10:54am | Imagine as a child moving to California, only to have your mother and father split up and your now-single mother addicted to cocaine. Imagine being homeless for an entire year. Imagine being a prepubescent pot dealer so that your little sister doesn’t go hungry. Imagine getting into foster care, only to be falsely accused of rape. Imagine your best friend being shot to death right next to you. Imagine getting thrown out of your school district because of trouble you didn’t start.

Imagine after all that you get yourself into a first-rate arts high school and, despite never having been a performer, finding acceptance and success — and then being tossed out of your home just six weeks before graduation.

For one Renaissance High student, what takes imagination is not conjuring up such a past, but how to create a future out of it.

“I’d always been a goofy person,” Marcus¹ says. “With my life story, you kind of have to be a goofy person, you know what I’m saying? [Otherwise] you’ll just be mad all the time.”

Marcus is sitting with me in Edna’s living room. Edna herself is another story, not yet 30 and with guardianship of Steve and Landover, her teen and preteen brothers. Trying to write her dissertation while figuring out the logistics of survival — yet somehow managing to throw the occasional tea party — Edna came home one day to find Steve and Marcus online looking for a homeless shelter.

“I kind of saw this coming,” she says. “Marcus had been staying over more and more. I knew he had a tough situation at home.”

Unfortunately, tough situations have been his status quo.

Disruptive as the move from Missouri may have been, Marcus’ first California year, spent in Riverside, was palatable. But then the family moved to South Central L.A. Within a year his father was out of the picture, and his mother had become addicted to cocaine, and suddenly Marcus was living on the street.

“I must have missed a lot of the third grade,” he surmises, having put at least some of what transpired out of his mind. “I don’t even know how I passed. But when I did go to school, the teachers said I had a lot of potential. But I wasn’t trying to hear all that, because the situation I had to deal with when I got out of school….”

At age 11, Marcus met a 17-year-old pot-dealer, “[who] taught me how to sell weed so I could get my sister something to eat. So that’s what I was doing.”

Sometimes Marcus and his sisters would get picked up from a homeless shelter where they sometimes stayed and taken to and from church. But one Sunday after services when his mother was nowhere to be found, the driver called the authorities, and the kids were taken to the station to await her. But she arrived at the station high on cocaine, and Marcus and his sisters were put “into the system,” which led to their being placed in foster care.

Marcus liked his foster mom, and in terms of living conditions, this was a significant step up. Unfortunately, the peace Marcus had found was brief. The disruption came in the form of his foster mother’s 14-year-old daughter, who, like many people her age, was becoming interested in sex. “I didn’t know what that was,” Marcus says, “but she would bribe me with stuff, like, ‘I’ll give you these cookies if you let me kiss you.’ … It just kept going like that, ’til we ended up having sex one day.”

His foster mom discovered what had been going on and presumed Marcus had been the instigator, and that her daughter was not a willing participant. Social Services got involved, and Marcus found himself accused of rape. “They was talking about putting me in jail and stuff,” he remembers, “and I was, like, 12 years old!”

Eventually the young girl confessed to her role, but the damage to the foster environment was irreparable, and Marcus found himself living with an aunt. “We thought it was all going to be good from there,” he says, “but then I found out that my auntie only took us in because she found out she could get money from the system [for doing so].” Instead of providing the children with proper clothing, “she would do stuff like use the money she got from the state to pay off her car loan. … She wouldn’t even buy us real backpacks. You know the little bags that you keep tents in? That’s what we used. … I mean, you do that to your own family? Really?”

Upon completing a 12-step recovery program, Marcus’ mother regained custody of the children², and Marcus rates his time in middle school as the best in his life — largely because it was sans disruption. Tellingly, Marcus calls this period “weird” because of its being relatively trouble-free and fun.

Not surprisingly, Marcus developed a rebellious streak, partying and ditching school. But by his second year in high school, just as he was getting his life back on track, Marcus was walking home with best friend Randy (whom he knew from Missouri) near Darby Park in Inglewood, when members of a particularly notorious Bloods set rolled up on the pair and committed a drive-by shooting. “We both ducked to the ground, so I thought we were okay,” Marcus says, “but when I got up, my best friend was dead.”

Marcus persevered, making it through to the end of his junior year, when on “a really, really bad day” Marcus let a gang member’s harassment get the best of him. The ensuing fistfight resulted in Marcus’ expulsion from the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Things had already been strained at home. Marcus’ older sister had given birth to three kids by the time she had turned 21, and Marcus was part of a family of seven living in a two-bedroom house in South Central, and his mother expected him to help take care of his sister’s children at the expense of his school life.

By the time he received an inter-district transfer, allowing him to attend school beyond the district of his residence, Marcus had been sold on Renaissance — though not yet on the idea of being a performer — by a friend from church. “It was a performing-arts school,” he says. “I was like, ‘What the hell am I gonna do there?'”

Nonetheless, with pertinent experience, Marcus auditioned for the school’s fall musical and won a role. “Some of my friends thought it was weird, so I was like, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t do this,'” he says. “But then I was like, ‘Man, forget it. I go to school there. I shouldn’t avoid it.'”

After that first show, Marcus continued to stay involved, working as assistant director on several projects before being cast in the school production of Damn Yankees (which played at the Center Theater at the Performing Arts Center in early May).

Meanwhile, not only was Marcus’ mother out of work, she seemed to have become, as he puts it, “lazy. It was like she didn’t have the will to work no more.” Her torpor was such that, despite being home all day, she would leave all of the household chores to Marcus and his younger sister. “I was already coming home at 7 on the train because I had rehearsals ’til 5:30,” he says of the days leading up to his mother’s throwing him out. “And before I did my homework, I would help my little sister clean up the house, take out the trash and stuff.”

Even before the transfer, Marcus says his mother had begun to seem resentful of his efforts to live an individualized life, expecting him to eschew extracurricular activities because of her and her elder daughter’s life choices. In Los Angeles it had been football and much of his social life she asked him to give up; at Renaissance it was theatre — and then the school itself. “I always tried to do what my mom said, because I love her,” he says. “But … I have a life, and I’m trying to live my life. … I was like, ‘Why would you let me commit to something and then tell me I gotta abandon it?’ … It was almost like she didn’t want to see me have a good time because she wasn’t having a good time.”

Up until 11:30 every night doing homework, then trying to get to sleep as quickly as possible so he wouldn’t be overly exhausted when he awoke in time to catch the 6 a.m. train to school, one night as he lay in bed he decided not to heed his mother’s call to attend to the crying baby in her room. His mother became so incensed that she got physical with him, then immediately tried to disenroll him from Renaissance. When that failed — “I was like, ‘Where else am I gonna go?'” he says — after a weekend when he stayed overnight (with her permission) at classmate Steve’s house in Long Beach, she finally made good on persistent threats to kick him out, informing him of her decision over the phone. 

“After she hung up, I said, ‘Whoa, I guess I’m homeless now.’ I’ve always wanted to move out, get out of that situation, so it was kind of a plus in my life,” he says, laughing, “only I didn’t have nowhere to go. … It’s kind of a relief not being under that stress, to just be able to go to school and not worry about none of that.”

Of course, an entirely different kind of weight was now pressing upon him: Where to live? His first — and only — idea was finding a homeless shelter; but Edna nixed the idea, allowing him to stay with them. It’s an untenable situation — “This has to be temporary,” she says — but her first thought was to deal with the immediate crisis.

“I said, ‘Yeah, you’re not going to go to a homeless shelter. You can stay here for a while,'” Edna explains. “I don’t feel comfortable sending an 18-year-old boy to a homeless shelter. I don’t think that is a particularly safe place for him to be. Obviously our house is a little small for so many people, but … he’s got six weeks left of high school. The last thing I would want is for him to lose the chance to finish, so I want to make sure he has a safe place to stay. … I like him. He’s a great kid.”

That is a sentiment resoundingly echoed by the Renaissance staff. “He walked into my office last summer and had a conversation with me about why he wanted to come to Renaissance,” says Principal Mark Zahn. “And I was so impressed with him. I don’t usually take seniors because they have no feeling for the school. [But] he’s an amazing kid. He’s done a lot of good things at Renaissance. He has an amazing attitude. … I gave him a chance. Sometimes I’ve gotten burned doing that, but that’s not this story.”

When I ask counselor Cheryl von der Hellen about Marcus, she offers a one-word answer almost before I can finish the question: “Survivor.” And she has no trouble elaborating: “He makes it literally against all odds. I see him with the weight of the world on his shoulders, but he just keeps marching forward. He’s amazing. … To watch him come in and just immediately fit in….”

Marcus does not know whether he will pursue life as a performer, but he does feel richer for the experience. “I’m not necessarily hooked, but I’m not simpleminded anymore when it comes to [acting, etc.],” he says. “I’ve always been spontaneous, but [performing seemed] just a bit too outrageous. But now I’m open-minded. I’m willing to try different things. And it is fun.”

As for the future, Marcus’ desires are modest: a home, a job, a chance to further his education. He’s in the process of enrolling in Long Beach City College and hopes for financial aid, and he’s already applied for several jobs. He’s also considering signing up for the National Guard, though he considers such a move a last resort.

Still up in the air is the foundation: Where to live?
     
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I’ve written this story not (just) because I think it’s a good one, but because I’m hoping that perhaps someone reading these words might be willing to take a chance on a good kid who’s gotten bad break after bad break in life. I’m heavily persuaded by the idea that the people we turn out to be is largely contingent upon our life experience. And yet, with some pretty bad life experience, Marcus is a pretty good guy. 

I’m wondering what he might become given some better experiences.

If you’re willing to help in some way — job opportunity, educational resources, a lead on somewhere to live — please contact me at greggory@lbpost.com, and I’ll pass along the pertinent info to Marcus or put you into contact with him directly.

Footnotes

¹Aside from members of the Renaissance High staff, all names have been changed in deference to the privacy of the individuals involved.

²Where was Marcus’ father during all of this? Addicted to crystal meth. He has stopped doing meth relatively recently, and today he lives in a men’s home for recovering addicts.