A walk with a former prostitute, after her five-year sentence

Every once in a while, someone in public office decides that the city’s prostitutes need managing.

In 1918, the director of the Kansas State Board of Health complained to Tom Pendergast about the number of soldiers who contracted venereal disease while on leave in Kansas City. Pendergast promised health exams and jail sentences in an effort to calm the health director, who threatened to make Tom’s town off-limits to Camp Funston personnel.

In the mid-1970s, Mayor Charles B. Wheeler declared war on prostitution. Streetwalkers mounted a counterattack. A prostitute who went by the name Ocelot filed a civil-rights lawsuit, arguing that the city’s new solicitation ordinance was vague and arbitrary.

Bob Beaird, the Jackson County prosecutor from 1999 to 2002, brought felony charges against a few persistent offenders. A felony charge came with a prison sentence of up to five years.

Beaird, now a judge of the Circuit Court of Jackson County, says the get-tough initiative caused a stir on Independence Avenue and other streets where prostitutes worked. “I said, ‘Let’s see if we can put more pressure on them,'” Beaird tells me.

The Prosecutor’s Office didn’t keep a rec­ord of the five-year sentences it sought and obtained. I get the sense that it wasn’t a large number. Off the top of his head, Beaird was able to remember the name of one woman. That offender, now age 41, is currently on parole for second-degree robbery.

Another “known prostitute,” as the police refer to a veteran hooker, received a five-year sentence in 2002.

I recently enjoyed a $16.42 date with her.

“It’s Christmastime,” the voice on the phone said. “I need some money.”

I had found the phone number in an arrest record. I called, on the chance that a prostitute caught in the felony-charge dragnet might want to talk about the experience. To my surprise, the number worked.

She agreed to meet. But she had demands. She wanted money and didn’t want her real name in the paper.

Confidentiality I can do. Cash is another matter. The Pitch doesn’t pay sources. So we bargain. I agree to buy Ginger (a pseudonym she would later choose) a few drinks and something to eat.

I pull up to a house in south Kansas City that has been cut up into apartments. A middle-aged woman who outweighs me by 50 pounds is standing on the porch.

First stop is a convenience store on Prospect Avenue. Ginger requests Bud Light Lime. I buy two 22-ounce bottles. For lunch, I suggest Gates. “Oh, Lord,” Ginger says, “Gates is too rich for my blood.”

As I drive, Ginger establishes herself as a difficult interviewee, the kind of subject who asks three questions for every one posed to her. She wants to know how I got her number. She wants to know why The Pitch wants to talk. She wants to know if I’m a vice cop.

Eventually, Ginger begins to relax a little. A funny, intelligent woman begins to emerge. Still, my new friend operates on a different frequency. She mentions that she has bipolar disorder.

“I love rap songs,” Ginger says, fiddling with the radio dial. “My favorite rapper is Snoop Dogg. D-o-o-gg.” Ginger says she also likes Barbra Streisand, Madonna and Michael Jackson. “My favorite is Britney Spears. If I was young again, I’d want to be like her. She’s a bad bitch. She made that man she had the babies with … she made him go home.”

Ginger says she grew up in the projects. Her mother worked at the post office. She says she got into prostitution while attending the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She liked the money. She thought of becoming a teacher, but eventually streetwalking became a career.

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“There was money in this town in the ’70s, honey,” she says.

Ginger worked the main corridors of prostitution — Main Street, Troost Avenue, the West Bottoms. She was a pioneer of sorts. “See, I was one of the first bitches to start working on Independence Avenue, in ’81.”

Ginger worked alone. “I never had a pimp. A pimp is a poor man. Sell his ass, just like I sell mine.”

For protection, she relied on her wits. She left for Oklahoma City when, in 1988, the bodies of prostitutes who worked Independence Avenue began to turn up in the Missouri River.

Violence was a constant threat. “When Terry Blair [a serial murderer captured in 2004] was out here killing the prostitutes, I wasn’t getting in the car,” Ginger says. “I’d get in the car with old men. Well, shit, I ain’t no motherfucking fool. This is my hometown. I was born and raised here. The serial killer wasn’t an old man.”

Ginger says she traded exclusively in oral sex. “I didn’t have intercourse, just blow jobs. I used condoms. I put a rubber on and get busy.” For her, the plague of the ’80s wasn’t AIDS — it was crack. Ginger says she didn’t use hard drugs. But crack addictions led other prostitutes to drop their prices to $5 and $10.

“Prostitution used to be a big business in this town,” Ginger says. “Since crack come out, it’s no money. A person might as well get a Social Security check or go to the soup kitchen or get a job. There’s not no money in this town since crack came out.” Ginger holds prostitutes with cocaine addictions in low esteem. She calls them “crackitutes.”

We stop at a house near 31st Street and Prospect. Then we head to the Gates on Emanuel Cleaver II Boulevard. Ginger asks for beef on a bun with fries. I’m ordered back into the restaurant when Ginger discovers that there’s no barbecue sauce in the bag.

Ginger is generally respectful of the police officers who arrested her more than a dozen times. Her temper flares when I mention that, in the course of researching her criminal background, I learned people knew her by name in the areas she worked. A former assistant prosecutor told me that parents used to complain about having to shield their children’s eyes while walking them to and from the bus stop. Upon hearing this, Ginger curses at the urban gentrifiers who bought “them mansions in Hyde Park.”

But her anger fades quickly.

“You can’t get mad at people because they don’t want that shit in their neighborhood, and they got kids. I ain’t mad. I did it to myself. It’s over. I’m free. I ain’t in no trouble now. And I’m going to leave it like that.”

After receiving the five-year sentence in 2002 (“I cried,” she says), Ginger spent several months in the Chillicothe Correctional Center. “I got along with everybody. I didn’t have no enemies, you know. I worked and I got myself together. When I was [put on parole and] ready to go home, I went to my favorite correction officers and I talked to them and I said goodbye. And I didn’t go back.”

Not to a state facility, at least. One spring afternoon in 2006, Ginger offered a blow job to an undercover officer at 25th Street and Prospect. She pleaded guilty and was ordered to serve 30 days at the Municipal Correctional Institution.

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Ginger says she no longer works the streets. A man she describes as “a friend in the country” helps her out from time to time. “I’ve been a hustler all my life, but I’m through,” she says. “Now, if somebody wants to give me a gift, I’ll take it. But straight-out walking the streets? I just pray to God I’m through. It’s not worth it.”

The afternoon gives way to darkness. We end up back at the convenience store on Prospect. The bargaining begins anew. I relent and dig $5 out of my wallet.

“OK, give me a few more dollars for another beer, and I’m getting out,” Ginger tells me.

“No. I gave you $5.”

“Well, shit, I’ve got to put this in church!” Ginger says, cackling.

A few weeks after saying goodbye to Ginger, I call the city’s vice unit. A sergeant tells me that officers working in the city’s Central Patrol Division made 176 prostitution arrests in 2008.

Charlie Wheeler’s “war” continues.

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