Leaving Breezy Street

by Brenda Myers-Powell

  Finally, I said, “Wait a minute. Why I gotta be a dumb bitch?” I wasn’t no punk or nothing.

  She turned to me and said, “Shut up, bitch. Young-ass, jazzy, jump-in-the-car-with-a-crazy-motherfucking P, young-ass bitch!”

  I was like, “Huh?”

  She said, “Yeah, you jump in the car with a cracked-up pimp and then you come in the house and see my arm broke and Sandra got a black eye and your ass ain’t ran! Don’t you see what’s happening here? You a goddamned fool.”

  That’s just how that went. That was how silly I was, and that’s how I know my girls today. I know how stupid they can get. I was there for a minute before Tommy Knox showed me he was a sociopath who had psychopathic tendencies. He was a maniac.

  Here’s what I know: some pimps have to be the bitch inside of them. They have to be weak and hateful. It’s some type of deep-down, incorrect relationship with a woman that has him twisted around. Sometimes pimps get lucky, and they fall in love with a real bitch who can handle them. But those women had to be some cold-ass bitches, because sometimes that pimp didn’t want to love. Or maybe she loved him, but she wasn’t no punk, and they came through that nonsense together, and then they found out that they really loved each other and knowing that they loved each other ate their ass up. Sometimes a pimp and a bitch turned out okay together because it seemed like it couldn’t work no other way. Jackie loved Tommy Knox to death. It was something in their relationship that was like nobody else’s. They were together for like thirty years. She knew what he needed, before he said so. He knew how to soothe Jackie before she bust a cap in his ass.

  Tommy Knox was good at that. Tommy Knox knew almost everything about all his ladies. When I was with him, we had little apartments all through this two-story building. There were two apartments in the basement. There were four apartments on the first floor and four apartments on the second floor. All of them were kitchenette apartments. You would let the bed out the wall, and once you pushed the bed up, you had a little sitting area. Tommy and Jackie had the first-floor apartment in the front; we also had the apartments in the back. That’s where he put me because he said I was the baby.

  And I was a baby, and he treated me how I should have been treated. He used to call me Dirty Red. Most times he treated me like a kid. “Go sit down somewhere,” he’d tell me. “Don’t say nothing. Eat this.” I was supposed to give him a hundred percent of the money, and then he would give me an allowance. But Tommy was difficult. He’d forget to give me the allowance, and when I asked for money, he’d give me a hard time about it. If somebody came through with food stamps to sell, he’d give us that and let us go grocery shopping. I always held back a little and spent it on records, soda pop, lunch at the diners. Jackie taught me to do that. She held back her money to get high before she got high with Tommy Knox.

  I had been with him six months when I tore his car up. He had this Cadillac, and I’m driving it, trying to let everybody know this was my pimp’s Cadillac. I jumped in there to move the car, but I didn’t know how to drive. Stupid me. All the pimps who were there were looking at me like, “That bitch dead.” The next day, Jackie told me one of the pimps said, “Man, we ain’t gone see that bitch again.” Another said, “Oh man, I know him. She dead. That bitch done tore that Cadillac up, man.” Everybody knew what had happened in the whole ho/pimp game. I went to jail that night, and even the folks in there knew about it. “Ain’t you the one who tore the car up?” I heard some wife talking about it from the cell: “This crazy young bitch decides she wanna be a truck driver and run into something.”

  Finally, I couldn’t take any more. “Bitch, I hear you talking about me, ho! Ask me how much money I got, bitch, while you talking.”

  I knew I was in trouble, so I stayed on the streets working for five days until I had a thousand dollars to give Tommy Knox for the car damages. Nobody could get money like me. At least you could say I was the best street trainee in the world. Ma’Dea had made me tough, and Jackie got me street ready. Jackie was like a big sister to me. She told me how to act around Tommy Knox, and I learned not to say nothing out the way. Unfortunately, Jackie didn’t take her own advice. She took whoopings for me. She even took the blame for tearing up the Cadillac. Be quiet, girl, but she loud-mouthed Tommy Knox in a minute. Tommy Knox always used to beat Jackie more than he beat me.

  I mean, Tommy used to walk up to her and be like, “What’s up bitch?” Boom, boom. Boom, boom.

  I was on the steps crying. “Why you hit her?”

  “Bitch, shut up and go upstairs.”

  I was crying, “He gone kill her. He gone kill her.” I was the baby. I was just up there in my apartment, traumatized. But I was also loving it, loving all this drama going on.

  Tommy was a drug addict. Jackie was a dope fiend some of the time, too. They nodded off: heroin, pills, syrup, Robitussin, anything that was a nod. They didn’t care. But when Jackie stayed sober, we used to have all kind of adventures. Once, we were out strolling and we saw Mailbox Mary. I had met Mailbox Mary in jail. She was a white woman with brown hair. Mailbox Mary could have been in her thirties, but she looked older than that. We used to call her “crazy white ho” because, first of all, Mailbox Mary didn’t have a pimp. She wasn’t attractive, and the pimps called her a crazy bitch, too. Anyway, the hos found out about the envelopes and how she used to mail the money she made on the streets back to herself. She was this careful white woman. She didn’t get picked up and put in jail like the rest of us.

  We would be in the bullpen, and of course, there was always a power struggle when you were in lockup—there were the bitches that ran it and the bitches who got it. Say, for instance, if me, Jackie, and Sandra were in the bullpen together and another ho was there. Okay, that girl is not in our family. So when she went off to sleep, we would check and see if she had any money in her shoe or in her bra. We gone take that money. Because, in that bullpen, we are the aggressors. Now, if I am in the bullpen alone, I got to be careful. If I went in there by myself, I didn’t go to sleep. If you did, you woke up with a shoe heel in your head. They were wearing those platforms back then. You’d wake up, and a girl would have bust you in your head. They would steal your money, your brand-new boots. Anyway, Mailbox Mary would be in jail, and it was crazy. She’d be standing up in the corner; she knew better than to go to sleep. She was tall as hell. And girls would be getting mad. “Sit down, bitch, you making me nervous.” And Mailbox would just fall down in the corner and say, “I ain’t falling asleep around you bitches.”

  If we thought she was asleep, we would sneak up on her. But she was playing possum. She’d start screaming, “AHHH! Guards!” And then the guards would come and they would put her in a bullpen by herself. Then in the morning, when we all went to court, bitches would throw their old bologna sandwiches at her. Mary would be in the corner hissing at us. So one day, me and Jackie were on the North Side and we saw her. We were going to catch her before she got to the mailbox. Mailbox Mary took off. Down the block, vroom, around the corner. We couldn’t catch her. That ho slammed into the mailbox and slapped her envelope in.

  You know, everybody talked shit about her. Some hos said Mailbox made a lot of money. Some hos thought she didn’t make that much, but they underestimated her. But no matter what, Mailbox was out there. She had her regulars. She was out there for something; she wasn’t just out there to get abused. I’ll tell you what: she knew how to get that money to that mailbox. And when I start thinking about the relationship between prostitutes and pimps, I stop thinking that Mailbox was a dumb bitch. Maybe she was the smartest one of us out there. Maybe we were the dumb ones, because no one was taking Mary’s money. You could count the times when someone found money on Mailbox Mary. That bitch always made it to the mailbox. Jackie and I had to find other things to do besides spending all of our time chasing after the lone white prostitute.

  One time, we were working and ran into a hotel on Lake Street. We ran through this hotel if the police were hot, and we walked down
the hallways to see what was happening. We would see a door ajar, open it up, and peek in, cause we were always in them hotel rooms. Try to catch somebody sleeping. There was a white lady knocked out across the bed. She had a mink coat on the chair, and there were two-gallon bottles, like the kind they have in the pharmacy, of syrup, and a whole bunch of other stuff. She had come there to buy drugs and Lord knows what all. She had a lotta money, too.

  We stole the money, the drugs, the mink coat, slipped out the back door, and went home. Jackie and I stood at the front door, and I made a decision. I had never tried this kind of dope in my life because I was taught that out in the game, you never wanted to be a drug-addict prostitute. I didn’t even work in the vicinity of them. I still thought I was going to be something important. I thought I was going to run into this fantastic, rich-ass trick who was going to take me away from all of this. And I would be a kept woman somewhere. I would have everything I need. But at home with Jackie and Tommy, I wanted to fit in. All the time, I was left out. Everybody was nodding and getting high, and it seemed like they were communicating. They were down there nodding, and all I was doing was staying in my room listening to music. I was left out, even though I was the money getter. So this time, I stood at the front door with Jackie with all our treasure and I thought, Y’all not leaving me out this time. And I drank syrup with them.

  At the end of the week, my back was hurting and I told Tommy Knox, “Something’s wrong with me. I can’t describe it.” I told him how I was feeling.

  “Bitch, you got a habit.” He closed the door on my face.

  I stood there in the hallway thinking, What? I went up to my room. It was Tennessee’s, the country pimp, old place. He and his woman had the upstairs front apartment. Tennessee was country, but they had everything laid out up there with a whole seventies look. They had shag carpet, the beanbag, the beads separating the kitchen from the living room, the crushed velvet bedspread. It was funky; it was cool. Tennessee and his woman left town, and I asked the landlord could I get that apartment. I was glad I did. I loved it up there, my little own seventies domain. I spent a lot of time up there by myself. I opened the door, and I started crying, cause I felt like, I guess, a dope fiend. This is how it feels to be a dope fiend? I needed some more syrup, but I wasn’t gone let my body do that to me. So I took a laxative and I drank a lotta apple juice. That whole weekend I didn’t come out and make any money cause I was up there messed up. And Tommy was downstairs, high as always, so it wasn’t like he was keeping tabs on me. I was upstairs in my little apartment, kicking it.

  Jackie started doing as much dope as Tommy Knox. I loved her, but that bitch was a professional nodder. I used to be working with her sometimes, watching her back, and I was thinking to myself, why this bitch taking so long? One time, I went back there and there she was nodding off on a trick’s schlong. And the trick was sitting up there in the car, looking like, Come on now.

  He looked at me and said, “Wake this bitch up! This ho’s done went to sleep on my dick.”

  I started tapping on the window, “Girl, wake up! You spose to be dating this man!” Jackie tried to wake up, and I got her out of the car.

  Every time she pulled that stunt, I got her home some kind of way. But Jackie couldn’t get too high for me. She was my girl, my big sister. And I was a little girl. She protected me. She could sing, too. Jackie Webb. Everybody in the game could tell you about Jackie Webb. Back in the day, they knew about her.

  Jackie and I used to be together all the time, getting into this and that because I still had connections to the stores on Madison Street. Madison was still the ghetto shopping area for the West Side. Now it’s a bunch of beauty supplies, but back in the day it was shoe stores and Three Sisters, Learner’s Shop and Goldblatt’s. Stores that were bustling and we bought everything from them. Everybody went to Madison at the first of the month to spend money, and folks were selling stuff out of the trunk of their cars. Folks selling bootleg shit and socks and whatever your pleasure. There’s a hot-dog stand here and there. People would be piled on top of each other. Somebody would tell you that was thirty dollars, and when you walked away, they would say they would give it to you for ten. That was the beat of Madison Street. I could go up there without a dime and come back with bags. Jackie and I used to go—she used to wake me up early in the morning, cause she dug the fact that I had these connections and we could go up there and shop. “Let’s go up there on Madison,” she said.

  “Alright. I ain’t seen them in a while.”

  I had one named Bob who used to work at Bakers shoe store. We used to load up on shoes. I had a good Korean guy at the wig store. And the dude wasn’t my trick, it was just that I could go and talk him out of anything. Sometimes he just gave me free wigs to get me out of his store; I was talking so much slang. His name was Mr. Kim; he was cool.

  On this particular day, we were kicking it. We had got our little outfits and we were sharp. So we had decided to go out in the streets. Let’s work early. Tommy Knox didn’t really care. He didn’t know if we were in the house or not. He was in there nodding with that fat-ass Teko and that old man Fred. Oh my God, let me tell you about those two. Old man Fred: he looked like something out this Snoop Dogg movie. Old-ass dusty dude. He was a pimp, and he had one bitch, and she never made any money. She was always locked up. The only time he had money was the first of the month, when they got a check from the government. He was a leech. If Tommy got to snorting, Fred snorted with him.

  The other dude was this big fat Yogi Bear type, Teko. He used to nod standing up. I remember him because my job was to make sure they didn’t burn up the house. All of them would drop their cigarettes when they nodded off. Tommy would wake up and the mattress would be on fire. The mattress smoldering—that’s how their nod was. They left me to take care of it because I didn’t do no drugs. Milkshake and a hamburger and I was tight.

  When they got around Tommy Knox, they got into his mentality. They wanted to say anything to us. I was glad when Jackie looked at them and said, “You can’t just say shit to me. You ain’t Knox, man.” She just cussed them out real bad. “You stanking-ass, ugly-ass punk. All you do is hang around here and hold his dick while he nod off.” Of course, then Knox got up and knocked her down. “This disrespectful, bitch.”

  But Jackie said what she needed to say.

  * * *

  So that’s where I lived. Living and loving it up with Jackie, but Tommy Knox was always there to remind me how harsh it was. The longer I stayed, the worse he got. It was like he couldn’t help himself. I will never forget the first time he beat me with that half a pool stick. Right in front of me, he sawed it in two and wrapped it in black tape. I was in there talking to him. I could detect there was some sinister thoughts going on, but I was just thinking this brother high and talking. But when he got through taping that pool stick up, he said, “Come on in the back, Red.” He took me in the back apartment and started beating me. He stood in front of the door so I couldn’t get out. I was trying to protect my face and my body with my arms. He beat my arms up real bad. I had so many bruises on me. He had me take my clothes off while he beat me. Then he locked me in the bathroom. I climbed out the window and ran to the neighbors’ house and knocked on the door. It was a couple’s house and the husband came to the front. I didn’t know them.

  I was naked and I was knocking on the door. “Can you help me?” He stared at me; then he looked back into the house.

  I heard his wife say, “Who is it, baby?”

  “It’s a naked woman from next door.”

  She came to the door and let me in.

  I said, “Could you help me?”

  Tommy Knox beat me with that pool stick because that was all he knew. He used to beat Jackie like that, for no reason. With Sandra, he went over to her apartment across the hall sometimes and just tighten her up, just whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. He was brutal with women. “I can’t stand funky bitches,” he used to say. “I don’t give a shit about a funky-ass bitch.�
� And yet he had hos.

  We had no self-esteem, and we allowed him to talk to us like that. But after I went through that, I knew it was time to get out. I just didn’t know how to do it. Something needed to push me out the door. I was just as shocked as anybody with what went down next.

  * * *

  Jackie got gang-raped by gangsters. Jackie had a smart-ass mouth. There were a whole lotta smart-ass-mouth bitches out there, but sometimes you don’t realize who you talking to, and you ain’t spose to be talking to everybody that way. Gangsters were out there hollering at Jackie; Jackie hollered something back. Out there in Lake Street. Lake and Central. There was a lot of traffic up there. The el train was coming through. Then them dudes heard Jackie saying, “You faggot motherfucker.” The whole gang went around the corner and snatched Jackie in the car, and they took her to an alley and raped her.

  After them gangsters were done with her, she ran back to Tommy Knox, who was off in the back nodding off, like always. Jackie told him, “You need to do something and fast.” He said, “Let’s go round these punks.” Not “Let me go bury these brothers,” but “Let’s go round these punks.”

  So they ganged up—old man Fred and Teko and Tommy. They went up there and shot out the gangsters’ car with a .22. I mean, with a .22? That’s a little-ass gun. What they should have done was went out there with a BOOM-BOOM gun, make a building shake. After it went down, that .22 was all the neighborhood talked about. I mean everybody was saying, “He did a drive-by with a .22? What kind of mess was that?” I was getting an earful. On the ho stroll, when I went to jail, everybody was talking about how somebody shot up the gangsters’ car with a .22 and the gang was out there looking for the dudes who did it.