Cellar Girl

by Josefina Rivera

  Mom had to sign off on my homework every night.

  One time she saw that I’d written a report and there was crossing out on one page where I’d made some mistakes.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘I just had to change it. It’s fine.’

  ‘No, it’s not fine. You do it over and do it right this time.’

  It was a five-page report!

  ‘I can just take this page out and replace it,’ I argued.

  ‘No. You got to learn how to do it right the first time. You’re in such a rush to get it over with you’re making all these mistakes. Take your time and pay attention to what you’re doing and this won’t continue to happen. Now, do it over.’

  So I had to start my report over again from scratch. From then on I learned how to think about what I was doing, concentrate and do it right the first time.

  Trust me, it did not happen too many more times because I was not going to keep continually doing my work over.

  * * *

  At first I got to see my birth brother Freddy and my birth sister Iris because we’d all been fostered by parents who belonged to the same Catholic War Veterans club. That’s how my mom got the idea of fostering in the first place – another lady in the group had started fostering children. And once all Mom’s kids were grown and she was in that big eight-bedroom house with just my dad she thought it might be nice to offer her home to a less fortunate child. She’d wanted a baby all along so when child protective services came up with me she was thrilled. I loved getting together with my brother and sister at the Catholic War Veterans club but on one occasion we were outside playing when Freddy grabbed me by the dress and it tore. It was an accident but the adults got all upset and said we couldn’t see each other no more because we were ‘abusive’ to each other. It wasn’t true.

  I did pretty well at school, constantly getting As and Bs – only because my mom wouldn’t accept anything else. Plus, I didn’t find the work difficult. The school was strict though – if you stepped out of line you got your hand smacked with a ruler. I was a good all-rounder. I learned the saxophone and piano, I loved dancing – modern, jazz, tap and ballet. And I was even a cheerleader. I was popular too – other kids liked being around me.

  The problem was, I got bored easily. I could learn stuff real quick and then I was always looking around for the next thing. And the next thing that came along was drugs. I guess I was no different to most teenagers in that I liked to experiment so I was thirteen when I started smoking weed. A lot of the kids in my area smoked and it didn’t feel like a big deal. But I was always on the lookout for something more, something to get me higher. So I tried coke and it wasn’t long before I was introduced to crack by some older kids.

  I was hanging out at a friend’s house one day when I saw her cooking up a rock of crack. And I was fascinated. I asked her if I could try some and she said sure.

  Crack was unlike anything I’d ever tried before. On crack, I felt invincible and strong. That’s what crack feels like, like you’re capable of amazing things. So you can see why it’s so addictive.

  But I didn’t think I was going to get addicted. I thought that I was just experimenting, I thought that I’d be able to try it, and then turn my back on it. I was just fourteen and at that age, you feel indestructible. Nobody tells you that if you start smoking crack you’ll be an addict within a matter of months. And besides, where I lived, drug-taking was the norm. Yeah, there was a bit of peer pressure, and like most teenagers, especially when they’re going through that stage where they’re trying to gain independence from their parents, what my friends thought about me was more important than what my parents thought or said. Stretching boundaries is an important stage in everyone’s development, but now I know that it’s a dangerous one too, especially if you lived where I grew up, where drugs were everywhere and taking them was seen as a normal, everyday thing.

  I got to admit, I felt like I had a lot of fun back then. I was just a regular teen and I liked to get high. The strange thing was that it didn’t affect my studies. I was still getting home every night and going to school the next day. Still racking up the As and Bs and making all my extra courses.

  Mom knew something was going on, of course she did, but I was doing so well in school, doing all the things I was meant to do, that I guess she felt it couldn’t be too bad.

  I don’t think she ever realized the true extent of my addiction or the pull of crack to take you so far off course you can never find your way back. Mom was strong, she was tough but in some ways she was completely ignorant. None of us knew back then how many lives and families would be ruined by the drug.

  I saw whole streets fall victim: good families, good kids. But once they were hooked there was no going back. That’s the way it was for me. And the deeper I went, the harder it became to remember what I wanted out of life. That’s what addiction does – it takes everything from you until you want nothing else but to get high all the time, every day.

  * * *

  I wriggled the fingers on my left hand – they tingled and fizzed from going to sleep so long. I tried to do the same with my right hand but I could hardly feel it now. My back ached with being bent over for hours. The dampness seeped into my bones.

  * * *

  It wasn’t long before I was selling drugs to make money to buy my own. They had a street corner at 18th and Wallace and I knew some people who had already been working for this group of dealers so I just joined in. I’d go and get four or five bundles of coke for as little as $10 a bag, sell them on for $25 and get my share out of the profits.

  In the beginning we were getting $25 a bundle but the demand got so high eventually we had people sat in lines waiting to buy their bundles and we were making $50 a bag. It was mad money.

  But then the dealers started to cut coke with other stuff to increase their profits, and that would set off my allergies, giving me rashes or making it hard to breathe. I was looking for an alternative source of income when my friend took me to a go-go bar. I was seventeen at the time and I remember looking up at these girls slinking and sliding all over the stage and thinking – wow, that’s cute.

  The lady who ran the place asked me if I wanted to give it a go. Sure, why not?

  Since I’d danced all my life I knew I could do it and after I went in the first night I loved it. Best of all, the money was unreal – $400 a night in tips plus $10 a hour wages.

  It really wasn’t a great leap from go-go dancing to prostitution. After all, we were being propositioned in the bar every single night. That same year one guy asked me if I’d do something with him for $200. For $200 I was willing to give it a go. It was over in five minutes and for five minutes’ work I earned hundreds of bucks. That sealed the deal for me. Most of the girls in the bar were hookers too – it was all just part of the same thing and with the drugs and the mad lifestyle I didn’t see much wrong with it.

  Mom didn’t interfere either. Her neighbors might gossip at her. ‘You know your daughter is out hooking,’ they’d tell her after seeing me on the street.

  ‘Yeah? Well, she can’t be doing a real good job of it because she’s spending all my money!’

  Mom was never ashamed of me or judged me. She always thought that whatever I got into I would have to get out of myself. I had to learn my own lessons the hard way.

  I was nineteen when I had my first child – LaToya. Her dad Billy and I had been together two years on and off. He took off when I fell pregnant and headed out to California, saying he had some friends there who could get him a job. I thought we’d be all set for a change of life and at seven months pregnant I followed him over to the West Coast. But when I got out there things weren’t quite as Billy had led me to believe.

  There was no job and no home – we were staying with some of his friends and I had no choice but to apply for welfare. As soon as my first check came through I bought a bus ticket home to Mom, just in time to give birth. Right from the start LaToya was a sweetheart – she
wasn’t a difficult baby and I loved being a mom. My mom babysat while I kept on going to school where I studied accounting.

  I had plans, I had high hopes for myself but things never seemed to work out like I wanted them to. I never got back with Billy – while I was at college studying business management, I met Ronnie and we got married. Looking back I think I did it just to see what it was like. LaToya was three years old and I felt that she needed a father figure in her life – Ronnie was a great husband and a good provider. But, as always, I got bored real quick. After just a few months I told him it wasn’t working out for me – the routine of married life was too dull. I couldn’t cope with doing the same things week in, week out. I was used to ripping and running. There were no hard feelings and we stayed friends but I moved out with LaToya and that’s when I got mixed up with Robert.

  He was trouble. He was the kind of guy who always wound up getting into fights. He’d have a few drinks then he’d start rowing with someone. Before long his friends would be pulling him away and he’d be walking off.

  But then after just ten paces, Robert would turn around and shout at the guy: ‘What did you say? What’s that you saying about me?’

  Yeah, Robert ended up in a lot of fights. But I loved him, of course.

  By now I was heavily dependent on crack. I had to have a smoke of crack just to get going in the morning. I’d dropped out of the go-go club scene when I first got pregnant so now I was working the streets to get my customers. Since Robert was an addict too he didn’t mind about the hooking. It was a whole different thing from picking up guys in the club but with my growing addiction, I didn’t have much else I could do. I managed to stop when I fell pregnant with my second daughter Zornae, but after that, it all went wrong and I ended up back on the drugs.

  I now had two children and crack had taken over my life completely. That’s the thing about addiction – you don’t know it’s happening until it’s too late and by then everything is such a mess you just keep going to forget how you’ve screwed everything up. So Ricky was born with drugs in his system – I’m not proud of that. The child protective services had taken his sister a few months before and they were threatening to keep him too. That’s why he was in Pennsylvania Hospital, getting his weight up. LaToya was now five and she’d been with me until just six months previously when her dad Billy, now back from California after a year, had snatched her off me. Now he was making it difficult for me to even see her, let alone get her back again.

  Luckily my mom still got to see Toya because Bill’s mom would take her round for visits. She had seen Zornae a few times and was obviously cut up when she got taken but by this point my mom was more concerned about me and the drugs. She could see things weren’t going well.

  I’d split from Robert while I was pregnant with Ricky. I knew my lifestyle choices had screwed things up for my kids and me and I was determined to make things right again. I was tired of the drugs, tired of the streets and ready to get my kids back. It was time to change.

  Two weeks before I’d appeared for a court hearing where the judge approved a social worker visit to inspect my new apartment at 6th and Gerard. I was determined to get all my kids back living with me. The new place I’d sorted out was a heated apartment and done up real good, and I felt motivated to start 1987 with a whole new attitude and life. I wanted to stop the drugs and I wanted to come off the streets. I was only going to keep smoking crack and working the streets until the kids came back, I’d told myself. Then everything will be different.

  All of this was running through my mind as I was curled up in the hole. All of my bad decisions, the stupid risks I took, were torturing my mind as much as my restraints were torturing my body.

  I knew I was taking a risk by going out on the streets that night but I never thought anything bad would happen to me. Yes, I’d had a lot of weird requests over the years, but most were pretty harmless. Some guys wanted you to do them with dildos, some liked to be chained up themselves, one guy liked me to put on high heels and walk over pastries! Then there were the ones who only wanted to talk and then paid you for your time, like you were a counselor.

  Even the cops who occasionally picked me up liked me too much to charge me with anything. I’d even tricked for a few of them over the years so they didn’t hassle me.

  I was only twenty-five, but there wasn’t a lot I hadn’t seen, done or heard.

  I never imagined I would be the one who’d get picked up by a guy who pulled a knife or worse.

  I was too smart, too quick for that.

  Now I was stuck in this hole and it was beyond anything I could have ever imagined. I thought of my mom again and I could hear her voice in my head: ‘You’re a fighter, Josie.’

  A little sob escaped my lips – I didn’t feel like a fighter. For the first time in many, many years I felt utterly, utterly helpless.

  And stupid as hell.

  Chapter Three

  Gary

  I couldn’t think of anything else to do so I was still screaming and hollering, hoping someone would hear me, praying someone might come down and rescue me.

  When my voice cracked with pain, I tried banging on the board over my head. I kept this up for ages until I heard vibrations of feet tramping overhead. He was down here. He was lifting the heavy earth-filled bags off the board, pulling the board aside and dragging me out of the hole by my hair.

  ‘Argghhh!’ I screamed in agony.

  My vision was flooded with light and I had to squint against the harsh glare of the ceiling bulb.

  Gary’s huge form loomed over me – he was holding a long wooden stick. I saw him pull his arm back and then the stick came swooping through the air. I cowered in expectation of the pain to come, trying to shield my face with my quivering hands. And then – crunch!

  The heavy pole came crashing down on my side, whacking all the air out of me and leaving me wheezing in shock.

  Again, he raised the large stick in his hand and, gripping me by the hair, brought it down once again on my side. I was paralyzed with pain. Again and again the stick came down, now on my legs, back and buttocks.

  I couldn’t see him anymore through the pain and tears but his voice above me was unemotional and mechanical: ‘Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.’

  I was so disorientated and woozy from the beating that I didn’t understand him at first and kept hollering, the blows thudding down so hard that every part of me was in torment. After a while my senses seemed to disconnect from my mind and I couldn’t even tell where the stick was landing. What am I doing? I thought, I don’t need to shout. Nobody can hear me.

  I stopped screaming and he stopped beating me. I was crouched down with my head tucked into my body, but as the seconds ticked by without more beatings I dared to open my eyes and glance around me. This basement – it looked so different from just a day ago. When he put me in the hole I could have sworn I was at one side of the room, but it looked like I’d re-emerged in a totally different part of it. I was so confused and groggy I didn’t even remember the layout of the room correctly.

  I was starving, freezing and my throat was parched beyond belief, but these things hardly registered. My whole being was poised in anticipation of what he would do next. Is this the moment he kills me? I wondered. How will it come? I’d stopped panting, taking just small shallow breaths, ready for whatever came next.

  As soon as Gary seemed satisfied that I wasn’t going to start hollering again, he forced me back into the hole. This time I wasn’t down there more than thirty minutes before he was back in the basement, taking off the board and hauling me out again by my hair. He had a small cup of water in his hand and he gave it to me to sip. I got up enough strength to lift the polystyrene cup of water to my mouth and the water dribbled down my throat. It was instantly restorative – with that small trickle I could feel the strength returning to my body, my mind focusing back into the present. I took another sip – then another and another. I didn’t want to gulp it all down too quickly as I k
new it would make me sick.

  He’d brought down a blue air mattress and he made me lie on it. Then he took down his trousers to have sex with me. I didn’t struggle. I was too shattered and numb to even think to resist.

  His grizzly beard stung at my face and grated against my cheek. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

  When he’d done he let out a satisfied sigh, then he pushed himself off me, swiveled his body so he was at right angles to me and laid his head on my lap. Then he fell asleep.

  It was the most bizarrely intimate gesture in this whole violent encounter so far and I couldn’t figure it out at all. I didn’t know what this guy was going to do next and that made me even more scared.

  I tried to stop myself from imagining the worst. Instead, I cast my eyes around the basement, looking for any means of escape. I saw his clothes – he’d not come back with the keys to the padlock for my chains so even if I could overpower him right now and knock him out, I would still be chained down here. I guess he’d kept the keys upstairs for exactly that reason – he was a nut all right but he wasn’t stupid. The only thing I could see that gave me any cause for hope was a small air vent in the top of the wall opposite where I lay. I didn’t know where it might lead but judging by the width, I reckoned I might be able to squeeze through.

  He woke up with a start, unembarrassed by falling asleep in this way, and immediately got up to grab a spade that he’d brought down with him, digging the hole deeper and wider, filling up more plastic bags like the ones he’d placed on the board.

  All the while he was talking.

  ‘You know, Nicole, I brought you here for a reason,’ he began, the cold steel of the shovel slicing through the damp, gritty earth. ‘It’s part of my plan. I want to have kids, you see. Lots of them. I got kids already but the state keeps taking them off me. Well, I got a way now of having kids so nobody can take them away anymore.