Moriah Ulinskas

Mildred Thomas

 

I was born in Memphis, TN in Shelby County in 1966.  I left home the first time when I was 14.  I had a good childhood until my mother started seeing some guy.  We had moved to New Jersey when I was 11 years old- my mother, my brother and me. We moved to Newark.

 

I didn’t like my mother’s new boyfriend. There was too much drinking and he moved in with us.  When I was 13 he started raping me.  I told my mother, but she didn’t believe me.  I went to New York to be with my aunt, but the police found me and made me go home to my mother.  Her boyfriend continued to rape me until I ran away again when I was 16.

 

When I was 16 I went to a shelter in New Jersey, where a met a group of young men and women who took me to Port Authority with them.  They introduced me to drugs- marijuana and crack.  I trusted them, more than my own family, but one day the women left and told the men to watch out for me and they raped me.  I ran out of the building and found two cops on the street.  I took them back to where the men who raped me were, but they were gone.

 

The police took me to the hospital. That’s where they told me I had been raped, I didn’t really understand it before.  I went back to my mother again and she finally understood what her boyfriend had done and she kicked him out.  I stayed at home until I was 19.

 

When I was 19 I moved to New York City looking for the “Big Life”. It was the 1980s and New York City was cheap! I got an apartment, I hustled for money. I was a prostitute.  I learned from hanging on the streets and worked for a few years as a prostitute, but then I didn’t want to be one any more and I kicked my pimp out of my apartment.

 

I found my godfather and he helped me. I decided to come to San Francisco. I came for the weather, the people. I came by bus because I was afraid of airplanes.  It was 1994.

 

I stayed in the Haight Ashbury at first. It was alright. I liked it and it was a good move.  I started sleeping with a lot of different men and I caught HIV.  I was on the streets and had to look for shelter and food, then I met my boyfriend George.

 

George worked in a hotel in the Tenderloin and I lived at the hotel with him.  Then he got a job at a bigger hotel and we lived there.  Me and George partied at home, we didn’t really go out or go to other parts of the city.  Friends would come over and we would do drugs.  I would stay home and cook and clean and get high.  We never left the Tenderloin.

 

When I was in my 30s I had a stroke from the drugs.  I was at Laguna Honda Hospital for almost ten years and George came to see me every day.  Then I came to Leland House about 10 years ago.

 

George passed away. I don’t have any pictures of him, but it feels like he’s still watching over me.

 

I’m looking to move to an SRO, but not in the Tenderloin. That doesn’t feel like home anymore.  God gave me a second chance and I’m making plans to move on out of here.