Maggie Williams considers this, her head tilted like a confused terrier.
"Who would buy that?" she asks in a raspy voice. "That's the stupidest thing I ever heard."
Maggie states this with authority. She has spent nearly half her 52 years selling sex acts to earn cash for crack, five bucks at a time.
Her entire universe is a six-block rectangle in Riviera Beach, west of the old Spanish Courts Motor Lodge, where drug dealers seem as common as vendors at a Dolphins game.
Maggie gets high at least six times a day or she loses control. She wails about hating her life. She begs for money. She cries about dying.
When she feels good, she talks about her tricks as matter-of-factly as the weather. Shocking details from a life spent in the passenger seat of men's cars: Old men, young men, rich men, poor men, timid men, twisted men.
Some want sex. Some don't know where else to go for a human touch. Most want crack.
"Did I tell you about the fat guy I picked up at the Denny's in Lake Park?" she asks.
She takes a short hit off her buck-a-pack Cheyenne Menthol 100's. Her sun-soaked face is as creased as leather. She wears a baby-blue shirt, black shorts and high-top sneakers she dug out of a Dumpster.
Once, long ago, Maggie was a happy kid, the sixth of seven children in an Irish-Catholic family, who memorized poetry and loved to make rhymes.
Once, she dreamed of finding a soul mate and getting married.
Then she met something more powerful than love: crack cocaine.
At 27, she "married the pipe."
Now, Maggie is so famous in Riviera Beach that Mayor Michael Brown introduced her to a CNN crew, who interviewed her about blight. Some clever kids, eager to meet a real prostitute, interviewed her, too — and paid her $25 for video footage they posted on a Web site.
Locals recognize her from two blocks away, because she walks with a signature hop.
They know her by a name she hates: "Scaggie Maggie."
Maggie's slice of 'The Raw'
In Maggie's netherworld, criminals make the rules and law-abiding citizens drive by — quickly.
If a car stops in this stretch of Broadway, it's assumed the driver wants drugs. Dealers surface along the side streets to serve their customers, who drive in from places like Wellington and Jupiter and Lantana.
White buyers sometimes feel safer getting crack from white prostitutes than black dealers, even if it costs them more.
"There's this guy who smokes crack big time," Maggie says. "White guy, black Hummer."
Here, nobody knows your last name, just your street handle: "Get Down" or "Tall Debbie" or "Chicken George."
Riviera Beach cops have nicknames, too: "Good Bar." "Gomer Pyle." "Curly Top." "Big Head."
They call this part of Riviera Beach "The Raw" — because it's torn and bloody, like a wound.
Maggie's world consists of convenience stores with bulletproof glass, garbage-strewn lots, shabby homes and a bank parking lot where addicts routinely pass out in the drive-through lanes.
She can hop-walk and catch up with a crack dealer in mid-stride, then do a deal in three steps. Cash for crack. As fast as a magician could do it.
Five bucks buys a thin, brownish chip of crack called a "pound" or a "nickel" — a cheap and potent high.
Ten bucks buys a "dime," $20 a "dove," and $100 gets you a "yard." Dealers chip those quantities from a slab called a "cookie."
If a drug dealer feels heat from police, he'll throw drugs on the ground and take off. That's why Maggie always walks with her head down — she's scanning the ground, trying to find crack. That's called "a floor score."
Since 1973, Maggie has been arrested for three felonies and 75 misdemeanors, including 19 prostitution busts. Her longest jail stint was six months. Police found a thin slice of crack, a $25 "Jamaican Juggler," in her cigarette pack. It was too big to fit in her mouth, which is where addicts usually carry crack because it doesn't melt.
She has slept on rooftops with rats and in bushes with roaches. But for the past two years, Maggie has paid $5 a day for a couch in a high-traffic, crowded house near Spanish Courts.
Her beat-up beige sofa is her sanctuary: A small fan points at her face to cool her when she sleeps, and she can watch a 24-inch color TV with cable. She piles her meager possessions around her and keeps her makeup and toothbrush in a pretty pink cosmetics bag.
Anything of value she finds, she sells for crack.
Anything of value given to her, she sells for crack.
Maggie operates by her own personal street code: She's often high or drunk or both, and she occasionally stinks of sweat and stale beer. But if she can get a ride to the marina, she'll wash her sheets and her few clothes. She showers daily. She preaches safe sex.
"If you're going to allow prostitution," she maintains, "you ought to be certain the girls are clean."
This code — and pure luck — have kept Maggie alive on the Riviera streets for 25 years.
She is the rare constant in a place where about 30 hard-core junkies and whores live, and where the players change constantly. Few live long enough to qualify for AARP.
"Tina Piper died of AIDS," Maggie recites. "Liz died of AIDS. Gary went into the hospital for his back. They gave him the wrong medication. He blew up and died.
"Dottie died in her sleep," she continues, "Old age, I guess. Shorty died of AIDS because he was having sex with Tina, but he didn't care because he loved her."
On one scalding July afternoon, Maggie wants a ride to the hospital to visit Toni.
"We were in jail together," she says. "She's got AIDS."
Maggie wants to see Toni "before she hits The Last Stop."
What's The Last Stop? Hospice.
Maggie's visit is business, not sentiment.
She begins by scolding the frail woman for not using condoms. That's why you're here dying, Maggie tells her in street language. Toni is either too docile or too weak to do anything but agree.
That reprimand done, Maggie softens and produces a small, glass, crack pipe that she loads.
Toni gets one last blast. Maggie doesn't take a hit herself.
She hugs Toni and says goodbye.
Two weeks later, Maggie reports the news on the street about Toni:
"Yeah," she states flatly. "She's dead."
'Know what my fantasy is?'
Getting to know Maggie is an exercise in trust — hers and yours.
You have to be willing to find her. Give her $5 for lottery tickets or cigarettes. Buy her fast food.
Prostitutes expect to be paid for their time, even if they're just talking.
It's best to start at the abandoned, boarded motel on West 14th Street that they still call the Rock Garden. This is a landmark for addicts, the local hangout.
Sometimes, when Maggie's pale blue eyes are as dead as a mannequin's, a visit with her lasts only minutes. She's way too high or way too desperate to get high to do much except scream and cry and laugh in a lunatic cackle.
Sometimes, she'll rant about what happened in the crack house.
"A black whore punched me in the face this morning," she blurts one day, pointing to a round mark under her eye from the puncher's ring. They were fighting over a pair of pink pants.
Sometimes, she fumes about what happened at her "job" at the gas station.
"I filled 30 bags with ice, drained two coolers, swept the backroom. Got paid with a pack of Newports. I had a buck-and-a-half that I put with the Newports and got crack. Got ripped off. I was so mad. It was bad. Tasted salty."
She also does cleaning work at a bar on Broadway owned by Jamaicans.
Maggie spends $30 a day on crack — more, if she can get the money. If she's not on a binge, she's awake by noon, doing the rounds, looking for change, rummaging through garbage, smoking crack.
When she's turning tricks, her mind switches to neutral, she says: "All I think about is what I'm gonna do with the money."
The drug binges are the worst. Two, three, four days without sleep, without food.
Word on the street is that the crack is being cut with methamphetamine, which could explain Maggie's sleepless nights and tooth pain.
When she comes out of a binge, Maggie needs a burger.
"Can we go to McDonald's?" she asks.
Always drive-through.
She can devour a super-sized Big Mac and fries faster than a starving construction worker. She spikes her large Coke with sugar packets.
Junkies gotta have sugar.
When Maggie is "on" — just after she gets high — she is funny and quick, aware that she commands attention. At these moments, glimmers of her true personality appear.
She laughs about her lifestyle: "It ain't easy being sleazy."
She jokes about her troubled history with men: "I'm the president of the Stuck on Stupid Club."
She quips: "Hell, every man in the world pays for sex anyway."
She recites poetry she wrote from memory: "On each and every corner, on each and every block, you'll see one of the boys selling that cocaine rock..."
Once, on the way to McDonald's, she asked, in a soft voice: "Know what my fantasy is?"
No, what?
"I want Ricki Lake to do a makeover of me on her show."
Ricki Lake doesn't have a show anymore, she's told.
"How about Oprah? She still on? Then Oprah. A makeover on her show. But it has to include tattooed eyeliner."
'I am not a crack whore'
Maggie's personal code of ethics includes a criminal caste system, a way of separating herself from other addicts.
On one August day, she suddenly stops mid-bite of a Whopper Junior and flies out of the car to stop a favorite dealer crossing the street.
She climbs back in the car, slouches in the seat and pulls out her crack pipe, loads it and takes a deep hit.
"Whew," she lets out deep breath. "When you're white around here, you never get as much crack as blacks. They'll always screw you. Even me."
Across the street at a bunker-like laundromat, a handful of black men and women, in bedroom slippers, are milling about.
Inside the car, Maggie is talking about what a security guard paid her $10 to do the night before.
"I don't even like anyone to touch me anymore," she says, shoveling french fries. "But at least I'm not a crack whore."
What?
She points to a dazed-looking black woman outside the laundromat.
"She's a crack whore," Maggie says, a twinge of disgust in her voice.
"I am not and have never been and never will be a crack whore," she exclaims, slapping the dashboard. "Never!"
What?
"A crack whore," she explains, speaking slowly, "trades sex for hits of crack. I sell sex for money. I buy my own crack.
"You can't go any lower than a crack whore."
Problem child
Maggie grew up in Freeport, Long Island, the youngest girl in a family of four sons and three daughters. Red-haired and petite, Maggie was "the happiest kid, always happy-go-lucky," her sister Dorothy remembers.
But Maggie's life of crime started early — around 10 — when she stole porcelain dolls from a neighbor's collection.
By the time Maggie hit her teens, nobody could control her.
"Margaret was always a problem child, running away and getting in trouble," says her oldest sister Barbara, a retired nurse.
When their father, Robert, retired as a firefighter and decided to move from New York to Palm Beach Gardens in 1970, Maggie became an even bigger problem.
She wanted to finish her senior year in Freeport, and, in defiance, she ran away and hitchhiked to California with a school buddy.
She landed in jail for stealing lunchmeat.
She told cops her name was Sunshine.
She met Angela Davis, the '60s radical, at the San Rafael jail.
Police cut a deal after they called her parents: If Maggie abided by the rules of her girlfriend's parents, she could finish her senior year in Freeport.
She graduated in 1971, then worked at a Long Island dry cleaners and bought a green '69 Dodge Charger. A couple years later, she joined her parents in Florida.
Maggie's memories of her father are vivid and limited. He bought cases of beer in quart bottles. Ballantine and Piels. Her mother, Alice, raised seven kids and drank Canadian Club with beer chasers.
"I remember my dad carrying her to bed after she passed out," Maggie recalls.
She started drinking at 15 or 16 when she and her little brother, Kevin, tapped dad's beer supply.
Five of the seven Williams children became alcoholics, says Dorothy, a retired certified legal assistant who lives in South Carolina. "Only Barbara and I weren't."
(Kevin died of cirrhosis in 1989 at 33.)
"Our father was a hardworking man, a firefighter. We're a close-knit family," Dorothy continues. "You know, birthday parties, cookouts, all of it."
Once, their bond mattered to Maggie, her sisters say.
"It's all Margaret ever said she wanted — family. Family was everything to her," Dorothy adds. "I always thought she could have straightened out if she found that. She wanted to be married."
But booze and boyfriends proved to be a lifelong weakness.
Maggie was arrested for the first time as an adult in 1973 for stealing $250 from a West Palm Beach bar.
"I went with a guy to Key West," she says, laughing. "They arrested me when I got back."
She had her first daughter in 1975. She was single, working full-time laying PVC pipe and had an alley apartment in the north end of West Palm Beach.
After 11 months, she knew, and her family knew, she couldn't raise a child. Her sister Barbara adopted the baby girl, Marisa. Maggie got the name from a guy she met in a bar. "It's something in Spanish," she recalls.
A year later, Maggie moved in with a Riviera Beach cop that she met at the High Tides bar in West Palm.
"I never really loved him," she says, "but I thought 'married' to a cop, with a job, I could get my daughter back."
That didn't last.
Maggie had an affair with a Palm Tran bus driver named Ernie.
"I used to take the bus up U.S. 1 to work," she says. "I'd slip him notes sayin' I'd like to go out with him."
Ernie promised to leave his wife and give Maggie a new life in Tarpon Springs. He lied.
In 1977, she had another daughter and named her "Dania" because she got pregnant in Dania. The baby was adopted at birth by a wealthy Boca Raton family, who changed the infant's name to Dana.
Maggie never took one look at the baby. "I don't even know her birthday," she says.
In 1981, Maggie was walking down Broadway in the north end of West Palm Beach when she hit it off with two black girls, who took her to their room at the Granada Inn. They turned her on to crack and how to turn tricks to pay for it.
"That was all she wrote," Maggie says, wistfully, "once I met the glass pipe."
'It'll end for Maggie
in a grave'
Tricie Valenti has known Maggie longer than anyone in Riviera Beach.
Valenti pronounces her first name "Tree-cee" — but addicts know her as "The Cat Lady," because she has a dozen cats and a cat banner flying outside her tidy white cottage.
Years ago, Maggie slept in the alley behind Valenti's house.
"She had this tarp," Valenti says, "and the police found it and sprayed it with pepper so nobody could sleep there. Then someone set fire to it, and it almost burned my house down."
Valenti, 52, has lived in this house, in this Night of the Living Dead neighborhood, all her life. She stays safe because she has a pitbull mix named Sheba — and she has earned the respect of the streets.
She managed to conquer her own drug demons — heroin addiction — more than 20 years ago, after she shot heroin cut with a meat tenderizer, and then spent three years in and out of the hospital.
Valenti knows how Maggie thinks: "I know what it's like to get up and want dope."
She knows every crack-addict scam: They sell their food stamps and anything they get from the health department, including crutches. They can strip a house of every ounce of recyclable metal, bathroom fixtures, you name it. They also figured out how to scam FEMA. Some addicts in Riviera Beach filled out government forms after Hurricane Wilma and collected up to $5,000.
"Like all of them," Valenti says, "Maggie's addicted to the lifestyle, not just the drug."
Maggie loves the hustle, her friend says, and she won't change.
"It'll end for Maggie in a grave. You can see neurological damage, the twitching, the swinging of the arms."
Nerve damage is why Maggie walks with a hop, Valenti says — though Maggie calls her strut "the Williams walk."
"It's dumb luck and street smarts that she doesn't have AIDS. It's just unbelievable. A miracle, really."
'Tell my family that
I miss them'
When Maggie gets sick or beat up, she goes to friends like Valenti for help.
Valenti pushed Maggie to get medical attention for an ugly, purple mass that had been growing on her right thigh for years.
She finally had it removed this August.
The doctor delivered good news: The tumor wasn't melanoma. And he gave Maggie prescription painkillers, which she sold to give herself a two-day vacation from hustling.
On the third day after the surgery, Maggie gets up before noon, eager to wash her blood—soaked sheets. "They're stinkin' up the whole house," she rants. Her thigh is wrapped with a spongy bandage, brown with bloodstains.
She smokes crack and is in high spirits, and if she can get a ride to the marina, she can wash those sheets.
Then, she'll talk about her family:
"To the day I die, I'll say it was the best thing I could do to give my daughters up. I wasn't ready to be a mother financially, physically or mentally. DCF (the Department of Children and Families) would have gotten 'em, no matter what.
"I feel really wrong when I say I have two kids. I gave birth to two kids, but I wasn't there when they grew up.
"The last time I saw my father before he died, he found me and gave me $100. He wanted me to go to rehab. My whole family got sick of me asking for money. They gave up on me.
"Before my father died last year, Marisa came looking for me. Just asking people on the streets. I saw her for about an hour. Thank God I was straight. I had sleep. I wasn't doing the dance.
"I don't know if she's married or not. She gave me her phone number, but I lost it, of course. I did try to call, but the number was disconnected. She married somebody with some long-ass Polish last name. I don't know what it is. She's solid, not fat. She looks good. She was working at Publix. I don't know about now.
"I'm a grandmother. Marisa had three kids. She sent me pictures once.
"My parents passed away. My family was close. We were Irish-English-New York-Catholic-Yankees.
"There were seven kids in my family, but there's only six left.
"My youngest brother, Kevin, died of either AIDS or cirrhosis of the liver. I think cirrhosis, which my mother died from, too. I haven't seen any of them in 20 years. Maybe 15.
"No one ever sends a Christmas card. Where would they send it?
"If I could, I'd tell my family that I miss them and I love them."
She starts to cry: "I want to see them again."
'We all had to block her out'
Everyone in Maggie's family has tried to help her — and given up.
"As much as my heart goes out to Margaret," says Barbara, "emotionally, we just had to stop. It's not like we don't care about her. We all bent over backwards."
Adds Dorothy: "To survive, we all had to block her out."
Maggie's brother, Robert, owns a successful flooring business in Connecticut. In 1982, he brought Maggie to live with him and his wife, Tina.
Robert had his sister's teeth fixed, bought her clothes, got her a job and gave her money. It lasted about a month. They caught her stealing from them.
"Each one of us, in our own way, thought we could rescue her," Dorothy says. "But our own sanity was at stake."
Barbara guesses she hasn't talked to Maggie in 10 or 15 years. She is hesitant to share family photos of Maggie's young life because she does not want Maggie to know where she lives.
Neither does her brother, Alan, who had not seen Maggie in 30 years until recently, when he was driving down Broadway and saw a woman yelling at cars. Maggie came up to his car, looked in and didn't recognize her own brother. As soon as the light changed, Alan sped away.
Marisa, Maggie's elder daughter, went looking for her mother last year.
"Everybody I asked knew Maggie," recalls Marisa, 30. "She was copping (buying crack) when I found her. I was so proud of her. She just held it in her hand the whole hour we talked."
Marisa did not tell Maggie that she, too, had been a crack addict.
"I knew her whole story, and I swore I wouldn't do that. I was in lockdown for four years," says Marisa, the mother of three boys, who's now happy and healthy. "But don't tell me you can't change — because I did."
Marisa laughs when she recalls what they talked about: "She told me about all her sex escapades."
Before that meeting, Marisa had not seen her mother since she was 9. She met her half-sister, Dana, once — about 10 years ago, when the adoption agency got them together because Dana was using drugs and alcohol.
"She was 17," Marisa says, "I was 19. We met at a Denny's. She looked exactly like me, only cuter. It was weird. She bites her nails; so do I. We both worked at a sports shop."
Marisa hasn't had contact with Dana since then.
"I think her (adoptive) father had just died. That's why she was having problems."
Maggie's sister Dorothy saw Maggie last year, too, not long after Marisa's visit. She was in Florida taking care of their father, who was dying of cancer.
Maybe Dad should see Maggie one last time, Dorothy thought. So she drove to Riviera Beach and found Maggie at a convenience store.
"I was so shocked that I could barely speak," Dorothy recalls, adding, "She was so nervous, she couldn't stop speaking.
"She asked me if I remembered a poem I wrote in high school: 'There comes a time in everyone's life, when something good must end.'
"I was shocked," Dorothy says. "I didn't remember it, and she knew every line. Her mind was so sharp."
They talked for 45 minutes, but Dorothy could not bear to tell Maggie about their father.
"He wouldn't have been able to take seeing her like that."
Robert Arthur Williams died Sept. 6, 2005, at age 90 in Port St. Lucie.
Nobody told Maggie.
She found out herself, by chance, when she was rooting through a Dumpster.
Inside was a copy of The Palm Beach Post. Maggie read the funeral notices:
"Mr. Williams, a native of New York City, died Tuesday. He was a retired firefighter. Survivors include two daughters, three sons, 18 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren."
In the final record of her father's life, Maggie was not listed as one of his survivors.
Knights in white satin
On a sunny spring day, Maggie heads to the Comprehensive AIDS Program office for a court-ordered HIV test.
Riding along on Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard, she sees the "leaky teepee" — the old West Palm Beach Auditorium.
"I went to a Moody Blues concert there," she says.
When was that?
She squints trying to remember. "Early '80s."
Early 1980s — that's when Maggie's every memory of the outside world, the sober world, stops.
She has never logged on to a computer or used an ATM machine.
She hasn't been to a movie theater in more than 20 years.
She's not worried about the price of gas, a pension or 401(k).
Maggie's family spent a lifetime agonizing about her, and they still do: "Our biggest worry, to this day," Dorothy says, "is how will we know when she dies?"
Dying. That's one thing that concerns Maggie.
"I made a decision," she says. "I don't want to be buried. I want to be cremated."
OK.
"I don't want to rot in the ground."
OK.
"I think about suicide because I don't want to die lonely.
"I want to be in love and love someone. Kenny Rogers says there's someone for everyone. Where's my someone?"
She doesn't wait for an answer.
"In five years, I hope I'm married. I hope I find the right man."
Then she laughs.
"If you're going to dream, dream big."
About this story: Maggie Williams was interviewed for a few hours each week over the past eight months. Reporter Paul Lomartire drove Williams to court appearances and a doctor's appointment, and The Palm Beach Post spent approximately $75 in that time on Maggie — for fast food, cigarettes and back rent. Staff researchers Melanie Mena and Amy Hanaway contributed to this story.
Riviera Beach Mayor Michael Brown, who knows Maggie and her drug-saturated neighborhood, says: 'If anyone on Earth would question why we need redevelopment, they need to know the story of "Scaggie Maggie." '
Riviera Beach Police Chief Clarence Williams was asked several times to comment on the city's crack problem. On Wednesday, police department spokeswoman Rose Anne Brown made this statement: 'Police also work in that area of the city to remove violators of the law without consequently destroying the lives of those who may be products of society's ills.'