Lost Girls (9 page)

Sara said yes.

Maureen smiled and stretched out. “I’ll keep the room for us.”

CHLOE

The girls grab at the arms or shoulders first. It’s best to start by touching them. They’ve spent all night at a strip club, where the women can’t go too far.

Hey, sweetie, what’s your name? Where are you from?

They answer:
Oh, I’m just visiting . . . This is my vacation . . . I just came here on business.
They’re almost always from out of town.

Really? Yeah? Would you like a nice massage—a nice back massage? Hot towels? Lotion?

Sometimes they’re interested. Sometimes they’re disgusted. Sometimes they smile. Some guys play along smugly: “Oh, but why do I have to
pay
when I can give you the best night of your life?” Melissa and Kritzia would look at them and be like,
Oh, please, fuck you.

But some guys get excited. That’s when you say you’ll give them a blow job. Then you touch them again. Then you make the deal.

Kritzia Lugo was small and round, with lush lips and big eyes and a gift for gab. In Times Square, she was known as Mariah, a salute to her idol, Mariah Carey. Melissa Barthelemy was known as Chloe. Friday and Saturday nights were slow, too many families clogging up the sidewalks. But almost every other night, Melissa and Kritzia would hang outside Lace, the strip club on Seventh Avenue north of Forty-eighth Street—Melissa with a cigarette and Kritzia with some weed; their pimps, Blaze and Mel, standing a safe distance away, across the street or around the corner—waiting for men to come out.

Their workday began long after the Broadway theaters went dark, just as the few strip clubs left in Times Square were getting ready to close. In the new New York—after mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg helped make over the porn palaces into a family-friendly tourist hub, as safe and secure, almost, as a theme park—the escorts and their pimps have to be discreet. The girls dress a little more modestly. They’re a little quieter. They walk longer lengths up and down the block so that, technically, they can’t be accused of loitering. The pimps are still there, but at a remove, able to watch the girls work and to bolt if need be.

Times Square at three
A.M.
is a complicated place: volatile and dangerous but also, in its way, like any other workplace, with protocols and procedures, a social hierarchy, and intra-staff dramas. The McDonald’s on Broadway, south of Forty-seventh, was like the company commissary. Melissa knew that many of the drunkest guys stumbling out of the strip clubs ended up there. Even some of the homeless guys were part of the social hierarchy, rounding up guys and bringing them to the girls in exchange for a finder’s fee. Melissa and Kritzia would throw them a big tip so they would come back. Around the corner, on Forty-seventh between Sixth and Seventh, was the break room: a tiny open-air public plaza with a few metal tables and chairs and some slate decor. The girls called it the Batcave. One time Melissa braided Kritzia’s hair while they sat there talking, helping her tighten her extensions and curl them at the bottom with a curling iron. She often boasted about her beauty-school training, like a physician boasting about medical school, and then she’d laugh and threaten to cover Kritzia’s head with bald spots, chasing her around the Batcave with the curling iron.

When she first saw Melissa in Times Square sometime in 2006, Kritzia didn’t talk to her. This skinny white girl, always laughing at something.
What’s so funny to you?
Kritzia thought. But when Kritzia stared her down, Melissa gave as well as she got. That broke the spell, and they became close friends, sharing the same irreverence and attitude. Then Kritzia saw the risks Melissa took—she’d go with anyone who would rent a room—and she thought that Melissa wasn’t built to last, not even a year.

Melissa proved her wrong. She was in New York for three years, until 2009. When Kritzia heard about her family in Buffalo, ready and waiting to take her home, she would wonder why she was here at all. Melissa would say only, “I’m here because I want to be here.” In those moments, Kritzia thought maybe she and Melissa weren’t such kindred spirits. She figured Melissa had been this wild since she was a little girl, and when she got that taste of something else, she wanted more.

Where you worked in Manhattan depended on how you looked. The fast-track girls—the ones on Ninth Avenue or the West Side Highway, waiting for guys to pull over—were usually the hard-luck cases, strung out and ragged. The girls who ran around Times Square were average, like Melissa and Kritzia. Prettier ones—tall, skinny girls—had better luck on the East Side. Within each of those worlds, there was a pecking order: The girls with pimps hated the girls who worked for escort services; the girls who worked for escort services couldn’t stand the girls who worked solo on Craigslist. If you had a pimp, your money wasn’t your own, but you had protection. If you were with a service, you were often working harder than a lot of hos who had pimps, and you were making a lot less. Strippers were at the bottom, mere geishas, catering to the vanity of any man who walked through the door, and the men are not permitted to touch. The streetwalkers like Melissa and Kritzia played such games for only the briefest of moments, as long as it took to get a client to say yes. They had sex as soon as they could and as fast as they could, and they moved on. It always annoyed them that the strippers had the more dishonest job—they were the biggest teases—and yet were the ones on the right side of the law.

From Kritzia and some of the others, Melissa had learned the parameters of the stroll. You couldn’t look at other pimps. You couldn’t talk to other pimps. When there was a pimp on the sidewalk, you had to walk in the street; if you stayed on the sidewalk, they could touch you. If they touched you, that meant you were out of pocket, and if you were out of pocket, the code dictated that they could take your money.

You weren’t supposed to talk with other pimps’ girls, which was obviously a rule they broke every day. It was insubordination, pure and simple, but Melissa had nerve. She had swag. The big entertainment of the evening sometimes was waiting to see what nasty things came out of that little white girl’s mouth. She would make fun of strippers:
Dance, dance, dance, dance all night long, for next to no money; who would waste their time like that?
She would even make fun of her pimp. Like the time she said, “I don’t give Blaze all my money, I keep my money,” and pulled out her credit card to show them all. Blaze thought he controlled Melissa, but for as long as she could remember, Melissa answered to no one but herself.

When Melissa would come home to Buffalo for a visit—not often, but never less than once a year—she and her mother, Lynn, Lynn’s boyfriend, Jeff, and her aunt Dawn would all go out to a club or a corner bar where they could talk and drink. When the bar closed, they’d come back to Jeff’s parents’ house, where Melissa would sit up on the kitchen counter and keep talking. There was none of the old friction. Melissa was a grown woman, making her own decisions.

They would laugh about old times, and whenever her current situation came up, Melissa would be guarded about how things were in the city. Jeff thought that she wasn’t making as much money as she wanted to—not enough to afford to start a business, not nearly. That didn’t stop her from coming back with gifts: She sent Amanda five hundred dollars to shop for new clothes for school when all she needed was a hundred. Several months after moving, Melissa told Lynn and Jeff that the hair salon had closed. Now, she said, she was dancing in a nightclub. They struggled with how to react. No one they knew in Buffalo had ever done anything like that.

“Is it stripping?” Jeff asked.

Melissa was nonchalant. “Oh, yeah, we just take our tops off. There’s no touching.”

Lynn wasn’t sure what to say. “You know, I’m not around the corner. It would take me eight hours to get to you.”

Melissa reassured them that she never worked alone, and Lynn knew Melissa all too well to force the issue.

Melissa didn’t talk much about men. She did say that her old childhood boyfriend, Jordan, was history—that she’d left him soon after arriving in New York, for Johnny Terry, the guy who had lined up the hairstylist job for her before she moved. On the phone with her mother, Melissa would laugh and say, “Oh, Johnny and Jordan, they can’t stand each other.”

The summer after Melissa moved, Amanda asked to visit her in New York. Despite everything that Melissa had told them, Lynn was all right with it. Amanda was so different from the teenager Melissa had been—docile, even-keeled. Rather than worry that Melissa would be a bad influence, Lynn hoped that Amanda would keep Melissa in their orbit and maybe even persuade her to come home.

Amanda visited for the first time in the summer of 2007. She saw where Melissa was living. The basement apartment in the Bronx wasn’t exactly legal; there was no real division between Melissa’s room and the upstairs level, where a quiet family lived. Amanda couldn’t believe the number of Melissa’s cats, too many to keep them straight. Melissa, it appeared, had grown a formidable soft spot for strays.

Amanda also met Johnny, though she quickly learned that no one called him that. Everyone called him Blaze.

Kritzia thought Melissa was lucky, in a way, to have fallen in with Blaze, because even if he wasn’t enough of a fighter to protect her, everyone knew Blaze was close to Mel, Kritzia’s pimp, and no one would ever make Mel angry. Kritzia and Melissa soon learned they could mess with practically anyone and not worry about reprisals. When rival girls went after them, their men would stop them, telling them there was nothing to be done. Thanks to Mel, they were bulletproof.

Mel and Blaze called each other brothers and operated like business partners. Mel was the muscle, solidly built, with a reputation throughout Times Square as not just a pimp but a drug dealer. After going through a few bad pimps, Kritzia had chosen Mel. She was as infatuated with Mel as any girl could be with a pimp, but it wasn’t quite like that with Melissa and Blaze. Blaze was flashier and funnier, as well as less menacing. His whole persona—the flyboy, the pretty boy, the player—made him come off as a phony, trying too hard. There were rules for pimps, too, and Blaze ignored a lot of them. Pimps can’t have sex for pleasure. The only girls you can sleep with are the girls who are paying you. But Blaze would go to a club and pick up girls—square girls, not working girls. Blaze might have thought he could do that because he never considered himself a real pimp—he was, he thought, above that kind of work.

Blaze and Mel shared a house on Watson Avenue in the Bronx. Kritzia and Mel had the master bedroom. Blaze had a smaller bedroom that he kept to himself. Melissa begged Blaze to let her live there, too, but he said they didn’t have space. The real reason was clear, at least to Kritzia: Another girl, Em, was Blaze’s bottom bitch—the girl with the most seniority. At times the situation got the better of Melissa. She’d lose her temper and scream at Blaze: “I’m tired of you using me up to take care of your
wife
.” Em knew how to protect her position. She would sob and wail and accuse Blaze of not loving her. The situation never changed.

When talking with Melissa about the life, Kritzia often overflowed with conflicting emotions—sentimentality and self-pity, remorse and fury, repulsion and attraction. “Let me tell you, Manhattan is disgusting,” she would say. “All these frickin’ rich people with all this money who just want to blow it on coke and hookers. And then a whole bunch of homeless people, sleeping on all the corners, cold, hungry, smelling like urine. And then a whole bunch of prostitutes, trying to make cash. And then we all get to know each other.” Melissa didn’t see it like that at first. Everything about her had a conspiratorial quality: the smirks, the insolence, and the teasing, punctuated by her saying, “Right?” and laughing. When Melissa came to hang out at the house on Watson Avenue, she and Kritzia would spend the whole time in a bedroom, sealed away from Em and everyone else.

With Mel’s muscle backing up their every move, Melissa and Kritzia were emboldened. All the other girls were too scared to speak up and do whatever it was they wanted to do. Kritzia and Melissa, they just did it. They would walk on a sidewalk occupied by pimps. When they saw the other pimps’ girls with a trick, they would go up to him and try to steal the trick. “Honey, don’t do black, do white,” Melissa would coo. “You know it’s the only way to go.” They got tattoos together. Melissa’s said
Blaze,
Kritzia’s said
Mel
. Melissa had wanted Kritzia to choose the same spot she did, on her back, but Kritzia wanted hers on the back of her neck, where nobody would see it but Mel.

They worked together a lot. Guys liked the duo. Once a guy told Kritzia, “You’re pretty, but I need something more.” When he saw Melissa, he was like, “Oh, you two are perfect. Skinny and titties, titties and skinny! Ooh!” Kritzia shook her head at how stupid that sounded. For one john, they took a bath at the Marriott Residence Inn, earning four hundred dollars each. They met a guy who wanted human waste on him. Kritzia couldn’t do it, but Melissa did. She wanted the extra money. He wasn’t even masturbating while it happened. He just lay in the tub in his room at the Intercontinental Hotel.