street prostitute 6 continued: photographing Ronda

            Finally it's just Ronda and I.  I frame her in my viewfinder; and she leans back, appearing relaxed.

“Damn, it feels weird.  Being out here, right where I always worked and everything, and not need a shot—it's kind of strange.”

Click. 

“I feel like a normal person.  A normal person.”

Click. 

“I'm a little bit spaced still.  It might be the tranquilizer they put me on in there.”

Click. 

“Goddamn.  Try not to get this cigarette in these pictures.  My mother's gonna see these pictures.”

“Your mother doesn't know that you smoke?” I ask.

“[Sighing] Oh, I don't know.  I don't guess she really cares.  I just hate anything to be rubbed in that bugs her.  She always told me I should write a book.  But I don't think she realizes what will be in a book if I wrote it.  You know what I mean?”

Click. 

“So what'd you do in jail all day long?”

“Mmm.  Got up at...five and ate breakfast, and went back to sleep till eight.  Then got up and went outside, and then came back in and ate lunch.  And read books.  I'm reading Paper Moon right now.”

Click...Click. 

“I couldn't sleep in the daytime like everybody else,” she goes on.  But I learned to sleep at night, and I always had weird dreams, too.
  
“In one, I was in this big, long corridor made of concrete and Plexiglas and filled with water.  And people were...trapped in that corridor, you know, and there were cops rolling around with normal, everyday people, too.  ...    And something about a walrus stuck in the corner and only one person knew how to get it out.”

Click. 

“I can't believe I got out.  I'm just amazed that they let me off.  Because I have been fucking up.  It was karma; it was karma.
  
“That's what I think it was...karma.  Do you believe in karma?”

I move in close with my camera and peer—silent for a moment—into her eyes....

Taken on: September 1, 1984

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