Girls Like Us Read online

  “My boyfriend tried to shoot me and I grabbed the gun and now I’m here cos I shot him by accident. But he was beating me every day and I was scared of him. I don’t understand why they didn’t lock him up before this all happened. I didn’t mean to kill him, I just wanted him to stop.”

  Girls are crying as they speak. The girls sitting next to them cry, too; their backs are rubbed, some compassionately, some awkwardly. Soon most everyone in the room is crying. I’m wiping away tears, too, as the group continues. Teachers drift out quietly and yet the girls don’t want to move. Something’s happening in the room that was unforeseeable an hour ago when the rowdy, boisterous group had sauntered their way in pushing, cursing, cracking on each other. The room has let down its guard, without the defenses, the anger, the front that has been carefully erected often for years prior to their incarceration, if not hastily built as soon as they hit the island. “Weakness” is not accepted in an adult correctional facility, despite the fact that most of these girls are not even of the age of majority and should be experiencing high school in a very different environment. Yet here we sit together listening, allowing each other to share raw emotions, to be scared, to be hurt, to be girls just for a few minutes. Even in my naïveté, I’m clear that once we leave this room their defensive fronts have to return, which is perhaps why they seem so reluctant to leave.

  A girl with a scarf covering her mousy hair and pockmarked skin who’s been sitting near the front, tears streaming, finally speaks.

  “I’ve been in the life too—I was on heroin, and I had a man who was pimping me out to everyone to buy drugs. I can relate to what you were saying about nearly dying cos I nearly died too. They tied me up in a bathtub and stabbed me in the head with a screwdriver.”

  She leans forward and pulls her hair back. The wounds are horrific—fresh and red; her whole head is littered with lumps of raw flesh and there’s a collective gasp from the rest of the group.

  “I thought I was going to die, but somehow I lived and managed to get out. And now I feel like you came here for a reason to tell me that I was supposed to live. I never heard no one talk about this stuff, about the stuff you did, that I did.” She chokes up. “I’m glad you came.”

  The room murmurs assent and I’m choking up, too.

  A petite Latina with long black curls, who’s been the most silent and reserved of the whole group, finally speaks up and looks directly at me. “She’s right, you was sent here, miss, for us. God sent you. Everyone else, the counselors and stuff, they can be nice, but they had a luv-luv life. You feel me? A luv-luv life, they read about the shit we went through in some book—that’s good ’n’ all but you lived this shit. It’s different, your life was like ours, some the same, some different but you been there, you feel me? And look, you came all the way from a whole nother country to here. To New York, to Rikers! That’s kinda crazy, if you think about it, you feel me? So that’s why I know. God sent you. To us. To help us be strong. To let us know we not alone and we can be all right too.” She finishes her pronouncement and sits back in her original spot against the wall.

  Later I’ll learn her name, Miranda, and that she’s incarcerated for murder. Over the months that she’s incarcerated, before she’s finally sentenced and sent upstate, we’ll connect occasionally but we’ll never be particularly close, yet her words will reverberate for months and then years to come. I’ll never really hear the term luv-luv life again but it will stay in my mind as a perfect description of those who seem untouched by life’s horrors and tragedies, for whom childhood memories conjure up joy and innocence, for whom the thought of family evokes comfort and safety and for whom the word love remains undistorted and untainted by disappointment, by violence, by fear. Over the years I won’t meet many girls who’ve had luv-luv lives, yet thanks to Miranda, I’ll remember that that’s the whole point of my being here.

  For most first-time visitors to New York City, there are a few essential tourist spots: the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, Times Square. However, for the first six months that I live in New York, the only place I can cross off my “must-see” list is Times Square and that is only because, at the time, it was still home to a burgeoning sex industry. My list of places visited went something like this:

  Hunts Point market—creepy industrial area at night in the Bronx

  Long Island City/Queensboro Plaza (under the bridge)—creepy industrial area at night in Queens

  Flatlands—creepy area at night in Brooklyn

  A few other assorted deserted areas

  A youth homeless shelter

  Rikers Island jail

  I came to New York City in August 1997 to work as a missionary for an agency that works with adult women in the commercial sex industry, a job I’ve obtained not based on my sparse résumé, which consists of being a waitress and a nanny, but rather on my rare admission that I’ve worked in the sex industry, too. Given that I have moved from Germany to the States for work, I don’t really expect to be living it up in tourist hot spots, but I don’t know that I’m really prepared for night after night of street outreach to some of New York’s most notorious tracks. The first night in Hunts Point, located in the poorest congressional district in the country, the South Bronx, I’m horrified by the quiet, deserted industrial landscape. All I can think as I drive around is serial killer’s paradise. So many dead-end streets, Dumpsters, the absence of streetlights, no one around for miles to hear you scream. Over the next few years, the Disneyfication of Times Square pushes sex stores, strip clubs, and the street-based sex industry farther and farther into neighborhoods like this, areas where no tourists from Iowa want to visit and residents’ concerns about crime and safety are largely ignored.

  It is in these dark, desolate areas that I do outreach, talking to women and girls on the street, although in the beginning, these conversations are often fairly one-sided.

  “Hey, how you doing?”

  “Would you like some hot chocolate/coffee/candy/a toiletry pack?”

  “So, my name’s Rachel. . . . I’m from an agency that works with women on the street.”

  Often they ignore me, so casually and easily, as if I am simply an annoying fly that is buzzing near their ear. Sometimes they give me the once-over and weigh up quickly that this little girl with a funny accent isn’t po-lice and doesn’t have much to really offer. And once in a while, on a slow night, they begin to talk to me and I learn names, street names but still; whether they have children and where they got that cute jacket/shoes/earrings. It isn’t deep but it’s a start. The more I’m out there, though, the more they learn about my story. And soon they introduce me to others, particularly the younger girls. I learn not to bother them too much on a busy night, to be aware if we are being observed by their pimps, to not take up too much of their time if we are. For months, the only people I really meet are girls and women who are being sold on the streets.

  Nights are for street outreach. Daytimes I go to detention centers, shelters, and Rikers, where the girls and women who come in are scorned by staff and the other residents or inmates alike.

  “Whatcha daddy gonna do for you now, huh?”

  “Nasty ho.”

  If the other girls and women didn’t know what the girl was in for, the guards or staff made sure to announce it. To have been on the street, to be in “the life,” as the girls called it, was to be on the lowest rung. It didn’t matter how old they were; they were shunned and mocked as dirty, nasty, hos, whores, hookers, dumb bitches. In this environment, it is jarring to go public for the first time about my own experiences: The looks, the snide comments—particularly from the adults, who are supposed to know better—make me flush with shame and cry at night. It isn’t surprising to me then that the girls go back to the familiar, where they are at least accepted, even if that means being sold and abused. Most of them really didn’t have anywhere else to go. The girls are surprised, and then relieved, when they realize I won’t judge them. In the beginnin
g, simply not judging them and my own story are about all I have to give, and while we develop some good relationships, I know that I have to be able to offer them more.

  The first girl that I really work with one-on-one is Melissa, a strikingly beautiful seventeen-year-old who towers over me even in her sneakers. Melissa is an angry young woman who is often frustrated by my lack of knowledge about the welfare system, the housing system, the subway system, and anything else even remotely useful. I’m woefully naive in thinking that I just need to be supportive and caring and offer encouraging platitudes, which Melissa often throws back in my face as she struggles to leave her one-year-old daughter’s father, who has also been her pimp since she was fourteen. With Melissa, I negotiate the bureaucratic nightmares that are endemic to every public system and grow angry right along with her that caseworkers look bored with her plight and have no answers for her situation. It is on these long, tedious trips to the clinic, to the welfare office, to the housing offices that we begin to bond, albeit reluctantly on Melissa’s part. While she and I share a common understanding about the general workings of the life, she is frequently impatient, often downright scornful, of my lack of knowledge about street slang—“What’s the track?” “What’s a wife-in-law?”—and the intricate rules of “the game.” “Why do you have to walk in the street and not on the sidewalk?” “Why can’t you look a man in his face?” Melissa becomes my teacher, and I begin to make the connections between the things that I’d experienced and the stories she’s telling me. The area where girls worked on the street is called the track; the girls I tried to recruit to work for my “boyfriend” would’ve been my wives-in-law; the money I had to give my “boyfriend” was my quota; oh, and my boyfriend, yeah, he was actually a pimp. This was probably one of the hardest things for me to verbalize and it would take a while for me to really accept that reality.

  Jennifer, my next tutor, is a moonfaced Latina who would call me at 6 a.m. after a beating. I’d meet her at the train station and let her sleep on my couch. After a night or two, Jennifer would find her way back to her pimp, although eventually she stayed with me three, four nights, then for almost two weeks as I searched desperately for a program out of state that would take her. From Jennifer I learn that leaving the life takes practice, that girls need to try multiple times without having someone give up on them.

  Tiffany, who weighed about eighty pounds, ran up a ridiculous phone bill at our office calling psychic hotlines. Her pimp had cut off half of her hair and it was so badly matted that I had to take her to the hair salon to have her head almost completely shaved. No program would take Tiffany: She didn’t have a drug problem, a prerequisite for most programs that cater to her age. One night she disappeared for a few hours and returned proudly announcing that she’d smoked crack and was now eligible for the drug program, but we had to hurry cos she wasn’t sure how long it would be in her system. From Tiffany I learn how few resources are available to meet the needs of these girls, and how few people understand what they’ve experienced.

  I meet Aisha at Rikers. One day she rolls up a leg of her sweatpants to show me the crude tattoo of her pimp’s name that he’d hand-carved into her inner thigh as he sat between her legs holding a gun to her head. From Aisha I learn about the systematic violence of pimps, and make the connections to my own experiences. Kimmie, who is stabbed in the vagina by a group of men and left to die in the street, reminds me about the violence of johns.

  Then there’s Katherine, my first successful intervention, which I can’t really take full credit for. Katherine—soft-spoken, with delicate features—and I spend a couple of court-mandated days together and then talk on the phone a few times before she decides to return to her family in Houston. She goes back to school and eventually gets a Realtor’s license. Throughout it all she sends me cards and e-mails thanking me for our brief time together. I post her picture proudly over my desk. Katherine, I believe, comes into my life simply to encourage me that support does make a difference.

  Mostly, though, it is just tough, sad work. I listen and listen to story after story of fatherless girls; motherless daughters; parents lost to the streets; drugs; prison; domestic violence turned murder; sexual abuse by an uncle, a cousin, a neighbor, a teacher; running away; being put in foster care; meeting a man—that was central to every story—meeting a man who made promises, who made them feel safe. After a while, everywhere I look I see pain. Every teenage girl on the subway is a victim, or at least a potential victim. Every man, particularly middle-aged white men, the ones I most closely associated with johns, is a predator. I am both numb and oversensitive, overwhelmed by the need, the raw and desperate need of the girls I am listening to and trying to help. I’m overdosing on the trauma of others, while still barely healing from my own.

  I cry for hours at home and have fitful nights of little sleep. My nightmares resurface as my own pain is repeated to me, magnified a thousand times. It feels insurmountable. How can you save everyone? How can you rescue them? How do you get over your pain? How do you ever feel normal?

  I don’t have many answers, for myself or for the girls. So I listen and listen, doing my best to learn as much as I can, to make the connections, to be open and honest about my own experiences, to be sincere, to love them and not judge. And while that isn’t much to offer, it becomes the basis for some amazing relationships. I learn to be honest during that first year about what I can’t specifically relate to; while we share many common experiences, I can never claim to have lived someone else’s life. I wasn’t and never will be a thirteen-year-old black girl from Bed-Stuy who is sitting in a juvenile detention center. I have experienced different privileges and supports that sometimes leave me with a sense of survivor’s guilt. Yet still, despite the difference in cultures and even continents, in ethnicities and slang, threatened with guns or threatened with knives, sold in a club or sold on the street, our experiences are consistently more similar than different. The themes are common: the lack of family support; the need for love and attention; the early stages that felt almost good; the pain that kept us trapped; and the long, slow journey back to life, feeling all the while that we’d never quite be normal, that we’d never fit in—a message reiterated through family, through loved ones, through society’s view of us. Over and over it is clear for all of us that our backgrounds had prepared us for this. In one way or another, through abuse, neglect, abandonment, we’d been primed for predatory men, for an industry that would use us up and spit us out.

  Every new encounter provides a new mirror for me to view my own experiences through, and there is a level of selfishness during this period as I hunger to understand more about the girls’ lives in order to understand mine. If I could figure out what had happened to them, perhaps I had a better chance of explaining it all to myself.

  Chapter 2

  Risk

  There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul

  than the way in which it treats its children.

  —Nelson Mandela

  WINTER 1989, ENGLAND

  My room is the “isolation” room, windowed on three sides, where children who have contagious diseases and require constant supervision from the nurses are kept. Yet as our local hospital does not have a pediatric psych department, this is where I’m placed. Initially I’d been placed in a regular room, but when the nurses realized that every time I was left alone I would utilize all my creativity in finding new and inventive ways to attempt suicide, they moved me. I’d pretended to want to shave my legs so a gullible friend from school brought me razors. I’d developed a sudden craving for R Whites Lemonade, which was conveniently sold in a glass bottle. I’d used bandages to tie my neck to the plug hole in the deep sink and then filled it up. While none of these attempts has been successful, I’m left with sliced and diced wrists and a realization that no matter how much you want to die, the human body will not simply relax and let itself be drowned, especially not in a sink.

  My initial and most serious attemp
t, the one that has landed me in the hospital, is downing a bottle of wine with over forty of my mother’s various pills. I’m told that I flatlined for a few seconds and was brought back. A nurse cries later as she tells me this. I’m sad, too, but mostly because the student renting a room from my mother came back from France early and called an ambulance when she found me slowly passing out in the kitchen. Everyone tells me that I’m lucky to be alive.

  I stay in the hospital for three weeks, trying to cut, trying to drown, as social workers scramble to figure out what to do with a suicidal thirteen-year-old who’s adamant about not being placed into foster care. My mother is also rallying to keep me—despite the fact that just a couple of weeks ago she’d had a severe nervous breakdown and had locked herself in the bathroom and tried to kill herself as I pounded hysterically on the door. My stepfather, Robert, who moved out over a month ago and into his new girlfriend’s house, is banned by the hospital staff from visiting me, partly due to the fact that he showed up drunk, partly due to the fact that he kept yelling that I was “just like your mother,” and had to be escorted out. Given these facts, it’s a small miracle and probably not a great testament to the wisdom of my assigned social worker that I’m discharged home to my mother. Life, unsurprisingly, doesn’t get better.

  As a small child, I’m fortunate enough to live with my great-grandmother, my maternal grandparents, and my mother deep in the heart of the countryside of Dorset. My mother shows no signs of the struggles that she’ll later face when alcoholism will take control of her life and fling her (and me) around like a floppy rag doll. In fact, she doesn’t even drink then. She is the quintessential good single mum: endlessly devoted; creative and permissive about my freedom to explore nature, art, play; fiercely protective; firm about my tantrums. We are close in a way that only a single mother and an only child can be. My grandmother, much to my chagrin years later when I discovered the photographic evidence, makes us matching outfits. A child of the late seventies, sadly these outfits consist of pinafore dresses and smocks with lots of flowers. At the time, though, I’m thrilled to be mimicking my young, pretty mother.