“I had two daughters from [him], ” said a different woman,
“and he introduced me into heroin and prostitution. I went
further into drugs and prostitution, and al my life the only
protection I ever had was my grandmother, and she died
when I was five years old. ” This woman spoke about other
males by whom she had children and was abused. She spoke
about her mother, who beat her up and closed her in dark
closets. It’s good that her grandmother was kind because her
grandfather wasn’t: “I can’t remember how old I was when
my grandfather started molesting me, but he continued to
rape me until I became pregnant at the age of thirteen. ” Can
one count how many women there are on our fingers and
toes, or does a bunch of us have to get together to have enough
fingers and toes, or would it take a small army of women to
get the right numbers?
There is another woman who was left in a garbage can
when she was six months old. She was born drunk and had to
be detoxified in her incubator. She was, in her own words,
“partially mentally retarded, ” “abandoned, ” and “raised in and
out of foster homes, ” some of which she says were good. She
had the chance to stay with a foster family but chose to be
with her father, since that was her idea of family. He was a
brute, good with his fists, and first raped her when, as a child,
she was taking a bath with her kid brother; and like many incest-
rapists, he’d rape her or make her perform sex acts and then
give her a child’s reward. “I just wanted him to be my father;
that’s al I wanted from him, ” she said. At twelve she was
stranger-raped. The stranger, a fairly talented pedophile, would
pick her up from school and talk with her. Eventual y he
slammed her against a garage and raped her: “Nobody had
ever talked to me about rape, so I figured he was just showing
me love like my father did. ” On having the rape discovered,
the girl was called no good, a whore, and shunned by her
family. “My father had taught me most of what I needed to
learn about pleasing men, ” she says. “There was a little bit more
that [the pimp] needed to teach me. So [the pimp] would
show me these videos, and I would copy on him what I saw
was going on in the videos, and that’s how I learned to be a
prostitute. ” Her tricks were professional men. She worked in
good hotels until she found herself streetwalking. “I ended up
back in prostitution. I worked out on Fourth Street, which is
