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I was happy to be able to locate Prince, coming back from collecting pallets for money.

I had been looking for him for over two weeks, hoping to finally give him a copy of his picture. I have been asked why I bother giving copies to folks who are homeless. Sure, a few of the guys lose the pictures pretty quickly, but then there are folks like Jaime, who frame them and proudly display the pictures. Its a nice feeling to see someone who has so little have something to be proud about.

I also wanted to see if I could help him. I offered to pay his fines for outstanding warrants if he agreed to immediately go into rehab. He agreed. I hope he actually follows through.

More on Addiction: Faces of Addiction
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It was around midnight when I ran into Takeesha, who was high. The police were out in force; Princess was arrested earlier in the day. Takeesha thanked me for the first picture and wanted to talk about her past:

She said her mother was a prostitute and an addict, whose pimp put Takeesha out on the streets at twelve. Takeesha had her first child at 13, the result of being raped. "I had a lot of bad experiences. I used to be with pimps. I got cigarette burns on my body. (They) beat me with hangers. They used to punish me, put me in closets with rats."

She came to Hunts Point in 1988, and that's when she started using heroin. She used to be on methadone, but she got kicked off Medicaid, the result of some missed paper work. When I asked her why she didn't walk to Mott Haven and fix it she said, with tears in her eyes "This place is so bad and evil. It's like so simple to walk across the bridge, but it's like you can't go across, you understand? This place is evil. It's possessed. It's evil. I been here a long time. There are bad spirits here...I have seen good people. I have seen people that have family, jobs, and they come here and they get dug in, and two weeks later they living in a cardboard box."

I post people's stories as they tell them to me. I am not a journalist. I don't try to verify, just listen.

More on Addiction: Faces of Addiction
More Bronx photos here: Bronx

Michael, who also goes by Shelley, was disowned by his parents at 15 because he was gay. He turned to prostitution: "I was out on the streets, and that was the easy way to survive." He has been working in Hunts Point or Newburg since then, needing the money to live, and for crack and heroine. He dresses as a woman when he walks the streets, with almost all of his clients not knowing he is male. He also has a steady client of gay married men, who are deep in the closet.

His father, a trucker in the Bronx, was "strung out on drugs, and abusive." Michael was molested when young. When he told his parents "they blamed me. 'If you weren't gay it wouldn't have happened.'"

When I asked him if I could post his story, he said yes, and his friend said: "This is nothing. This is everywhere. There is a lot more shit out here."

More on Addiction: Faces of Addiction
More Bronx photos here: Bronx

I post people's stories as they tell them to me. I am not a journalist. I don't try to verify, just listen.

Cynthia, forty six, starting prostituting at the age of thirteen. She turned to the streets after battling her mother, a single mother in Brooklyn. "I didn't want to listen to her, she didn't give me any time." Cynthia is now the mother of fifteen children, eleven of which are still alive. Her "baby" is sixteen, her oldest child thirty.

We talked about the child prostitutes in Hunts Point now. She told me "Hunts Point isn't what it used to be, when the girls would stick together. Then came crack and heroin, that fucked up everything. A girl out there at that age. She got no choice. It ain't right."

Cynthia claimed to be drug free, but she was clearly on crack, agitated and slurring. When I asked her how she wanted to be described she looked me in the eye, thought for a second, then said "An honest person. Thats what I am. An honest person."

More Bronx photos here: Bronx
More on Addiction: Faces of Addiction

I post people's stories as they tell them to me. I am not a journalist. I don't try to verify, just listen.

Sonia, forty-six years old and the mother of five, is a crack addict who "sells her body for drugs." Smart, polite, and well-spoken she told me and my friend Nina of her life-long battle with her addiction. She started when she was twenty-two, an overwhelmed single mother of three children working two jobs. She got into prostitution, becoming "a five dollar whore," trading sex for drugs with neighborhood dealers.

When we asked her how much money she needs a day for the drugs she said "as much as I can. I can't stop. I get some money, go and buy it, smoke crack, relax for thirty minutes. I have to get some more. It's non-stop. Until I keep walking back and forth and nothing nothing nothing gives, that's when I will say, 'God says go home.'" She has a "significant other," a wonderful man who's been with her for seventeen years. He does not drink, smoke, or do any drugs.

She has been clean before, something she says can only come from her. She started crying telling us of the eight-year period when she was clean. "I went to a program, mothers and children, everything was great, I came out, got a job, felt good, had money." She fell back four years ago.

When I asked her how she wanted to be described she responded, "I am good person with a very bad disease."

More on Addiction: Faces of Addiction
More Bronx photos here: Bronx

I post people's stories as they tell them to me. I am not a journalist. I don't try to verify, just listen.