THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 9, 1996 TAG: 9606050032
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MATTHEW BOWERS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 243 lines
THE ALWAYS-OPEN doorway to Byron Joyce's office darkened.
It was a young boy, shadowed by the dragon.
The ``dragon.'' That's what Joyce sometimes calls the nasty side of life on urban streets - in his case, the streets of Norfolk's Berkeley section.
The mythical fire-spitting beast represents for Joyce the mean streets' allure, their danger, their despair. It encompasses the hustlers and cheats, the petty crooks, the violent hoodlums, the guns, the drugs, the children birthing children, the ``friends'' who lead weaker ones to do things they shouldn't and convince them that it doesn't matter, that nothing matters.
Joyce knows the dragon. They danced together a long while.
This particular afternoon, though, the dragon had under its wing a boy of about 7 wrapped in an impossibly oversized T-shirt. The youngster stood in the doorway of Joyce's office in the Campostella Boys and Girls Club - silent, head held high, lower lip jutting defiantly, only the slightly downturned corners of his mouth betraying any trace of fear or contrition.
No capital offense was involved. A staffer had caught the culprit red-handed ripping down a paper sign in the hallway of the aging schoolhouse the club occupies. The boy's older brother - probably still in elementary school himself - stood with his arm draped protectively around his younger sibling's shoulders.
Both looked straight at club director Joyce. Joyce stared back.
How do I save this young boy today from the dragon? he wondered silently.
The dragon is why Joyce is here. It's why he comes every afternoon to this former elementary school in Norfolk with its peeling paint and cardboard-covered windows and urine-smelling hallway and one-armed chair in his office. Why he isn't deterred by repeated threats to close the club because of insufficient funding.
Why almost every day he arrives at this facility for recreation and sports wearing a suit and a shirt buttoned to the neck.
Why he hung pictures not of sports stars but of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X and Bill Cosby.
Posted news clippings of successful club members.
Established a section of bulletin board for ``Most Improved'' club member.
Reached into his own wallet to help buy leftover high-school basketball uniforms for the club's championship team, explaining to his charges with a white lie that ``Tabb'' stood for ``Tidewater Area Basket Ball.''
This is why he returned to a Boys and Girls Club post paying near the minimum wage, leaving a job bolting fenders onto pickups at the nearby Ford plant that paid him three times as much.
Here, he might make a difference in a child's life. He might keep the dragon at bay.
Still looking at the stolid boy in the T-shirt, Joyce drew the only real weapon he had - the Boys and Girls Club itself.
Do you want to keep coming here? he demanded of the boy.
No answer.
You must, Joyce thundered. You're here just about every day. You want me to send you home?
The boy looked straight ahead.
Joyce's voice softened slightly. Why'd you want to tear up the sign? You want the place to look all raggedy? Don't you want the place to look as nice as it can?
Still no answers.
Joyce gave the boy a choice: fix what he ripped down, or leave the club.
It would be the easy thing - the proud thing, the cool thing - for the boy to leave.
All of us make choices, big and small, that affect the direction of our lives. Joyce decided that, for this boy, this was one of those times.
Joyce was this boy, not long ago. Facing the same dragon.
Byron Carlval Joyce met the dragon when he was about 13.
His parents had just split up, and he and his nine brothers and sisters moved with their mother from Tidewater Park to Berkeley. Joyce made a bunch of new friends - also without fathers in their homes - and began spending more time on the streets.
Joyce and his friends dubbed themselves ``The Airplanes.'' They played basketball, shot pool, threw dice, looked to each other for support. In time, they graduated to hustling, making money using loaded dice and marked cards. Occasionally they'd beat up a drunk for his cash, or an unlucky kid with a summer job and a few dollars in his pocket.
``Learning how to get money without getting a job'' is how Joyce describes this street apprenticeship.
Joyce fell from the school honor roll to straight Es - flunking every course in every quarter one year. By age 15 he had given up on book-learning, and was looking forward only to becoming old enough to join the Navy and get rich hustling naive shipmates trapped with him on long cruises. ``That was my dream,'' Joyce says with a laugh.
His dream got interrupted. Joyce and some buddies were nabbed his senior year for breaking into a school and selling stolen books. He was briefly jailed - the experience so frightened him he broke out in hives - and booted out of school.
That left Joyce only the streets - and the dragon.
Around the time Joyce was 19, someone told him about all the money to be made selling marijuana. Joyce started selling - and using.
As he entered his 20s - his adulthood - Joyce was just another guy on the street, with no high-school diploma, no training, no job or career prospects or plans or even dreams, nothing but selling drugs and getting high.
The dragon was winning.
At the height - more accurately, the depth - of the decade Joyce spent stoned on the streets of Berkeley, he estimates he smoked as much as $2,000 worth of crack cocaine a day, five days a week - a $20 ``rock'' about every 15 minutes. He drank almost a half-gallon of Canadian Mist whiskey each day.
He rarely worked, financing his habit by selling even more drugs. It made little difference to him that he might be messing up other people's lives, destroying families, causing other crimes to be committed to pay for his merchandise.
He also didn't mind crossing into other dealers' ``turf'' to sell, or buy from several competing suppliers. A legion of street salespeople worked for ``The Discount Man,'' Joyce's nickname because he undersold competitors. Just like Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton - except that Walton's angry competitors probably didn't come after him with guns.
A rifle-toting Joyce and one of his brothers even shot at one such threatening guy, trying to get him before he got them. Joyce figured he'd rather go back to jail for murder than die bloody. Fortunately, everyone was a lousy shot and no one was hurt.
``I broke all the rules,'' Joyce says. ``I know I should've been gone.''
Joyce stayed away from home for months, crashing in friends' houses or vacant buildings or not at all. He wore the same filthy clothes for days on end. He evaded police, competitors and bounty hunters with wild disguises: He'd hack off all his hair; wear fake ``Moses'' beards and sheets, or tall ``Afro'' wigs; sometimes pose as a woman in wig and miniskirt; even wrap himself in vines, sticking branches in his pockets and holding part of a bush in front of his face like a surreal street commando.
Despite his drug use, despite the dangers of the street, Joyce retained some of his wits, some compassion, some respect.
He sometimes refused to sell drugs to would-be customers, the ones who looked like they came from nice neighborhoods or families, urging them to save their money, to not risk their lives.
When his drug habit worsened and he couldn't continue renovating a house he bought in the neighborhood, he signed the deed over to his mother; she still lives there.
When he was high or plying his trade, he tried not to let his mother see him - no easy feat in the close neighborhood.
``I hurt my mom so bad,'' Joyce says. ``She'd see me on the street and shake her head. I know she went home and cried, because I know how she is.''
Things began changing for Joyce one night in January 1989. Police caught him with four small plastic bags containing powdered cocaine. Jail, bond, street; jail, bond, street - the pattern repeated itself several times as Joyce skipped court dates, concerned only about his next high. The pattern finally ended with a conviction in May 1990. Felony cocaine possession. Possible 10 years in prison.
The judge gave Joyce a break - she put him on supervised probation with special conditions: pass random urine tests for drugs, undergo counseling, attend Narcotics Anonymous meetings . . . and live with his mother, obeying her curfew.
Joyce seemed to try. He avoided drugs. He found work. His probation officer convinced the court to free him from supervised probation early.
Joyce wanted to stay clean. Start his life fresh.
He had new plans.
He figured he could do a much-better job of selling drugs if his mind wasn't muddled, and if he wasn't smoking up so much of his stock.
The dragon still led this dance.
Joyce suffered occasional relapses on his way to his planned life as a drug-free drug dealer, but he made progress. He and his mother began attending a support group for addicts and their families at Bethany Baptist Church.
One day, the group heard stirring testimony from a former addict, Arthles H. Lynn, a barber and preacher. Joyce was mesmerized.
This man sounded real. He had been where Joyce had been, lived what Joyce had lived.
Joyce had to hear more. He followed Lynn to his barber shop, to the gym to lift weights, all over. ``I wanted what he had,'' Joyce says.
There were no lightning bolts or voices from bushes, but a gradual dawning for Joyce, who rarely had attended church - God wanted him, had a plan for him, and God's plan didn't include using or selling illegal drugs.
Joyce was going to church, but struggling with his addiction. The God that Lynn helped him find changed his life.
By August 1990, Joyce felt he had been ``saved.'' As fervently as he used to sell drugs, he now was a Christian with a singular mission: helping children, particularly those from broken families like his, avoid the wasted, messy life he had lived until then.
A Norfolk Parks and Recreation Department worker, Bernard J. Thompson, used to urge a young Joyce and his buddies to play ball. Years later, Thompson would scoop a drug-addled Joyce off the streets to ride around in his burgundy van and talk. Joyce remembered the lift it gave him, although then he didn't take advantage of it.
Now Joyce would teach the next generation using his experience. His life.
``I know what's out there for them,'' Joyce says. ``What's out there for them is very appetizing. It's easy to get sucked in. I know.
``I can't change my past, man. But I can be here for these children.''
That desire, that experience, was why regional Boys and Girls Club officials a year ago promoted Joyce to direct their embattled Campostella club without more-traditional credentials, like a college degree. They couldn't buy a cautionary-tale background like Joyce's at any price.
So, at 34, after changing his own life, Joyce has a new plan: changing the world, or at least as much of it as he can touch.
He's married, with a son and stepson. Through his church, he's counseling and preaching, particularly to former addicts like himself. He's hustling again, but this time legally to find donations and sponsors to help keep his club open - his bosses recently asked him to print up a summer-program schedule, a hopeful sign it'll stay open at least that long.
Whatever happens, he'll always have the children of his neighborhood. Kids with no fathers at home. Kids taught by age 13 that there's little hope of ever getting a decent job. Kids who don't look past the next day because no one's ever shown them that there's something to see.
Joyce wants to show them, prove to them that the dragon doesn't always win. Maybe he'll do it with the Boys and Girls Club and its homework tutors and organized sports that provide a safe haven for a few hours each day. Maybe he'll do it by going to college and someday coaching in high school. Maybe by starting a business and hiring these kids.
He barely survived the dragon. He doesn't want anyone else to have to try.
Perhaps the hardest part for Joyce is knowing that, no matter what he does or says, everyone must fight the dragon alone to some extent.
So it was with the sign-vandalizing boy in his office.
The boy decided, more with a shrug than anything else, that he wanted to stay.
Joyce instructed one of his staffers to give the boy some tape, have him repair the sign and then apologize to the staffer and to Joyce.
The boy turned and walked out with his brother's arm still around him. Joyce called to the older boy to remove his arm, to go back to what he was doing.
``He's got to stand on his own,'' Joyce said.
The dragon lost. This time. ILLUSTRATION: Staff photos by VICKI CRONIS
ABOVE: Byron Joyce is surrounded by junior league basketball players
during practice. From left are Takyon Madison, Gary Madison and
Reggie Perriman, all age 15.
RIGHT: Joyce cajoles his players during their first game.
A member of the Campostella Boys and Girls Club wears a shirt
promoting black self-reliance. Likewise, director Joyce hung
pictures not of sports stars but of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.,
Malcolm X and Bill Cosby.
Terrell Brown, left, and Curtis Owens, both 13, laugh at director
Byron Joyce after another boy beat Joyce in checkers.
In Campostella's teen rec room, Johnathan Coley, 12, is teased by an
older boy, Russell Branch. Both are regulars at the club.
With Byron Joyce's motto hanging over his head in the children's rec
room, Jamal Muhamad, 11, celebrates after beating his opponent in a
game of pool.
Joyce leads his basketball players in a prayer. As fervently as he
used to sell drugs, Joyce now focuses on helping children,
particularly those from broken homes. by CNB