by Glen Korstrom
Northern News Services

NNSL (Feb 04/98) - Scrapes cover 18-year-old Brian Lamb's torso.

Wearing a white undershirt and jeans, with a red handkerchief hanging from his right pocket, the homeless teen struggles to find a shirt as he balances on a ladder in a friend's closet.

"I have no desire to get a job," says the short-cropped bleach blond with multiple earrings. "That's one thing I share with a lot of street kids."

Though there is the Side Door drop-in centre to hang out during the day, there are no beds in Yellowknife for those under 18 to crash.

The Salvation Army requires single transients vying for its 17 beds to be at least 18 years old. Even for its two dorms for men and one dorm for women, only adults are allowed.

"Sixteen and 17-year-olds are at risk in our community," says Salvation Army director of community services Karen Hoeft. "They fall between the cracks."

But Lamb is not lobbying for support.

"If there were shelters, you'd see a lot of kids leaving their problems and going to them," he says. "I guess it is the freedom that I like."

Sounding every bit the survivor, yet vague about the origin of his scrapes, Lamb lists several other local youth in his situation. And it is this community which keeps him braving the Yellowknife winter.

Lamb says he gets by through care packages from his not-quite-estranged parents and the generosity of friends who let him stay on the couch.

Sometimes he cleans house for friends in exchange, he says.

He is not on welfare and says he would not want to sponge off the government, despite his reliance on friends.

Lamb abstains from drugs but knows many others fall into that trap.

And when a youth passed out in the Yellowknife Arena on Jan. 31, he was taken to the police station to sober up before being released to social service officials.

Though Yellowknife is still a town with a population under 20,000, it is the major centre for the North and therefore endures big-city problems other towns its size manage to avoid.

Lamb, for example, first hit the streets as a 15-year-old in Inuvik after arguments with his parents.

Fortunately it was summer.