Pep Talks

On another block, a smiling motorist wearing a red bandanna cruises up next to Peg's driver's-side window. "Gimme twenty dollars," he jokes.

"I'm not gonna give you no twenty dollars," Peg answers, playing along.
"Then give me your cellular phone," he shoots back with a grin.
After some more banter, Peg and Pepper move on. "I used to be married to him when I was using," Peg explains between giggles. During their eleven-year marriage, she adds, he often would lock her in the house in a vain attempt to keep her away from drugs. But she always found a window to climb out of.

Before heading back to PEP's offices on Biscayne Boulevard at 30th Street, the pair passes by the street of abandoned buildings that Peg once called home. A man in a blue pullover with a white towel draped over his shoulder approaches the car on foot. He brandishes a wad of bills and boasts that he's no longer using drugs, claiming he's "straight as one dollar." As they drive away from him, Peg remembers, "I used to fuck up his shit all the time." She says he just drinks a lot of beer now. Peg, clean four years now, can't even have a glass of wine at dinner because she fears it will reignite her addiction. Eyes fixed on the road ahead of her, she calmly says, "I like my life how it is.