Lost Girls

by Robert Kolker

  If all Amber had ever wanted was a family, that was what they became on America Avenue. Kim and Dave were the mom and dad, and Amber and Bear were the kids. Whenever Kim could pull away from her boyfriend, Mom and Dad would head off to lunch at the Post Office pub, where Dave would ogle the waitresses until Kim sneered at him; Amber and Bear would do their own thing at home. The neighborhood around Dave’s cottage reminded Bear a little of Tennessee: a little laid-back, a little country. When Bear noticed that Dave headed out every day to Nassau University Hospital, for methadone to help with his chronic pain, then asked him about it, Dave was pissed off at first. But when Bear promised not to tell anyone, the secret drew them closer.

  When Kim couldn’t come by Dave’s place, they formed a trio. Amber was Dave’s little buddy, his comrade-in-arms, and Bear made for a happy third member of the crew. When Kim visited less and less often, Dave felt like a divorced stay-at-home dad. He felt played by Kim. For the first time, he thought she might only have let him sleep with her so she could get what she needed: money, a phone, and a babysitter for her sister.

  They were going to the movies, Amber in the backseat, Kim up front next to Dave.

  Amber nudged her sister. “Kim. Ask him.”

  Dave glanced at her. “What?”

  Silence.

  “Kim!” Amber said a second later. “Ask him!”

  Dave was annoyed now. “What the fuck?”

  Kim turned to Dave. “Do you know Craigslist?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know how they have the escorts on there?”

  “Yeah,” Dave said. “Whores.”

  “No, escorts,” said Kim.

  “Listen, I’m not an idiot,” he said.

  Kim didn’t blink. “What would you think if I were to do that? Would you be mad?”

  Dave wasn’t about to let on that he would be. “Why would I be mad?” he said. “You’re not my girlfriend. Of course not.”

  Later that night, Amber made it clear to Dave that Kim was asking for them both.

  “Can you protect me?” Amber said. “If I do this, can you protect me?”

  Dave saw the ad in his head. Sisters.

  Amber had asked Bear, too. The guys were on the fence at first, but they came around. Dave told himself that Amber could save enough to find an apartment and restart her life. He told them he wanted nothing to do with the money. He didn’t want to think of himself as a pimp. Better to be a bodyguard: Amber and Kim’s guardian angel.

  Hanging out of view in the kitchen, Dave and Bear would hear Amber—she used the name Carolina on Craigslist—recycling the same old Coed Confidential line to every john: “I’ll get as funky as you want dancing, but you’re not going to touch me.” That boundary had always been easy for Amber to play with, and she knew that flouting the rules was one reason a lot of the men were there. Amber would do little things, such as play with herself, but there were always johns who wanted more for their $250.

  Early on, Dave and Bear came up with a way of assuring that Amber wouldn’t ever have to go further—an angry-husband scam that stopped her calls not long after she collected the johns’ cash. Bear or Dave would barge in just after the start of every date, as soon as the money was collected, screaming bloody murder—“HELL, no! Where’s my shotgun!”—and the guys would run out, shitting themselves. “These men would go flying out,” Bear said. “I’m talking naked, dick swinging, out the front door.” The routine didn’t always work. Once, Bear came through the front door and saw a huge black guy, built like a linebacker. The guy was stone-cold angry. “I’m not leaving without my money,” he said.

  Bear broke character. “Give the man his cash,” he said to Amber.

  The phone never stopped ringing. Dave and Bear were amazed by how easy Craigslist was; the money came straight to their door. They didn’t know it at the time, but Carolina was starting to make a name for herself in chat rooms and on websites for johns, like the Erotic Review and UtopiaGuide and Longislanderotic.com. On July 11, 2010, a john complained about getting robbed by some men with baseball bats after paying a girl named Carolina two hundred dollars for sex. Another member of the group asked for the address. No one from this board needs to be involved, he wrote. I have friends who can take care of this shit. The angry john supplied the address and Amber’s number. Three days later, someone named Morrie posted a message: A friend of ours told me today that “You won’t hear from those 2 girls anymore.” But nothing had happened to Amber—not at that point, at least—and the three of them kept on going.

  Kim was posting ads, too, under the name Italia. Sometimes she worked with Amber, sometimes alone. Kim had the keys to Dave’s house, but she came around only when she needed money or she knew that Amber had some. When she could upsell the johns for sex, Kim sometimes made five hundred dollars. Two calls like that and she had enough to call it a day. For long stretches, Kim wouldn’t work at all, perhaps because she felt Amber was making more than enough for them both. Whenever Kim was short on money, she would call Amber and tell her to post an ad. Amber would say no, and they would quarrel: “Are you kidding me? You go do it.” “No, you do it.” But most of the time, Amber would post the ad and make some money, and along would come Kim again, inviting her sister on a shopping trip.

  Amber needed Kim in spite of it all. Dave and Bear came to believe that Kim looked at her sister as a burden—and this wasn’t something that Kim ever really denied. Dave remembered her saying once, “If it wasn’t for her pussy, I wouldn’t have anything to do with her. Because her fucking pussy makes money.”

  Bear was the first to start using again. He hadn’t stopped for long. Every day he took the train from West Babylon to get his methadone at the Greenwich House on Delancey Street on the Lower East Side. Greenwich House was a quick walk from Tompkins Square Park. Bear knew dealers on Crusty Row—“the asshole of New York,” as he put it, the southwest corner of the park, near Avenue A and Seventh Street. So he would get a bundle first and then his methadone.

  Amber sweet-talked Dave into driving Bear there once to pick up stuff for her. Then it turned into twice. Dave couldn’t stand it. Amber was using now, too. Next came Kim, who would glare at Amber shooting heroin, and then

  cook up any coke that was lying around for herself.

  One afternoon in June, Dave decided he’d try it, too. Amber wasn’t around, and neither was Kim. Bear had some dope but tried to talk him out of it; Dave was the only grown-up left in the house, the sole voice of reason.

  “Go fuck yourself,” Dave said. He had never shot up before. “How much should I do?” he asked. “If it’s up to me, I’ll just put a whole shitload of it together and fucking do it.”

  Bear told him he’d wind up killing himself that way. So Dave diluted two bags to start, then pulled up on the needle. He had been on methadone for so long that what came through the needle brought him finally home.

  Each bundle held ten little parchment-paper bags of brown powder. They’d take the powder and dilute it with cold water from the tap, mixing it. The needles came from CVS. Bear needed ten bags, dumped into a cooker, just to feel normal. He’d shoot a whole bundle at once and be fine for the day, stopping long enough to inform his less seasoned comrades that today’s heroin wasn’t as strong as it was in 1970 or even 2005. “Nowadays it’s all fucking garbage,” Bear said.

  Dave always shot in his right arm. A whole bundle, too. That would last him three or four hours. He’d shoot up three or four times in a twenty-four-hour period.

  Amber shot up everywhere. She spent a lot of time hunting for a spot, adding needle marks up and down her arms right up against her old ones, like a child playing with crayons and tracing paper. Dave wouldn’t help; he had an aversion to shooting other people up. Her tolerance was as strong as Dave’s and Bear’s, though she was basically a third the weight of Dave. She started off doing a bag or two a day and then stepped up quickly to three bags in one hour and two bags another two hours later. By the end of the summer, Am
ber was doing twenty or thirty bags a day, two or three bundles. Even Bear had never met anyone that tiny who did so much dope.

  Each day Dave led an expedition from West Babylon to Tompkins Square Park. Most of the time, Amber felt sick in the morning and didn’t want to wait three hours for Dave to come back, so she would go with him. Prone to road rage, Dave would grind and gnash his teeth the whole length of the LIE, screaming at other drivers. In the city, Dave would spend anywhere from $250 to $500 for six or seven bundles, a day’s supply. On the way back, Bear would already be high, and he’d try to give Dave some, too, just to chill him out. He’d shoot Dave with a needle in the neck—the jugular vein that always bulged from all of his screaming and yelling. Bear used to say he could throw a needle across a room and hit it.

  Sometimes they brought home enough to tide them over for the next day. Other times it wouldn’t last, and at ten-thirty or eleven at night, Dave would drive back to get some more.

  Amber was never sober. The half of her day when she wasn’t making money on calls, she spent nodding off. Dave, paradoxically, was hyper—relieved to be feeling serene for once—and felt exhilarated, even euphoric, like he was floating. When Kim could steal away from Mike and the kids, she would come by to smoke crack, and she’d be hyper, too.

  Dave lost forty pounds. Now and then he would look at Amber, all eighty pounds of her, doing hundreds of dollars’ worth of heroin a day, and it would dawn on him that she was back where she’d started, maybe worse than ever. Dave came to realize that Amber and Kim had reverted to the way they’d lived for years before he came along. This was the way they were. This was their norm. Now it was his, too.

  In July 2010, he had a moment of conscience. “Get in the car,” Dave said, and Amber freaked out, screaming and crying. He said, “Well, then, you’re living on the street. I’m throwing you out of my fucking house. See if Kim helps you.” He took Amber to Beth Israel in Manhattan and dropped her off at the detox. A few days later, Amber came back. Dave stopped pressing the point.

  Any pretense about Amber not having sex with her clients had long since faded away. She was the main economic engine of the house, bringing in $1,000 or more some days, though most of the time she averaged about $4,500 a week. That was enough for about $3,500 of dope a week, or $14,000 a month. By August, Dave had sold every car in the dealership and closed it. Anything worth any money started to disappear, starting with the big-screen TV.

  The cottage had holes in the walls where Dave had thrown tantrums. Bear started descending into deep paranoia, convinced that everyone was trying to kill him. This wasn’t about having a family anymore; it wasn’t even about a routine. Everything of value had been stripped until the house, Bear would say, wasn’t even a house anymore. It was a spot.

  The neighbors, all too aware of the whorehouse, crack house, and heroin den on their street, called the police constantly. Bear’s paranoia was infectious: The housemates would cut the lights at night and use a pair of night-vision goggles of Dave’s to look out the windows, checking for saboteurs.

  Then one night Amber got hurt. She did an outcall by herself, without Dave or Bear, and Dave got a phone call from her, crying. Dave floored it five exits down the Southern State Parkway, and there was Amber on the side of the road, her mouth bleeding. The guy had beaten her and thrown her out, she said, because she wouldn’t blow him.

  In August 2010, Bear was walking out of a liquor store near Crusty Row in Manhattan when an undercover cop jumped out of a fake taxi. The cop searched him and found a pocketknife. A more thorough frisk yielded a bundle and a half of heroin in a wax packet in Bear’s wallet and three plastic bags of coke stuffed in his butt crack. Bear knew he was done: a convicted felon, collared for felony possession and the possession of a weapon.

  At Rikers Island, Bear doubled over in pain, shaking from withdrawal. He saw Amber in court, and she said, “I’m going to get you out.” Three days later, Bear was released on a $3,800 bail bond paid by Amber. She’d raised it all herself.

  Amber thought she had solved the problem. But Bear had more experience with the police, and he knew the house on America Avenue would be raided any minute. He was worried about himself, too. He was drinking so much liquor and popping so much Xanax, over and above the dope, that an overdose started to seem like a foregone conclusion. The guilt over the mother of his child taking care of his little boy without him was too much. He could ignore that guilt as long as he was enjoying himself. Now he said he had always planned on leaving.

  Amber was destroyed by the news. Another abandonment, another betrayal, another family ripped away from her. Bear checked himself in to North Shore University Hospital. He was too sick for a detox. He needed a regular hospital bed, where he was placed in a medically induced coma for the first few weeks. After he came out of the coma, he stayed in the hospital for another three weeks before being transferred to a residential rehab, a condition of his release from jail.

  Amber came by to drop off some of his belongings. She still felt scorned. Bear remembers the way she looked then, emaciated. He knew there was nothing he could do to make her happy. She looked him in the eye and handed him the suitcase. With the other hand, she gave him a fifty-dollar bill.

  Maybe she was calling him a pimp. Maybe she was reminding him who had gotten him out of jail. Maybe she was inviting him to go somewhere with her and find a use for that money. Maybe it was all those things. But Bear wouldn’t take the money. And Amber wouldn’t take it back. They were at an impasse.

  Finally, she threw it on the floor. “Let it fly off or pick it up,” she said, and walked.

  When Amber came down to Dave’s car, she was all smiles. She told him that she’d met Bear’s father and mother, and that Bear had proposed to her, and that the parents were going to pay for them to get an apartment, and that she was pregnant.

  All lies, of course. Dave knew that much. He understood. He took Amber back to the house on America Avenue, where she went back to work.

  West Babylon. September 2, 2010.

  Amber had one call early in the morning, at about eight. She went with Dave into Manhattan to get dope, and they hung out at the house with some old friends of Dave’s, getting high and watching movies.

  At about four or five P.M., Amber placed an ad on Craigslist. She got some responses, but nothing solid. Amber was on and off the phone with the same guy for a while. He called her and chatted, then called again. She was working her Southern accent, describing her body, and by the end of the day, she thought she had him on the hook. On some calls, Amber would upsell the guys—“You only want a half hour? I got my rent to pay, my landlord is on my ass”—but this guy was different. Even before they met, he was telling Amber that she would walk out with a lot of money.

  They arrived at a price: $1,500 for the night. He would pick her up around eleven and have her back by six or seven the next morning. She told Dave. Leaving the house for an outcall was unusual, but something made her trust this guy. Maybe she knew him. Or maybe it was the money. Or maybe with Bear gone, she had less of a reason to think twice.

  At the agreed-upon time, she and Dave left the house together. He walked her over to the corner of the lawn, right by the mailbox, and they hugged. She walked down the block. Before heading inside, Dave might have glanced down the street at the taillights of a car. If he did, he was too high to remember.

  Kim was in North Carolina when Dave called. Amber had been gone for three days. “Don’t worry,” Kim said. “She’ll come back.”

  A few more days passed. Dave called again. Kim was out of ideas. Bringing the police in seemed like a bad idea. So she did nothing, hoping Amber had found a new crowd someplace.

  Bear was sitting in rehab, harassing his counselors to use the phone every three hours to call Dave. “Is Amber back yet? Is Amber back yet?” Bear just knew she was lying in a ditch somewhere. “Dave,” he said, “I’m telling you—this girl is dead.”

  Interlude: Oak Beach, 2010

  Somewh
ere in the marshes of Oak Beach, past the sumac and the sea grass, a tiny greenfly lands on a strand of salt hay, a wiry plant, slender but strong, that first thatched the rooftops and insulated the walls and padded the mattresses in the growing city to the west. All through the nineteenth century, while the Vanderbilts and the Astors built estates on Long Island from Great Neck to Huntington, the barrier islands remained wild with salt hay and rich in oysters, small mountains of which soon scored a regular place on the menus of Manhattan’s finest restaurants. That lasted a few decades, until too many outboard motors of too many pleasure boats ruined the oystering, and the people of Oak Beach were taught their primal lesson: Be wary of those who might ruin your very good thing.

  The seventy-two homes in Oak Beach today are a mix of winterized old beach bungalows and modern McMansion-like Capes. Even now, to live along the windy, fogged-in roads is to resign yourself to a particular set of challenges that the inlanders of Long Island don’t face, and without some of the basic comforts enjoyed by your Hamptons neighbors out east. The people of Oak Beach are miles from the nearest supermarket, gas station, drugstore, hospital, or police precinct. Flooding is a constant threat. The marsh beside Oak Beach is a mosquito’s paradise, and the poison ivy in the marsh grows higher than the salt hay ever did—as tall as two men and as thick as the branch of a tree. All along the beach are piles of crumbling tombstones brought from the town of Babylon and stacked into jetties to help combat erosion.

  The reward is solitude. The people of Oak Beach are there because they want to be left alone. The gate, with its quaint little gatehouse and electronic keypad, is the perfect embodiment of the place’s ethos. Walking past the gate is not against the law, but it sends a message. The houses are built on public land and collectively overseen by a homeowners’ association that has operated like a miniature government for over a century, its small, clubby leadership screening new arrivals and making rules and generally promoting the idea that, as far as members of the Oak Island Beach Association are concerned, their quiet village would be perfect in every way if not for the intrusions of the outside world.