I’m starting to make peace with some of the ugly things I did. I’m talking to the people I’ve hurt and understanding their side of the story. I’m piecing together almost two decades of heroin addiction and seeing my life for the first time as a sober person. It’s taken a lot of work to understand my addiction and what fueled it, and to let go of the things that weren’t in my control. I’m turning it around—not just for me, but for my kids, too.
Sometimes I walk along the neighborhoods where I used to score, and I look at these new fancy restaurants and businesses that have opened up. There’s a tapas place on the corner where my dealer used to hang out. Now it’s crowded by yuppies on their lunch break. The streets don’t remember—it seems that the world has moved on. Every day, I have to wake up, cover my scars, and pretend that I have, too.
Erika, early twenties
I look like a normal girl. I have a normal face and normal eyes. I speak like a normal person. During my freshman year of college, I became an escort, and everything stopped being normal.
I felt really alone in college. I went from living at home with my family to having nobody around except for a mismatched roommate. I attended classes and tried to meet people there, but I had a lot of trouble reaching out to my peers in a way that didn’t feel awkward or like I was desperate. It felt easier to build relationships online, where anonymity made it seem like I had so much less to lose. So I started reaching out to people, mostly people on dating sites and meet-up groups. That’s where I met someone who gave me cocaine for the first time. He took me to a couple of house parties with shady characters. Eventually he introduced me to Mandy, who was supposed to be my hookup. Mandy was a prostitute, but I didn’t know that when I first met her.
She was a tall and pretty brunette with really intense green eyes. I called her Cruella de Vil once, and she thought it was funny. She had her clothes tailor-made and she was hypersexual. I was drawn to her voice—she had a kind of crackly smoker’s voice, low and sultry—and to the fact that no matter where she was, she never seemed alone. She was always surrounded by people who hung on her every word. She wasn’t “normal.”
Our relationship went into fast-forward mode. I had known her for a couple of days, but she treated me—everyone, really—with indiscriminate familiarity. I was “babe” or “love”—never Erika. I started to doubt that she knew my name. While her attention was on me, Mandy was very good at making me feel like I was the only person who mattered. I started noticing that I didn’t like it when her attention flitted away to someone else. It felt, somehow, like I’d failed to keep her happy. So I started to become addicted to her, to what she offered.
She glamorized her life—she had the hookups for the best clothes, the “in” to the best clubs. When she first took me to her apartment, she had a pile of money on her bed. I was snorting cocaine every day at this point—probably about $100 worth a day, which really isn’t that much—and I occasionally took Molly and ketamine. Of course, I was also on painkillers and drinking pretty heavily. At this point, I was using my student loans to buy the drugs, and I was totally broke. So when I saw all that money… let’s just say I’d kind of already made up my mind. Whatever she was doing, however she was getting that money, I was all in.
I wasn’t really Mandy’s victim. She just took advantage of what was in front of her. She helped me set up my ads on Backpage and Eros. I charged between $100 and $400, depending on what the clients wanted. When I first started out, I forgot to ask for the money up front once and the guy left without paying me. From then on, once the clients came into the apartment, I’d take the money first and take it away to a different room. Then, I did whatever they paid for.
On the weekends, I made up to $2,000.
At first, I got to keep everything I made. I used all of it for drugs; at my very worst, I was using about $200 worth of cocaine a day, but I was on a lot of other things, too. I started selling sex to pay for the drugs, but then I was on the drugs to keep selling sex—to live through the day and do what I had to do. I always wondered when that switch happened.
About a month or two into us working together, Mandy started coming up with reasons why she needed help with money. First, she needed to see the dentist. Then, she needed a fix for the car. Sometimes she was short on rent. I always helped her; I was naively happy to do it. But eventually, the reasons stopped coming—she just started demanding money. I gave her about half of what I made, sometimes more, sometimes everything. She became, essentially, my pimp.
Over the months, I started getting regulars who wanted to see me once or twice a week. If I count my regulars once, I slept with anywhere from three hundred to five hundred different men in a two-year period. I spent whole weekends with people and got paid lump sums to be totally at their disposal. I made hundreds of thousands of dollars. I have none of it.
Some clients were just lonely. Some guys are into different things that they can’t tell their wives and girlfriends about: one wanted me to blow up a bunch of balloons and sit on them. There was something puritan about him. He never asked to have sex with me or to touch me. He never even touched himself. He just put the $120 on the dresser and quietly sat on the bed, watching me in an almost passive way. He wanted me to look right at him, maintaining eye contact as I lowered myself onto a balloon, and then move from one to the other carefully—without bursting any of them—in a room that looked like an explosion of candy buttons.
I didn’t mind it at all—the only annoying bit was that I had to blow up the balloons myself, which took me at least half an hour and always left me light-headed. Also, I hated the way that the static made my hair float for hours after I was done. All in all, though, this was the most bearable appointment of my week. I tried to be sexy about the whole thing, but it was just plain weird, even for me. The more I thought about it, though, I would take weird any day over what my other clients asked me to do.
I used to meet one guy in his home and we had sex surrounded by photos of his wife and kids. I refused to do it on the bed. Another guy was into choking. He got off on the sound of me gasping for air, he told me. And the helpless look in my eyes. He also liked to spit on my face. I wouldn’t have seen him again, but he paid well: $2,000 a week. After he had choked me out one time, I ran out of the room and was crying on the couch. When I eventually went back, he looked up at me and, politely as can be, asked if he could use my bathroom. I kind of numbly nodded—like, You almost killed me, but you’re asking if you can use my bathroom?
While all of this was happening, I was still in school. My grades obviously started suffering. I didn’t go to class, but I’d show up to take the exams. Having that responsibility kept me grounded in reality—like I couldn’t totally drop off the face of the earth because school would notice. But dipping my toe into normalcy also made me feel like even more of an outsider than I had before. The girls in Lululemon, talking about this weekend’s frat party, would never have cut it one day in the life I lived. Eventually, I dropped out. My parents were pretty clueless about everything. I think they sensed that something was wrong with me, but they never really asked, you know? And how do you tell your dad about something like this? I just couldn’t do it.
Weirdly, what kept me going was my relationship with Mandy. She had me thinking that we shared something, that we were in on this together. She was telling me that we’re not like other people—“We can’t relate to normal people,” she said. “We’ve got to stick together, you and I.”
It was comforting to have her, even if I knew that she was using me. She had a hold on me. I’d known from the very beginning that I was expendable to her, but I stuck with her. It was the whole idea of collective suffering, you know? I remember she pulled a gun on me once during a fight—I don’t remember what about—and hit me on the head with it. We were driving to New Jersey during Hurricane Sandy. Imagine! The streets were totally empty. I was bleeding, and she refused to pull over and let me clean the wound. She had this strange detached look to her that
night. But even when it got awful, I was constantly trying to convince myself that it wasn’t so bad. Whenever one of the other girls who hung around us tried to approach me or help me, I’d always dismiss it: “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Eventually, we got caught in a sting. One of the cops who came, I think with the federal human trafficking task force, locked me in my room and raped me while all his buddies were just outside the door. Then, he let me go.
As awful as it was, I saw this as my second chance. I went home one weekend and I told my parents about what had been happening. Their reaction was weirdly calm—they went into crisis-management mode. They helped me get clean. A few months later, I was allowed back to school. My mom and dad come visit me all the time now. I think they’re scared that something will happen again. But I don’t think so. This all feels like a strange fluke. I don’t know how I got there and how I got so deep. I guess I’m just happy it’s over.
Shep, midforties
I make $2,500 every two weeks, after taxes, working somewhere in the ballpark of a sixty-hour week. Of that money, $1,700 goes to my first ex-wife, with whom I have a son and a daughter, for child support. No word yet on how much of my paycheck will go to my soon-to-be second-ex-wife, for more child support. I’m in my midforties, I don’t own my home—not for lack of trying—and my bank balance, after I get paid and before I pay the bills, reads -$1,200.
The rapid descent started, I guess, in 2016. My second wife and I had been married for a few years. She’d been going to school to become a massage therapist, and I supported her financially through it. It took three years, and it was like pushing an elephant up a hill with a feather, but she finally graduated and established a steady clientele. She was making good money, and things started looking up for us.
We talked about it and decided to start trying to have a baby. Of course, a heartbeat later, she was pregnant. The house I had bought—a $272,000 investment on which I still owe $222,000 after almost ten years of payments (high interest, zero money down, forty-year mortgage)—was starting to fall apart. There were 252 broken tiles on the main floor. There was no way I would bring this little guy into a world with crawling hazards.
I slowly started repairing the main floor, by myself, after work. I couldn’t do it while my wife was awake and about, because the fumes from the chemicals could hurt her and the baby. So I fixed most of it between the hours of 10:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m., during which she slept in our bedroom. At 6:00 a.m., I’d wake up to go to work. With a schedule like that, naturally we didn’t get to see very much of each other, and I could tell that it was putting her on edge. She seemed very sensitive and distant, but I chalked it up to the stress of the pregnancy and did my own brand of nesting: I tried to get the house pristine, ready and safe for the baby. But I told my wife, “No matter what’s happening, you can always come talk to me; I’m always here for you.”
I got home from work one day—June 3, a Tuesday. I found her in the bedroom, crying, and she admitted to cheating on me.
And then she said, “But that’s not the worst of it. I’ve been reported at work, and I’m going to be fired, lose my license, and have to pay a fortune in fines.”
I asked her how many times she slept with him, and she said once. To confirm, I looked through her billing—she was a contractor and had to keep her own records—and she’d been seeing this guy an average of thirteen times a month for the last nine months. His wife had found text messages that he’d erased on his phone and called the local board that regulates massage therapists to report my wife. My wife was a little smarter about it—she came clean and told me she had downloaded some sort of application that hides sexy photos and texts. Not that I would ever have looked through her phone. I’m not that kind of guy.
At this point, I didn’t even know if the baby was mine. She’d been having unprotected sex with him. I took a two-month stress leave from work to think about things, and I decided, ultimately, that I couldn’t stay with her.
When I got back to work, an oversight on my boss’s end cost me what’s called a workplace safety violation. I’m a union worker, and I love my job. I remember sitting there with my union rep, feeling like I was about to lose my mind because everything was falling apart and I could potentially lose my job. Until they sorted everything out, which ultimately took six months, I had to show up at work every day and not work. Let me tell you, there’s nothing worse than telling a depressed man to just sit with his thoughts for six months.
In the meantime, the board held a hearing on the complaint against my wife, and they told her she would be facing $90,000 in fines and a permanent suspension of her license. I told her to tell them that she was seeking counseling, that she was repentant—to use all the buzzwords to get them to reduce the fines, at least. Ultimately, they suspended her license for five years—after which, to regain the right to practice, she would have to go back to school for another three years—and she was fined $3,500.
There was no way I was going to kick the (possible) mother of my child out on the street, and neither of us could afford to rent, so we ended up living together, as roommates, while the divorce was getting processed. We had no savings: before everything fell apart, we used the little money that we had saved to take a real estate course. We got into the business of buying and selling storage lockers. I had equity on the house, so I contacted a hard-money lender to get that initial seed money. We were so close to turning a profit, until she lost her job. And then the lender refused to finance me anymore and we lost the business.
She didn’t work again, obviously, so I paid for everything. I did notice that $600 was showing up in our bank account every month, and I asked her where it came from—turns out, she’d taken out a loan from her father. The money eventually stopped. The poor guy went broke, too. But she and I were very good roommates. I’m a very forgiving and generous person, which I think gave her the wrong impression about where we stood with each other. Since things seemed amicable and we still lived together, she didn’t want to believe that it was over. I told her, “I forgive you for cheating on me. But lying to me about the extent of the cheating, making me question the paternity of the baby—that, I feel terrible about. We can’t come back from that.”
To add to our already stressful living situation, my oldest son from my first marriage has moved in, too. My ex-wife refuses to sign the separation agreement paper stating that he’s living with me because she wants to keep getting the child-support payments. She and I were high school sweethearts—we met when she was a freshman and I was a sophomore. She’s not a very nice person, but unfortunately I found that out too late. She has no empathy for other people at all. My son called me crying one night because she had threatened to punch him. The poor kid was sleeping with a pellet gun to protect himself. I couldn’t have that, so I moved him in with me.
I still have about $80,000 in debt from legal fees from my first divorce, so I have to represent myself in all legal matters, from the most recent divorce to any prior custody and child-support issues, because I can’t afford a lawyer. The bank is making a killing off overdraft fees and interest payments on my accounts. On top of that, the court is garnishing my wages for child support; thankfully, I was able to amend the child support order to the proper amount with arrears, but they sent me to collections six months later, claiming that I hadn’t been paying enough. It’s a mess. My son is still in high school, but he’s a good kid; he got a job and he pitches in whatever he can. The only light at the end of the tunnel is that the house value has appreciated in the last few years—it basically doubled in value—and we’re putting it on the market in May. My second ex and I should each walk out with a bit of money—enough to make a fresh start or, in my case, just barely get myself out of debt. And if my day job doesn’t work out, I could always try my hand at lawyering. I’m basically an expert in family law.
I have a friend who works as a crisis counselor and sometimes he uses me as an example of the guy who always end
s up in the eye of the hurricane, in the perfect storm. He tells people who are in trouble: “It can always be worse. Things will turn around.”
I’ve never had it easy—everything I’ve ever done has been a challenge. I was raised not to complain, though, and I learned from my folks that life can get really hard, but as long as you band together and look at the glass as half full, things always work out.
My friend was right—things did turn around. My son was born in September, and it wasn’t until February that we got the results of the cheek swab for the paternity test. It confirmed that the baby is mine. He came out looking like an old man, a wise soul, so I call him “little geezer.” He’s such a happy baby, and looking at him at any given moment helps me realize how lucky I am. So there’s reason to celebrate after all. I guess the lesson here is, no matter what happens, try to laugh about it, and try to look on the bright side. Oh, and don’t get divorced.
LOSS
Henry, seventies
In recovery, they tell you that alcoholism is chronic, progressive, and fatal. But it wasn’t until she died that this lesson really resonated. Up until the very end, I thought I could cure her. I thought I could save her.
I met my wife at an interoffice softball game on a weekend afternoon. She wasn’t a very good player, and I teased her about that a lot. We quickly became inseparable. She was a formidable woman with a sharp tongue and a quick wit. We dated for a couple of years and then got married.
I had reservations about her drinking from the very beginning, but I loved her and ignored the problems. She tried to hide it from me, and I was a willing accomplice. I didn’t want to see it. But in retrospect, I knew that she was an alcoholic—I just knew it in my gut. Later, when we were married and it became painfully obvious that she was ill, it became the two of us against the world, putting on a show, pretending everything was fine. But I needed the good in her, so I took the bad with it, too, because I thought I could fix her.
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