Beauty’s lime-green tights set her apart from the dreariness of a street lined with parked semi-trucks and empty walls topped with razor wire. She was working, waiting for men who would pay her for sex. It was March of 2012, and she had been in Hunts Point, in the Bronx borough of New York City, only a few months. I was a year into a project photographing and documenting the lives of street addicts.
She approached me with a broad smile and a want to talk. After an hour of listening, I asked her the question I asked everyone: “How do you want to be described?”
“Like in one sentence?”
“Yes, one sentence.”
Beauty
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Beauty in the Bronx, 2013. Photograph: Chris Arnade
“I’m a good person. I don’t like to see anyone down. I like to make people happy.” She smiled, “Yo, that is like three sentences, but you a writer, right? So you can turn that shit into one sentence.”
For the next three years, as my project deepened, I looked forward to my time with Beauty. Mostly it was late-night conversations on empty streets, but being her friend also meant spending time in hospitals, prisons and other sad institutions.
She had it rough – beaten by men, selling sex to survive, and living under bridges, on roofs, in shelters. Yet she didn’t feel sorry for herself. She didn’t want or expect sympathy, because she wasn’t a victim. She was Beauty, she had it pretty good, and she could never imagine things weren’t going to get better.
I loved listening to her: the quick wit, and her nonstop stories told in a voice closer to singing than talking. She made me, and everyone else, laugh about things that had no right to be funny. She would spin a 15-minute soliloquy, her arms waving and her face one big smile, about having no home, about riding the subway at night to sleep and staying away from men trying to grab her in the dark:
“Of course I pissed in my pants. Yo. I can’t just whip out my dick, riding between rolling cars, and piss into a tunnel. The 2 train doesn’t have toilets and sinks. You understand? I got to let it loose in my pants. I done jumped the turnstile once, and I ain’t gonna do it again, so I just go. You got to. It be like, at first, damn that is warm, and then I forget about it, because it just pee.”
She could be lost to rage, but a rage every other New Yorker understands, one that comes from not suffering fools, especially people who take themselves far too seriously. “Yo. Are the cops being real? Throwing me a disorderly conduct, when all I was doing was just sitting on the wall sipping a grape soda? Grape soda, straight up. Not mixed with anything. They always hasseling me for being me.”
Whenever I saw her, I made the offer I make everyone I work with in the Bronx: I will drive them away from Hunts Point to anywhere in the US. This Christmas, Beauty asked to be driven back to Oklahoma City, to stay with her mother…
