THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, December 9, 1995 TAG: 9512090040
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ELIZABETH SIMPSON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 433 lines
FOR SANDRA DORGAN, a ride down Atlantic Avenue is like leafing through a scrapbook.
There's the hotel where she and her friends used to party in her teenage days. A few blocks farther, the hotel where she had a miscarriage. And there's the bench where she used to sleep if she couldn't find a better place to bunk for the night.
``That's where I stayed when I first ran away from home,'' she says, pointing out another hotel. Across the street is where her 1-year-old daughter was conceived with a man Sandy knows only as ``a guy on the fourth floor of the Econo Lodge.''
Farther on, high on a hill, grass spills down regally from a red-brick building. Sandy has never been inside, but the sight of the place causes her a slight intake of breath.
``The Cavalier,'' she says, gazing steadily at the castle-like hotel. ``Some day, when I get some money, that's where I'm gonna stay. The Cavalier.''
While others may dream of a house in the suburbs or an uptown apartment, Sandy dreams of a place where she can check in for the night.
Sandy defies easy labeling. She is 20 years old but childlike in ways. She is a product of the foster-care system, a child of adoption. She is a welfare mother.
She is homeless occasionally, restless always. She is a lost soul, a wanderer, a rebel without a cause.
She came of age in a subculture of teens who live day-to-day, hand-to-mouth - seeking shelter, food and affection any way they can. They often have no real families to turn to, only a constantly shifting group of friends in a series of hotel rooms.
A Department of Justice study identified 127,000 so-called ``throwaway'' kids nationwide in 1988. They are children who were asked to leave home before they were 18, or who ran away without anyone asking them to come back. In some cases, they were tossed out by parents who could no longer tolerate their defiance. Virginia Beach, with its myriad motel rooms and anonymous throng of tourists, seems to be a haven for them.
People who work with this population say these teens often grow into adults who lack basic living skills, who drift from place to place, moving in and out of homes, jobs, relationships and trouble. As a group, they exact a toll on society. In welfare dollars. Emergency-room bills. Police calls. Not to mention the uncertainty placed on the children they carry on their hips from place to place.
In the three years since she left her adoptive parents' home, Sandy's lived in so many hotel rooms, trailer parks and apartments she cannot keep track of them. ``At least 50,'' she says, shaking a head of dark-rooted blond hair at the thought of counting them.
``It is lonely,'' she says. ``It's definitely lonely, not knowing where your next meal is coming from. Sometimes it gets frustrating. There are times I wish I could just sit down and relax.''
Most people ponder how their lives will unfold, wonder and plan for the next step in life. For Sandy, the question of ``What's next?'' is always right in front of her. And the answer is not some far off, carefully planned proposition; it is now.
She can pack in 20 minutes. Be gone in five. She can carry all she needs in boxes and bags that can be stuffed in the car trunks of strangers. She can feed a child on the handouts of charities and 7-Eleven clerks. She can land on her feet.
She survives, but only on the edge. And even though her surroundings are always changing, much of her life seems like earlier scenes replayed: Getting thrown out. Calling 911. Asking for food. Looking for a place to stay.
She is also a woman whom no program has reclaimed. Not foster care, not adoption, not welfare. Not shelters, not runaway counselors, not jail time. She often wonders why she lives like she does. As a daughter of a pastor, she thinks religion might have something to do with it:
``I don't know why this happens to me,'' says Sandy, eyes brimming with tears, voice shaking, as she finds herself, once again, between homes and jobs and food. ``I guess 'cause I'm not saved.''
Sandy stands, one hand on her hip, the other on a baby stroller, in a parking lot across from the Chesapeake house where she's been staying the past week.
It's a warm August night and she's dressed in a black-and-white, mini-length jumper. An ankle bracelet rests against her pale skin. Brittany, her blond, blue-eyed daughter, grasps the side of the stroller and examines a rock on the sidewalk.
Three volunteer counselors with Stand Up for Kids, a local group that helps homeless young people, get out of a car.
``Hey,'' Sandy says, greeting the counselors with high fives before launching into a run-on explanation of her latest crisis. Her arms wave, her voice rises and falls in the still night air as the counselors listen.
``Do you know what happened? I was living in this trailer with some friends, and some bad stuff was going down, and so I left one day and when I went back to get my stuff, they had stolen everything. All my clothes. My CDs. They stole everything. This dress I got on? It's stolen. I shoplifted it. So I'm living with my mom now, my biological mom, but I'm not gonna stay there long. I'll be gone in a week. There's 11 people living there, and I can't live like that. My mom, she's got to have power. It's all about power. If she says jump, her kids ask how high. I'm not like that. I have had my freedom. I've lived on my own since I was 17.''
One of the counselors, Donald Ramos, listens and nods his head, interrupting only with a ``really?'' from time to time.
Ramos' place is not to advise, not to find her a place to live or a job that will last, not to judge her. His place is to give her a cardboard box filled with oatmeal, cereal, soup, beans, crackers, shampoo, baby wipes. And to listen to her story, and let her know that on this one night, on this one corner, she is not alone.
As a Stand Up for Kids volunteer, Ramos canvasses the Boardwalk in Virginia Beach seeking homeless kids and helping them find food and shelter. He has known Sandy for more than a year.
Sandy left her adoptive parents' home in Virginia Beach about three years ago, a few days before her 18th birthday. ``I was rebellious,'' she says. ``My father told me to get out by the time I was 18, so I did. There were so many pressures at home, and I couldn't take it any more. Pressure to be nothing but a good child. I wasn't perfect like my sister was. My father called me a whore and a slut and a tramp.''
She still keeps in touch with her parents, still asks them for diaper money and rides, still talks to her mother on the phone. But as far as a place to stay, she's on her own.
Ramos can't begin to count the places he's taken food to her. First he met her at Beach Books, an adult book store where she not only worked but lived. Then, several hotels on the Boardwalk, sometimes a series of different rooms within the same hotel. ``I've seen her go from being an 18-year-old to someone who looks 35,'' he says.
Now she's staying with her biological mother, whom she met only recently. But that reunion is starting to sour. ``I can't do anything with my child without being told how to do it,'' Sandy says.
The counselors coo over Brittie as Sandy looks down at the girl, whose eyelids are heavy with sleep. ``I'm proud of my baby,'' she says. ``This child is so bright. She's smart, she's so smart.''
``Take care,'' Ramos says. He tells Sandy to call the next week and he'll bring clothes for her and for Brittie. That's his way of getting her to take some responsibility.
She doesn't. Three days later she is gone.
Sandy's adoptive mother, who didn't want her name used in this story, said she and her husband took in Sandy as a foster child when she was 10 months old. She weighed just 13 pounds. ``She looked like she'd just been born. You could see every vein,'' her mother says. ``She never demanded attention because she'd never gotten it. She wouldn't even cry when we got her.''
The couple intended to keep Sandy until she was adopted by another family, but year after year went by with no adoption in sight. Soon Sandy was enrolled in school, and embarrassed at having a different name from her foster parents.
``That really bothered her,'' her adoptive mother remembers.
She and her husband finally agreed to adopt Sandy.
Sandy remembers the party she had when she was adopted. She says she was 6 years old at the time, but her adoptive mother says she was 9. ``We never took her with the intention of adopting her,'' her mother says. ``But the welfare people said it would be better for her psychologically.''
The couple had problems with Sandy when she was in high school. ``We put her in counseling,'' her mother says. ``And finally the counselor said, `If she wants to run away so bad, then let her.' ''
The mother can't say what went wrong where, but she believes Sandy never bonded with anyone. She thinks that's what's given Sandy her rootless ways.
``It seemed like if you told her you loved her, she wouldn't respond. She was hard to handle. Her problems . . . she took them everywhere. I have talked with her, pled with her . . . but it's like talking to a wall.''
On a gray September afternoon, two weeks after she met with Ramos, Sandy and is headed to her latest home away from home. It is raining, and Brittany is on her last diaper.
Yet Sandy proudly talks about a coffee mug she bought that morning for $6. She and Brittie had huddled in a photo booth to take their picture, then inserted it behind the plastic cover of the mug.
``I'm sending it to my boyfriend,'' she says, explaining that he's on a six-month Navy deployment. ``Look at Brittie. Isn't she cute?''
Sandy stuffs the cup in her backpack and walks into the Virginia Beach duplex where she's been living the past week with a man who once hired her as a nanny for his daughter.
``Call your mama,'' he says as soon as she walks in the door.
``What?'' she answers.
``Call. Your. Mama.'' he repeats firmly in a low, gruff voice. ``Call your mama and pack your things.''
``Pack my things?'' Sandy repeats everything he says, giving the words time to sink in.
``You're getting outta here.''
``Just because I wouldn't sleep with you!'' she screams, followed by a string of expletives. He answers likewise. Sandy picks up the phone, dials a number for a friend, Anne Marie; tucks the phone under her chin; and starts packing. Brittie, meanwhile, plays with a ball. Throws it in the air, lets it bounce away, picks it up off the floor. Then she waves her arms in the air like an orchestra conductor as her mother's voice reaches a crescendo.
``Anne Marie? He's throwing me out. I don't know, I guess because he thinks I'm a slut and a whore and I lie and this and that and the other. So now I gotta move out. Look, I gotta go. Gotta call Social Services. I'll call you back.''
Sandy runs a quick circuit of the house. From the kitchen - a carton of diet Cokes - to the living room - more clothes - up the stairs - Brittie's rocking horse - quickly she gathers all her belongings into bags and boxes and piles. Toothpaste and shampoo and clothes and jackets.
She dials the phone again, still stuffing bags with clothes, Brittie's blankets, dolls. ``I'm being thrown out of my home and I have a 1-year-old daughter,'' she tells a receptionist at Social Services.
The office she needs is closed for the day. Back on the phone to her friend: ``It's after 4:30 and I can't get through. Can I come stay with you? Just for the night. I'll call Social Services in the morning. My mother? No, she wouldn't take me if I were the last person on Earth.''
Piles of belongings are gathered at the front door. A child's car seat. A winter coat. Two blankets. A stroller. A few cans of food. Brittie's clothes.
In 20 minutes, she is packed. She leaves, packing all her things in the car of a reporter. She closes the car door with a sigh of relief, then yells: ``My insulin. I forgot my insulin.''
She knocks on the door and screams for her ex-housemate to give her the insulin out of the refrigerator. He tells her he's calling the police.
She stops someone walking down the street. ``Can you call 911? I need the police,'' she says standing in the rain as Brittie, surrounded by belongings, peers at her from the car window.
Within minutes, two police cars arrive. The police listen to the ranting, get the insulin from the man and send Sandy on her way.
She is teary now, her voice still shaking. ``Definitely I have been through this before,'' she says. ``It's not nothing new.''
She goes to the Bow Creek Golf Course Motel, a long row of unadorned, worn-looking rooms in Virginia Beach. The friend she called has a 1-year-old boy and is pregnant with a second child. She's staying at the motel using emergency money for homeless mothers provided through Social Services.
Sandy unpacks her belongings, including a porcelain doll with a ruffled dress she bought for Brittany at Wal-Mart for $12. ``Don't touch,'' she tells Brittie, setting the doll on a bedside table.
``I definitely have got to have a job,'' Sandy tells her friend, mixing oatmeal in the microwave for Brittie. Sandy's face brightens as she remembers the cup she bought earlier in the day. ``Look what I got Josh,'' she says, pulling out the cup from her bag. ``Look at Brittie's picture. Isn't she cute?''
Rollin,' rollin,' rollin,' on the river,'' music blares out of the Judeo-Christian Outreach Center's thrift store in Virginia Beach. It's three weeks later now, late September, and Sandy has been at the Judeo-Christian shelter three days.
``I have to find a job by Friday,'' she says. ``So I need someone to take care of Brittie. If I don't have a job by Friday, they'll kick me out.''
She browses through the store. Looks for shoes. Picks out a couple of toys for Brittie. Here's a quilted blanket that Brittie can sleep on. And a ``Sesame Street'' toy that Brittie can bat around the floor.
The shelter is a last resort for her. In the three years she has been on her own, she's stayed mostly with friends she met on the street. And friends of friends. Friends of friends of friends. People she has met at clubs and arcades and along the Boardwalk. She's stayed in hotel rooms until she's been thrown out. With new acquaintances until the relationship goes bad. ``The police have come multi, multi times. I can't count how many times,'' she says.
Sandy, who dropped out of school when she was a senior, knows the rules of eviction. And when that final notice comes, she makes do somewhere else. She's slept in a car. Slept in the woods. On a park bench.
``If I ever had a problem, I always made sure Brittie had a place to stay,'' Sandy says. She's taken the girl to her adoptive mother's home and then found some other place to sleep herself.
She gets insulin for her diabetes through Medicaid, picks up a welfare check at Social Services. Otherwise she gets by on food and clothing from friends, charities, churches and from panhandling. ``I've gone up to people and told them I didn't have food. That I needed juice for the baby,'' she says. ``I've gone to garage sales and asked, `Is there any way you can help me out?' Most of the time they understand.''
She's stolen. She's also had jobs, which she usually keeps for a few weeks. A month or two at the longest. She was a groundskeeper at a McDonald's. A nanny. A waitress. A housekeeper at a hotel. A manager of an adult book store.
``I'd get some of my homeless friends to watch Brittie, in exchange for them staying with me,'' she says. Other times, she would stay with friends who had jobs, who would buy food for her and Brittie.
She says she's never had to prostitute herself, as a lot of runaway kids do. She's been pregnant twice since she's been on the street. Once she had a miscarriage; once she had Brittie.
When she was two months pregnant with Brittany, she got married. The story is not exactly a Hallmark moment. ``I was living on the street and this guy came to me and said, `If you marry me, you'll get free meals, a house.' I thought, `Great. Maybe this will work out.' ''
It didn't.
Less than three months later, Sandy was on her own again. ``Marriage was a waste of time,'' she says.
After Sandy tucks her thrift-store finds on the bottom bunk of her shelter room, she heads to a nearby trailer park. If she gets a job, she'll need to find a sitter for Brittie. A man at the shelter has told Sandy there's someone at the trailer park here who baby-sits kids. She's trying to find her.
She sees two women standing in a small, fenced yard with three children smashing balls of PlayDoh into the sidewalk.
``Do you know anyone who keeps kids?'' she asks one of the women.
One of the women raises her hand.
``Could you keep Brittie for me?'' Sandy says. ``I have to find a job by Friday.''
Sandy tells her she won't know what hours until she gets a job.
``OK,'' the woman says, shrugging her shoulders.
In less than five minutes she has employed a child-care provider. No questions about experience. Or cost. Or quality of care. She laughs in joy at finding someone so fast. ``Well, God bless me,'' she says jubilantly, slapping her leg.
Next she trolls the Boardwalk for work.
``Are you still looking for housekeepers?'' she asks at the Four Sails Hotel. The receptionist hands her a job application. Sandy fills it out as Brittany slumbers in her stroller.
The blank after the ``name'' entry stumps Sandy. ``Address. What's my address? I`ll just put down the shelter's name. How do you spell `Judeo?' ''''
She moves on down the application. Tries to think of her job experience. ``Spring - McDonald's - groundskeeper. Reason for leaving? Illness.'' Farther down is a box for references. She tries to think of someone she's known for more than a year. Finally puts down Don Ramos' name, and her friend Anne Marie. ``Who else do I know that doesn't dislike me?'' she asks herself.
She finishes the application, hands it in, then goes on to the next hotel.
``That place has nice rooms,'' she says, pointing out a hotel across the street. ``If I get a job, I might just find a hotel to stay in down here.''
A shelter counselor had suggested a plan for Sandy to move into her own apartment at a much lower rent than a hotel room. But Sandy prefers hotels, and the apartment plan is soon forgotten.
Two weeks after she leaves the shelter, she lands at The Beach Cabana, a sea-green-trimmed hotel that's seen better days. A towel is stuck in a hole in the door where a doorknob used to be.
Since she left the shelter, she's found a job as a housekeeper, worked two weeks, gotten thrown in jail for failure to appear in court for traffic violations, and lost her job because of her jail time. But the one paycheck she got buys her a few weeks at The Cabana.
``Monday I'll go out and try to get another job,'' she says as she puts away food she got at a food pantry at the Open Door Chapel in Virginia Beach. Rice. Jell-O. Tea. Pineapple chunks. Beans. ``Look, they gave me peanut butter but no bread or crackers to put it on,'' she says. She eats it out of the jar with a spoon, giving Brittie a few bites.
Two girls are with her, both minors who have left home. A man wrapped in a blanket is sleeping on one of two double beds in the white cinder-block-walled room.
``That's Jeff,'' she says. ``He's a friend. He has a car.''
Within the general chaos of her life, Sandy has tried to create order. She's covered a table with a white cloth and carefully laid out items that are important to her. A photo album with pictures of Brittie and a snapshot of Sandy at her adoption party. The porcelain doll she bought at Wal-Mart. ``See? Her arms and legs move,'' she says. Candlesticks with no candles.
Brittie follows her mother from the bed, rumpled and unmade, to the beat-up stove, to the nearly empty refrigerator and back to the bed. ``Mama,'' is her steady, unending refrain.
Sandy thinks a minute when asked how her daughter has fared during the moves from shelter to apartment to hotel.
``I guess OK. She's being fed, clothed. Hey, Brittie, look. Want some Jell-O?'' she says sitting on the bed to open a container of cherry Jell-O. ``Ummm, good.''
Still, Sandy knows this is no way for her daughter to grow up. ``It's been hard on me,'' she says, ``and hard on my child. More hard on her than me. She's young and she shouldn't have to go through it.''
Sandy says her adoptive parents have said they'd like to adopt Brittie, but she's adamant that they won't, adding: ``My adoptive parents say Brittie's insecure because she meets so many different people. I've thought about putting her up for adoption because I can't provide for her and so on and so forth. No way I can do it. I don't want her to end up where I ended up. I do not want to see my daughter go through that. She's the love of my life. I don't have any other family.''
So Brittie moves wherever her mother does. She doesn't have a bed of her own, much less a room. She sleeps with her mother or in a blue porta-crib that Sandy found a few weeks ago in a pile of stuff next to a Goodwill box.
Brittie eats food put together from grocery stores and charities, and plays with toys slightly worn from the children before her. She has never known the glory of her own backyard swing, the restfulness of a regular nap time, the security of familiar night sounds.
``It's almost like a child raising a child,'' Ramos says. ``Sandy has not had a chance to emotionally mature. It's easier to be a parent when you see other parents your age with their kids. She doesn't have that. She doesn't know the things that come from being part of a family.''
Although Brittie may slow Sandy down, she also keeps her going.
``It's like Sandy's out there in the middle of the ocean,'' Ramos says. ``And Brittie is her life preserver.''
The Saturday before Thanksgiving, Sandy presses her forehead against black metal bars in a flourescent-lit processing room at the Norfolk City Jail.
This is the first of two weekends of jail time she must serve to make up for missing her court date for traffic violations. Most people would have taken care of the tickets in a day. Pay the fine. Face the judge. Follow the rules. But Sandy let the charges go until she ended up on a thin mattress on a concrete floor in the women's cell block.
``You a weekender?'' a deputy asks, filling out intake papers.
Sandy nods.
``Name?''
``Dorgan, D-O-R-G-A-N.''
``On any medication?''
``Yes, insulin.''
``Pregnant?''
``No. Well at least I don't think so. Not unless I got pregnant in the last two weeks.''
After processing, Sandy changes into prison-issue garb and sits down on her mattress to talk about what's happened since she moved to The Beach Cabana.
She's still looking for a job. She's kicked out her latest boyfriend, Jeff. But she's gotten two new roommates to stay with her. People she's known ``for a while.'' A month. She also linked up with a guy named Jamie a week ago. He has a wife and three kids in North Carolina.
``He's a sweetheart,'' Sandy says. ``I met him at Norfolk Live. That's a club on the base. He comes and goes. I wish he weren't married.''
Her new roommates are keeping Brittie while Sandy does her jail time. ``I told her I didn't want to leave her, but that I'd been a bad girl. I made my bed and now I've got to lie on it.''
Thirty-three hours later, on Sunday night, Brittie arrives at the jail with Jamie and Sandy's roommates. The little girl is dressed in a red coat with gold buttons, red velvet dress and lace socks, but no shoes.
Sandy strides out of jail, and gathers Brittie in her arms.
``Were you a good girl?'' she asks, nuzzling the little girl's cheeks, which are rosy from the cold. ``Did you miss me?''
Brittie looks at her mother and smiles broadly.
And then it's back to the Oceanfront. Back to familiar territory. The doorknob on Room 204 has been replaced. Inside, a space heater sits on the refrigerator. A fan is spinning on a bedside table. The sole working light bulb in the place is in the kitchenette.
The Cavalier is 20 blocks to the north, and a world away. Yet Sandy is ebullient, relieved at being out of jail, content with having a place to stay.
Besides her fanciful dream of staying at The Cavalier, Sandy has other hopes, but she must be prodded to visualize them. Maybe getting trained to be a nurse. Or a child-care provider. She gazes into the air and allows herself to dream just a little. To list the things she thinks might make life go right again.
``Let's see. Get a divorce. Get remarried. Have a house, one or two more children. Go back to church and have a nice career and be able to provide for my family. That's what I want.
``If I had all the money in the world, I'd help people in my situation. Single mothers. I'd start my own charity. I'd buy land and live on it, and have them come live on it. I'd help other people get on their feet.''
Sandy spoons ice cream out of a carton into Brittie's mouth. It's 8:30 p.m., and Jamie has gone to get a McDonald's Happy Meal for Brittie and some light bulbs for the room.
Brittie, meanwhile, follows her mother from the bed to the kitchen to the bathroom, out to the balcony, back to the bed, never letting Sandy out of her sight, even for a second. Like her mother, she's always on the move.
``Look at her,'' Sandy laughs at Brittie, who is demanding more ice cream. ``She's just like a little birdie, always hungry.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photos by MOTOYA NAKAMURA, The Virginian-Pilot
Sandy Dorgan answers questions by a sheriff's deputy before starting
a weekend stay in Norfolk City Jail...
Left: Sheriff's Deputy Candy Jennings leads Sandy to a cell at
Norfolk City Jail.
Below: Friends Brian Kuzawa, left, and Russel Richardson visit Sandy
and her daughter, Brittany, in a Virginia beach motel room.
Photo by D. KEVIN ELLIOTT, The Virginian-Pilot
Sandy Dorgan and daughter Brittany often stay in motel rooms like
this one in Virginia Beach.
Photo by MOTOYA NAKAMURA, The Virginian-Pilot
Sandy Dorgan hugs daughter Brittany after leaving Norfolk City Jail,
where she was picked up by a friend and her roommates, who had cared
for Brittany over the weekend.
KEYWORDS: INDIGENT PEOPLE HOMELESS by CNB