More and more, I’d been running away from Moses and his daily quotas, hiding out in hotel rooms or spending the night with tricks and trolling the worst tracks in the city for money. A far cry from the uptown tracks I had worked before, these streets were the last stop for many. I had to service three times as many men down on Delancey Street to even come near the money I used to make on Fifty-Seventh.
Usually I could manage to escape Moses for several days at a time before he would hunt me down on one of the many tracks in the city, beat me, and drag me back under his control. I knew every time I hid from him that he would eventually catch up with me, but after a while I stopped caring. I suppose that at some point in the battle between heroin and Moses, the drug won out.
I still searched the streets for his figure before stepping out, and I still flinched if I thought I glimpsed his big car speeding toward me. One afternoon I realized it had been weeks since our last encounter, and it dawned on me that maybe, just maybe, he was really gone. Just where he had gone, I had no idea. Nor did I care.
At first I was pleased—relieved, even. I thought that at least I wasn’t getting beaten, and I was happy I could keep the money I earned on the streets. Slowly I began to realize that heroin was keeping me out on the track just as efficiently as Moses had, but by then it was too late. I couldn’t quit.
As the months passed I became a walking shell of a girl, and my outer body began to match what I thought my inner soul looked like. My weight dropped to a hundred pounds. At five foot nine, I was rail thin. I lived on a diet of heroin and soda. My skin became grayish white from spending my days sleeping, and I had another hepatitis relapse and felt weak and sick to my stomach most of the time. I also started acting out in weird ways, wearing the same dress for days on end and pulling out the hairs from the top of my head, like I had at Tekakwitha. I wasn’t really alive; I merely existed.
My days and nights were all the same: sleep, wake up sick, get money, find drugs, repeat. Any deviation from my day was only of slight interest depending on the level that it interfered with getting more drugs, or money for drugs. I was dying, and I knew it. At some level I think I even welcomed death.
But somehow deep inside I realized that if I was going to survive, I had to get off of heroin for good.
The day I dragged myself into the methadone clinic I was clinging to the last dim light of life. At the time I didn’t understand how the program worked; all I knew was that the methadone was supposed to help me get off heroin somehow. Later I learned that I would be given progressively smaller doses of methadone, which would slowly help me become less dependent on heroin but wouldn’t throw me into withdrawal. More importantly, the program was free to me, so I wouldn’t have to work the streets to support my recovery.
***
Not long after I started the methadone program, I saw Moses coming up the block on Forty-Second Street. I hadn’t seen him in what seemed like a long time, but I started to shake like I had whenever I’d run into him before. I was still so afraid of him, terrified that he was going to start beating me and make me come back and work for him again. There are some things that a person can get over and others that she will never recover from, never be able to forget.
“Hey, girl. Come here,” Moses said as he approached. I noticed that his hair was longer and kind of messed up, not like his usual processed and pressed style. He didn’t have on one of his custom-made suits, either—just a pair of black slacks and a tan long-sleeved shirt. I saw he still was wearing his diamond rings and gold watch, and I remembered how they had sparkled on our drive up to New York when I was just thirteen years old and mesmerized by his green eyes. Was I really that same child?
“Come here. I ain’t gonna do nothin’ to you, girl.” He smiled his little smile at me, the one that never quite reached his eyes.
Drug-free, I was hyperaware of every move he made. I quickly glanced around us and tried to see how I could get away from him if I needed to run. “Why? What do you want?”
“Girl, I don’t want nothin’ from you. You ain’t got nothin’ I need. I just want to say hi.”
He stepped closer, and I felt my body tense, waiting for him to hit me. My hands balled into fists.
“What do you want? I gotta go, Moses.”
He reached out to grab my arm. “Come on and have a drink.”
I blinked as he nodded toward the bar on the corner. He’d never asked me to go to a bar with him before, much less offered to buy me a drink. What did he want from me? I didn’t trust him, but at the same time, something inside me was curious. It had always been like that; he drew me in like a snake hypnotizing its prey. I could actually feel my heartbeat slowing down as I moved toward him.
“Okay.”
We walked into the bar. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw a tanned, half-naked girl gyrating up on a small platform near our table. Moses smiled at her, and she smiled back. I wondered if that was why he had taken me there to that bar, something to do with that dancer, to show her that he had other women under his control. With Moses, there was always another motive.
My eyes darted around the room, searching for a fast way out in case it was all some kind of trap. Only one lone customer sat at the dark wooden bar, talking to the bartender and watching the dancer through hungry eyes. The bartender leaned in with a gray rag in his hands as he listened to the man in front of him. Neither of them paid much attention to us.
We didn’t talk that afternoon, not really. But to be honest, we never had during all the years I had been under his control. He sat and drank his cognac and watched the dancer. A few times he stared at the needle tracks that ran up and down my hands from years of injecting heroin. I tried to pull my sleeves down over my arms to cover what I didn’t want him to see. He had never tried to get me to detox off the drugs; he had only beaten me every time I came home without any money to give him. The beatings had not worked. But something had to give, either him or the heroin. I had only ever been a dollar sign to him anyway, a commodity, something to be bought and sold. When I left that bar, I felt like I was leaving a shackle, rusty and chillingly familiar, behind me. It would be years before I heard the name Moses again.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
My counselor at the methadone clinic on First Avenue was a woman named Anita. She was in her mid-forties, plain with a chunky build, and about my height. Anita had been a heroin addict herself for many years and knew how to listen. She wasn’t a social worker and it wasn’t her job to rehabilitate me, but she took an interest in me and tried her best as a counselor and as a friend to help me get my life together.
It wasn’t easy. I’d long forgotten what the square life was supposed to be like, and all she had to work with were the bits and pieces that I could dredge up. She somehow managed to get me a social security card and convinced me to start going on job interviews. I agreed to do it because I wanted to please her, but I had no social graces, no education, and no life skills. Sending me on a job interview was like sending a wild animal to work at a bank; something bad was bound to happen.
***
I sat in front of the interviewer’s desk, feeling uncomfortable and out of place in the stiff business suit and tight blue blouse Anita had made me wear. The hard wooden chair I was sitting in dug into my thighs. I kept asking myself just what in the hell I was doing in this stuffy office building on Thirty-Fourth Street.
The man interviewing me wore a blue bow tie and had a big belly that seemed ready to pop out of his starched white shirt. His shiny gray-black hair was parted down the middle, and he wore thick glasses that he stared over, making me even more uncomfortable.
I kept my head down and tried not to fidget.
There were several moments of tense silence as he scanned my hastily scribbled application. Then suddenly my prospective employer blurted out, “So, how much do you want?”
My head jerked up when I heard the familiar words. I might not have known how to go on a job interview, but I understood those words
well, or thought I did.
“How much do you have?” I smirked, staring him in the eyes as I leaned closer to his large desk, my blouse straining open.
He blinked nervously and pushed at his glasses with one shaky finger. “Excuse me? I… uh, that is…what salary were you expecting for the position?”
I didn’t get the job that day.
***
In the meantime, Anita had turned her attention to reuniting me with the family whom I had not talked to in almost a decade. It was more her idea than mine; by the time Anita came into my life, all the memories of the people I had left behind seemed like they belonged to another person, and I suppose they did. I was not the same girl I was when I first ran away from home. But I wanted to make Anita happy. I agreed to give her my real name and my last address in Fairfax.
The first time I called the phone number Anita gave me, I was sitting by myself in a former client’s small, dark bedroom in Little Italy. He’d been allowing me to stay there while I sorted things out, as long as I kept out of his way. I sat for a long time, twisting the small piece of paper with the phone number on it. Finally I persuaded myself that I wasn’t nervous, just curious. I dialed, and when I heard the phone ring, I almost hung up. Then a woman answered. Her voice sounded distant and tinny over the line.
As soon as I heard that voice, I began to experience the floating feelings that had begun so long ago.
It was my mother.
“Hello?”
“Mom?”
Gasps, then silence. “Hello! Who…who is this?”
“It’s me. It’s…Barbara.” I sat stiffly on the edge of the twin bed, listening to my mother’s ragged breathing. I tried to picture the kitchen where the phone had hung on the wall, and my mother standing there beside the honey-colored wooden table, holding the phone in her hand.
Finally she came back on the line. “Barbara? Barbara, oh my God! It can’t be! Is this really you?”
“Yes, it’s me. How are you?”
“Oh, Barbara, it’s so good to hear your voice again.”
My heart cracked open just a little in that moment.
There was a short pause, almost as if my mother had stopped breathing.
“Mom?”
My mother cleared her throat. “Your father and I have to tell you something.”
I gripped the telephone tightly and held my breath in anticipation of what she would say next. Had my father finally admitted to what he had done to me all those years ago? This couldn’t be really happening! Finally the truth would come out, and maybe now my mother would actually believe me.
“Your father and I have been divorced for a while now.”
I could feel the tiny crack in my heart slowly close back up, blotting out the light of hope that had begun to creep inside. I should have known better. My mother had chosen not to see what had happened to me when I was younger, and if I was honest, I hadn’t forgiven her yet. But I didn’t say anything; silence seemed easier than bringing this into the open. Maybe the time would never come, never be right.
As for the divorce, I wasn’t surprised by the revelation. I knew they’d eventually separate, because they were always arguing. But it seemed odd that she had chosen this particular moment to tell me about it. Weren’t there other, more important things to discuss?
We sat there on the line, neither of us seeming to know what to say.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
My parents got me a train ticket to Philadelphia, where my older sister Pat had been living for years. Because it was almost Christmas, everyone would be reuniting there for the holiday, with the exception of my younger brother. He was in the Navy and was out of the country at the time. I couldn’t believe that all this time I had been so close, only hours away from family.
When I stepped off the train in Philadelphia and made my way into the brightly lit station, I heard Christmas music flowing all throughout the gray-and-white marble building. Everything was so cheery and bright; there were Christmas decorations and red and green lights everywhere, and a huge tree with big gold and silver balls stood right in the middle of the train station. Outside it was dark, with big wet snowflakes coming down and landing softly on the green wreaths hanging over the doorways to the train station. The crowd was bustling and buzzing in anticipation of the coming holiday.
The Christmas cheer was completely the opposite of how I was feeling inside. I was numb from the huge amount of methadone I had taken on the train ride, and was unsure of what I would find when I walked into my sister’s home. Memories are tricky; I hadn’t seen any of these people in years, and it almost felt like I would see cardboard cutouts instead of my family. They didn’t seem real to me. I didn’t even remember what being part of a family felt like.
Everything was unfamiliar, even my clothes: a tan wool coat, a new fluffy sweater, jeans, and black suede boots. I hoped I looked normal, like one of the squares. I didn’t know what normal was anymore. Had I ever? I felt like I was dreaming this whole affair.
Yet as I stood in that train station, it all started to come back to me in pieces—the trees and the decorations and the gifts, the food, the feelings, the families, and the fun. I suddenly remembered one Christmas Eve when I was seven or eight. After everyone was asleep I had snuck into the living room to see what Santa had left me. I could picture my spot of gifts by the tree, and the package that was the right shape for the hardcover book of Alfred Hitchcock stories that I had wanted. I could almost taste my favorite Christmas treat, the peanut butter fudge my mother would make each Christmas Eve.
Memories flooded my mind as I stood and flagged down a taxi. I had not celebrated anything in a long time, not my birthday or any other holiday; Moses had made sure that each day was a workday for the young women he controlled. A tiny part of me began to come alive, and I felt something close to excitement and expectation.
When I reached the house, the first thing I noticed was how much older everyone looked, especially my mother. Her face was lined, and her brow was now furrowed with wrinkles that makeup couldn’t conceal. My father looked almost the same, though; the years seemed to have taken less of a toll on him. I barely recognized my older brother and sister.
Reuniting with my family during Christmastime was like sitting with strangers in a bus station—or being stuck in an elevator with people you never saw before, standing in uncomfortable silence and counting down the stops until it’s your turn to get off. The trouble was that I didn’t know when my stop was, and it didn’t look like I was getting out of there any time soon. So I did my best to fit into this group of people who seemed more like strangers than the dim memories of my family.
I had brought each person a scarf that I had crocheted with wool I’d bought from the Woolworth on First Avenue. I’d learned how to crochet while I was locked up in the detention center years before, and I’d never forgotten how. The scarves were a big hit; somehow I’d remembered that my mother loved blue and my sister, purple. I felt proud that they all seemed to really like the scarves, trying them on and looking at themselves in the big mirror in the hallway.
My mother cried, drank too much wine at dinner, and continued drinking after dinner was long over. I watched the nervous glances from the rest of the family as her antics and conversation grew sloppier. Had my mother always been an alcoholic? I remembered seeing the Alcoholics Anonymous Serenity Prayer on a big clock in our kitchen. I had forgotten how often my parents fought about my mother’s drinking.
No one asked me where I had been or what I had been doing for the last several years, not once. Whatever homecoming I might have imagined did not happen that night. But I wasn’t bothered by the lack of interest in my past life. What would I tell them, anyway? All of these people were little more than strangers to me. Still, somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew I wasn’t going back to New York. There was nothing left for me there, and no reason for me to return.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I stayed at my sister’s place and attended t
he methadone clinic there in Philadelphia, where I managed to detox myself down to almost twenty milligrams of methadone from the hundred milligrams I had been taking every day in New York
This was a completely new experience. While I was proud of myself for coming almost completely off methadone, I also felt as if every single nerve in my body was exposed to the air like a bad tooth. All of my senses were heightened: smell, taste, and even sight. I felt so shaky and raw inside that everything around me seemed off somehow.
Opiates like methadone or heroin cause the pupils to constrict and very little light to get into the eyes. During detox, my pupils went back to their normal size, and the increased light flooding my brain caused me massive headaches. I could smell the slightest whiff of food or perfume from miles away, and certain smells, like meat cooking, made me viciously nauseated.
I was also extremely twitchy; an unexpected tap on the shoulder would make me yelp in surprise and raise my arm to smack the person who wanted only my attention. I was horribly aware of each and every thing that happened near me.
Too aware.
Facing reality without any kind of numbing agent was tough, and my emotions were all over the place for a long time. Watching the news could bring dramatic reactions, especially if the broadcast had any kind of human interest story to it. Anything from a lost puppy to a bomb in an office building would bring me to tears. Panic attacks occurred each time I had to do an errand. The shrink at the methadone clinic in Philadelphia told me that he believed I had agoraphobia, a condition that causes great anxiety about going outside. He explained that it was actually the fear of losing control.
How little he knew.
I couldn’t take it anymore. Consciously, I didn’t think of killing myself; I told myself I only wanted to feel better. I searched through all the medicine cabinets in the house for any kind of mind- or body-altering drugs. I remember taking several different medications: cold medicine, antidepressants, my sister’s blood pressure medication, and all of the sleeping pills I had been prescribed. I poured the many-colored pills into my hands, pushing them into my mouth, swallowing them down, and finally gagging on them. I wanted to make all the bad feelings go away. I wanted relief. I needed to sleep.
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