Maggie, The Poet Prostitute

[Herman Munster]

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/accent/content/accent/epaper/2006/09/17/a1d_maggie_for_web_0917.html

A T-shirt decorated with the words "Crack Whore" costs $16.95 on the Internet. Maggie Williams considers this, her head tilted like a confused terrier. "Who would buy that?" she asks in a raspy voice. "That's the stupidest thing I ever heard." Maggie states this with authority. She has spent nearly half her 52 years selling sex acts to earn cash for crack, five bucks at a time.

Her entire universe is a six-block rectangle in Riviera Beach, west of the old Spanish Courts Motor Lodge, where drug dealers seem as common as vendors at a Dolphins game. Maggie gets high at least six times a day or she loses control. She wails about hating her life. She begs for money. She cries about dying. When she feels good, she talks about her tricks as matter-of-factly as the weather. Shocking details from a life spent in the passenger seat of men's cars: Old men, young men, rich men, poor men, timid men, twisted men.

Some want sex. Some don't know where else to go for a human touch. Most want crack. "Did I tell you about the fat guy I picked up at the Denny's in Lake Park?" she asks. She takes a short hit off her buck-a-pack Cheyenne Menthol 100's. Her sun-soaked face is as creased as leather. She wears a baby-blue shirt, black shorts and high-top sneakers she dug out of a Dumpster. Once, long ago, Maggie was a happy kid, the sixth of seven children in an Irish-Catholic family, who memorized poetry and loved to make rhymes.

Once, she dreamed of finding a soul mate and getting married. Then she met something more powerful than love: crack cocaine. At 27, she "married the pipe." Now, Maggie is so famous in Riviera Beach that Mayor Michael Brown introduced her to a CNN crew, who interviewed her about blight. Some clever kids, eager to meet a real prostitute, interviewed her, too — and paid her $25 for video footage they posted on a Web site. Locals recognize her from two blocks away, because she walks with a signature hop. They know her by a name she hates: "Scaggie Maggie."

[mike_c]

1. damn, K&R-- I couldn't stop reading that story....

Wow. I'm sitting at my desk weeping. :cry:

[sweetheart]

2. Ouch, what a painful life

It feels deadening, the suffering in that photoessay of her life. The crack doesn't
bother me, frankly, its just a drug, everyone takes drugs, and toeach theiz own,
its something else just deadening, the way grass looks growing between pavements
where everyone walks, yellow, partly dead from being stepped on, yet still surviving,
and really, ouch, wow. The woman is poor and has a roof over her head, but dammmm,
i'm hurt that my culture leads a woman to that.

[Herman Munster]

3. the sad thing is

her family really tried to help her multiple times and they eventually gave up on her.

You really can't help someone who doesn't want to help themselves. It's very sad.

[Wiley50]

4. Illegal Drugs are Expensive. It causes this situation.

People are gonna do drugs. Fact of life.
When drugs are illegal, Criminals are in control.
And people turn to crime to get them.
Sad, but true.

And Who makes all the money from illegal drugs?
How about the BFEE, for one

Look in Octafish's journal for starters

Get a clue