Lost Girls

by Robert Kolker

  Amanda visited for the first time in the summer of 2007. She saw where Melissa was living. The basement apartment in the Bronx wasn’t exactly legal; there was no real division between Melissa’s room and the upstairs level, where a quiet family lived. Amanda couldn’t believe the number of Melissa’s cats, too many to keep them straight. Melissa, it appeared, had grown a formidable soft spot for strays.

  Amanda also met Johnny, though she quickly learned that no one called him that. Everyone called him Blaze.

  Kritzia thought Melissa was lucky, in a way, to have fallen in with Blaze, because even if he wasn’t enough of a fighter to protect her, everyone knew Blaze was close to Mel, Kritzia’s pimp, and no one would ever make Mel angry. Kritzia and Melissa soon learned they could mess with practically anyone and not worry about reprisals. When rival girls went after them, their men would stop them, telling them there was nothing to be done. Thanks to Mel, they were bulletproof.

  Mel and Blaze called each other brothers and operated like business partners. Mel was the muscle, solidly built, with a reputation throughout Times Square as not just a pimp but a drug dealer. After going through a few bad pimps, Kritzia had chosen Mel. She was as infatuated with Mel as any girl could be with a pimp, but it wasn’t quite like that with Melissa and Blaze. Blaze was flashier and funnier, as well as less menacing. His whole persona—the flyboy, the pretty boy, the player—made him come off as a phony, trying too hard. There were rules for pimps, too, and Blaze ignored a lot of them. Pimps can’t have sex for pleasure. The only girls you can sleep with are the girls who are paying you. But Blaze would go to a club and pick up girls—square girls, not working girls. Blaze might have thought he could do that because he never considered himself a real pimp—he was, he thought, above that kind of work.

  Blaze and Mel shared a house on Watson Avenue in the Bronx. Kritzia and Mel had the master bedroom. Blaze had a smaller bedroom that he kept to himself. Melissa begged Blaze to let her live there, too, but he said they didn’t have space. The real reason was clear, at least to Kritzia: Another girl, Em, was Blaze’s bottom bitch—the girl with the most seniority. At times the situation got the better of Melissa. She’d lose her temper and scream at Blaze: “I’m tired of you using me up to take care of your wife.” Em knew how to protect her position. She would sob and wail and accuse Blaze of not loving her. The situation never changed.

  When talking with Melissa about the life, Kritzia often overflowed with conflicting emotions—sentimentality and self-pity, remorse and fury, repulsion and attraction. “Let me tell you, Manhattan is disgusting,” she would say. “All these frickin’ rich people with all this money who just want to blow it on coke and hookers. And then a whole bunch of homeless people, sleeping on all the corners, cold, hungry, smelling like urine. And then a whole bunch of prostitutes, trying to make cash. And then we all get to know each other.” Melissa didn’t see it like that at first. Everything about her had a conspiratorial quality: the smirks, the insolence, and the teasing, punctuated by her saying, “Right?” and laughing. When Melissa came to hang out at the house on Watson Avenue, she and Kritzia would spend the whole time in a bedroom, sealed away from Em and everyone else.

  With Mel’s muscle backing up their every move, Melissa and Kritzia were emboldened. All the other girls were too scared to speak up and do whatever it was they wanted to do. Kritzia and Melissa, they just did it. They would walk on a sidewalk occupied by pimps. When they saw the other pimps’ girls with a trick, they would go up to him and try to steal the trick. “Honey, don’t do black, do white,” Melissa would coo. “You know it’s the only way to go.” They got tattoos together. Melissa’s said Blaze, Kritzia’s said Mel. Melissa had wanted Kritzia to choose the same spot she did, on her back, but Kritzia wanted hers on the back of her neck, where nobody would see it but Mel.

  They worked together a lot. Guys liked the duo. Once a guy told Kritzia, “You’re pretty, but I need something more.” When he saw Melissa, he was like, “Oh, you two are perfect. Skinny and titties, titties and skinny! Ooh!” Kritzia shook her head at how stupid that sounded. For one john, they took a bath at the Marriott Residence Inn, earning four hundred dollars each. They met a guy who wanted human waste on him. Kritzia couldn’t do it, but Melissa did. She wanted the extra money. He wasn’t even masturbating while it happened. He just lay in the tub in his room at the Intercontinental Hotel.

  They saw how worn out some of the other girls were—their eyes sunken, their faces saggy. “Wrinkled!” they would shriek. “How can you be wrinkled at twenty?” To ensure their own future viability, Melissa and Kritzia came up with a few methods of screening johns for safety. A guy with a briefcase probably just came from work, had a life, and was less likely to be trouble. A guy staying somewhere nice—at the Waldorf, the Sheraton, the Parker Meridien, the Westin, the W—wasn’t likely to be in the mood for any drama, only a good time. And older men were always preferable to the young ones. Kritzia made that rule after one too many young guys tried to attack her, alone in a room. In hindsight, she realized how suspicious she should have been: Why would a young guy pay when he could get his mack on for free? A guy like that had to be messed up.

  The guys who annoyed them the most were the young white guys. They were stingy—they wanted to pay fifty for everything—and then they wanted to boast about it before, during, and after: “I don’t have to do this, I’m doing it to help you out.” Melissa and Kritzia would have to keep from scratching out their eyes. You want to help me out, give me a little money and get lost! That’s how you help me out.

  On the other end of the spectrum were the johns who bought them dinner, took them to the movies. One guy took Kritzia shopping for a dress and shoes and asked her to model them for him. They went back to his place on Eighty-sixth Street, and he took pictures and gave her three hundred dollars and said goodbye. Another guy played dominoes with her. Still another filled her iPod with music—Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, whatever she wanted. Another guy, he just wanted company. When he fell asleep, she left.

  Countless johns wanted to do coke, which was always welcome. Most of the time, after a line or two, their little friend wouldn’t cooperate, so they’d be there for hours, racking up a sizable bill while waiting to get hard. Kritzia would wonder about these men—with too much time and too much money, men who just killed time with a hooker. Guys like that would want the girls to do coke, too. They knew ways to fake it—instead of sniffing it with the rolled-up bill, they’d lean down to block the john’s view and pretend, sniffing nothing and sweeping the coke on the floor in one swift motion. The art of the swindle extended to sex. Sometimes a guy was too drunk or high to notice that he was having sex with the girl’s hand. If someone complained, all she would have to say was “No, honey, we have to hold the condom in place.”

  At times it seemed almost like a game—how quickly they could turn around a call, how much money they could take. They ran scams together, running to the bank to pull money off of debit cards lifted from their johns. Some guys would foolishly send them to an ATM to get the cash to pay them, naively giving them cards and PINs. Why should they take out only a hundred dollars? They took everything the guy had and threw the card in the garbage.

  They got busted together. Once, they were at the Hilton and stole a hundred dollars from a guy who ran after them in his underpants even though it was almost snowing outside, the little crystals that drift down right before it snows for real. The guy caught Kritzia, but Melissa kept running. Then Kritzia broke free, caught up to Melissa, and grabbed her by the hair as payback for having left her behind. Melissa fell and lost one of her heels, then started running off balance. That was when the police grabbed them both, and the john, too.

  While Kritzia spent a fair amount of time in jail, Melissa seemed to get bothered by the police less. She had just one recorded arrest, on September 12, 2008, at Sixth Avenue and Forty-sixth Street. The following April, she pleaded guilty to attempted prostitution, a misdemeanor, and w
as sentenced to five days of community service. Melissa once told Kritzia that a cop tried to get a blow job before he let her go. Kritzia believed her; it had happened to her, too.

  Kritzia really liked weed, but Melissa couldn’t tolerate it. Two pulls and she’d run around thinking she could fly, and she’d still be high the next morning. Instead, Melissa would drink a lot. It wasn’t that she drank for fun—she drank to be okay, to mellow out. They’d go to a deli in the fashion district, just south of Times Square, whenever Kritzia got the munchies; Melissa would order only a cup with ice. Then she’d pull a beer out of her purse and pour it into the cup. Kritzia never met a white girl who did anything like that. She told Melissa not to do it while she worked, but she would go on a date, and a guy would offer her a drink, and she’d take it. “You don’t know who opened this bottle!” Kritzia said. But Melissa seemed to trust everybody, as if nobody would ever harm her. When Kritzia tried to call her on it, Melissa would say, “So what?”

  Melissa had advice for Kritzia, too; usually about her hair. One night they got into Blaze’s car together, and Melissa smiled. “Mariah, it’s time for you to start cutting your hair—your ends are getting all burned.”

  Kritzia snorted. “What do you know about ends being burned?”

  “Girl, I went to school for hair! Come over sometime. I’m gonna fix you up.”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Come on, Mariah! Let me, let me!”

  “No, I’m good.”

  “A long time ago, I dyed my hair red,” said Melissa. She reached in her purse and pulled out a picture of her with her hair dyed red, in a ponytail. The picture had the posed quality of a school photo, Melissa facing forward, smiling like she was ready to show up for cheerleading practice. Kritzia would remember that picture later.

  Melissa kept talking about Buffalo with Kritzia, if for no other reason than to mention her little sister, Amanda. When Kritzia told her she also had a sister, Melissa said, “We should all go hang out one day!”

  Kritzia gave her a look. “Can you imagine, them and us?”

  Melissa didn’t skip a beat. “Yeah, we should just take them shopping, and they won’t ask us any questions!”

  Holy shit, Kritzia thought.

  Lynn met Blaze only once over the years, a short hello in an Atlantic City casino. Lynn and Jeff had gone there on a trip with friends, and Melissa persuaded Blaze to drive her there to meet them. They stayed for a few hours, long enough to talk and play the slots. Lynn didn’t like the way Johnny, as she knew him, was dressed, a giant baggy T-shirt and jeans tenuously attached to his waist. This was Jordan all over again. Melissa troubled her, too. She was wearing a cream-colored dress and spike heels. Lynn thought she looked sleazy. When she said as much, Melissa sat up a little straighter. “I look beautiful,” she said.

  Blaze snorted when he heard that. “I look better than you do,” he said.

  Amanda didn’t like Blaze, either. She thought he was a pretty boy—vain and petulant. Every conversation had to be about him. Amanda’s first visit to the Bronx was low-key but fun. Afternoons were for the sisters—shopping, the Bronx Zoo, the Statue of Liberty. The nights were Melissa’s alone. She would throw on a dress, and a car would be waiting, and she would leave Amanda at the apartment by herself, telling her not to leave, calling to check in before Amanda went to sleep. Mornings, Amanda would hang out on the stoop, waiting for Melissa to wake up from her night out.

  A year later, in the spring of 2008, Amanda visited Melissa again. This time things seemed much bleaker for Melissa. She had broken up with Blaze and didn’t talk about him much anymore. Maybe it was that the surroundings weren’t so new this time; in any case, Amanda saw through to the bare facts of what her sister was doing to herself. She understood that there might never have been a hair salon, at least not one run by Blaze. She saw Melissa on the computer, a laptop she’d bought secondhand, posting ads on Craigslist, and she saw the cars that picked her up—livery cabs, mostly. She saw it all.

  But Amanda was nine years younger than her sister. She didn’t know how to talk about something like this. Amanda and Melissa never discussed where she went in the black cars. And when she returned home, Amanda didn’t tell a soul what she had discovered.

  One day in Times Square, Melissa said to Kritzia, “Mariah, why don’t you come with me?”

  Kritzia squinted. “Go with you? Go with you where?”

  “Go with me—we’re just gonna go.”

  “Where?”

  “Let’s go to Buffalo.”

  “Hell, no!”

  Melissa seemed so sad. Kritzia knew she had been fighting with Blaze. And she had mentioned that her mom was putting pressure on her to come home. The street was getting harder for her. Melissa didn’t like walking all night. She told Kritzia, “This is not for me. I just can’t be here.” To Kritzia, that was the worst paradox of the life. You had to be strong enough to work hard and long in order to convince so many men to part with their money, but weak enough to be there in the first place.

  Kritzia started to see Melissa doing calls without Blaze around. Melissa said, “Shhh! Don’t tell.”

  “Bitch, what are you doing?”

  Melissa waved her off. “Oh, Mariah, nobody can do nothing to me.”

  Melissa had more than enough reasons to leave Blaze. She lived on her own and, most of the time, paid her own rent. The two of them were touch and go, a pattern of breakup and reconciliation. Toward the end, Melissa wasn’t giving Blaze anything close to all her money. Why should she, she thought, when she didn’t have a reliable pimp like Mel to protect her? Thanks to Blaze, Melissa had slammed right into the system’s great fallacy: Why should she sacrifice herself to a pimp who spent all her money when he didn’t even look after her?

  By 2008, Melissa had switched almost entirely to Craigslist. She wasn’t the only one. Kritzia had another friend, Fabulous, who did it, too. In the few years since the website had caught on, Craigslist had done more to delegitimize the age-old system of pimps and escorts than a platoon of police officers could. Why sign on with a pimp when it was so easy to take a picture and let a guy call you—way easier than walking the streets and looking for a guy and then trying to convince him and then waiting forever at the ATM while he tried to sober up enough to remember his PIN? With Craigslist, johns came to you, and you didn’t have to share the money with anybody.

  Melissa asked Kritzia to join her. Kritzia refused. She was scared. The streets weren’t easy, but you could see a guy first. You couldn’t get to know him well, but at least you could make a snap judgment, look in his eyes, check out his clothes, see his cash, and assess his body language. As far as Kritzia was concerned, with Craigslist, you were completely in the dark. Every time you met a client was another roll of the dice, with only a few seconds on the phone to suggest if the person was for real—not a cop, not a crook, not a psycho.

  As Chloe, Melissa advertised outcalls only: She’d only go out to a john’s place. She charged $100 for fifteen minutes, $150 for a half hour, $250 for an hour, and $1,000 for overnight. She was openly breaking her arrangement with Blaze. She made enough money to come home to Buffalo at Christmastime and take Amanda and Lynn to a spa for massages. “You deserve to be pampered,” she said. On Christmas morning, Amanda and all the cousins each unwrapped an iPod Touch.

  There were consequences. A few weeks after she returned, Melissa got jumped by a group of women with one man nearby. Police later said she had her cell phone and that a witness picked it up off the ground and tried to give it back, but Melissa was curled up in a ball and wouldn’t take it. The witness heard the man say something like “This is what you get for disrespecting me.” He later identified that man as John Terry—Blaze—from a photo the police showed him.

  On the last night of the Christmas visit, Jeff and Lynn got Melissa so drunk that she got down on the floor and started playing with Emily, his dog, barking at the top of her lungs. They’d been out at Neighbor’s pub on Cleveland Drive, just d
own the street from Jeff’s parents’ place in Cheektowaga, and Melissa had been putting away 7 and 7’s. When they came back, she had some beers. Now it was two A.M. Jeff tried to shush her, but she wouldn’t stop: “Come here, Emily! Woof! Woof! Woof!”

  Jeff’s parents were asleep down the hall, but they were both going deaf, so it didn’t really matter. Still, he was reminded of what a lightweight she was, so tiny that three drinks would put her over. She pounded them down, anyway.

  That night at Neighbor’s, Jeff had tried, as usual, to introduce the idea of Melissa coming back to Buffalo. There seemed to be a little more urgency, in Jeff’s view: Melissa wasn’t acting like herself. Something was bothering her. She just was not happy. After the barking fit ended, she lay down on the couch, resting her head against Jeff, and he tried again.

  “Come home,” he said. His sister-in-law ran a cosmetology school. He could get her a job there.

  “Not yet,” Melissa said. “I’m almost ready, though.”

  The Bronx. July 12, 2009.

  On July 11, Melissa sent a late-night text message to Amanda to firm things up for another visit to New York. The next day, the security camera of her local bank recorded Melissa depositing a thousand dollars into her account—the proceeds, it is believed, from a date she’d had earlier that night. She withdrew a hundred dollars before heading out the door.

  Melissa was seen alive that afternoon, July 12, sitting on the curb outside her building on Underhill Avenue in the Bronx. Her phone records show a call to Blaze that evening, under a minute long. It might have gone to voice mail. Blaze would later say that he knew Melissa had lined up another thousand-dollar date the next night, somewhere on Long Island. He even said he knew the place and knew of the john. But he said that Melissa was working on her own; he’d offered her a ride that she’d declined.