Children of a Lost World

What intrigued me about Jeremy was the world he’d created.

It was a mystical place of dragons and unicorns, a fantasy city laid out in exquisitely penciled drawings.

The details of the dream place were precise, the streets and buildings, the courtyards and the homes, interlaced on paper, connecting, logical.

Jeremy showed them willingly one sweltering afternoon on Hollywood Boulevard but seemed unable to explain them. They were simply his world and I suspect it was a better one than the world he occupied.

A handsome young man, he is one of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of homeless youths who migrate to Hollywood looking for something different than what they had.

I found him standing on a street corner with no particular place to go, carrying the drawings in a backpack. He’d bummed his way west from Delaware a year ago and now sleeps under a freeway bridge and eats when he can.

I met him as I walked the boulevard with three women from a drop-in center for homeless youths called My Friend’s Place. It occupies a two-story building just around the corner on Ivar.

There, young people between the ages of 14 and 24 can drop by for a meal, for help of various kinds, for classes, for referral or for just a moment of peace off the hard, hard streets of Hollywood.

Founded nine years ago by an entertainment executive named Steve LePore who wanted to do something for the city’s forgotten children, the center is a no-strings-attached haven for kids who exist on the edges of life, where their beds are often concrete and their tables set from dumpsters. It’s where Jeremy created his fantasy world.

I had heard about My Friend’s Place for years. It operates through private grants and donations without any government attachments and has built a reputation of trust and reliability with the kids on the street.

You don’t have to pray, fill out forms or pledge yourself to sobriety to get into the place. All you have to be is young, homeless and hungry. Program director Brian Newhouse rightfully describes the center as “the most unconditional service provider in town.”

The kids who drop in include those who have turned to drugs for their fantasy worlds and those who sell themselves to survive. “They come to Hollywood to make their dreams come true,” Newhouse says, “and discover that it’s a nightmare.”

Twice a week, staff members and volunteers hit the streets offering homeless kids food and introducing them to My Friend’s Place. On one hot afternoon last week, I went with them.

Suzie Oh was the staff member. Lorraine Lewis and Robin Dalebroux were the volunteers. Young and attractive, they were a contrast in vitality and purpose to those they talked to along Hollywood Boulevard.

They handed out snack food without preaching and listened to the stories of those sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against buildings or just drifting aimlessly down the boulevard, like floating debris from cultural wreckage.

One young man, sitting on the pavement near the doorway of a pizza parlor, had just learned he was HIV positive, but seemed oblivious to its impact. He talked instead of a fiancee and a new life. It was all a sham, Suzie Oh said as we walked away. There was no fiancee, no new life. At 20, he was a prisoner of the streets, and deep in those terrible places where the soul accepts no fantasies, he knew it.

The three women were at ease with the people they confronted, either those they recognized or those new to the boulevard. Their efforts help draw up to 100 young people a day to the center, all the more amazing because enclosure is what the kids were running from in the first place.

“They’re afraid of doors,” Newhouse says. “We can’t even bring them upstairs because they feel they might be trapped. They’ve been burned by people they ought to be able to trust, and now they don’t trust anyone.”

Victims of sexual, physical and emotional abuse visit My Friend’s Place five days a week and often join classes in drawing, writing and photography. In addition to developing their talents, the classes also work as a form of therapy. It was here Jeremy created his Other World.

Part of it was a “book” sketched on rough white paper that traced a Medieval romance, but it was the fantasy city that intrigued me most. I don’t know why Jeremy was on the street, the center doesn’t know why and he was clearly not willing to answer a lot of questions.

It’s easy to assume his fantasy city was a place he would rather be. There was no confusion there, no pain, no anguish of the heart to drive its occupants away into a brutal world of marginal survival.

But Jeremy understood the realities too and his next drawing proved that: It was of a man in chains going down in quicksand.

One can only guess at what will become of the young artist, whether he will find the world of his dreams or, bound in the chains of failure, disappear into the choking enclosure of the swamp. Will he make it? I wonder.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com