Girls Like Us Read Online Free PDF Page A

for whom the thought of family evokes comfort and safety and for whom the word love remains undistorted and untainted by disappointment, by violence, by fear. Over the years I won’t meet many girls who’ve had luv-luv lives, yet thanks to Miranda, I’ll remember that that’s the whole point of my being here.
    For most first-time visitors to New York City, there are a few essential tourist spots: the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, Times Square. However, for the first six months that I live in New York, the only place I can cross off my “must-see” list is Times Square and that is only because, at the time, it was still home to a burgeoning sex industry. My list of places visited went something like this:
Hunts Point market—creepy industrial area at night in the Bronx
Long Island City/Queensboro Plaza (under the bridge)—creepy industrial area at night in Queens
Flatlands—creepy area at night in Brooklyn
A few other assorted deserted areas
A youth homeless shelter
Rikers Island jail
    I came to New York City in August 1997 to work as a missionary for an agency that works with adult women in the commercial sex industry, a job I’ve obtained not based on my sparse résumé, which consists of being a waitress and a nanny, but rather on my rare admission that I’ve worked in the sex industry, too. Given that I have moved from Germany to the States for work, I don’t really expect to be living it up in tourist hot spots, but I don’t know that I’m really prepared for night after night of street outreach to some of New York’s most notorious tracks. The first night in Hunts Point, located in the poorest congressional district in the country, the South Bronx, I’m horrified by the quiet, deserted industrial landscape. All I can think as I drive around is serial killer’s paradise . So many dead-end streets, Dumpsters, the absence of streetlights, no one around for miles to hear you scream. Over the next few years, the Disneyfication of Times Square pushes sex stores, strip clubs, and the street-based sex industry farther and farther into neighborhoods like this, areas where no tourists from Iowa want to visit and residents’ concerns about crime and safety are largely ignored .
    It is in these dark, desolate areas that I do outreach, talking to women and girls on the street, although in the beginning, these conversations are often fairly one-sided.
    “Hey, how you doing?”
    “Would you like some hot chocolate/coffee/candy/a toiletry pack?”
    “So, my name’s Rachel. . . . I’m from an agency that works with women on the street.”
    Often they ignore me, so casually and easily, as if I am simply an annoying fly that is buzzing near their ear. Sometimes they give me the once-over and weigh up quickly that this little girl with a funny accent isn’t po-lice and doesn’t have much to really offer. And once in a while, on a slow night, they begin to talk to me and I learn names, street names but still; whether they have children and where they got that cute jacket/shoes/earrings. It isn’t deep but it’s a start. The more I’m out there, though, the more they learn about my story. And soon they introduce me to others, particularly the younger girls. I learn not to bother them too much on a busy night, to be aware if we are being observed by their pimps, to not take up too much of their time if we are. For months, the only people I really meet are girls and women who are being sold on the streets.
    Nights are for street outreach. Daytimes I go to detention centers, shelters, and Rikers, where the girls and women who come in are scorned by staff and the other residents or inmates alike.
    “Whatcha daddy gonna do for you now, huh?”
    “Nasty ho.”
    If the other girls and women didn’t know what the girl was in for, the guards or staff made sure to announce it. To have been on the street, to be in “the life,” as the girls called it, was to be on the lowest rung. It