Pubdate: Wed, 02 Jun 2004
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2004 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Charlie LeDuff

A LAS VEGAS JUVENILE JUDGE FINDS HIS TEST CASE AT HOME

LAS VEGAS, May 27 - Judge Gerald W. Hardcastle is a community pillar,
an upright, modest man. He is a family court judge, the final arbiter
for children who are neglected or abused, addicted or delinquent, lost
to their parents or heading there.

An endless stream of teenagers passes through the judge's courtroom,
all with the same glum 10-mile stare. The judge will dispense
decisions in 100 lives before lunch. He will do this with a brisk
efficiency that is not the same as coldness. Sometimes, looking down
at the pitiful one before him, the judge will be struck with an almost
overwhelming sense of melancholy.

There is nothing physically impressive about the judge and nothing
unimpressive. He is 58, fleshy and balding, with a hard blue gaze. He
writes academic papers that people do not read. He is a regular at
political fund-raisers. He reads philosophy. He has Wednesday-night
cocktails with the regularity of a churchgoer.

The judge is a stickler for protocol and punctuality. Above all, he
commands order, with a sternness that colleagues say detracts from his
many good qualities. Some deduce that his sourness comes from the
disorder in his personal life, from his own troubled daughter.

When the paperwork is in order and the files are as they should be,
the judge drives home. His neighborhood is hidden behind concrete
walls and surrounded by scrub lots and half-built subdivisions. The
houses, with their unnecessary green lawns, are all the same. The
judge does not know his neighbors, most of them recent arrivals from
someplace else. He waits for his garage door to close before getting
out of his car.

The walls keep strangers out, but they were also built to keep
children in, shielded from the neon hypnotism of the Strip.

"We like to pretend what goes on downtown doesn't affect what's going
on up here," the judge says. "But the town is growing so fast, life
here tends toward chaos."

At times, the judge stands at his door, unsure of what he may find
inside. Will there be a nude young man in there? A half-dressed girl?
Personal property gone missing? Someone unconscious in the bathroom?

The judge can tell you about the horror of standing in the emergency
room above his daughter, her painted lips dull red, her skin light
blue. He can tell you about the fear he felt, wondering where it all
fell apart.

He blames himself for his daughter's problems - his insatiable career
drive, the pressure he placed on her to maintain appearances. But he
also blames the corrupting influence of Las Vegas, a city grown beyond
belief and control. He followed a dream here 30 years ago, when this
was a small town. Now, he says, his dream is dead.

"I wouldn't come here again," he said. "I won't retire here. There's a
lack of social control. The kids don't have dreams. I ask them, What
do you want to be? They tell me nothing."

When the house is quiet, the judge retires upstairs, to a table where
he builds little boats from sticks, dreaming about a future on an
island somewhere. In his closet, he keeps neatly stacked shoeboxes
containing mementos of his daughter's childhood: ribbons, toys and
photos from the days, not long ago, when she was a good girl.

"If you want to know Whitney," he says. "Here she is in these
boxes."

Whitney Hardcastle came late to the judge's life, 20 years after he
and his wife arrived here from Ogden, Utah. That marriage, which
yielded three children, did not last. The judge married another woman,
Kathy, a lawyer and now the chief district judge of Clark County.

With this second family, there would be no more mistakes. Whitney, the
chestnut-haired little one, would be perfect. And she loved her Daddy,
stood by his desk as he worked, chirping incessant questions,
sparrowlike. She took up horses to please Daddy, joined the riding
council to please Daddy. Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.

And then one day, the milk of her youth turned sour. She got sick of
Daddy. And Daddy walked in from work one day into his perfect home
with the high ceilings, green lawn and pool out back, and saw a
stranger, a world-weary sloucher with black hair and nails and a bull
ring through her nose.

This person sneers at his advice, thinks his life is rigid and
uninspiring, his Wednesday-evening cocktails the stuff of dopes.

"He has patience for those boats, but not his child," she says as she
lies on the couch in front of the afternoon television. "He wants to
collect my childhood in those boxes. He wants me to be in those
boxes." She knows she is the world to him, and tortures him for it.

"My dad has been trying to make me happy," she says. She stares
blankly at the television, then says in a hollow voice. "But it's not
working."

The judge likes to think that children do better in adversity, that
wealth and beauty can damage children in the long run.

That's not it, Whitney says. She knows the root of her problem: It's
bad to be a good kid. How can you be good, she asks, when everybody
around you is bad? She tried, the horses and the teen council, being
the perfect daughter of two judges. But she couldn't do it forever,
fending off the bad kids and their parties and grown-up stories about
three-way sex. Then a friend, a 14-year-old boy, killed himself. After
that she joined the crowd, pulled in like a ball in the ocean. The
horse was eventually sold.

"When you have a problem you want the attention, so you keep your
problem to make people notice you," Whitney says as she drives across
town to a party. "Before drugs, I felt like no one. After my best
friend killed himself when I was 13, I took out my betrayal through
drugs. I became the girl who did all the hard stuff. People began to
know me. I was out there doing stuff no one ever heard of. I was
pretty crazy.

"I wish I had that horse, though."

The judge noticed the change about four years ago. The school called,
saying Whitney had been caught with marijuana. The judge gave his
daughter a pat lecture, the same one he gives in his courtroom. The
stuff about responsibility and health, the future and whatnot. She
asked him what would he know about it, and he realized he knew almost
nothing at all.

The judge says he is a generation removed from how people feel about
things today. "I'm not a touchy-feely guy," he said over a Wednesday
evening cocktail.

He was ill-prepared when the spiral down began. The Hardcastles
removed their daughter from private school at her request. Gone were
the uniform and structure and watchful eyes for the judges' daughter.
Whitney got lost in the Las Vegas wash and the influences inside the
chaotic schools, the father believes. She was drowning while he was at
work, spending all those hours trying to help other kids swim.

"I'm not embarrassed; that's why I'm talking about it," he says. "Las
Vegas is a difficult place to raise a child. Go home or bad. You've
got women's butts on billboards. Your kids are on their own while
you're busy earning a living. If you bring your children here, be warned."

'I'm Not Anything'

It is hard to know if Whitney has turned a corner. She wants to ride
horses again. She has passed some high school proficiency exams, but
her work habits are spotty. It is an improvement, though, from when
she was a teenage runaway on the streets of Hollywood. Asked what she
wants to be, she says a lawyer. Just like Daddy, as though this will
happen by osmosis or something.

She is a thin girl, waifish with long, angular face, a tongue stud and
nose ring. She is frenetic, unable to focus on a topic for more than a
few sentences, calm one minute, ripping through a string of invective
in the next. At 17, she has a poor self-image. She describes herself
as ugly, small-chested and big-hipped. "I'm not good looking. I'm not
an adult. I'm not anything. I'm spoiled," she says and laughs at the
absurdity of herself.

The Hardcastles indulge their daughter with money, cars, a cellphone,
nice clothing. They are waiting for her moment of clarity, the day she
wakes up and they all laugh about this. Kathy Hardcastle has drinks
with the girls on Saturdays. It seems that her friends' children
struggle, too.

"You don't give up," she says. "You just try to be consistent and hope
something sticks. At least we haven't lost a child."

Kathy Hardcastle, 52, is the inscrutable presence in this family; at
once dominant and indulgent, driven and plain-spoken yet aware that
constantly talking about one's problems will not reduce them. She
makes her living in judgment of sadists and hoodlums, and is
practical-minded about human infirmity.

"I'm a realist," she says. "She's going to do what she's going to do.
Love her and she'll find her way home."

They spoil their daughter, the Hardcastles know. In defense of
themselves, they recite that old saying: No matter how much you give
your kids, it never feels like enough.

Consider that Whitney brought a runaway boy home last year and the
Hardcastles let him stay. His name is Steven Matthews, a moptop
17-year-old who mumbles when trying to express himself. Kathy
Hardcastle took him in thinking he might be a steadying influence on
their daughter.

The situation is anathema to the judge. A boy sleeping in his
daughter's bed. One high school credit, unable to carry a
conversation, no interest in books, no hobbies. He stays out late and
does drugs. And when the judge asks the boy-man what he wants to be,
he shrugs and mumbles "I dunno." This goes counter to everything the
judge believes, another example of the influences destroying his Las
Vegas dream, living right there across the hall from his bedroom. Yet
he goes along, grasping at straws. "I'm not an expert in raising kids.
But I love my daughter. She's my biggest heartache and my biggest
pride. Above all, we're a family."

Still, this reprobate can make his blood boil. The judge once gave the
ultimatum. "I go or he goes!"

His Honor, the man of order and discipline, washes the reprobate's
underpants on Saturday afternoons.

"He's our family now," Kathy Hardcastle says as a matter beyond
discussion. And to this end, she bought her husband a new washer and
dryer.

The washing gives Judge Hardcastle a modicum of control. "Some colors
need warm. Some need cold. Heavy material needs warm, no matter what
the label says. Reds bleed. Jeans go in cold." The judge folds them on
his pool table. The kids don't bother to carry them upstairs.

"I've done nothing to earn his respect," Steven admits. "But he hasn't
given me any. I think he's shrinking my clothes. I wish I knew some
way to show him."

Young, Restless and Stoned

Steven talks little about the catastrophe of his young life, except to
say that no one abuses him at the Hardcastle home. He does not use the
word love, cannot manage to say it except to say, "They're good to
me."

At a recent rock concert with Whitney in a park on the edge of town,
Steven asked to borrow a pencil and wrote a list of the drugs young
people do. It read like a periodic table: E, O, H, K, GHB, 2CB, 2C1,
methamphetamine, methadone, CCC, cocaine.

"I haven't tried heroin yet," he says. "And I never tried speed until
I got to Las Vegas."

All day long teenagers came to the show, emerging from the back seats
of luxury sedans. The parents stopped down the street to spare their
children the embarrassment of being seen with Mom. Moms hand them
bills, money that will most likely go up their noses.

The drugs and beat and budding sexuality of thousands of teenagers
make an intoxicating and volatile combination. A young girl convulses
in a drug overdose while paramedics work on her. Another group of
girls, no more than 14, wearing low-cut tops and panties above their
waistbands, their eyes moist and glistening, laugh at the girl's
misfortune and kiss one another with tongues.

Punk music grinds from the stage and ranging gangs of boys run through
the crowd, trying to initiate a stampede.

Whitney is distracted, more distracted than usual, her eyes wide
underneath her glasses. She mills around with a group of homosexual
boys who are her closest friends, her merry band of misfits.

Steven keeps a distance. He has broken it off with Whitney today, says
he has been treating her badly, feeling kind of weird about having a
girlfriend who is now sort of a sister.

Whitney grows more irritated as the afternoon dissipates into evening.
The desert sun sets a riotous red. Whitney is bumped hard by another
girl running through the crowd.

The fight lasts only a few seconds, with Whitney landing a punch to
her face. The girl wriggles away.

An adult standing back by the pizza truck surveys the dissolution with
a frightened expression.

"People come to Las Vegas for the opportunity to do better for their
families," says the woman, Linda Skipp, whose 13-year-old has been
swallowed in the crowd. "But you can't have sex and drugs and gambling
and then expect to raise a healthy family. Look around."

Back home, Whitney's mother reads a book by lamplight. Whitney's
father, guilty of nothing more perhaps than loving his daughter too
much, has retired to his corner upstairs, building his little boats
from sticks, wondering if the kids will be home tonight.
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