The first time Christine tried to sell her body for money, she was chased away by the prostitutes on Sunset Boulevard after just 20 minutes. "They told me to go home, said I was too young," says the short, thin, green-eyed girl with brown hair. Christine is not her real name; and she has no home, not anymore, certainly not on Sunset. Home was once a neatly kept two-story house in a middle-class section of Louisville, Kentucky, with Mom and Dad and a little sister. Home was also screams and broken glass and calls to 911. "My mom and dad fight a lot, and I just couldn't stand it anymore," Christine says. "So I made it my New Year's resolution: No more fighting." On Jan. 2 she slipped out the kitchen door at 5 a.m., with $144, two cans of Diet Coke, six cans of Star-Kist tuna fish, a jar of Skippy peanut butter, her diary, some clothes, a pocket knife and a photo of her eight-year-old sister. She paid $68 for a bus ride to Hollywood. "I sort of figured that anybody could get by in Hollywood. Lots of freedom and good weather and stuff."
A week after failing to sell her body, Christine tried again. She walked up and down Sunset Strip for four hours without getting a single offer. "I was wearing jeans, which were dirty, and I was carrying my backpack, so I guess I didn't look right," she says. Down to her last $7, she bought a doughnut for dinner and spent the night on a park bench. Unable to afford even a cheap miniskirt, she sat down in an alley and pulled out her spare blue jeans. After carefully marking off a line just below the crotch, she cut off both pant legs using the saw blade of her Swiss Army knife, a gift from her dad. At 9 that evening she was back on Sunset, peering nervously at each passing car while attempting to mimic the poses and gestures of other prostitutes.
Within an hour, a blue sedan pulled up to the curb. The driver, a heavyset man, maybe 60, motioned her inside. At a nearby motel, Christine was too nervous to discuss money; he just dropped a couple of bills on the bedside stand. "He said something like, 'That should do it,' " she remembers. Then he took off his pants. "I couldn't do it. I wanted to run. I just started crying," she says. "It was like the man was really, really embarrassed. He was older than my father even, and I couldn't stand it. He asked me to please, please stop crying, but I couldn't. So he just gave me $10 and walked out, saying he'd never touch a kid who was crying." Christine turned 16 two weeks later. Four days after that, she would finally turn her first trick, earning $60. The next night she would score twice. "At least it's better than living at home," she shrugs.
That's exactly what the 15-year-old boys who sell their bodies on Polk Street in San Francisco say. And the young pickpockets in midtown Manhattan. And the baby-faced heroin addicts panhandling in Seattle. In Miami. In San Diego. Sure, the streets are brutal, even terrifying at times, but let me tell you a few stories about my dad or my mom or the uncle who won't leave me alone.