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66 Chapter 4 Gendered Lives Combining Work and Family with Drug-Using Roles Mia Mia was a fifty-year-old woman who remained in a relapsing addict/junkie (RAJ) phase throughout the three interviews we conducted . Although she was decidedly one of the most despondent of the suburban poor when I met her, she had been raised in a middle-class neighborhood until her parents divorced. Her father wanted to keep her, but her mother fought for custody and won. Mia sighed when she told me this, adding that she wished she could have been raised with her paternal grandparents , who had fought for custody and lost. Mia moved to a poor suburban neighborhood with her mother, a depressed alcoholic who was sexually promiscuous. She recounted an incident that occurred when she was nine years old: My mother was just full blown alcoholic. Um, men in the house all the time . . . I remember one time—my mother was always drunk but she got drunk this one particular time—took off all of her clothes. Put on a short fur coat that just covered herself. Got in her ’65 Mustang and drove off naked and drunk. And she would tell me stories even back then that she would sleep with the policemen to get out of tickets and DUIs. You know, back then weren’t like they are now. You know, I really was disgusted with her. When Mia was older and her father remarried, she lived with his new family during the summer. He led a considerably higher-status life and she noticed the difference, secretly wishing to live with him instead. She did not tell her mother: I felt real guilty because my mother would always be so dramatic. Very jealous of my relationship with that whole family—my father, my Combining Work and Family with Drug-Using Roles 67 stepmother, my half sisters, and brother. I mean she would be, she would torment me with jealousy over that. So I had to balance the feelings and try to take care of her feelings. And I’m a child just trying to live my life. Wanting to be more like my father but [sighs], you know, she would be drunk and crying and “you’re all I’ve got.” . . . And if I came home and said something that was good about my stepmother she would be enraged. Torn by the emotional turmoil in her daughter role, when she was fifteen Mia started to inject Preludin, what she called prescription speed in a pill form, with a boyfriend. At sixteen she ran away with him. She experimented with different drugs while they were living with his mother, who she described as the “biggest Dilaudid dealer in the area.” Mia and her boyfriend became physically addicted to pain pills, and he coerced her to help him make enough to maintain his habit. She explained, “And that’s when the crime started. He put it to me in a way that you’re going to help me burglarize these houses and apartments because if you’re going to be strung out on my bill, um, you’re going to have to help.” Her crime spree came to a halt when she was arrested and incarcerated for burglary. She went deeper into the drug world and acquired more unconventional roles after she was released: Actually when I started dancing I was twenty. But I was still with him— the dope dealer. And I actually went from that dope dealer, from him, to the dope dealer that was bigger than him. And the second dope dealer introduced me to dancing. And I had no idea what I was—you know. He took me downtown to the [City Hotel] and said well you’re going to do this. And I’m like, what am I doing. But I, I was not a prostitute at that time, but I had slept with men for money—not really for money but I guess for drugs. I would sleep with anybody for drugs at that time. When I started dancing, the prostitution came in. Just to support my drug habit. As it did for too many of the women in this study, Mia’s time in jail did little more than increase her involvement in the criminal world when she got out. By the time she was twenty-one, she says, “I wasn’t working in the clubs. I’d be walking the street. I got arrested for...

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