “Do you know it makes me feel good to be around you?”

  “You’re just trying to rattle my cage.”

  “Uh-huh, I’m trying to release you from your cage.”

  “I think you’re getting the dumb door open a little.”

  “I think you are getting the dumb door opened a lot!”

  “I tried the light bit last week. I even showed it to my mom and Dorie and Dana.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, they liked it as much as I do. In fact, Mom and I even hung a bright light permanently in a corner of the laundry room, and we put a beanbag chair under it. And you know what else?”

  “No, what?”

  “I’m ready to take my tapes home to relisten and relisten to them right there in my very own light therapy corner.” He thought for a few seconds. “Maybe the one I’m going to make today I won’t. I didn’t think I’d ever tell anybody in the world about that descent into Hell that I chose to take. No one made me! I thought about it all night long…a miserable night…I’m soo ashamed. I hope you won’t hate my guts when I tell you.”

  “I may hate what you did, dear Sammy, but I promise you I won’t hate your guts or anything else about you. You’re my true friend, remember? As well as my client.”

  “Well, like I told you, or maybe didn’t tell you, one night when it was cold and wet on the street, Blunt (blunt is also a street term for a marijuana cigar), decided to hop in his old mobile and go to California. He’d lived in East Los Angeles originally and thought we’d be better off there. He’d ripped off a runner’s small stash, so he thought we’d have enough stuff and money to get us there.

  “Anyway
, when we got about halfway to L.A. we had some car trouble. Before we got to the garage, he stopped a well-dressed man just coming out of a building. Blunt looked at the guy with the dead-eyed stare he had perfected. It was the gang leader’s stare that most of us could never quite get. Blunt held out his hand, and the guy just reached in his pocket and took out his wallet. Blunt took out the stack of bills in it and handed the empty wallet back. It was almost a polite encounter between the two of them. Me! It had been a while since I’d had a mota (marijuana cigarette) and I was so scared I about messed my pants. Some hardened gang member, right?”

  “You were just a scared, hurting, lost kid.”

  “I wanted out of there. Man, I wanted out of there so bad I could taste it, but after the garage guy fixed the water pump or whatever pump it was and we were driving down the road smoking some killer bud, (strong marijuana) it all seemed kind of funny, not wrong or anything…funny.”

  “Do you think you would have done the bad things you did up to that point without drugs?”

  Sammy was quiet for at least a minute. “Noooo, no way. I not only wouldn’t have, I couldn’t have!”

  “What does that mean?”

  Sammy spoke as slowly as if he were weighing each word. “I think drugs kind of change the balance between right and wrong, yours and mine, good and bad, kind and unkind, darkness and light.” He stopped for a long time. “I hope you never know how dark it is in there, and you know what?”

  “No, what?”

  “You don’t even realize it’s dark until you come back up into the light.”

  “That’s beautiful, Sammy. It’s almost poetic.”

  “Not to me it’s not. To me it’s ugly and dark and evil, and I’m glad as anything that it’s in my past.

  “Anyway…we pulled into the black, dark, scary-movie-like streets of East Los Angeles and even mj (marijuana) couldn’t cover the danger and squalor and evil I could sense and smell.”

  Sammy’s voice became soft and feeble, and his eyes appeared so dull that for a moment I thought maybe I should stop him. “Sammy…” He didn’t seem to hear me.

  “I guess I stayed totally twisted (stoned) for the next century. I don’t know how long. Dimly, darkly I can see drive-by shootings, graffiti paintings on warring soldiers’ turf, a young boy hit on the head with an ax, a girl so cut-up in a fight even her mother wouldn’t have recognized her. No one seemed to have any hope, not even me, maybe especially not me, at that time. We were all like a bunch of crabs in a bucket.” Sammy seemed to come out of his trance a little. “I read once that gang members are like crabs in a bucket. Have you ever seen crabs in a bucket? If one tries to climb out, the others pull him back down again and again and again until he finally gives up.

  “Suk was the eighteen-year-old gang leader Blunt knew. Three of his guys had fine buggies (nice cars) and plenty of money. The rest of us just ran errands to fulfill our needs. Everything seemed to center around a matter of respect. Respect for what I don’t quite understand.

  “To make a place for myself I pretended to be a Tijuana Mexican. My mom’s mother was a Tijuana Mexican. She died when Mom was six. Then Mom was adopted by an childless older Anglo couple in San Diego. They were killed in an automobile accident when she was two weeks past her eighteenth birthday. She took what little money they’d left and went to nursing school.

  “I don’t think Mom was ever ashamed of being Mexican, part-Mexican, I suspect, but she never seemed to feel comfortable talking about her past. Still she taught us to be bilingual from the beginning. In East Los (East Los Angeles) I hung with the Latinos, including Suk, and felt they might have been part of my primeval past.

  “One evening as I stumbled past a very pregnant, very young girl, who had been bad cut (knifed) by either her husband or her lover or her pimp or her john, I almost threw up. Life had no meaning, no worth, there. People were all either too calloused or too afraid to do anything. They were like flies on the wall or cockroaches in the corners.

  “One Sunday I graduated to crack. I know it was Sunday because I could hear the Catholic church bells ringing. Crack made me feel so good and euphoric that it frightened me. After a couple of days, I gave it up because the smallest pinpoint of something good in me said crack was the biggest liar of all. Whiningly I went back to spinning out on tabs and reds and bud.

  “While on drugs, I could still semi-function, being a runner when necessary or, once, going with my carnelitos to rip off the wetbacks who were crossing the border. Most of them had with them everything of value in their lives, which wasn’t much. They put up little resistance. I remember I felt so bitter and hostile, I almost wished they would, so I’d have a reason to act out my brutal feelings. Action was the only thing then that could bring me out of my lethargy. I hate to admit this, even to myself, to say nothing of you, but in some crazy, insane, demented way the evil little embryo of a satanic idea was beginning to form in my mind. I wanted to do a driveby. I can’t believe I said that! It was bad enough to have thought it.

  “Promise me on the lives of your children that you’ll never tell anyone what I’ve just said.”

  “Oh, Sammy, you know I don’t have to promise on the lives of my children or anything else. I simply need to reassure you again that anything you say will forever be a solemn and sacred confidential disclosure.”

  “I can’t believe that it could have been, but there were times when I wanted to feel the gun in my hand, feel the feeling that comes with…snuffing someone. It seemed to give the others the greatest high of all…”

  Sammy began to cry pitifully. His body wrenched and shook. His eyes and nose streamed. A tiny childlike whimpering squeezed out from somewhere deep inside his tortured soul. After a while he whispered flatly, “Now you know why I wonder if even God can ever forgive me.”

  I grabbed his hands tightly. “As I told you once before, it will be a lot easier for God to forgive you than for you to forgive yourself. How are you coming along on that?”

  “Not very well. If I could just rub out, wash out, scrub out, hypnotize out, meditate out, therapize out…the evil gook. Have you ever had a client who had been in so unforgivably deep?”

  “Maybe not in the same kind of gook, but gook, nonetheless. Gook that made them want to blow out their candles, too. It isn’t a matter of which direction the pain comes from; it’s a matter of when the pain gets so horrendous that it seems completely unbearable.”

  “Oh yeah, and at this time, PCP (an animal tranquilizer) was sometimes mixed with mj and it can really make people go crazy. Please tell me that is what made me feel…you know.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “I don’t know. I hope it was PCP, though.”

  “Do you think you’d have felt that way and had those thoughts without it?”

  “Oh, dear God in Heaven, I hope not.”

  “You’re basically quite a religious boy, aren’t you, Sammy?”

  “I don’t think so. At least I’ve never thought of myself as being that way.”

  “If you don’t think so…”

  “But then again, maybe I am. Maybe that’s why I feel such guilt and pain. I hadn’t always thought wrong was right, like some of my carnelitos (Mexican gang friends), so maybe…I don’t know.”

  “Do you want to talk about that for a minute?”

  “What?”

  “The difference in thinking and feeling between someone who knows wrong from right and someone who doesn’t?”

  “Maybe there isn’t any difference. Yeah, there is. Some guys seemed to think that shooting on drive-bys was like shooting at bottles in a carnival.”

  “How did you feel?”

  “Actually, I only went on two…I think…and even though the adrenaline was racing through my body like strings of firecrackers and no one really got hurt, I…”

  “You what?”

  “Part of me really wanted to…be the one that got popped.”

  “You mean, you didn’t really want to do it t
o someone else? You wanted it to happen to you?”

  “Yeah, I think that was it. Because my life held no meaning, how could anyone else’s have any meaning or use or…Oh, I was soooo screwed up, so doped up and screwed up I wasn’t hardly even me.”

  “Who or what, at that time, controlled your life?”

  “My good, God-given sense sure didn’t.”

  “So?”

  “I guess the dope did…and the anger…and the fear…and the pain…”

  “And who gave permission to the dope and the anger and the fear and the pain to control your life?”

  “I guess I did.”

  “Could anyone else have given them that permission?”

  “I guess not.”

  “You guess not?”

  “No! I know not! No one but me could have given permission to anyone or anything to control me, EXCEPT ME! I got so mad at Mom eons and eons ago when I thought she was trying to control me, even though she was trying to do it in a positive way. Then I stupidly and rebelliously allowed every sense and action and thinking process I had to be controlled by all the negative and vile things in the world! Actually, not only allowed it, but encouraged it!”

  “Do you want to explore that?”

  “Well, I was pretty put-together mentally till…you know…No, I guess you don’t know…yet! Anyway, in those olden days, so far back I can hardly remember them, I had friends and sports and music and my job. It was just a gofer thing in a medical clinic, but I liked it, and I had Mo…”

  “Mo?”

  “Harmony.” Sammy winced and bit his bottom lip. “She was like the most wonderful thing that ever happened in my life. I…I loved her. She carbonated every red blood corpuscle in my bloodstream.” He winced again, so strongly it was almost like a small seizure. “We were tight as anything till…I blew it…like I blew everything else in my life.”

  “Why do you suppose you did that?”