By John Frank t i l l IB" ■ i l l On the street they sport names that swagger with defiance—Snake, Tex, Pony, Baby Spike—bu t as I sit in theju ry box I canI help wonder whether such aliases are less a show o f bravado than they are a camouflage against the unwelcome prospect of lengthening police records and visits to juvenile court. Testifying at the moment is Pony, a witness for the State. In response to questions by the prosecuting attorney, Pony is describing life on Second and Madison, the downtown intersection frequented by Seattle’s male prostitutes. S.P.D.’s vice squad, as I’ve just learned from the testimony of an undercover detective, has its own name for the area: “ the soap district” they call it. “ Forty dollars would get you half a gram,” Pony tells the court about a valued but hard-to-get street drug, crystal Methedrine. “ Sometimes we’d pool our money and buy a gram.” “ And how long would you and your friends stay high on an ounce of crystal?” the prosecuting attorney asks him. “An ounce? You mean a gram?” Pony smiles slightly at the prosecutor’s error. Shooting up a gram of crystal, as he’ ll go on to explain, would keep them high for two or three days. The thought of doing an ounce, well. . . . Pony—blonde, pale, crucifix-studded silver chain dangling a good foot-and-a- half from the pierced lobe of his left ear— is a teenage p ros titu te . He’s been granted immunity in exchange for his testimony, and his unabashed account of solicited sex and intravenous drug use is making my fellow jurors and me shift uneasily in our seats. We are the twelve who remained after the attorneys had interviewed and stricken from the panel a dozen or so other prospects. We’d voiced no strong opinions about prostitution, didn’t appear to be religious zealots, and hadn’t seen the movie Streetwise. We’d do. It’s surprising how articulate this kid on the stand actually is; in recounting the behavior of the defendant in the case—a man in his twenties on trial for promoting prostitution—he sprinkles his sentences with such words as “ aggressive” and “ arrogant.” His voice hardly falters throughout his testimony, even though he’s well aware that he’s good as dead if he ever meets the de fendan t, s ta r in g un- blinkingly at him from only a few feet away, on the street again. The other seven prostitutes who gave statements to the police know this—only one of them has shown up to testify. UDGMENT The prosecutor has begun questioning Pony about a local teen nightclub, one recently shut down for several months after being implicated in publicized reports of drug trafficking. “What happened in the City Beat parking lot after you got into the defendant’s car?” she asks him. “ He reached over and locked the door on my side. I unlocked it. He kept on locking it. Finally I pretended to cough and unlocked it when he was distracted. I got out of the car. He got out and followed me. My girlfriend was there. He started screaming at her.” I wasn’t surprised to hear that Pony kept female company; relatively few male prostitutes, the detective had earlier told us, are in fact gay. But his “ girlfriend” ? Pony had known her only one day and didn’t have a clue as to her last name. “What happened, next, Pony?” “ He turned to me and started saying, ‘Are you coming with me? Are you coming with me?’ I got back into the car and we drove to the motel to get high.” “Who else was staying at the motel?” “ Kenny was staying there, and some guy named Baby Spike, and Lauri. And Lau ri’s baby,” he adds as an afterthought, mentioning someone we’ ll not hear about again during the course of the trial. “What happened with the defendant after you got high?” “ He told me, ‘The drugs aren’t free, you know.’ ” “What did you take that to mean?” “ He wanted me to have sex with him. But when he told me what he wanted, I told him I didn’t do that sort of thing.” “What did he say to you when you refused?” “ He said for me to go downtown and bring back fifty dollars. He said his people would be watching me to make sure I didn’t spend any of the money.” “ By downtown, he meant. . . ? ” “ Second and Madison.” In reply to more questions Pony proceeds to ramble off a litany of street people, rental houses, Aurora Avenue motels, expeditions to and from Second and Madison, sex acts, drug deals, and violence. The sheer amount of going from place to place over a period of only days seems mind-boggling. The judge has told us it’s our responsibility to determine the credibility of the witnesses; the whole chain of events is beginning to seem so /ncredible that I think to myself it couldn’t possibly have been made up. Even the a t to rn e ys appea r overwhelmed—it’s like a bad novel with too many characters and settings crammed into the first chapter. The defense attorney seems to be prefacing most of his que s t ion s w ith , “ Let me get th is straight.” The prosecutor knows her opposing counsel will try to play the jury’s bewilderment for all it’s worth, and she’s struggling to organize the slippery chronology that’s so conspicuously eluding everyone. “ Pony, what happened when you didn’t Jessica Dodge Clinton St. Quarterly—Summer, 1987 13
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