I first meet Kimberly Conley, 19, as she sits outside a downtown rehab clinic, gossiping with friends. Vickie and her granddaughter Kimberly Conley on the porch. Everybody knows where the girls are and I lived in the area, so anytime I tried to walk, guys would try to pick me up.”Įventually, when she was desperate enough, Jen “just went with it”. “I had to do dope so often I couldn’t maintain a regular job. Once the drugs began (Vicodin at 24), it progressed to heroin (“everyone was doing it”), and then sex work. “I ran away at 14 because of abuse and ended up in a foster home. Her daughter Cricket (“I like unconventional names”) clings tightly to her as she tells of being pulled into drugs and sex work. She has recently cobbled together a different life, put herself in rehab, gotten off drugs, and is focused on being a mom for her one-year-old daughter, her sixth child. When I ask her about it she is simple and blunt: “It was horrid. She walked and worked it for seven years. At that age! Daaaaaaaamn.” A pickup truck with a huge American flag decal covering the back window pulls up to her, slows down, and the older woman approaches the truck. While we talk, an older woman, in her late 60s, parks across the street, and then leans against the hood while she smokes. I just want to get clean and get out of this place.” “Being out here, sucking men for money for drugs, this is degrading. They sit in the car, listening to the radio, both picking at sores, riffing on their lives. For many people, myself, that is hard to stay away from.” When you start using drugs you are accepted for who you are, including your imperfections. You around family members who use, around friends who use. “Sure, as long as you don’t take a picture of my face. Kayla started using pills after high school, then moved to heroin, and then four years ago “started prostituting”. Perhaps things are more complicated than what I see.īesides, there is so much visible pain in Portsmouth, it is hard to focus on any one situation. Perhaps others have inquired more than I have. I also assume I am missing part of their story. I think about calling child protective services, but it is clear James cares and is attentive. One woman drops off two slabs of bottled water, and a minister inquires about their condition, but otherwise they are unseen. I buy it from the street since I don’t have a prescription.” ![]() Then I moved to the harder stuff like Oxy 80s, then heroin.” I ask him if he still uses drugs, “No, I don’t. My father drank, and I started drinking when I was a teenager. “I was born in Portsmouth and raised around drugs. Outside I ask him more questions about his situation, and he tells me his history with drugs. One afternoon I run into him in the McDonald’s bathroom, filling plastic bottles with water to clean his children. I continue to see them over the next few days along a commercial strip, Meghan standing by the side of the road holding her sign, staring straight ahead, her expression vacant, while James pushes the cart with the kids in it, collecting bottles and cans. He smiles and says no, they are all fine. I tell him I am a reporter writing about drugs and poverty, and ask him if there is anything I can do to help. It has been warm the last three nights, so that’s good.” ![]() We crash in a shed behind the house of a friend.” I ask him if the shed has water and heat and he smiles and says: “We have a cord we run out to the shed. When I ask him how he can be on the streets with two kids, he clarifies: “We ain’t really homeless right now. He explains that they were evicted a year and a half ago for “non-payment” and after a stint in a shelter, they took to the street. James is polite and soft spoken, his focus shifting between the kids in the cart and Meghan on the corner. The cart smells, the blankets inside damp and dirty. James (his name has been changed) is 39, and the woman with the sign is Meghan (her name was also changed), the mother of the two children, aged two and three.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |