Muriel’s Story --- By Kevin Ryan and Tina Kelley, authors of Almost Home
Note: the following is a partial excerpt of Almost Home. Click the book to read the rest, by ordering a copy today. Muriel, who grew up near Vancouver, British Columbia, was sold by three different pimps before she turned 20. She found help at the Covenant House shelter there, but it took several stays there before she could truly break free of prostitution. Here is part of her story: Muriel’s friend beamed with pride as she showed Muriel her pimp’s apartment in Gastown, the hip neighborhood known for its gaslights and cobblestone streets that bordered Vancouver’s harbor. The two-bedroom apartment had a stainless steel kitchen, a beautiful balcony, and access to a sauna, a pool, and a fitness room. It looked like an elegant set-up, half a world away from Muriel’s shared room in the shelter. In fact, it was a “microbrothel,” accommodating one or two prostituted girls, easily hidden from the police, often found nowadays in high-rise condominiums and upper-income neighborhoods. The girlfriend called Muriel a few nights later, asking her to come live there. Muriel quickly told her counselors she was going back to turning tricks. She had grieved over her time in prostitution, but she could not shake its pull. The staff recognized the pattern, having seen a number of trafficking victims go back to prostitution while in the process of breaking free of it. And Muriel was free to leave—Covenant House’s central principles include the belief that young people choose their own paths, even if that means
going backward sometimes. Transformation does not hold up any other way. She was young, Asian, and lovely. There was no shortage of demand for her. She describes the johns disdainfully, how full of themselves they sounded, their tendency to show off their houses and brag about their careers. There was an old man who lived by the yacht club downtown, a milkman who just wanted to talk, a guy or two who had just gotten out of jail, married men who would pay six hundred dollars an hour. There was a steady stream of them during the total of four months she worked as an escort for three different pimps—at least two calls a day, sometimes eight or nine. They were mostly boastful, self-involved men, and they used her body, sometimes roughly, never tenderly. She was not fully a person to them; the encounters hinged on their fantasies. This was not about intimacy, love, or connection. The pimps made sure that the drugs kept her numb. Yet when Muriel left Covenant House, she took with her a certain phrase that hounded her. Somebody there, no one remembers who, had planted a stubborn seed with her. “They told me, ‘It’s your decision to go back,’” Muriel said, “and also, ‘You’re so much better than that.’” Her counselor, Crystal, felt deeply sad to see her go but remembered how Muriel had struggled with prostitution’s strong grip, often confessing that she didn’t know whether she could give up the drugs and the money. Of course, Muriel didn’t ever have control over her income. She learned that early on when her first pimp took her shopping for fancy clothes, bought with money she had already earned for him by having loveless sex with a parade of johns. When she was “working,” the PI’s, as she called her three successive pimps, dominated her life, never leaving her alone, hacking into her phone, keeping her on a strict diet, making her and the other girls wake up at 6 a.m., and working them almost all of the time. Her pimps kept drugging her with GHB, the date rape drug or “G,” which, when mixed with alcohol, makes people pass
out. It is often a sexual stimulant, and the pimps tricked her into taking it by mixing it with the cocaine she craved. The combination compelled her to do what she didn’t want to do. She found herself struggling with her own addictions and adding a new one—energy drinks. Her pimp forbade her to sleep until she had turned a trick, so she filled a wall of her apartment with the empties of Red Bulls and Monsters. “I was in pretty deep,” Muriel said. Lisa Ronaldson, a Covenant House Vancouver case manager, remembers working the overnight shift and watching the shameless behavior of the pimps affiliated with a local motorcycle gang. “They would bring us in people, and say, ‘Could you clean up these people? They’re not making a profit for me.’” The pimps tried to use Covenant House as a way to heal their “investments,” bringing girls and young women in when they were menstruating, to let them sleep for a week. During those stays, counselors tried to show the prostituted young women that their pimps and the whole system considered them easily dispensable. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. In the end, Muriel got scared straight—she saw a friend descend into addiction to Oxycontin and started seeing people she thought were her friends turn more distrustful the longer they worked. She kept wondering whether this was what she wanted to do for the rest of her life, and she began to see more of the dangers of prostitution. Although she had felt invincible at the beginning, that feeling was long gone. When one of the johns pushed a girl down a flight of thirty-five stairs in a rage, Muriel suddenly felt in danger. “That could’ve been one of our calls,” she said. “You can be that girl on the news, that Jane Doe wherever they put the bodies. Everyone’s so much better than that.” That phrase kept coming back to her, as she tried to make the break with her addictions and the wild parties. She realized that she no longer wanted to be that prostitute, that junkie. She wasn’t
happy anymore, in her ongoing retreat from reality. It was time to go back to Covenant House. During the last year, she had left prostitution twice, only to return again. But this time, she resolved to break free for good‌ The rest of Muriel's story, and those of five other resilient homeless young people, can be found in Almost Home: Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope. Click the book to read the rest, by ordering Almost Home.
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