AIDS Alibis: Sex, Drugs, and Crime in the Americas

6. Losing It

b / L"-jing It Fugitive Redemption I n big cities like Chicago, many individuals are isolated from families and other community institutions that might help them with economic resources and meaningful rituals in times of trouble. Indeed, isolation may hasten the slide into addiction, a set of psycho-physiological obsessions with their own demanding and often cruel rituals of engagement. If it weren't for its astonishing power of destruction, drug addiction would attract no special interest. Addiction is a challenge of doubtful reward. Getting trapped requires determination. (Many people throw up a lot ttying to get used to heroin, for example.) Successful addicts must learn to market their talents in a local system of organized behaviors, just like everyone else. Becoming adept at thieving, con, or selling sex or dope allows the addict to control the intervals between full syringes. The more adept you are, the more opportunities you have to reign in that fugitive redemption. This chapter is about two women, an addict and a wife, both raised Catholic in their mid-twenties, both European (or whites in black parlance). One was living off the Latino copping networks on westside Chicago, and one found her way to a southside shelter from rural Illinois. I interviewed them in the field stations of the AIDS intervention project. I call them Boots and Sandy. Their personal histories trace the lay of the land.I 81 Copyrighted Material • CHAPTER 6 III II. oct Routine u '" III I was pretty surprised when Boots walked into the westside station. It was that Daughters ofAmerica look. But the bruised eye and hungry edge tipped me off that she might be a convincing study participant . She introduced herself as Tommy the pimp's new girl, but she was working freelance. She said she gave him money sometimes because she liked him. He pampered his girls and had a formidable reputation. (He was supposed to have killed three people and was wanted in Philadelphia. He tortured some guy who cut off one ofhis girls' ears.) Boots said that she and Tommy have a lot offun together. She shot drugs at least five times a day and had been working sex for three months. She qualified for the study, which meant she would get ten dollars to have her blood drawn and tested, ten dollars for the NIDA surveillance interview, and ten dollars for an ethnographic interview : That's thirty dollars, enough to buy dope. First she explained the bruises: Yesterday, her friend took her to cop. The punk brother of a local gang leader called her friend an asshole. So she said, "Don't call him an asshole." He said, "Shut up, you dirty whore." She slapped him, and he punched her hard twice. It knocked her back five feet, she saw stars, grabbed on to a car, stood there for a second to let everything get back into sight, then turned and walked away. The surveillance interview provided some crucial details: Born and raised in Cincinnati, she had become a twenty-five-year-old Buddhist with some college experience. She'd had her own apartment for seven months, but she was moving out. She had no children. She first got drunk at nine, first used pot at eleven, first shot up something at twelve, first shot up cocaine at fourteen, heroin at fifteen, and speedballs at twenty-four (a regular just-say-no textbook case). Speedballs (a mixture of heroin and cocaine), were her preferred drug combination . She shot this at least four or five times a day, a habit that cost three hundred dollars a day. She did barbiturates two to six times a week; alcohol about once a week; freebase, methadone, opiates, and 82 Copyrighted Material LOSING IT . tranqs less than four times a month. She'd been in treatment lots of times, mostly detox-residential settings in the suburbs. She always cleaned her needles with bleach and, except with current boyfriends, always used condoms for intercourse. She used condoms when convenient for oral sex (90 percent ofher professional activities were oral). She worked seven days a week and serviced 3 to 5 tricks a day. With about halfher tricks being regulars, that came to about 150 men in her first three months, 4 ofwhom she knew were injectors. Her health was excellent, and she was not sure ifshe was pregnant, she said. A friend of hers was outside waiting for her...