Memoirs Aren't Fairytales (31 page)

“Where's Dustin?” I asked, looking around the steps and on the sidewalk.

“The judge didn't set bail,” he said. “Dustin's too much of a flight risk, I guess.”

I walked down the steps and turned in the direction of the train station. Tommy was behind me, and over my shoulder I said, “Tell Richard I said thanks for getting me out.”

He grabbed the back of my arm. “Not so fast,” he said. “Richard wants to talk to you. You're coming with me.”

Of course Richard wanted to talk. He wanted to know what I'd said to the cops and what I was going to say during my trial.

His fingers clamped my wrist, and he dragged me to the street where his car was parked. A black Toyota, just like Dustin said. He put me in the passenger seat and went around to the driver's side. My stomach churned, not just from being dope sick and from the thought of seeing Richard, but from the scent of the car too. The odor was a mix of bong water and cat piss. I rolled down the window, and he told me to put it back up.

“Do you have any dope?” I asked.

Tommy only used meth, but he might be carrying some smack since he'd know how sick I'd be when I got out.

“I'll get you some once we get to Richard's,” he said.

Richard's house was the one place I didn't want to go. He knew I hadn't ratted him out. If I had, the police would have already raided his house. But how was he going to make sure I wouldn't talk? He'd probably make me stay at his house until the trial to make sure I didn't meet with any detectives behind his back. I'd be locked in one of the bedrooms or worse, the basement. And he'd rape me again, or he might just have one of his squatters kill me instead.

I didn't know what Richard was going to do, but I knew I had to get out of this car. The jail wasn't too far from his house. If I was going to escape, I had to do it soon.

The road went from three lanes to two, and Tommy stayed to the right. I checked the lock and it was up. He didn't expect me to bolt from the car.

I waited for him to speed up after stopping at a red light and when the gauge hit fifteen miles per hour, I opened the door.

Tommy shouted, “What the fuck are you doing?”

He reached for my arm, but I moved away just in time, rolling out of the seat and onto the pavement. My shoulder slammed onto the road first, and then the side of my stomach hit and my thigh. I felt the sting immediately, my skin scraping against the street.

The car behind Tommy's slammed on its breaks. Tommy did too, but I was already up and running. I ached, and blood oozed from my cuts, but I only ran faster.

I sprinted down side streets and through alleys, looking over my shoulder to make sure he wasn't following. After a few more blocks, I came to a music store. I went inside and headed towards the back of the store, pretending to look through the racks of CD's while keeping my eyes locked on the front of the building.

One of the sales clerks came over and asked if she could help me. I told her I was just checking out the new music. She looked at me like I was still wearing my blue jumpsuit and handcuffs and at any minute I was going to pull out a gun.

I didn't need a mirror to know how bad I looked. My fingertips were black from when the cops took my prints, and my clothes were covered with blood from the jump.

She said the new releases were in the front of the store and I was in the oldies section. She also said my appearance was bothering the other customers and she asked me to leave. Enough time had passed and I knew I'd lost Tommy, so it was safe to go back on the street. But I had to be careful. Richard and his whole gang would be looking for me, and I had to stick to places outside Dorchester and spots in Boston where they wouldn't check.

I apologized to the clerk and left the store.

On the way to the train station, I stopped by a Goodwill drop box. There was a trash bag full of clothes that hadn't made it inside. I found jeans and a t-shirt that looked like they'd fit, along with a winter hat and scarf, and changed in a McDonald's bathroom. Outside the train station, I panhandled, and when I collected enough money, I rode to Roxbury and scored a few bags and a rig.

When I finally made it to the park, I curled up in the small space between the slide and monkey bars and shot up. My stomach pains went away, but I didn't get high. I didn't have enough money to get high, and the dope was cut and not that strong.

I didn't know what to do. On the way to the park I'd stopped at a newspaper stand and saw Dustin's mug shot along with mine had made the front page of the
Boston Globe
under the headline “Boston Police Make Decades-Largest Heroin Bust.” I was sure Michael read the paper and had told my parents the news.

If I decided to go to court, I wouldn't be able to stay sober until my trial, so in prison I'd have to detox all over again. And if I didn't talk to the police, I'd rot in that cell for at least fifteen years. When I got out, I'd be forty, and half my life would be over. Even if I ratted everyone out, I was still going to jail, and any amount of time was too long. The only thing I could do was live on the streets until I figured out a plan.

When I was a kid and imagined my life, this wasn't what I dreamed of: addicted to heroin, getting arrested and living on the streets. My friends and I talked trash about the kids we grew up with who turned into oxy-heads and went to Acadia Hospital for rehab. And now I was one of those fucked up kids too. But I didn't want to be.

I put on the winter hat and pulled it down past my eyebrows, covered the bottom of my face with the scarf, and set out to boost in the morning. It wasn't exactly hat and scarf weather, but I couldn't take the chance of being recognized by any of the store clerks. Boosting gave me enough money to buy dope. And later tonight I'd trick, buy food, and rent a hotel room.

But by midnight, I'd only been hired by one John, and he only paid me ten bucks for the blowjob. Johns were driving up and down the track looking to hire and all the other hoes on the street were getting picked up. My clothes weren't sexy, and they were covered in filth from sleeping in the park. I'd tucked the bottom of my t-shirt under my bra to show off my caved-in stomach, but even that didn't help. My face was dirty. My hair was greasy and tangled, and I didn't have an elastic to tie it back.

The hookers around me were charging eighty for sex. When a trick pulled over to negotiate a price with one of the girls, I went up to the driver's side window and offered to do him for twenty instead. He turned me down.

I moved further down the street and took off my t-shirt, standing at the corner in my bra. A car pulled up, and as I was telling him my fee, a cop turned down the street and drove towards us with its blue lights on. I took off running and cut through an alley, hiding next to a dumpster. The cop didn't follow me, but I wasn't going to risk going back out onto the track.

There were some Styrofoam take-out boxes in front of the dumpster. Most of the food inside was rotten except for a few chunks of bread. Once I picked off the green fuzz, I ate the bread, and when I had to go to the bathroom, I squatted on the opposite side of the dumpster. I watched my river of pee spread into the middle of the alley and a rat scurry through it.

How much longer could I do this—sleep in an alley without any food and water and barely have enough smack to keep me straight? I kept reminding myself that this was better than jail. Anything was better than being locked up and sober, being wakened every night by nightmares. This time, they'd be filled with visions of Richard raping me.

But life on the street only got worse. My clothes got dirtier, and my stomach got hungrier. The food I was eating out of the trash bins, moldy and mushy, was making me sick. Maybe I was sick because I wasn't shooting enough dope. Either way, I was throwing up every few hours. I went from getting one or two Johns a night to none. I stole CD's and electronics out of the cars parked on the streets, but I ran out of energy after a couple hours and would collapse, dizzy and puking, on a bench. The pawnshops were ripping me off too and only giving me half of what the electronics were worth. I didn't have enough money to buy clean rigs, and the one I had was dull, and an abscess was forming on my arm.

I hadn't seen Sunshine on the track all week, so I stopped by our old hotel to see if she'd let me move in with her. Lucchi, the owner, said she didn't live there anymore. I called her cell phone and it was disconnected.

I had to talk to Michael and beg him to help me. Even if he'd only give me food, at least that would give me some more energy so I could steal for longer without getting sick.

When I knew he'd be home from work, I walked to his apartment. His doorman, a different guy than before, told me to wait on the sidewalk while he called him. Michael came outside. He smelled so clean, like the hospital room when I'd overdosed. How long ago was that? Six months?

Michael didn't say anything. He just stood against the building with his arms crossed.

“I need help,” I said. “I'm starving.”

His eyes didn't move from mine. His posture didn't shift, and his expression didn't soften. He still didn't say anything.

“Please, Michael, I need your help.”

“I'll only help you if you're willing to help yourself.”

Help myself? Did he mean tell the cops the truth and take the plea bargain, go to jail and get sober? If he thought I was going to do that, he was fucking crazy.

“Can I have some food?” I asked.

He covered his face with his hands. “As much as I want to feed you,” he said from behind his fingers, “I can't until you get clean.”

“All I need is some food, and I promise I won't ask for anything else ever again.”

He shook his head and reached for the door.

“You can't leave me like this,” I shouted. “I'm starving.”

The door slammed in my face. I banged on the glass, leaving smudge marks and prints. “I'm your sister,” I yelled.

He got into the elevator.

“Please,” I screamed. My foot slipped, and I fell to my ass on the hard pavement.

The doorman said if I didn't leave, he'd call the police.

I looked up at him from the ground. “Michael won't let you call the cops on me, I'm his sister—”

“He's already given me his permission,” the doorman said. “Now leave.”

Michael was done with me, and that meant my parents were too. Screw them. I didn't need their help anyway. I'd done just fine without them for years.

I walked down the sidewalk and sat in the park. I didn't have any dope. I couldn't steal until after sunset, but that was only a few hours away.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The street wasn't a kind place to live. Business people wouldn't spare much change, car doors were locked more often than not, and dealers wouldn't let me pay them with sex. Every time I went to the shelter to sleep, it was full, and the soup kitchen was always running out of food. They'd give me fruit or granola bars and say to come back in a couple hours when they restocked. I never did, it was too far of a walk. I was surviving, but barely.

And then I met Big Teddy. I was lying on the sidewalk, dope sick and starving, and days had passed since I'd eaten or shot up. Big Teddy kneeled down in front of me wearing a black velour tracksuit and overgrown cornrows hidden behind a bandana. His skin was so dark the only part of his face I could see were his gold teeth.

“Come work for me,” he said. “I'll watch your back and give you what you need.” He pulled my arm away from my body and turned it over, eyeing my track marks. “I've got some real tight shit too, no street grade junk for my girls.”

I needed to get well again. I had nothing more to lose.

“You in?” he asked.

“Yeah, I'm in,” I said.

He picked me up in his arms and put me in the passenger seat of his van, and we drove to his house in Roxbury. Compared to the streets, any place would have been luxurious, but his place really was. There was leather furniture and a big-screen TV on the living room wall.

Big Teddy introduced me to Emma, the girl sitting on one of the couches, and to Suzette, the housemother, who was in the kitchen. Suzette told me to call her Mama. She was a hefty woman, fat like Big Teddy and over six feet tall with blond hair teased like a beehive. Big Teddy said Suzette would take good care of me and left the house.

Suzette brought me over to the kitchen table and helped me sit down. She made me a sandwich and sat across from me, watching me chew and swallow. The sandwich was the first real meal I'd eaten since the day before Dustin and I had been arrested, and it tasted as good as lobster.

After I polished off a bag of chips, she brought me to a room upstairs, which she told me I'd be sharing with two other girls. On the bed, she placed cotton shorts and a t-shirt and a bundle of junk. I asked for a rig and she told me she didn't allow her girls to shoot dope because her clients got turned off by track marks.

“But—”

“No back talking,” she snapped. “Snort it like all the other girls do. We're nice enough to even supply you with that shit.”

She had seemed so nice when I was eating my sandwich and had even asked if I wanted dessert.

She took me into the bathroom where she gave me a razor, my own bar of soap, and a towel.

“Strip,” she said.

“Right here?”

She closed the bathroom door. “Hurry up, I don't have all night.”

I took off everything I was wearing, and she looked me all over, inspecting every inch of my body and mouth. I hadn't showered in weeks, and I'd thrown up on myself that morning. My smell was too much for even me, but she didn't seem bothered by it.

When she was done examining me, she told me to sit on the toilet and spread my legs. She put on a pair of rubber gloves and combed my pubes with her fingers. I'd spread my legs for Johns, but this was different. She was crouched down in front of me, her face inches from my crotch. This was like when the nurses had checked the dirty kids at school for lice.

When I asked what she was looking for, she said warts and crabs. “Big Teddy can't get a rep for giving the crawlies to his clients.”