Bronx Beauty: struggling with addiction, my friend still made it home
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Version 0 of 1. Beauty’s lime-green tights set her apart from the dreariness of a street lined with parked semi-trucks and empty walls topped with razor wire. She was working, waiting for men who would pay her for sex. It was March of 2012, and she had been in Hunts Point, in the Bronx borough of New York City, only a few months. I was a year into a project photographing and documenting the lives of street addicts. She approached me with a broad smile and a want to talk. After an hour of listening, I asked her the question I asked everyone: “How do you want to be described?” “Like in one sentence?” “Yes, one sentence.” “I’m a good person. I don’t like to see anyone down. I like to make people happy.” She smiled, “Yo, that is like three sentences, but you a writer, right? So you can turn that shit into one sentence.” For the next three years, as my project deepened, I looked forward to my time with Beauty. Mostly it was late-night conversations on empty streets, but being her friend also meant spending time in hospitals, prisons and other sad institutions. She had it rough – beaten by men, selling sex to survive, and living under bridges, on roofs, in shelters. Yet she didn’t feel sorry for herself. She didn’t want or expect sympathy, because she wasn’t a victim. She was Beauty, she had it pretty good, and she could never imagine things weren’t going to get better. I loved listening to her: the quick wit, and her nonstop stories told in a voice closer to singing than talking. She made me, and everyone else, laugh about things that had no right to be funny. She would spin a 15-minute soliloquy, her arms waving and her face one big smile, about having no home, about riding the subway at night to sleep and staying away from men trying to grab her in the dark: “Of course I pissed in my pants. Yo. I can’t just whip out my dick, riding between rolling cars, and piss into a tunnel. The 2 train doesn’t have toilets and sinks. You understand? I got to let it loose in my pants. I done jumped the turnstile once, and I ain’t gonna do it again, so I just go. You got to. It be like, at first, damn that is warm, and then I forget about it, because it just pee.” She could be lost to rage, but a rage every other New Yorker understands, one that comes from not suffering fools, especially people who take themselves far too seriously. “Yo. Are the cops being real? Throwing me a disorderly conduct, when all I was doing was just sitting on the wall sipping a grape soda? Grape soda, straight up. Not mixed with anything. They always hasseling me for being me.” Whenever I saw her, I made the offer I make everyone I work with in the Bronx: I will drive them away from Hunts Point to anywhere in the US. This Christmas, Beauty asked to be driven back to Oklahoma City, to stay with her mother. This is how, a few days later, we found ourselves at a Missouri truck stop, where I handed her my last $20 bill to buy something from the dollar menu. She tossed it back on my table with a scowl: “Fuck this, I ain’t spending our last dollars on fries. I am going out to smoke a blunt.” She had sprinkled her last pack of K2, a synthetic mix of various chemicals sprayed on herbs and sold in bodegas, on a blunt rolled the night before in a Pennsylvania truck stop. Instead, she smoked a Tropical Fusion Swisher Sweet cigarillo, straight up. She glanced at a group of police officers armed with bags of Big Macs and Happy Meals boarding SUVs. “They don’t know about my warrant out here,” she said before changing the topic. “You ain’t going to get gas? We got like another 1,000 miles to go?” I told her I was waiting for cheaper prices farther south, near her home in Oklahoma City. It was the first time she commented on anything to do with the drive. Holding her lighter tightly, she collapsed into the back seat of the van and fell asleep. Two hours later, as I pulled in to the next truck stop and before I could get out to pump gas, she started yelling. “I thought you had everything all set up! I thought you had your money in order! I thought if you going to drive two days to take me home, you would have gotten a roll of bills. Now you out. Out. And we about to be stuck. I ain’t working no trucks for you. I thought you had your shit lined up. Damn. A man comes and tells me he got his money in order, he better have his money in order.” “Beauty. I am just out of cash, but I got plenty of money. I got credit cards and a bankcard. How do you think I’ve been paying for the gas or for the hotel last night?” Her face, tangled with anger, relaxed. Nobody in Beauty’s life, certainly not a man, had money other than cash. She grabbed my soda: “Well, I’m gonna steal that Dr Pepper, just letting you know. That’s what I say before I steal. To be polite.” Beauty was born Daphenie, birthed in a prison hospital in Oklahoma to a mother doing time for drugs and other charges. Her mother stayed in prison for most of Beauty’s early life. “I looked forward to visiting on Sundays. She would braid my hair out in the visitors’ yard.” Beauty was passed among various aunts and cousins, depending on who was out and free. They all lived in the same poor section of Oklahoma City, filled with a grid of wide, flat roads holding fast food chains, gas stations and corner liquor stores. Her schools were within walking distance, and filled with kids like Beauty: poor and black. In middle school, she was diagnosed with ADD and placed in a special education class. In high school, she worked hard and made the cheerleading squad, but dropped out at 16, frustrated by a schoolwide restructuring that cut back on the special classes she was enrolled in. By then, using a fake ID, she had already started stripping at the XXX-tasy Ranch, a club near a tangle of interstates filled with men wearing cowboy boots. She went home with a few customers who offered her money for sex. She turned to street prostituting a few months later, something she didn’t hide from her mother or friends. Most had done and did similar work when an addiction flared and cash was tight. Beauty was surrounded by crack. It was her mother’s drug and the drug of the streets around her. The parking lots of corner stores near her home, where kids run to buy quarter candy, are strewn with tiny plastic bags. Inside, you can buy crack pipes disguised as containers holding tiny plastic flowers. Beauty ran from and will not tolerate that drug. “When my mom found crack, that’s when the walls started coming in on me. I can’t stand that peppermint burning smell.” Beauty fled into the false safety of K2. Crack is an awful drug, but what you buy on the streets is generally consistent. K2 is worse. It is labeled as potpourri and marketed as synthetic marijuana, although it has nothing to do with either. What they spray onto the herbs is an ever-changing mixture of chemicals meant to stay one step ahead of regulators and give an unpredictable high to the smoker. Three and a half years ago, aged 21, Beauty left Oklahoma City to come to the Bronx with a pimp who promised she would “make mad money”. He took her to Hunts Point, where she started walking the empty industrial streets they call “the track”, trying to draw the attention of men looking to pay for blowjobs and “to party” – a lot of them truckers hauling foods from the Hunts Point Market. When not walking the track, she sat on a low wall outside the high fence of a monastery, smoking blunts with her friends, many of whom lived in a shelter across the street. That first pimp’s name is forgotten. She quit him early, and started working through a series of pimps with names like Sexy, G, Campaign, Dee and Heavy. The pimps, like her, were homeless. They, like her, mostly preferred K2 as their drug, although they also dabbled in crack and heroin. They, unlike her, didn’t sell sex for money. She loved each of them upfront with the same giddy expectation. This one wasn’t going to beat her. This one was going to “get off his ass and hustle”. If things went well for a few weeks, talk turned to going back to Oklahoma with him. Each one failed her and each one hit her. G was the last one. He was around for about a year and was good to her for a while, stood by and didn’t freak when the K2 started causing her seizures. It didn’t last, though. “I was always taking care of him, earning double dollars for me and him, and he never did nothing, except come around touching me,” she said. “We were real tight for a minute. I was even going to take his name. First guy I was willing to do that for. He let me down though, messing around with other pussy, trying to pimp on everyone else.” A few months ago, during Thanksgiving week, Beauty spent an hour sitting in the Hunts Point McDonald’s on my computer, looking at pictures of friends and relatives on Facebook (“That is my cousin Bo. He’s walking now. So damn cute”). She spent a long time looking at pictures of her mother, who was out of prison, clean for four years and dedicating her time to the church. Beauty’s optimism was gone. She wasn’t getting any nights in the shelters since she was running from a warrant, having to sleep on subways. Her seizures, ugly fits of tongue biting that ended with her waking up in Lincoln hospital, were becoming regular. I made her the offer I had been making since I met her three years prior: I would drive her back home to stay with her mom. Only her, not her and a pimp. The answer was the same: maybe. G was on the outs, but still figured in her future. He was in a shelter at 125th Street, where she had close friends, a couple “who are straight up and working to get custody of their kids back. They have a tarp space under the Bruckner they willing to share”. I left her with a time: 9am the day after Christmas. I would be at the McDonald’s in Hunts Point. If she wanted to quit the Bronx and get a ride to her mom’s home in Oklahoma City, she had to show up then. And she did, exactly at 9, carrying a light backpack and smelling of the streets. “I haven’t showered in a long time. Was at G’s father’s house a few week ago, but his father’s wife was there. I wasn’t gonna disrespect her by using the shower.” I gave her my phone and computer while we waited three hours to make sure she really wanted to go. She spent that time figuring out her old life, leaning over the keyboard, squinting (her glasses were lost long ago) at photos of babies, weddings, selfies. She wrote phone numbers on her skin, the letters worming their way around a thick burn mark in the center of her hand. She called everyone who would answer, her voice once again filled with happiness and strength. “I am coming home, for real, not shitting you. Like in two days. I be smoking K2, they still got it down there too, right? To be straight up with you, I been street homeless. I was gonna bring this nigga with me but he left me and I’m glad he left.” She smoked her last cigarette in the Bronx before getting into my van. “Time to lose this place. I am tired of sleeping on trains, tired of hustling for a few dollars out here. I am scared, sick of running from police. I don’t got anyone here. I don’t trust anyone here.” A half hour later, when we reached the top of the George Washington Bridge, she started rocking, nervous, sucking on her first and middle fingers, staring out at the Hudson River below, looking the opposite direction of the Manhattan skyline. Sucking her fingers was a habit, one she did after smoking K2 or when upset with a man. When the tollgate lifted, we joined the traffic heading west into New Jersey and she changed her mind. “I can’t do this. I can’t leave. I got nothing in Oklahoma.” I told her if she still felt the same way in 20 minutes I would drop her off at a PATH train station with service back into Manhattan and give her $40. She was asleep by then, slumped over, her fingers fallen out of her mouth. For the next two days, as we drove further west, Beauty mostly slept, jacket pulled over her head, or stared out the window. When awake her face was lit by the glow of the phone, reading Facebook or calling blood family in Oklahoma and street family in the Bronx. She spoke often to her mom, asking her to get clothes and hair braids from her sister, to be ready to make her favorite meal of noodles and chicken. She asked if she could borrow $20, a request that was denied. The first night we collapsed in a small hotel just off the interstate, about halfway to our destination. Beauty loved the room. She fingered the ironing board – “This place gots everything!” – and spent most of the early night watching TV. She took $20 and walked across the parking lot to buy herself a burger and Sprite. She came back straightaway. I wasn’t certain she would; she had noted the truck stop across the street and how a few of the rigs were probably headed to the Bronx. She spent the next morning talking to more friends, laying on the bed and laughing. She unwrapped the last of her meal, saved from last night, and ate. She went outside to smoke, an edge coming back into her voice: “I should of bought a whole lot more K2. We got another day of this.” With each new state we entered, she would call her mom, excited, hoping the proximity would convince her that her middle child was really coming home. The K2 was a day gone and the mood swings picked up, the highs getting higher and the lows getting lower. “I need something to keep me right. I need K2 or a man; they stop all the anger.” She used to sleep after smoking; now she stayed up and narrated nonstop memories, her words coming faster the closer we got. She told stories of growing up, of aunts and uncles and cousins she missed. She talked of her mother’s older boyfriend, Mr Fields, who has been in her mother’s life for 34 years. They started dating when her mom was 16. He was a farmer with land, cattle and chickens, a good, decent man who stood by when her mother would fall into crack. At dusk, with a light snow falling, we pulled into a Waffle House parking lot. She was talking into the phone, angry about something, and left the car. She walked into another empty parking lot and hid behind an idling semi-truck. She dropped her pants and peed, squatting against the wheel of the truck. She continued speaking into the phone as she peed, as she pulled up her pants, as she entered the Waffle House, only putting the phone down to politely order: “Yes ma’am. I will have a burger, chili and Sprite. Thank you.” When we crossed into Oklahoma, her words quickened, each new sign or landmark prompting a memory, regret or fear: “My momma had a girlfriend named Sweet Pea who lived here in Tulsa. She was a drug dealer who always treated us right, buying us presents even when momma slept on the couch and wasn’t good to Sweet Pea. She was always getting into things. Came into the house once bleeding. Someone had thrown a coffee cup at her head. Never seen so much blood. Ever.” “You ever been to a Golden Corral? They don’t got them up in Bronx, they a Southern thing. They my favorite. Like a second Walt Disney World with food. That is the shit.” “Not sure what my momma is thinking. I can’t fit in my sister’s clothes, that bitch is big!” “I get home and everybody will start wanting my check. Social Security gives it to me and then all them people start clawing for it, trying to make a claim on it.” “I miss G.” Her mother now lived in a small apartment complex. Many of Beauty’s relatives lived in the same neighborhood, some on the same street and a few in the same building. “Can you believe that? She just lives three doors down from her momma, and she thinks she making it on her own.” We pulled into the parking lot and our headlights lit a courtyard empty except for a basketball lying on a dirt patch. Beauty sat still and refused to leave. “I left this place because everybody here is lazy. In Oklahoma, niggas will just wait on a bitch, try to get you pregnant and then leave. In New York they get up and hustle. They ain’t always pimping on you. They are men.” She took her bag and walked around the complex, squinting for her mother’s number. A woman, Beauty’s age, stuck her head out from one of the screen doors and smiled. “Hi, Daphenie. I see you are back.” Beauty started yelling, screaming at the woman, who closed the door: “Mind your own business bitch. I ain’t any of your concern. You hide behind that door. Come outside and I will fuck you up.” Still yelling, Beauty entered her mother’s apartment. Her mother tried to hug her – “You home now, it’s OK” – but she was bent over and lost in anger. Her mother hugged me. “You can go. She will be OK. She has these fits now and then. We just need to get her a bath, some sleep and her medicine. Come back in the morning.” I waited in my hotel expecting a late-night call, a plea to take her back to the Bronx. It didn’t come. Instead Beauty, who had on the trip friended me on Facebook, poked me and sent requests to play Candy Crush. The next morning she was bathed and wearing borrowed clothes, sitting in the living room with her mother and Mr Fields. Daphenie – no one calls her Beauty here – apologized for the night before. On the living room table were family photos, group shots of her aunts and uncles. She held the pictures and told stories about the past, about times she waited for her mother to come home, hoping she wouldn’t be turned out on drugs or messed up. Her mother, steeped in the language of recovery, worked through a series of platitudes – “You need to be sick of being sick” – before telling her: “When you turned to prostituting, when you began living on the streets, we all stood strong, hoping it would pass like my addiction passed. We just glad you are back with us, here where you got family. You’re better off here.” Her daughter hugged her and went quiet, before regaining her voice. “Maybe, Momma. Maybe. But I made it on my own. I made it in New York. The Bronx, New York. I might of sucked a few dicks, I might of slept on a few subways, but I made it.” Three days after arriving in Oklahoma City, Beauty turned herself in on warrants outstanding from five years prior. During the booking process, while handcuffed, she kicked out the back window of a police car. Mr Fields paid her bail. Her mother is arranging with the city to get her medications, her benefits and her own apartment. Two weeks later she started once again sending me requests to play Candy Crush. To see more of Chris Arnade’s work, visit his photography page |