“I went to do a drug deal, OK, and there were two girls on the bed–it was a small one-bedroom apartment, and they were making out,” says Timothy, his sentences tumbling fast one after the other. “And the guy came in. The guy was good-looking and young. And I’m getting the drugs out. And I turn around, and he takes a full Coke bottle and totally clobbers me, OK? And I’m like down. I went down. I mean, you can’t help but go down when you’re hit with a thick, full Coke bottle, you know? Right there.” He points to his temple. “I’m lucky I’m not blind. I’m lucky that it didn’t shatter.
“I took that opportunity–and this had to be God–I got through that space. I got out.” He shakes his head.
That was six years ago, when Timothy (which is a pseudonym) was 16 and living on the streets of Chicago. He did drugs and sold drugs; he was a full-time prostitute and deep into the occult. He has struggled to define and redefine himself, tried to control himself and, failing that, tried to control those around him. He has now been off the streets for three years; a year ago he became a born-again Christian. Looking back, he says his life was on a track headed for death, and he couldn’t see any way to change its course; even when he was 12, he was sure he’d be dead by the time he was 17. “I should have been dead so many times,” he says. “And I’m alive.”
This time he wound up in a Salvation Army runaway shelter in Chicago, where he spent the night. He was awakened in the morning by the screams of a woman who was being raped in the alley. He yelled down that he had called the police, and the man disappeared.
Where he stayed depended in part on how angry the people in each possible refuge were with him–and in part on how much money he had. Timothy was doing drugs and needed a lot of money. He slipped quickly into selling drugs, then into selling his body.
He walked the same streets over and over–down Halsted to Belmont, over to Broadway, down to Diversey, and back around–listening for car horns, watching for the right eye contact, asking any possible client for a cigarette–sometimes for no other reason than that he wanted the cigarette–almost praying on days when he had no money that someone would pick him up.
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“Quite honestly, I think I probably stole less than the majority of them do. A lot of them would steal your whole wallet. A lot of them would steal your credit cards. A lot of them would steal your property. I’d always leave money in the wallet. For two reasons. Number one, I never wanted to leave anybody broke because I know what it’s like. Number two, I figured if they thought there was some money in there, they might think ‘I must have spent it.’”
