Edgar Allan Poe (A Call for Halloween Suggestions)

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

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

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

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

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

"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

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.