I was a shy young girl. My gymnastics training helped me beat the boys at sport. I loved drawing and everything creative. Raised Catholic, I was gregarious and a book lover. I fooled myself into believing that if I was having sex, then I was being loved. With this faulty thinking, my secret transition to prostitution was relatively easy. Before entering prostitution I could go clubbing, pick up any man I wanted and get my sex fix. I was going to make all the men pay for the child support money my father never provided.
Sex became not only a substitute for love but a way of exacting revenge for the faults of my father. Yet in making men pay to use me while thinking I had the upper hand, I allowed them to destroy me, to degrade my desire for real intimacy and to sacrifice a decade of my life that I could have instead spent as an emerging painter, editor, and video artist.
I had not heard of prostitution until I was I clearly remember the moment, sitting with her in the front seat of her beige Lincoln Continental. I felt deeply sad and shocked.
Once, when I was about seven, I had looked inside some black plastic bags in our basement, hoping they might contain a present for me. My mother once mentioned that my father had, in a drunken rage, threatened to kill us all.
Many times. Yet somehow this did not quell my desire to please him, nor dampen the pain I felt after he left us. He reminded us that there were children in worse situations than us; that we would be doing all right without him and without his money.
