The Shadow of Prostitution

I used to say that if the girl in my first book, Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, showed up on my doorstep, I would not let her in. But who was she? Now, more than a decade later, I find myself still unable to read more than the occasional passage in Runaway, and then wincingly. It exists in the world as a document of an actual period of my life, available to any stranger with a capricious interest, and yet I am barely able to crack its covers myself. It seems as vulnerable as a fleshy, pulsing thing without a shell. I want to throw clothes over it, encase it in a suit of armour, cover it up. I want cool distance rather than the raw, stormy moment. What a different book it would have been had I waited to tell that story from the detachment of a decade later, through the clinical gaze of a professional writer rather than the urgency of a teenager. Yet even then I was something of an observer, a reporter dispatched into the explosions and turmoil of my own adolescent life. The writing was always larger than I was. I felt it to be a force for which I was merely a mouthpiece. My diary, in which I recorded every conversation, every ingested drug and flailing emotion, was the shield between myself and that life, though oddly it would later be what left me open, unprotected. I remember recording my life compulsively, forsaking sleep in order to do so, even if it was my first night's sleep in days. If I could just pin those events onto the page, all that had passed before my eyes, they would cease their clamour inside me. The evils would be harnessed and coaxed back into Pandora's box, which would be shut up tightly the moment I finally laid down my pen. They were no longer confusing events and emotions I could hardly bear to reconcile as my own, but words as neat as pins. They had happened to someone, but surely not to me. The despair, the shame, the scorching rage—later, I was surprised when people referred to the anger in the book. I could not remember feeling anger myself, but it had poured onto the page like lava.

This stranger whose life seems in so many ways foreign to mine is still inside me, her experiences knit into the fabric of all the other lived experiences before and since. But the drugs, the group homes, the constant running away—those events seem firmly consigned to adolescence, behaviours that have scarcely left a mark on the rest of my life. Recently I was in the pharmacy, and there was a man in front of me who was trying to get his prescription for Valium renewed. He was perhaps in his late twenties, with messy hair and wild eyes, and extremely agitated. In a rising voice he kept insisting to the pharmacist that he was going through a rough spell, he really needed the drugs. He said he had changed doctors, and he mentioned the name of a doctor I thought I recognized as one known among addicts for being generous with prescriptions.

Once, I must have resembled this man. I caught my reflection in the mirrored post, my expression judgmental and detached, as if what he was experiencing was nothing I had ever been through. Yet I, too, had gone from doctor to doctor, concocting ailments that might result in a scrawl on a slip of paper that could be exchanged for a handful of painkillers or tranquilizers, for hours of starry elevation or cozy blankness. But I felt no empathy for him. It occurred to me that it was harder to go from day to day in the "straight" world than it had been in his world, though the melodrama of addiction had lent each hour a kind of urgency and crisis that seemed real. I remembered staggering down tilting sidewalks high on methadone or some candy-coloured cocktail of pills, sneering at the blunt, boring faces of the ordinary people with their jobs and their houses in the suburbs and their families and what seemed their unutterably dull lives. Now those were the lives that I craved to understand, to describe in my work. Those were the lives with the shading and the subtlety, the heartbreaks and triumphs, the cruelties as well as the moments of hope.