a family physician who treats a lot of them, told me most of his patients had a prior history of sexually transmitted disease or had engaged in anal sex; otherwise, there is no “type.”
In the first flush of the crisis officials said there was a very definite type: girls who traded sex for drugs. This persisted in the public mind even after the sheriff asserted that “in no way” was that the case; too many girls had started turning up talking about love. I was meeting mostly girls who had moved in the same circles as Williams: some, like Tania, who’d never had sex with him but knew those who had; others who had; one who was positive. Although I’ve been told there were girls from “well-off, solid families” who’d had sex with Williams as a tryst with danger, the young women I was meeting were all working-class and precarious. I drove along imagining the rapper’s lyrics as a kind of baseline unifying the fragments of life history I’d heard:
You’re seventeen and you left home years ago. Your mother bugged you or was tougher than you thought your father would be, or she just threw you out. And you love her but she never had time—or maybe she had time but not as much as you wanted. You “wanted it all.” But she couldn’t help it really ’cause there were other kids and she had to work all the time; or she could help it, but she spent all her time with her boyfriend and then got on you about yours! Or she paid too much attention, or there was too much fighting, or she was always sick, or you got pregnant, or you couldn’t take another day of your father harping on everything you’d done wrong, or … or … too many reasons you’d rather not talk about. So, you’re living with relatives, friends’ families or kids alone and in the same boat as you. You’re working midnight to eight to pay the rent and utilities, to pay for food and clothes. You’re trying to go to school, but it’s hard to stay awake and it’s a drag to be hassled as if you’re a child. You’re sick and you need an excuse. The excuse is supposed to come from your mother, but you don’t live at home. The teacher says, “Well, get one from whoever you live with.” So you get it from your girlfriend; she’s who you live with! But the teacher thinks you’re being smart, so you get in-school suspension. You don’t mind that so much ’cause at least they leave you alone to do your work or think. And you’re with all the other kids who are always in detention, the “bad kids,” the ones “who are just looking for a place to fit in—they’ll accept anyone.” You actually tried to be a prep once, ’cause it’s not like you’re poor or nothing, but you had to dress a certain way, walk a certain way, talk a certain way—it was too much. And you dreamed of being a cheerleader but you were too fat, or you were a cheerleader but with everything else you were trying to keep together it was too much. And you have average grades or below-average grades, but it’s been clear for a while that no one expects much from you, and anyway school’s a bore so you drop out. You hear little kids counting the days till they can drop out too, asking, “Can I drop out as soon as I turn sixteen, or do I have to wait until the end of the year?” Anyway, you hang out with your friends. There’s not much to do unless you swim or play basketball, but you won’t go to the Boys and Girls Club ’cause “that’s for really grubby poor kids, these little kids who just piss in the pool and turn it yellow,” and you don’t like the Y ’cause that’s where the preps go and “they have this attitude they give to anyone who don’t have as much as they do.” Sometimes you go to JCC to play basketball and that’s fun, and there are girls who run track with this club Striders and they go off to meets out of town, which is okay if you like to run but if you don’t, well, you don’t. And there’s just nothing to do in this town but get high and fuck—well, and hang out and play cards and watch BET on cable, but really nothing else. There used to be a teen club and that was good ’cause you could go dance all night, but that closed up. You can’t get into the bars unless you’re twenty-one—well, you can sneak in—but the only really good DJ is at the Rusty Nail. They got a good one sometimes at Rascal’s. No?! Rascal’s is a gay bar?! Well, anyway, it’s not like you drink that much or get high that much—maybe a beer or some weed—though you know some kids who are in AA now because, you know, life is hard sometimes, and “in this town if you fall you don’t just miss a stair or two; you fall down the whole damn staircase.” And it’s not like you just sleep with anyone, either. You’re not like “those little girls who are just whores, you know, real pigs, who go with anyone.” Those little girls are disgusting, and some of them are real shystee bitches—“you know, not what you’d call real women”—the kind who talk behind your back and steal your man as soon as you go to jail. Oh, yeah, you can go to jail so easy in this town. Your boyfriend—he’s black and from Buffalo—he was in jail for a month and a half for throwing a stick at a car. He was mad—“he has problems with anger”—so he threw this stick and these white kids jumped out and started a fight, and one of them had an outstanding warrant but your boyfriend’s the only one got locked up. And you know this other boy—he’s black and from Brooklyn, he knew Face there—he went to jail for two months for driving without a license. Two months! You’ve been to jail a bunch of times, “always for the little things, never for the big things,” but those little things add up. Or maybe they’re not little things. You were at a boot camp once—eighteen months. And later you were in for four months—breaking probation—’cause you cursed out your landlord, said you’d blow up his house when he wouldn’t do what you needed. You have problems with anger too, but it’s not like you have a history with explosives. Now you’re through with “the business”—the pharmaceutical business, what do you think? selling drugs—’cause you just don’t want to be in jail again. You’re eighteen, nineteen, and you’re not talking about a little time now. But in the business, on a good night, you could make three, four thousand dollars in a few hours—“Jamestown is full of crackheads”—and that sure beat packing boards or sorting screws for five or six dollars. Yeah, you got to get out now. Maybe go to Atlanta, “where there’s some culture”; you and your boyfriend might have a chance in a black city. Nothing’s easy, though. Your little sisters think it’s glamorous ’cause you been out on your own since you were thirteen, fourteen. “But they don’t know how hard it is, how real hard.” It’s not so bad, though; it’s not like your friend in Rochester who has a three-year-old kid by her mother’s boyfriend who still lives in the house and visits her room every other night—and her room is right next to her mom’s! Or like your girl in Buffalo who had HIV—maybe from Face, nobody knows—and who was killed last year. It was an accident, a gun went off that wasn’t supposed to, but you never had a friend who died before. She was eighteen. That was in Buffalo, and Buffalo’s dangerous. “Jamestown isn’t dangerous, it’s just boring.”
I wish this pain would go awayI wish this pain would go away
Marx was wrong. Sex, not religion, is the heart in a heartless world. It may not turn out well; in fact, it almost certainly will not. Most every girl I met trailed a broken heart somewhere in her short past; if she didn’t, it was because she was still with her first boyfriend, or because she had never let anyone get too close, or because at eighteen, having determined that “we’re both clean,” she was planning for her wedding right after graduation and heartbreak would catch up with her soon enough. Whatever the case, sex brought the promise of something good, something intimate, something sweet and fleshy and maybe pleasurable; it brought that promise as surely as it carried the darker risk of pain and sorrow. But everything carried that—and more than the risk, the plain, lonesome reality. To be held in someone’s arms, to be kissed, to be entered and, in the act, forgiven for not being the most beautiful or the most responsible or the most stable; to be forgiven for the reckless dream of wanting, a baby, a partner, a life; to exert that power of forgiveness over someone else: only sex carried the slim hope of something better.
It is difficult now, when his mugshot has appeared across the country and young women have appeared on television weeping over their predicament and his betrayal, speaking of his violence and irascibility, to imagine that there was also a time when Williams delighted them and they delighted him. It is as if these young women, cast as victims of sex, must be denied every pleasure of their past and every power of decision—good and bad—so as to prepare
