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Behind the Faces - Meet Tara, the crack-addicted prostitute

Daytona Beach News-Journal (FL) - November 12, 2006

Author/Byline: SETH ROBBINS - STAFF WRITER
Edition: Final
Section: Section A
Page: 01A
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.

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