I told Mr. Klein that I had to think about the apartment a little longer because I had a roommate and didn’t want to desert her, which was partially the truth. I think he knew I was lying, but he didn’t say anything. As for me, I was biding my time until I could find a way to convince Moses that he couldn’t say no.
I was sure that Moses would only agree if my moving would benefit him financially. And when he lost the two new girls that were working for him, I knew it was time to bring up the apartment again. He couldn’t afford to turn down free housing for me. Cindy was still with him, but she was sick now; she had broken her pelvis when she jumped out of a hotel window, trying to get away from an enraged trick. Since she was out of commission for a while, I was the only girl Moses had working the track.
Moses finally agreed to the arrangement with Mr. Klein, but I could tell it pained him.
***
For a few days I lived my fantasy of having my own apartment. Then it came to an end. Moses had been storing most of his clothes at his East Side apartment with Cindy, but with Cindy’s broken pelvis, he couldn’t afford the expense of keeping two apartments in Manhattan. He moved Cindy into the smaller West Side place where I had lived, and moved himself in with me.
But Mr. Klein had something else up his sleeve. He banged on the door one day. “Barbara! Let me in!” he bellowed. He had volume for an old man.
Moses knew Mr. Klein would be pissed if he saw him there, so he jumped into the closet and hid under a pile of clothes.
When I let Mr. Klein in, he gave me a quick smile and squeezed my shoulder. Then he went straight to the closet and opened the door.
I never dreamed I would see the mighty Moses look like a scolded child, but that’s exactly what happened when he came out from under the pile of clothes. To me, he had always been larger than life, but now he was reduced to a caricature.
“Leave now,” Mr. Klein said. “This isn’t your place, and I never want to see you again here.”
A muscle in Moses’s cheek twitched, but he didn’t say a word as he grabbed his jacket and headed out. But before he left, he sent me his smoldering green gaze, and I knew I’d pay for this small victory later.
I was right. As soon as Mr. Klein told me good-bye, Moses immediately burst back into the apartment; he must have been watching from outside.
He punched me a couple of times as I held up my hands, trying to save my face from bruises. Before he was done, he threw me down two flights of stairs. I didn’t break any bones, but I cracked my head on the cement floor. I could feel a large lump developing on my forehead. I knew I would have to wear a hat out on the track for weeks.
Moses didn’t move out of the apartment, and I was too afraid to tell Mr. Klein.
***
Even after I moved into the apartment, I would still visit Mr. Klein at his own place down the street. Although I knew I was having sex with someone many times my age, and I knew he was only a trick, I felt like Mr. Klein was one of the only people who had ever been nice to me. Sometimes he would let me spend the night, and we would make breakfast in the morning.
One morning while he was having sex with me, he started to breathe heavily and turned bright red.
I pulled myself back from him and frantically searched his face for a clue to what was happening. “What’s wrong? Robert, what’s wrong?”
His white hair swung over his forehead, and his flushed, craggy face went slack. He just slumped on top of me and stopped moving. His body was heavier than I had ever imagined.
With difficulty, I pushed him off. His wrinkled, naked body lay sprawled across the disheveled bed. The condom was slipping off his now-flaccid penis. I grabbed his red plaid flannel robe that was lying at the foot of the bed and ran out into the quiet hall, screaming for help.
The creaky old elevator seemed to take forever. Finally, the short Latino elevator operator came to see what the commotion was about.
“Oh my God,” he said, his face flushed as he opened the metal folding door of the elevator. I thought he looked young, but he was probably still older than me. “I’ll call an ambulance.” He didn’t have to ask what I was doing there. I had been up the elevator many times before.
As he ran off to call for help, I went back into the eerily quiet apartment to wait for whatever would happen next. The dishes from our breakfast of pancakes and hot chocolate were still sitting on the heavy mahogany dining table. I didn’t want to go back into the bedroom where Mr. Klein was. Moving slowly to the bar, still shocked by what had just happened, I poured some whiskey into my hot chocolate mug. Even though I hated liquor, I gulped it down.
I waited for what seemed like hours, but I knew I had to stay until help came. Mr. Klein had been good to me in his own way. I would never forget the way he’d helped me get off heroin and defended me against Moses. True, he was an old man who had sex with a young girl, but he tried to help me, too. I wanted to do right by him.
The ambulance men came crashing into the open apartment and went straight to the back bedroom, dragging stretchers and heavy metal oxygen tanks with them. They came out of the room fairly quickly and announced that Mr. Klein had passed on.
I didn’t know what to say. One of the medics brought me my clothes from the bedroom, and I got dressed in the dining room and left. No one even questioned me. They seemed to know pretty well what had happened in the back bedroom.
The next morning, I was sitting in the corner restaurant next to the apartment building where Mr. Klein had let me stay, and his adult son came in. We exchanged some looks but not one word. I left the little apartment a few days later and never went back.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months, and I continued to work the streets of New York, bringing Moses thousands of dollars. Now that I was sixteen, the hypnotic force that had tied me to Moses had weakened, and I only continued to work for him out of fear. Even then, there were many times I vowed never to return to him, but I would find myself drawn back like I couldn’t control myself.
I knew in some small part of my mind that he was evil and would only hurt me. At the same time, though, I felt he was the only person in the whole world who accepted me. Regular people looked at me with disdain; I had seen it with my own eyes every time I was dragged into court after being arrested, chained to the other girls. We all could see the mouths turned down in distaste and hear the murmurs: “Look at that! Wow, what are they wearing? Whores! Lock them up and throw away the key!”
Moses was right—the cops hated me, and normal people would never accept me. Just like he said, “Once a ho, always a ho.”
I certainly didn’t feel like a regular teenager. Growing up on the streets of New York had turned me into an adult even while part of me remained a child, frozen in time, unable to do anything for myself. I had learned how to cook a little from Moses, who showed me how to broil a steak because that’s what he liked. But because Moses had constantly moved me to hotels and apartments around the city, I never learned how to do basic things like cleaning a house or doing laundry. I don’t remember celebrating any birthdays or holidays, either, not even Christmas. I had no idea what was happening in the square world; all that had passed me by.
I hadn’t been inside a classroom since the day I ran away from Bon Air. The memory of sitting with other students my age, listening to a teacher, seemed like it belonged to some other lifetime and some other person. I felt stupid and dirty as the things I’d learned in school slipped away, replaced by lessons I learned from the streets and Moses.
I couldn’t imagine ever going back to school, but I missed being able to devour books and transport myself to faraway places by turning the pages. I’d get paperbacks from the corner newsstands or would find them in the big hotel lobbies after I’d finish with clients. I’d even find books in clients’ homes, begging the tricks to let me keep the books, or stealing them if I had to. I’d do whatever I had to do to get what I wanted—pretty much how I got everything in my life
during that time.
Sometimes Moses would catch me reading. I’d be so deeply into the story that I wouldn’t notice him until the book was ripped from my hands and thrown across the room.
“I done told you, bitch! I told you no damn reading! You just love getting beat down, don’t you, bitch?”
He would stand over me, shaking his head, narrowed eyes staring down. I could feel the anger steaming off his skin. “You one dumb bitch, you know that? You a ho! What you think a book’s gonna get you? Answer me, ho! What’s a book gonna get you?”
I would stay silent, confused over whether I should answer him or not.
He would push me with his boot. “What you say, bitch? That’s right, nothin’! You a ho and good for one thing only.”
But I couldn’t even handle that. Soon after Mr. Klein’s death, I had gone back to using again. The craving for the drug had never really left me, and the feeling of pure relief when I took it was hard to forget; as soon as I was in its grips, I no longer felt dirty and worthless. I believed I was controlling a small part of my life, instead of Moses monitoring my every move. It felt wonderful to have that back.
What I didn’t see then was that the heroin was controlling me. What came first? Doing the drugs or working the streets to get money for drugs? It soon began to blur together.
I no longer spent my nights on the track thinking about meeting Moses’s quotas; now I scanned the streets for potential customers so I could get my fix. One night, I was feeling really sick because I had not had my nightly shot of heroin. As I walked out onto the street and turned down the block, a small black car pulled up next to me.
“You going out tonight?” the driver asked me.
I checked him out quickly, sensing that something wasn’t quite right, but the overwhelming need for heroin quickly silenced that inner voice.
“Sure, what are you looking for?” I opened the door and got into his car.
He slowly drove away from the sidewalk, pulled out his wallet, and showed me a badge. I couldn’t believe it. He was an undercover cop, and I had just gotten a case.
A case was what you got when you propositioned a cop. It didn’t matter that he had asked me first; a judge would believe him, not me. Instead of being seen as a victim, I was treated as a criminal.
I had not paid enough attention to my little voice, the one that always seemed to know who was a good customer and who would get me in trouble. That little voice had kept me alive every day while I was out on the streets, but that night I was so focused on getting drugs into my system that I hadn’t listened to it. Now I was going to jail.
Worse, because I had been rounded up by the police wagon so many times during the previous few months, I was sentenced to thirty days at Rikers Island.
I had heard horror stories about Rikers, about girls being stabbed and killed over petty arguments. One thing I had been told over and over was that “working girls” like me, girls who had men like Moses controlling them, were near the bottom of the criminal totem pole and were very often beaten and ridiculed for giving a man all the money they made on the streets. I was sick with fear over what might happen to me at Rikers. I was also getting weaker by the hour from lack of heroin. When we were brought to a separate holding cell to wait for the bus to take us to the prison, I could hardly stand up straight, let alone walk.
We were fed a lunch of bologna sandwiches and Kool-Aid, which I didn’t eat; just the sight and smell made me want to throw up. I thought briefly of the addicts I had spent time with in my earlier days, and how I had felt so superior to those women. I lay huddled on the cement floor and kept my head down until I heard the clanging of heavy metal keys and doors being opened.
When we arrived at Rikers Island, we were stripped, searched, sprayed down with a delousing spray, and taken to a big room and assigned beds. I was up all night running back and forth to the bathroom with diarrhea. The most I could normally last without heroin was several hours, and that amount of time had long passed. I was miserable: cramping stomach, runny nose, and chills racking my body. I was terrified of the seizures that could come with full-blown withdrawal, and all I could think about was the next day, when we would be taken to the prison cellblock. In my weakened state I was sure to be a target, especially if one of the guards shouted out the reason I was there. My plan was to make up some charge, any charge other than prostitution, that would lift my status. I figured maybe petty thievery would do the trick.
Moses had already told me on the telephone that he was not going to get me out. He didn’t want to pay the few hundred dollars’ bond that would get me released before my thirty days were up.
“Pick you up? Is you crazy, ho? I ain’t pickin’ up nobody from nowhere. I can’t believe you even callin’ me.” I could picture his face in a deep frown of dissatisfaction.
I knew it was hopeless, but I desperately needed drugs. “But I thought you would help me. I am so sick, Moses. Please, please. I will do whatever you say. It’s not my fault. Please just come get me.”
“Sick? Sick? Yeah, you sick, ho, in yo’ damn head if you think I am coming to the damn jail to get your good-for-nothing ass out of there. Don’t call me no mo’, hear me?” He slammed down the phone.
So much for his promises of protection.
I was at the end of my rope. I knew I had to get myself out of Rikers Island, and the sooner, the better. The next morning, before the sun came up, I broke down and decided to tell the authorities my real name and age in hopes that they would let me go. Even though this went against everything Moses had taught and beaten into me, I was so sick and scared that I didn’t care anymore.
A female guard approached my cell, looking unhappy that I had disturbed her early-morning cup of coffee.
“What do you want, girl?” The smoky aroma of her coffee made my stomach turn over.
“I…I…I need to talk to someone.” I sniffled and shivered, my arms wrapped around my body. The guards at Rikers were notorious for giving girls like me a hard time, and she knew very well why I was I locked up.
“Talk? About what?” She turned as if to leave, and I realized I had to get through to her somehow.
“Wait, please wait!” I began to cry, tears running down my dirty face. I was only barely holding back the vomit. “I’m only sixteen and a half. I’m not really twenty-one. Please help me. I want to go home, back home to Virginia.” I blurted out the words without really thinking. I just needed to get out.
Her eyes widened. I had gotten her attention, “Sixteen? You a minor? What the hell?”
Things moved pretty quickly after that. I told the authorities my home address in Fairfax and the last phone number I remembered. There was a flurry of activity, and before I knew it I was told they had contacted my family. My parents were on their way to New York to take me home.
At that point I began to have doubts about the whole thing. All I had wanted was a shot of heroin, not to go back to Virginia. I tried to figure out how I would manage to slip away from my parents after they came and rescued me from Rikers.
But when the prison guards took me to the small cement room where my mother and father were supposed to be waiting to take me home, there was Moses instead.
I don’t know how he had found out about my parents coming. I don’t know how he got there before them. But I went with him. I was confused, and very, very sick from lack of drugs.
I wish I could say I thought about my family, about how disappointed my mother and father would be when they traveled all the way from Virginia to pick up their daughter from prison, but I did not. I thought only of one thing: how I was going to get some drugs and stop the shivering and cramps racking my body. I couldn’t think of any other way to make that happen but to return with Moses to the city and the life.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The sun was starting to rise over the roofs of the nearby buildings on the Bowery as we finished our negotiations on the deserted street.
We walked quickly down one or two blocks,
and I followed his slight figure into the small, gray brick building in the middle of the block. The place seemed to almost blend into the places next to it, so bland and nondescript it was; it seemed to say, “I matter to no one, just like the people who live inside.” Up the stairs we went, down the hallway, and into the small cubicle of a room he called home.
The trick lived in one of the transient hotels that the Bowery offered those down on their luck. These hotels housed the population of alcoholic men who’d been spit out by life and dragged through the streets of New York City.
“In here? This is it?” I sniffed the damp, unmoving air. There wasn’t even a ceiling overhead, and I was sure his neighbors would hear us clearly.
“Home sweet home, baby.” He smirked at me. “You do anal, right?”
I stared at the floor and answered in a dull monotone. “Give me the money, and do whatever you want. Just hurry up.”
He slyly slid a ten-dollar bill onto the greasy table beside his cot. “That’s all I got.” His smile was smug; he seemed to know I couldn’t refuse.
Too weak to reply, I gingerly turned over onto my stomach on the dirty gray cot he called a bed.
Ten dollars would buy a small amount of peace, maybe one small hit of heroin.
***
It had only been a few years since I had left Rikers Island to return to the streets, but it seemed like a lifetime had passed. Though I still wasn’t yet twenty-one, I felt ancient and used up. The nights I’d spent on the glittery sidewalks of Midtown Manhattan or inside posh hotels like the Plaza and the Ritz were like a dream, something that had happened eons ago to someone else. I had long forgotten that little girl, the one who was hiding deep inside, waiting for a safe time to reappear. I hadn’t thought of her for years; all memories of my childhood seemed to belong to another person.
I couldn’t stay out on the track without heroin, and I couldn’t get my beloved heroin without working on the track. The drugs numbed my feelings and allowed me to keep moving forward. But I also couldn’t make enough money, hundreds of dollars a night, to meet Moses’s demands and to buy the heroin I needed each day.
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