Lost Girls (7 page)

On her first call, Kim used the name Mia. The john was a guy named Vinnie who owned a backhoe service in Raleigh. He was nearly twenty years older than Kim, and she was scared to death. But when he opened the door, he seemed nice, so she danced and stripped to the music she played on a boom box. He was a gentleman and tipped her and kept her an extra hour. She walked out with hundreds of dollars and a regular customer.

Once she signed, Kim became part of a little sorority of full-timers. Kim already knew a couple of them from school. June’s working name was Cameron. Crystal’s was Mocha; she was one of the few black escorts working consistently in this part of Wilmington. Like any sorority, they threw a great party: a DJ for one part of the house, a band for the other. Once they took aluminum foil, poked holes in it, and covered the TV screen like a Lite-Brite. They turned the volume down on a cartoon, threw on the Doors and Pink Floyd, and sat there, high, staring at the light shining out of the holes, laughing. Another time they filled a bathtub with purple Jesus—vodka and grape juice and whatever else was around—and guys came by and dipped their cups. A guy who was seeing one of the girls brought ecstasy. Someone else’s boyfriend walked around administering acid directly into people’s eyes with a dropper.

Kim became fixated on making more. Her family was a parade of tragedy, and Kim was the one who always had to fix it. Now that she was making real money, she felt empowered. She learned tricks to maximize revenue. Even though the fee was $175, the guy usually had $200, and if by chance you couldn’t make change, that was an automatic $25 tip. Sometimes she’d lift a john’s credit card. Other times a watch would disappear, or some checks. One look at her parents, frail and declining at home, and Kim could justify anything.

Just as it was for all the other girls, Kim always made a show of not offering full service, at least to anyone who asked. When it was Amber’s turn, she wouldn’t bother drawing that line.

Some survivors of childhood sexual abuse turn their back on sex altogether. Others turn the tap on full blast, trying in vain to trivialize it even as they reopen the wound over and over. By the time Amber was a teenager, sex had become meaningless to her, even as it came to define her. Even before she worked for Teresa, Amber tried to make money for herself as a free agent in and around Nesbitt Courts. When she was sixteen, Amber charged some neighborhood boys for sex. Her first trick, according to an old neighbor named Carl King, earned her seventy-five dollars. Carl eventually lost his virginity to her—for free, or so he says—and so did a friend of his. “She didn’t care what people thought about her,” Carl said. “She really didn’t. It was kind of her thing, and I always admired her for that.”

Not everyone was quite as warmhearted as Carl. A promiscuous white girl in Nesbitt Courts was a hot topic, and Amber got a reputation. A rumor went around that Amber was spreading gonorrhea. Amber never cared what anyone said. Her sister was more famous around Nesbitt Courts than she would ever be.

Everyone saw that Kim had a car, cash, and clothes. Practically everyone except their parents knew where Kim was working. She had made up a cover story for Al and Margie that held for a while. She said she worked for the Hilton in Wilmington, driving a limo to the airport to pick up VIPs. All her cash, she said, came from tips. She waited to tell them the truth until she was sure there was nothing they could do about it. They needed her. They were too frail to work, and Kim was paying their bills.

When Amber finally joined Kim at Coed Confidential, both sisters were mindful enough not to throw it in their parents’ faces. Privately, Margie told Al that she hoped the girls were working their way through a phase. The girls were young, she said. Their stories weren’t over yet. Al tried his best to be philosophical. Kim was a hard worker, ambitious and powerful, stronger than he was. Amber, though, was a special case, more sensitive and vulnerable. Al saw how much Amber needed to be close to Kim, but he also saw her wrestling with her decisions. What gave him the most hope was the way Amber would allow herself to be overtaken by a deep and chaste religious fervor, at least sometimes. That, in Al’s estimation, had always been the biggest difference between the sisters: While Kim never believed in anything except herself, Amber never stopped searching for something bigger.

They’d seemed so alike to the other girls at Coed Confidential—both skinny little chatterboxes, brash and sassy—that it took a while for everyone to notice how different Amber was from Kim. Kim ran cooler. She was less affectionate and more self-reliant and mercenary. Amber was the sweet one. She had an endearing daffiness, a genuine innocence. She couldn’t even drive.

For Amber, the work didn’t seem to be as much about the money as the chance to connect with the people at Teresa’s house—to be a part of a family. She wanted the money, but more than that, she wanted to make an impression, to fit in. If you asked her to pick up a dime bag of weed, she would come back with a quarter bag or a twenty and try to shrug it off: “Here, I got you some extra, I didn’t know if you wanted it or not, but what the hell.” “She’d yes you to death,” June remembered, telling you anything you wanted to hear if you would only be her friend.

Once, the boyfriend of a girl named Chastity got busted buying pills, and she couldn’t afford a lawyer. Amber wanted so badly to help that she made an offer: “I’ll just dance for the lawyer. How about that?” After Amber walked out of the office, whatever had happened inside, Chastity’s boyfriend had adequate legal representation.

Teresa’s parties were getting bigger—so big that they upstaged the business. Where they’d once lasted all weekend, now they started earlier in the week until it seemed like every day offered a chance to cop. Teresa moved seamlessly from pot to acid to ecstasy, then coke, then crack, then heroin, then meth. She’d order enough for everyone, as if ordering pizza. The ecstasy parties always got a little mystical. Crystal thought ecstasy opened her third eye. Once Crystal was giving Teresa a massage and started seeing a flash of light in Teresa’s back, and then she started seeing visions of what seemed to be Teresa’s life. Teresa went ballistic, screaming, “What the fuck!” After that, everyone wanted a reading.

Kim’s first pull on a crack pipe happened at one of Teresa’s parties. Teresa had been the first to try it, as usual. Then she kept taking June’s coke and cooking it into crack, and June—the stuck-up one who used to say, “Crack, that’s the poor people’s drug”—eventually went all in. Then came Crystal and, finally, Kim, who fell in love. “I could work all the fucking time,” she said. One gram would last Kim for two days. She could work an entire weekend without crashing. The only problem with crack was how miserable you got when you started to come down. All the girls experimented with Xanax and other pills, anything to help them sleep off the hollow feeling.

Whom Teresa liked best often depended on who did the drug she liked at the time. When she was into coke, she and Kim were best friends. When she moved on to crack, she and June were best friends. And when Teresa started on heroin, it was Amber’s turn. Amber wanted only crack at first—like her sister—but heroin snuggled up to her and held her tight. It numbed her, zoned her out. She started when Teresa had made a new connection, a dealer who would go to New York and bring back pills. One day the dealer showed Teresa and Amber how to shoot up. Heroin brought the parties to another level. The dealer went into convulsions once, and they stuck a wallet between his teeth so he wouldn’t bite off his tongue. When the dealer’s girlfriend started OD’ing once, they had to do the same thing for her; for a little while, as they watched her shake, they considered dumping her at the ER and driving away.

By then the drugs had fully upset the familial atmosphere at Coed Confidential. Kim was scooping up whatever coke was floating around at the parties and selling it on the side. Crystal left Teresa altogether and started a rival agency called Sensual Pleasure, specializing in happy-ending massages. And Amber was forced out by Teresa after too many complaints about her ripping off the johns—taking the payment and any drugs and just walking out.

With nowhere else to go, Amber worked a little for Crystal. One night she went by Crystal’s place at the Governours Square Apartments, near Carolina Beach, and they smoked crack. Crystal performed a reading on Amber, looking into her past and seeing that she had been through something terrible. They talked about the rape and cried together. Crystal thought the drugs must have been to help ease the pain. She could relate: She didn’t want to deal with the stuff flashing in her head all the time, either.

By dawn, the crack was gone, and they didn’t have anything to help them come down. Amber started crying again. She wanted to go out and get more. Crystal said they should stay there. Amber kept crying, so Crystal held her like a baby. Then Crystal started praying for her, telling her it was going to be okay. “Have you ever prayed before?” she asked Amber.

“Yeah,” Amber said. “I pray sometimes.”

“Well, are you saved? Are you a Christian?”

“I think I am, but I don’t know.”

“Let’s just be sure,” Crystal said. She said the Sinner’s prayer—
Heavenly Father, I know that I have sinned against you and that my sins separate me from you
. Amber repeated it after her and received Jesus Christ.

Amber stopped crying. She smiled a big smile and gazed upward, weeping gratefully, praising God, praising Jesus, praising and praising until her voice was a hollow whisper. Crystal sat and watched her, thinking how fucked up it was, coming down off a crack high and praising the Lord.

II.

MARIE

New Year’s had come and gone, and so far, for Sara Karnes, 2007 had been a disaster. The telemarketing job had ended, as had the job at McDonald’s. Things with her boyfriend were strained. They fought as much as they slept together, and they hadn’t lived together since losing the hotel room. The only bright spot was Maureen.

Sara said she hadn’t known what her new friend was really doing at the massage appointments. Later on, she would chalk that up to gullibility. Even if she had suspected something, Sara might not have brought it up, for fear of ruining a good thing. Maureen was throwing Sara fifty dollars just for driving her to the appointments. Most of the time, she would dart back out in ten or fifteen minutes; if she stayed the full hour, Sara got a hundred. Being paid for sitting and waiting seemed like a good deal to Sara. Moreover, every time Maureen got in the car, she filled the gas tank.

It took a while for Sara to realize that life wasn’t going that well for Maureen. The red tape of Maureen’s life seemed exhausting: Sara got tired just watching Maureen juggle custody of two different kids with two different dads. Some days she had Aidan, other days Caitlin, other days both, other days neither. If she had the children and a massage appointment, the kids went to Missy’s, which sometimes prompted an uneasy negotiation. Despite the money she was making, Maureen’s life seemed to be closing in on her. She and her roommate had been a month or two behind on rent for a while. By spring, they were being threatened with eviction. She was constantly worried about Steve calling social services and arguing that their boy should live with him. Maureen knew he was waiting for a reason to try.

Maureen couldn’t find a regular job, and not for lack of trying. She had answered want ads for receptionist positions, for a job greeting shoppers at Walmart, but wasn’t hired. Again and again, she turned to Sara and her car to make enough money to pay the rent. Their lives intertwined. Sara’s boyfriend did some dealing, and Maureen became a customer, buying ecstasy and pot and sometimes coke to stay awake. He was good to Maureen at first, charging just forty dollars for a gram of coke and allowing her not to pay up front. Maureen would give him her food-stamp Electronic Benefits Transfer card as collateral. That arrangement worked only as long as Sara and her boyfriend were together. As winter turned to spring, Maureen accused him of trying to take extra money off of her EBT card while he waited for her to pay. Sara didn’t believe Maureen at first, but he couldn’t hide what he had done forever, and when Sara learned the truth, she left him.

That left Sara homeless for real this time. Maureen came to Sara’s rescue again, inviting her to stay on the couch at the apartment in Norwich. She didn’t charge Sara rent and even paid for all the groceries. Sara couldn’t believe it, though she soon learned that being a friend of Maureen’s meant being on the receiving end of an almost embarrassing amount of generosity. Turning a blind eye to whatever financial pressures she was under, Maureen had taken in other friends, including a girl named Penny. When Sara started thinking that Penny might be using Maureen, she realized she couldn’t talk, since she was freeloading, too.

They all needed money, not just Maureen. As summer approached, no great solution seemed to be presenting itself. Sara wasn’t sure how much longer they all could stay together. It took until June for Sara to learn that Maureen had a plan. Both of their birthdays were coming up. Sara turned twenty-five on the eleventh, Maureen three days later. With whatever money she had made from appointments, Maureen booked a hotel room at Foxwoods and threw a party. The room overflowed with friends Maureen had made over the years at the casino. Sara got drunk, and not long before the sun came up, she and Maureen went back to the apartment. They were alone for the first time all night, and Sara noticed how Maureen’s expression had changed. She seemed serious—completely sober.

“I need to talk to you. It’s important.”

“What?” said Sara.

“You like to have sex. Why don’t you get paid for it?”

Sara had always liked to think of herself as an operator—someone who could talk anyone into anything. Now she realized that Maureen was in a whole other league. She fell silent as Maureen explained that before Aidan was born, she’d been going to New York for a few days at a time, but only every now and then, when she needed the money. She wanted to start again, with Sara as her partner.

“Do you like it?” Sara asked.

Maureen told her it was fine. In New York, she was a different person.

Maureen had posted her first ads on the Eastern Connecticut/Adult Services page of Craigslist three years earlier, not long after she had showed her friend Jay DuBrule her photos. She had used her mother’s name, Marie—a choice that she never explained to anyone who knew enough to ask. The replies had been instantaneous. She asked Jay if he’d come with her. He drove her to a few people’s houses. She taught him the procedure: She goes in the house, and Jay calls her five minutes later; no answer means trouble. If she answers and says everything’s fine, that means he paid her and she’s good. “Then I’ll be out within the hour,” she said. And out she’d come, a hundred dollars richer.

The sex itself she insisted she could handle, but the johns were too close for comfort. Many of them were men who lived in Groton and the surrounding towns—guys whom she easily might run into later at ShopRite or Cory’s or Wendy’s. And the money wasn’t quite what she had hoped, or at least not as much as she knew she could make a short distance away, at the casinos. Though Mohegan Sun was out of the question—her mother still worked there—Foxwoods was wide open. Maureen waited until Caitlin wasn’t visiting from Mystic and booked a few nights in a hotel room at the casino. Before her first outing, she taught Jay how to freshen her Craigslist ad, editing it every now and then while she was out so the ad would bump up to the top of the list. The casinos brought Maureen to a different class of john—out-of-towners, from all over New England and New York and beyond, with more money and willingness to pay for what they wanted. They treated girls like entertainers, like professionals. This felt more like a business now, and Maureen preferred that. She met a few other girls, including one named Chrissy—a boy dressed as a girl, really. Missy later told friends that it was Chrissy who invited Maureen on her first trip to New York.

Manhattan was the ultimate moneymaker, Chrissy said—filled with tourists and businessmen and bored rich people. If she got a hotel room and posted an ad, she could make a thousand dollars or more every night. Maureen’s initial trips there were brief, just a day and a night, with Chrissy at first and then alone. She asked Jay to drive her, but he declined. He had two jobs and custody of his daughter, and truth be told, he didn’t feel quite as bold about going to New York as Maureen did. When she came back, Maureen had talked with all her friends in bright, breezy tones about her experiences. She spun it as an adventure: The men she met were all young and good-looking and nice to her. The hotel was luxurious. The city sparkled. She was exaggerating, but the money, at least, was real—piles of bills that she nonchalantly stacked high on her dresser. Some of her closest friends, as well as Missy, would say later that what Maureen was doing didn’t satisfy her soul—that the spiritual, cosmically curious Maureen had nothing to do with this. But it wouldn’t have been difficult for Maureen to be open to the possibilities. After so many years of depending on others, she could leave responsibilities at home and become another person for a while—all under the pretext of making money so she could be a responsible parent. And the attention: Seen the right way, the job was one where people were so eager to see her that they were willing to pay money. For the length of a call, she would be desired—a star, famous, loved, rich.

The logistics weren’t ideal. She had to give Steve a story to explain her time away; since he hated talking to Maureen’s family, she said she was staying with them. She managed to keep Will out of the loop, too—that was necessary; he was too volatile and protective to allow it—but not Missy. She needed her sister to know where she was; otherwise, she’d have nowhere for Caitlin to stay when she wasn’t with her father in Mystic. By then the sisters’ relationship had become tense. Although the trips to New York had upset Missy, there were limits to what she could tell her older sister to do and not do. She was too afraid of alienating Maureen to talk about it. Caitlin was old enough to overhear Maureen making her plans. When she was within earshot, Maureen called them “modeling trips.” Around Jay, Maureen was less discreet. The work demanded something other than romance—something sharp-edged and practical. When she talked about the work with Jay—managing Craigslist postings, fielding phone calls, meeting strangers—he thought for the first time that his friend was more than whimsical and mystical and lighthearted. She was tough. Not that she would fight, but that she would never let anything get to her. To do what she did, and in New York, of all places, took a certain fearlessness.

There also were hidden costs—anxieties that Maureen couldn’t tamp down. On July 5, 2004, the year she started traveling to New York, Maureen had another premonition, which she dutifully recorded on her MySpace page:

Having serial killer dreams again . . . Love is hemorrhaging in my head, fading away with every beat. Maybe all it takes to keep alive is smoking it to death.

For Maureen, the money also promised freedom from Steve. But when she became pregnant with her second child, a boy named Aidan, she and Steve grew closer. Maureen had used condoms as an escort; there was never any doubt in her mind that Aidan was Steve’s child. Steve wanted the baby, and part of Maureen did, too—another baby to care for, now that Caitlin was growing up and living mostly with her father.

The pregnancy brought the New York trips to a halt, and when Aidan was born, in 2005, Steve was a devoted father. Maureen went searching for work, never keeping a job for long. It took a year for the relationship to fall apart, and for Maureen to go off on her own with Aidan. By then, Steve was paying all the bills, and Maureen had next to nothing of her own. When the telemarketing job at Atlantic Security didn’t pay enough, the massage appointments began.

Now, with Sara as her new protégée, Maureen was ready to go back to New York. The city presented the solution to everything all at once. The money would help Maureen support both Caitlin and Aidan, prevent her eviction and keep a roof over her head, and maybe even liberate her from Steve once and for all.

They hadn’t even left for New York yet, and Maureen had become a different person—all business. “I’m gonna hook you up with Vips,” she told Sara. He was her guy in New York, the one who could almost guarantee a successful and profitable trip to the city.

While Craigslist was still free—the website wouldn’t start charging five dollars per Adult Services listing until 2008—Vips, or Vipple, had a JavaScript program that would keep posting and reposting your ad so it stayed at the top of the list, never getting lost in the shuffle. Vips charged a flat fee of $150 a day for his services, and he spent a good chunk of his spare time trolling modeling websites to offer his services to girls thinking of getting into the game. That, Maureen said, was how she met Vips. From the start, she had built Vips’s fee in to her overhead, along with a hotel room. Even with those expenses, Maureen told Sara that if she did anywhere from five to seven calls a day, she could walk away with one to two thousand dollars for every day she worked.

Sara called Vips from Groton. He had an Indian English accent. He told Sara he wanted to meet her. She and Maureen were talking about going down to the city that weekend anyway. They left the next day, taking the train instead of Sara’s car. Maureen said Manhattan parking-garage fees would be an added expense—sixty dollars a day to park was money they could be spending on cabs for outcalls.

Maureen was seasoned enough to have developed some rules. She started sharing them with Sara on the Amtrak ride into the city. Rule number one was always follow your instincts: If it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it. Maureen said some of the johns were cool, but some of them were shitty. No amount of money can save your life. Rule number two was to view all outcalls suspiciously, but if she ever agreed to one, stay in Manhattan. Don’t go to Queens. Don’t go to Brooklyn, even if it’s just over the bridge in Williamsburg. Staten Island, no. The Bronx, no. Only some parts of Manhattan were allowed. Unless it was a regular call, Morningside Heights was a no, as were Washington Heights, Harlem, and Alphabet City. Sara spent a lot of those first days with a city map in front of her.

The Maureen issuing all these directives was different from the carefree girl Sara had met six months earlier at the telemarketing company. This new sense of seriousness seemed to Sara like an unintended consequence of the escort life. Maureen would explain that, too: You got onto Craigslist to make more money than you could ever make at a real job, but sooner or later even that started to feel like a grind.