Series: Four Lives, One Last Chance - A Year In Drug Court: Part 14 Of 41

ACT II. LINDA: NEVER LOOKING BACK

The first thing Linda does every morning is swallow the pill that keeps her
alive.

It's a giant white capsule that often gets stuck in her throat, one of five
similar pills she takes every day to combat the HIV in her bloodstream.

After a shower and a bite to eat, she has a few minutes to play with one of
the many nieces and nephews her mother is perpetually baby-sitting. By 8
a.m., she has to leave her parents' house to catch the No. 12 bus to Drug
Court.

Linda waits for her ride on Jefferson Avenue, smoking a Marlboro Red as
early-morning traffic booms down the six-lane road. By habit, she stands
with her back to a utility pole, a remnant of the days when she couldn't
afford to let anyone sneak up behind her.

She has repeated this ritual for most of the past year, ever since she
first entered the Drug Court program and moved home with her parents.

The sight of Linda standing along Jefferson Avenue used to mean something
else. Now, when she stands at her bus stop, police cars sometimes slow down
to take a peek, and the occasional old man, looking for a good time, stops
to see whether she needs a ride.

Her bus stop, across the street from RD's Gallery of Girls, is about a
quarter-mile from her old stomping grounds. Thanks to a police tactic
called "mapping," which bans convicted criminals from high-crime areas,
Linda is now barred from even walking there.

By virtue of her repeated drug and prostitution arrests, Linda has been
mapped from a 3-mile swath of Jefferson that stretches from Harpersville
Road to Mercury Boulevard.

This area of town is dotted with low-rent apartments and thrift motels
popular with drug addicts, prostitutes and all manner of people looking for
a high and a good time.

For more than a year, these hotels were Linda's home, the place where she
played the never-ending game of the addict: avoiding the cops, earning
money, scoring drugs, finding a place to party. It was an exciting game,
one that Linda played well enough to avoid any serious jail time and stay
high most of the time.

For Linda and most women who take cash for sex, prostitution was simply a
means of earning money for drugs. Often, the men she slept with were
addicts, too. And often it was like one big party - dozens of people in a
hotel room, smoking crack, watching pornographic films and having sex.

This seedy world was the last stop on Linda's long ride through drug and
alcohol addiction. And there seemed to be no way out.

A year earlier, she had been walking through the parking lot of the King
James Motor Hotel, headed to a friend's room to take a nap.

Then a taxi pulled up, and the man in the back asked whether she wanted a date.

Linda should have known it was a sting. She even knew the officer she slid
next to in the cab. But she was simply too high and too weary to notice.

When she quoted the man a $20 price for oral sex, the blue lights came on
behind the taxi. The cab pulled into the Brake King and an officer stuck
his head in the window.

"Well, hello, Linda," he said.

He didn't even need to ask for her identification or Social Security
number. He knew the information by heart.

After searching Linda, the police found a glass tube used for smoking crack
cocaine - known as a "stem." The cylinder once contained a tiny rose, a
novelty item commonly sold in convenience stores around the Peninsula.
Addicts throw out the rose, stuff a piece of a Chore Boy copper scrubbing
pad inside and place a rock of cocaine on top.

Instant crack pipe.

With that stem, Linda picked up a possession charge, which violated her
probation from a previous offense.

While that arrest took her off the streets, it was not what turned her life
around. Linda could have fought the charges. She might have been spit back
onto the streets for more of the same.

In jail, however, she learned the devastating news that would change her
life. She learned that she had contracted HIV.

Now, standing at her bus stop, Linda is at once so close and so far from
those hotels and the life she lived. At 39, she is finally trying to put
all that behind her.

The bus comes, and Linda climbs on board. She sits alone in a beam of
sunlight that streams in the window. She reads an inspirational pamphlet as
the bus rolls past the places where she once gambled with her life. Linda
never looks up from her page.

She knows she can never go back there.

The price would simply be too high.