Susan Watts

This is a story about the strength and courage of a woman who transforms her life from a point of near death to a successful road of recovery. Gloria Colon, age 33, is a woman caught in the urban nightmare of prostitution and drugs, near the roar of the Bruckner Expressway in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, New York. Her life on the streets began in her late teens, a result of what her mother attributes to her “running with a fast crowd.” She has been raising Gloria’s daughter (now 13) since the child was a year old.

Once beautiful, Gloria’s body is now a canvas of scabs, scars and disfigurations. Her top false teeth - a gift from a dentist, John - are chipped and move about. She lost the bottom ones. Converging demons of drugs, johns and violence have turned her into predator and prey. Her body crumbles as the heroin runs inside her, but she must score some crack, fast, to jolt awake to turn another $10 trick to buy another $10 bag of heroin, another trick, another bag, 10 bags a day. The sex-for-sale food chain has left her broken.

She is one among the estimated 5,000 prostitutes who work the streets in New York City; one among the 2,500 of them who are virtually homeless; one among the 96% who use drugs and alcohol, the 40% who are injectors, the 67% who smoke crack. Some 18% of them are HIV positive.

“Before I was like this, there was a better person in me. I can’t tell you the times I’ve puked, shitted on myself. My tastebuds are going, my eyesight … “ “So many times I’ve had a knife to my throat … been pistol-whipped. It’s part of the profession. It shows on me.” – Gloria Colon

Desperately wanting out of the wretched life that consumes her, she begins a daunting journey that delivers her to Phoenix House, New York City’s 30-year-old drug treatment lifeline that she will cling to or plummet back to certain death. She enters the program a pale detox graduate. Admission tests at the on-site medical center reveal a textbook of a junkie’s body: Gloria is diagnosed with cervical cancer and hepatitis. Her skin is a mass of raised lesions, multiple tracks and scars. She is malnourished, her liver and her lymph nodes are enlarged, her upper abdomen is distended. “I haven’t seen that kind of abuse of anyone’s body in 20 years,” says Loretta Hinton, managing director of the facility.

She begins the strict regimen of the program every day at 6 a.m., cleans her room, gets to breakfast and then to her “morning meeting.” Then it’s on to her 9-5 “boutique” job in clothing distribution that pays $1 a week. Her work makes room for seminars heavy on relapse prevention. Soon she’ll start school to earn her high school equivalency diploma. Down the road she’ll begin vocational training with her eyes set on a job and apartment of her own. “My mommy, my grandmother, my daughter have been waiting for me for so many years. I can’t let them down,” says Gloria. Her first 90 days are do or die: Of the city’s 1,000 adults and 400 adolescents who enter the program annually, 40% split within three months, another 20% by year’s end. “I want my sobriety so bad. I ache for it.”

December marks Month Five of healing. She is on the New York City subway with members of her Phoenix House “clan” during her first supervised outing. The excitement going to Rockefeller Center to see the tree is overwhelming. Her eyes sparkle as the decorated store windows dazzle her. “Recovering, getting clean and sober, cherishing it. Those are my Christmas presents to myself, as well as giving it back to others by staying that way. Sobriety …,” she says, “ … is breathtaking.“