Somebody's Daughter

by Jessome, Phonse;

  Tank considered trying out his skills on Stacey the first night they met—taking her aside and advising her to stay away from the crowd she was now moving with—but he was deterred by her obvious excitement at the prospect of going to Toronto. “You could tell she wanted to be in The Game; she was in my front room, just bouncing, telling me where she was going,” he recalled years later. “I figured she knew what she wanted, so I ignored her.” Of course a trained counselor might have wondered if Stacey was being manipulated into believing the trip really would be an innocent shopping expedition, but Tank never took the courses. His recollections of meeting Stacey emerged during an interview in a federal prison, where he was sent in the spring of 1993. Tank’s dreams of leaving The Game and becoming a respected citizen were put on hold for three years as he served concurrent sentences for living on the avails of prostitution and running a common bawdy house.

  Stacey’s time to work in the escort service arrived in early July. Kenny came to the apartment to get her and then drove to a small older home in the South end of Dartmouth. Stacey’s image of where and how prostitutes worked changed the second she saw the old gray house that served as a brothel and escort service. She had expected to be in a plush apartment with a well-stocked bar. She thought she would sip Champaign and wait until well-dressed customers came to her. The escort service was about as far from plush as you could get and still have a roof over your head. The run down old house needed a paint job both outside and in. When Stacey walked in the first thing she saw was a filthy, tattered old sofa that had been shoved up against the wall in the entry hallway. A girl about Stacey’s age sat silently in the middle of the sofa and paid not attention as Stacey walked in with Kenny. The girl didn’t smile, she didn’t even bother to look up. It was as though she’d been shoved there along with the beat-up old piece of furniture.

  The hallway opened on one side to a large room that probably had served as a family room when the building had been a home. Now the room was an office with a desk, a phone, some cabinets and a couple of chairs. The man seated at the desk looked up when Stacey walked in, his eyes skirting past her to Kenny who walked into the room without waiting for an invitation. Kenny and the man spoke briefly, and then Kenny gave Stacey a kiss and promised he would be back later. Stacey sat next to the young girl on the sofa and waited for the man to call on her. Kenny had already explained the workings of the house to her.

  Clients calling the escort service could ask to have a girl come to them or they could arrange to come to the house to meet with a girl in the private bedroom at the end of the hall. Inside the bedroom there was a single bed, a night table with a lamp on top, and a small waste basket. The night table had one drawer; inside were an assortment of condoms. The waste basket beside the bed was half filled with discarded condoms and their wrappers. Stacey would not be asked to leave the house on her first night. She was there for in service customers only, as part of the deal Kenny made with the owner. On that first night Stacey had either oral or straight sex with four different men. Two of those men promised they would be back to see her again. Stacey was polite to the men and while she did not like what she was doing she was proud of herself for having the nerve to do it. She couldn’t wait to swap stories with Rachel when she returned to the apartment.

  Kenny returned to the Escort Service shortly after midnight. The old man behind the desk opened a cash box and pulled out an envelope which he handed to Kenny without comment. Stacey pulled herself up from the uncomfortable sofa and silently followed him outside. Back in the car Kenny kissed her and asked how it went. Stacey told him it was okay but Kenny wasn’t really listening. He was busy opening the envelope and counting out just over two hundred dollars stuffed inside. He pulled out twenty and gave it to Stacey.

  “Just in case you want to get some cigarettes or something. I’ll keep the rest for the trip. Two or three more shifts and you won’t have to go back there any more.”

  Stacey sat quietly in the car as Kenny headed back to her apartment. She didn’t really want to go back to the old man and his dirty little house but she was happy Kenny knew it was just a temporary thing. She was sure Kenny would understand when she told him she would never go back to the service after they returned from Toronto. Kenny may have known that was what Stacey wanted but it was not what he had planned for his new recruit.

  In the days that followed Stacey could detect a slight change in the way Kenny treated her. He was still attentive and still talked about the trip to Toronto but he didn’t spend nearly as much time with her and rarely took her to the mall anymore. A new routine developed almost overnight. Kenny would pick her up at the apartment, take her to the escort service, pick her up at the end of the night, give her twenty dollars from the envelope and then take her home.

  It was the same way T-bar shuttled Rachel back and forth from Hollis Street—just as every pimp controlled the every movement of his girls, not out of concern for her welfare but in order to keep track of the money. His money, not hers; Stacey Jackson had become a commodity, and the “trip” was just a come-on K-bar had used to obtain that commodity. She had no emotional significance to him, and never had.

  Stacey didn’t have time to reflect on the change in Kenny’s behaviour or what it might mean. She was too busy fighting a running battle with her mother, as Debbie Howard begged Stacey to stop seeing Kenny and start looking for some new friends, while Stacey defiantly insisted that it was her life to do with as she wished. The-arguments gradually eased off, neither one of them was going to change the other’s mind. Mrs. Howard’s anger created another difficulty for Stacey as she planned her trip. Her mother refused to look after Michael, hoping somehow this would stop Stacey from going. She hadn’t counted on Kenny’s resourcefulness; the pimp suggested Stacey contact her ex-boyfriend, Roger, whose parents adored their grandson. With her child-care problem solved, Stacey was free to head to the big city.

  In the week before leaving Halifax, Stacey met a young prostitute who quickly replaced Rachel as her closest friend. Annie Mae’s “Choosy Suzy” routine of switching from pimp to pimp had brought the nineteen-year-old into T-bar’s stable—she’d heard he and Kenny were going to Toronto, and even though neither of them was a major player, the trip sounded like just what she needed. She met Stacey soon afterward and the experienced prostitute took a liking to the naive beginner. As for Stacey, she found it impossible not to like Annie Mae, a fast talker who filled the younger girl’s head with stories of her travels and exploits telling her about the bars she would visit in Toronto and Montreal. Annie Mae promised to show Stacey the heart of the big city.

  Annie Mae’s upbeat personality, and her excitement about returning to Toronto, made Stacey begin to feel good about herself for the first time since Kenny had dropped her off at the escort service that first night. Neither of the two girls had ever had a best friend in high school—Annie Mae never made it that far in school, while Stacey, who quit early, kept to herself most of the time. High-school chums were indeed what they resembled; they played off each others’ strengths and seemed to know almost from square one how to make each other laugh.

  Annie Mae was the kind of person who lived in a world of tunnel vision where there was only one path to follow. She had chosen prostitution several years before meeting Stacey and had never looked back. Despite all of that, Annie Mae liked her life and was a great cheerleader for anyone wanting to give the streets a try. Stacey did not suffer from tunnel vision because she lacked any vision at all. The teenager had no life plan, no ambition to speak of and absolutely no idea where she would be in five months let alone five years. That lack of general focus resulted in Stacey’s lack of problem solving skills. Like many young women recruited by pimps Stacey had no strength when it came to finding solutions to the problems she faced. When Stacey hit a road block she could see it clearly but she could not see any way around it or over it and she could never see it coming. A serious problem would stop Stacey in her tracks or cause her to try to ru
n backwards. Annie Mae would see the obstacle and not even bother looking for a way around preferring to charge ahead no matter the consequence.

  Annie Mae had no money of her own; she had been beaten by pimps and robbed by customers; and she had been arrested a number of times. Yet her zest for life was unmistakable, and The Game was to her liking. Annie Mae told Stacey she had nothing to fear as long as she kept her head up and knew how to have fun. Stacey figured that if Annie Mae could go through all that and cheerfully continue to identify herself as a “lifer,” then she, Stacey, had little to worry about. After all, she wasn’t going to be in The Game long enough for any of those bad things to happen to her. She was going to Toronto with Kenny and she had a wonderful new friend who was clearly delighted to take the younger girl under her wing. The rest could wait.

  For Kenny, on the other hand, the presence of Annie Mae had an entirely different significance. This was one of the best girls working out of Halifax when it came to training new talent—she knew more about the streets than most pimps—and Kenny hoped that with her help, he could turn Stacey into a real money-maker and also earn himself a lot more respect among the major players.

  Kenny, Terrance, Annie Mae and Stacey arrived in Toronto late in July, and on their first night in the city Kenny stopped “playing” Stacey and started working her. Stacey, typically, could not, or would not, see it coming. There were six of them staying in the small apartment—another pimp and prostitute from Halifax had joined them. While Annie Mae and the other girl, a heavy-set redhead named Stella Daniels, began to dress for work, Stacey sat down in the cramped bathroom to chat with them, as she had done so often in Halifax. Annie Mae was applying a heavy dab of make-up above her eye, and Stacey was digging around in the small cosmetics bag the girls shared, when Kenny walked in. “Get dressed,” he said curtly. “You’re going with them.”

  Stacey was shocked, and started to protest, her voice rising with anger. “Kenny I can’t do that. I don’t do that. It’s not the same. No, I’m not going with them.” When she saw the expression of the face of the young man she thought was her boyfriend, her anger turned to fear. Gone was even the polite indifference of the past few weeks. This was a stranger, his face a mask of fury, his voice a venomous hiss as he moved threateningly towards her: “What the fuck did you say to me? Are you disrespecting me, girl?” Annie Mae quickly intervened. “Relax, K, I’ll get her ready. Stacey, you just be quiet, girl. I’ll look after you down there—you got nothin’ to worry about.”

  Kenny left the room, and Annie Mae grabbed Stacey by the shoulders. Clearly, she would have to explain a few ground rules to this new comer. “Honey, you knew why we were coming here. I hope you didn’t think you’d be hangin’ at the mall while the rest of us worked. That just ain’t gonna happen, so get it out of your head now, okay? Listen to me when I say this, girl, or things are gonna get real hard on you real fast. You never, never talk to your man that way. They hate it. If T-bar had been in the room, Kenny would have been forced to beat you for back-talkin’ like that; so don’t let that mouth of yours get you in any more trouble.”

  “Annie, this isn’t why I came here, and he knows it.”

  “He doesn’t care what you thought your were doing, Stacey, so just get ready and we’ll go downtown. It’s a warm night and we’ll make some good money.”

  Stacey suddenly understood that her relationship with Kenny was nothing like what she had been hoping against hope it might still be. He hadn’t used the word love in weeks, though she had, and now she knew it had been completely one-sided. She couldn’t go home—Kenny had all the money she had earned and Stacey never even thought of calling her mother to ask for help. She decided to accept Annie Mae’s advice and go downtown with her friend; working the street in Toronto couldn’t be any worse than working the escort service back home. As she began to apply her make-up, Stacey suddenly felt excited, as fear and adrenaline heightened her senses. Then, just after nine o’clock, the three girls piled into the back of T-bar’s Trans Am, while Kenny and Terrance sat together up front.

  Kenny laid down the law as they drove towards the stroll. “This is not like the escort service, Stacey. No one books your dates—you have to hustle the man from the curb. A car slows down, you make sure he sees you first. You walk over and see what he’s shopping for. Do not talk to a black man on the stroll, ever. There are some players up here trying to move on our women, and you don’t want to get mixed up with them, so just stay away from any black guy who approaches you.”

  That last rule sounded stupid: Why couldn’t black men buy the services of the Nova Scotia girls? Stacey didn’t get the point—that the players were unwilling to take the chance of having their girls scooped up by pimps who weren’t part of “the family,” as they called themselves. As long as she did what she was told, she’d be keeping up her end of the family compact, and that was all the pimps cared about. A “dumb ’ho” couldn’t be expected to understand loyalty. Kenny continued to talk, but Stacey tuned him out as the car turned onto Yonge Street. The teenager stared out the window, taking in all the people and all the stores—clothing boutiques, stereo shops, jewellers, gourmet food emporiums.

  As the car got closer to the heart of downtown Toronto, Stacey craned her neck excitedly, searching for the fabled CN Tower. Was that it, that thing that looked like a lit-up spacecraft in the sky? She wanted to ask—maybe they could all go visit it sometime—but she thought that would sound stupid.

  The two men dropped the three girls on Gerrard Street, just east of Yonge and only a block or so from the stroll. The Metro Toronto Police Juvenile Task Force was paying closer attention to Nova Scotia pimps, so they avoided driving near the stroll when they had their own vehicles in Toronto, knowing their plates could give them away. This meant a bit more freedom for the girls than in Halifax. There the pimps patrolled Hollis Street frequently and picked up “their” money at regular intervals; but Kenny and Terrance, like most of the Scotians, insisted on staying in touch by cellular phone, as they sometimes did back home as well. Kenny had told Stacey to phone him right after she “broke” (serviced her first client) and to keep calling regularly until he had decided that she had earned enough for the night. Such anxiety was a perfect example of what distinguished young pimps like Kenny and Terrance from experienced players operating in Toronto and other big cities—the leeway they gave their girls on the street. Major players often sent prostitutes to another city on their own for days or weeks, and rarely supervised them on the stroll, they were confident that the girls knew better then to try to pull one over on them.

  Stacey was a walking contradiction as she headed toward the stroll. She was dressed like a woman of the night but she was every bit the awestruck kid in the big city for the first time. She walked awkwardly in her heels and tight miniskirt. The stumbling gait was not improved by her tendency to look everywhere except where she was walking. Stacey could not get enough of the city sights and she asked Annie Mae about everything she saw, the big buildings down toward the harbour and the manicured courtyard at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute.

  The three girls reached Annie Mae’s favourite corner shortly before ten o’clock—a prime slice of the section of Church Street referred to by the prostitutes, the pimps and Toronto police officers as the Scotian Stroll, so named because the pimps who had laid claim to it years before were from Halifax. The girls came not only from the Maritimes but also from Quebec, Ontario and many other areas of the country. Teenagers from small towns out west; young women from Montreal; girls from rural Ontario—they were all lined up next to their Maritime “sisters” in the Scotian Stroll, hoping to earn enough to keep their pimps happy. For the first time, Stacey Jackson of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, was one of them.

  Young girls work the Scotian stroll a block from Annie Mae’s favorite corner. [Print from ATV video tape]

  Stacey had been on the stroll less than five minutes when a man in a blue Jeep crooked his finger and signalled her. Terrified, Stacey tur
ned her back and walked away, hoping one of the other girls would approach him instead, but Annie Mae blocked them, making sure no-one moved on her friend’s first date. “Stacey turn around girl, that man wants you,” she hissed, grabbing Stacey and spinning her back towards the curb and the waiting Jeep. The man behind the wheel was much more attractive than any of the guys who frequented the escort agency; in his mid-thirties, he had a slim build and a handsome face.

  “Well, are you going to say anything?” The man leaned across the seat and smiled at Stacey, obviously attracted by her youthful nervousness.

  “Hi—um—” What should she say? The other men had always told her what they wanted. “Can I help you?” He smiled again: “I sure hope you can. How much for a blow?”

  Well, at least he’d come out and asked—and Stacey knew the answer, too, because Kenny had told her. “Eighty dollars, she said, more confidently.

  “Fair enough. Get in.” Stacey jumped into the vehicle and the man pulled away from the curb, keeping up a steady stream of conversation as he turned a few corners. She wasn’t watching exactly where he was going, intent as she was on paying attention to the stranger by her side. Years later, as she recalled the incident, she shook her head at her own naiveté. “I was pretty stupid; I mean, he could have taken me anywhere and killed me. As soon as we left the curb, I was lost. I couldn’t tell him where to go, and I didn’t know if he was taking me somewhere dangerous.” Luckily, her first customer wanted “only” what he’d asked for. They pulled over in an alley, and he promptly parked the Jeep and unzipped his jeans. Stacey pulled a condom from her purse; the man placed it on his penis, and she leaned over, her hands shaking. She could barely catch her breath; she was so nervous. This apparently excited him all the more—before Stacey thought she had actually started, he was finished.