Pubdate: Tue, 01 Feb 2011 Source: Windsor Star (CN ON) Copyright: 2011 The Windsor Star Contact: http://www.canada.com/windsorstar/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/501 Author: Frances Willick, The Windsor Star DESPERATE WINDSOR ADDICTS TURN TRICKS TO BUY DRUGS It's A Miracle I'm Still Alive, Woman Says WINDSOR, Ont. -- High on cocaine and nine months pregnant, "Michelle" was pedalling home from a nearby tavern with a 50-piece for a client when she felt her first contraction. It was her greatest fear. Michelle's worst secrets -her pregnancy and her addiction -were about to be exposed. "My whole life was about to change," she says. And not for the better. When she arrived home, she tossed the packet of drugs to her customer and ran upstairs. As her four children lay sleeping in the rooms next door, she sat in the bathtub and tried to gather her scrambled thoughts. "I was just thinking the worst-case scenario: they're going to take my kids away," she says. But it was too late to plot an escape, too late to convince anyone with her lies -not the paramedics, not the firefighters, not the Children's Aid Society. Michelle gave birth to a daughter on her couch that night in 2003, and not long after, all five children were taken away. She hasn't seen them in years. "Michelle" is one of the growing number of Windsor women who have turned to sex work for a living. One of Windsor's most marginalized, most invisible people, her life is a complicated web of trauma, drugs, prostitution and crime. The AIDS Committee of Windsor's Roy Campbell estimates there are about 75 women working the streets at any given time, including those who pick up tricks on the streets or through phone and Internet chatlines. The majority of those women are addicts who favour crack, crystal meth and morphine, he says. "I've seen girls who are out there to make money to buy diapers because they weren't getting enough money through their assistance." "But we know that most of them are connected to the crack," he says. Margaret Bodnar, the executive director of the local John Howard Society, estimates about 90 per cent of the prostitutes referred to her agency are drug users. Deborah Gatenby, the executive director of Windsor's women-only addiction treatment program at the House of Sophrosyne, says more women in Windsor are turning to sex work to make ends meet. Windsor's poor economy has pushed more women into the city's strip clubs, escort services and body rub parlours, and that influx of new workers means others are displaced onto the street, she says. * * * Taking drags on a cigarette outside a downtown Windsor office building, Michelle shares her tale, quick and raw, laced with expletives. But as pedestrians walk by, she pauses for a moment or lowers her voice; the tricks, the johns, the deceit and the petty crimes are a thing of the past, she says. Nobody needs to know. After her kids were apprehended and sent to live with their father, Michelle gave up on life. "I didn't care to live, I didn't care to die," she says. Cocaine. Crack. Crystal meth. Speed. Morphine. Dilaudid. Oxy. Booze. It didn't matter -as long as it blocked the pain. Cobbling together the cash was easy. She'd shoplift, taking orders from friends for cologne, perfume, Nike socks or jerseys. S he'd slip into a store, nick the goods, stash them in a garbage can outside and then go back in for more. Once, she says, she waltzed into an electronics store and walked out the door with a 32-inch plasma TV. She'd steal. She says relatives had to track her down at a crackhouse to tell her that her father was dying. But where others saw tragedy, she saw opportunity. While visiting him in his hospital room, she took $50 from his wallet. "I was f---ed up. I just wanted to get high more and more and more." She'd hustle. "It wasn't pretty. It wasn't nice," she says of the first time she had sex for money, around 2004. "He was very ugly, very old and I puked. But I needed the money." Eventually, though, it got easy to sell herself and support her drug habit. "You don't even have to be looking for it. Whereas before I'd be whistling them down, waving them down, today I'm minding my own business and I've got them honking." On a good day, she says she'd net $400 or $500. But not anymore. "Nowadays, it's sad. If somebody stops me and they want head, for instance, they don't want to pay any more than $20. It's gotten really bad. You got girls who suck d---for bags of Doritos. There's been times where I've done it for less than five f---ing dollars, just because that's how bad I was craving." Today, Michelle says she doesn't turn tricks or do drugs. "It became life or death. I was on rock bottom." She'd tried every drug on the market. She'd mixed them, crushed them, injected them. "There was nothing else left. I just woke up one day and the desire wasn't there." Through the help of a methadone clinic, she's been clean for a couple of months, she says. "It's been a struggle. You go places and everyone's talking about dope and crack. Just talking about it gets me wanting to do it. I get the sweats going. "But I see where it brings people, I see where people are at today, and it devastates me. It saddens me. I don't want to be there." There's only one thing driving her to stay clean: her kids, who are now around 16, 13, 12, nine and seven years old. "I've got five kids, and one day they're going to come home. I've got to be there." - - - - It's Friday night and "the Circle" is buzzing. At this tiny public park on Drouillard Road, about 20 people have gathered to sit, chat or have a smoke following a free weekly dinner at a nearby church. "Sandy" isn't supposed to be here. She's already been picked up six times for prostitution, and the terms of her probation require her to steer clear of certain streets, including this one. 'COPING MECHANISM' For many, drugs are a way to suppress negative memories. University of Windsor criminology professor Willem De Lint says there's a strong correlation between substance abuse and deep trauma. "People don't try to destroy their lives just for the hell of it. Usually there is a precipitator," he says. "Many of these people are in distress or pain." Some addiction treatment counsellors say drugs and alcohol -the very demons they seek to expel from their clients -can offer lifelines to addicts. "We talk about the tombstones in their eyes," says Deborah Gatenby, the executive director of Windsor's women-only addiction treatment program at the House of Sophrosyne. "They sort of disconnect to the point where their despair overwhelms them and they're almost not able to connect with you. "Sometimes their substance abuse saved them. As maladaptive as it is as a coping mechanism, this reaching for substances enabled them to sort of survive intact enough that once we reach in and move all that other stuff out of the way, there's a really whole, fairly well-developed and wonderful person inside that's just been crippled by the trauma." As she settles into a bench and pulls her long brown hair into a ponytail, she keeps one eye on her paper plate, piled high with potatoes and salad, and another eye on the road. If a police car cruises by, she may have to scram. There's a warrant for her arrest. She hasn't paid her recent $300 fine for prostitution and she missed her court date because she couldn't drag herself out of bed after staying up late the night before, getting high. Drugs came early into Sandy's life. Her father died when she was just an infant, and she later witnessed her mother suffer physical abuse at the hands of her stepfather. Just a medicine cabinet away was an escape from her troubles. At 10, Sandy was already overdosing on her mother's sedative prescription pills -Serax, Valium, Mandrax. But it didn't take long for harder drugs to follow. Two weeks after her 16th birthday, her mother died. Sandy says she wasn't close to her siblings, so she struck out on her own. But when she applied for a job at McDonald's and the manager asked for her social insurance number, she simply left, embarrassed. She didn't know what that was. "I had no income, nowhere to live, I had nothing. I didn't know my head from my butt." She turned up at her sister's home to beg for a place to stay. But that bed came with a price. She says her sister, a cocaine and crack user, "sold" her to men in order to feed her habit. "If I tried to sleep, one of the guys would come in, and I had to do it. All I knew was, OK, if I have sex with this guy, my sister would love me and I'd be OK. She'll look after me. I'm OK." Her days quickly became a cycle of crack and cocaine use. Her sister, she says, gave her cocaine in exchange for babysitting her infant daughter. Sandy's attendance at Assumption high school grew more sporadic. And at night, there were the men. Eventually, Sandy says she realized that working under her sister's roof wasn't working in her favour. "I just had sex with three guys, but I'm still having to ask for a cigarette? I'm still having to beg for food? I'm not getting nothing out of this," she says. So, she hit the streets. Sixteen years old, a prostitute and a crack addict, Sandy's chances at a normal life were quickly slipping away. She hadn't finished Grade 9. She'd never had a regular job. She'd never even had a teenage sweetheart. For Sandy, sex was a means to an end, and the end was crack. "After being sold, it was like, what is sex? No big deal, just open my legs and that was that. It didn't mean anything to me. I figure I must have gotten raped 100 times, and it's no big deal to me." After a couple of years working the streets, Sandy went to rehab, got off drugs and moved to Alberta, where she says she worked three part-time jobs at Zellers, the post office and a restaurant. Though she admits she drank heavily during that time, she says her employers valued her. "Although they knew I was a drunk, they knew I was a hard worker, ambitious, and I made people laugh," she says. Eventually, homesickness got the better of her, and at 30, Sandy sold everything, came back to Windsor and moved in with her sister. It didn't take long for her old habits to return. "(It was) welcome home, put a crackpipe in my mouth and I started smoking crack ever since," Sandy says. Now 36, she's leading much the same life she led at 16. Two decades later, her body tells the story of the intervening years. Her cropped tank top and capri pants reveal tanned skin that's mottled with scars. When she's high on morphine, she scratches her arms and legs until they bleed. Among the white blotches are countless small red sores; her sister's dog has fleas. Today, Sandy is trying to chart a different course for her life. She just left a bad relationship and moved to a new apartment, and she says one week ago, she walked into a methadone clinic to start addiction treatment. When she leaves the Circle tonight, though, she'll still pace the sidewalks, waiting for the johns to roll down their windows and slow to a stop. Methadone or not, she still needs cash, and sex is the way she'll get it. "I need a flea collar, bread, milk, juice, body soap, shampoo. It all comes out to $40. That's going to be my first trick," she says. She lists her prices: $60 for oral sex, $100 for intercourse, $10 extra to touch her breasts, more to touch her genitals and a premium for anal intercourse or anything else. "I try to get what I can out of them." On an average night, Sandy says she makes $500 to $1,000, and all of it goes to crack and morphine. "I'd be lucky to wake up with $5 and a pack of cigarettes," she says. Her second trick tonight will leave her with a bit of cash in her pocket for the morning. Her third and final trick tonight will be for "a treat" -a toke or two of crack for her and her new roommate. It may be a slow start to recovery, but at least it's a start. "I'm still able to hold my head up," she says. "I know it doesn't say I love myself because I'm out there doing what I'm doing, but I like myself a little more than to be going under just yet. I'm not ready. "To be walking and living, I'm so thankful.... It truly is a miracle that I'm here." - --- MAP posted-by: Jo-D