Sisters of the Road (11 page)

“You want my opinion, he’s a dope dealer,” said June on the way up to Capitol Hill. “And cocaine’s the name of the game, the way he looks. Hawaiian shirts at the beginning of January. He obviously doesn’t feel the cold—his snow is hot, not freezing.”

I was less interested in linking Wayne and Karl to dope than to prostitution. In fact, all I really wanted to know was what they’d done with Trish and if one of them had killed Rosalie.

“I went and talked to Wayne earlier in the evening,” I told June and Eddy. “He seemed so friendly and casual.”

“That’s the worst kind, honey,” said June. “You never know where you are with them until it’s too late.”

I
WENT BACK TO SEE BETH LINDA
the next evening after work. The drop-in center was just as crowded as before; it was like fighting my way through a teenage party to get to her office.

“Well, you’ve certainly made the rounds,” she said in her comforting deep voice, when she’d heard my stories of meeting Rob and Melanie, Wayne and Karl. “What do you think now?”

We were sitting in her tiny back office, surrounded by the bulging file cabinets and mountains of papers on the desk and chairs. Beth was wearing a turquoise and red tunic over black pants and a huge squash blossom necklace today. There was something both commanding and gentle about her presence, and it wasn’t just her size. It was the sense you had looking at her, at her slightly weathered freckled face and calm green eyes, that (aside from the Carltons) she had learned to tame her devils.

“I guess I’d like to know more about what Trish has been doing for the past couple of years.”

“I thought you might be back, so I got out Trish’s files. I looked for something on Rosalie too, but either she never came in, or she used a different name. That happens pretty frequently.” Beth put on glasses and warned me, “This is confidential stuff, so I’m not going to let you read it; I’ll just give you the main outline.

“She was first arrested over a year ago as a runaway. Loitering. The cops don’t always pick up new kids for prostitution, especially if they’ve never seen them before. They give them what they call a talking to and what the kids call harassment and take them to the detention center where their parents or guardians pick them up. This happened twice with Trish—the detention center is a great place, by the way, to make new friends and learn the ropes. They bond with each other and the old hands teach the new ones.

“Okay, the third time, someone from the vice squad picked Trish up in a car and says she suggested an act of prostitution. That means money was mentioned. There’s no way of knowing whether she suggested the act or the officer did. It’s happened that a girl who’s never done anything, who’s just been hanging out on the street, will be approached by a man who offers her twenty bucks to go with him. She hasn’t got any money so she says yes, and bam, she’s in juvenile detention with a prostitute label on her that she’ll never get off. Without having done anything. These are the kids we try to get to first with the outreach workers. Because once a girl has got that label, it’s like a tattoo—it can’t be washed off. The parents know, the cops know, sometimes the counselors and teachers at school know. She’s officially a bad girl, a whore now—something that people can throw in her face anytime she steps out of line.

“And most of the time it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Beth looked somber and lit a Carlton. I don’t know exactly how it happened to Trish, but at any rate she became a chronic runaway. There were some meetings with her parents but they didn’t go anywhere. You can see why. Her stepfather has it firmly fixed in his mind that she’s a piece of trash, and her mom goes along with it. They signed her over to the state. The state placed her in a series of foster homes and she ran away from all of them. It’s not surprising. The foster care system in Washington is a disgrace. A lot of people take in kids just for the money and there’s no real way of checking up on them. Some of them abuse the kids, physically and/or sexually. The kids have no rights and no recourse, except to run. Other foster parents will take in a lot of different kids—so a kid from a relatively sheltered background will find herself in a house with drug addicts and shoplifters, kids who’ve never had a home, kids with a string of arrests, kids who can be abusive themselves.

“All this time it looks like Trish got little or no one-on-one counseling. She was in and out of school, failed the ninth grade, even though her test scores show that she’s a bright girl with a high aptitude for English. It wasn’t until she got institutionalized last spring that they found out she was on drugs, and that anyone seriously started to work with her. That’s how it happens—and by then it’s almost too late. A kid has such an internalized sense of degradation and hopelessness that it’s hard to even get to her, much less get her out of the life. That’s especially true of young prostitutes. Their sense of themselves as female has invariably been damaged. They’re so distant from their bodies—they’ve had to become that way to survive—that they slip back into prostitution at the least opportunity. It’s the easiest and for many the only way to make money. Especially if they use drugs.

“But Trish got some help and in some ways she was one of our success stories.” Beth smiled briefly. “Not that we have overwhelmingly great standards for success. If a girl can get herself on birth control pills, that’s a big step, and if she can remember to use a condom, that’s another. Most of our girls have had VD and a lot of them have been pregnant. They know little or nothing about their bodies and their health is often really bad. I mean, you’ve seen them out on the streets in winter wearing practically nothing—and they don’t eat right, Coke and french fries for days on end. We try to tell them about birth control and nutrition, but it doesn’t usually sink in.

“Anyway Trish got placed in a halfway house about six months ago and started coming to weekly meetings for a group of young prostitutes, though, as I told you, she didn’t always make it. But the group is good. It’s a way for the girls to share some common experiences around pimps and customers and to get them talking about their feelings. Trish was also doing some school work here, working for her high school diploma.

Then she ran again. It was in September and we lost sight of her. She wasn’t picked up on the streets. I don’t know if she stopped hooking for a while or if she was working through some massage parlor under a phony ID. But it was the last I heard of her until you turned up.”

“You didn’t go looking for her?”

“I tried. A little. But it’s a big city and Trish is a smart girl, with an even smarter guy behind her. You don’t get far with Wayne. And I’ve got my hands full with the kids who actually come here for help. I just figured—hoped—that Trish would pop up again.”

“What do you know about a guy named Karl? A friend of Wayne’s?”

Beth shook her head. “Trish never mentioned anyone besides Wayne.” She looked tired. “I’m sorry I can’t help you more, Pam, but my group for gay kids starts in ten minutes. I feel bad though … you know, you do care about each kid individually—but there are too many of them. Each with his or her own history and problems. You do what you can.”

“I know,” I said, and I felt the hopelessness of it.

P
ASSING BACK THROUGH THE
front room I saw the girl who had directed me to Beth in the first place, the paper-skinned teenager with the dyed black hair and glittering nose stud, who looked like she’d just dropped her teddy bear.

She was with another girl and studiously avoiding my eyes.

I went up to her anyway. “Hi,” I said. “Remember me?”

Her companion looked me up and down, not unfriendly, just wary. She was probably all of thirteen, in a too-large Army jacket and black beret. “You work here?”

“No, but I’d like to talk to your friend a minute. What’s your name?”

She made a helpless attempt to stare me down. It didn’t work. “Cady,” she murmured. She still had her cold. She waved her companion away.

Thanks for telling me about Beth,” I said. “I’ve talked to her and she’s really been great. I’d just like to ask you two things—Do you know where Rosalie lived? And if so, will you take me there?”

“What makes you think I know anything?” Cady tugged nervously at her black forelock and looked sideways at the video game players.

“Because you came up to me the other night. It makes me think you care about Trish and want to do something to help.”

“Well, even if I knew, I couldn’t do it now cause I got something to do here.”

“Beth’s group?”

She nodded. “And I’m late anyway.”

“I’ll wait for you then, over at the Clock restaurant. I can get you something to eat if you want and then you can show me.”

I didn’t think she’d go for it, but after a minute she sighed and agreed. It might have been the promise of food, though I liked to think it was because I was such a nice person.

I watched her go over to her friend and shrug. Then they both disappeared in back. I maneuvered my way through the crowd and walked two blocks to the all-night Clock restaurant.

I had a cup of coffee and thought about Carole. I found myself going through the same thought process I had all winter just before I slept with someone. The reasoning went something like this: First of all, Hadley was never going to come back to Seattle, admit it. I couldn’t spend my whole life waiting around for her. Second, even if she came back to Seattle, what guarantee was there that she’d be interested in me? None. I mean, she’d been the one to break it off, right? Third, even if she
did
come back and
was
interested in starting up again, should I immediately fall into her arms and tell her yes?

Of course. I mean, of course not. She needed to be taught a lesson (even in absentia) and what better lesson to teach the girl of your dreams than that she was not the only game in town?

I let the waitress fill my cup again and grappled with a very simple reality: I wanted sex. And Carole promised sex and lots of it. Naturally June would be furious. Penny and Ray were couple enough in the collective and Carole was a dingbat besides (I could hear June already). But that was easy for June to say; she had Eddy. And I had no one. And no immediate prospects. Except Carole.

I put my head in my hands. Why had I thought that becoming a lesbian would solve all my problems? I’d thought that because last summer I’d fallen in love with Hadley and that
had
solved all my problems. At least temporarily. So why hadn’t that damn woman stayed around? We could be having a Meaningful Relationship
right now
, and I wouldn’t have had to go through all those stupid affairs to prove to myself that I was a lesbian. And to prove to my sister and everyone else that Hadley had been no mere flash in the pan. It was all her fault that I was even contemplating sleeping with Carole—an irrevocable act that I knew would bring me nothing but trouble.

Cady had the appetite of a horse—and she was as jumpy as one too. She gorged down steak and eggs and a piece of apple pie as well as two large Cokes, but the whole time she was looking around, at the waitresses, at the other customers and occasionally at me, as if she expected someone to come and snatch the food away from her any second.

I tried to put her at ease as much as possible, but her attention span seemed much shorter than Trish’s, and she wasn’t all that interested in the little I told her about myself, even when I mentioned I was a lesbian. I thought she might think we had something in common, but it was clear I just made her nervous. I was going to have to come up with a better life story if I was planning to hang around much with kids like these.

It wasn’t until she’d finished her dessert that I brought up the subject of Wayne. “You know him?”

“Yeah,” she answered briefly, warily. “He’s cool.”

“Is he Trish’s old man?”

“
She’d
like to think so.”

“But he’s got other girls?”

“A couple.”

“Are you one?”

“Me?” Cady looked upset. “I’m gay now. I don’t go with no pimps. I’ve got better things to do with my money than give it to some dude.” She slurped her Coke and blew her nose, a red lump with a glittering rhinestone in her soft, pallid face. “We were talking about pimps in our group. There’s nobody who’s ever had a good one.”

“What about Karl—is he a pimp too?”

“I don’t know him.”

“Are you sure? Bald guy, with a black beard? An artist who’s a friend of Wayne’s.”

Cady shook her head. “I don’t hang out with Wayne, I don’t know his friends.”

“What about Rosalie?” I persisted. “Was she working for Wayne?”

“Maybe she used to,” Cady said and put down her fork finally. “But she wanted to quit, she was trying to get off the street.”

“You mean she wasn’t working as a prostitute?”

“She stopped. When I saw her she said she didn’t want to do it no more, she was sick of it. I know what she means.”

“But Trish and Rosalie were staying together and Trish was working for Wayne. Did Trish want to stop too?”

“I guess,” said Cady indifferently. “But probably Wayne wouldn’t let her.”

“You said Wayne was cool.”

“Yeah, they’re all cool, till they bust your head open. I had one guy when I was straight, he was more my boyfriend, another guy on the street my age. But it got to be a hassle, when I was making money and he was spending it. And I wasn’t going to get pushed around by no dude who couldn’t even support himself.”

“Is Wayne different?”

“Wayne’s got some class. I mean, he deals coke and shit so he doesn’t have to live off girls or nothing. He’s more like a friend. Like, he’d help you if you got in a jam, talk to people, get you a fake ID, loan you money…”

“And he doesn’t ask anything in return?”

“Oh sure, you got to pay him back sometime….” She pushed away her plate and snuffled loudly into her napkin. “But you got to pay everybody back. He’s no different.”

Rosalie had lived in an old hotel in the city center, one of those pay-by-the-week fleabags. I guessed that Rosalie must have been paid up and that the desk clerk hadn’t been reading the papers and didn’t know she was dead, because he told us her room number without asking any questions and hardly a look at us. Since his job was not to see what was going on around him, that wasn’t surprising.