John Irving

The children of Pike Street are runaways; when I first saw Mary Ellen Mark's photographs of them--in the spring of 1983--I knew they were perfect characters for an important story, because they were both perfect and important victims. The characters in any important story are always victims; even the survivors of an important story are victims. At the time, Seattle's Green River Killer had already murdered 28 young girls, yet the teenagers of Pike Street were holding their own--pimps, prostitutes, and petty thieves, they were eating out of dumpsters, falling in love, getting tattooed, being treated for the variety of venereal diseases passed on to them by their customers.

All teenagers plan for unlikely futures--"three yachts or more"--and lifetime lovers, but the children of Pike Street must conduct their dreaming in the presence of expediencies far darker than most Americans can imagine. Tiny is a fourteen-year-old girl, malnourished, an accomplished prostitute with a lengthy record of occupational diseases; her alcoholic mother says that Tiny's prostitution is "just a phase." Dewayne is a sixteen-year-old boy; he visits his father, a failed arsonist, in prison. Dewayne's father fails as a father, too; Dewayne is one of the victims of Pike Street who won't survive this story.

More than a year after I saw Mary Ellen's pictures of these children, I saw the rough cut of her husband's movie. Martin Bell is an Englishman, which makes the powerful authenticity of his film all the more impressive to me: that he could so thoroughly have gained the trust of Tiny and Dewayne and the others--that he has succeeded in getting them to accept the presence of his camera so unselfconsciously, so completely gracefully. These children's voices are heartbreaking; their tone is mostly deadpan, sometimes dreamy, relentlessly honest. It is the narrative technique of Streetwise that makes you forget you're watching a documentary; the absolutely natural quality of the children's voices has the storytelling exactness of fiction. And the unobtrusive quality of the camerawork contributes to the impression that Streetwise is as concrete and inevitable as a good novel.

I saw the finished version of Martin Bell's movie not long after President Reagan's landslide victory. I wish the president could see Streetwise, for there is little acknowledgment of the existence of Pike Street's children in his plans for America. At a time when so many of the self-righteous are crusading for the rights of the unborn, who is paying attention to the born? Mary Ellen Mark and Martin Bell have been paying attention to the children of Pike Street, who are very much born--and unloved, poor, unwanted, abused. Like all good stories, Streetwise is timely. I wish that the national (and presidentially approved) fervor for fetuses could be slightly redirected. Dewayne and Tiny and their friends Rat and Shadow and Munchkin--they all managed to be born. But who is taking care of them?

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