Along Park Heights Avenue, amid graffiti-covered storefronts and abandoned houses, Teddy Page watches the crack vials and money change hands and shakes his head. He knows all the dealers and their stories: He grew up with them and once hung out in a gang with them.
Around the corner, Teddy, a muscular, soft-spoken young man with a sullen face and the beginnings of a beard, points to a waist-high brick wall. It's called "Death Row," a favorite spot for executions -- and the place where he saw his first one four years ago.
Here, in his lower Park Heights neighborhood, Teddy Page spots landmarks of violence and loss and waste at every turn. Here, again and again, he has seen rec-league teammates and schoolyard playmates of his childhood shot to death or arrested or crippled in their teens.
Yet, three years ago, he could think of no better place to be.
As an eighth-grader, he chose street corners over classrooms -- and missed 150 of 180 school days. He hung out with the "Dog Pound" gang, got a .38-caliber handgun, loved the adrenalin rush only a good fight gave him and saw a future dealing drugs on the street.
"I look at these boys out here now," he says, "and I know it could be me, because I didn't think there was any other way, really. . . . I had no future. I didn't care about myself. I didn't care about anything."
But then, just as most of the people in Demetrius "Teddy" Page's life figured he'd become a statistic, he began an astonishing journey from gang member and chronic truant to model student and class leader.
Today, the 18-year-old senior at Forest Park High beams when he talks of making the honor roll. He pores over college catalogs and studies for entrance exams. He clings to a dream of becoming an FBI agent and raising a family in a neighborhood with well-kept lawns, no boarded-up buildings and no need for guns.
At a school where academic success sometimes brings taunts and threats, in a neighborhood where high school dropouts outnumber graduates, in a city where about half of those who start high school never finish, Teddy Page overcame incredible odds.
How did he rebound, after tasting failure and abandoning hope of any legitimate success?
The question brings a long silence. Then he looks to the dealers, his eyes downcast beneath the Chicago White Sox cap shading his face, and speaks of dreams and absent friends, of his mother and the others who refused to give up on him long after he had given up on himself.
And, he says, time is precious now, too precious to spend on street corners.
He's never seen his father, but assumes the role of man of the house. He cares for his mother, who has a disabling back injury. He makes sure the rent gets paid, the laundry gets done, the meals get cooked. He looks after four little brothers and sisters and works part-time jobs to help pay the bills.
"Somehow," Teddy says, "I just managed to keep my head above water because I realize now that I have had -- and have -- dreams, and I know if you have dreams, really, you can rise above your circumstances."
The dreams took hold, slowly, tentatively. He had failed sixth grade and for the next two years cut school, walked hallways or stirred up trouble -- did almost anything but study -- at Greenspring Middle School. Then, in eighth grade, he hurled a bowl of corn at an administrator on lunch duty, just for kicks, and was invited to leave.
He missed almost the entire year. Still, he advanced to ninth grade at Forest Park High on a "social promotion" -- a polite term for one school dumping its problems on another school.
Yet at Forest Park, he excelled in class, made the wrestling team, was elected Mr. Sophomore, then Mr. Junior and helped run The Young Gentlemen's Society, a group for young black teens where the talk often turns to violence, drugs, poverty and defying odds.
Fatherly guidance
At Forest Park, Teddy sits in a nearly bare basement room where the man who became a surrogate father taught him how to dream.
Clinton Miles saw something in Teddy that so many others had overlooked -- a fiercely competitive spirit, a voraciously curious mind and, lurking beneath the tough veneer and gangsta rap lyrics, a kid terrified that he would never make it out of a ravaged neighborhood.
Since then, Mr. Miles, a former high school guidance counselor, has served as mentor, friend and advocate for Teddy as part of a city dropout-prevention program called Futures. They hang out in school, go bowling and, on Sundays, pray at Central Church of Christ in West Baltimore.
At any given time, Mr. Miles, a gentle man who rarely raises his voice, counsels 50 kids in Futures at Forest Park. But, he says, few turnarounds have proved as dramatic or as heartening as Teddy's.
"You're dealing with a child, and every day, his main thought is survival: 'Can I make it through this day without getting shot, without gettingbeaten, without getting threatened?' And in the end he somehow has to make school fit into that world and provide for his mom and family and deal with peers who tell him, nTC 'You think you're better than us' and try to bring him down. The greatest thing is Teddy hasn't given in to that."
Teddy looks to his mentor and nods. Without Mr. Miles and Futures, he says, he probably would have abandoned school long ago and joined his old buddies dealing on the street corners.
But Futures, run by private foundations, the city and state, was unlike anything Teddy has ever associated with school. Futures relies on teams of advocates, teachers and job-training staff to provide college prep courses, counseling, home visits, cultural trips and summer jobs.
Still, hardly a day goes by that Teddy's not tempted by the street life. Sweating over chicken cookers at the KFC on Reisterstown Road, he curses under his breath as he thinks of the dealers who buy cars with wads of cash from $1,000-a-night crack enterprises.
But he always stops to consider the toll. He'll be an FBI agent, he says, because he's seen too much bloodletting, too much death, too much waste.
"Too many of us are dead or behind bars, almost all of them young black males. . . . We had slavery and the civil rights movement and we fought so hard, and what are we doing now? We fought for nothing. We're killing ourselves now."
His old buddies can't get over it. Using street slang for police, they say, "Damn, Teddy, want to be Five-O. Get away from us."
"I tell them, just respect me, don't do anything you wouldn't do around the police, that's all," he says.
Sometimes, he shows them his gold-capped teeth or new Nikes and says, with more than a bit of pride, that he earned them -- legally.
In their Oswego Avenue rowhouse, for as long as Teddy can remember, his mother has been filling her children's heads with talk of a world foreign to her and to them.
"I tell them, 'Get an education, and get out of this ghetto. Get away from this city, this violence, go away to college, travel,' " says Beverly Forrest. " 'This place steals away your youth, your childhood.' My sons, they're an endangered species.
"I don't even want them to talk to people about dealing drugs. If I didn't beat them to death, I would at least call the police."
She's lying on a tattered couch in a crowded room with black garbage bags covering the windows and videotapes overflowing from a closet.
She's spent much of the past five years in this room, forced to give up her nursing jobs because of a degenerated disc in her back. She passes time watching videos, reading a worn Bible and keeping tabs on the street out front.
At 47, her life has been a study in resilience. Junior high school dropout. Nine children, five ex-husbands. Night school, a GED, some college, two jobs at once to pay the bills.
Now, her disability and welfare checks total $794 a month. After paying rent, she does her best to clothe and feed the five children who live at home on a little more than $350 a month. Teddy pitches in $50 from his pay every two weeks.
She still commands respect at home. Unlike many of her neighbors, all her children graduated from high school, and the four older ones have full-time jobs. Teddy, the kid who loved to read and got A's in first grade, would be the first to graduate from college.
"When I get down and it gets to be too much on me," she says, "I think maybe I have given birth to maybe a congressman or a world-class lawyer or someone who will find the cure to a disease."
Not so long ago, Teddy Page's world -- and his dreams -- extended only as far as the streets of his Park Heights neighborhood. His horizons have expanded considerably.
To Johns Hopkins University, where he's worked for two summers as part of Futures. To Washington, where he's testified for the U.S. Labor Department and a panel of educators on how to improve schools. And to college offices, where he seeks answers on admissions requirements, criminology course offerings and financial aid.
At Hopkins this past summer, he found the nest of Academe intoxicating. While putting together a newsletter on Futures students and doing clerical work, he took a college class and even lectured one day.
He knew the subject well: "The Sociology of Juvenile Delinquency."
The college students listened as he spoke of the void in young lives. Inner-city teens join gangs and deal drugs for a sense of belonging, for protection, for money and, mostly, because nobody taught them a better way, he said. As for the inevitable violence, he told them, "You can't really run from it. You can't."
But, he found, you can't stop trying to either. And, you can't underestimate the power of dreams.
A few people cared enough to help Teddy Page learn to dream, and that made all the difference.
"Cleary, Teddy was on his way out of school and out of society," says Frank Stluka, a Hopkins researcher who taught the delinquency class. "He's got a great gift. In the midst of it all, when he seemed to be heading toward the depths, he had this ability to step back and see the perspective of a whole different world, and I think that very well saved him."