It was Jeanine.
Jeanine prostituted for drugs sometimes, for rent other times. She was a runner for a dealer on the corner. She and Elizabeth had known each other a while. Jeanine came over to her, on the corner, when it was cool, when the corner wasn’t busy, and they’d talk. The dealers and runners were a stable crew, and though they were busted in sweeps once in a while they always came back, and were part of the neighborhood. They knew Elizabeth and she knew them, and they didn’t hassle each other. When a fight erupted over turf, she made sure not to be there.
It was Jeanine.
Jeanine had been the girlfriend of one of the Lopezes, Jorge. She was the mother of their three children. Elizabeth bought the first baby a present. Jeanine said it was the only one the baby received.
Jorge and Jeanine sat on the stoop in front of the building holding the infant, and then they didn’t because it was taken away by the City. Jeanine explained that they had to go to the agency to see it. The agency controlled chunks of Jeanine’s and Jorge’s lives, because they’d had a child and they themselves were legally children and on drugs. Jeanine said she was trying to stay straight.
Jeanine became pregnant again. Then this child was taken away from her, and Jorge and she started getting high again. Then Jorge got deeper into shit, and into more trouble, and they both went down, down the well together, and the third baby was taken away. All the kids were placed in foster care. Then Jeanine went to prison. The Lopezes said Jorge was in Puerto Rico. Jorge was in jail. He and Jeanine were over.
If Jeanine wasn’t on the street, dealing, if she wasn’t in jail upstate, she lived at her mother’s.
Looking out the window, Elizabeth remembered the afternoon Jeanine came over and slept on her bed. She remembered it as if it were yesterday. Roy was at work. Jeanine’d been up all night. Her mother wouldn’t let her into their apartment.
— Until I was about five, we all lived together. It was, like, happy. My mother had four girls and four boys. My mother separated from my father, she became a drunk, started using drugs, heroin, and when they got back together, he molested me, and he ended up molesting my little brother and sister. I think he molested my other brother too, but I’m not sure. They don’t speak on it. It caused problems between my mother and me. She blamed me for it. She was in denial for a long time. It happened to my little brother and sister when I went to jail the first time. My father was a really messed-up guy. He used to be a numbers man. He took money and disappeared. Then she had another boyfriend, but she’s always insecure about me and her men, like maybe they want me, or I want them. I’m like, please, these old men, get out of my face.
Elizabeth was thinking about how she’d do in jail.
— It’s all how the mind handles it, if they break your spirit. I guess it’s tough because people tell you when to eat, when to sleep, when to shit. And they do any little thing to provoke you to get into trouble to lock you in solitary, make it hard for you to get out. ’Cause if you’re in the city, you can do up to a year, and you have a day to go home; but if you’re upstate, they can keep you from going home, they can hold you there. You’re dead. You hear from the outside world, but their life goes on without you, so it’s like you don’t exist. I didn’t have a hard time. That’s probably why I don’t fear going back. But I don’t want to go back. Some people go in with this attitude, they try to be too tough, and people beat them up. A lot of people from this neighborhood go. A lot of people have been in jail before — the more times you go, the more people you know. It’s like you’re a fixture. It would be very hard for middle-class people, people like you. My mother’d been incarcerated before I was ever born.
Jeanine slept for a while. Then she woke up and they had coffee at the rectangular table in the kitchen.
— Do you hate your mother?
— No, I love the old goat. She’s a pain in the ass. I want to hurt her sometimes. We’ve had fights.
— If you don’t buy her drugs.
— She has a fit. You pay to stay home, you pay to stay somewhere else. I gotta give her drugs, because I know she has a fit. She’s had a hard time. My mother’s father raised them. Her mother abused them from when she was little. My mother was in the hospital for three years because she was getting beaten very badly. Then they grew up in homes, because they took them away from her father because back then it was a man with little girls. Then my mother came back home, and she was with my father since she was thirteen years old. My father was older, twenty-six, she was like thirteen or something. Hello. She should have realized then the man had a problem.
Elizabeth nodded sympathetically.
— Jorge used to beat me. First of all, he had an inferiority complex. I had to teach him how to read. The home setting was not happy. Very disturbed. He had the heroin habit. His sister died from AIDS, from shooting up.
Emilia’s funeral. Jeanine couldn’t handle it, too heavy.
— Jorge killed somebody during a robbery. They’re not too kind with you taking somebody’s life to deprive them of their property. If you kill somebody in a crime of passion or self-defense, it’s one thing; but if you kill someone to take their property from them, it’s worse. Jorge’s crazy. The heroin, man. When he was so sick he didn’t want to hear nothing, and he had attitude, and he wanted to beat everybody up, and blamed the world cause he was sick. When he was straight he didn’t want to be bothered; he wanted to enjoy his high. There was no in between. He became crazy shooting up towards the end. He didn’t cry for anything. He cried when my kids were taken. But this guy didn’t cry for nothing, except one day his fucking set of works got clogged, and he cried like a baby. That’s when I really started staying away from the house. It gets to the point where I’m like numb, I really am.
Elizabeth wondered how Jeanine protected herself on the corner.
— The customers are more dangerous, because you don’t know them. Though I got my leg broken out there, when the boss guy came out with a bat because somebody said someone was selling something besides his merchandise. We don’t harm customers, in fact, people in the neighborhood say they feel safer coming home because they know we’re standing there. I’ll walk down a drug block before I’ll walk down a deserted block. People are not likely to try and drop someone on a block where there’s drug dealers, because they’re afraid. I’m not afraid of my colleagues, I’m more afraid of my customers, because I’ve been raped by customers. One girl was chopped up in pieces, we don’t know who did it. You get some weird customers, they come out and like they’re mixing. These are people who don’t get high on a daily basis. Some do — they’re real cool. Some people that don’t, they’re mixing alcohol or coke, heroin and pills and everything all at one time. They’re not stable. Plus whatever problems drove them to get high. They want to take you somewhere. It’s bad to get in a car, I used to, but I had an incident. Sometimes I have customers, when I see them really messed up I don’t want to sell to them. They’re more dangerous to us than anyone. Most of the regular cops don’t bother you. Sometimes they have nights when they want you off the corner, they come by, slow down and say, Take a walk. There’s this older black guy we call Batman. He beats up the guys. He just gets out of the car and beats them up. He won’t even take them to jail. Just beats the shit out of them.
Batman the cartoon or because he uses a bat?
— He’s a black man. I’m black myself, but this guy’s blacker than my shit. He’s even got this gold ring that has this Batman picture. His partner is six foot seven — they call him Robin. He’s terrible. They’re terrible. But they won’t beat up the girls. There aren’t that many girls out there, but they won’t really beat us up. Which makes them angry, they get more angry at us because they can’t really search us. But there are more female cops now, before you never saw them. This younger guy, he used to always want to talk to you, offer you help. If he arrested you, it would be because he felt like you needed a break. There used to be two sisters down the block. They were saving their money to go to school, so the cops wouldn’t arrest them.