THE MOST POPULAR ITEM ON SEPULVEDA BOULEVARD IS A $20 BLOWJOB. SO says *Terry, and Terry ought to know. She used to work the strip.

A blowjob takes seven minutes from pickup to drop-off, which means a working girl can make $100 an hour easy, more than enough to get a room for the night and stay high on coke all the next day. When business is good, we're talking a tax-free $35,000 a year, and that's working part-time.

Terry delivers these market dynamics from the front seat of a white Plymouth as we cruise Sepulveda, the dreary, six-lane strip that cuts through Southern California's San Fernando Valley. It's a little after 11 P.M., and the cheap motels and topless clubs lend the boulevard a lurid menace. But Terry is an engaging guide, chatty, funny, very direct, and she sounds downright nostalgic as she points out the sites. There's the Sierra Lodge motel whose elderly Chinese proprietors used to call her room to warn her whenever the police were parked nearby, and there's her "office," the Foster's Freeze ice-cream stand, where any guy looking for a date could count on finding her.

With big blue eyes and dyed black hair, Terry looks older than her 35 years. She's 40 pounds heavier now than in her working days. She blames the extra weight on her new vice-free lifestyle. Well, almost vice-free, she says, shrugging as she lights another Marlboro. Three years ago Terry would have been working Sepulveda at this hour. Tonight she heads back to a modest, four-bedroom house in Reseda, a suburb about 30 miles north of Los Angeles. The house is headquarters to the Mary Magdalene Project, an organization that rehabilitates prostitutes.

Of the precious few programs around the country designed to help prostitutes, the Mary Magdalene Project appears to be unique. Other outreach or advocacy groups operate in Minneapolis, St. Louis, San Francisco, Chicago and Cleveland, but they aren't as individualized or comprehensive. The Mary Magdalene Project is a two-year, live-in program that offers recovering prostitutes education, healthcare, job training, career counseling, psychotherapy and, perhaps, most important of all, the kind of day-to-day parenting that most of they women never had. According to Jerri Rodewald, the project's executive director, 135 of the 175 graduates of the program now work as nurse's aids, carpenters, dog groomers, welders, hairdressers and secretaries. Some are struggling along on welfare. But less than 10 percent of the women who complete the program return to prostitution.

Terry entered the program in February 1993. "The first time I walked into this house," she says, "I thought, Oh God, I'm home."

THE MARY MAGDALENE PROJECT got its start in the late 1970s when the parish grounds at the West Hollywood Presbyterian Church became a refuge for three neighborhood hookers. The church's pastor let them sleep in the Fellowship Hall and helped them find day jobs, and when he found out they were still turning tricks at night, he appointed a task force of church women to create a permanent shelter. In 1980, with a $30,000 grant from United Presbyterian Women, the task force leased the house in Reseda and hired the Reverend Ann Hayman as program director.

Bent over the long picnic table in the kitchen, Hayman, 45, is speed-wrapping a pair of LA Gear sneakers and holding court as the graduates drop by with kids in tow. The robust, red-haired Hayman looks every bit the sturdy Idaho farm girl she is. Hayman has an irreverent sense of humor and a razor sharp feminist edge. In her role as program director, she has played housemate, advocate, referee, confidant, advisor, cook, chauffeur, guardian angel, best friend and worst enemy to the dozens of prostitutes who have passed through the program over the last 14 years. "There wouldn't be a program without her," says Rodewald. "Ann is the key. She's committed herself to the women."

Hayman's commitment didn't happen right away. She balked when first offered the job. An assistant pastor in a Presbyterian parish, Hayman didn't think it was a good career move for someone aspiring to be president of Princeton Seminary, her longtime ambition. And Hayman had another, more personal reservation.
"I was afraid the women would change me," she says, "that somehow they would alter my perception of life," she says. In the end, frustration at not being able to affect change in her parish outweighed her fears. Hayman took the job.

There was no handy how-to manual on reforming prostitutes. There was hardly anything at all. Hayman's dogged research eventually unearthed the work of Jennifer James, a psychologist whose Seattle-based research showed that teenage prostitutes had run away from abusive homes and were selling sex to support themselves. Very soon, Hayman would see this pattern over and over.

The Mary Magdalene women represent a mix of ethnic groups; roughly 50 percent white, 25 percent African American, 25 percent Hispanic. Half have mothers who were prostitutes and two-thirds have children of their own--almost always in foster care or living with family members. The vast majority of the women have a history of sexual or physical abuse by a parent or mate or both. Most display a weakness for drink, drugs and no-account men, the kind of men, says Hayman, who "redefine the term pond scum."

For the first two years Hayman dutifully followed the advice she had been given by the project's therapists and board members. "Everybody told me I had to have a professional relationship with these women or they would eat me alive," she says. "Professional meant detached, objective. I was really good at it for about 18 months." Then Rita arrived.

When Rita was first admitted to the project, "she told me her parents were wonderful and loving," says Hayman, with a roll of her eyes. "She was just the wild one in the family and she became a prostitute to rebel."

Three months later Hayman happened by Rita's room one morning while she was getting dressed. The door was open and Hayman noticed an unusual scar on Rita's back. "It was the imprint of a steam iron," says Hayman, "complete with the little holes." When Hayman asked about it, Rita said her father had burned her, but she couldn't remember why. "That's when I realized she didn't consider that child abuse," says Hayman. "Kids like Rita grow up thinking this is normal. Until I come along."

Most of the women have had miserable, often violent relationships with their real parents, and Hayman, as surrogate mom, bears the brunt of all the pent-up anger, resentment and mistrust. "They have fears about betrayal and abandonment," says Hayman. "Why should I trust you? You're just like all women; you'll turn on me for a man. It's frustrating as hell." But, she says, shrugging, "They need me." And after two years, "I was finally able to say okay, nothing horrible is going to happen to me if I get close."

THE WOODEN CREDENZA IN THE DINING ROOM is piled high with presents. There's a party tonight for Miriam and her 10-year-old daughter, Tracy. Mother and daughter are in the den arguing over the assembly of a Barbie grocery store to the beat of MTV. Katya, another of the residents, darts back and forth from her bedroom to the laundry room off the garage. Karl, the three-year-old son of a graduate, is eyeing the upright Wurlitzer piano in the living room. Terry and her 13-year-old son, Roy, are holding hands as they watch Amos & Andrew in Hayman's upstairs bedroom.

The house is a neat, two-story stucco home on a quiet residential street. There's a basketball hoop in the driveway, a grill and picnic table on the shady patio out back. Bicycles in all sizes lean against the side of the house. From Monday through Friday the house is as quiet as a tomb. The women, as many as six at a time, leave at sunrise for work or school, and stay away until well after sunset at therapy sessions or meetings of Alcoholics, Narcotics, or Prostitutes Anonymous. When they return, as late as ten at night, they eat, watch TV, corral Hayman for advice, or monopolize the communal pay phone in the garage. But before turning in, they are careful to do their daily chore. Each woman is responsible for cleaning a different room of the house each day.

On weekends the house hums with residents, graduates, and all their kids. It's a squawking, squabbling, ever-changing family with Hayman as the hub. She's the one who throws the birthday parties, baby-sits the kids, cosigns the car loans, cooks the dinners, lays down the law, and intervenes with the cops, the social workers, and her board of directors on behalf of her sometimes prodigal daughters. There's also the occasional disgruntled pimp, like the one who showed up demanding his "bitch" back and threatening to blow up the house. It's hardly the Brady Bunch. But Hayman has managed to create the kind of family ties that most women in the project never knew.

TERRY IS A RARE EXCEPTION to the typical prostitute profile. She was raised in a middle-class Jewish home. Her father was a successful baker who moved his wife and three daughters from New York to Los Angeles when Terry, the youngest, was five. He died of a heart attack three years later. Terry's mother was a loving and devoted parent. But Terry started running with a fast crowd and by the time she graduated from high school, she had tried acid, heroin and cocaine.

Maybe if her overbearing older sister hadn't moved back home after her divorce, or maybe if her mother had survived the lung cancer, Terry would have stayed home longer and outgrown the streak. As it was, Terry moved in with a druggie boyfriend at 18. By the time her mother died, a year later, she was dealing for a living. It was the beginning of a 15-year spiral into addiction, crime, homelessness, jail and eventually, after she left her live-in boyfriend and lost both their sons to the state, prostitution. The boys, now 8 and 13, have been in foster care for four years.

"I didn't wake up one morning and say, I think I'll be a prostitute today," she says. But with her kids and boyfriend gone she started hanging out with Leslie, an old school friend who'd become a working girl on Sepulveda Boulevard. ""I just couldn't stand life. I'd go over to her apartment and we'd get loaded and pretty soon I was living there. I was looking for a job but I didn't know what I was going to do."

Other working girls were constantly through the apartment and they'd "tell stories about what these guys wanted them to do and how they dealt with it. And I thought, Well, maybe I could handle that. Eventually, when I ran out of scams, it was the thing to do."

Terry took a certain pride in doing her job well. She treated her clients right-she didn't rob or rush them-and she had lots of repeat customers to show for it. Lawyers were the best paying and most reliable. Sure, there were weirdos, like the guy who dressed up in women's lingerie and had Terry spank him. "But some were real gentlemen," she says. "There are just some real lonely men out there."
Terry was arrested three times in three years, and after the last arrest she spent several months in Sybil Brand, the Los Angeles County women's jail. It was during those bleak and sober months that she admitted she was burned out on life. "I started thinking, What are you gonna do when you get out of here?" she says. "In a couple of days you'll have no money and no place to go." She heard about the Mary Magdalene Project in a self-esteem class at the jail.

Like all newcomers, Terry was given a physical. Women aren't accepted into the program if they are using drugs or alcohol, or if they have severe mental health problems. The most common medical problems among the project's women aren't sexually transmitted diseases but chronic foot and back ailments and missing teeth. High heels, hard pavement, and johns who get rough are occupational hazards.

Terry took a series of aptitude tests; the project tries to steer women towards jobs that will pay at least $10 an hour. She thought about studying accounting, but a felony conviction for writing bad checks ruled that out. She settled on a course for legal secretaries at a vocational school and saw a notice for a law firm receptionist posted on the school's bulletin board. She finessed her resume, listing as references friends from Narcotics Anonymous who owned their own businesses. The pay was only $7 an hour, but the firm was small and Terry gambled--correctly, as it turned out--that they wouldn't run an extensive background check.

After more than a year at the firm, Terry still hasn't shared her past with her coworkers, and she probably never will. She tells them she rents a room from a Presbyterian minister, and that her two sons are better off living with their father for now.

With Hayman's help Terry started seeing her sons again shortly after she entered the program. Alex, the younger, was living with a foster family; Roy was in a group home. The fear that she wouldn't be able to get them back nearly cost Terry her place in the project because, for the first three months, whenever there was a set back with the foster care system, she'd go out and score some coke. The third and last time it happened was after a social worker suggested that Roy move into the Reseda house with Terry. Hayman vetoed the idea, arguing that Terry wasn't ready.

"I was pissed," says Terry. She stayed out all night doing coke with a friend. When Terry came back the next morning, "I couldn't even think about facing Ann," she says. "So I went upstairs and packed a bag. I didn't expect her to let me stay. But she was really understanding. She gives grace when she feels grace is due." In retrospect, Terry realizes that she wasn't ready for Roy to join her. "Ann was right," she says. "She usually is."

Terry hasn't had a relapse in more than a year now. Roy joined her at the project last December. She hopes to have Alex back soon. She hasn't told her sons yet that she used to be a prostitute. Alex is still a little young, but Roy will have to be told soon, and she isn't looking forward to it. "It's probably gonna be one of the roughest things I'll ever have to do," she says.

But Terry would rather focus on all she has to look forward to. When she graduates this summer, she'll have saved several thousand dollars, which she'll use to buy a car. And she has just completed a word processing course so she can earn extra money to support her family. "I see my life falling into place, and it's really exciting," says Terry. "Just sitting down and having a conversation with my kids without being under the influence. Making new friends. People actually liking me for who I am instead of for how much money or dope I have. I feel this big smile inside me all the time."

"These women have tremendous courage," says Ann Hayman. "You have to be strong-willed to survive, to even try." Hayman is proud of Terry's progress, but as always she is careful not to take credit for it. "That, she says, "belongs to the women themselves."

*The names of some prostitutes and their children have been changed to protect their privacy.