We try to run them out. But they come back, sure as roaches. The streets are infested with them.
They bring down our worth. When it’s, I’ll die for a hit, a smack, a shot of the stuff, you can forget asking seventy-five dollars for what a coke whore will do for pennies.
They’re killing themselves, and us, too. If I had one wish I’d wish they’d get the job done. If they’re going to kill themselves, then do it. We have rent due. We have to eat.
How do you know you have a lunatic on your hands? It’s in their eyes. If he looks at you too long and there’s nothing going on inside his head, you have a potential problem. Now, most johns, they get excited looking at you. They breathe heavy. Their eyes glaze over. Maybe they’re panting. Any of this, it shows in their eyes.
I’ve seen it a couple of times when the eyes lay as flat as the desert. One time I went along with it, even though I was thinking I shouldn’t. Even though warning bells were going off inside my head.
I needed the cash. It was that simple. We had a week or two of rain and the rent was due. I went against my better judgment.
It turns out this guy needed more than twenty minutes of my best work and still there was nothing to show for it. First he’s embarrassed, then mad. He starts yelling that I’m no good, that he wants his money back.
In a circumstance like this, the last thing you do is complain. Instead, you back off easy. I said, I guess I’m just not your lucky number tonight. I guess I lost my golden touch.
I told him, “I had the same problem just the other night. I guess it’s time I found myself another career.”
And maybe laugh about it, like it’s nothing.
Then you get out of there. Quick.
That’s how I handled it. The other times I had a psycho asking me for it, I walked away. No thank you, polite as can be. And kept walking.
Any job has one or two things about it you don’t like. You put up with it because it comes as a package deal.
That’s how I look at the cops. As a minor inconvenience. They come, they get you to offer them a good thing, they arrest you. You’re in juvie a month or two, in foster care for less, then back to square one.
The finances are messed up. All for him and none for you. It seems like I get my rent paid, buy groceries, stockings, a pair of working shoes, and there’s nothing left. Meanwhile, Manny’s got a cream car and silk shirts. These things don’t get by me.
Most of the time I think, Well, look at him, he’s got fifteen girls he’s running interference for. That’s a big job. At least he doesn’t hit me. He isn’t some masochistic SOB, and I should be grateful for that. But one day I’m getting out. Moving on to something better.
I’m going to get on a service. I’ve got the looks for it. I’ve got the business sense. I knew some girls who made it into the big time. Made top dollar, and kept half of everything they pulled in. I knew a girl who had a credit card machine in her apartment. Visa, Mastercard, American Express. She took it all. And the work, cream of the crop.
So it wasn’t all bad. There was room for advancement, if you had what it took to get ahead.
That’s what I was looking for. A way to the top. I kept my eyes open, too. I wasn’t out there thinking of the moment and nothing more. I thought about my future.
I thought of myself as a commodity. American made. I thought, Somebody will come by who can’t resist the packaging.
And then it was ¡Adiós! ¡Hasta la vista!
That’s the way it works. Someone likes what he sees, and BAM! You’re outta there.
It was like treading water, waiting for that to happen. It was like any job, with things you didn’t like about it, and fringe benefits that made it worth sticking around for a while.
This is my song. I made it up myself. They let me in the library, the nurses who liked my attitude, me wanting to get ready for my moment in the sun, my first group and having something to say for myself.
My song says it all, my little rap better than anything Latifah comes up with. This is how I was, when I was on the street:
I’m the American Dream.
I’m your inspiration.
Your destination.
I’m a woman of independent means.
I have it all:
Liberty; libertad; liberación.
I’m the American flag.
I’m a franchise.
A lawless indiscretion.
Outspoken, downright shameless;
I’m loose.
I’m redemption.
The key to your happiness.
I’ll see you through to tomorrow.
Today. Hoy.
I can make you as good as new.
Instantly.
Before you can say Jack Robinson.
I am the cure.
The serum.
One shot of me and you’re hooked,
Line and sinker.
I’m an addiction.
A craving.
I’m nicotine and kerosene.
You’ll burn for me.
Chain-smoke me.
Toke me.
Intravenously stroke me.
I’m tradition,
Like marriage vows and first sons.
I’m your inclination.
And destination.
It’s not cosmic.
There’s no rocket’s red glare.
No love at first sight.
I’m no wonder of the world.
I’m the American Dream.
I’m small business at its best.
I’m success in the flesh.
You see, Doc? It’s a matter of natural selection. Birthright. Darwin knew what he was talking about.
Live Birth
A girl I knew used a wire coat hanger. Clinics only take you after you prove you’re old enough to make the decision yourself. They don’t care if you don’t have parents. That you’ve been living on your own a long time. The law is the law.
She said the ladies at the clinic gave her a five-page questionnaire and had her sit for an hour in a plastic chair, waiting her turn for review. Then they tell her, Sorry. Sorry. You have to prove you’re old enough. It’s the state law. Have you told your parents?
She asked them, “Is there a state that doesn’t have this law? Is there a place I can go?”
It turns out she can go to Mexico or the state of Maine. Either is a world away.
She waited. She said the pregnancy began to fester. Johns don’t like you if you’re embarazada. She began to show. She couldn’t buy food. She was behind on her rent. When johns don’t take you there’s no way to pay the bills, unless you steal. She tried taking a can of soup and Doritos from a family market on Haines Street, but they ran after her. She threw it back at them and kept running so she wouldn’t go to jail.
She said she thought of throwing herself in front of a car. But that would mean the welfare hospital. Beds are filled and you’re put on a cot in the hall, with people bumping into you, their talking and crying keeping you up all hours, and them butting into your personal business: “What happened to you? You look horrible, a mess. What happened to you?” There’s no privacy.
She thought she could use the hanger and do enough damage that the baby would come unglued and come out of her like a blood clot.
She said it felt like electricity moving around inside her. And then she began to bleed.
She bled like it was raining. Like it would never stop.
She told me she stumbled into the emergency room, the clean one at Cedar’s where the stars go, and they had to take her. She was a true emergency.
They took her baby from her like it was a live birth.
She said the wire coat hanger was the best choice open to her. She said she would have to do the same again if it came to that.
She was in the hospital four days, and when she left they gave her a three-month prescription of birth control pills and a dozen condoms and told her to go to the county clinic when she ran out.
This girl, s
he said it was nothing. Not at all like the horror stories you hear where the girl dies, all bloody and crying for her mamá. She didn’t think of her mother at all during her crisis. It was a few minutes of pain and wondering if she was going to die. She thought about her place. Who would come and go through her things? Would they keep the good stuff? Or would they think it was junk and throw it all away? That’s the kind of thing that went through her mind.
She said the bleeding told her enough to go to a hospital, but she waited twenty minutes just to make sure the baby couldn’t be saved. She didn’t want to go through all that and still have a pregnancy, another mouth to feed when she couldn’t feed her own.
Then she went outside and got herself a cab and said, Cedar’s Sinai, like she was somebody. Like she was a movie star. And they took her. They had to. She was likely to bleed to death.
“If you can have an at-home birth,” she said, “there’s no reason you can’t have an at-home abortion.”
She did it just fine.
“I’m a pioneer in birth control methods. They’ll write a book about me. Write me into historia.”
Little Niña
I have a roommate. Her name is Mary Christine. She is not like the rest of us, who have done it for a place to live, for groceries, for makeup and a pair of tall boots. Mary Christine slept with her brother.
“He’s in prison now,” she says. But not for the sex, which started when Mary Christine was nine and her brother thirteen; when her brother changed his name to Jesus and convinced the little Niña they were saving the world. Mary Christine’s brother killed their father. “He’ll be there for a long time.”
Mary Christine’s real name is Tammy. In group, at lunch, passing in the hallways, we have to call her Tammy, but alone in our room she asks me to call her Mary Christine; she still believes everything her brother told her. I pretend I’m Switzerland and make up my own name for her. She is young, fourteen, and too innocent for us. Still a girl, really.
The little Niña is the only one of us with a regular visitor who isn’t our social worker or shrink. Her mother visits every Tuesday. She arrives at exactly nine a.m. and stays until they ask her to leave.
She walks into our room like she’s returning from the market: “Mom’s here!”
The little Niña, sitting on her bed, turns a page in her magazine. She pulls her knees up to her chest and hums. Not a song, but the buzz of a housefly, of a jet engine.
“Now is that any way to say hello to your mom?” Mrs. Jacobs swats the Niña’s leg with a leather glove. She wears them driving. She has a toy dog, too. She sometimes brings him, shut up in her purse. “I brought you something special today,” she tells the Niña. “And don’t let them take it away from you this time.” Her white, white hand is stuffed in her purse, hunting.
Staff doesn’t throw away the things her mother brings; the little Niña does it. She tears them up, even if it’s a pillow or a favorite shirt, and flushes the pieces down the toilet.
“I can’t believe I found this,” her mother says. “It was inside a book, on the desk in your bedroom.”
The special something is a baby picture of Mary Christine, only the photo has been cut. In it Mary Christine is wearing a blue, fluffy dress, her hair is lighter, almost blond, and curly. In front of her folded legs is a third foot, larger, laced into a brown boot. Mrs. Jacobs lets the photo slip from her fingers onto the magazine and into Mary Christine’s lap.
Mary Christine picks up the photo and brings it close to her face.
“Where is he?” the Niña shrieks. “What did you do to him?”
“Who?” Mrs. Jacobs asks. She has forgotten her only son. Shut him out of her heart when she woke from the gunshot blast and found herself soaked in her husband’s blood. “What are you talking about?”
“My brother.”
“You don’t have a brother, Tammy,” Mrs. Jacobs says, her face as closed as a door. “It’s just me and you.”
“No. No. No.” Mary Christine holds the photograph against her face and cries.
Mrs. Jacobs picks up her purse. She slips her hands into her gloves. “I don’t know what I’ll bring next week,” she says. She’s slowly moving Mary Christine’s belongings out of their tidy home in the Hollywood Hills. “How about your yearbook? You don’t want to forget your friends.”
Later, the Niña tells me she feels like a dirty dish towel her mother twists, twists, wringing out the only part of her that matters.
She won’t tell me her brother’s real name. Mary Christine writes Hey-Zeus letters staff won’t mail. Instead, the Niña tucks them into her diary, where no one, not even staff, is allowed to go. She writes him a letter telling him they don’t want her to have the baby. The doctors are saying the baby will be retarded. He won’t be able to talk. He’ll spend his life in bed, crying or unconscious. He won’t know she is his mother.
“I think all babies know their mother,” she tells me. She looks at me over the letter in her hand. “Don’t you?”
“Depends,” I say. Having a baby at fourteen is plain loco.
She’s in her third month and will have to decide. Before, the pregnancies ended on their own. One when Mary Christine fell out her bedroom window, which is on the second floor. The other naturally.
Her pants are tight. She doesn’t button them, but they’re difficult even to zip. The nurses bring her clothes from their homes that will make her more comfortable; her mother won’t accept that Mary Christine is having her grandchild.
Mrs. Jacobs tells Tammy on her next visit, when she comes in the middle of the day, with a long envelope and a bag of the Niña’s clothes, that she must choose to abort. She shows her pictures of babies born in-family. Some have their noses smashed into their faces, others are missing ears and toes. They never say mama. They never look into your eyes and say I love you. Some of them don’t even have eyes. Some of them are so messed up, an arm comes out of a leg socket. Does she want a baby like that, her mother asks. One that will suffer every day of his life?
Mary Christine doesn’t answer. She clutches the bag of clothing, pulling out pieces — a pair of jeans, underwear, a cheerleading skirt — until it’s all piled in her lap.
Her mother leaves the pictures spread out on the bottom of the Niña’s bed and walks out.
Mary Christine doesn’t choose to keep or do away with the baby. It’s by God’s intervention that her third baby is taken from her. This is what she says. She is in group one week after her mother came with the pictures. Her stomach is gone, flat as pavement. Her face is as angular and as starved as the face of the real Jesus.
“The baby is gone,” she says. She doesn’t cry. She’s holding a small crocheted beanie she made during rec time.
“Gone where?” the doctor asks.
The Niña shrugs. “Heaven, I suppose.”
I think about this. Do all babies go to heaven, even those who never take a breath?
Crank
Speed, crank, meth, crystal, ice.
Swallowed, smoked, snorted, injected.
A cheap high. An epidemic.
In group they ask us to talk about any and all drugs we’ve used and why we think we’ll go back to it when we get out.
“I never used. Not the hard stuff.”
My blood hasn’t been tainted. I never feel the need crawling on my skin, digging into me like claws or fangs.
Really?
They don’t believe me.
I know a lot about drugs. Mostly what they do to a person, and I picked that up watching my cuates. A person uses them enough, they’re wasted on or off of them.
Hitler used speed. He was an aficionado. Passionately devoted to the stuff. They don’t tell you that in the history books. Stick with me, Chloe Doe. I’ll let you in on all the dope.
Your parents pop little white pills for a long-haul vacay. Drive through the night, and the next, and you asleep in the backseat, headlights passing overhead. Before you know it you’re at Grandma’s.
&nbs
p; It’s not new. For a while coke was the drug of choice, but for the working class, it got expensive. Zap! Back into the limelight.
Twenty-five dollars of coke gets you an hour high. Twenty-five dollars of meth gets you three, sometimes five hours.
You can’t beat that. More for your money.
And it’s the same thing. Gives you the same rush. You feel like you can run a marathon and discover the cure for cancer.
I’ve seen labs set up in motel rooms. In garden sheds. In mobile homes way out in the middle of nowhere, that suddenly become the center of activity. First giveaway. That’s when you’re too doped up to be making it. There’s a general street rule: if you’re making it, you shouldn’t be taking it.
Last year a lab blew the roof off a house in East L.A. and set the whole block on fire. It exploded like it was the Fourth of July. I never saw anything like it. Houses went down like cardboard, and all the firemen scrambling like busy little bees, and dumbstruck. What can you do? It was a meth lab.
The little niña-woman, my roommate, confesses: She swallowed a bottle of baby aspirin. She was nine. Her parents rushed her to the hospital and they pumped out her stomach. She said she ate Mexican for dinner and it came up like acid. It burned her nose. Small chunks of tortilla chips got stuck in her throat. It made her cry.
Her parents stood next to the bed wondering if she was going to die. Her mother said, “Save my baby. Please, please, please.” And the father rubbed the mother’s arms and told her there was no chance Tammy was going to die. It was just a bottle of baby aspirin, for God’s sake. Just a bottle of baby aspirin.
This inocente, she said she thought at the time, listening to her father talk about the baby aspirin as if it was a moron’s choice of relief, that she should have taken the Tylenol. It was on the top shelf of the medicine cabinet and if she’d been more into it, if she’d thought it through rather than thinking anything would do, she’d have grabbed a bottle of something that would work.
Hospitals don’t take childhood suicide attempts for real. They asked her, Why did you swallow the baby aspirin? and she told them she did it because she liked the way they tasted — like vitamin C and a little bit like Tang. They’re also a pretty color, like orange SweeTarts.
Chloe Doe Page 4