EvaYin108

There was this huge black man at the park. I watched him break open a young homeless guy's face with a thick steel thick. It was crazy and totally unexpected. One minute we were all just hanging out and the next, blood was flying through the summer air.

Later I found out this same man repeatedly raped a homeless girl so violently that she was hospitalized. This guy started coming after me, trying to get me to come with him to "parties" and asking to be alone with me. I tried to get him arrested, he was heroin dealer so I called 911 when I knew that he had some heroin on him. The cops came searched him, found it but let him go for some reason. They also told him that a young woman had reported him. This put me in danger. Later I did it again from another payphone. I went into a bathroom to fix up afterwards and when I came out for a smoke, a cop tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I had just used the payphone. I lied easily but the other thing that saved me was that it was a Japanese restaurant and there were so many other Asian women. He was confused.

They never arrested that big guy and later he tried to pull me into a paneled van with his friends. He told me that he was going to a party and that there were other women and lots of drugs. I refused and he got so angry, as angry as he had been when he smashed that guy's face with a chain. I made myself seem small and pitiful and then I hugged him and asked in a baby voice if he could please let me stay at the park with my sister. Then he left in rage and disgust.

That was just one incident of many but I think it was one of the scarier moments.

Oh another scary moment was when my friend who I had met on the streets smoked some pot and had some kind of psychotic episode. He scaled the fence and tried to jump into the freeway at East River Drive. None of the cars slowed down. I caught onto his pants leg and stopped him but he kicked me and got free, then he jumped. Miraculously a huge bus was driving by and he managed to push himself against the bus. He landed on the floor with a sprained ankle and got away.

Oh yeah, I begged all the time. We called it spanging, it was short for spare-changing. I could easily make over $80 an hour just because I was young, Asian, and I seemed trustworthy. I usually told people that I was stranded and needed money for the train. Unfortunately all that money was shot directly into my veins in the form of heroin haha.

Yes, I was offered jobs just because I looked pretty clean-cut. I didn't take any when I was homeless in NYC. I'm back home and going to school in California now. I've been clean for more than 7 years.

Oh I was pushed around a lot. I had to sleep with my face covered on the street so that people walking by couldn't tell that I was female. I was robbed many times. Some pimps tried to force me into prostitution. That was on the second night I became homeless. I was young and naive. They tricked me to come with them somewhere. Then it started dawning on me what they were after. I decided to do it but the job didn't work out. The customer thought it was a police sting because I looked underage. Then the pimps brought me to a park and said that they would give me some heroin but that I had to do them a favor too. I was scared and in a dangerous situation so I just agreed to it. I gave one of them head and they gave me a small bag of heroin. Turned out it was only worth five dollars.

Getting clean and getting my life in order was a long process. I talk about it in detail in my book. The short story is that I just realized how useless it was, how I was spending so much energy, time, and fucking my life and relationships up just to chase a feeling. A feeling that was only temporary.

She's doing great, getting her Master's to be a nurse practitioner. She's clean and got her life together now. :)

My identical twin sister and I went to stay in Queens with an older Irish man that she met in rehab in Long Island. Once we got there she started feeling weird about their relationship. She didn't want to sleep with him anymore and he was getting frustrated. He said he was cool with us staying there for a month and with us doing heroin but one night when we came back, she had a hickey on her neck from some cute homeless boy she had been making out with. It pushed him over the edge and he claimed that his landlord had come into his apartment when we were gone and found our needles and paraphernalia. He said that he was getting kicked out of his apartment and that it was our fault and that he was kicking us out. Then when we starting packing he admitted it was a lie. But my sister didn't want to stay there anymore. She felt pressured to have sex with him and she didn't want to anymore. She wanted to leave so I stuck with her and left too. We were young and stupid and we thought that it be an adventure to be homeless. We were very wrong.

No, but I sold myself in other ways -- even in ways that aren't technically considered prostitution. I quickly learned that on the streets I needed a bf for protection. I wasn't even very attracted to my first bf, he was this big black guy who sold drugs at the park but the other men were scared of him. Once I became his gf, was offered some measure of protection.