Chloe Doe (5 page)
Then I say to myself, Can’t be. That’s not the way I’m going. I had a premonition: death by drowning.
I dream about it. I feel it inside like it’s happened to me before. In another life maybe. Or did I drown when I was a baby, was saved, and remember only the feeling of it? Like suffocating. Tumbling, and then the sweet oblivion. Not caring if I get a last breath. I’ve found what I’ve been looking for all my life.
So I figure it’s got to be drowning. Or maybe strangulation. Maybe some twisted john’s going to get me with an extension cord. But he’s not going to kill me off slow.
My death is decided and AIDS doesn’t come into it. But it’s something that’s always at the back of my mind. It’s got to be. It keeps me careful. It’s enough of a worry that any john that looks sick, any beyond skinny, any with scabs on his face or hands, and I say, No, thank you. I tell him, unless he has a bona fide, signed and sealed certificate of health dated yesterday, I don’t do it.
“Not for a hundred dollars?”
Not for a thousand. Not for ten thousand dollars and your Cadillac. I’ve still got things to do with my life.
Another thing is junkies. They’re so hooked on smack, they’ll break your hundred-dollar trick by doing it for twenty.
It’s robbery. They undermine the business. You get ten crackheads out on the street on a good night and your take is half what it should be.
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.
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, she 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.
”
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.