It doesn’t happen terribly often, but occasionally something will happen on this site that will remind me why I spend several hours each night, hunched over this little computer screen, churning posts out into the abyss. Today, was one of those days. An amazing comment was left in an old thread about local prostitution, and what we as a community should do about it. The comment, left by a woman identifying herself as a former prostitute here in the city, was incredibly informative, brutally frank and totally heartbreaking. Here, in hopes that it might lead to a more informed, intelligent and compassionate discussion on the issue, is the comment in its entirety. I haven’t edited it at all, aside from removing the woman’s name, but I did break it up into paragraphs to make it easier to read.
This is not going to be short. I’m going to tell you about a woman I know and her life on the street’s. She just had her 45th b-day in January and she cried because she never thought she would still be alive to see it. This woman grew up in Sault Ste. Marie, MI. She grew up with parents that were both addicts. Her father being a mean raging alcoholic and her mom pills and weed. Nothing was hidden in her home and the children saw everything. When her dad was off on one of his many drunken excursions her mother would take advantage of it and bring guy’s in the house to have sex. One night when she was 4 yrs old and had fell asleep on the living room couch her mom brought a guy home with her and she woke up to the man taking her clothes off and fondling her while her mother watched. This man had paid her mother to do this.
This family that this girl grew up in is an old and well known family in that area. The horrors and abuse in this family is also well documented with Social Services, but back in them day’s people stayed out of their neighbor’s family affairs even if abuse like her and her brother’s and sisters were put through. Her father beat the kid’s on a daily basis like they were grown men and beat her mom in front of them. She still can clearly remember the day that her dad put the shotgun to her mom’s head and made them watch while he pulled the trigger. She grew up with 8 brother’s and 3 sister’s with the youngest girl Cathy dying at the age of 4 and a half months because her mom came home high and put the baby in the bed with her and rolled over on top of her in her sleep and suffocated her. Her mom spent 6 years in newberry mental hospital after that and was finally declared fit to be released in 1975. Oh and there was’nt any bullets in the shotgun so her dad did’nt kill her mom, but that was only because he was drunk and forgot to load it.
Every kind of abuse that is known these kid’s were subjected to mental, emotional, pyhsical, and for her and her oldest sister Barbara sexual. Her dad started raping Barb when she was twelve and when DSS removed her from the home he started on her. Do you know what happen’s to the mind of a 6 yr old girl when her daddy does that to her? What happen’s to her soul? She got exceptionally good at hiding inside of her mind. When she did that he could’nt hurt her anymore because she was no longer there. It becomes a blackness that you can’t see through or feel anything through. Her daddy was’nt hurting her anymore he was hurting the blackness, and the blackness protected her from her daddy. Finally soxcial services stepped in, but that was only because at 6 yrs old she swallowed a bunch of aspirin trying to kill herself and the hospital reported it.
All the kid’s were put into foster care. They were all split up into different families. The older kid’s got lucky and got good homes, but her and 2 other younger brother’s got put into homes that were also abusive. After 3 yrs of going through 15 different homes she finally got put with a family at Kincheloe Air Force Base she was 9 yrs old. Her younger brother Tim also came to stay with them. This family treated her like she was theirs and would alway’s be theirs. She got periotic visits from her mom, but they never seemed to be anything more than 2 strangers meeting and her mom never stayed more than 30 minutes. One day when she came home from school they asked her how she felt about going and living with her mother she was 12 yrs old by then. She had buried all the pain she had been put through when she was younger and so deep inside of her that it looked and felt like it happened to someone else. She wanted to be with her mother more than anything in the world. To this day she regrets making the decision to move back home with her mother, because she often wonders what kind of person she would have grown up to be if she had stayed with her foster family. They loved her and were going to adopt her and her brother if they would have stayed with them, but she did’nt and when she moved back with her mom all the nightmares that had took years to go away came back. She started remembering what happened to her in bit’s and pieces. Some parts she still can’t remember because of the blackness. Her shrink say’s that’s how her mind kept her from going crazy because the only time the blackness came was when her father came to her and made her do things. She never remembers during or after it happened. She only remembers the beginning then everything goes black.
Now she’s out of foster care and her mom fooled everyone into thinking she was o.k. They all believed that she was drug free, but she was’nt. She would leave at night and come home after the bars closed with a different guy every night if she came home at all, and she would be having sex with these guy’s when the kid’s were coming down the stairs to go to school right in the living room where they had to walk through to get to the kitchen. She did’nt care if she saw them or not just like she did’nt care about them. she made it a point everyday to tell them how much she hated them because they were just like their father and the only reason she got them out of foster care was so that she could get more welfare money. She also told them that she fought to get them back because even though she did’nt want them she sure as hell was’nt going to let someone else have us. Her mother at that time being addicted to Dilaudid ( morphine ) was the first person to give them drugs. That was the start of 33 yrs of hell for her.
It got to the point where social services would’nt give her money for all of them so she put most of the kids back into foster care because she could’nt take care of them and her drug habit too. Billy was already 15 and he left on his own, but she was 14 when her mother put her out on the streets with nowhere to go. She knew about hitch hiking and left the Sault and ended up in Ann arbor with some people that were coming for the Hash Bash. When your 14 and homeless with no money, clothes ( except the ones on your back ) and hungry with nowhere to go and no one to help you end up having to do things that you end up hating yourself forever for. For the longest she ate out of the garbage cans behind mickey D’s in down town Ann Arbor, but only would do it when it got to the point of her either eating or starving to death. That all changed in the winter of 78. She had been sleeping in laundromats or sometimes would crawl underneath a stairwell in an apt. building to sleep and not freeze to death. One night when she was wondering how she was going to find food and stay somewhere warm an old man started following her. He eventually started talking and asked where she lived and when she told him nowhere he offered to let her stay with him and if she would have sex with him for 100 dollars. For someone who had never even held a 10 dollar bill in her life hell 100 dollars just to let a man go to bed with her made her feel rich. That was the start of something that would eventually become her whole existance.
At first it was great the sex she did’nt care about and she has never in her life had a ” pimp “. She met some street people who turned her on to heroin. She hated what she did with these guy’s, but the dope made it all go away. Finally found something that was tailored to her specific needs. She could do the heroin and not feel anything and that made it possible for her to be with all these different men. It was all good until the first time she had a knife put to her throat and was raped. For 33 yrs she has been a prostitute and a damn good one. Never once will you hear of her ripping any customer off and she alway’s used condoms… hell they are free if you know where to go get them.
Do any of you know what it’s like or do you know of anyone that has ever been raped? Do you know that over the course of 33 yrs of hooking she has been raped over 100 times. She alway’s wanted to stop working, but did’nt know how because it was all she had ever done since the age of 14.
Finally she gave up trying because everytime she tried to change her life someone would come along that had seen her on the street and would say something to the manager of where she had finally gotten a legal job and would say something and get her fired. This happened 4 times to her finally she just said to hell with it why even try anymore. Even though she was trying to better herself and get off the streets people would’nt let her forget what she did.
I’m the girl in this story and something happened to me 1 year ago that changed my life forever my mother died. At the time of her death i was already in the methadone program on Ford Blvd. That place saved my life. My mother had never not once in her life ever told us kid’s that she loved us not until she was dying. I loved my mother more than my own life and for once I wanted her to be proud of me before she died and i wanted her to see the change in me. It will be 2 years this fall since I have walked Michigan Ave, and used drugs. I went back to school 1 year ago ( college) and one thing i am not is stupid. You can not be stupid and survive 33 yrs on the streets without getting killed or killing yourself. My mother got to see my grades from my mid term thesis on family addiction ( I got an A ) and for the first time in my life she told me how proud she was of me and how much she loved me and made me promise to stay in school and make something of my life before it was too late. That was last August 21, 2008. My mother died right before Thanksgiving and even though i wanted to die with her I did’nt.
I’m still in college and drug free and still getting straight A’s. I wasted too many years of my life on the streets and have put literally millions of dollars of heroin into my body over those 33 years. I will tell you something though. Everytime i went to jail if I would have had somewhere to go and had a job waiting for me when i got out they would have had one less hooker to worry about. These girls have nothing to go to when they get out of jail except back to the streets. What do you think they’re going to do when the jail either kicks you out at midnight or 6:oo am? They are going to do the only thing they can do and that is go to work on the street and from there the cycle starts all over again. And just to let you know i love children and i would never let a child see me getting in or out of a car and i aplogize for the one’s that do. Children should not be subjected to that and I don’t have children, but if i did i would be pissed off too if a girl did that in front of them. I have never had a pimp and alway’s made sure that i looked good out there when i was working. The better dressed you are and clean you are the more money you make and i made 3 – 5 thousand a week, but i have nothing to show for all that money but a lot of scars from using. So the next time you see a girl walking the street don’t think for a minute that she’s out there because she likes what she’s doing. Don’t holler out your window to get a job or call her names. Let her know that there are actually people that care and want to see her change her life and if you own a business… please offer her a job you might be surprised at how quickly she will say yes. Most of all don’t make her feel any worse than she already does about herself. Don’t kick her when she’s down she’s already doing it to herself instead try offering a hand up. God will most surely bless you for it. Peace and Blessings to you all – from a former addict and prostitute in Ypsilanti known as Hubba Bubba ( I alway’s chewed the gum ).
And the weird thing is, within a few hours of this being posted, another former prostitute wrote in to wish her well and offer a few words of advice. Here’s her note:
It’s funny but I just knew it was you even before I got to the end of the post. I sincerely wish you all the best. I’ve been clean and out of the life for over twenty years now so please let me assure you it’s worth it. Even when it sucks it just doesn’t suck as much as alla that.
I always wondered what happened to you, and Blondell. I already know about Carol. As well as so many of the other girls. And guys.
But if you don’t mind one piece of unsolicited advice, only because I’ve been watching a trend with some of the other folks I still am in touch with…. It seems like at some point most people are faced with a crux in which they really have to get completely clear whether they are in it or out. Some communities are tolerant of a sort of, one foot still in, in some ways, but most are just not tolerant at all. I’ve seen a lot of people completely lose their hard won new support systems and fall back because they tried to run a little game.
Again good luck, it really does get easier, in most ways anyway.
These two comments have really affected me. First, it’s just amazing to me that a little blog like this can illicit such heart-felt contributions from my neighbors. Second, I find it incredible that not one, but two former prostitutes were out there today in the MM.com audience. It makes me wonder how many former sex workers there are in our community right now, leading productive, meaningful lives. And, third, I’m just extremely thankful that we as a community now have a window into the life of one of these people that we’ve spent so much time discussing over the past several years. My hope is that it makes all of us a little more compassionate toward these individuals, a little more motivated to help, and a little more optimistic about their prospects. And, I hope this letter puts an end once and for all to the ridiculous notion that prostitution is a “victimless” crime.