"I'm a Hooker."

Seeing her rush into my small office was perplexing, like glancing out a car window only to see an SUV resting on the roof of a house after a hurricane.   I'd seen her before, walking sadly and suggestively down Jackson Avenue in Pascagoula, Ms. late at night.  She was among a small cadre of prostitutes who prowl the 2 lane road,  book ended on either side, by a long-closed auto parts store to the north, and a questionable massage parlor to the south.

"I'm a hooker," she announces without fear of judgement as tears flow from her eyes, her thick, wet steams marbled with black mascara.  Inside the small office, she glances frantically, at the door she had just entered.  "I Just got out a jail," she roots nervously through her fatigued, faux-leather bag, I assume for a tissue, or a cigarette.   

Her dress is pretty, and modest.  It is blue with splashes of red and white flowers.  I can envision her sitting comfortably in a church pew in that ensemble,  but this is her work uniform, and she likely wears it most every day.  The blue and red, less brilliant than the day she received it, worn by the hot, Mississippi sun and faded by rainstorms that pepper the summer afternoons.  The shoes are even more telling.  The Dr. Scholl's are streaked with deep black scuff marks, and the flat wooden sole are rounded at the toe in heel, overworked grooves pressed away by hours and miles of endless walking. 

As I've mentioned in previous blogs, my time in Pascagoula is my first job in television news, and everyday, it seems is a new, mind blowing experience.  Like a man, blind at birth, given his vision well into old age, and this day in 1995, is no exception.

"The police just let me go," she cries dragging the back of her hand across her wet, runny nose, "but they spent all night raping me."  She quickly grabs at her bra strap placing it firmly on her shoulder, as if the memory alone had forced it to leap back to her bicep.  "What?  What happened?"  I'm  trying to comprehend what I'm hearing, "I gotta go," she digs both thumbs into each of her eyes, then pirouettes and bolt out the glass office door, "hold on!" I follow her a few feet, as she darts down an alley, jogs around a corner, and is gone. 

"I honestly don't even know if we arrested anyone for prostitution last night Chris," the shift captain will announce to me in his friendly, easy southern drawl, "and if we did Chris, man, I don't know how much stock you can put in them claims," he says as he tries to dismantle her charge, "ya say she said she was a prostitute huh?" he chimes trying to reinforce her credibility issues, as he tugs at his jowly chin,  "It seemed like she wasn't lying," I insist, "I wonder why she would make a charge like that and just run off?" he lifts his beefy paw from his chin and stroking the back of his head.  "I'll look into it for ya, OK?"  But I can't promise anything."  I will never hear another word from the captain on the allegation.  

On my way home from work, I will take the long way past Jackson Avenue, trying to locate her again.  I never do.

Several months later, my beeper buzzes alive, as I am summoned to a broken part of Pascagoula, populated by listing wooden fences, packs of meandering feral dogs, and houses topped with corrugated steel instead of shingles.  

Police have found the murdered remains of a prostitute inside one of the exhausted shacks.  I don't know if it is the woman who pleads with me for help that blazing August afternoon, but the description is similar. Either way, I think often about that day she charged into my office, how broken and helpless she seemed, and how futile my efforts were to do anything about it.