Granny does tricks

She walks the streets to pay for drug habit

by Victoria Sayer Pearson, Ventura County Star Newspapers

VENTURA, Calif. Victoria Black Anderson walked away from the courtroom
without going to jail.

Her prostitution and drug possession charges had yielded a sentence of 90
days in a drug treatment program.

"I'm in shock," she said as she put on her shades. "The birds sing a little
louder. The sun shines a little brighter."

Within an hour she was back on the street.

Like many other prostitutes, the 46yearold Anderson fuels her drug
addiction by reaching below steering wheels and leaning over consoles for
lonely men.

A hostage to heroin, she sells herself to buy the drugs her body demands.
Drug programs, jail, the brutality of her clients and the kindness of
strangers have not been enough to break the cycle.

>From a halfblock away, she didn't look as if she belonged on the street.

Instead, she appeared set for a country club luncheon: Platinumblond hair
in a pixie cut. Taupecolored pants with a matching tunic vest tied loosely
at the neck over a lacy blouse.

In the wind, the flappy panels whipped around her thin frame like sheets on
a clothesline.

She adjusted the earphones of her Walkman and began her slow, graceful walk
past the stores and restaurants of Ventura Avenue. In five minutes, she
climbed into a white station wagon. A couple of blocks later, she climbed
back out. The same thing happened with the next driver.

"They didn't want to pay," she said, "and I won't do it for less than 20."
On a good day she can make a couple of hundred dollars but this wasn't a
good day.

"Basically, I make enough to get by," she said. "I'm not into savings
accounts now."

After 50 minutes of walking, smoking cigarettes and stopping at phones, she
announced, "It's dead." But she knew her supplier was just five minutes
away and might give her heroin on credit. She figured she'd find enough
business to pay him back later that afternoon.

In her car, she struggled to extract a tiny brown square of heroin from its
foil wrapping.

Her recently applied long fingernails, like crab claws, kept her from
getting at it. Cursing, she futilely dug through her purse for tweezers and
finally bit through the foil.

"When I slam, it takes forever," she said as she warmed a spoonful of
heroin with a cigarette lighter. "I have no veins. It could take hours, a
hundred sticks and I won't give up."

She lives in her dusty blue 1982 Buick. She said it was given to her by the
staff at a drug detox center. The car has lasted longer than the cure.

In the back seat, a plastic trash can held her carefully selected
thriftstore ensembles. An alarm clock was glued to the dashboard. The
front seat was a jumble: underwear, a purse, bloodspotted paper towels, a
copy of Writer Magazine, eyelash curier, hand lotion, an appointment book,
a Stephen King novel.

She pulled up her pant leg to reveal a calf scarred by needle marks and
swollen by blood poisoning.

"I was voted the best legs in high school," she said, lowering the needle
close to her last mark. "Best eyes, too." Thirty seconds later she leaned
back, relieved.

"I feel it now, " she said.

In a few minutes she fluffed her hair and dabbed on some lipstick.

Anderson sometimes takes her grandchildren to the beach or to Denny's. On
this afternoon, she had time for just a quick visit. When she stepped out
of the car, her 4yearold granddaughter ran to her side and wrapped her
arms around Anderson's legs. Anderson picked her up and cradled her.

"I'm the only one who holds her like this," she said as she rocked the
child. "She's my reason for living she's my heart."

"Give me a kiss," Anderson said, gently setting the child down in the
driveway. "Grandma's got to go to work."

Anderson has been a prostitute off and on for at least 20 years. Also a
nurse, a model, a hairdresser, a restaurant manager, and a paralegal.

She was once married to a Los Angeles lawyer who gave her thousands of
dollars for drugs.

She says she has a degenerative bone disease perhaps, she thinks, the
result of breast implants and she became hooked on morphine after back
surgery. From there, it wasn't a great leap to heroin.

"It eliminates the pain, goes to the core of my nerve center," she said.
"All day long you're consumed by getting heroin. As soon as you get it,
you're thinking what you're going to do to get the next one."

Time is money. Anderson has a few "regulars" but none were seeking her this
afternoon.

She glanced at the street. "Forty dollars just drove by," she said.

Anderson prides herself on avoiding the kinky. Once turned down an offer of
$3,000 to spend a weekend beating a man with a cato'ninetails.

Still, she can't avoid the violence that comes with the territory.

When she worked The Stroll a nowdefunct prostitute strip in Oxnard
she once was picked up by a man who drove her to a power plant.

"He told me he just wanted to kill me," Anderson said. "He ran over me with
his car, back and forth. I couldn't get away from him."

Her ribs were broken and both lungs were punctured. She would have died if
officers hadn't rescued her.

(c)1997 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc.