Girls Like Us

by Rachel Lloyd

  It’s hard to tell how much time elapses, but I come to while it’s still dark. I wait for a heavenly light, a tunnel, something, but nothing appears. For a few moments, I’m perplexed. Am I in heaven or hell? I wonder if there really is a purgatory, or perhaps everyone’s wrong and in the end there’s just a nothingness. As I still try to make sense of the afterlife, it slowly dawns on me as I regain consciousness that I’m lying in about three inches of water and that not only am I not in heaven, hell, or any combination of the two, but I’m still quite alive. I cannot fuckin believe it. My plan failed. I failed. I’m about to cry when suddenly the absurdity of the situation hits me. I’m lying flat on my back on the second-floor roof in a puddle at 4 a.m. in the pitch-dark, and in the middle of a rainstorm. I feel ridiculous and I can’t help but laugh, albeit a little hysterically as it has been a rough night. As I lie there, soaking wet, rain mingling with tears of both sadness and now full-out laughter, it occurs to me that despite all my best efforts to end my life, I’m still here. No matter how many near-death experiences I’ve had in the last few years, I’m still here. Maybe there is someone somewhere protecting me, someone who sees more of a future for me than I see for myself. I think God has saved my life. Suddenly I’m grateful. As I feel the rain on my face, I realize I don’t want to die anymore. Finally, sore and knowing I’ll be bruised all over tomorrow, I get up. The only way off the roof is to knock on my downstairs neighbor’s bedroom window and climb through into his apartment and back up the stairs to mine. I hadn’t taken the key with me, not thinking I’d need it, but I remember that there’s still a spare key under the doormat. I’m way past the stage of feeling mortified, so I knock on my neighbor’s window until he wakes up. He’s a little startled to see my face peering in, but he lets me climb in without any questions. I try to mumble something about needing to get something off the roof, but trail off halfway through hearing how silly I sound. I figure while I’m there I might as well ask for a cigarette. Staring at me standing there soaking wet in the middle of his bedroom, he gives me four. It’s not until I get upstairs to my own apartment that I realize that the bathrobe cord is still tied tightly around my neck.

  That night I have an epiphany that will change my whole life. At the time I don’t realize it. At the time, I’ve probably never used the word epiphany in a sentence. But the thought that maybe I have a greater purpose leads me to a small nondenominational American church the following Sunday, and that sets me on a path that will result in my walking away from the life two months later and never going back. This inexplicable belief in God’s love for me at a critical moment sustains me over the next few months, and ultimately over the next decade. It doesn’t make leaving easy, but it does make me leave. It is perhaps an atypical exit, although as I’ve come to learn from many girls that while recruitment generally follows the same script, leaving the life looks very different for each individual girl. There is, however, to borrow language from the substance-abuse community, always a sense of hitting bottom. A feeling of being sick and tired of being sick and tired. For some girls, it’s the indignity of a brutal beating that forces them to finally escape. For others it may be a change in the status quo—a new girl comes into the house, a wife-in-law gets pregnant—that shifts the dynamic and helps them to see that all their labor is in vain. Jail may interrupt the cycle, with a pimp’s arrest taking him out of the picture and giving her a chance to think clearly. Even sitting in jail waiting for him to bail her out and realizing that despite all the money that she’s made him, his refusing to come and put a mere five hundred bucks down to get her out of Rikers might be the final straw. Some girls may even view an unexpected pregnancy as a sign, an opportunity to start afresh with a new life, a chance to give their baby something they never had.

  Regardless of the circumstances, what makes the most difference in whether a girl leaves or not when that door opens up is if she believes that she has options, resources, somewhere to go, and the support she’ll need once she’s out. Without that glimmer of hope, whether it comes in the form of family, a program like GEMS, or a church community like the one that helped me, it’s unlikely that she’ll leave. And then the door will close just as quickly as it opened, leaving her feeling trapped once more. and this time even more convinced that this is the life that she’s destined to lead. Hope and the belief in other options is why I founded GEMS and what we’ve tried hard over the years to impart to every girl who’s walked through the door. “Here’s my number, you can call anytime” is the mantra. Sometimes they don’t call for months; sometimes they never call; sometimes they call frequently when they are almost but not quite ready to leave. But we take each call seriously, even from the girls who return to the life over and over again. You never know when someone’s “hit bottom,” but you just hope she has that critical phone number on hand when she does.

  “Yo, Raych, wake up, wake up. Raych.”

  My boyfriend, Jason, is shaking me. “What?” I’m aggravated; we’d been out late, and I’d just fallen asleep.

  He points to the phone in his hand. “I think it’s an emergency.”

  The voice on the phone is crying and frantic. “Yo, Rachel, I cannot take this no more, I’m done, yo. Please come get me. Please. I gotta go, Rachel, I gotta go.”

  “It’s OK. Try to calm down a little, OK.” The girl is speaking a mile a minute and it takes me a minute to figure out who it is. So many girls have my home number and any one of them could be frantic in the wee hours of the morning. I check the caller ID but it’s a 718 number. She’s probably calling from a pay phone. I take a guess. “Patricia?”

  “Yeah, hurry. Please. I can’t go home. I can’t go back again ever. I wanna leave. Please. He’s gonna kill me. Rachel?”

  “I’m here; it’s gonna be OK. Try to breathe. Are you safe right now? Where are you? Where is he?” I’m trying to piece the situation together in my groggy mind.

  “I’m on Ditmars and Thirty-first, but he’s not here.”

  “OK, you know that gas station on Astoria? I think it’s a Shell.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Go inside there and wait for me. I’ll be about twenty minutes, all right? Just hang on.”

  “Just hurry, please.” She’s pleading.

  “I’m hurrying, hon. I’ll be there.” I’m already throwing on my sweats and hunting for a left sneaker. As usual, my bedroom has clothes strewn everywhere so the sneaker takes a while to locate.

  “She OK?” Jason already knows the drill. We’ve been together long enough for him to have witnessed the crisis calls, the late night runs, the never-ending needs of a hundred teenage girls. While he isn’t a fan of girls calling me to see what I’m watching on TV, and in fairness, neither am I, he gets the emergency part. He follows me to the bathroom as I splash water on my face.

  “You want me to drive you?”

  “Nah, I got it.” I’m still trying to make my eyes open properly.

  “You got your keys? Driver’s license? Money?” I’m notorious for leaving the house without any combination of all three.

  “Yep, yep, yep.”

  “OK, be safe. Drive carefully. Call me when you get down there.”

  “I don’t know what time I’ll be. . . .”

  “Yeah, I know. Just call me.”

  He walks me to the door, kisses me on the forehead, and goes into the living room to finish playing his Madden NFL game. Just another GEMS crisis night.

  As I drive to the Triborough Bridge to cross into Queens, the rain that has been coming down lightly all evening suddenly worsens, and within minutes I’m driving in a downpour, wipers turned up to the max, fog lights on, gripping the wheel tightly with both hands. I think about that day I first met Patricia about six months earlier. She was court-ordered to come to the program after several arrests for prostitution. She was shy, initially, and reluctant to commit to the program, but a choice between GEMS and Rikers wasn’t a hard one to make. I liked her immediately and learned quickly that her shyness
masked an extremely talkative and lively personality. After a few sessions, she began to connect to the staff and the other girls, and before long everybody had developed a soft spot for her. Patricia completed her five sessions but stayed in touch, calling me and her counselor and still coming by GEMS sporadically to check in. Lately she had been vacillating between a real desire to leave and an ingrained loyalty/love/fear of her pimp, Lucky, whom she’d been with for several years. She believed that Lucky had murdered another girl who had tried to escape. Lucky had recently been locked up on some random charges, and we’d all hoped and prayed that this would present the opportunity Patricia needed to make the decision to leave. Instead, his cousin took over the family pimping business, and out of guilt and fear, Patricia gave him most of her money every night and put the rest in Lucky’s commissary. Despite my fervent prayers, Lucky managed to get out on bail and picked up right where he’d left off. Patricia had said that her pimp had been increasingly violent since he came home, and her calls and visits noticeably dropped off. This man had his hooks into her mind and soul, and I wondered what had precipitated tonight’s decision.

  I can see Patricia as I pull up to the gas station. She’s shaking, and while I think initially it’s because she’s gotten soaking wet waiting for me, as I turn the heat up and she dries off, I realize that the rain has nothing to do with her tremors. Patricia, who starts talking as soon as she’s in the car, is close to hysterical, chattering about a gun and his threats tonight to beat her down when she returns home. She’s an odd mixture of emotionally exhausted and exhilarated. She rants, her Puerto Rican heritage colorfully expressed by a variety of English and Spanish expletives, some of which I know, others of which I can guess the meaning of. “I hate him, I fuckin hate him, can you believe this bullshit? After everything I’ve done for him? Maricon! He’s got the fuckin balls to tell me he’s gonna beat my ass? I should beat his ass! He’s a piece of shit. He’s a lowlife. He ain’t shit. He thinks all those other girls are gonna be there for me if he gets locked up again? Hell no. I been there for him and he’s gonna kick me like a dog last night? Just straight kicking me for no reason. Hijodeputa. I swear to God, I can’t take it no more. I’m out here risking my life every night and you just wanna beat on me every time I come home? That don’t make no sense. I don’t know why. . . .”

  Her rapid-fire monologue is halted by sudden sobs. I let her cry it out for a little while, but she’s too angry to cry for long. She starts venting again, all the years of suppressed feelings about her abuse pouring out. But she’s heady with the drama, almost euphoric after making her decision. I mostly listen, stopping once at Kennedy’s for chicken wings and French fries as she hasn’t eaten all day.

  It doesn’t take us long to get to the GEMS apartment where she’ll be staying. She’s calmed down now, worn herself out with her tears and yelling. Total exhaustion sets in and I know she’ll probably sleep half the day. In the beginning, most of the girls are seriously sleep-deprived after all the long nights when they’ve been forced to stay outside on the track, sometimes for days at a time until they have brought in the necessary quota. I get her a care package with toiletries, pajamas, and some sweats, and talk for a while about the rules at the apartment—the phone cannot be used to call him; the address has to stay confidential; safety first. I explain to her, as I explain to all girls who are leaving their pimps, that she may want to call him and may even miss him and that this is a normal part of the process. Tonight she doubts what I’m saying; this will be a conversation that we’ll need to have again and again. Patricia is adamant that it’s over, that she doesn’t ever want to hear his voice again, that she’d rather set herself on fire than go back. I know that she believes this now. There’s a determination in her voice that makes me believe that this is real. I have to believe this is real every single time, with every single girl; otherwise I couldn’t do this work. Yet life is rarely that simple, and traumatic relationships that are characterized by brainwashing and submission rarely end this cleanly. I believe that like me, she’s had an epiphany in the wee hours of a miserable, rainy night. I also know that knowing you don’t want something anymore is very different from actually being done, free and clear. I very much doubt that she will never speak to him again, but I hope and pray that by the time she does, she’ll have had enough time away to think a little more clearly, to experience what life could be without constant violence and oppression, to have enjoyed her emancipation enough that she ultimately makes the decision to truly stay free. It’s our job to provide an alternative, a safe environment where she will be surrounded by people who love and value her, as opposed to the life of pain and virtual captivity that she’s gotten used to. If we’re lucky, we’ll have a few weeks with Patricia as the anger sustains her and keeps her away from him and from the life. I’m hoping it will be enough time. I know, but Patricia doesn’t yet, that it’s when the anger subsides that the hard part begins.

  Leaving is difficult. Yet there’s often an initial euphoria normally fueled by anger, relief, a desire to “show him,” and a new heady sense of freedom after having been a slave to someone else’s every whim. Girls are relieved to finally be able to get some rest. They tend to eat everything in sight, are excited to be able to hang out like “normal” young women. They start to believe that things can get better and begin to excitedly make plans for the future, going to school, getting a job, finding a “square” boyfriend. Unfortunately, most girls expect these things to have happened by day four.

  Slowly the day-to-dayness of mundane reality begins to sink in. Your new life isn’t quite what you thought it would be when you ran away at 3 a.m. one night. Your family doesn’t accept you back with open arms. In fact, your family’s still crazy and you remember why you ran away from them in the first place. It turns out that since you haven’t been to school since the sixth grade, you’ve got a lot of work to do until you’re ready to take your GED. Then it turns out that you can’t even register for school until you get your ID, which takes forever because your mother was from Jamaica or Kansas or Georgia and your birth certificate needs to be mailed from another country or state. Living in a group home with a bunch of other teenage girls is frustrating, and someone keeps stealing your shirts. Even though you get to keep your money now, it’s hard to make ends meet. Jobs are hard to find, impossible if you’re fifteen, close to impossible if you don’t have a GED. Boys are unreliable, inconsistent, only after one thing. Not only are you frustrated with your lack of progress, but you feel bored and depressed. It’s the same shit every day: get up, go to program/school/look for a job, go to groups, come home, eat, go to bed. It feels like something is missing. You begin to believe it must be him, the life, or a combination of the two. Suddenly the initial euphoria is gone and you just feel sad and numb all the time. You don’t remember feeling like this when you were with him. You have nightmares and sometimes flashbacks. You wonder if you’re going crazy and if you’ll ever know what normal feels like.

  THANKSGIVING 1994, GERMANY

  I wake up screaming, tears streaming down my face, clutching my nose, trying to wipe blood away. But there’s nothing there. It takes a few seconds for me to realize that there is no broken nose this time, no bleeding to stem. I try to breathe, to calm down, still shaking from the nightmare that felt so real. It’s been like this for weeks. JP is gone, and I’ve been out of the life for almost a month, yet it’s hard to shake these moments that come by night and sometimes by day. The daytime ones are easier; I do my best to control them. But I feel powerless over the nightmares. No matter what I read, how much I pray before I go to bed, they come unbidden and unwelcome. In these dreams I experience terrifying moments of total paralysis where it feels like I’m awake but I can’t move, I can’t scream, I can’t breathe, and there is often the sense of an evil presence in the room, or sometimes on top of me, crushing my chest. I know I’m about to be killed at any moment and I am helpless to resist. I wake from these encounters in a cold sweat, shaking, unab
le to go back to sleep.

  While I was with JP, I sometimes would dream about a situation that we had just experienced, or more accurately that he had just put me through, and in my dream I would manipulate the ending so that it all came out the way I wanted it to. He would stop right before hitting me and apologize; the night would end with us going to bed calmly, not with me crying alone under the covers. These happy-ending dreams are now occurring constantly along with the violent nightmares, leaving me totally stressed and confused about my feelings the next day.

  When I first get out, I become a nanny for a single mother in the military. Miraculously, she agrees to hire me, although I’ve neglected to tell her much about my past—only that I’d been in a bad relationship. I spend my days alone doing my best to take care of a thirteen-month-old child, despite the fact that I’m desperate for someone to take care of me. It’s a job that barely pays in a month what I could make in a few hours at the club, but at least room and board are provided. Taking care of a small child is draining enough, but with all the nightmares, I’m getting a fractured night of sleep at best. I’m now getting up at the same time as I used to come home, and the sudden change to my body clock is jarring.

  I’m tired most days and on edge. I have daily nosebleeds and regular headaches, both of which the doctors had warned me would happen due to the damage done to my nose and head and the facial fractures caused by the constant punching. My body aches all the time. I cry without warning. In church I cry from the moment I walk in, until the moment I leave. I feel as if I’m in a fog most of the time. I’m easily startled and quick to react to anyone invading my personal space. Another nanny in the building is joking around one day and goes to put her hands on my neck. Without thinking, I punch her in the mouth.