Vickie's Prostitution Blog

Today at YANA

2010-08-05T15:43:00.000-07:00

For those who are new to this site: YANA is a nonprofit program in Baltimore for women who prostitute or who have prostituted in the past. In the years that the YANA counselors met thousands of times with hundreds of women, they found that almost all of the clients were victims of overwhelming childhood sexual abuse -- often perpetrated by their own families. Fathers, stepfathers, uncles, cousins, and big brothers raped our women when they were little girls. Mothers, stepmothers, aunts, cousins, and big sisters pimped them out to family members, drug dealers, landlords, and strip club owners -- and sometimes molested them as well. The prostituting women we've met are often intensely conservative, shamefaced women doing what they were taught as children, while yearning for a community where they can be treated with respect. YANA is a place where they have that respect. Today's post gives an overview of the typical needs and accomplishments of our prostituted women. Anyone who wants to know more about the women discussed today can look them up through the labels on the right.

For those who are old friends of this site: today I'm posting updates on Liz, Jessie, Diane, Linda, Tina, and many others.

Liz: As the result of heroic effort by Heather, from People's Community Health, working through YANA, Liz has now had two meetings with social workers and doctors who are getting her into a detox program for alcohol, followed by a place to live. Liz has looked to be close to death for a long time. She was so thin, so often beaten up, so often in tears, trembling, praying not to die or telling us all that, "The Lord has me." Now at the age of 49, she is about to go on the "cocktail," getting treatment for her long term HIV infection (probable AIDS). She warned us all today that she'd be getting fat soon after the detox. Liz said she once weighed 185 pounds. She rocked back in her chair, legs spread and up in the air, one hand out giving us the finger. "I had a picture taken in a bikini just like this!" Then she roared with laughter along with the rest of us. "My son said, 'Mom! Put some clothes on!'" Liz has got to be Liz. Losing the addiction does not mean losing the attitude.

Jessie: She's been clean for years now, working full time at a job through her transitional program and taking classes through Open Doors. Jessie is a tremendously likable Black woman who wishes she had become a scientist, but thinks that the head trauma she suffered from an abusive boyfriend has left her "not smart enough" for serious study. Still, the hospital where she interned has called her back for an office job. She had done research work at the hospital during her internship that sounded at least comparable to the first job I got after getting a degree in English from William and Mary. Jesse has a handicapped son whom she gave up for adoption years ago when she was still using. She longs for contact with him, but knows, "I can't give him the kind of lifestyle he enjoys now." Jessie has saved $500 that she wants to give the adoptive mother to spend on Jessie's son as well as the woman's other children.

Diane: Diane is doing better with her depression and anxiety, though taking classes on her HIV status has her frightened. She gets nervous sitting in a group of people she doesn't know, especially when they're talking openly about a subject that still makes her feel ashamed. Diane, a Black woman around the age of 40, loves other people, but she prefers to do little helpful things for them without having to spend a long time involved with anything emotional. She is planning to move out of her Section 8 housing without telling her on again/off again boyfriend and abuser where she is going. This much is great. Less great is her plan to let another man move in with her at the new place. He is someone she's known and liked for a long time, but the moving in together is his idea, not hers. This is a woman who once stood at an intersection for over an hour afraid that she would be hit even if she crossed with the light. A stranger finally helped her across. Diane really does not need anyone pressing her into an anxiety provoking situation.

Linda: An older White woman, Linda is one of my favorite clients. She's back in town after spending some time in Ohio with one of her daughters who needed her. While she was gone, another daughter moved without telling her. Linda stood at her daughter's old door knocking until the police drove up wanting to know why she was there. When she answered, the police accused her of wanting drugs instead (abandoned buildings quickly become crack houses). "No sir," Linda answered. "I've been clean for 3 years, and I don't want to go to jail no more."

"Oh, I've never heard that before!" the cop told her. "I guess I'll have to take your word!" (Yes, he was being sarcastic.) Linda continued explaining until suddenly the officer realized who she was. In fact, Linda's daughter had left a message and the new address with no one other than the officer's girlfriend. He gave it to her. Linda was still amused, telling me about it.

Later, Linda (forgetting how much I already knew) talked about how she stopped using heroin. She gave all credit to Sid, telling me that Sid talked to her for 4 1/2 hours. "I didn't know she knew the signs of when people needed to use, but she did. She told me she know I was going to see the money man as soon as I left. I said 'WHAT?!" Then I told her she was right."

I doubt that Sid (our director) spent a full 4 1/2 hours talking to an addict in need of a fix, but I know she spent a long time, and I know how deep and sympathetic her understanding can be. For many women, talking to someone like Sid can be a life changing experience. Linda didn't even go into rehab. She "lay down for 3 days" and didn't use drugs anymore. And she did one other thing: she rescued a 12 year girl out prostituting on Wilkens Avenue. That experience is written up on the Whatever Happened to the Little Girl post.

Linda was in getting donations, telling me the other women in her house got into her room and wiped her out while she was away visiting her daughter. How Linda -- blunt, street smart Linda -- could have been surprised by that still amazes me, and yet, our women are constantly being surprised by the bad things that happen to them. I guess they need to believe that their friends are nicer and their surroundings are safer than they really are just to survive.

Tina: Tina, a tiny white woman in her late 30s, didn't come in today, but she was in yesterday. She's suffering from pneumonia, which may actually be good news since she has been unable to breathe for some time. She's been afraid she was about to die like her sister did recently. Tina wants to live for the sake of her sister's children. She is very sick, and she is in pain. She flags; she rallies; she makes wise plans; she comes in drooping from what has to be a fist full of street pills on top of her methadone.

The New Women: Two new women came in today, one White, quiet, anxious-looking, the other a bit younger, Black, warmer and more outgoing, dressed a little crazy. They were both court ordered to YANA. I think they both liked it. Time will tell, but Sid, feeling a little exasperated, has said that women do as well at YANA when they're forced to come as when they choose to. My guess is that even the ones who are forced soon make the decision that they want to be in a place where they are welcome and respected.

Kimberly is Out

2010-07-17T20:41:00.000-07:00

Kimberly is one of our most troubling clients. She's smart, I think. She's definitely grandiose and hostile. She can contain herself for a little while, but as soon as she gets a little encouragement, she starts spiraling into crazier and crazier displays of superiority and contempt. Apparently, while I was on vacation recently, she became increasingly emboldened, to the point that she tried to lead a prayer for one of our most vulnerable clients, Liz.

That sounds like it might have been sort of nice, doesn't it? Kimberly began by announcing that Liz would die soon (probably true, and a prospect that has Liz absolutely terrified). Kimberly is quite loud when she's excited, and quite repetitive as well, so I'm imagining the nearly shouted insistence that Liz would die! die soon! certainly die! As always, she gave advice as well. She told Liz to get a life insurance policy so that she could have a funeral. Then she tried to lead the rest of the women in prayer for poor about-to-be-dead Liz. I gather that the other volunteers got her shut down at that point.

Kimberly left soon, and when she came back, she was told that she couldn't return until she had a conversation with Sid. This prompted a loud accusation of racism since Kimberly, like most of our current YANA clients, is Black. The other clients were having none of that. They defended the White volunteers, and told her to "just look around her" if she thought YANA was a place that didn't welcome Blacks. Kimberly threatened to go to Sid's superiors (there are none -- take that any way you like). When told that there was no one over Sid, Kimberly said she would complain to Hezekiah House (our landlords). She later tried an unscheduled meeting with Sid, was rebuffed, and did not return at the scheduled time. The plan at this point is that she is out for good.

There's good reason to ban Kimberly. She persistently pushes or breaks YANA rules. She lies; she manipulates. She attacks the other clients. She shows no sign of wanting or receiving anything positive from the organization. She's an enormous burden on the volunteers. I dislike her to the point that my skin crawls when I see her come in. And yet. . .

Yet, when I think of her, I find something enormously appealing in Kimberly. While I don't know her background, there's a lot of reason to believe that she's had the sort of childhood so many of our women have suffered through: malicious parents, serious sexual trauma, no protection, no stability. That's the sort of background that convinces you that you are less than the people around you. And Kimberly is resisting the only way she knows how. She finds someone weaker, and she stands over that person like a dog that's won a fight, howling to everyone in earshot, "Look at me! I'm better than this person! More than this person! I'm the one who can dominate!"

She's still trying so hard not to be worthless. I have a weird sort of admiration for Kimberly. I just can't help her. I can't change YANA to be the much more structured environment she needs. I can't work up much optimism that she'll find the sort of place she needs.

Tina's Sister is Dead

2010-07-17T14:02:00.000-07:00

I've posted about Tina many times. I've said that she is small; she is sick; she doesn't back down from a fist fight; she believes in revenge, and she believes in family. I've said that she and her cousin Liz remind me of a pair of leathery old cowboys, bones smashed almost to dust from all the hard falls they've taken, still riding the same sad, few streets of Baltimore with death, for each of them, almost visible on the horizon.

Somewhat more prosaically, I've also said that Tina's mother tried to hang her when she was still in elementary school and that Tina believes she was infected with HIV by the aunt who regularly injected her with heroin when she was 14. I haven't written how she became a prostitute because I've never asked her that. Anyway, I think I already know. A poor family like Tina's doesn't spend daily heroin money on little girls without a reason, and what more efficient, economical reason can there be than to keep them compliant for their tricks?

Another thing I haven't written about was how much Tina loves her sister. They're close in age, and although the sister was the favored child, she was still abused more than enough for Tina to cling to her and love her. Tina's sister got the heroin injections too, of course, prostituted, got HIV and then AIDS, got sick, gotten beaten, was in and out of comas. After her children were born, she went off heroin and onto methadone so she could care for them. She married, drove a car, lived in a Section 8 house with her mother and her family. Her husband was a drug dealer and violent, but he didn't hit her or their children. On the whole, Tina's sister seemed far healthier than Tina. Still, she spent a long time in the hospital, seemed to get better, then developed some sort of strange lung infection and rapidly died. Tina's reaction has been an enormous surprise.

Tina's using fewer drugs, often far fewer, so that she can care for her nieces. Drug dealer dad is still on the scene, but Tina doesn't think too much of his parenting abilities. She's sure she can do better. The Section 8 house has already been transferred to Tina's name because, in Baltimore at least, people with HIV get faster city services. She's afraid to live there with him, but she does so anyway for the sake of the children. To a very large extent, Tina has stepped into her sister's shoes and has begun living a healthier life. I had thought her sister's death might just kill her instead.

Tina herself seems to have at least a fair understanding of how much she is helping herself by helping her nieces. She told us one day that she didn't worry too much about her own daughter because she knew her child was happy and safe being cared for by her (paternal) grandmother. All of Tina's focus now was on her sister's daughters. Then Tina said she knew she was being selfish. Of course, we assured her that she was not. It might be more accurate to say that she was being the best sort of selfish, protecting and strengthening herself through a worthwhile mission. She may have been the last sort of person Ms. Rand and Mr. Brandon were thinking of when they wrote the "Virtue of Selfishness," but she's a living example of some of their better ideals.

Faced with tragedy, Tina did not give in. She did not accept merely surviving from day to day, hoping only to avoid greater pain. Tina has a project. She has love. She has a deep desire to impose her will on her own ugly little corner of the world and make it a better place. Despite all her many wounds, Tina is just plain strong. She makes me feel the way I did when I was 14: that there will always be a great love to be had, something important to do, a big fight to be won. All those romantics who used to write about the indomitable human spirit should be so lucky as to meet someone like Tina.

Grieving for Lilian

2010-07-16T20:35:00.000-07:00

This is the 6th or 7th time I've written something about Lilian, but it will be the first time I tell you about the person she has become. As I wrote in the beginning, she's a petite, white woman, well groomed, well dressed, somewhere near 50. When I first knew her, she was quiet, rather dull, in fact, and I didn't think so much of her. She'd stare into the distance or make some remark in her flat affect way, and then drift back into her mousy silence.

In the fall, her energy level picked up dramatically, and suddenly a lively, teasing, sweet natured personalty emerged. I assumed that the change in Lilian was a change in drug usage, and I was right. The Lilian who was fun to be around was the real Lilian, no longer repressed by whatever she was putting in her veins or taking in a pill. She was rapidly becoming sicker, though, leaning a little sideways from a stroke, her t-cell count plummeting almost to the point of full blown AIDS, going into the hospital with serious breathing problems. None of that seemed to bother her, however. Lilian had a level of denial that made her seem indomitable.

She disappeared for a while, and came back sicker than ever. She was still the same sweet natured Lilian, eagerly finding the good news or the humor in anything and laughing delightedly at her own self mocking jokes. The denial, however, was gone. She even spoke about having to start getting honest with herself about how sick she was. She was thankful for the support she received. She was thoughtful. She seemed like a remarkably well integrated adult. I don't know how such growth can be possible for a woman who was helped into prostitution by her mother while she was still in her teens and who appeared to have spent all or most of the long years that followed caught up in the trauma and addiction that come with a life of "getting into cars." Still, there it was. I saw the growth. I saw the whole person, the one that had been dormant all that time, blossoming forth with all her rich appreciation of the world around her.

Lilian came back sporadically, used the snow storm to manipulate an overnight visit with her grandchildren away from her transitional house. She was still a pleasure every single time she came. Recently, she has been gone for 8 weeks. It was time spent in the hospital and a nursing home. She is leaning on her cane much more dramatically now. She's had the AIDS pneumonia and probably another stroke. Her legs are badly swollen, and her hands shake from the seven medications she's on. She has an infection in her intestines that the doctors can't cure, and they've told her that they will have to remove her colon. That means a colostomy bag.

Lilian is still alive. She's still a lovely person but every time I see her now, I think of a snowman, slowly decreasing in the sun and the rain. It's hard to imagine a return to health for Lilian and hard to imagine that she has all that many more years left. She's still trying, though. She still has her good attitude. I'm going to try too, although my attitude isn't nearly as good. I hope to find a way to take her for a second opinion on the colostomy bag thing. Still, I've already started to grieve for a good woman who may have begun to enjoy her life only at its end.

Why do Women Prostitute? Part III

2010-05-27T13:48:00.000-07:00

Without prompting, a young YANA client wrote down some of her feelings and gave them to me to read. She also gave me permission to post her writing on the internet. Here is what she said:

When women get sexually assaulted people fail to realize that it lead's to alot of things. Some of us don't feel loved. We get into prostitution and other things. When being in situations like that we alway's seem to think that it's our fault but in reality it's there's.

We feel abandoned and it hurt's to really talk about our problems. Most of us have trouble sleeping, trusting people. I should know because that's how I started off. Some people ask what do you think about while your doing it? I said that it's different for others but your mind goes through phases.

When your out and about there's alot of things to watch out. The main one is getting locked up or having sex for no money. Alot of people will Judge you but not realizing the situation that brought you to this point. Most of us have flashback's about our rape or situation. Some of us would have never imagined that what we once endured as kids that's would be our situation year's later.

I'm so glad that I found someone who would really listen instead of Judging me. The trouble with most of us is that we have no guidance or no one to talk to about our problem's at all. Some people ask me what I'm addicted to the money or the sex? I'm addicted to the money because it's fast. It's not a easy journey for most but it's a stepping stone. If it wasn't for God, YANA and positive roll model's most of us would be still dealing wtih day to day life style that we once lived. By the grace of God I survived.

Mother's Day (almost) with the Prostitutes

2010-05-05T12:50:00.000-07:00

Today was slow for the most part, and I was bored, flipping through the equally boring books on a back shelf, more than a little resentful of the fact that YANA would close if I left early. Then, when it was finally almost time to go home, Janet came in. Janet was one of the first clients I met at YANA. Chronically stoned, speech slurred from drugs and not enough teeth, HIV positive, very actively prostituting, pregnant again with a small legion of children already scattered about the city in other people's custody, Janet sized me up and decided to call me "mom." Have I mentioned that I had no training and no background in working with prostitutes, or with addicts, or, for that matter, even with the poor? I found my new "daughter" (only about 10 years younger than I am) more than a little overwhelming. If she noticed that fact, Janet didn't care. She kept slipping me little notes about the hardships in her life and asking for small amounts of money. I didn't give her cash -- at least not all that often -- but Janet worked her will on me. I did become a sort of mom to Janet, paying her extra attention and doing extra favors for her.

It was hard not to feel for one of the most abused of all our severely abused clients. Janet's uncle began raping her when she was 3. He continued for 8 years, until he was arrested and convicted of it. He served one year in jail and was then welcomed back into the family with open arms. Janet's father began giving her heroin at about the same time. I've never heard why, but I'd be willing to bet he was raping her too or prostituting her out to his friends. What else would have justified the 10, 20, 30 dollars a day it cost him to keep her enslaved? When she was in her teens, her cousin killed her mother, and the aunts who had cared for her in the past abandoned her. When her father died many years later, Tim Bridges, YANA's deputy director, took her to the funeral. Her family hadn't wanted her to come. Apparently, they thought she wasn't good enough for them.

Despite her childhood of abuse -- and her adulthood of continuing abuse -- Janet had an oddly adorable, high spirited nature. She was an open hearted little girl who burst into tears when she was sad, then called herself a "crybaby," dried her eyes, made a joke, and went back out, smiling, to join her friends on the street. I don't think anyone expected her to make any big changes. She was our perpetual lost and loving child. Janet, however, had other ideas.

She is clean today and has legally regained custody of her two teenage daughters. The girls, who had endured years of, at minimum, emotional abuse, are giving their poor mother a run for her money. The little one shows her teacher and principal disrespect "in a horrible way" by pulling down her pants and telling them to kiss her ass. Janet, as she puts it, "perseveres." She tells them the right things. She goes to the school, monitors homework time, plays games on "family fun day" at home for as long as her teenagers will sit still for something like that. She takes them to Kennedy Kreiger for counseling. She is currently desperate for money, and we are arranging for her to talk to some people about a job. Maybe I'll slip her a hundred tomorrow, as a present to myself if nothing else. We don't see her very often any more, but it was something very fine to hear her talking today. For those of us who know what it is to be a parent, the example of Janet doing so much with so little is a wonderful thing.

And while I was talking to Janet, Tina came in with a client from the past I didn't recognize. Tina pulled out an elaborate, music playing Mother's Day card, asked the spelling of my name, and made it over to me with several inscriptions offering sweet kisses and warm hugs. She had several other Mother's Day cards as well, for, I assume, her own mother (see previous posts about the attempted hanging) and whatever other women she has adopted as her own.

The client I didn't recognize, Gloria, told me that her mother was murdered in 1992 and that her son "died at her feet" 7 months ago. I told her that we would celebrate Mother's Day tomorrow and that if she came back she might want to participate in a talk about our mothers and our children. I told her that a lot of the women had children who had died, and that many of them would want to share happy memories of their daughters and sons. Gloria seemed eager to come.

Motherhood -- the failings of our clients' mothers, the failings of our clients with their own children -- is a deeply felt theme in the women's lives. So many of them try so hard. So few of them give up hope.

Tina

2010-04-29T17:34:00.000-07:00

I saw quite a bit of Tina yesterday. Other than her methadone, she continues to stay clean. It's been months since she nodded out at YANA. She seems to be making friends. She has even begun to take on expression in her face and voice so that she matches her own words, laughing, frowning, and smiling as she speaks. It's really sort of wonderful to be near her, and, still, sort of horrifying as well. The story of her life hasn't changed much.

Her sister has been in the hospital, very seriously ill, for more than 30 days now. Tina makes the daily pilgrimage to visit her. Because the sister had served as a buffer between her and her mother, Tina has also made the entirely reasonable decision to live in a shelter while her sister is gone (see some of the previous posts on Tina to find out what a piece of work that mother of hers is). Tina believes, also entirely reasonably, that her own health has dangerously deteriorated, but she won't get medical care herself. She wants to wait until her sister is home, with her children, not waiting on Tina's daily visits.

In the shelter, Tina met up with up with one of our old clients who's come back to town. Tina brought her in and begged a blanket for her as diligently as she begs for herself and her sister. A grad. student who comes with the professors gave the woman a beautiful, embroidered blanket that she kept in her car. Tina also brought another woman from the shelter, an older woman with what to me was a fascinating appearance. She was slightly built, hair completely covered by a red bandanna. She was wearing a jacket with a skull and cross bones motif (see superstition post for how common something like that is at YANA). She moved with the slow, hesitant gait of many of our women over fifty, and she had a face that reminded me of a turtle's -- bony, with a blunt nose and chin that protruded out at about an equal distance. Tina and this new woman, Marcy, are friends now, but apparently Marcy had previously avoided Tina. Tina explained that she had originally planned to beat Marcy up in retaliation for something a childhood friend claimed Marcy did. Marcy knowing how Tina fights ("I never stop," Tina explained) kept her distance. Tina considered, however, Marcy's age and the fact of her pace maker and decided not to. Then she found out that her childhood friend had lied, and she and Marcy are friends.

"How did Marcy know how you fight?" I asked Tina.
"She's seen me," Tina answered.

That was what I'd figured. It's hard to know what to say to any of that. For one thing, Tina weighs about 11 pounds and has one tooth (o.k., maybe a few more pounds and a few more teeth, but still, she looks like a sweet, little gap-toothed 8 year old, or possibly a wizened little, almost toothless 100 year old.) For another, Tina will sometimes stop in a fight. She's stopped before when she and the other women both ran completely out of breath. For a third thing, though, if someone hadn't intervened, she really probably would have started back up once she could breathe again. Sweet, serious, horrifically sick and abused little Tina is long on ideals and short on pragmatism. And somehow she still has the fight left in her to carry out the family ideal of retaliation. Little Tina is nothing if not loyal.

Santa Clause is Dead

2010-04-29T17:11:00.000-07:00

Jennifer walked in. "Santa Clause is dead," she told the room flatly. That wasn't a joke or a bit of irony. Santa Clause was a homeless man who lived in her neighborhood. She had talked about him many times, how he was a fat, white man w/ a tummy like Santa Clause. How he fixed his abandomium up nice and everybody liked him. How children liked to hug him and call him Santa and how he cried one day because, she thought, he wasn't used to being hugged and loved by children or anyone else. How eventually he came to trust her well enough to knock on her door at night if he was hungry and know that she would always give him food.

Santa Clause was in intensive care from the beating someone in the neighborhood gave him. Jennifer worried about him. She tried to visit, but didn't know his real name. This morning, she heard that he died. She said that this weekend she would buy some balloons, say a prayer, and release them in his name. Jennifer loves her neighborhood, all however many blocks of poverty, drug abuse, violence, early death, neglected children and battered women. She absolutely loves it. And when you love a group of people you invent -- or perhaps simply recognize -- all kinds of small beauties, kindly characters, funny moments within their midst. Jennifer's own neighborhood had just killed one of hers.

Liz's Rainbow

2010-04-27T20:44:00.000-07:00

Some of our professors are back -- I'll let them write in and identify themselves if they care to -- and they're asking our women about their hopes and dreams again. They brought craft supplies for YANA clients to make big pictures of their goals. Liz, dressed like the 60s had exploded all over her, purple tie dye, giant dream catcher earrings and all, spoke up right away. "The rainbow!" she called across the room. "I'm going to paint the rainbow!"

I was surprised by how excited I was by the thought of Liz revealing her goals. "At the end of the rainbow?" I asked. "What's at the end of Liz's rainbow?" Liz just smiled. I went back to taking care of the day to day needs while Liz joined the four or five women who were who were making their posters. Liz got into the glitter markers right away. She drew a long, brilliant rainbow from corner of the poster board to the opposite corner, using no colors any rainbow ever saw.

"What's at the end?" we asked. She told us there was a pot of gold, then obliged by drawing a few round smudges to represent the pot. When we asked what was in the pot, Liz answered, brightly, a little uncertainly, "Everything."

Other women drew happy homes, sobriety, pretty clothes, peace. Liz had no idea of what to draw. I don't think she has ever had any dreams, just a wild, long streak of glitter and her name signed beneath in tall, red letters.

Our Client's Children, Part II

2010-02-18T14:36:00.000-08:00

The storm closed YANA, trapped most of us in our homes, left the Washington/Baltimore area frustrated and out of sorts, but for Lilian it became a source of profound enjoyment. She used it to engineer an overnight visit with her children and grandchildren and was still glowing with the pleasure of it when she came back to YANA. Lilian, like the other women she lives with in her transitional home, is required to follow a strict schedule with curfews. She got up early the day our second storm was expected and took the long bus trip to her children's home. By the time she was "ready" to leave, there was no transportation, and she was forced to stay overnight.

"You engineered that!" Her house manager said when she finally returned at the end of her second day out. "Why else would you have gotten up so early to go out there?" I don't know how Lilian answered at the time, but she laughed gleefully when she told us the manager was absolutely right. She had engineered a long visit with her grandchildren, and it was wonderful. She even slept with the three of them and cooked for them the whole next day. Lilian also explained, quite offhandedly, that the five year old and six year old boys are "slow" because they're drug babies. The 11 month old daughter is smart, though, and fast, and "evil." And then Lilian went back to her grandmotherly pleasure in the baby's fat thighs and boisterous ways and how lovely it was to have a long visit with them at last.

I picked Diane up yesterday, and both of us waved to a little girl sweeping snow on a neighbor's porch. Diane told me that the girl, like other children from the area, visits her often. The visits were painful for Diane, though, because they make her more lonely for her own children, who live with Diane's sister. Diane does talk to them every couple days, though, and believes that she will get them back soon.

Annie went to jail recently for protecting her daughter. The daughter's boyfriend had managed to throw her and their children out of their apartment, but the daughter had returned with the help of the landlord and regained the apartment and gotten a restraining order against the father of her children. He broke back in while Annie was visiting.

You don't always know which stories you hear are true, but I thought, and Sid, with her many years of counseling expertise, also thought, that Annie was telling exactly what she remembered. Annie's eyes got big as she marveled over how fast the man moved, rushing through the door and straight at her pregnant daughter. He got his hands around her throat and was choking her when Annie's own vision began to falter. The room dimmed for Annie. She wasn't sure of all the things that happened next, but she knew they resulted in the boyfriend on the floor, his nose gushing blood, straddled by Annie. She also remembers thinking that it was her daughter who was pulling her away and only slowly realizing that it was actually the police. Annie, belligerent, hyper-aroused Annie, was the one who ended up being arrested. And within a few days, the daughter began letting the boyfriend back in for visits. "I'm not going to jail for her again," Annie announces in her flat, gravelly voice. "I've been there once. I'm not going again." The daughter still calls, though, and Annie still goes.

Tina spent a lonely Christmas in the hospital, but was cheered when someone brought her a picture of her daughter beside the tree. The little girl was smiling, surrounded by an enormous pile of presents for her and her cousin. Wisely, Tina has consented for her daughter to be raised by her paternal grandmother. The child visits with Tina often, and Tina can see that she is being well cared for. Tina explained that her daughter's father had ten brothers and sisters, and that they each were given only one present for Christmas. The women at the table all agreed that this was a reasonable decision on the parents' part and the children were probably happy to get that.

Tina didn't argue this point (though I'm not sure she agreed with it either). Apparently, however, the girl's father had at some point mentioned the possibility that one Christmas present would be enough for their child. Tina's usual monotone took on emotion at this. "Oh no," she said. "Oh no, oh hellll no." She shook her small head. "I told them this isn't the old days. My daughter can't get just one present." Tina's little girl gets all the presents her family can manage, and Tina contributes as much as she can. Whatever donated toys and clothes Tina can get her hands on at YANA (we don't have many, but Tina is actually quite gifted at acquiring whatever is in sight) go to that little girl. So does Tina's money from her small disability checks. Tina has never said anything about the toys and presents she got as a child, but she mentioned just recently that her godmother's son raped her when she was eight. Tina told the godmother, who responded by putting her over a chair and beating her with a belt. I doubt she even tried to tell her own mother.

Diane Update

2010-02-12T10:23:00.000-08:00

The local snow storms have prevented Diane from beginning her GED program, but she is still planning to enroll. She's still interested in a number of things, and I am still reminded, from time to time, that her being interested in anything is a triumph. When I drove her home the other week, she mentioned, out of nowhere, that former Baltimore Mayor Dixon (recently driven from office by a conviction for stealing, of all things, gift cards meant for the poor) said she had no regrets. I told Diane that saying you have no regrets seems to be the fashion now days, and that I thought it was ridiculous. I said I certainly regretted some of the things I've done, or failed to do. Diane said she had regrets as well. She regretted a 20 year drug addiction. I had to admit that was a pretty big thing to have to look back on.

Diane went on to tell me about she began. Apparently, not until she was almost out of her teens. She was pregnant, living with the baby's father, who told her he was going out to a job every morning. The job turned out to be a) dealing and b) stealing drugs from higher up dealers. She discovered his actual occupation when she came out of the bedroom one morning to find him dead, in a pool of his own blood. When I murmured whatever banality I came up with ("Sorry to hear it. Must have been hard for you" or the like), she segued effortlessly into memories of having been raped repeatedly by her stepfather as a child, starting at about the age of eight.

As people who read this blog know, childhood sexual trauma, especially within the family, usually precedes our clients' entry into prostitution. I've heard about so many forms of child molestation, so many times, that all I typically register is the extent to which the woman is comfortable talking about it. Usually, though, I'm spared any of the details and the resulting mental images. It was painful to hear that Diane's stepfather "used to put vaseline on his private parts" before raping her and her sister. And it is always painful for me to hear whom the women blame, whom they absolve from all blame.

In Diane's case, there was her sister, mentioned in tones equally wistful, bitter, and confused, who left home without protecting Diane. It sounded as being abandoned by her older sister, the only other person in the world who shared in Diane's secret torture, might have been almost as painful as the rapes themselves. But, Diane volunteered twice, in tones of satisfaction, her mother never knew anything about it. She had no idea at all.

Being raped by the men in the family is bad enough. Having a mother who either consented to the abuse, or was so far removed from her daughter's life that her child knew better than to go to her for protection is simply unbearable. That is the thing that can never be acknowledged.

Liz, Again (No Good Deed Goes Unpunished)

2010-02-12T07:08:00.000-08:00

Liz was in, looking sick, distressed, pulling out an envelope full of medical forms for me to see. She showed me six prescriptions and gave me the copay amounts for each. They totaled about $21.00, which seemed reasonable to me. Liz often comes in needing copays. She stays a couple hours, washing up, picking out new clothes, weeping, and chatting, and bragging, always leaving in a visibly better mood. This time, however, one of Angela's community health care crew pulled me aside to talk about Liz.

Without giving any privileged medical information, the woman told me how badly Liz had acted out at the hospital. "Showing her tail" was the phrase used. I tried to believe that was a metaphor. Unfortunately, it was not.

I told her that of all our battered clients, Liz was the one most frequently beaten, that she goes through long periods in which she seems to suffer a serious physical trauma nearly every week. The woman nodded in ready comprehension, "Hmm hmm, with that mouth," she said. No argument there. This time Liz had been acting out with the health care providers who were trying to get her into the long term rehab she needed to save her life. "She doesn't want the prescriptions. She's dope sick," the woman concluded.

And there I was about to hand Liz enough cash for two hits of heroin at the same time that our group was swelling from its normal size of 5 to 15 to more like 30, when I needed to leave YANA to pick up a volunteer who had generously made lunch for the crowd, when a tired-looking middle aged woman who had been procrastinating for months over reentering the job market had finally decided that she was ready to work on her resume with me, and, when, oh, yes, Kimberly had shown up with her nephew (see the previous post). I took the coward's way out, got the health care worker to agree to take Liz to get the prescriptions filled, and hurried out the door to get the lunch and volunteer, stopping only to tell Liz that she was getting a ride to the drug store. Liz reacted with a lot of quick talk about how she didn't need a ride. She was in a hurry. Nobody needed to treat her like that. She needed her medicine right now -- in other words, with all the anger and agitation you would expect from a junkie being denied a fix. Whether Liz is on drugs again (likely) or whether she was that overwhelmed by a delay in getting her usual fifth of vodka (also entirely likely), she was in no shape for me to leave, and I was in no position to stay and try to -- I don't know -- talk her out of needing drugs or booze? I left. She was gone by the time I returned, and there were plenty of other things to do then.

It wasn't until the next week that I found out that Liz had sat in the open area of YANA loudly cursing the health care work in front of the other women, that she had screamed so much in the car that she was dropped off at the drugstore rather than supervised there, that the health care worker and Angela then had words about whether the rules even permitted her to drive a client anywhere. . . In other words, no good deed goes unpunished. You can't care about people's recovery more than they do. Some people can not be helped. Liz is Exhibit A for a whole host of truisms.

And yet, in frequent, but very short intervals, Liz can be loving and funny and kind. She holds on, holds on valiantly, to a kind of cowboy pride in her own sexy toughness. She also seems to go out looking for trouble, daring a world in which dares are answered with gun butts to the head, a pair of girls kicking her in the ribs and face once they've gotten her down, a boyfriend who hits her with his fists. Then she basks in whatever love she can get, gets back up and swaggers right out there again. Liz in other words, is still full of life, however twisted and self defeating that life may be. The next time I'll probably just put everything else on hold and go get the medicine myself.

Kimberly

2010-02-11T12:44:00.000-08:00

Remember Kimberly, the cake-making YANA client who had so much to tell us about Liz's evil sister? Well, Kimberly herself is turning out to be more than a handful. She starts off upbeat and enthusiastic about her latest adventures; then, when she gets the usual YANA response of enthusiasm and approval, she rapidly becomes louder, more aggressive, more profane. It isn't long before she's flying around the room like a rickety but triumphant little World War I fighter plane, engine rumbling, spraying us all with equal parts contempt and self congratulation. If she's talking to someone like me, the contempt is in the intonation. If she's talking to another client, she can pretty much take leave of reality.

One time she found a client's coat slipping off the back of a chair. She picked it up and made a comment about straightening up someone else's clothes. There is a lot of doing small things for each other at YANA and then wanting, really needing, to be thanked. The other client thanked her. That was the first, modest little loop of the spiral. Then Kimberly expounded on the negligence of the slipped coat and explained she wasn't anyone's maid. Another crooked loop or two of Kimberly chasing her good deed and the other woman's failure, and suddenly Kimberly was off in the ozone, machine guns firing, loudly playing the part of the outraged mother, telling another middle aged woman that when she was in her own home she could make her own rules, but until she got her own home. . . etc. Thankfully, the woman being berated chose to ignore her.

On another day, when we were especially busy, Kimberly brought her nephew to YANA and then prepared to leave him while she ran an errand. I told her that under no circumstances could she leave a child unattended at YANA. After a little argument and what seemed like genuine disappointment, Kimberly agreed. I foolishly walked off to attend to the two or three other claims on my attention, and walked back in to discover the boy sitting alone, Kimberly nowhere in sight. She had walked off under the nose of a very good YANA volunteer, having coolly led her to believe that she had permission to do so. She did return in 45 minutes or so and listened politely as I explained that she was banned from YANA for the 10 days. Later I found out that she had first assailed another client for not having done enough to take care of the boy.

Although Sid approved -- very highly, in fact -- of the temporary YANA ban, I really don't know how to deal with Kimberly. YANA is a place where we encourage people. It's where we try to help women with a long, long history of abuse begin to feel good about themselves again. But when we show Kimberly approval, or warmth, or even basic respect, she takes it as permission to behave badly. Contain, repress, "take that woman down a peg," just isn't the way we do things at YANA. And I can't think of any client we've had who's been quite like this one.

Thinking about her more, though, I wonder why not. It would seem to me that grandiosity would be a natural enough counterbalance to shame, and shame is a constant theme in our clients' lives.

Updates

2010-02-03T08:06:00.000-08:00

Lilian has gotten all her bottom teeth pulled. She was back at YANA looking well and making a valiant effort to eat tacos, shell and all, before settling for the meat alone.

Diane has signed up for a GED class! She should be in it right now. My hope is that the three of us -- Diane, Sid, and I -- can meet to form a sort of Team Diane to troubleshoot the problems she's likely to encounter. I can imagine quite a few, from learning disability to no money for the bus to depression to interference from that guy who persists in living with her. We can definitely give her bus money.

Helen came in briefly with her beautiful and probably overmedicated granddaughter. I saw the child twitching for a moment, but later she seemed o.k. I didn't get a chance to talk to her, just saw her eating a taco. Helen still lives with her daughter's family. The apartment she's had for months is sitting empty. I don't know if she doesn't have the energy and resources to get it furnished or if she just doesn't want to separate from her daughter and grandchildren. I gave her information another client brought in about a man who was giving away old furniture.

Love, Peace, and Hair Grease

2010-02-03T06:54:00.000-08:00

That was what Liz had to say a while back at the end of another long session of crying and comforting. Once she was all cleaned up, with her jeans tucked into her knee-high leather boots and her hair looking good, she got tired of all the mushy talk. When somebody tried to float another homily about God and doors opening her way as she left, Liz struck a little pose, two fingers up in a peace symbol and all, and announced "You know what they say, Love, Peace, and Hair Grease!" I was pretty much with her on the whole shutting up the well wishers thing. Their platitudes are almost as threadbare as hers, and we hear a lot more of them. Still, "love, peace, and hair grease?" That was weak even when it first came out in her childhood. She didn't have anything catchier, more updated than that to say?

No, she did not. Liz, like almost all of our clients, uses decades-old slang for everyday talk and the most painfully overworked of Christian one-liners for encouragement. Any aging suburbanite who's ever watched cable is likely to use an edgier, more modern vocabulary than our urban prostitutes do. For our women, an ass might be an ass, or it might be a heiney or hind parts. A person who uses a lot of drugs is an addict, or maybe a dope fiend. A vegetarian eats "nare any meat." Dirty dogs do their dirty deeds.

And there's little or none of the language that glorifies street violence. You are not going to hear that a gangbanger rolled up on someone with a nine or a glock or whatever the expression for a powerful gun is now. You rarely even hear the term "driveby." You just hear that someone got shot or almost got shot. And more often than you'd like, you hear that the victim was the woman's cousin or nephew, or, sometimes, her son. Which, I suppose, is a pretty good reason for not using any of the more exciting and accepting words for killing people.

And women in recovery never seem to tire of telling one another that they are blessed, that God never closes a door without opening a window, that God will never give you a burden you can't carry, and that they wish us a blessed day. And though the sentiments are very old, they are delivered, time and time again, as if they are urgent, and astonishing, news. Which, I suppose, they generally are.

We do have "abandominium," though. It's what we all call the abandoned buildings that the homeless move into. I don't know if it's local to Baltimore, or if it's a nationwide term. Either way, it's a delightfully jaunty word, making the joking best of the place that most of our women have at some time in their lives called home.

Our Client's Children

2010-01-20T11:45:00.000-08:00

Lynette wasn't in today, so I couldn't talk to her about her apparently brilliant and very troubled son. Helen came, though, with "good news" about her grandchildren. The older two children, girls aged 5 and 6, are in counseling now and both are on medicine for their hyperactivity. I've met these children in their home a few times now. So has Heather, and we were both surprised to hear them referred to as hyperactive by their grandmother. They were curious and well mannered, asked permission to step outside the house and again to go down to my car. They weren't loud. They asked questions and listened to the answers. But, they're both on the hyperactivity meds, and at least one is in a level 4 placement at Bon Secur. I'm not sure if she is the one who was raped by her grandfather, Helen's father in law, at the age of three. But that one, the rape victim, is still "hyperactive" despite the medicine. The three children are also on a different medication to help them sleep at night. Works like a charm, apparently. Sometimes they pass out even before they get to the bed.

What I do consider genuine good news is that the counselors are working with their mother, teaching her to use "time outs" instead of spanking and "hollering." The mother "does a lot of hollering," Helen explained. And, Helen continued, the children's father is still working, but not spending the money on the family. He spends it on drinking, and the two parents "party" and fight most the night in front of the children.

Maybe the kids really are hyperactive, rather than poorly socialized or made anxious by a chaotic environment and the rape. Maybe there actually is some medical benefit to knocking children unconscious every night. It certainly has to make life easier for the parents. An evening routine, story reading in bed, and consistent discipline are hard work. I can't help but think that fundamentally healthy children are being labeled and drugged to accommodate the sick adults who surround them.

Liz's Sister, Part II

2010-01-14T17:36:00.000-08:00

A wonderful woman, Angela Jackson, comes to YANA sometimes with her coworkers from People's Community Health Center to talk about AIDS and related health concerns. We had a moderate crowd of listeners, including a few women I'd never met before, and I sat in the back, enjoying another of Angela's smoothly-run lectures and discussions. Shortly into her presentation today, though, a tiny, strange looking woman entered the room. When I got my first, partial view of her, I thought I was looking at Liz, though when she turned to look in my direction, she looked quite different. I wondered why I thought of Liz at all.

The strange little woman sat up front near Angela, talking, interrupting, almost trembling with freakish, random, small waves of agitation. At one point, she got in some cross talk with another client and then said she apologized. Immediately, she said she apologized again. In about another half second she said again that she apologized, this time sticking her face forward and grimacing until it looked like the exoskeleton of an insect.

At one point Angela asked if anyone knew how Hepatitis A was spread. The strange woman said it was from using the bathroom and not washing your hands. She said that's how her dad got it since he had never used drugs. This particular revelation seemed to leave her momentarily relaxed and amused, but as Angela followed up on the spread of Hep. A through feces, the little woman's haggard face continued its rotating display of tics and sags.

At the end of the talk, the little woman made her way to me, said, "I'm Liz's sister! She's in the hospital, and I'm so worried." Then she fell into my arms, making crying noises without actual tears. Samantha was, indeed, a real person, and, at long last, I had met her.

There isn't too much to tell at this point. I took her back to talk to Sid and Angela, and Samantha immediately began interrupting again, explaining that she had brain damage. Soon Angela needed to talk to Samantha alone about some health questions. The good people from Community Health Center agreed to follow up with Liz's hospitalization, and I had to get back to the larger group. It seemed to me, though, that if you grew up loving Samantha, you would have to keep on loving her. She seemed so obviously brain damaged, so incapable of being anyone other than who she was, so far beyond any rational criticism or rebuke.

To my mind, one of the worst things you can say about anyone is that he or she can never be expected to do anything differently or better. It's condescending. It's saying the person is hopeless, saying she's doomed, and I have learned long ago that those poor, helpless people can prove you wrong every time. Probably, I tell myself, there's a lot more to Samantha than I've seen in this one little meeting. But, still, my God. It's actually disorientating to think that Liz must be the healthy one in the relationship.

A Note on Diane

2010-01-14T17:10:00.000-08:00

I haven't written about Diane in a while, but I have been thinking about her. Edgar is still living with her, but as far as I know, he hasn't been violent in a while. She went through a period of not coming to YANA and missed the Christmas dinner. And even after she returned, I began to think of how interested in the outside world she had been earlier, and how little interest I've seen her display over the past few months -- ever since Edgar moved in. Then I gave her a ride home yesterday, and right out of the blue, she said, "You know what my biggest shame is?"

You won't catch me changing the subject when a YANA woman says something like that. I asked her what it was. Diane's "biggest shame" is that she has trouble reading an analog watch. And by extension, that she is not as smart as she'd like to be, can't do math, dropped out of school in the 11th grade and began having babies.

We chat for a minute about learning disabilities, and I mention my very-smart husband who claims that he still has trouble keeping positive and negative numbers straight and remembering to write a "p" so that it doesn't look like a "b." Diane takes that in and seems encouraged. I ask if she's thought about getting a GED, and she tells me, quite eagerly, it seems, that she has. She wants one even if she has to start on a very low level learning to work with numbers.

Diane can get determined about a thing. I will help her in any way I can think of, including paying for a course if we can't find a free one. I hope the next Diane post brings good news.

Lynette -- Another New Client

2010-01-14T14:40:00.000-08:00

I had an extremely interesting first ten minutes of the day yesterday. I met Lynette, a smallish white woman with snaggly teeth, brown hair pulled back into a pony tail, and a quiet, likable air. She told me that she's clean now, but had a relapse not long ago. She said that she is working on honesty, and that once she is honest, everything else becomes so much easier. As she spoke, she took off her jacket, and I saw a large, elaborate tattoo of a woman's name, encircled by a heart, on her neck.

'Female lover or daughter?' I wondered. I had the bad feeling that I knew the answer. I asked who the woman was.

"My daughter," Lynette told me. "She was murdered almost five years ago. She was 15 years old." Lynette is not the first woman I've seen with that sort of In Memorium to a dead child. As I murmured a little series of generic sympathies, Lynette continued on about a candle light vigil planned for next month on the fifth anniversary of the girl's murder. She told me that the killers had not been caught, but that police believed three people were involved -- two "shooters" and a lookout. I couldn't think of a way to ask whether her little girl had burned somebody in a drug deal or whether she'd been figured for a snitch, so I just kept nodding and making sympathy noises.

We got back to the subject of Lynette's recovery soon enough, and Lynette told me she realized now how much her own behavior affected her seven year old son. She said that when she was at home and sober, he behaved fairly well. When she wasn't, he acted out. She also told me that he was currently suspended from school. When I expressed my frustration that children so young were suspended from school, she told me that he'd been suspended 13 times last year. "He unplugged every computer in the school. Not the classroom," she told me. "The whole school." Even if the little boy hadn't actually managed to get every single one, this struck me as a remarkably sophisticated prank for a 6 year old even to think of, much less pull off.

"Is he smart?" I asked.

Lynette smiled a bit. "We think he might be. He knows his times tables." Not too shabby for a second grader with a drug addicted, prostituting mother and a school that throws him out as often as it lets him in. "He could write his name when he was two," Lynette added.

Oh boy. YANA client with a genius son, who may have already started down the path of some seriously hostile behavior. Come to think of it, being executed at the age of 15 by a criminal organization of at least three people is pretty damn precocious too. Perhaps I was getting much too far ahead of myself in imagining Lynette's children on the basis of only a few startling facts, but, there we were. I was imagining them, still murmuring praise for the clever son and sympathy for the murdered daughter. Lynette, apparently having chatted enough, moved on to get her donations and then returned to whatever system of programs and groups and part time jobs and appointments that made up her life. I hope we see a good deal more of her.

Liz's Sister Part I

2010-01-14T13:04:00.000-08:00

One of our relatively new clients, Kimberly, has a lot to say. Apparently, she also makes cakes in a cast iron skillet. I'm supposed to get a peach cake one of these days. I'll let you know if I ever do. Anyway, those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know about Liz, one of our sicker, more troubled, and, in many ways, more endearing clients. Liz lives with a sister named Samantha. None of us have ever seen Samantha, but we hear a great deal about her. Samantha steals from Liz. Samantha spends all her money on drugs, then takes to her bed, demanding care from beleaguered, overwhelmed Liz. Samantha takes Liz's money, then throws her out of the house, not even giving her time to get her heart medication. Samantha has been married to a bipolar man in the suburbs for decades, taking his money and living with a series of boyfriends in the city while pretending to be faithful.

These damaged, complex relationships aren't unusual for our clients, but the stories Liz tells about Samantha can't possibly all be true. Years ago, Samantha kidnapped somebody, and Liz rode in the car afterward with her sister and the victim. Liz was sentenced to more time than Samantha, the judge having explained that being an unknowing accessory after the fact was worse than committing the underlying crime. Samantha also gave Liz syphilis by taking a bath in the same tub that Liz later used. Apparently, the 13 years of stripping and the 17 arrests for prostitution had nothing at all to do with Liz's catching a venereal disease.

I believe that Liz is a reasonably honest person. I don't think she has either the inclination or the self discipline needed to concoct elaborate stories or to prevent herself from blurting out pretty much every single thing she has ever done or thought. Still, the Samantha stories got so over the top that I sometimes flirted with the notion that Samantha didn't even exist. She seemed to be taking on the mythical qualities of an evil twin in the ongoing Gothic horror movie that was pretty much Liz's life.

Then we learned that Kimberly lives right next door to Liz and Samantha. In a cheap Baltimore row house, right next door is really right next door. Kimberly seemed to know everything about the two sisters and to have no compunction at all about sharing. According to Kimberly, Samantha exists all right. She exists, and, if anything, she's even more horrible than Liz ever told us. In Liz's presence, Kimberly reported the continual bedlam Samantha and her array of strange men produced. She repeated language so vulgar that even in Jr. High I wouldn't have wanted to hear it (at least, not all that often in the middle of the night). She emphatically stated that Samantha regularly took Liz's money and then threw her out of the house. She even told us that Samantha had thrown Liz out naked once, and that Kimberly had brought her in and given her clothes. Liz didn't seem to like being reminded of that particular incident, but she nodded grimly when Kimberly looked to her for confirmation.

"And Liz is sweet as gold," Kimberly told us several times. "Nothing at all like her sister. Sweet as gold." At YANA Liz is, well, something of a pain in the ass. But then, YANA is the place for abused people to strut their stuff a bit, act entitled, burst into tears and then luxuriate a bit in all the hugs and kisses that follow. Liz outside of YANA, is just a dying 48 year old woman, still prostituting, still getting fall-down drunk nearly every day, still under the power of a sister she loves.

New Clients and a New Year

2010-01-13T16:30:00.000-08:00

Probably because the Christmas dinner served as such a good advertisement, we began 2010 with a number of new clients. As is typical for our new clients, most of the women were from the recovery house next door. That means that they all have histories of serious drug abuse, but that they are sober now or at least making the effort to be. For many, that sobriety is one very fragile and precious thing. A woman named Didi announced that she had thirty days clean time, and we all applauded. She was almost giddy with her accomplishment, with finding a new place to receive care, with being listened to. When I asked if the women wanted to talk about themselves a bit, she told us that she had been sexually abused as a child and that she was still trying to cope with the guilt she felt for not having taken care of her mother. Didi's mother had been an alcoholic.

"And you feel guilty about that?" I asked. "You think you could have rescued her from her alcoholism?"

"I couldn't have rescued her," Didi said. "But I could have treated her better. I manipulated her. I lied to her. I got into her bank accounts, and I stole from her." In the space of about ten seconds I went from picturing a seriously abused and neglected child blaming herself for her parents' failures to picturing a relentless adult addict, exploiting and stealing from her sick mother. I imagine that both mental images were reasonably accurate. Didi, at any rate, was glad to have spoken, and surprised to hear that quite a few YANA clients have mother issues.

Another new woman, Glenda, quickly spoke up to tell us that her mother didn't like little girls and turned her head to make a spitting gesture whenever Glenda tried to hug or kiss her. Glenda, too, had been raped by family members, and Glenda, unsurprisingly, had been called a slut when she tried to report the abuse. Glenda loved her mother. It actually sounded to me like her mother loved her. When I asked if her mother had a bad past of her own, Glenda said emphatically that she knew she had been abused as a child and that she saw her continue to be abused as an adult. Glenda is over 50, and she was more than a little exasperated by the fact that she was still trying to forgive her mother, to accept her own anger about the past, that she was still trying to fight her way free of the things that happened to her when she was five and ten years old.

I asked another woman if there was anything she would like to talk about, and she looked at us all as if we were mildly crazy. "No, I don't need to talk," she said. "I liked my mother." The room laughed. The women seemed energized by the things they had told. "Women's rap!" Glenda said more than once. "I like that even better than the clothes!" So far, so good for the new year.

Christmas Dinner

2010-01-13T15:44:00.000-08:00

Denene cooked it. She had set her alarm for the middle of the night so she could take one turkey out of the oven and put the next one in, but she managed a flawless holiday dinner for 50. Anne's woman's group contributed 50 beautiful gift bags. And the day was wonderful. Every bit as wonderful as the previous week had been bad. More so.

I'm not sure why. It may have been the food. Or the experience of celebrating Christmas together. It may have been Sid's presence. When she wants, she can cause people to feel loved and loving towards each other. It may be because, under Sid's guidance, the women took turns telling the room what was in their hearts, and the room responded with warm enthusiasm. It may be because, again under Sid's guidance, the women gave thanks, not to God, but to the individuals present who had helped them.

Whatever it was, the women talked about the good things in their lives. Lilian's exhusband had sent her gift cards so that she could give Christmas presents. She gave me a beautifully wrapped book with a card calling me her angel. Other women celebrated clean time, the gift of being able to talk about their lives with other women, friendship, renewed relationships with their children.

Maybe a good round of "what are we happy about" will work the next time things get rough at YANA. I'll give it a try.

Leading up to the Christmas Season (post from 3 weeks ago)

2010-01-13T14:04:00.001-08:00

When I walked into the office area of Hezekiah House, Sister Catherine looked up from her conversation with Father Joe and said encouragingly, "I see you have a lot of people here today!"

"A lot of pain in the ass people," I blurted out. In the half second it took for me to realize how inappropriate I was, the old nun and old priest had already burst into merry laughter. I muttered something about donations. They seemed to understand perfectly.

The week leading up to Christmas was not good. We got more donations than usual, and, with them, more anxiety about missing out on the largess while other people got too much. The loudest complainers were -- I imagine a number of you have guessed it -- the ones who regularly swipe the most stuff. Clients wielded religion like a truncheon against one another, loudly trumpeted their own altruism, and pulled me aside, repeatedly, to tell on the other women. They didn't always wait for actual facts, either. Suspicions, dark, dark suspicions were far too important not to be shared.

"Greed!" Jennifer exclaimed. "The deadliest of the seven sins."

Right.

One woman who usually takes a great deal was reported by several women to have made off with bags full of our highly coveted "toiletries." Unfortunately for her, the largest of her bags broke open in front of several other clients as she was leaving the building. Apparently, the woman refused the offers to get her sturdy new bags for her loot, confirming for everyone that she didn't have permission to take that much stuff in the first place. The growing, collective rage found its focus on this one client as woman after woman identified her and told me the story again. The little mean woman didn't know the client's name, but described her, venomously, as the "one with those ugly marks on her face." I ended up promising that this woman would not get anything the next day because she had already taken too much. It was a promise I didn't mind making, given how obnoxious she'd been in cadging (and demanding) extras from me.

So, the next day she was back, and relatively acquiescent when I told her she wasn't receiving donations that day. She left a little while later, then returned, calling out across the room to me that she needed something warm to wear because it was cold out. She was wearing a coat, but it didn't look all that heavy. The day was bitterly cold. I didn't know whether she had any place warm to go. Whether she even had any place to live. Every woman in the room was listening. I turned her down. The woman was simply astounded. "But it's so cold out!" I told her she could get something the next week.

When I told Sid about it, she said she thought she'd read something like that in the bible. "I was cold. I asked for clothes. You turned me down. Isn't that how it goes?" Sid murmured. I had no apologies. That client was -- probably -- relatively forgiven by the group once they saw her being publicly rebuffed. The overall anger level at least didn't get worse. She really had been stealing from YANA.

It was still an exhausting, and depressing, week. The next time we get that bad I will be more directive with the women. I will lock the cabinets, and we will have a vigorous, and not-at-all free flowing discussion about we behave at YANA. How we react when others are not quite as advanced in their behavior as we are. How we worry about our own conduct rather than anyone else's. If that fails, I'm closing YANA early.

Another Thief (post from four weeks ago)

2009-12-12T04:53:00.000-08:00

We limit our clients to taking four items of clothing per visit, and we're not too particular as to whether the women sorting through through the donations are actually clients or whether they are simply impoverished women from the neighborhood. They don't come regularly unless they have the YANA background anyway, and some people might need the encouragement of clothes and coffee first before they're ready to acknowledge prostitution. There's good reason to let impoverished women take the things they need -- or, at least, I think so. Some of the time.

The "regulars," the "real" YANA clients, can get pretty worked up over outsiders coming in and taking their stuff. The other day, so did I. A woman I didn't know came on a quiet day and began moving about the room with the kind of wordless determination that my dogs (sorry) will get when they're after food left out on the coffee table. The few YANA women present rose in alarm as they saw her obvious attempts to take far, far more than the allotted amounts. Either so desperate or so socially oblivious that she didn't notice that the only other three people present were intent on every move, the woman careened from one part of the room to another, pulling huge amounts of clothing out of the cabinets, trying to stuff it in her bag, and angrily taking it back out again when reminded of the four item limit.

Finally, when she was literally backed into a corner, trying to shove multiple pairs of shoes on top of a small wardrobe's worth of clothing, the woman melted down to a brief, but dramatic, temper tantrum. "This place is a trip!" she screamed when I blocked her from taking her stash. "This is a trip!" Shoes went across the room. She threw a shirt back at me. "Call the police," one woman said. Both the other clients were standing right at my shoulders. There was no violence. It only occurred to me later that there probably would have been if I'd been alone with her and hadn't let her take what she wanted. After the woman stormed out, the other clients had quite a bit to say about her.

One of the clients who'd been there, Jennifer, knew the woman from the neighborhood. Predictably enough, Jennifer's stories centered on drug use, violence, and theft astounding even for Jennifer's street. According to Jennifer, this woman had been put out of an abandominium. "Put out of an abandiminium!" Jennifer crowed. In other words, she was so low, so incapable of even faking basic, civilized behavior that she was forcibly ejected from an abandoned building by the other squatters. Jennifer is a good story teller. The women laughed. I laughed. I probably should have done something very different.

AIDS

2009-12-11T20:10:00.000-08:00

For those of you who recall the "Whatever Happened to the Little Girl?" post, the client who saved the little girl -- while prostituting her own daughters -- still comes to YANA once in a while. I'll call her Annie, but I think of her as Typhoid Mary, after the woman who went from town to town nursing the sick and unknowingly infecting them with her disease. Our own Annie is, well, she's a pleasure to be around. I always enjoy her company. She is interested in the little world around her. She has energy. She tells her stories passionately, and she genuinely cares about the people she tries to help. She also has immense system of denial that allows her to move through the world completely ignorant of the harm she inflicts and the many illnesses, physical and psychological, she carries within.

Annie lives in one of these bizarre arrangements that exist in our part of Baltimore. It sounds like sort of rooming house, sort of a charity, mostly just one guy's weird idea of something he'd like to do. Annie's son pays $350 per month for her to share a room in a house full of recovering female addicts. There's the usual set of mind bogglingly elaborate restrictions, swiftly enforced with punishments for the disobedient. A pair of squabbling, fifty year old roommates may each find themselves standing in the corner when the manager on shift gets irritated enough with them. And after listening to Annie recount the actual squabbles, it's sometimes hard to find all that much fault with the manager. Anyway, while most of Annie's energy has gone towards protecting her stuff from her thieving roommate, she is sometimes very moved by the suffering of the other women. She tries to help them. Her latest cause is a woman with AIDS.

The AIDS victim has been thrown out of the house because she has AIDS, but has slipped back in and is hiding in the basement. Annie seems to be leading the small band of women bringing her food and helping to hide her. Recently, they've discovered that the landlord's wife knows the woman is in the basement and is yet another secret sympathizer. All the women know that they will eventually be caught and disciplined.

Meanwhile, the landlord is requiring everyone to submit proof that they are HIV free, and an argument appears to be raging throughout the house as to how the disease is transmitted. Annie seems to be telling the truth when she says that she has been going to the library for information on the subject. She doesn't seem to have her landlord convinced yet that the virus isn't airborne. Annie herself is wondering how to show proof that she is virus-free. She knows she is, but she doesn't want to open up all her medical records to this man. I'm a civil rights lawyer, and I'm making her no offers whatsoever to intervene. I'm not sure whether meeting the requirements of civil litigation would be too much for these women or whether meeting the realities of this house and its occupants would be too much for any court, but I just don't see a good outcome in juxtaposing the two.

What I'm left with is Annie, sympathizing with anyone who has such a disease, trying to help her, comfortable in her own good health, entirely forgetting the day a few years ago when she wept and told me her own HIV test had come back positive. Frankly, I wish some of her psychological shortcomings were as manageable as the virus.

A Note on Tina and Liz

2009-12-10T05:11:00.000-08:00

They're cousins. I'd had no idea, but I probably should have guessed there was some family relationship. They have the same small builds, light brown hair, and regular, even features. They have the same intense love/hate relationship with their sisters, with whom they both live and by whom they both claim to be abused on a regular basis. One day they come in distraught, telling us that they have no clothes, no medicine, no place to live because their sister put them out on the street after collecting the rent money. The next day they are borrowing a cell phone to check in with their sisters and say they love them. They have much of the same illness and the same sweetness.

Tina and Liz are two of our sickest clients, the ones we watch striding the brink of death, strangely undaunted, grasping at small victories and slender attachments. They are both still ready to throw their little, semi-invalid bodies into the mix, Liz still prostituting, Tina still up for a street fight. (Liz has occasional flashes of self awareness, though. She once told the room that cars slow down for her, get a good look, and then speed off. "They're thinking, oh no, grandma's out tricking!" Liz told us. Then she roared with laughter. Tina, on the other hand, narrates a fight with another woman at the homeless shelter with no sense at all that there's anything futile and strange in a brawl between two sickly women exhausted by their own diseases. "We had to stop," she tells me. I assume she meant someone broke up the fight. "No," she says. "We couldn't breath.")

They were probably both once beauties. They are needy, and mannerly, and small. They are mentally ill. They make me think of two little old men -- leathery old cowboys, maybe -- who never retired. They keep riding the bucking bull, getting thrown until their bones are crushed almost to dust, imagining that the few sad blocks of South West Baltimore are the glorious, wide, open plains. Never guessing a world could exist beyond their horizon.

Precious

2009-11-28T20:26:00.000-08:00

There's a movie out now about our women, though the word "prostitute" is never used. It tells the story of a girl named Precious whose father rapes her from the time she is three until she is sixteen. I call her prostituted, and thus, one of "ours," because her mother knows about the rape and allows it. She lets her husband have sex with their child in exchange for his remaining in the marriage. And then, unsurprisingly, she hates her daughter for being "loved more" than she is.

Turned into a sexual object by the most dominant person in the home, while the rest of the family both benefits from her abuse and despises her for it, Precious acted out on the big screen what we at YANA see in the faces and lives of our clients everyday. But for me, the most telling part of the movie is not what happens to Precious, but what she dreams could happen. Imagine a girl whose parents rape her, beat her, call her an animal and tell her she's too stupid to learn anything. You might imagine that going inside her mind would be like entering a sort of macabre fun house of twisted images, revenge fantasies, black despair. Instead, Precious holds on to the same hopes almost all of us have. She wants to be pretty. She wants to be loved. She wants to be a good mother. She wants a happy family. She wants to achieve.

I watched Precious fantasize her life on screen, and I thought of the YANA women every step of the way. I thought of the women who gathered around Liz and Tina, praising them when they dressed up in donated clothes and how all them understood the importance of that moment of beauty. I thought of the shy smiles on the women's faces when they tell me they have a new boyfriend -- a great guy, someone who doesn't use. I thought of a woman who blinked back tears when her friend told the rest of us that she was a caring mother. I thought of the day I took Janet to the hospital to see her baby once more before the social worker took him away. Most of the time, Janet watched while I held her little boy, and afterward she told the staff all about how I talked to him and rocked him in my arms. Janet's own family began raping her when she was three. They tried to keep her away from the funeral when her father died. Janet called me her mother, and I think she longed for her child to be held by a loving grandmother, in exactly the same way that Precious did. Precious took pride in her steadily improving test scores. Sheri was overwhelmed with pride when she got a diploma from the "Phenomenal Woman" course offered by the health department through YANA.

Precious is a hit movie. It's obviously gunning for some academy awards. I left the theater thinking that maybe people do want to know about "our women." Maybe they can believe how brutal their lives are. Maybe they want to know how prosaic, how deeply held, how enduring their dreams are.

Dear H.

2009-11-24T13:21:00.000-08:00

A while back someone named "H" left a very thoughtful comment on the blog, and I haven't had time until now to respond. I 'm doing so now in a post because I thought that what H had to say was important enough for a longer discussion.

H. took me to task a bit for a reference I made in the "Whatever Happened to the Little Girl" post. I said that 12 seems to be the average age for entry into prostitution. H. asked how I know what the average age is and seemed genuinely interested in any statistics I could give him (I'm assuming H is male). The truth is that even "seems to be" is stronger language than I should have used. I had mentioned in an earlier post that people who work with prostituted women often cite research claiming that 11 to 13 is the average age at which people enter prostitution, but that I didn't know how the studies were performed. I can tell you that at YANA, the counselors have worked with many hundreds of women in Baltimore and have found that almost all of them have been subjected to very severe sexual abuse at a very early age. I've been to symposiums about working with prostituted women and have heard the directors of other agencies say the same thing. As I may have quoted in another post, one woman announced "Incest is the boot camp of prostitution." The rest of the room nodded. A police sergeant, Byron Fasset from Dallas, Texas, has formed a unit specializing in working with underage prostitutes. He's kept statistics on more than a thousand girls and found a near universal pattern of abuse suffered by both the girls and their mothers. I see the faces and hear the words of the women at YANA. Even to a layperson like me, so many of them seem frozen at some very early stage of development, and it's easy, very easy to imagine that a part of them just stopped growing on the day they first learned what horrible things that the grownups would do to them.

But none of that is proof of the average age at which women or girls enter prostitution. For one thing, I seriously doubt that anyone has done the kind of exhaustive study necessary to know the average anything for prostitution. There are precious few provider agencies in this country, and they aren't in the business of keeping statistics or probing the women for information they might not want to give. Academics are starting to take an interest in prostitution, but how many of them do you think are out doing lengthy evaluations of thousands of women all across the country? We had a woman do her Ph.D. research at YANA. She spoke to ten of our clients for a little under an hour each. My understanding is that her committee not only accepted this day and a half of research as being good enough for a doctorate, but they also praised her for her great street creds.

And even if we did know the real averages for childhood sexual abuse, how would we know whether the children were actually prostituted? Remember that prostitution can have a very broad definition. If, for example, mom is turning her five year old over to her drug dealer or landlord once in a while in exchange for a little credit, then that five year old has been prostituted. If mom is letting dad have a go at their three year old in exchange for a little peace in the home, then that three year old has been prostituted. If dad is turning a blind eye to what his buddies or maybe his own father does to his eight year old in exchange for their approval, then that eight year old has been prostituted. I know that happens, but how would I or anyone ever know how often it happens? Usually, the child will only know that the landlord, or the dad, or the strange men in the neighborhood hurt her. She won't know who benefited from it.

And much of the time, she doesn't want to know. Within the safety of YANA, most of our clients will talk openly about being raped as children, but they do not think of themselves as having been prostituted as children. Prostitution was their own decision, and it most certainly had nothing to do with their mothers. Recently Sid spoke about the 5 year old in North Carolina who was prostituted by her mother. The child was found dead. Our women were appalled. "Anyone under the age of 18 who is prostituted is a victim of human trafficking," Sid explained. "Have you ever heard of anyone under the age of 18 who was prostituted?"

"People from the Philippines!" one woman said. "I've heard about that!" Nobody else seemed to have ever heard of such a thing anywhere, and the subject swiftly died in an embarrassed silence. So, to answer H., no I don't know the average age at which a woman or girl enters prostitution. And I don't think anyone does, even for one country. If you're thinking about walking-the-street prostitution, then your estimate of somewhere between 16 and 24 sounds as good as any other to me. As for your "defensiveness" about people who try to "demonize" prostitution with claims of child sexual abuse, well, human behavior is complicated, and all we have are anecdotes. If your girl friend is the basis for your "defensiveness" around the idea that being raped repeatedly as a child leads women to prostitution later, it's always possible that she really is that co-ed paying for college tuition that we hear about so much on the t.v. shows. Maybe she went into prostitution for any variety of her own reasons. But if she's been prostituting, and she's promoting defensiveness around the idea that anything her parents did was the cause. . . well, like I said, she might be the exception to all our anecdotes. Then again, H., she might not be.

The Thief

2009-11-20T18:18:00.001-08:00

We had some unhappy women at YANA the other day. Jessie was visibly wilting. She whispered that she needed to talk to me and Heather privately, then sat staring sadly out the window. Sherie was there too -- which was good news because Health Care for the Homeless had managed to procure a small grant for her to get some special services, and time was running out for her to collect it. Sheri had to wait a while to see our nurse practitioner, Marti, and then she came back out scowling dramatically and muttering grimly about people not understanding that she had appointments. Marti called me in to talk, and Sheri and I both knew who the subject of the conversation would be.

Marti was just plain fed up. Sheri came to get prescriptions refilled and wouldn't submit to any examinations. Marti had already refilled more than she thought she should and wouldn't do it anymore until Sheri came in for some blood work and the rest. Sheri had even turned down the grant, claiming that she didn't have time to come in over the next couple days. Marti is like everyone else I've met at Health Care for the Homeless, absolutely dedicated to serving the poorest of the poor, patient, good humored, a consistently positive person to have around. I expect that the experience of being ticked off with one of our women was distressing for her. Although I needed no convincing whatsoever, she explained at some length that it had been necessary to cut Sheri off, that Sheri was harming herself, that even more than most of our other clients, Sheri was the source of her own problems. I agreed, also at some length.

Meanwhile, Heather was left with the furious Sheri whose humor had not been improved by the knowledge that Marti was in the next room telling on her. Endlessly patient Heather "reflected back" to Sheri her emotions, calming her considerably. I've seen Heather in action with the other women (and with me when I've had her trapped in the car on the way to YANA and decided to get a little free counseling). She is very, very good at sending out the sympathetic rays. By the time I returned, Sheri was admitting that part of her "condition" was a tendency to overreact and snap at people. She was also making somewhat vague promises to go down to Health Care for the Homeless for a check up. She also looked exhausted, and after, foolishly and against the rules, giving her a little bus money, I hustled her out of there to go home to rest.

I wanted to get to Jessie and have that talk about what was making her so terribly sad. When I turned to her though, she told me, smiling, that she had already talked to Heather about it. Jessie had been grieving because she'd seen Sheri stealing four deodorants. I'm not kidding when I use a word like "grief." As I've mentioned a time or two before, our clients are fragile people. They come to YANA to be in a safe place, removed from all the ugliness of their lives. I think that when they see people getting away with "addict" behavior here, they feel hopeless. It might not be too great an exaggeration to say that they see it as the bad winning over the good.

"Well," I said. "Addict behavior. We had one client who almost made it out the door with a t.v." This gets a laugh. Heather has obviously done a good job calming Jessie as well. We talk a bit about people being at different stages, and Jessie nods. She says that some people come to YANA for the wrong reasons. I say that some people get less out of YANA than others do. They get coffee and donated clothes, but not a start on a better life. Jessie doesn't seem to be angry any more, but she certainly had been. She would have called Sheri out on her behavior if they'd been at the rehab., but Jessie had figured out that angry accusations and heated discussions weren't the thing at YANA. Her self imposed restraint hadn't been easy. Respect for YANA had made angry, and it had kept from getting any satisfaction from her anger.

Oh well. Sheri had been close to my son, Daniel. He laughed when I told him about it. How does a healthy person, happily off at school, get mad at someone like little Sheri? How does a comfortably middle class person take the theft of four deodorants seriously? When I told Sid, she made the obvious assumption that Sheri wasn't getting any blood work done because she was selling the pills instead of taking them. Sid wants to help Sheri "go away somewhere." When I told my husband, he said he felt like crying. How could anyone be so bad off that she needs to steal four deodorants?

What's my reaction? I guess I'd like to see her off in some rehab. too. I'm not the one to talk to her about it, though. Sheri's poverty doesn't make me particularly sad. As far as I'm concerned, the circumstances of her life are just that -- circumstances. Something needs to happen, though. Sheri has been coming to YANA longer than I have, and she hasn't made friends there. Not any. She hasn't gotten clean. She hasn't gotten counseling. She sits alone with the three deep slash marks on each arm from a suicide attempt, barely coherent, stealing on a fairly regular basis and persistantly wheedling me for small hand outs. And, as far as I can tell, she longs for. . . everything, community, love, expression, recognition. The same things almost everybody else wants. I have no idea whether she'll even start to try to get them.

Lilian and the other Ladies

2009-11-20T14:27:00.000-08:00

In one sense Lilian seems to be doing better -- she is more talkative and more vibrant than she once was. I suspect that this is the result of some change in medication. Either she's sober now after taking some street drug that numbed her, or she's on some different combination of medicines prescribed for her. Maybe she's taking fewer meds, or maybe she's on a good antidepressant (we had a client the other day who announced, "I'm feeling good! That antidepressant is working!"). I don't get the impression that she's coming to YANA wound up on crack or the like, but, then, drugs affect people in different ways, and I'm no expert. At any rate, she is increasingly charming and fun to be around, while just as oblivious as she ever was to the larger issues in her life.

This week she showed us the two or three large bruises on her arm and complained about having 18 vials of blood taken from her. She said it was because the doctors believed she'd had a mild stroke the week before. "They think that's why I'm leaning to the right and drooling," she told the room. And then "Look at those bruises!". But before anyone could express any sympathy, for her, she triumphantly delivered the punch line, "But guess what?! They took so much blood they gave me a $10.00 Walmart Gift Card. That's a Christmas present right there!" Lilian burst into gleeful laughter over having been given a present by her doctor and seemed finished with the conversation.

I asked her to look directly at me for a second and confirmed that one side of her mouth was sagging. I fell completely into Lilian mode in telling her this. "Not much!" I assured her. "I never would have noticed if you hadn't told me about it!" She had a follow up appointment with her doc. -- I didn't feel required to say anything more than that. Besides, I don't feel capable of battering down that weirdly powerful invisible shield she's managed to erect between herself and the horrors that seem to lie in wait.

As Lilian was leaving later, she stopped to tell the other ladies the latest bit of gossip. "You know that 14 year old boy that got raped and then the guy cut his throat?" Everyone but me seemed to know quite a bit about it. One woman wasn't sure whether the killer had been caught and the rest quickly told her that he'd been caught the next day at a 7-11. "Well, his grandmother is in my house," Lilian said. "She was holding up well until the funeral yesterday. Then she fell apart." Lilian delivered this news kindly, the way one woman will tell the others about the well being of someone else from the church or the neighborhood. Grandmothers in rehab, people whose children get killed, women like our women so often know one another. It was community news for them. And the reaction was a community reaction. Even after Lilian was out the door, the clients were still reassuring me and each other of the tortures that would befall the child killer in prison.

"They're going to do to him worse than what he did to that child," a woman said.
The rest nodded like they were in church, hearing hearing the God's honest truth.
"That's right. That's right," the women affirmed.
"That's what we always did!" Jessie said.
"You don't know how fast news travels in prison," one woman told me. "They're going to know before anyone. They're going to be waiting for him."
This prompted another round of "that's rights."

Then one of the women made the mistake of telling us what she personally would do to the man if the 14 year old had been her son. I didn't think anything of that. Most parents I've known would be talking about dismemberment if they imagined their children raped and murdered. Unfortunately, Jessie took the opportunity to point out that while she used to think the same way, she had been "working on her spiritual side." One's spiritual side is very, very important to our women, especially once they get into rehab. Embarrassed, the speaker began a rapid fire explanation of just how important her own spiritual side was to her and how much she was learning in her bible class.

"For example, did you know that when you're asleep you're dead?" She smiled proudly delivering this bit of knowledge to people who obviously had no idea. "That's right! Your pores open up, and your immune system doesn't work, and everything goes in and out of you. You're dead! King James is the truth!" There wasn't a woman in the room foolish enough to touch any of that, and in a minute or two we were all restored to the usual low hum of conversation. Sad stories. Small victories. A nearly endless supply of improvised strategies so everyone could get by.

YANA Today

2009-11-11T12:39:00.000-08:00

YANA was slow today. Liz came in after two weeks on a psych ward, still wearing a hospital i.d. on her wrist. She was sad about having gotten drunk immediately after having been detoxed. And her sister has kicked her out yet again, so that she has no clothes, no medicine, no food, no place to sleep. Our visiting professors tried talking to her about available resources, but Liz has good medical care when she wants it, and she had no interest in going to a shelter. She got some warm clothing, and Diane fixed her a cup of soup and a cup of coffee. I asked her about the abandaminium Officer Leather Glove had set up for her. Officer Leather Glove, as she calls him, has been a friend to Liz for years, showing special kindness to one of the more frequently abused citizens on his police beat. Months ago, he put some sort of notice (a sign? crime tape? I wasn't sure) around an abandoned house and told people that only Liz was allowed in there. I think Liz values his caring about her more than she does the house, but at any rate she smiled happily at the mention of Officer Leather Glove, and told us that she was staying in the abandominium he gave her.

In other news, we've had a nice illustration of how much working with the poor does to expand one's overall sense of charity, compassion, and general, dare I say it. . . saintliness. YANA, exasperated by minor, but ongoing, variations in the use it permits other groups to make of its space, has banned any use at all of its space by any other group. The decision had been discussed with Hezekiah House management in advance and heartily approved. Approved, but apparently not followed when one of the nuns needed the space. Then, as Sid and I carried on an immensely important discussion of my personal life in the general office area, Brother Joe pointed out, with the kind of accuracy that can only be described as barbaric, that we were doing exactly the same thing we had banned other groups from doing. After we retreated to Sid's office, we realized that Lilian had been ringing the front door bell in the rain for something like ten minutes. The manager of one of the banned groups had been downstairs the whole time, but, knowing that she was a YANA client, had declined to let her in. As the rain soaked woman and I went upstairs, I told her that he was angry at us because he couldn't use the YANA area. "Well good!" Lilian answered. And then, triumphantly, "It's our space!". She forgot the inconvenience and personal insult, cheered, enormously, it appeared, by a bit of gossip about having put something over on one of the other charities. What the hell, she was happy the whole afternoon. There seems to be plenty of room for pettiness in saving our little part of the world.

Lilian

2009-11-04T14:23:00.000-08:00

Lilian is one of our clients from the next door recovery house who began coming to YANA last year when we moved to Hezekiah House. She's little, white, close to my age, quiet, and well groomed. Much of the time she looks like the kind of middle class woman you expect to find teaching a children's Sunday school class -- a picture of mild, if rather vague, contentment. On days when she's not doing so well, she looks a little mousy and pink -- a Sunday school teacher who's spent a too-long morning with children who kept running around the room and throwing things out the window.

If there's ever anything troubling about her, it's her lack of anger or obvious distress. There was the time she got raped about six months back. She was upset then, even a bit trembly, but she accepted comfort from the group as easily as a child lets herself be picked up and held. It wasn't long before she returned to her usual placid state. It was a state that didn't change much when she told us that she had once been kidnapped by a pimp, though she did warn us, seriously, about the dangers of prostituting. Today, Lilian was also fairly matter of fact about her recent hospitalizations. HIV has driven her t-cell count down to 239, which means she is almost AIDS-defined. She was so sick that the hospital was calling her relatives for permission to put her on life support, but what distress she managed was reserved for the prospect of being intubated, and the oxygen mask that "scared the bejeebers" out of her. She was equally unconcerned about the larger picture some time ago when she mentioned that her daughter had stage 4 cancer.

Months later, I did see her get a little teary and extra pink, grieving openly over what she said had been the worst thing to happen to her that year. Her dog had died. I told Heather on the way home that day that I'd come out of my coffin and strangle any family member of mine who got more upset about the dog dying than my being diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.

Lilian sat in a group once when a professor asked why women prostitute and what people should know about prostituted women. Lilian answered the "why" question like almost all our women do. She said she prostituted for drugs. She also said that she had been kidnapped at least once by a pimp, and she nodded in agreement when the other clients said that they wanted people to talk to them, as long as they didn't talk down to them. As far as I can tell, none of Lilian's opinions vary from the norm. And like most of our clients, Lilian's entry into prostitution seemed to have more behind it than drugs. She mentioned in passing today that she got into prostitution because some girls talked her into it when she was a teenager. She didn't begin on the street; she put an ad in the personal section of a tabloid magazine for "young girls to take advantage of old men" as she put it. Her mother paid for the ad. She was eventually arrested for some sort of money scam she had going with the girls because one of the "old men" they targeted was a police officer. I couldn't tell whether he was undercover or a john that got pissed off and knew how to use the system to revenge himself on the underage girl he'd been sleeping with. Somehow that arrest and a subsequent arrest for joy riding in a stolen car resulted in a four and a half year prison sentence.

When I asked her how she did the prison time, she said it was one day at a time. She couldn't think about the outside world. She couldn't think about the future. She thought about each day as it came. I had the feeling I'd just heard the philosophy that got her through her entire life, but then again, maybe I'd just heard a too-easy way to summarize a woman who doesn't let all her feelings show.

(Helen) Vickie Reading at the Baltimore Book Festival

2009-11-03T16:58:00.000-08:00

A couple years back I won the Maryland State Art Counsel's top award for short fiction. The award was for the first chapter in a novel I'm writing, but when it came time for the winners to read out loud at the book festival, I asked if I could read an essay about one of the YANA women instead. A good natured organizer gave me permission, and I sat in a tent on a noisy and rainy night, trying to tell our little group what it meant to know Helen. Click on the video if you'd like to hear something about this extraordinary woman's life.

Halloween and some updates

2009-10-30T05:59:00.000-07:00

As you know from the last post, I went to YANA armed with (overly) elaborate plans and bags full of supplies. And. . . . .almost no one came in. The few who did were not our more high functioning clients. We tried anyway. Jennifer did a good job, introducing Poe as "a guy from my neighborhood." I talked about the uses of fear and got a little thrill from the way the most ancient of the Pammys nodded and sent me understanding looks from beneath her cascade of gray hair as I said that sometimes our emotions are so big that we can't describe them with everyday words. We need to talk about demons and monsters just so that we can explain how bad something is. Pammy, and for that matter the entire room, seemed to know exactly what I meant.

After Jennifer read Annabel Lee out loud, we tried to do the group poem. I started it off with a line about a demon "on my back." Most of the people who wrote were the volunteers, however. Other, more articulate groups at YANA have done better with this sort of thing in the past. Then, as we talked about Halloween, one of the newer clients said her husband used to dress her up as a princess and the like. She made a few more, grim faced, inarticulate references to this dressing up before I asked her how she felt about it. "Not good," the woman said. "He had a gun to my head." As Sid pointed out later, you know somebody has problems when she forgets to mention that part of the story.

The new client, Mary, held forth for most of the rest of our hour or so together. She had been a military brat herself. Her husband was a traumatized vet. who did terrible things to her and then didn't remember later. He gave her black eyes and a jaw that had to be wired back together. Her parents called to ask if she was all right. She said she was because she was afraid, then she was more afraid that God would punish her for lying. At last a general came to the house and made her husband stop. In court, her husband jumped over the table to attack her, but this time she fought him off herself. The weeping female judge told the bailiffs to stand back and let her do it. Later, her jealous sister got her put away in a psychiatric hospital for two years, but she found a way to do good there. She listened to others and tried to help them.

For Mary's sake at least, we turned out to have exactly the right group of people. They weren't talkers. They weren't judgers. They weren't interested in drawing attention to themselves. They listened in quiet support. Our Sister Mary said the right things about how well the woman had done and what a long process it is to forgive an abuser. I don't think Mary the client could have spent a better hour. She told me so many times afterwords how relieved and happy she felt about being able to talk that way. She said she couldn't usually tell people what happened to her and that we "just drew it out of" her. For myself, I was feeling a little sick from too much peanut brittle and candy, a little disappointed that we hadn't produced a collection of meaningful poems, a little foolish and annoyed with myself for caring about the poems, and more than a little depressed from the experience of listening to the drawn out ramblings of a mentally ill woman with no idea at all of how to help her. Even I couldn't help but notice, though, the relief that filled that woman by the end.

For the rest of the clients -- I don't know. There were so few of them that they got a lot of candy and Halloween socks and little toys. I'm sure they liked that. They could have left at any time, but they stayed. My guess is that actual community, rather than an art project and discussion of metaphors, probably did them good. The point of YANA, after all, is to listen and support. Maybe, in their quiet ways, all the women there felt a little more like family.

UPDATES:

I forgot to mention that Tina came in Wednesday, dressed as her usual rag doll self. She had gone to the funeral, but stayed only briefly. She said that her cousin was so heavily made up that he didn't look like himself. The backs of his crossed hands were more or less flesh colored, but the palms were purple. After she saw that, she had to leave. Tina hadn't talked to Sister Catherine yet, and Catherine wasn't there when Tina came in. I told Sister Mary about her as well, and now there are two vigilant nuns primed to find Tina and reassure her of God's love.

I asked the youngest of the Pammys if she would mind telling the room about her HIV status. She didn't mind people knowing about the disease at all, though she was rather floored at the public speaking aspect once I announced that she had something to say. Pammy was diagnosed about seven years ago with HIV. This past February she became AIDS-defined because her t-cell count had gone below 200. She got on the "cocktail," and her t-cell count went back up to 359. Her viral load is so low that it's undetectable. There may not be a cure for HIV, but apparently you can come back from full blown AIDS. The room applauded her.

Best of all -- I asked Diane if she'd heard anything about the client that the little mean woman said had been arrested for arson and murder. "I haven't heard anything," Diane said. "Since she went into the program." According to Diane, the client had been hospitalized again, then moved directly into rehab. The client really was very sick. This move from hospital to rehab. happens. It makes a lot more sense than the client having been let out of jail. And Diane knew the client much better than the little mean woman did. Of course, I didn't repeat the rumor to Diane. I have the feeling it's nothing more than that.

The Plan (Halloween Again)

2009-10-29T04:47:00.000-07:00

We'll celebrate Halloween today, with candy, of course, and also a few little give aways. Our clients will be given very small treat bags decorated with smiling spiders, teddy-bear type ghosts, and the like. There are some dollar-store Halloween socks and pencils and erasers to put inside, either for themselves or their children. They'll also get copies of Poe's poem, "Annabel Lee." My plan is to tell them that there are least three things people can do with their fears. One is to use the fear to keep themselves and others safe from real danger. Another is to get rid of the irrational fears using the techniques that Heather will teach us. A third possibility is to transform the fear into something small and funny like the little ghost pictures or into something more significant like art. Jennifer will then talk about Poe, and I will read Annabel Lee, and try to provoke a discussion of it.

Annabel Lee talks about angels who are so jealous of the poet's perfect love that they murder his lover. It mentions demons under the sea. The hope is that I can talk to the women about having emotions so powerful that we need images of murdering angels and demons in order to express them. We'll try to write a group poem using some monster images to express feelings, and maybe a few women will write individual poems as well. The idea is to see our thoughts and emotions as something we can control and transform. I'll let you know how it goes.

Another Day at YANA (Almost Halloween)

2009-10-28T13:15:00.000-07:00

Today, Heather, our volunteer psychologist, offered to lead a group discussion on anxieties and how to manage them. Unfortunately, I had the bright idea of starting the discussion off by announcing to an already very chatty group that we would talk about anxieties because it was almost Halloween. I said it because I was trying to get their attention, and in that I was certainly successful. The women were all electrified -- but not in the sense of animated debate so much as in the sense of hair standing on end, eyes throwing sparks, tossing information about the Halloween gang killings back and forth as if they were trying to get rid of a live hand grenade. According to the women, the gangs planned to shoot 31 women to death for the month of Halloween. They said that the shootings had already begun and that 13 women were dead so far.

Tina, who I believe has lived in the area all her life, was astonished. Almost all the other women seemed to be in the know, echoing the numbers of dead and soon-to-be-dead and reminding each other that there would also be a lot of rapes. They said the women were shot all over the city, and that anyone could be killed. They advised Heather and me to drive straight home, and they advised each other of where to hide and what to scream if the hiding wasn't successful. Heather, who turns out to be an impressively patient young woman, sympathized briefly, and asked what else, besides the possibility of being shot, made them feel anxious. A woman whose name I haven't bothered to learn yet, preferring instead to think of her as "the little mean woman," treated the room to a discourse on her fear of being shot while sitting with her aunt in the front row of church. She justified this by reference to a robbery in a different church something like a year ago. As I've written before, not many of our women go to church -- or maintain a particularly good relationship with their families for that matter. But at least they all got to know that the little mean woman did both.

"Worry about your safety in the street and in church!" Heather said kindly. She gently prodded for other causes of anxiety. Kiki began a rapid fire explanation of someone who owed her 7 dollars and who had the nerve to accuse her of having an attitude when she needed the money back, and she really needed the money, and she wouldn't have asked if she didn't, and . . ." "Worry about money," Heather said with grave sympathy. "A lot of people worry about that." The other women filled in eagerly with advice. "You're not getting the money back," Tina swiftly informed her. There was prompt and enthusiastic agreement on this point. Kiki still wanted to watch out for the debtor after he got his check, but, again, she was warmly and swiftly advised to let the matter go. Grudgingly, I will admit that even the little mean woman was helpful on that point. And as for Kiki, there really was nothing petty in her concerns. She's pregnant, collecting free baby clothes from our donors, and genuinely worried about her own ability to give and withhold. She was afraid of not having enough. She was afraid of becoming the sort of person who wouldn't give anything to a person in real need.

Somebody else said something about people who died in Pakistan and praying for them. We don't have the kind of group that talks about pet peeves and minor annoyances. It's gang killing, rape, robbery, betrayal, poverty, and war with them. Heather and I sort of had manageable little phobias in mind. Finally, in reference to I don't know what, Kiki said something about claustrophobia. I loudly (and truthfully) announced to the room that I'm very claustrophobic. Nearly all the other women said they were too. "How about fear of heights?" Heather asked. Another problem for most of the room. It rapidly became clear that murder, rape, and the rest don't preclude all the other fears. Mentions of snakes, spiders, mice had most of the women shuddering.

Heather began a discussion on how people's bodies feel when they're anxious (racing heart, shallow breathing and the like), then asked what we do when we get to that point. "I used to just sniff dope," Jennifer told us. "But I don't do that no more." Other people talked about going to their "happy place." Heather talked about deep breathing. Some women had to leave. Another woman, Lilian, came out of the bathroom wearing a very attractive pantsuit she'd found in the donations. The rest of the group burst into a frenzy of praise. "Now I have something to wear to church!" Lilian said. "Last week I wore jeans." At this point the group was divided between continuing to praise the church clothes and reassuring her that it didn't matter what she wore as long as she went. Not too much else got down in the anxiety discussion.

The little mean woman managed to tell me about a neighborhood woman who set fire to an abandominum, planning to kill one person and accidentally murdering a man who was asleep down stairs. The woman she mentioned was a YANA client who hasn't been around for a while. She was troubled. She was living in an abandominium. She was involved in some fires, and Liz told us months ago that the police were looking for her. I said nothing to the little mean woman. It's possible that the rumor is true.

Patient Heather was pleased with the initial discussion. She plans to hold further groups on how to implement some of the anxiety strategies. Pammy came in with her mother who is also named Pammy and with an elderly friend also named Pammy. The three women seemed fairly pleased with their names, and the eldest Pammy smiled in genuine amusement when asked if she was the great grandmother. The youngest Pammy (herself a grandmother) had been diagnosed with AIDS earlier this year because her t-cell count was so low. Apparently, it's back in the healthy range now, and her viral load is undetectable. She beamed as we exclaimed over her obvious health and well being. Lilian hugged me for a long time before she left and said that she thought of us often. Another woman, Sheri, came in just at closing, and I gave her a birthday card from Daniel (son in the pictures) and myself. I got a lot of hugs from her too. She said her birthday hadn't been very good and that she would "cherish" the card. Excitedly, she told she was making something for me and Daniel for Christmas. The women, especially Lilian and Tina, took it on themselves to clean the room and take out the trash, then filtered out for another day. As we left, Tina told us again how afraid of elevators she was. She said that the emergency phone in an elevator at a hospital didn't work, and when she got stuck she ripped it "down to the wires" trying to call somebody. People heard her screaming, though. She left for her sister's house before going back to a shelter. It was another day with pretty much the usual mix of women at YANA

Whatever Happened to the Little Girl?

2009-10-27T05:28:00.000-07:00

In How Much Money Do Prostitutes Make Part II, I wrote about one 12 year old whom a client of ours found prostituting out on Wilkens Avenue. My point was that since the majority of prostituting women seem to begin at that age, it's unreasonable to imagine that they're able to hold out for the kind of money that they "should" be able to get. Even if she's on Wilkens Avenue, a 12 year old having sex with a middle aged man is just a rape victim. How well would you expect a child rape victim to negotiate with her rapist? How well can she do it six year later, after she's been degraded thousands of times and she's strung out on drugs in order to endure it? The free market analysis, in other words, is more than a bit flawed.

After I read jg's comment to Part II last night, I realized that a lot of people might be curious about what happened to that particular little girl, so here is what I know. The client, Linda, who was out prostituting with her own adult daughters, was appalled to find a child on the street openly doing the same thing. Linda confronted her, didn't know what to answer to the inevitable "Well, what are you doing here yourself?" reply, but refused to leave her side. Linda and the little girl spent most of the day together, with Linda warning her away from an unmarked police car, giving her bus money, taking her home, listening with grief stricken empathy to the child's story, feeding her with bag lunches she got from YANA, and telling her, over and over again, that there was such a place as YANA where people cared about a girl like her.

The little girl stoutly maintained that she wouldn't trust a place like YANA, and she wouldn't go to a place like that either. Then she went back home with Linda still at her side. They both met the mother on the street, and the girl told her mom that she hadn't made any money. The mother responded by hitting her in the face. The 12 year old asked for Linda's cell phone and then, to Linda's astonishment, called the police. Linda was frightened, but she didn't leave. The police showed up to find a pair of middle aged addicts screaming at each other and a little girl who identified herself as a prostitute. First thing they did (good old Southwest Baltimore!) was slap handcuffs on the child.

Then they called back the mother who was rapidly sidling away. She ignored them at first, but was persuaded to return when they shouted out a threat to shoot her. Linda, meanwhile, was vigorously explaining that it was the mother who should be locked up, but probably mom herself was much more helpful in that regard. She came back shouting profanities and threats at her daughter. The girl was released from her handcuffs, and she raised her shirt, showing the officers the marks on her belly and back from being whipped for not bringing home enough money. The mother was cuffed and taken away. The daughter was taken away as well, but the police committed a final amazing act on that remarkable day. They took the time to explain to the still-argumentative and grieving old prostitute that she didn't need to worry anymore. The little girl wasn't being arrested. She was being taken to social services where she would be protected, where she would never have to see her mother again.

One year of being prostituted, beaten, and betrayed by her own family balanced against one day of being listened to and cared about by a stranger. It was enough. The girl decided she deserved something better out of life, and she had spirit enough to go get it.

One day transformations are rare, but transformations over time are pretty much the norm. Given enough listening and support, women do decide that they can do better, and they do start to take that difficult journey away from not just one year, but 20 or 30 years of savage abuse. The story of prostituted women is the story of resilience.

Tina and Liz

2009-10-23T22:19:00.000-07:00

I didn't get to see Tina the next day because I left early to give a talk at Notre Dame. I did see Sister Catherine, though, and told her about Tina's belief that anyone who overdoses goes to hell. "Oh that old Catholic teaching," Catherine said. "I'll keep an eye out for her." Catherine spoke with the kind of determined growl you'd expect from an undaunted old nun who'd spent her life defending the poor. I hope Tina came back in that day. I was sure she'd be in good hands with Catherine.

I saw Liz for a while that morning. She was much her usual self, sad, victimized, worried about her future, eating grits, and finding some new clothes so she could begin her transformation into a loud mouthed, laughing, sexy -- albeit toothless -- woman again. Then she gave me two bucks. I'd given her a five for her three dollar copay on her zoloft prescription. She brought me change. Most of the time, Liz lives on the street. She has switched from heroin to vodka, but she is an addict all the same. She is also damaged in more ways than I can count. And she matter of factly brought me change I'd never asked for. If you've never worked with addicts, you may be wondering why I'm bothering to write this. If you have worked with people like Liz, all I can say is that it really happened. I swear it.

Tina Gets a New Dress (The Lord Provides)

2009-10-23T21:07:00.000-07:00

Tina came in Wednesday sober and coherent, as she's been for the past few weeks, but obviously sad. Her cousin had died. He had been released from prison a few days earlier and had already been found dead of an overdose in an "abandominium." She had come to YANA to find a black dress for his funeral. In the strange way that things so often work at YANA, there was one black dress in our little donation closet. It was an absolutely gorgeous Liz Claiborne, and it fit her perfectly. Tina looked through our 7 or 8 pairs of shoes and found a very cute black pair that also fit her perfectly. Ditto for our one black blazer.

The other women all began to fuss over the sight of our usually woebegone little stick figure in rags transformed into a runway-way thin model with the great outfit. "Is someone going to take her picture?" Jennifer wanted to know. Heather, our volunteer psychologist, got her cell phone. Tina hurried to the bathroom to fix her hair, and another client said, "Let's do it professionally!" and set up a screen to serve as a backdrop for the shoot. Heather took a few pictures; the room admired Tina, and Tina, staring at the images on the phone, asked if she could get copies. She said that her mother would probably want to enlarge the pictures and hang them on her wall.

Tina's mother tried to hang Tina when she was eight. Tina's brother stopped her, but to this day, when mom gets drunk, she tells Tina, "I should of kicked that chair out from under you when I had the chance!" She curses Tina and hits her when she lives with the family. Much of the time Tina survives on the street or in shelters. And, I can imagine that Tina's mother really would hang up the picture proudly. Our clients have very complicated family relationships.

And, certainly, all the women at YANA were delighted with Tina's good fortune in finding such good clothes. Again, I heard the word "blessing" and the explanation "This is how God works" far more than I would have cared to, and, once again, I managed to restrain myself from saying anything along the lines of "Halli-fucking-luah a 22-year-old is dead, but Tina has nice clothes!" For all that Tina really was pleased with both the outfit and the attention, she was still grieving deeply.

She got me aside a bit to talk again about her cousin's death, and for the first time in the nearly five years I've been at YANA, I heard what one of our women thinks about the afterlife. It was every bit as bad as I'd feared. Tina said that since her cousin had died of an overdose, he had committed suicide, which meant that he was in hell. She said that Jesus suffered and died for our sins, and instead of finishing that sentiment with anything about forgiveness or redemption, she said contrasted his goodness with her own evil and shook her head, grim-faced. Tina told me that she wanted to be with Jesus and the angels, but she didn't think she had much of a chance. After all, she explained, there was no excuse for the things she did.

I didn't know what to say to Tina. We don't tell people how to feel about religion at YANA, and we especially don't do it if their belief in the damnation of addicts who overdose might be what's saved their lives so far. Add to that the very real possibility that smashing through a fragile person's self definition might have more consequences than I know what to do with. . . and I decided to fob off the whole problem on someone else. I asked Tina if she would like to talk to Sister Catherine when she came back, and Tina eagerly said she would. I figured that Catherine's decades of comforting the downtrodden would serve her in good stead.

I also didn't know what to say to Tina about her grief for the loss of her cousin. She said she worried about going to the funeral. She said her last funeral was for her grandfather she'd only seen once in her life. She said she tried to pull him out of the coffin because she didn't want him to leave her. How do you comfort someone who feels her losses that deeply? My answer was to give her a couple of bucks for bus fare and to accept her hugs and thanks for having done "so much."

Prostitution and the Church

2009-10-17T22:56:00.000-07:00

The church was beautiful, small with stained glass, polished wood, built to look like a ship with something precious inside, making its way through a community that looked like it was filled with storm-tossed debris and monsters of the deep. The occasion was tragic, a memorial service for a young woman murdered as she tried to leave prostitution. The dead woman, Cindy, had graduated from a YANA program designed for women on the brink of change. She had done community outreach, given away condoms, tried to do better, tried to turn her back on the darkness of her life and become one of those thousands of points of lights that politicians like to talk about. Instead, someone broke her neck when he threw her down the stairs. I'm not sure whether the murderer was supposed to be a boyfriend or another trick, but she was dead either way, and the little church that she liked to visit sometimes was filled with teary-eyed mourners.

It soon became clear that the minister was not one of them. As we sat there in increasing amazement, he pointed out that she had been a prostitute, then he lectured, with grim matter-of-factness, her children, her mother, and her friends on the hellfire and damnation that await sinners. It was blindingly obvious that he saw no reason to mention heaven or salvation or anything else of comfort in a sermon about someone like her. He said almost nothing else about Cindy or her life, though he did take the time to announce that a couple of her mother's other children were dead as well. Having discharged what was clearly an onerous little task, he moved on to a much more interesting topic: graffiti had been scrawled on some churches in California. In a service nominally devoted to the murder of one of his flock, this man's outrage and, apparently, genuine grief poured forth on the subject of petty vandalism. After we left, Sid told me that Cindy had sat timorously in the back when she attended that church. She'd been afraid to talk to people. Wonder why?

So, that was one experience our women have had with organized religion. We've had a few other negatives: belligerent, self-styled preachers who've called us to schedule a time to come and "save" our clients. Those types have never gotten through the door, which is too bad for them. They probably would have found a little cluster of women easily abashed, ready to admit their guilty natures, eager for salvation. Our clients could have offered them a rich opportunity to feel morally superior.

Yet, moral superiority is not the usual response we get from churches. During our time of wandering through a fiscal wilderness, the churches have been our salvation. They give us money. Ministers preach about YANA from the pulpit, and their congregations send us bags full of supplies. We have a church (I believe of the same denomination as poor Cindy's minister) that makes up elaborate and expensive Easter baskets for the women every year. There's another church that tried to give us space for YANA until they ran into insurance problems. A group of young adults from a Korean mega-church worked very hard with our women. We gave them space to put on dinners and offer gentle sermons to the clients Thursday evenings. They drove out to our neighborhood and picked the women up for Sunday church. They took them to picnics, visited them in the hospital, prayed with them, looked after them until we worried, unnecessarily as it turned out, that they would be become enablers rather than helpers. The leader of that group was a young male engineer who became almost tearful with gratitude for the opportunity to serve God by serving the women of YANA. He was simply stunned by the thought that people could call themselves Christians and still turn their backs on the downtrodden.

And we've gotten the most help of all it from the organized Catholic Church. The Sisters of Mercy were one of Sid's first funders. They've regularly helped with small grants, and the nuns themselves volunteer at YANA. They are always well liked by the women, easy with them, and kind. Hezekiah House itself is owned by the Catholics, and they are the ones who took us in when we couldn't afford the rent. I'll probably never forget our first meeting with Brother Joe. We poured out stories of our women's suffering, and he responded immediately with plans for YANA days at Hezekiah. Midway through the meeting, we realized, with more than a little shock, that Joe wasn't clear on the fact that we planned to come with the women. He was so appalled by their circumstances that he was ready to have their little staff add YANA days to their schedule. For those of you who've been reading this blog, how would you like to squeeze an extra responsibility like that into your work week?

Still, for all the help we've gotten from the churches, I believe that the most important relationship between our women and the church is the women's love of God. At least if you measure religiosity in terms of gratitude to God, belief in having been blessed, and the absolute certainty that a literal God exists, then the prostituted women of YANA are -- by a long shot -- the most religious people I've ever met. Especially after they get a few weeks' sobriety under their belts; then they start praising him for everything. Ask them how they are today, and half the time the answer is "blessed." They thank God for a two-day janitorial job, for miniature bottles of shampoo and conditioner, for a blanket in the winter. They remind each other of his importance. But they rarely go to church. And they never talk about heaven.

Maybe most of their experiences were like Cindy's. Maybe the contempt her minister felt for her was the norm, and all the helping churches have been the exception. How can they risk the pain of being told by a messenger from God that they are contemptible in his sight? Maybe the women don't think they deserve to go to a place that good. Maybe, and I suspect this may be the case for at least a few of them, the experience of going even to a welcoming church would be too powerful for them. If they believe they have walked into God's house, and they feel impelled to think about what God wants them to do with their lives, how do they go on living the way they do? And how much help can they get from a traditional church if they want to live differently? Thinking about what I wrote in the second How Much Money do Prostitutes Make? section, how would they be able to take it in the message they are valuable. They are loved. They are important in the eyes of God? I believe a message like that would be intensely painful for some of the YANA women. And maybe the concept of heaven is too. Despite their sickness and despite the fact that almost all of them grieve over the loss of someone they've loved, they never mention heaven. I'm pretty sure they believe it exists. Maybe they just don't think it's for the likes of them.

Edgar Allan Poe (A Call for Halloween Suggestions)

2009-10-14T13:43:00.000-07:00

Jennifer came in yesterday marveling over the mock funeral held for Edgar Allan Poe this past weekend. She wasn't sure whether his body was taken out of the crypt or a replica was used, but she was sure that there was something more than a little amazing about having a funeral for a man who had been dead for over a century. It was obvious, though, that she would have gone to it if the tickets hadn't cost $40.00. Jennifer likes to be in on almost anything that happens in the neighborhood.

And Poe is definitely part of this Baltimore neighborhood. When I did my little school marmish bit of telling Jennifer that an unknown person had been leaving roses and cognac at Poe's grave on his birthday every year, she immediately told me that the stranger had almost been caught one year. According to Jennifer, the people who had staked out Poe's grave went on a lunch break, and the mysterious fan left his gifts then. Jennifer went on to talk about Poe's house, a museum within walking distance of YANA. She told the room that the building was so small, you couldn't have gotten most modern furniture up the stairs. She said that Poe was a morphine addict, and smilingly recited a line or two of "Annabel Lee." Then she talked about "The Raven" and concluded -- in the same wondering tone she had used talking about the funeral -- "That wasn't even no raven he was writing about. It was a crow."

After that she told us that a woman in her neighborhood said she had known Poe when he lived nearby. Jennifer wasn't sure whether that was true or not, but the woman was very old, and she was white, and she had lived in the neighborhood all her life. Also, everyone looked out for her, and she when she walked her dogs in the morning nobody bothered her, and color didn't matter, and the corner boys. . . well, you get the point. Jennifer is a talker. But, also, because one of the great American writers of the 19th century had been brought into her life, she took an interest in him.

It occurred to me then that maybe we could do something with Poe for Halloween. We could read a short story or poem out loud then write our own or illustrate his. I could talk about Poe as having been addicted to both alcohol and the 19th century equivalent of heroin. I could say that he grew up in a foster home, that at one point he had lived nearby, and that he had often been poor. Most importantly, I could say that he had been deeply scarred by the deaths of people he loved, and that he had transformed his pain into art. Maybe we could talk for a minute or two about doing something with life's horrors rather than only being afraid of them.

The practical applications of this idea seem a little difficult, though. Most of his work seems too long and complicated, and, frankly, too grotesque for our ladies. I hadn't remembered "The Black Cat," but I thought the title sounded sort of Halloween-lite. Then I read about a man who gauged out his cat's eye, hanged his cat, had his family's home mysteriously burned down, then got a new cat which grew a gallows sign on its chest, and I didn't think it was quite the thing to get the YANA women happily chatting away about cruelty and guilt. I've seen little Tina gasp and shudder at the sight of a dead cat by the side of a road.

Maybe "Annabel Lee" would be a good idea. It's fairly short, and it's very pretty. It is Halloween appropriate because it talks about death, and evil angels, and underwater demons. Most of all it talks about a love lost, a love that reminds Poe of childhood innocence. Do any of you reading think it's a good idea? Do you have another suggestion? What kind of art could we do in response to it? We have two weeks to decide, and I'd love to see some suggestions. Let me know. thanks, vickie

How Much Money Do Prostitutes Make? Part II

2009-10-12T14:58:00.000-07:00

O.K., some prostitutes may be poor, but at least, people argue, sometimes they get paid a lot of money. They have to be paid well for doing the things you can't get most women to do for free. You know, the freaky stuff. At least that has to cost real money. Limited supply, serious demand, risk in even asking other women for some things -- it makes sense that certain acts have to be expensive.

Well, let's see. There's having unprotected sex w/ a man who's pretty obviously sick. The risk of getting Hep. C or the AIDS virus ought to be worth some serious cash. Our women try to use condoms for intercourse, and they really try to avoid actual intercourse altogether, but unprotected sex definitely happens. Prostituted women seem to have a long list of serious physical ailments, but I don't see any of them getting rich from it, and I've never heard, not once, about the big bucks any of them scored by sleeping with a sick man.

Then there's rough sex. We had a client who agreed to take her pants down and let a man spank her for money. Once he got her over his lap, he pulled out the paddle and hit her full force while she screamed in panic. Sid took pictures the next day of the purple bruises that covered the woman's rear end. The price? A dollar a whack. Even the client's mother thought a dollar was a little low. Unfortunately, however, the price seemed to be mom's only objection.

Still, risky sex and sadistic sex are available outside of prostitution. How about sex that could put you in prison for life if you tried it with anyone other than a prostitute? How about sex with a really young girl -- 12 years old, for example. There's certainly demand for that. If a man gets convicted for having intercourse with a young child even once (and who wants to have sex just once?) his life is pretty much ruined. I would have thought that a man who can find a family willing to let him have sex with their little girl would pay thousands of dollars for the opportunity. I really am with the economists and everyone else on the net -- people who can get something as dangerous and taboo as that have to be willing to pay a fortune.

Except that they aren't. People who've studied the issue claim that the average age of entry into prostitution is from 11 to 13 years old. I don't know how those studies were conducted, but I do know that a large majority of our clients who actively prostitute come from backgrounds of severe sexual abuse. Sometimes their families rape them. Sometimes their families sell them. Sometimes they seem to drift into horrible situations. I doubt that many of the women who have taken their daughters out prostituting with them waited until the girls were 18 first.

We had a client who met a 12-year-old out prostituting on Wilkens Avenue. The girl said she "had been doing this" since she was 11. She was out by herself with no money, no protection, nothing to eat on a cold December day. She would be beaten by her mother if she came home with less than $20.00 (the cost of two hits of heroin). I'm guessing that mom and boyfriend shot up more than once a day and, of course, had other expenses too. Not that they weren't willing to help the child earn more money -- in fact sometimes the girl woke up to find her mother ushering another trick into her room -- but the girl wasn't able to support the family by herself. How could she? You have to be able to name your price to get it. She was a little girl sent out of her home by her mother, standing on the side of the road waiting for the next rapist. What kind of value could she put on herself? How much fight could she muster when the middle aged man who picked her up told her what he thought she was worth?

And if she continued prostituting, if by the time she was 18 or 20 she had been sexually degraded thousands of times at her family's insistence, what kind of change would you expect her to make? Does she suddenly go out, saying to herself, "Now I'm worth something! Now I can really put a value on my services!" I've been at YANA four years now. I've heard a lot of women say that they were blessed, that they were fortunate, that they came from wonderful homes. I've never heard any of them say they were worth much money. That's what's wrong with assuming that because the women are worth a lot of money they'll know how to get it. They've been taught since they were little girls that they aren't worth anything.

Note

2009-10-12T13:14:00.000-07:00

My husband, who got his doctorate in geophysics from the University of Chicago, thinks I should be a little clearer about whether the economists mentioned in the previous post were actual Chicago researchers or whether they were merely published by the school. My husband is a very good husband, loving, and supportive, and a lot of fun to be with. He's also the one who set up this blog. So, for hubby's sake, let me be clear. All I know is that Edlund and Korn's Theory of Prostitution was published by Chicago. I don't know that the economists themselves are actually affiliated with the school -- although, as my husband morosely conceded, given that it's Chicago we're talking about, they very well could be.

How Much Money Do Prostitutes Make? Part I

2009-10-11T20:42:00.001-07:00

Lena Edlund and Evelyn Korn seem to know. They're a pair of economists who've written "A Theory of Prostitution," which was published a few years back in the University of Chicago's Journal of Political Economy. The theory was that prostitutes make "so much" because they are required to forgo the economic opportunity of becoming wives. As support for the "so much" money prostitutes make, Edlund and Korn cite to some newspaper articles claiming that prostituted women "can make as much as" various large amounts, and they cite to a study purporting to show that street prostitutes in Las Vegas make a few thousand dollars a year more than unskilled laborers. This study was based on asking women how much they were paid -- and then assuming that they wouldn't hesitate to tell a stranger just how little they would take to have sex.

It doesn't seem like much support for a very long paper -- filled with impressive-looking charts and equations and reaching some rather grandiose conclusions as to why all women aren't out hooking -- but I'm guessing that the authors didn't think they really needed any support. Doesn't everyone already know that prostitutes make the big bucks? "Why do prostitutes make so much money?" is a question that's all over the internet, and not many people dispute the premise. Here's what I know about actively prostituting women in Baltimore:

A lot of the time our women can't scrape together enough money for a pack of cigarettes. They buy singles. They bum them. They split a cigarette with a friend. Sometimes they pry butts out of the cracks in the sidewalks.

They line up to get the little hotel soaps and mini bottles of shampoo our donors give us. If they can get a pair of nice socks, they're thrilled. Getting a sanitary napkin or a new pair of underpants is even better.

The older women go without blood pressure medication because they can't afford the few-dollar co-pay. They don't get enough to eat. A slice of pizza can be a pretty big treat.

Often, they've never gone on a vacation. Nobody has ever taught them to drive. They beg for something to give their grandchildren for Christmas.

They are homeless. Whether they're in a shelter, or under a bridge, or at the mercy of somebody who's given them a temporary room, they almost never have a place of their own.

And yet they're selling sex. And not just any sex, but, sometimes at least, the freaky stuff that's hard to get anywhere else. You'd think that would be worth a lot of money. I'll bet our friends Edlund and Korn could prove that they make a lot of money with their opportunity cost graphs. I have my own theory -- not likely to be published by U. of Chicago -- as to why anyone selling something that desirable might not be getting rich. I'll tell you about in Part II.

Why do Women Become Prostitutes? Part II

2009-10-08T11:14:00.000-07:00

Concerned staff from an alternative school have asked Sid and me to speak to the faculty next week. Their school is an area with heavy prostitution, and they have two questions: 1) How can they help students whose parents may be prostituting? and 2) How can they help distressed and tearful prostituted women they've seen hurrying in and out of cars near the school? These are absolutely wonderful questions to ask -- and they're horrible questions to have to answer. Today I tried asking the YANA clients what to do. The results were something less than textbook clear.

The women suggested counseling and gaining the trust of local prostitutes. They said that it was important to be listened to and not lectured. All very good, but there were no suggestions as to how to gain that trust or how to start the listening process with a frightened woman who is literally running in the other direction. One woman said something more interesting. She told us that when she was out on the corner prostituting, she didn't consider herself a prostitute. She thought she was "dating." The other women nodded. They talk a lot more freely about prostituting when they're talking in the past tense. They can be pretty open about it then.

What they aren't open about -- at all -- is the subject of anybody's mother prostituting. After someone referred to prostituting women bringing their "dates," i.e. tricks home, a new client named LaTeisha said the following, unprompted, within the space of about five minutes. "Some women bring a lot of dates all up in the house. My mother never did that. I came from a good home! My mother was a drinker!" And then, tearfully, "My mother saved my children, but she never saved me." O.K., I don't want to read too much into what the women say, but has anyone you've ever known told you that their mother didn't bring her tricks home with them? If they just announced something like that wouldn't you think the mother was prostituting?

As soon as LaTeisha said she came from a good home, another woman chimed in to say that she came from a good home too. LaTeisha went on to tell us that young people don't know how to date anymore, that they just hook up to have sex. LaTeisha might have a point there, but then she said that the parents teach the girls not to come home "with nothing but a wet ass" after sex; they should have money too. I don't think LaTeisha is speaking for the larger society there. I don't think she knew that most mothers don't act that way. LaTeisha's recommendation for teaching young people not to prostitute? Men should know how to walk with a lady. They should walk on the outside of the sidewalk near the street.

The other women in the group had little to add. I asked if a girl whose mother was prostituting was herself at high risk for prostitution. Only one person responded, and she said, with great determination, that people can rise above their environments. I can't think of anytime I've known a YANA woman to say that she prostituted because her mother did, or that she led her own child into prostitution. And yet, we see, over and over again, that prostitution in our neck of the woods is inter-generational.

Sid and I went to a national conference on domestic trafficking last year and heard the same thing from people in other parts of the country. One detective led a nationally known unit that has been keeping statistics on prostituted women. Not only did almost all of them report a sexual assault background, but over 95% of their mothers reported the same background. Another woman stood in front of the room and told us that "Incest is the boot camp of prostitution." In the first year of YANA's existence, the counselors documented hundreds of stories of childhood sexual abuse. We've had many mother-daughter pairs come to us, often with the daughter having found YANA first and taking the first step away from prostitution.

Still, the mother-daughter thing isn't talked about. The reasons for prostituting are almost always given as "I just wanted to run wild." or "I'd do anything for drugs." Even when the drug use began after the prostitution, the drug is given as the cause. What should counselors do when the students have prostituting mothers? The answer is confusion, silence, and insistence that their own mothers were good. On the one hand, that lack of awareness doesn't bode well for staying out of prostitution. LaTeisha, who is clean, admitted that while she isn't on the street anymore, she will turn a trick in an emergency. "If I don't have food, I will get in a car to feed my children," she said. Right. LaTeisha hasn't had custody of her children for years. Prostitution may be self sacrifice, but it isn't noble, and it sure isn't done for the sake of the kids.

On the other hand -- and this is very important -- women struggling with prostitution still make progress in their lives. They still find ways to grow, to enjoy themselves, and to appreciate each other. LaTeisha is dating a man with no job and no money at all. She isn't crazy about this fact. ("That mf better get a job" is how she put it.) But she really lights up when she talks about him. They enjoy each other. They talk. He takes her around his family. She says she's enjoying what she should have had when she was young. Most of our women were put on a very hard road when they were children, and they keep stumbling forward without thinking too much about why they're there. A lot of them get amazingly far without taking much of a look backwards.

Halloween

2009-10-07T12:26:00.000-07:00

"A woman who's on her period can't hold a rose. If she tries, the petals will all fall off." The forty-something YANA client who told me that was dead-serious. So was the woman who explained that her daughter's ghost never visited her because the girl understood that her mother was "afraid of dead people." Her daughter restricted her appearances to other family members out of consideration for her mother's nerves. As far as I could tell, everyone else in the room seemed to believe that this was an immanently reasonable decision on the part of the ghost.

YANA women tend to be pretty literal. A rose is beautiful. A period is nasty. So, never the two shall meet. Or something like that. And people you love don't just live in your mind as abstract ideas. They're real people. So, if the mother never walks in the girl's old bedroom and sees her sitting on the bed ready to talk, the way her uncle has, it must be that the daughter is a good daughter, respecting her mother's wishes.

Their language, too, shows a surprising level of respect. Almost all YANA women are Christians, and I can't think of a single time I have ever heard any of them take the Lord's name in vain. Generally, they try not to swear at all in YANA, but when they do, they say bitch or the "f" word. Even little Tina has been known to announce that she "don't play that shit" when she thinks she's been insulted. No blaspheme, though. They don't mess around with God. They don't wear skull and cross bones motifs, get devil or hell fire tattoos, or dress, even remotely, Goth. And they certainly don't like Halloween.

I have been wanting to do more in the way of decorations and crafts, but I knew we'd be pretty limited with Halloween. There'd been some thought of getting a Halloween movie for our VCR, but no one was thinking Jason or Kruger. Even so, something that suggested any level of physical danger seemed like it might not work for our ladies, and the things I would consider fun -- like making scary masks or drawing pictures of goblins and skeletons -- well, I had the feeling they would be a problem too. Superstition, after all, is limiting, and superstitious people have limited lives in large ways and small. Then someone mentioned today the rapes that would be coming up soon with Halloween.

Rape is not something I associated with Halloween. Oh yes, several women explained. It's big challenge time with the gangs, big initiation time. Around Halloween, our local Bloods and Crips like to make a competition out of how many people they can rape or kill. Sid confirmed the explanation. That's what the gangs do.

Think of living your whole life in a neighborhood like that. Think of being one of the prime candidates for the raping or killing. Imagine that you're out at night quite often, and that at least once in your life, possibly many times, you've slept in abandoned houses or under bridges wondering whether someone would come out of the darkness to attack you. Then think that images of witches and demons have turned into rallying symbols for the attackers. Revulsion and terror start to sound like very good reactions to me. Amusement and abstraction -- not so much. I've begun to rethink my little syllogism. Maybe it's not that people who are superstitious end up with limited lives. Maybe it's that people with severely limited lives had better end up superstitious if they want to survive. They might miss out on holding roses at certain times of the month, but they also might find a place to hide when the wrong person or the wrong holiday draws near. And if they find comfort in their dead children's continuing acts of respect, good for them. That sounds like another good way to survive.

Instant Grits

2009-10-01T19:05:00.000-07:00

They're probably the best snack food to keep on hand: not attractive enough to be stolen, heavily fortified, an easy meal, and sugar-free. It's the sugar free aspect that's most important. Quite a few of our clients have Type II diabetes, although most of the women who have it are thin, not fat. I believe the medical explanation for all our skinny adult-onset diabetics is that people who are genetically disposed towards diabetes are likely to develop the disease if their bodies are subjected to long term stress. Obesity is a stresser, but not the only one. Long term alcoholism and drug use are other types. Our underweight women tend to have the most serious substance abuse problems, and the result is a lot of skinny diabetics. Perhaps there are some doctors or other medically knowledgeable people reading this blog who can tell me whether I'm right or not. All I know for a certainty is that we have some very small women who recite mind boggling numbers when they tell me what their blood sugar has been and who can go through some pretty dramatic mood swings after they eat.

Diabetes is not the only illness common in our group. The long term injuries can be impressive too. Today, I watched one woman help her friend take off her jacket. The woman being helped stood with her arm out in front of her at a crazy angle like a curving tree limb. She had an unreal smile plastered on her face, and she told me that she had cried from the pain this morning. She'd had surgery on her arm almost a year ago and seemed to have accepted intense episodic pain as a normal part of her life. When she mentioned the surgery, Liz looked over and commented that she'd had two surgeries on her arm. Another woman standing nearby had chronic pain in her leg from having dropped something on it when she was doing some pick-up construction work. We have a fair number of limping women. The people who built Hezekiah House wisely included an elevator. Not having to climb even one flight of stairs is a relief to many of our clients.

Most of our clients make very little of their ailments, accepting their accumulating disabilities as an unremarkable aspect of middle age, rarely bothering with a cane or walker. With some women, though, paying attention to the physical injuries is unavoidable. Yesterday, a tall, heavy set woman came in for the first time and loudly treated the room to her biography (sexually molested by eight different people as a child, beaten by her mother when she told about it, slashed her wrists when she was thirteen, beaten in the head with a pole). "I've died five times," the woman solemnly intoned. Personally, I'd have liked to believe that this mentally ill woman had imagined it all, but there were the broad scars on the inside of her arm. There was her face, askew in three places as if the skin had to be refashioned over the crumpled skull. Who knows? Maybe she did flat line five times. Maybe every word of her litany was the God's honest truth. Certainly, she was a walking testament to her injuries.

We've had a few women with endocarditis. My understanding of this disease comes from them. Apparently, dirty needles aren't just needles previously used by people who are sick; they're also needles that just physically have dirt on them. Push that dirt into your vein when you're shooting drugs, and you can end up with bacteria or fungus infecting your heart. I think that if something else doesn't get you first, you eventually die from it. Certainly we've had young women go into the hospital then nursing home for weeks at a time with their endocarditis problems. Little Tina isn't the only one to speak matter of factly about her body not being able to get enough oxygen.

The list of health problems caused by the various forms of abuse is certainly much longer than diabetes, broken bones, and endocarditis. We had a women with fissures that opened up across her body like the cracks in the ground at the beginning of an earthquake. Quite a few women walk around with one leg substantially larger than the other. In addition to AIDS and hepatitis C, missing teeth, swellings the size of baseballs, infected pick marks, and soaring blood pressure in young women are a pretty routine part of life for the prostituted women of Baltimore.

A nurse practitioner and HIV specialist from Health Care for the Homeless come to YANA every Thursday morning, to give testing and treatment. They are nothing short of valiant as they row against the tide. We try to give out blankets and coats during the winter. I remember giving Tina a blanket last fall and hoping that she survived the cold, living on the floor of a garage. And now I've figured out that instant grits would be a good idea. There are times when I think that these little stop-gap measures are nothing short of pathetic in the face of the massive disorders our women face. Our women, however, do not agree. They're delighted to line up like they did today to get flu shots from Health Care for the Homeless. They know how vulnerable they are and how much they need the small measures. Liz beamed at me when she got the grits. They anxiously search our little supply of donated clothes for something warm to wear and revel in a good coat. They want to live. They want to get better. The woman who died five times thanked God for her blessings and thanked us, repeatedly, for the few small things we gave her.

Note: Anyone who could help me in understanding the medical issues is urged to write in with corrections, additional information, or any other comments. People who would like to donate coats, blankets, and other warm things for the coming winter can do so by clicking on the YANA website on the right hand column.

Why do Women Become Prostitutes? Part I.

2009-09-30T11:33:00.000-07:00

I suppose that most of you have heard Mackenzie Phillips' claim that she had a ten year sexual relationship with her father, beginning when she was 19. Her father, a musician with the Mamas and Papas, can't deny it because he's dead. Mackenzie Phillips has a long history of serious drug addiction and doesn't present particularly well. And the claim itself -- well, by now, we're used to hearing the stories of young children who've been made the victims of incest or preyed upon by daycare providers. We know how we're supposed to react to them. Mackenzie's claim, that as an adult she had an affair with her own father, is something else. People don't seem to know how to react to her. As far as I can tell, she's become a very, very public object of embarrassment. You can't help but look at the red haired, slightly ravaged looking woman, tossing her head, smiling ingratiatingly, and talking, talking, talking about how she spent her 20s sleeping with dad. At the same time, you don't want to look at a person like that any longer than you have to. She's probably sick, after all, and, given the incest, maybe a victim, but in a lot of ways she's just plain repulsive for having participated in her own degradation.

It's her family I find most interesting. Both her dad's ex wives have denounced her, even Michelle, with whom she was supposed to have had a close relationship. Neither of them mentioned the father's role in addicting Mackenzie to drugs before she reached her teens. Her youngest sister has unleashed a series of snide remarks, supposedly meant to be neutral, acknowledging Mackenzie's need to "come clean." Little Sister also sounded angry that Mackenzie had left her alone with the father who could have done the same things to her -- if he had done them to Mackenzie -- which probably he didn't. It was Mackenzie's other sister, Cheyenne came to Mackenzie's rescue, proclaiming her belief in Mackenzie and her love of her sister. Cheyenne's support consisted of the following: 1) a statement that she believed the affair happened, 2) repeated emphasis on the consensual nature of the affair, 3) a description of what an idyllic time she had with their father the few times he visited, 4) a lengthier discussion of how hard Mackenzie's revelation had been on Cheyenne's family, and, finally, 5) forgiveness for Mackenzie for having told her story. At no point did Cheyenne or anyone else express any interest in Mackenzie's claim that the "affair" began when her father raped her, that their sex frequently took place when Mackenzie was too stoned to know what was happening, or that her father had allowed one of his friends to rape her when she was a child. For this display of sympathy, Mackenzie gratefully and enthusiastically professed her love of Cheyenne.

Perhaps she was right to be grateful. Nobody at all came to Ellen's defense when she turned over evidence against her husband the rapist. We had a client whose uncle went to prison for the years he spent raping her while she was in elementary school. When he came out, the family welcomed him back with open arms. Decades later, when the woman's father died, a YANA staffer took her to his funeral. Nobody in the family would let her ride with them. When our women are battered, even by a stranger, they want to protect the man who attacked them, the way their mothers protected the men who attacked them as children. Very few of our women have ever denounced a family member who beat them or raped them, and of the ones who have, I can't think of any who got even as much support as Mackenzie got from Cheyenne.

Why do women become prostitutes? I don't have the answer, at least not all of it, but Mackenzie Phillips' family gave us all a nice, on-air demonstration of the culture that produced many of our clients. All the attention, all the concern is focused on maintaining the family just as it is. There just isn't any room left to worry about what's happening to the victim. The result sometimes seems to be a woman willing to participate in her own degradation. Long ago, I began to think of the women at YANA as the obedient daughters. Well into adulthood, they keep doing what they've been taught long ago.

Faces of YANA

2009-09-25T19:36:00.000-07:00

I think getting to know the overlooked people is good for almost anyone. Both my sons have volunteered at YANA, and both are compassionate, thoughtful men. My younger son, Daniel, was there this past summer. There are now three pictures of him with the women he met at YANA on this blog and another picture of three women posing together.

All of the women posed (enthusiastically) for pictures that they knew might be on the internet promoting YANA and its work. Most of our clients are proud of their affiliation with YANA. Still, pseudonyms are used in the posts, and nothing learned through counseling or my legal work with clients is ever used.

Tina

2009-09-25T10:35:00.000-07:00

Tina is another of our tiny, dying clients. She has a stick figure body and a face that makes me think of a child's little drawing: mouth, nose, and eyes all sketched with a few straight lines, a fringe of short bangs on her forehead. It's a sweet, slightly quizzical look without much force behind it. Often, as she feels the effects of her methadone -- considerably enhanced by high dose xanex bought on the street -- she moves like a little stick figure losing its animation, swaying and bobbing, eyes shut and mouth open, taking minutes to raise or lower the Styrofoam cup filled with lukewarm coffee. Even her hands are like something a child would draw, although, in this case, we're talking about a bored or slightly malevolent child. She has some fingernails that stop short of the end of her fingers and then grow straight up, so that they're perpendicular to where they're supposed to be. They can get quite long, and thick, and rather yellow. These witchy growths on her otherwise unmarked body are caused by a virus.

Tina, who is in her late 30s, spent much of last winter sleeping in her boyfriend's mother's garage. She has AIDS, which she says was acquired through being regularly injected with heroin at the age of 14 by her aunt. She has many of the diseases and the fungal infections that typically go with it. Her t-cell count (often 800 or more in a healthy person, dipping below 200 for someone with AIDS) tends to remain below 40. She is, appropriately, on none of the AIDS medications. She couldn't maintain the regime, and the drugs do more harm than good if they're started and stopped, mixed with everything else she buys on the street. She says that her doctor is frustrated with her, and it's obvious that she doesn't blame him. Tina's blood pressure is also extraordinarily low, and she speaks matter of factly about her body's lack of oxygen. When she goes to the E.R. she's like a t.v. character going to Cheers -- everybody knows her name.

And everybody seems to like Tina, or feel sorry for her, or tolerate her anyway. She is so much like a little disabled child that it's hard to remember she's a woman, but she is. She has a boyfriend. She has a two-year-old child she adores (don't worry, too much, anyway, the dad's family has custody). She can get very angry when she thinks she's been insulted, and she will apologize at length weeks after an incident if she sees a person she thinks she spoke to rudely. She is aware enough of what her life is to feel despair. Suicide is a recurring consideration.

It was both reassuring and depressing to listen to her yesterday talk about her past. Boys in the Hood was on our little V.C.R., and Tina, looking over at it, remarked that if the characters got revenge they'd go to prison. Then she continued in her soft, slightly gravelly, no-preliminaries monotone to tell about her own revenge history. "In my family," she said,"When anything happens to anybody, mom, sister, brother, grandma, doesn't matter, the first thing we think about is revenge." I can believe that. Not too many months ago, her mother hit her in the face. Tina didn't react because her little daughter and niece were in the room. Tina's mother called her a "pussy" for not hitting back. Normally, the women would fight.

Tina told me that when she was in a half way house when she heard that someone had hurt a close friend. The first thing she did was call a cab, then go on trash can duty so she could get outside. The cab came, and she ran for it, but somebody at the halfway house stopped the cab from taking off. Didn't matter to Tina. Nobody had hands on her yet, and she went flying down the street in a bright green sweatsuit, ducked in an alley, unzipped it, and reappeared in the red sweatsuit she'd hidden underneath, flagged down another cab and kept moving. "You'd of thought I did murder someone," she said. "The way they kept showing my picture on the T.V. They said I'd escaped from prison, but it was a halfway house." I asked if she got revenge while she was out, and Tina made one of her mild adjustments of expression, tending towards surprise. Of course she had gotten revenge. And later, when she and the offending woman were both in the same jail, she got it again.

And she didn't get caught anytime soon, either. Police came to her home, and helicopters circled the skies above it. She ran to the roof of her stepfather's club, white trash bag in her hand. Tina hid in the snow, beneath the white bag, unseen. I'm (inappropriately?) delighted by this image of her determination, her foresight in grabbing the trash bag, her winning something for once. Perhaps with some of the same feelings I'm having, Tina went on to talk about her little sister who, as a teenager, tried to jump out of a moving police car. She named the two police who had her at the time, one of them, Officer Smith, is a man I've heard quite a bit about. Officer Smith and partner took the little sister into a walled alley for a discussion of her escape attempt. While Officer Smith was cracking her ribs, Tina's little sister managed to blacken his eye and give him a bloody nose. Tina modified her expression again towards slight amusement. "I heard the other police made fun of him for that 'cause she didn't weigh but a hundred pounds."

Tina quietly chatted a bit more. She said she didn't mind prison except for the first few days she spent in drug withdrawal. Otherwise it was fine. "I skate all over there," she said with a tiny smile. "It's because I was locked up so much when I was a minor. I became institutionalized." A fair enough assessment, I suppose. She'd probably be better off in prison now, but there's life inside that little doll-like figure and surprising sweetness too. I hope she'll keep coming back.

NOTE

2009-09-23T18:35:00.001-07:00

There's now a link to the YANA website in the right hand column. I hope you'll take a look. Tomorrow's blog may not get written until Friday morning, but it will be written. Sorry I'm being so slow with the pictures. Eventually, there'll be a video too.

Remembering Amy

2009-09-23T14:20:00.000-07:00

Today I was asked if we would be doing anything in recognition of Domestic Violence Month or Sexual Assault something or other, and I had to admit that we weren't. If I'd been more forthcoming, I'd have admitted that I didn't know what either of those things are, but instead I just mumbled something about domestic violence and sexual assault being ongoing issues for our women. And then I remembered that we did have a client once who had briefly become the symbolic face of domestic violence for one local govt. agency, and I remembered what it had meant to her to recognized the way she was, to be held up as an example of success, to be praised, to be used.

Amy was a long term YANA client. She was one of many to come from astounding levels of incest and violence, but unlike the other clients, she hid her vulnerability well. To me she was just a dumpy, middle aged white woman, with bad clothes, a flippant sense of humor, and what turned out to be some real aesthetic leanings. Unsurprisingly, I felt very comfortable with her. Sid, who easily saw how broken Amy was beneath the all the wisecracking, loved her.

Years after Amy began with us, YANA partnered with a prestigious university for a jewelry making project. I wasn't volunteering at YANA then, but I understood the jewelry making to be tremendously popular, and, of all our clients, Amy was the one who became most excited by it. She was good at it, really good, and invented necklaces that were strange enough to look like something a character out of Dr. Suess's books would wear, and still conventionally pretty enough to be sold as decoration. She dragooned other clients into making jewelry with her. She worked, obsessively, on what became her new business, and she learned that telling her story helped her make a sale.

One of the very first days I began at YANA, the Baltimore Sun ran an article on her, artsy picture and all, chronicling her success as a jewelry maker. The twist on the article was that this particular jewelry maker had climbed out of prostitution and addiction through the love of beads. Amy walked through YANA with that article like somebody waving a campaign poster on election day. And beaming, absolutely beaming, she announced that she never would forget YANA, no matter how famous she got. She was right. She never did forget YANA, but she was taken, rather dramatically, out of the life she had always known. Amy became the prop for the academics who had "saved" her. She made appearances. She starred in a fund raising movie and attended a showing. One time she went on network t.v.

Of course, the academic whose project had been her salvation was the main speaker for that segment. She praised her own project, her school, and Amy's redemption. I believe she said something about the important economic benefits of having learned a trade -- that was certainly a point made at other presentations. Around the time of the t.v. show I bought a beaded necklace at a chain clothing store. It had 10 strands and many hundreds of tiny beads which were interspersed with more elaborate ones. It cost 12 dollars retail. I wondered how an American, paying American prices and working by hand, could ever make a living at a trade like that. The professor did not elaborate.

She had enough other elaborating to do with Amy's (and her school's) astonishing success. Amy, naturally enough, sat staring at the professor with the kind of look a very young baby will sometimes give a parent -- unqualified love, unqualified devotion. Very possibly, my memory of this is distorted, but it seems to me that she was actually staring upwards at the academic, like a rather large, but grateful, pet.

And who am I to begrudge her that? Someone said she was special. Someone said she had done well. That's what all of us are supposed to hear when we're children, and if she was just hearing it now in front of the whole country, why shouldn't she be thrilled? Especially since, now that both of her parents were dead, she was repeating her incestuous relationship with her elderly stepfather and his new wife. The woman she called mom collected money from the man she called dad and paid Amy to have sex with him. "Mom" often watched. Later she'd call Amy a whore and wheedle a good portion of the money back from her. A number of Amy's friends believed that "mom" and "dad" were Amy's biological parents, apparently because Amy herself never thought of them as anything else. The day we drove her to the t.v. station, Amy told us she had recently gone to her parents' house to clean for her mom.

She wasn't walking the street, though, and her few other clients were "boyfriends" she generally saw in their homes. She also had periods of sobriety, and even when she was on the drug line she hid it well. Amy disguised her misery, in other words. And she got more than televised praise from the people who used her to promote their own success. She got free beads, restaurant dinners, a chance to sell her work at Baltimore's Visionary Arts Museum, and a new view of herself. At one point she rented one of the nearby row houses, and all of YANA knew Amy now had a house of her own. When one client asked her how she managed it, Amy proudly answered, "Beads! Beads, beads, beads. It's all about making jewelry!"

She collected blankets and linens from YANA donations, and got a church group to donate a used washing machine. She never really moved in, though. With her history, she wasn't able to get the utilities turned on. She paid rent for a few months, then quit, soon got formally evicted. She spoke about how she'd turned her life around at an anniversary party and gave the address of her rented house when a visitor asked where she lived now. The visitor was obviously taken aback. She knew that successful entrepreneurs at any level lived somewhere else. Amy didn't miss a beat. "You stay where you're needed!" she announced, and there was a collective murmur of approval. Business lady and neighborhood saint.

Pretending to be a success took a heavy toll on her, though. Amy disappeared for weeks at a time. She confessed tearfully to me that she felt like she was letting everybody down. As much as she courted -- and knew how to manipulate -- the attention, it also overwhelmed her. An extremely well dressed lady from one of the government agencies came to our place once to talk to Amy about displaying her jewelry at a domestic violence function. I sat down with the two of them and told Ms. Well Dressed that Amy had been sick quite a bit, so much so that making another appearance might be too much for her. You'd think most people would at least fake a little concern. Not Govt. Lady. I don't think it even occurred to her. She booked Amy for her display and left.

Amy never made it to her display for domestic violence gig. I can't imagine Ms. Well Dressed Govt. Lady felt concerned, but I hope she was at least mortified by her procurement failure. We've had several very different sorts of professional women come to YANA lately. They're professors from other colleges, and they spend a lot of time with our women, listening, asking questions, doing small things to help. I think they like our woman, and I feel convinced that they actually want to know who they are. With their help, maybe we'll eventually do something for Domestic Violence Month and whatever that sexual thing is too. God knows our woman would like to be told they're special, that they've done something well.

Speaking of stereotypes. . .

2009-09-17T16:34:00.000-07:00

I've described our women as being the victims of brutal childhood rape, poverty, and isolating stereotypes. This is how I see them, but it would be a mistake for me to portray them as nothing but child-like victims who loathe every minute of what they're "forced" to do. They are quirky and sometimes strong. They can take some strange routes to prostitution, and when they find what they consider "goodness," such as motherhood or God, they can lord their discovery mercilessly over anyone in their path. They often look nothing at all like frightened teenagers, and, like Diane with Edgar, they can get some pleasure out of the street life, or at least from their idea of what that life is supposed to be. Here are some moments from today.

Today was the last day for Ellen, a quiet woman who has only been coming for a couple months and whose story I don't know well. Ellen is probably in her sixties, extremely obese, with waist length hair, and the dazzling blue eyes so many of our white clients have. She looks a little like someone who should be living in a forest with the Keebler elves. Asked how old she was when she became addicted to crack, she broke into a grin that was half embarrassment, half elven merriment. "Fifty-five," Ellen answered.

Ellen had been smoking pot intermittently since she was 19, but apparently didn't start on crack until her sister, "Miss Crack-head of the world" moved in with her. Then her life went to hell in a handbasket -- not that it was all that great before. Back in the 80s, her husband was arrested and convicted of serial rape. He was given three consecutive life sentences, but it was Ellen who was the pariah among their friends and family because she had given the police the evidence they needed. She has said that sometimes she feels guilty because she didn't turn her husband in earlier and protect some of his victims, but then she says she remembers what the man did to her, and her voice trails off.

Did she have a background of child sexual abuse? Did she start prostituting as a little girl, before she even had the comfort of pot? How can anyone stand to put their face in a stranger's crotch, be sodomized by someone who has no reason to care how rough he gets, go off with man after man not knowing if this is the night to become a murder victim -- without at least a little dope? Did she wait to start prostitution until her crack addiction, in her 50s? The fact that several of her siblings have serious drug addictions and that they turned against her, rather than her husband, when she gave evidence of his brutality suggest that she came from a severely abusive family. For that matter, the fact that her sister's presence triggered her addiction suggests it too. But the fact that she reports long periods of no drug use and stability while raising her children (and while hubby was out raping the neighbors) shows control, doesn't it? And apparently she waited something like ten years between the husband's conviction and her crack spree, so it sounds like more than simply trading off one form of degradation for another.

Maybe if I'd gotten to know her better, I would have seen that her background fitted a predictable pattern. Maybe not. Maybe I would have seen a weird, meandering path, blazed partly by her parents long ago, and then continued with whims, odd chances, conscious bad choices of her own. I doubt much of it was meant as a highway to adventure, though. She drew a picture of her dreams once -- a picture of a little house on a hill with sunshine and a lake "for swimming and fishing." She told me that having an image like that in her mind was "a survival technique." She said that when people wondered "where she had gone" when she stared off into space, they didn't know she'd left them behind to go to that peaceful home.

Ellen, of course, did not fill the whole day. We had the ravening hordes in for their clothes and "personals." They're an issue to be addressed later at YANA and in the blog. We had a very sweet, young volunteer, one who's loved by the clients, who talked to me about how trendy "sex work" has become among college students who see it as feminism and power. I hope that, like so many fashions, it mostly talk, mostly temporary. I managed a few words about the need for hurt people to master a bad situation -- trying to glamorize and conquer it. Feel bad about sex, get raped, get humiliated even, and maybe you have a great need to get control over the whole thing by making somebody pay. I don't know whether that's the driving force behind the feminism/power business, though. Maybe it's just all those idiots singing songs about pimps and 'hos.

I was bothered by the idea of it, anyway, and bothered by the fact that our t.v/vcr with its outdated tapes has been hijacked to play a single movie every day, nobody paying full attention to it, but everybody looking over at it from time to time. The movie is "Coyote Ugly." It's full of very sexy women dancing on a bar, in a half-way strip. They look kind of feminist and powerful, to tell you the truth.

We also have another little outburst of nasty religion. Generally it's snide one upmanship as to who knows the bible the best or who really knows how to pray. The remarks are kept more or less neutral, delivered with a smile, but they get their point across. Today, however, we had a new client who went into an intense, full-out harangue, first trying to use her grandmother status to tell other people what to do, then trying for the same domination using the Jesus & prayer rationale. If she does that again, I expect I'll be writing my first post about throwing a client out.

We also had Liz, another woman pushing 50, who came in, crying as usual. I have become very fond of Liz, though I'd be hard put to tell you why. Perhaps it is partly because what she repeatedly says about herself is true: she is dying or very close to it. Telling all about Liz would take far too much space for this blog, but I will say that she fit her usual pattern today. She came in, weeping and announcing her latest hardship. What's difficult about Liz is that they really are hardships, very serious ones, often visible in the bruises and abrasions on her face. Today she said she had cirrhosis of the liver. Given her astounding level of drink, liver damage was pretty much a given. After she cried and got hugged and received, once again, far more than the theoretical quota of donations, she went to the bathroom to wash up and put on her new clothes. Liz emerged, as always, triumphant. Weeping little old lady gone, somewhat faded beauty-queen stripper returned.

Lots of "I love you's" from Liz, lots of talk about surviving and kicking ass, and looking sexy. Mentions of her newest "friend." This one wants to commit her to a psych ward until she goes in for her interferon treatments. We nod when she says the psych ward might be a good idea. "I might go psycho on someone!" she says, waving her hands threateningly and laughing her Liz laugh, filled with bravado. The cure for Liz's mind boggling array of problems is always the same, and it always works. Give her a hug and help her look pretty. The rewards of being a girl are like jet fuel for Liz. She comes in, gets refilled, and takes off soaring.

Diane

2009-09-16T18:57:00.000-07:00

First of all, Diane is o.k., at least for now. Edgar, however, is living with her. He had a mild stroke while at her apartment. Diane got help, and, now that he's back home with her, seems to be taking care of him. She's back at YANA, reining in my profligate ways with the donations, coming up with good, new ideas for services, buying food for her cat, and apparently taking care of all the old women in her neighborhood. She also recently strangled Edgar into unconsciousness. I think this was before the stroke, but I'm not sure. "I choked him out," she told me, embarrassed and grinning at the same time. He had been messing with her ("just playing") when she didn't want to be messed with, and Diane got one of her "anxiety attacks." She choked him until his eyes rolled back in his head and he passed out. As you know, I've seen Edgar. I believe he to have been very drunk or very stoned for that to have been possible.

"There are some women who abuse men too," Diane told me. I agreed wholeheartedly. "I guess I became one of them then," she said. No agreement there. A batterer and rapist "messing with" with one of his victims deserved a lot worse than that. Still, there you go: intermittent moments of power, the occasional revenge, the occasional good natured reward. String enough together, and I guess you get enough to keep a person going.

NOTE

2009-09-16T18:53:00.000-07:00

Drop in at YANA is on Wednesdays and Thursdays. These are the days I volunteer and generally the days I'll be posting, though other posts may appear from time to time. The easiest way to know when there's a new post is to become a "follower" by clicking on the follower button in the right hand column and following the directions. Within the next few days, we'll be adding pictures and maybe a video. Keep reading!

Being "on the side of" Prostitutes

2009-09-16T17:26:00.000-07:00

The women we meet in this blog are the adult sort- of survivors of childhood abuse. Thirty, forty, fifty, and older, they are still struggling with the things that happened to them as children, faithfully recreating the abuse that was inflicted upon them when they were three, four, and five. Sometimes YANA works with the children themselves, though. Sid and her determined little band of volunteers collaborate with police and prosecutors, providing comfort and advocacy for those the government has chosen to consider the victims of human trafficking. By definition, anyone under the age of 18 who has prostituted is a trafficking victim, whether they cross jurisdictions or not. Often, by definition, they are also criminals and are prosecuted no matter how young they are. We will undoubtedly talk more about the children in later posts. Today, though, was a good reminder of where the grown up YANA women come from.

Sid and I talked before the women came in. Sid was still shocked and supremely frustrated by the treatment a teenage girl had received from some rural police. The girl, who was being prostituted by her father, and who was pregnant by one of her tricks, was interrogated at length by an officer who apparently knew both the father and the trick. She was told, repeatedly, that she was an habitual runaway and liar (wonder why she would be that?). She was told that, despite the fact that her father collected money from the tricks immediately after they screwed her, she was engaging in consensual sex. She was told that the victims services workers who were waiting for her in the building were nowhere around. She was told that they only wanted to help her in order to get her baby from her.

As far as anyone knows, the officer wasn't a rapist. He didn't have a thing for little girls, and he didn't profit from the prostitution. He had just chosen which side he wanted to be on, and it damn sure wasn't the side of a prostitute. In a sense, it's not an unreasonable choice. Being "on the side of" a prostitute, any aged prostitute, is painful, involving, as it does, the thought that mothers and fathers will sometimes do horrible things to their children, and that people can be hurt so badly that they will eventually start hurting themselves. What does that say about free will? Nothing most of us want to hear. Perhaps worst of all, it means that people we know, nice people, might have taken part in something evil when they decided to find out what being with a hooker is like. It's so much easier to believe that the homeless women wandering down Wilkens Ave. just decided to prostitute because they were too slutty and lazy to live normal lives. Besides, if you don't think being "on the side of" any aged prostitutes is just plain weird, tell all your coworkers that you read this blog. See what their reaction is.

And then, after you do that, maybe take things one step further, and tell them a benefit of reading. Without intervention, the isolation that little girl felt alone in an interrogation room with the sneering cop is something she could carry with her for the rest of her life. After what had been done to her by her own family, the contempt of the outside world could simply destroy her sense of being part of the human race. When we meet the women as individuals, not stereotypes they get to be human again. First they're human on the screen, then in our minds, then in the way we talk, eventually in the way that they get treated. The women I've met could use a few people on their side. They'd like to be seen as human again.

Worried about Diane

2009-09-12T16:15:00.000-07:00

Thursday we talked about clothes and whether nuns are virgins and the drive down Wilkens Avenue, but something else was happening that day. Or, to put it more precisely, something else was not happening. That something else was Diane's not coming to YANA. She didn't come in at all Thursday, and I still don't know why. I'm worried about it enough to be writing about it now and to wonder if I can contact her somehow before we open again.

Diane is a client-volunteer who's made herself in charge of donations and the general physical order of YANA. This is no small task, and it means that she incurs the resentment of some of the other women -- the ones who don't want the rules quite so reliably enforced and who certainly don't want them enforced by another client. Conflict is hard for Diane. She walks away sometimes. She tells me she knows she has to work on her "attitude." I believe she suffers from chronic anxiety, and I know there are times when she wants to lash out. She sticks to the rules, though, and, almost always, she does so with real kindness. Without the hugging, the professions of love, the gushing and the weeping we get from so many, Diane takes care of our space and everyone within it. She quietly, but deeply, enjoys the respect she has earned, and maybe because of it, or maybe for some other reason entirely, she is dramatically remaking her world.

Other women happily do our craft projects, but Diane is the one who tells me that she "woke up at 5 o'clock this morning thinking about my collage." She is learning to cruise the internet, wants presentations about current events, goes on retreats to the mountains with the nuns at Hezekiah House, seems to be helping every needy old woman in a one mile radius of her home, lobbies for a YANA trip to a museum. She's gone from dressing almost as badly as I do to developing her own very tasteful style -- slightly afro-centric, more black and tan than any bright colors, the details, assembled from donated clothes, generally dead on.

So, after decades of drugs, poverty, sexual abuse in one form or another, she's eagerly building a new life for herself. She'd be another YANA success story if her old friend, Edgar, would just leave her alone. I imagine her apartment is a big part of the attraction. He moves in. She gets a protective order to keep him out. He leaves, and she worries about whether he has clean clothes. She borrows my phone and spends hours calling the hospitals, imagining he is hurt. The protective order lapses, and he moves back in. He rapes her, then cleans the apartment, figuring that makes them even. She considers another protective order. I realize why the police, in a city as violence plagued as Baltimore, have been driving by her home, trying to keep an eye on Edger.

The day after we found out she'd been raped, Diane was late coming in. Sid and I abandoned YANA to the medical volunteers from Health Care for the Homeless and drove to her home. It was Edgar-the-Rapist who answered the door and told us that she had gone to Hezekiah House. "Oh, no!" Sid trilled with the kind of feminine alarm that assumes a sympathetic listener. "She hasn't come in! Can we leave a note?" He allowed us entry, and found Sid a piece of paper. It was a beautiful day. The apartment was well decorated and well kept. Early Michael Jackson music flowed out the open windows, greeting the neighborhood with its innocuous innocence. Edgar sat in easy possession of it all, eating his rather substantial breakfast.

Sid scribbled a word or two, then asked to use the bathroom. Edgar nodded. I sat in the corner of the dining room, secure in my (accurate) assumption that the indomitable Sid was searching the closets, under the bed, any place that Diane, or Diane's corpse, could be hidden. Exchanging a sentence or two with Edgar, the only real surprise I felt was that Diane could have ever worried about a man like that. Not that there was anything obviously wrong with him -- other than the sense I got that he'd rather run somebody over with a car than to ever, ever be considered so inferior as to need assistance. Polite, in other words, but wound up rather tight. We parted, cordially.

Diane was waiting for us when we got back, wondering if we'd brought the police to her home and if Edger was upset, chagrined when she found out that Sid had looked in her messy closet. She'd set her own plan into place for getting rid of Edger. She went to the home of one her neighborhood old ladies, then waited for the police to pick her up and remove Edger for trespassing. She'd already arranged for someone they both knew to pick him up and take him away. It was a good plan, but I knew by then that she wouldn't be consistent with it. The next time she was late, I went to her home again, but the doors were all locked. She was waiting for me, once again, when I returned. I felt ridiculous. I told myself I wouldn't do it again. I wasn't helping, anyway.

So, I didn't go to her home this past Thursday when she didn't come. She's been taking care of a lot of people in the neighborhood, including a kindergartner sometimes, and the most likely reason for her absence was that she was helping someone else. Still, the day before, she told us that she and Edger were both in court-ordered domestic violence classes. She wasn't sure whether they'd be attending the same one. She was, however, sure that Edger was allowed back to her apartment because his clothes were still there, and he got mail. I don't know what the judge actually told her in this latest go-round, or what she had told the judge. I only knew that she believed Edger's attitude had changed in the two weeks since he had raped her, that a judge had told her he was allowed back in for his things, that there was no chance she would heed my nervous advice and throw his clothes out. I also knew that, whatever other feelings Diane had, she was miserable, wandering in that blank space our women live in, a universe away from a world that can be remade just because someone wants to.

A Day at YANA

2009-09-10T12:58:00.000-07:00

For me a YANA day starts before I reach the building. I drive up Wilkens Avenue in Baltimore between Monroe and Gilmore Streets, peering into the faces of the women who sit slumped on the steps or walk the streets of the neighborhood. Prostituted women in Baltimore rarely dress for their jobs. They wear the same no-makeup, hair pulled back, jeans and t-shirts look that every other woman there does. Even so, just driving by, I usually have a pretty good idea of whether they prostitute or not. Our women are often seriously underweight. At 10:00 in the morning, they can be so exhausted or so doped up that they stagger. Look into their faces, and there's the sort of vulnerability a child might have if she were forced to do a grown-up's hard job and had no hope of relief. Recognizing the prostituted women on Wilkens doesn't take any great perception -- or if it does, then the middle aged men who wash their new cars and excitedly cruise the same strip are all gifted intuitives.

Today, I didn't stop for any of them. I didn't recognize any of our friends, and, though I saw several women who would probably be prostituting later in the day, I didn't see any who looked approachable at the moment. I went on to Hezekiah House, where YANA is currently located, and where I was soon swamped by women from the drug rehab. program next door. These women who came were all pretty new to YANA. For the moment, at least, they weren't prostituting. Many hadn't prostituted for a long time; almost all are sober. They were poor, though, and fragile, and they knew we had good things to give away. Keeping a semblance of order when you're the only person between five such women and fresh bags full of unsorted donations isn't easy.

Crabby, clerical start to the day, in other words. I heard myself saying, "I've told you repeatedly to write down the toiletries you need. . . " and heard a forty-something African American woman apologizing like a child for having touched without permission. Instead of cringing, all I could think was I was glad a fight wasn't breaking out. In over 12 years of dealing with clients who are often seriously traumatized, emotionally disturbed, and drug addicted, we've never had an actual physical fight, though there have been plenty of threats. The closest we ever came to one was when a lot of donations came in. I somehow imagined it would be a good idea to let everyone grab what she wanted.

The only part of the morning I enjoyed was introducing the concept of YANA itself. I told several, seriously interested women that YANA was formed when a social worker, Sid Ford, noticed that there was a population of women who were isolated from the rest of the world -- prostitutes. I tell them she wanted to create a sense of community. While it was very hard for me in the beginning to believe that this was the thing they needed most, it is never hard at all for the clients to understand. They nod like they're in church when I talk about isolation. "YANA stands for You Are Never Alone," I tell them, and some don't react in the least. Others look like they've just found out they're getting a pony for Christmas.

I go on to tell them we offer services: lunch, clothes, Thursday visits from the Health Care for the Homeless, a volunteer psychologist on Wednesdays, help with referrals into treatment programs, a place to rest on a hot or cold day. I finish by telling them that the main thing we offer is the community so many never had. YANA women themselves make up the program, and they make their own decisions to survive the way they always have or to make new decisions about their lives.

The rest of the day, we talk, we eat pizza, Health Care for the Homeless does its magic for the many women in need of care. The women try on warm clothes, and all admire the one young girl who models a gorgeous new suit on her tall, healthy body. "I can wear this to church or a job interview," she says several times, then leaves with a boyfriend. One woman tells me she often sees our "old clients," the ones who came more often when we were located on Pratt Street, close to the part of Wilkens I drove coming in. She mentions several women, including Trina who has not come to YANA in the year since we've moved. Trina believes she can't -- or else she is angry. It isn't clear, but somehow her not coming has something to do with a man who was dangerous. I break the rules and talk about Trina to another client. "We've missed her!" I tell the woman. "We want her back! Tell her to come." The other woman says she'll bring her next week. I'm not holding my breath. There's something else going on with Trina, and how could things not be complicated, angry, filled with a sense of abandonment for Trina? She began living with her molesting uncle when she was still a child. I believe her parents decided to give her to him, knowing why he wanted to take a young girl off their hands. She's middle aged now, and still lives with him. She'll be the first to tell that she made the choice to live the way she does.

When there are only a few of us left, Dolly (a new client, in rehab, sweet, obviously a little emotionally disturbed) turns her attention to Sister Mary, one of the Sisters of Mercy nuns who helps us. Dolly wants to know if "Sister" means Mary is a nun. Mary answers that she is. Dolly has a lot of questions about being a nun, but she gets through them rapid fire until she reaches the main one. "Are you a virgin?" she asks. She has to ask it several times because she is mouthing the words, with her hands cupped dramatically around her mouth. Once Mary understands her, she readily answers that she is. "You are?! Really! I've never met a virgin before!" Dolly can barely contain her delight.

Endlessly good natured Mary, who celebrated her 50th year of being a nun a few years ago, answered all the questions that followed. No, she'd never slept with anyone. She wanted to be a nun. She couldn't marry and still be a nun even if she only slept with her husband. If a man asked her out for a drink, she would explain that she was Sister Mary, and that would probably keep things from going any further. One man had asked her to marry once, but she thought he just wanted to get a green card. Mary was soon laughing. Dolly, realizing at last, that Mary really meant the virginity thing, suddenly began making desperate efforts to console her.
"There are some advantages!" Dolly said. "Child birth hurts! You never had to do that. And, and you never had to mess with men that don't treat you right. Those are advantages!" Dolly repeated her list several times, then thought of another, and pointed out to Mary that she never had to bother with birth control either.

"That's right!" Mary agreed. "I never had to!" She was still smiling. So were Dolly and the rest of the room. In my nearly five years at YANA, I've never heard virginity discussed or a nun grilled on her choices, but it was a YANA moment just the same. A weird little moment of delight as we all got to know one another a bit better.

* * *

Next Posts: We'll meet many more of the individual women and continue to follow them, and we'll talk more about Hezekiah House, Health Care for Homeless, our many volunteers, and the indomitable Sid Ford who founded YANA by driving the very mean streets of Baltimore at night, talking to prostituted women and believing that something good would come of it.

Tasha

2009-09-09T16:56:00.000-07:00

I'm a middle class woman who's been volunteering for years at YANA, one of the few programs in the country for prostituted women. In a state of something close to shock, I wrote the following a few months after I began:

Tasha

I don't want to sit this close, or else I want to sit closer and put my arms around her or do something else that could actually be of some help. Her name is Tasha, and she's telling me again that she hasn't used drugs in five months, and every time she says this, she runs back through the same script, the same gestures; she puts on the same big, plastic mask of an expression. "And now that I'm clean," she says, "new doors are all opening up for me." And her mouth gapes open; her lips stretch up to her cheek bones in a pantomime of delight. "The doors are all opening!" Tasha raises both hands to demonstrate, pushing her palms outwards and parallel to her rather than bringing them in, so that in her pretended ecstasy she closes everyone of the doors that hang invisibly in the air before her. In another instant she will show me sadness again.
She'll say that she's lonely, and then her face will suddenly come very close to mine, and her features will contort into something like an open mouthed wail. There are never any tears, though. She asked for a tissue early on, but the ones I brought her are for wiping the mustard off her hands as she eats free bologna sandiches. Tasha has also told me that she is three months pregnant and that she stopped using drugs one month into the pregnancy for the baby's sake. She says that she's HIV positive and that she has hepatitus C. Her mouth makes its soundless wailing shape again after she tells me that she's afraid for the baby's health, but that expression is swiftly supplanted by the suprise and delight she has to display when I tell her that prenatal care can help. When she asks if it's all right that the baby tickles her, I only say that it is. I don't ask how long she's been able to feel the baby move. I'm only a volunteer here. It isn't my job to catch her in a lie.
In the course of the next 30 minutes she tells me a story that's like an afternoon movie on the lifetime channel. A girl falls into prostitution and suffers every indignity but arrest. ("I hear you can get locked up for that? Is that right? Does that really happen?" And when I tell her it happens quite often, she opens her mouth like a frog's again to show me how amazed she is, how terrified.) In a part of town where the price of sex can go as low as two dollars, this woman says she averaged $500.00 a night. That's the prostitution you see on T.V., where women wear make up, leather mini skirts, knowing smiles. It isn't our women, walking their damaged bodies out of public housing or abandoned buildings in the morning, looking for drugs and maybe a free meal or some donated clothes. It isn't the woman sitting beside me either.
She tells me about her past, too, the childhood typical of a prostitute. But even the men who raped her, all friends of her father's, she says, are confused with the rapists on T.V. I suppose she's trying to make her plight more important and her attackers more dangerous when she says that she still sees them on America's Most Wanted.
There is no description, dramatic or otherwise, of how she left drugs and prostitution; there isn't much of one in popular understanding either. Very dramatic things just happen, and then you quit because some one thing gives you hope. Tasha tells me that she gave up the drugs and the prostitution when she found out she was pregnant. And now she lives with the baby's father, and the doors -- she makes the same series of closing motions, smiles the same unreal smile -- are all opening for her at last. She is a success, in other words, in a way that almost no woman who first comes here is. She's told her life's story the way it's supposed to be told.
I don't remember what I said to prompt her next remarks. Maybe my alarm or my approval didn't seem great enough; more likely she just wasn't finished with everything she could think of saying. Tasha pulls the edge of her tee shirt down and shows me a darker, badly wrinkled place on her chest. She says that when she was prostituting a customer held her by the neck and burned her with a cigar. The place she shows me is a child's clenched fist; it's a mass of chaotic scars; it's my whole field of vision when I try to look at her. And when I move my eyes, I see that something has happened on both sides of her neck as well. They're discolored and symmetrically marked, so that she looks like a statute that someone has marked with a pattern. Tasha, seeing me look there, tells me this is from a customer's choke hold.
I wonder what really happened to her neck. I imagine someone holding her down and using a knife or a nail to put the grid of small scars there. I think of someone burning Tasha, and her skin just cracking open that way. We don't discuss it further. She goes back to telling me that she's been clean five months, adding that she lost her family's trust when she became addicted and that gradually she's earning that trust back. The images evoked by these words -- "trust" and "family" are worse than all the rest. Because what kind of family produces a girl like Tasha?
What did they teach her about trust and how did they manage to send her out into the world broken into so many pieces that she doesn't know how real people smile or how they look sad? Who made her think she had to put on a performance like that, like a little wooden puppet of a woman, bugging her eyes, flopping her mouth open and shut, waving her hands all the wrong way? I want to get away from her again, and it's not because I think she's lying.
It's because I'm sure she's telling the truth. She really is as lonely as she says she is. She really has been choked and burned, raped as a child and prostituted and diseased as an adult -- and probably before she was an adult as well. The "father's friends" really do keep appearing, at least in her mind's eye and very possibly on the streets of her neighborhood as well. And the doors really do hang invisibly, in the air before her, and she really does raise her hands towards them,not knowing the difference between opening and closing.

* * *

Like I said, I wrote that after a few months of volunteering. Was it an insightful piece? Not really. The trauma, the childhood sexual abuse, the poverty -- they're all real enough, but they're far from anyone's whole story. It took me almost a year to start seeing our clients as three dimensional people, and when I did, they became fascinating in a whole new way. This blog is story of prostituted women in all their dimensions: trite, annoying, funny, kind, defeated, and triumphant. It's a privilege to work with them. I hope people will want to expand their own worlds by getting to know the women of YANA. Write to me and tell me what you think.

Tomorrow: A day at YANA