Doggy

Doggy was seventeen when I photographed him in Hollywood Boulevard. He walked around the arm of a girl of his age and was integrated into a group of young vagrants - Runaways- Greater than him. All of them had opted for flight in response to education received by their parents and moved at ease along the popular Avenue of Los Angeles. I talked to them and they told me that they did not want to live under anyone's orders, they thought life is too short to lose it by doing what others want. They only moved them the desire to be free, the same eagerness that perhaps one day had moved to their parents and that they had now forgotten because they had resigned themselves to being dependent on their always growing needs. They were not afraid of anything, or wanted to show me they didn't have it. Some told me that they had arrived in Los Angeles doing auto -stop for almost the entire country. They told me that the habit of the trip had developed in them the inability to stay for a long time in the same place. Most of them had acquired the habit of using the night to go out to look for what is necessary to live another day. During the day they used to sit, theatrical and idle, in the banks of the walk, next to their old military backpacks, their open food cans and their sleeping bags. They slept on the roofs of the houses and, when the nights were cold, they grouped into the open lobs of the old theaters. Doggy explained to me that almost all of them used false names to avoid police identification. He was a native of Phoenix and had been circulating through the country for several years in trains, buses and cars. He did not want to answer me to why he had fled from his house. He reaffirmed in what has already been said: there was no other reason than the eagerness for freedom he felt in the mind and body. After photographing him and talking to him, I sat next to his teammates in a bank on the walk. While talking with them from his desires and motivations, he looked at Doggy, who was standing and hugged his girl. He looked at him on that stage of hard young people with chains around his neck and couldn't help thinking that he seemed too innocent to be there. At sunset I said goodbye to him and others Runaways; I wanted to be prudent and follow his advice to leave that place before the night arrived. Pepe Navarro