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Where the Boys Are

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"There's a view that because there are guys hanging around in the neighborhood, we're not being effective," he continues. "But a lot of those guys are not our guys. We don't like it either -- it makes it difficult for us to do our jobs as well."

Robert Berger would just as soon see the Harbor Light pack up and leave. His business-district group has met with local aldermen and Salvation Army officials a number of times over the years, hoping to persuade them to relocate, but nothing has been worked out. Harbor Light, meanwhile, has been rebuffed by city officials in its attempt to expand eastward onto an abandoned block the Salvation Army owns east of Garrison.

Best dreams of an insulated, aesthetically pleasing campus. "One of the things I'd love to be able to do is have a campus-style setting where we're blocked off, so that the neighborhoods don't get too concerned," he says. "We'd have a lot of green space, so that when you drive down the street guys aren't hanging out on the corner. They wouldn't need to be if we had a city block, or two, where we had nice decorative walls and green space, picnic areas -- places just for them to hang out while they're not doing anything."

Until then, Berger contends, something needs to be done.

"With more individuals moving into the area, the safety of these people lies in the hands of the Salvation Army. They've got to change with it. I believe they should consider moving before one of their people ends up hurting somebody. At that point in time there's going to be a ruckus."

After a few weeks off, Lee's anxious to get back to the Stroll. But before hitting the street on this summer night, he kicks back with a tallboy of Busch in a car parked in front of his parents' house.

When he left just now, his mom asked where he was going. "I just gotta handle some business, you hear me?" he told her, sounding like 50 Cent -- affable yet vaguely menacing.

Lee says he's close to his mother. She was shot a few years ago in a gang-related spree that his family fears may been intended for him. While their mother was in the hospital, his sister padlocked the house and the family scattered. With nowhere to go, Lee crashed at the Harbor Light. He hated it.

"I'd rather be on the street than staying somewhere like that," he says. "Those guys are straight trash."

He says his current situation isn't bad. He has two young daughters he sees often and hopes to get married soon to his girlfriend of a year (she's not the girls' mother). His parents continue to take care of his financial needs, which is more than most 28-year-olds could ask.

"I don't trip off money like that," he says. "I got a nice house. I live good, I eat good. They support me as far as food, clothes, everything. Unless I'm trying to get something I don't need to be getting."

What he doesn't need to be getting is drugs. Lee's got a pretty demanding weed habit and dabbles in coke and heroin. He took to the Stroll six months ago, after he got fired from a landscaping job. A friend from the south side told him about it. "He told me I could make some cheese by doing nothing, just by standing around," Lee says. "Disgracing myself for a minute, but not too disgracing."

An aspiring rapper, Lee has laid down some of his tracks but has yet to catch a break in the music business. He says his brother recently got him a job washing dishes in Clayton, which he'll start soon. But the Stroll is his most reliable source of income. "It's kinda tough out here. But I don't got nothin' better to do, nothin' that I'm good at," he says. "I knew there was money in that field. I'm down there to get in where I fit in."

Lee spins countless tales of tragedy, including the time he and a friend were walking in this north-side neighborhood one early morning in 1993 and discovered a corpse just around the corner from his house. He interrupts his narrative to spit out the open window. A decade of friends and family getting shot has left a bad taste in his mouth.

He says he recently tested negative for TB, HIV and other STDs. If a john on the Stroll wants more than the hand job he offers, he turns them down.

"I don't get down like that," he says. "I come from a moral family. I don't lose my morals. I don't need no cheese like that. I'm not gonna penetrate nothin'; they can't put their mouth on it. But you'd be surprised how many just want to jerk me.

"You have to have boundaries, because you can hop in the car with a mothafucker who's a straight-up serial killer, a Ted Bundy-typa shit," he says. "I know the dangers of all that. I got in the car with mothafuckers before and they ain't got no conversation for me. I say, 'Hey, pull this car over and let me up outta here.' You know a lot about someone when you get in the car with them by their conversation. If they ain't got nothin' to say, then there's probably something else on their mind. You gotta read signs and you'll be all right. Don't look at the dollar signs. I watch enough Court TV to know that people are sick."

His line of work, he speculates, is even more dangerous than a female prostitute's.

"With all these faggots out here, I guess it's kind of different than women prostitutes. It's more sick-ass men out here.

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