'One Strike and You're Gone' : Used to be kids could make a mistake without ruining their lives, says author Russell Banks, who indulged in some juvenile high jinks himself. In 'Rule of the Bone,' he reflects on how today's teens don't have it so easy.

By BETTIJANE LEVINE

June 21, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

What do you do with a kid gone wrong?

A kid who was good when he was small but now lies, steals, cheats, manipulates, ditches school, talks like a gangster and looks like a bum?

A kid who won’t listen and doesn’t care--who causes such grief that sometimes you secretly wish he would disappear, just leave home so you wouldn’t have to wonder and worry every night?

There’s probably not a parent in history whose child has not exhibited at least one such aberrant behavior during the raging-hormone years--some more outlandish than others. But kids will be kids, they used to say. And they also used to say that every kid was worth saving, and almost every kid could be saved. Not anymore.

Sam Johnson’s teen-age son, for example, used to stay in bed on school days, steal the family car and do God knows what by night. Once he heisted dynamite from a federal stash to blow up telephone lines and the windows of a bank.

Years later the son, Lyndon Baines Johnson, admitted that in his teens he had been “a hair’s breadth away” from a lifetime in jail--but by that time he was President of the United States.

Russell Banks, born 32 years after LBJ, in 1940, was at the opposite end of the social spectrum. His father, an alcoholic and pipe fitter, abandoned the family when Banks was 12--after bestowing enough beatings to permanently cross the boy’s right eye.

Banks’ mother had no money or skills and four kids to raise by herself. You think her eldest would help her out? No way.

Banks and a friend stole a car in their hometown of Barnstead, N.H., and never looked back. For three months Banks’ mother didn’t know if he was dead or alive. Then police apprehended two cool teens driving a hot car down a leafy Pasadena street. Kids and car were shipped back to New England, where police and the car’s owner were persuaded to let the families deal with their young. In 1956 it was still possible to negotiate such things, and Banks says his adventure was “considered part of normal adolescent turbulence.”

In fact, all the way up through the ‘70s, Banks says, “a kid could have a scratchy patch in his life, leave home for a while, or just do something very wrong, even criminal, and still put his life back together again. There was enough connectedness between social institutions--school, community, family, church--so that a teen-ager’s life could be woven back into place and you could go on with it, get over it, even repair the damage you’d caused.

“Nowadays it’s three strikes, or even one strike, and you’re gone. If you get caught and put into the system, you’re finished. It changes you forever.”

Even if you don’t get caught you’re finished anyhow, he says, because the streets are so much more dangerous than ever before.

“It’s easier for a 15-year-old to get illegal substances than it is to get a job if he leaves home.”

In previous eras, Banks says, “kids could leave home and survive without being ruined--then come home again.”

After his own crime spree Banks went on to finish high school and become, briefly, a window dresser at a Montgomery Ward store, a plumber and pipe fitter and, eventually, a tenured humanities professor at Princeton University and the respected author of novels that have garnered dozens of prestigious literary awards and a Pulitzer Prize nomination (for “Continental Drift,” Harper & Row, 1985).

Banks’ latest book, “Rule of the Bone” (HarperCollins, 1995), reflects on rites of passage in a pulp-fiction world, fraught with peril for kids on the brink of becoming good or bad adults with no particular incentive to push them either way.

It is narrated by Chappie, a rural mall rat of the ‘90s. A sullen 14-year-old with a retro Mohawk haircut, baggy pants, assorted body piercings and the same indomitable urge that Banks surrendered to at that age: to get away from home.

Chappie begins: “My life got interesting, you might say, the summer I turned 14 and was heavy into weed but didn’t have any money to buy it with so I started looking around the house all the time for things I could sell but there wasn’t much. My mother who was still like my best friend then. . . .”

The tale takes off from there, as Chappie loots the only thing of value in his mom’s trailer home--old coins she’d hidden in a blanket on a closet floor, saving to give to him. The pawned coins bring enough money to supply free weed for an entire apartment full of blitzed-out, do-nothing, thirty-something bikers, who in return permit Chappie to live with them and audit their perversities.

The book proceeds through one year of the teen’s close calls and life-altering experiences: shoplifting, burglary, fire, kinky sex, death by accident and on purpose, a deep friendship with a Rastafarian who lives in an abandoned school bus and becomes the boy’s mentor--and finally a trip to Jamaica, where Chappie finds his real father, who deserted him when he was 5 and who, it turns out, is even a worse person than the molesting stepfather Chappie left back home.

Not an uplifting tale. But through it all, the reader sees through the teen-ager’s eyes that the uncaring person he presents to adults is not who he really thinks he is, nor is it who he wants to be.

The book received warm reviews, although critics did not deem it to be the next “Huckleberry Finn,” as its publishers claimed; 20th Century Fox plans to turn the story into a major film.

Banks, 55, says the idea for the book struck him when he taught writing at an Upstate New York prison for nonviolent felons. His students were “mostly drug dealers, ages 18 to 22. They were white and black, from the inner city and the suburbs. They wrote about their lives and I realized most had been living on their own since they were very young. So I asked how that happened.

“Their stories were so simple and normal and pathetic in a way. All had crossed a fateful line somewhere, had done one bad thing too many. Stolen a car, got in a fight, blew up at the wrong person, got into drugs in a dangerous way. Once they had crossed that line, intentionally or not, it was over.”

Banks says he suddenly realized that this could happen to almost any teen-ager these days.

“I have four wonderful children who are now in their 20s, and I know it could have happened to any of them. All kids right now are just one step away from disaster. Because if they fall out of the nest for any reason, if they give up the economy of their parents, there is only the economy of the streets. And the economy of the streets is not what it used to be. Now it’s purely drugs and sex.”

Banks says he “started listening, watching and thinking about today’s teens and their point of view--and what they knew about life from the way they have lived it.” And he realized that even the most menacing types--”the guys with the baggy pants and tattoos and big sneakers and sullen faces, who only speak to you in monosyllables if they speak at all,” are quite different than they present themselves. When they’re “in a situation they trust or they’re with their peers, they are funny and articulate, as kids have always been--and they are warm and loyal and have, I think, a very steady moral compass . . . even what you might call the worst of them, the gangsters.”

Is he an apologist for the element that does the drive-bys and the gangbangs?

“Not at all. What I’m saying is that I believe almost all young people have some or many good qualities up to that certain point when they start to lose it, when the world they enter makes it impossible to sustain those qualities any more. After a couple of years on the street, or in prison, the only loyalty left is to peers. The rest of the world looks hostile and punitive.”

But if their lives had been patched together before that last fateful event, he says, they might have made it.

Banks was surprised to find that teen-agers are “the fastest-growing segment of homeless people in this country. And they are homeless for longer periods of time now than before. It used to be a matter of weeks, maybe months that a kid would be homeless until something got patched together. But now it’s often years--until it becomes a permanent homelessness.”

Chappie’s exile, like the author’s own, has an upbeat finish. The fictional boy achieves what Banks calls “a solid sense of his own identity in the world.” Through his Jamaican mentor he learns to cook, a skill that enables him to earn money. The boy also learns, Banks says, that “he has the ability to love other people, and to express that love. Right then and there he has the beginnings of a real adult life. And he’s only 15 at the book’s end.”

Banks’ life, obviously, was part of the pattern on which Chappie’s was based. After high school Banks received a full scholarship to Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., which would have made him the first in his blue-collar clan to go to college.

“I was probably the white equivalent of an affirmative action kid; schools were just starting to recruit scholarship kids from poor families in those days.” But he was “like a lot of inner-city kids today at Ivy League schools on scholarship; I was not secure enough or socially equipped to handle the experience.”

He skulked out of Colgate “in the middle of the night, after only a month of classes” and began a series of low-paying jobs and failed marriages. One of his mothers-in-law saw his potential and paid his tuition at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill when Banks was in his mid-20s. He later divorced the daughter of his benefactress, with whom he had three children, and is currently married to his fourth wife, poet Chase Twichell.

His four daughters are college educated and embarked on careers of their own and--for the moment, at least--Banks feels relatively secure. He teaches half the year in Princeton, writes during the other half at a rural Adirondack cottage, and is in involved in films being made from three of his books.

Strangely enough, he says he owes part of his success to his relationship with his abusive father, who was not around during his teens.

At 21 Banks moved to be near his dad, became a pipe fitter himself and worked alongside him, trying to discover what kind of person he really was.

“I learned he was a man of great frustrations, alcoholic and bitter--but I think very bright. I made my peace with him.”

And that enabled Banks to move on in life, he says. But the father and son remained connected, and Banks cared for him at the end, as he watched him drink himself to death.