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By John C. Ensslin
News Staff Writer
It's mid-afternoon in Skyline Park. The Daniels & Fisher clock tower tolls 3 p.m. and an 18-year-old woman nicknamed ``Chewy' is singing a ballad in Spanish.
Then she rattles off a few phrases in Vietnamese.
``I can get in trouble in eight different languages,'' she boasts to her friends, as two Denver motorcycle police officers pull up. It is a familiar ritual, checking identifications and writing tickets.
Chewy got a ticket the night before.
Her real name is Lisa Castens, but she gave the cops a string of phony names. Her lying drew a ticket for providing false information.
Chewy said she doesn't want to give her real name, because she has warrants in Aurora and doesn't want her parents to know where she is.
Welcome to Skyline Park, a sunken concrete city park along Arapahoe Street that has been a magnet to an assortment of homeless kids, ``Goths,'' skateboarders and day-trippers drawn to an urban bohemian lifestyle.
The dark side of that lifestyle made headlines with the recent arrests of several youths, two of whom police said are suspects in at least one of the string of brutal slayings of older homeless men.
Melvin Washington was beaten to death just north of the park, which is frequented by many of the youths police have in custody. At least one of the youths was arrested there.
Denver police use the term ``mall rats'' when talking about the loose band of teen-agers who hang out around the 16th Street Mall.
Many are runaways or homeless. Some were abused or neglected as kids and placed in youth homes.
They spend their day ``spanging'' (hitting people up for spare change), bumming clove cigarettes off one another and sharing whatever food comes their way.
Every once in a while, a shoving or wrestling match breaks out. But these pass quickly.
They dye their hair bright, exotic colors. Some guys wear metal-toe shoes. The women wear spike-studded dog collars. Everyone has a pierced something, often a lip or a tongue.
They bristle upon hearing ``mall rats'' - a label they say is used by those who would prefer to see them as some kind of plague instead of as people.
They live in a park where people dine on grilled mahi-mahi while across the way sitconcrete benches stenciled with slogans like ``Property is Theft.''
They go by names like Sis, Chewy, Little Butt and Raven. Those who have hung out the longest regard their survival as a status symbol.
``Who are you?'' a guy asked Chewy last week.
``I'm old school,'' she replied with a touch of defiance. ``I've been coming down here since 1996.''
They come to Skyline Park at all hours because this is where they find one another. The makeup of the crowd changes almost hourly.
And while they tout their freedom and speak of one another as family, it is not a secure or easy lifestyle.
``I'm one of what you call old school,'' said Molly Sanders, 21, who grew up in Fort Collins.
``It's kind of hard to explain,'' she said. ``It's like, when you've been down here a long time, they (the other young people) know you're not a summer bunny.
``They (the summer bunnies) come here and spange and as soon as winter comes, they go home to mommy and daddy. They have no discipline,'' she added. ``I'm here by necessity. It's not my choice to be down here.''
Two months ago Sanders and her boyfriend moved into a garage in a friend's home in Denver. She comes by the park now to see her old friends.
``Just because my situation is improved doesn't mean I don't respect them or don't want to see them,'' she added. ``Because they're not bad people like everybody says they are.''
The violence that put these young people in the spotlight last week is also a part of that lifestyle, Sanders said.
``Violence is a part of everyday life down here,'' she said. ``If you don't stand up for yourself, you get eaten alive.''
The men who were killed appeared to have been savagely beaten and kicked, police said. Some of the youths arrested are suspects in the nonfatal beatings of two other transients.
That kind of brutality is without precedent among the youths she works with, said Roxane White, executive director of Urban Peak, a group that offers counseling, education and transitional housing for kids who want to get off the street.
For the last 12 years, White has been helping kids on the mall, trying to persuade the homeless teens to come off the streets. An outreach worker has never been hurt or assaulted, she said.
The spikes, the body-piercing, the hair dye, the motorcycle chain and chokers are a kind of protective color the kids use to protect themselves, White explained.
``They're survivors, by and large,'' White said of the youths who live on the mall. ``It's very important to look tough on the streets, 'cause that's how you survive on the streets.''
But that style also makes it hard for them to get by.
Take 21-year-old Kevin Kossow. He came back to Denver two weeks ago from New Orleans. Last week, police confiscated his cap, which had a pair of spikes on the brim, and ticketed him for possession of a deadly weapon.
Clad in black leather and steel-toe boots, Kossow rummaged through a bag that contained his own sheet music, a book by Karl Marx and George Orwell's Animal Farm.
He had stowed his other clothes that he uses for job interviews in a locker at the bus depot. But first he had to come up with the $100 to pay off what he owed for the locker rental.
Kossow and a friend are saving up to find a place to rent.
His friend, Kenneth Roberts, had the words ``DROP DEAD'' tattooed on his fingers. A bit wistfully, Roberts wished the letters had gone a little bit higher above his knuckles. They make it difficult for him on job interviews.
Like the people who frequent Skyline, the park itself faces an uncertain future. Two years ago, city voters approved $2 million in improvements to Skyline. Among the proposed changes: filling in the park's sunken areas and creating a street-level grassy area. Hearings on the changes begin next year.
Meanwhile, the faces of the people who hang around the park are changing.
``There's a lot of new kids now,'' Sanders observed last week. ``A lot of the old-schoolers have left.''
``They'll come back,'' she added. ``They always come back. It's what homeless kids call the Colorado curse. No matter where you go, you'll always be dragged back.''
November 7, 1999
