Tender Age Shelter

I lived 10 days in a tender age shelter and the trauma remains.  I was 11-years-old.  I had not committed a crime.  I was taken from the home of an Aunt and Uncle and incarcerated at McLaren Hall in El Monte, California.  I survived but I was changed.

MacLaren Hall was a notorious and violent institution.  You can google and read about the Lost Children of MacLaren Hall on many websites.  My mother was a criminal and a heroin addict.  She brought me into contact with a brutal, violent man and my brief stay at MacLaren Hall marked the end of the few turbulent years of my life I spent living with my mother.  The County of Los Angeles had to decide on whom would be my legal guardian.

My youngest years were spent with my grandfather.  He made me live by the law of his belt and I adapted and thrived.  I remember a teacher I had in the 2^nd grade, Miss Moss, telling my grandpa I needed to be in what they called a mentally gifted minors program and that I could do anything with my life.  2^nd grade is early to make such determinations. 

At around 8 years of age my mom got out of prison and persuaded the court to give her custody of me.  It was great.  Her pure love and adoration nurtured a sense of self in me I had not known.  It was also horrible.  I spent mornings hanging around the methadone center and nights avoiding the violence of her husband.  In between I navigated the streets of downtown Los Angeles, Bell Gardens or Hollywood, more or less aimlessly.  I was only with her for a couple of years or so but we moved a lot. 

When I think back to those times I sense in those early years I really could have become anything.  I could have been a scholar.  I might have become a professional.  The tumultuous years with my mother were a blessing and a curse in ways.  They marked me and changed me.  I developed a sense of a bully that is as strong today as it was in my 9-year-old mind when I plotted what I would do to the bully in my life when I reached a certain age. 

At 11 when  I entered my tender age shelter I was in shock.  I was living in  Hollywood on Western just off of Melrose, down the street from KHJ radio.  I had adapted to a lifestyle of sorts.  I stayed out of the apartment as much as possible.  My best friend was an African-American man who had an apartment nearby.  I had a bicycle and I rode it everywhere.   My bully would lose his shit one night and fire a gun at my mom and she would hock her wedding ring the next morning to get him out of jail.  Then one day something happened and my mom knew she was in trouble.  I was out riding my bike and when I returned around sunset there were police all over the apartment complex and two of my uncles were out front.  They said they did not know why the cops were there but that my mom had asked them to come pick me up because she had to go away for a little while.  She was on the run.

I shuffled between the homes of a couple of uncles until that day my social worker came to get me.  I sobbed as I left La Puente for the tender age shelter that was MacLaren Hall.

My arrival was a scene I will never forget.  I was told to walk across a playground and go to a building that would be my dormitory.  When I opened the door to that room cacophonous sounds shocked my ears.  At just that moment a kid who looked 14 or 15 escaped the clutches of one of the counselors and dove under a bed.  The counselor grabbed the single bed and slid it away exposing the boy who scrambled to the next bed.  All the while the Counselor was screaming expletives at the top of his lungs until at the end of the line where there were no more beds, only a wall, he got his hands on the kid.  He pulled him up into the air like a rag doll and through him a few feet in the air at the wall.  I remember the kid bouncing a little off the wall.  The counselor grabbed him again and pulled up off the ground and slammed him two or three more times into the wall this time without letting go of him.  The kid was crying and growling and dazed. 

Me?  I stood there and sobbed.  I have never been as scared as that moment.  I had no control over my life.  A system was telling me what to do.  In this world I had arrived in “Counselors,” could beat children.  I looked outside at the grounds and saw a large concrete wall and yes, it had barbed wire at the top.  I told myself I would find a way over that wall.  That was a pervasive thought for me all the days I spent at MacLaren Hall. 

I saw violence daily at MacLaren Hall.  I cried on a few occasions, which is not an ideal thing to do in a place with a hierarchy of violence.  The Counselors were lethal and the older kids were dangerous.  The older kids were utterly different from me in that they were already hardened.  Their anger was palpable.  I remember vividly how I viewed them and knowing the most important thing I could do would be to guard my sense of innocence.  I grew a hard outer shell from the knowledge of this place.  I did not get beaten.  One night I failed to obey quite right and a Counselor gave me a good shove as he yelled at me to pick up the mess and get in the bed. (or something like that,) and I moved from the push but quickly recovered and survived.  My modus operandi in that place was to make myself invisible.  I laid low.  I hid from  view behind others.  I looked down always.  The hard shell I put on softened the darkness that invaded my being and my innocence and youth and trust in humankind concentrated itself at my core and remained as perfect and golden as ever, if smaller. This is how I remember it.  I was protecting something.  When they asked who was Catholic and wanted to go to an Ash Wednesday service I raised my hand in spite of the fact I had little church background.  There were only three of us but the chance to go the little chapel was time away from the violence.  

I remember walking by a scene one day on the playground when a kid who was certainly no threat to anyone, who walked around most days sobbing and who could not talk back to me the time I tried to talk to him, was on the ground with three bigger kids around him kicking him.  I had somewhere to go and I barely allowed myself to look.  When I looked around for authority figures I saw one watching from a distance and slowly starting towards the malice underway.  So I protected what was inside me with all I had.  And my day in court arrived and I spent several hours focused on my hope that I not have to return to that place. 

My Aunt and Uncle agreed to become my legal guardians while I remained a ward of the court, one of Los Angeles County’s sons.  I was changed after my time in a tender age shelter.  Within a couple of weeks of living with my new family I got up one Sunday night during church and walked to the front as Just As I am was being sung by the congregation to accept the religion of my family and become born again.  Being born again became the driving force of the rest of my childhood.  

I lost so much of my self.  I lived with a fear of ever being in a place like MacLaren Hall again.  I was an agreeable kid, with everyone, at all times.  My Uncle often said I was a good kid.  I was a good kid, because I could not, would not go back to that tender age shelter or anywhere like it.  I was scarred and I was scared by my tender age shelter.  It is likely I have been significantly inhibited in life by my time there.  This is not an excuse.  This is merely a conclusion I draw from my personal experience. 

Tender age shelters, violent or otherwise, are not places kids go to end up stable, law abiding citizens.  Being taken away from your family, from those you love and who love you, is traumatic for children.  It twists and affects us.  We become angry and afraid in circumstances such as these.  I know this personally.