Flashback 1995: Addicted to the Street — How Drugs Lead to Prostitution

    

                                    From "The Immortal Plena," by Antonio Martorell

   On Monday, I wrote about the unique Chicago social service agency, The Night Ministry. That got me to wondering how many stories of mine they've been part of — dozens. This is the first, and one of those stories that burn in memory. I'd spent the night with the Cook County Sheriff's Police, arresting sex workers on Cicero Avenue. It was a revolving door — they'd be back on the street before the paperwork was finished. Toward the end of the shift, I wanted to talk in-depth to one of the prostitutes, and we picked Pamela Bolton at random. A choice that troubled me and I came to regret, because two weeks later she was picked up and murdered. I never knew for sure that the police saying she had AIDS led to her death, maybe by a former customer. But it was possible. Nobody had ever murdered her before...

     "How old do you think I am?" she says, turning her face under the streetlight; a worn, freckled face, under crinkly red hair, a face spotted with open sores. A kind viewer suggests she is 35 years old. "I'm 31," she says.
     Her real name is Pamela Bolton, but they call her "Cotton," for the drawl in her voice that harkens back to her youth in St. Louis and a half decade in Memphis, before she was a street prostitute.
     Bolton is a regular. "Just about every guy in county vice and every member of the Cicero Police Department has arrested her," said Paul Olson, a vice investigator with the Cook County sheriff's police. "We know she has hepatitis. We believe she has AIDS, but she won't admit it."
     Exactly why a person becomes a prostitute is a complex question. Drugs are a major factor.
     "The biggest problem with these girls is they are drug addicts," said Ted Kowalski, an associate judge in Branch 29 court. "I have seen hundreds of them. They all have drug habits."
     Behind the drug use is frequently a history of being abused.
     "The majority have been sexually abused in the past," said the Rev. Peter Brick, project coordinator for The Night Ministry, which does outreach to prostitutes. "My belief is that sexual abuse seriously damages one's self confidence. One result of lowering of self-concept is to feel good by escaping into drugs, and prostitution can then follow."
     Of her upbringing, Bolton says only, "I come from good family. My daddy was a police. If you had told me when I was 10 years old that I would be out here doing this, I would have laughed."
     She has been a prostitute for 12 years, and has been arrested hundreds of times, to no effect.
     "Oh baby, I walk Cicero Avenue like it's legal," says Bolton, who was arrested the day before by Maywood police and released a few hours later.
     A prostitute will charge whatever she thinks she can get, Bolton says; $10 from a drunk immigrant, $50 from a "scared, paranoid white man."
     "I'll tell you this," she says. "Any girl who tells you she won't do it for $10 is a liar."
     Bolton has three children. Her youngest is less than a year old — a "trick baby," meaning the little girl was fathered by a customer.
     "Right now this lady named Nancy's got her," Bolton says. "DCFS started having her, because she had cocaine in her system. But I got somebody to take temporary custody. Still, she was 8 (pounds) 4 (ounces). She had 10 fingers and 10 toes and a head full of hair. I don't know how it happened, but she is Puerto Rican or Italian. She's beautiful."
      Perhaps because their job involves such an assault on their dignity, prostitutes tend to be proud — of themselves, their demeanor, even their choice of trade. Even when reality contradicts what they're saying.
     "I was raised very well; I'm very well-dressed all the time," says Hope, another streetwalker, wearing her dress, it appears, backward, so that her tattooed breasts show through the plunging crisscross straps of what should be the back.
     "I come from a pretty influential family in St. Louis," Bolton says. "I've got a boyfriend who would support me if I wanted him to."
     So why, then, be a prostitute? Bolton says she has no choice.
     "Prostitution is one of the worst addictions you can have out here," she says. "This street life is more addictive than cocaine. More addictive than heroin. I still can't come away from here. This is home. My 3-year-old's daddy would take care of me for the rest of my life if I let him. I don't have to be out here. But once you get into this, you can't stop it. Lord knows I've tried. I do go home occasionally. But I go stir-crazy. I can't take that life. Too dull. This is what I'm used to. I can't get out. I can't stop. I cannot shake this."

      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, August 21, 1995