The Oldest Profession

"I want to work with young people and show them this isn't the way," Penny said. "As it is, if one of these young girls is beaten or robbed, we can't go to the cops. They just look at us and say, 'What do you want us to do? You're a prostitute!"'

Imagine yourself walking the streets of Old Town Eureka at 9 p.m. looking for tricks to fill your pockets so you can go to your drug connection and get another fix, just to get you through the next day. Hard to imagine? Not for Penny.

Penny is a prostitute, a junkie. Penny is also a woman who resembles a grandmother or a neighbor that you would send your kids to for lemonade and cookies. I met her on Third Street in Eureka on a chance encounter in the dark of night. She was wearing black jeans, a big overcoat, carrying a simple black purse and a few books in the cradle of her arms. I had a gut feeling that she was what I wanted for my interview, so I walked up to her timidly and introduced myself.

She was hesitant to converse with me, until I made eye contact with her and assured her I was not wired and carried no cameras. She explained that she was "working" and invited me to her home the next day.

Home turned out to be a dilapidated apartment building like something straight out of a modern drug movie. The hallway was littered with trash and stains. Sounds of blaring televisions and random yelling emitted from neighboring apartments, yet there was an eerie silence as I knocked on Penny's door.

Penny emerged from her neighbor's apartment to greet me. She worried out loud about the directions she had given me, as well as the safety of a girl like me coming to a place like this. She had been playing with the neighbor's daughter who knew her not as a prostitute or a junkie but as "Auntie Penny." As we walked into her apartment, I noticed how attractive she was with her flowing hair and bangle bracelets. For a woman in her early 50s, she could easily have been an aunt or grandmother.

Her place had cracks in the ceilings and walls. The slanting floor made her chairs roll toward the windows. Penny said she pays $300 per month to live in this place, and apologized for its condition.

She explained that she was coming down from a heroin high. She said she had shot up at 7 a.m., and was not feeling so well coming down. She began to talk, at what seemed to be a mile a minute. Her eyes occasionally opened and shut very slowly, as if her eyeballs rolled back into her head searching for her thoughts.
I had so many questions. She had so much to release. With so many long lost memories, where do we begin?

Penny (not her real name) was born in Massachusetts in 1946. She moved with her mom, dad and two sisters to Orange County when she was 10. They were an upper-class family, with a big ranch house and a pool.

Penny was an average student, involved in her high school drill team and other activities. Each child was given a car at age 16. From all sides, they seemed to be a typical American family.

Underneath, Dad was a raging alcoholic. Mom and Dad fought often. Sometimes Penny would come home to find blood on the walls and her father passed out on the floor. Penny would often help Dad into bed and then join her sisters in attending to Mom's bruises. Dad would usually wake up the next morning with no recollection of the beating he had given to Mom the night before. Then one day Dad decided to start beating Penny's sisters. He spared Penny from his rage.

"He never hit me," Penny recalls. "But, I never provoked him."

Penny began to weep as she reflected on the memories of her early years. She spoke of her sister, who died of a drug overdose at the age of 21. Her father had beaten her severely just. three weeks before.

Her mother died of a brain aneurysm.

"The garage door fell on her head and Dad wouldn't let her go to the doctor."

The father died soon after from liver sclerosis. The abuse had ended, but the learned cycle of abuse and tragedy had not yet had its run.

Penny graduated from high school at the age of 17 and entered college. She received an associate's degree in business from a community college in Fullerton. In her early 20s, Penny took a job with an oil company and got married. She later went to work for an advertising agency in Los Angeles.

After six years of marriage, Penny's husband revealed that he was a transvestite; he liked to dress. in women's clothing. He would go out after work dressed as a woman and come home looking like any other man. A year after the revelation, the marriage ended.

"It was like a dream I couldn't wake up from," Penny recalls.

"I loved him so much. How could I not see that? I was so protected from those things growing up."

Her ex-husband is now the vice president of a major candy corporation, Penny said. She doesn't know if he is fully "out" now.

Devastated, Penny quit her job and moved up to Eureka. She went on what she called "general relief," or welfare. She began smoking pot and taking acid to hide from her pain and depression.

She pulled herself out of this bout and landed a job - ironically - in the criminal justice system. She met a man during this time, and they had a son together. Their relationship ended after six years, Penny said, because of his abusive nature and his use of speed. This man introduced her to heroin.

As for the son?

"He is a bright, nice, soft-spoken young man," Penny says. "We are close, but he is not aware of what I am doing."

Penny is living the life of a prostitute and drug addict.

She said she does 1.5 grams of heroin daily. It costs about $30 for a half-gram, $50 for a gram, but Penny can often get a half-gram at a discount from a girlfriend.

When she was introduced to heroin, she got hooked and couldn't keep a job, so fellow addicts introduced her to prostitution.

Penny gives "blow jobs," oral sex, to her "dates." She doesn't perform sexual intercourse with her dates, she explained, strictly oral sex. For a job, it costs her clients $30. She usually has three dates a night, several nights a  week.

She describes her approach to it as cold and calculated.

"I just do my job, get my money go home. I don't have to take my clothes off, and if they don't want to use a rubber then they have to leave."

She has regular customers. Some of which she recognizes from working  in the criminal justice system. She also said that has dated bank presidents, judges, lawyers and other "important men." Her dates are older men, many of whom are married.

"I have been very lucky," she said. "Younger men either want to rob you or rape you."

She looks for a nice car and has the man drive her to a gas station. If she senses he is not an undercover agent OK, they proceed to her apartment.

Penny says she has never busted, but she has paid a price in other ways. Her constant shooting up led to formation of abscesses on both hips.  Heroin addicts who inject in the same place often form abscesses that wont heal. Botulism, a poisoning of the nerves sets in. The abscesses have to be cut from the body. Penny has scars the size of fists on both hips. She has new abscesses growing on her legs.

Penny wants to get her life to get so she can help herself and others. With her knowledge and history, she knows the pain and suffering that goes along with her lifestyle of prostitution and drug use. She hopes to save a few lives with that experience.

"None of us are proud of what are doing," Penny said. "I'd like to go into a rehabilitation program, a year program. I'd like to get a job and help other people in my position'. I would like to work with young girls who are doing this with no protection."

On Sept.30, a police sting in Old Town Eureka resulted in several arrests of suspected prostitutes and clients. This was the same night I met Penny, who was not one of them.

A police official explained that women caught for prostitution are usually cited and released. A second citation could result in jail time, but it is a rare occurrence. There were 10 arrests and 10 convictions in 1998, according to criminal records.

Heroin addicts in Humboldt County can get help from detox centers and outpatient counseling services. Help isn't always free and there are few alternatives. One clinic charges $7,500 for patients without medical insurance. Other clinics will prescribe methadone, a drug cited by critics as causing addicts to go from one addiction to another.

Somewhere, in any town, in any state, there are several women like Penny selling their bodies to survive. They may be heroin addicts or just trying to put food on the table for their children. They might be from a "normal" family or running from the abuse of a raging alcoholic husband or father. They may be many things.

Nevertheless, they walk the darkened streets wearing little clothing or a big overcoat laden with books, bangle bracelets and a head full of vivid memories.