The Transformation With His Troubled Youth Behind Him, Joe Demille Is Building a New Life Dedicated to Helping Others
Author: Don Aucoin, Globe Staff
Publication: The Boston Globe
Date: October 25, 2003
Like a basketball team mapping out a crucial play, nine teenagers are gathered in a huddle inside a dingy gymnasium at the Roslindale Community Center, listening intently to the young man talking calmly but authoritatively from the middle of the circle.
"We're going to try to get all the way up to the top," Joe DeMille says. "I don't know how we're going to do it, but we are going to do it."
DeMille is embarked on something of a similar mission for himself. He hit bottom during his teen years, when he bounced from his troubled home to the streets to courtrooms to state-run detention centers to foster homes. He used and sold drugs. He had a hair-trigger temper and would fight for pride, for money, or just because he didn't like the way someone was looking at him. "I was just a little tornado," he admits.
Now, at age 20, he is cutting a different kind of swath as a rising star at City Year, an agency that mobilizes young people into public service. Today,
DeMille will supervise 45 volunteers as they landscape and clean up three schools in Roxbury as part of City Year's annual Serve-a- Thon, which will involve 4,000 workers across the city. On a recent weekday morning, he tuned up for today's task by taking charge of more than 100 volunteers who painted the Roslindale gym from ceiling to floor, transforming it from an eyesore into a showpiece in the space of a few vigorous hours.
As rap music blared from a portable radio at midcourt, DeMille moved quickly around the gym on sneakered feet, his chinos spattered with paint, his T-shirt reading "Give - Build - Believe." It was unglamorous work - wiping down walls, laying down dropcloths - but he seemed to savor it. He stood on a chair to unscrew a sign from a wall. He applied a coat of light blue paint with a roller,
intently scanning the wall for bare spots. He dangled precariously from a second-floor perch to paint hard-to-reach places. He also tried to instill a sense of camaraderie and motivate the troops. "One, two, three, team!" he exhorted them as they broke from one huddle. "That's our wall," he said to his team, pointing at it as if it were a prize they had won. "Who wants to roll, and who wants to use paint brushes?" To a pair of youths immersed in the thankless task of wiping grime from behind radiators, he gave a thumbs up.
"He's a mover," remarked William Johnson, 22, a City Year volunteer from Roxbury. "He likes doing, not talking. But when he does talk, it makes sense." Another youth, who declined to give his name, grinned at the mention of DeMille's name. "He's my dog," he said. "He's cool. He keeps it real. And he's a boxer, so ain't nobody stops him." Then the youth cited the deeper reason DeMille has won so much respect so fast in the City Year cadre. "He just changed his life," he said.
Yes, but not without a lot of help, and not without a lot of bumps along the way. DeMille grew up in Beverly and South Boston, and home was not a happy place. His relationship with his mother and stepfather was an acrimonious one (his parents, who did not marry, split up when he was 6 months old). His unhappiness on the home front spilled out in school; at age 11, he struck a classmate in the face with a thick textbook. For the first but not the last time, he faced assault and battery charges. By 12, he had been placed in the custody of the state Department of Youth Services. He would remain in DYS custody until he was 18; he would also remain, more or less, in constant trouble until then.
"All my friends were like, `He's been to jail. He's so cool.' So from then on it was all about me proving myself," he says. "So I was constantly fighting, doing drugs, selling drugs. Pretty much all I attracted was bad people. . . . Every town I lived in, all the cops knew me, all the courts knew me."
As far as DeMille is concerned, his turnaround began when, at age 13, he met the man he calls "Uncle James," the "only person I could cry in front of": James Christian, then a youth worker at a short- term facility for delinquents in Somerville called Mentor. Christian would let DeMille pour out his feelings, but he also drew a firm line when it came to accountability, insisting the hotheaded youth think hard about his actions and reactions.
DeMille was in his share of treatment programs to deal with his anger, but whenever he was released and sent back home, he fell into the same patterns. Time and time again, he had to return to the Somerville facility. But DeMille and other staffers refused to give up on him.
"Joe was not an angel here, but you know what? We don't deal with angels," says Christian, who is now the program director at the facility, renamed the Somerville Transitional Shelter and run by a nonprofit organization called Community Resources for Justice. "We deal with kids who have made honest mistakes." Behind Christian's tough-love approach, DeMille heard a clear, overriding message: "He's always told me that no matter what anyone says, I'm a special person, that I'm destined for greatness, that he can see it in my eyes, and that one day a lot of people will know."
That sentiment seemed to be widely shared even when DeMille was at his most troubled. "We always had a special place for Joe in our hearts," says John Bates, director of the Lynn DYS office, who along with caseworker Brian Seaman oversaw DeMille's journey through the system. If another youth was in crisis at the Somerville shelter, Christian says, DeMille immediately brought it to the attention of staffers. That empathetic quality was evident even at the Roslindale Community Center. When DeMille spied a young woman leaning despondently on her paint roller, he gave her a shoulder squeeze and a solicitous "You all right?"
For all his roughneck past, DeMille seems like a born social worker - and in fact that's what he wants to be. He worked various jobs over the last couple of years, including a stint on a shrimp boat in Georgia. At the moment, he's living in Jamaica Plain with several roommates and running a landscaping company while devoting himself to his City Year duties, but he plans to enroll in college next fall and to eventually work at the Somerville shelter that was so pivotal to his turnaround. He wants to be the force in other kids' lives that Christian was in his. "I want to talk to these kids one on one," he says. "I want to say, `Work hard, and don't give up.' "
Christian is eager to hire him. Not every kid turns out like Joe DeMille; Christian has taken it hard when ex-clients have ended up murdered or in prison. He thinks DeMille's tale contains a lesson for youths who might be headed down that path. "I wish we had more of these kids to come in, because they bring a perspective that's unique," he says. John Larivee, the head of Community Resources for Justice, says stories like DeMille's also provide an "uplift" to those who work in the often-discouraging world of teenage delinquency. "It reminds all of us who do this day in and day out why we do this," says Larivee.
It's not all smooth sailing for DeMille, though. He got into a fight on a construction site three months ago - the other guy started it, he says - that ended with DeMille knocked unconscious by a lead pipe across the face. He is leery of taking City Year assignments in his former neighborhood of South Boston because, he says, "It's so easy to be brought down, to fall back into it."
Yet he does not have the bearing of someone who is going to fall. Overcoming initial qualms, DeMille has thrown himself into one of City Year's domestic-violence prevention teams. He and his father, Mark Moreau of Beverly, have grown closer in recent years. "I'm telling you, I'm proud of him," Moreau said yesterday.
In Roslindale, as DeMille directed the small army of paintbrush- wielding teenagers and 20-somethings, City Year service director Emily Cherniack called him "a natural leader" - and made clear she was talking about more than supervising a painting project.
"He can get people to change their path in life," said Cherniack. "I'm really excited to see the kind of man he's going to be."