After living in New York City for about a week, we found a condemned two-bedroom apartment for nine-hundred dollars a month.  After paying for the deposit and first month’s rent, we were pretty much out of money.  What was worse, the heroine had started to take its effects on Gerri’s appearance, and she was starting to look old and nasty.  She wasn’t making nearly as much money there as we needed, so she talked me into prostituting so that we could keep a roof over our heads and food on the table.

     I was twelve years old when I lost my virginity to some nasty old man.  He’d paid me two-hundred dollars to do “full service” on him, which means everything.  It was without a doubt the worst, most humiliating, most painful experience in my life.  I hated doing what we were doing, but after a while, I guess I just got used to it.

     About nine years ago, when I was seventeen years old, I met Darius Brown.  He was a big-time coke dealer and the brotha had major bank.  He’d offered me a job dealing coke and I did it without hesitation.

For a while, things were starting to look up for us.  Darius had become my man and was always giving me money, aside from the money I was making as his partner in dealing.  The only condition that he had was that I had to stop turning tricks. 

I was all too happy to give up that lifestyle. 

Two years later, Darius asked me to marry him.  He was good to me, too.  He promised me that we had one more big score to do, then he would give up dealing for good.  I had moved in with him, and he’d even invited Gerri to come and live with us. 

She’d declined.  I guess that she was just so deep into the lifestyle, that she felt it was too late to give it all up.  She’d always thought that Darius was just too good to be true. 

One month after we’d moved in together, it was time for Darius’ “big score”.  He did everything as planned, but the men that he was dealing with got greedy.  I watched the love of my life get gunned down right in front of me.  When the men who’d shot him left, I ran to him.  He told me that he loved me, and then he died in my arms. 

I was so devastated, that I tried to kill myself by overdosing on coke.  One second I was in the living room snortin’ coke, getting higher than I’d ever been, and then the next thing I remember, I was waking up in a hospital bed days later with some doctor telling me that I’d OD’ed.

A part of me wished that I’d died right then and there.