BEHIND THE FACES

Meet Tara, The Crack-Addicted Prostitute

DAYTONA BEACH -- She sits on a park bench, gobbling a burrito and
sipping tequila, things she hasn't had in a while. A small roll of
belly fat hangs between Tara Price's faded purple tank top and jeans.
Under the orange haze of a streetlight, her dark roots show. The month
she was in jail, she couldn't dye her hair.

Finishing her burrito, she belches, some of the tequila returning and
burning her throat. She spits. She will avoid crack tonight -- jail
dampened her cravings -- but she will take a walk around the dark,
broken blocks west of the river.

"I feel like getting all dolled up and wearing my red dress and
putting on some makeup," she explains. "I want to feel pretty again."

After finishing the night patrol, Tara's mother, Valerie Joyce,
changed from her police sergeant's uniform and shuffled past the
plaque Tara gave her. It's inscribed with a favorite Bible verse: "For
I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, . . . to give you a
future and a hope."

In her daughter's old bedroom, she grabbed some photo albums, dumping
them onto the kitchen table where her four children used to gather for
dinner.

In one photo, 3-year-old Tara pouted sweetly, her mouth pinched
downward at the corners like an open umbrella.

"I'm glad I took those pictures," Valerie said, her voice quivering.
"I never knew how much they would be cherished."

She lies awake some nights, trying to pinpoint the moment when
everything went off track. "What did I do? What didn't I do?" she
wondered. "What happened when she got clean? Why couldn't she be happy?"

Days before the July races, Tara sips vodka from a Sprite bottle, her
favorite red velvet dress hugging her hips. She twitches as though
dancing to a song no one else can hear. Her mood is upbeat: She hasn't
been arrested for some time.

Normally, Tara tries to stay away from the streets.

"You take a chance each time you get into a car," she
says.

She has a few regulars who call her when they're looking for sex or to
get high, or both. She also works part time for an escort service. But
business has slowed to a crawl tonight, and her crack supply has
dwindled to two rocks.

She takes another sip.

"I've got to get some sort of buzz," she says, "to be with a
man."

Standing under a streetlight, Tara tosses the bottle away and glances
in the side-view mirror of a parked car. She smiles. She is proud she
still has all her teeth. She rifles through her purse, a ruse to ward
off cops.

"I was just looking for my phone," she'll tell any officer who
stops.

From her bag, she grabs a clip, pulling back her bleached locks. Tara
sizes up vehicles and their drivers fast, setting her price according
to the car. Her ideal is an older married man in a Cadillac.

A white pickup and an old brown van circle but do not stop. Tara
absorbs the drivers' furtive glances.

With no one picking her up, she stalls for time, again sifting through
her purse. From the mess of cosmetics, racing knickknacks and condoms
- -- which Tara says she always uses -- she plucks a silk rose and
places it over her ear.

A train whistles in the distance. It reminds Tara of her last night in
a North Street crack house when she awoke from a cocaine-induced
seizure -- which she frequently suffers -- to find a man having sex
with her. "That was the scariest feeling in the whole world," she
says. "I was yelling and crying."

Tara escaped, chasing the man away with a broken bottle. Running from
the crack house, she heard the train whistle. She wanted to jump in
front. But her tiny feet, blistered and scraped from running barefoot,
couldn't churn fast enough to get her there.

"It's those times that I'm glad I'm not (living) near the railroad
tracks anymore," she says.

As her mother flipped through hundreds of photos, Tara's childish pout
abruptly changed into the insolent stare of a 15-year-old dressed for
the prom, sick of her mother snapping away.

As a student at New Smyrna Beach High School, Tara desperately wanted
to be a cheerleader. She wanted to watch "Beverly Hills 90210" too.
Valerie, a Jehovah's Witness at the time, wouldn't let her do either
because she thought cheerleaders to be loose and wild, the television
show amoral.

At 16, Tara met a construction worker named William Price while
walking to the library. By 17, she was pregnant, with bruises on her
face where he had broken her jaw in two places. With the baby on the
way and William Price in jail on domestic violence charges, Tara lived
with her mother.

Tara named her baby Chelsea, and, after William Price got out of jail,
the couple moved into an Edgewater motel known to harbor prostitutes
and drug addicts.

"I couldn't outwardly say that I knew she was smoking crack," Valerie
said. "I asked a very good friend in the (Narcotics) Task Force to
keep an eye on her. They caught Tara in the act."

Picked up for prostitution, Tara rode in the back of a cruiser to the
Volusia County Branch Jail.

"I was grateful something was going to be done," Valerie said. "I was
afraid. It was embarrassing. They (fellow officers) all knew my kids.
They knew Tara as a good girl."

Tara stepped out of the police cruiser, and the door slammed shut. She
was 19.

Now 28, Tara sometimes wonders how things might have gone differently
if she'd never tried crack cocaine. She often recalls the first moment
she smoked it.

"I hit that pipe," she says, "and I felt so good for a minute. Then, I
wanted more instantly."

At night, she'll shut her cobalt blue eyes, asking God to erase this
memory. But then a sound will jolt her back. Jangling keys remind her
of the keys she handed her baby to quiet her cries while she took her
next hit. How could she forget?

That night she handed over Chelsea to her mother and friends of
Valerie adopted her. Two more of Tara's children are being raised by
adoptive parents.

By then, she had moved to Daytona Beach, tired of being picked up by
her mother's colleagues whose police department is not named in this
story at Valerie's request.

Tara walked up and down North Street, men promising her drugs and
money for sex. They had sex with her in the bushes and then left her
with nothing.

An older prostitute taught Tara how to turn tricks. She showed her how
to walk, talk and negotiate, among other things. Her mentor is now
sick with AIDS.

"I was a very good-looking girl," Tara said. "I was a young baby. Now,
it's me looking at these other girls on the street. It's terrible to
live that way."

As Valerie sifted through more recent family photos, Tara's face grew
scarce. In one, she held Chelsea. In the next, the baby girl rested
alone in her crib.

"Where is Tara?" Valerie said, picking up another album. "I don't
think she is in here anymore because she wasn't clean."

There would be stretches of time, usually before or after giving
birth, when Tara would remain sober. She'd return home, be a doting
daughter, attend church and talk about finding a husband. The last
time was two years ago, after Tara finished a drug-treatment program
with Serenity House. Christmas morning, all of Valerie's children
gathered in the kitchen to cook breakfast. It was the first time they
were all under one roof in years.

That night, however, Tara and her siblings got drunk. Her mother was
angry.

Tara says her mother called her a "crack whore." Her mother insists
she didn't.

On Dec. 26, Tara was back in Daytona Beach, searching for her next
rock.

The family photos give way to arrest reports, mug shots, treatment
program pamphlets. Valerie has kept everything for Tara's children.

What can't be seen in the photos and pamphlets are sickness -- Tara
suffers from bipolar disorder -- and she comes from generations of
abuse. Valerie watched her own father beat her mother. Tara saw her
stepfather hit her mother before the couple became born-again Christians.

"She remembers those fights being real scary," Valerie said. "I look
back now, and I don't know how much it affected her. I grew up with
that."

Valerie thought she had broken the cycle when she had Tara. She
remembered embracing Tara and talking to her as she rocked her in her
arms.

"You might not have much," she told her newborn baby. "But you will be
loved and never feel alone."

Encased in a pink frame molded into the word "love" is Valerie's last
photo of her daughter. Tara looks down, a smile tracing the corners of
her lips. Her mother clings to her neck.

"That's the worst part," she said. "She feels unloved."

Tara is home in the apartment she shares with the man she loves. While
he sleeps in the bedroom, she's on the phone with her mother for the
first time in months.

She cries in the buttery light of the apartment, curling on the floor
by the couch where SpongeBob sits on the arm. Other childhood mementos
adorn the walls and shelves: stuffed giant M&Ms, Garfield and the
entire clan of Simpsons. A vase of silk roses, a gift from her
boyfriend, sits on the coffee table.

Her cries turn to sobs. She pleads with her mother to meet her
boyfriend.

"Call me," she says, "next time you're free for lunch. If you ever get
the chance I live right here in Daytona Beach. I would love for you to
meet him. He is so sweet."

Valerie says no. She refuses to see Tara or her boyfriend until Tara
is completely clean.

"You don't understand how important it is, Mom," Tara says. "Please
call me. Please."

Valerie insists she must answer police calls, and Tara's tirade
ends.

"I'm lucky to be alive," she says, after hanging up. "I'm trying to
hold on to the man I love. I want her acceptance."

Tara tugs on the straps of her stiletto heels. As the apartment grows
darker, she turns on a lamp. She dabs at her eyes with some toilet
paper. In the bathroom, with her boyfriend still asleep, she begins to
put on makeup. She curls her lashes, pins her hair up and powders her
nose.

"The men make me feel pretty, beautiful when I'm feeling lonely," she
explains. "I put on a pretty dress, makeup, and I can feel pretty again."

Tara is wearing her favorite red dress. She swigs from a plastic pint
of vodka.