Leaving Breezy Street

by Brenda Myers-Powell

  “What’s up, Breeze? What you want?” And then I would open my coat up, and I would have on like little pasties and a G-string. Or I would have a little maid outfit on with no panties on. And they would crack up because they were just drug dealers, living life. They would let me in the drug house, and I would play with all the guys, and they would give me a lotta drugs and some money.

  So I’m kicking it with Chug-a-Lug, and he was selling drugs out of this little apartment he had in Crips territory. This girl, Oriana, was in there with us. We didn’t really have any beef. She was just a crackhead. I had already given her some drugs but didn’t really want to let her in. But I did. She was so scandalous, subject to do things that made you hurt her. The guys would say, “She’s too scandalous, so I had to hurt her.”

  But I said, “Nah, let her in. She’s my friend.” But she wasn’t. I used to think she was okay, because crack had a way of turning women into anything. Women would do anything for it. I never got to the point where I would do anything for crack, but I also knew I was walking that road, so I felt sorry for her. For me, there was a cutoff, but all around me there were folks who had surrendered. I would be the person who said, “Okay, today the day it’s just not for me to get. I can’t go that far.” But I had my share of bullshit I did. Some of it was embarrassing or degrading. But I never got to the point where guys could come up to me and ask me to do something so humiliating. They wanted to watch you have sex with a dog. I couldn’t get with that raggedy shit.

  Anyway, when Oriana left, she took Chug-a-Lug’s gold chain with her. Like I said, she was scandalous. And I’m like, well, you know. But then I saw her downstairs. So I asked her, “Why you take that fucking chain?” And the Crips and shit were all around us and those were her folks. I was talking crazy to her. I mean, I saw that that bitch was gone bolt, so I knocked her down. She got up, and we started fighting, and I whooped her ass. But see, if I was going to whoop her ass, I should have whooped her ass and then got up out of there. Because all of her people were there. She’s a Crip-a-lette. I was not. I’m from Chicago, still thinking I was with the Vice Lords. I needed to sit my ass down or get up out of there. I didn’t do that. I headed back upstairs to Chug-a-Lug’s. I heard the bottle when it broke. I heard somebody break a bottle. Then I heard footsteps. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Like somebody was running. I got up there to Chug-a-Lug’s to knock on the door, but before I could detect that anybody was running up behind me—because it was a dark stairway—she was all the way up on me, and she had that broken bottle in her hand. And I raised my arm to try to stop her, but the bottle cut my face. My nose was open. She opened up my face. Blood was shooting out my face like a fountain. Chug opened the door. I fell inside, bloody. I scared the shit out of him. The police came and the ambulance. I was so high. That was why I was losing so much blood; my adrenaline was high. The firemen were trying to calm me down. I was screaming like a pig, “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. I’mma die. I’mma die.”

  And this smartass fireman said, “Yeah, you is, if you don’t shut up.” Because they were looking at the situation: we were at a drug house, they knew I was high. They didn’t treat us right. They didn’t treat crackheads like human beings. I mean, they were like, “They’re crackheads. Who cares?” They took me to Killer King Hospital. There are some hospitals in California where everybody says, don’t go there. They’ll kill you up in there. But you know what? Killer King saved my life. Twice.

  I went there in the ambulance, and the ER doctor came in and looked at me, and he said, “You a pretty girl. Let me see if I can get somebody down here and see if they can fix your face, so that you won’t be disfigured for the rest of your life.”

  “Okay, anything.”

  There was a plastic surgeon on staff at the hospital. He came down, and I remember him saying, “If we stitch your face, it will disfigure you.” He was looking at the keloids on me already. “But if I butterfly it, and you take care of it, you’ll have a chance.” He butterflied my face, wrapped me up, and the hospital dropped me off at a shelter. They had an overflow of people there, but they couldn’t turn me away. They made me a pallet in the broom closet. They took out the mops and stuff. There was a bathroom across the hall. I guess I needed the privacy. And that’s where I laid down, because I had no place to go.

  They forgot I was there. I laid in that broom closet for two days. I had a lotta painkillers and shit in me, and I was tired. I actually peed on myself because I was knocked out. I was so embarrassed. But I didn’t know what my body was doing. But coming out that closet, and realizing that the people didn’t even know I was there, it was like … some shit can get to you. I thought, this is what happens to you when you are in pain and you’re disfigured. For a minute I thought, should I call my family? Should I let anybody know? But I made the decision not to, because why should I call them and upset them? I wasn’t doing anything for them. I did an inventory of what I had been up to. All the mistakes I had made a long list. What were my options? Where was I going to go? Who cared about me anymore? None of it was good. Everything I did was dependent on my appearance. I couldn’t figure out a way out of the situation I was in. When I came out of the closet and started walking around, the man at the counter asked me where I had come from. I told him, and he said, “Oh, shit. We forgot you were there.” He looked embarrassed. I told him I was alright, but I wasn’t. I began to feel as invisible and insignificant as it comes.

  Meanwhile, word got out this bitch cut up my face. I had to go back into the neighborhood with that. And that means now folks would think they could just come and whoop my ass anytime they felt like it. All I could think about was vengeance. Because the worst-case scenario was worse than worst. Folks were looking at me like I was an alien or like I was about to drop dead. People would give me a dollar or two out of pity. I hated the pity more than anything. And it was kind of like that for a minute—until I got better, because I wasn’t hanging with nobody until my face got better.

  But there was some guys around who really liked me. I had done some things for those brothers. I had set some of them up. They had gotten money from me, and I had helped them when they were on their last leg. And those same dudes went and whooped her ass because she thought she could go anywhere and cut a bitch up.

  One of the guys, he had just gotten out of the joint. He was buff. Fine and shit. I’m messing with him. I was always the kind who wanted to spoil somebody, give them my money and shit. That was me. Even though they weren’t asking me, I was still in that mentality that I had to pay for my friends, my men, and my love. I always bought friends and bought love. But this guy was real cool. I had given him seven hundred dollars, and he was gone and go get his package. I thought we were together. Come to find out, he really needed that money to go and see his kids and he had no way of getting there. When I found out what he really did with the money, his woman was the one who told me. We were in the hotel getting high together and she told me, “He went to the kids and gave them that money. You is where he got that money from.”

  “Yeah, that was me.” We were cool; we laughed about it.

  That guy was the one who knocked Oriana out.

  Then another dude who was really cool with me, and was a real gangster, came to me and said, “I’m gonna kill Oriana for you.”

  “Nah, don’t kill her,” I told him.

  Now what I did do was put this dude Barry on her who had HIV. I told him to take her to the hotel and stick it to her.

  Barry said, “I got you.” That was low. But it was low times.

  California was starting to catch up to me. My face had been cut open, Lynn had been killed, I couldn’t sell much sex because I was in such awful shape. Even when I tried to do the right thing, it came back at me twice as bad. Like when I testified against this dude for killing this prostitute friend of mine.

  Her momma came to me and said, “Breezy, don’t just let this go. Say something.” At the time I was with this guy named V-dub, and he had gone to jail, but bef
ore he left, he told the brothers in the hood, “Watch out for my girl.” Everybody knew I had seen that guy who killed my friend, but the police hadn’t caught him yet. I heard he was looking for my ass. So V-dub told the brothers in the neighborhood, “Don’t let anything happen to my baby.” So the dudes in the neighborhood found the guy before the police and they beat his ass down. Beat him with bricks and left him for dead, but he didn’t die. He was in a nursing home. The police weren’t really paying him any attention because he couldn’t walk. But he got better real fast and started walking and left that nursing home and was back out on the streets looking for me. I was being careful, trying to dodge him. And some people were protecting me. But then the police got the bright idea to lock me up. For my own protection, they told me. They kill me with that shit. Why they got to lock me up? Why can’t they lock up the man who was after me? So now I was locked up for my own protection—how does that sound? And this brother was out on the streets.

  Finally, I did testify against him. Later on, I found out John Hunt was the killer’s chief. I didn’t know that. I would have never testified if I had known that. John asked me about it later, and he said, “You know that’s one of my guys. I can’t believe you did it. You testified.” See, John didn’t believe I testified because people knew me. They knew I’d stand up. I hadn’t forgotten what Coolie taught me: never snitch.

  I told him why I did it: my friend’s momma had asked me to. John looked at me. “You know you can’t come out on the streets no more.”

  “Yeah. I pretty much know that.” I knew I was fair game, and he couldn’t help me now. I needed to figure out my next step.

  * * *

  I decided to try to stop taking drugs so I could be a better ho. First of all, it wasn’t really safe for me to hang around with the drug dealers. I couldn’t pop up to the drug houses like I used to. It got so bad, folks wouldn’t sell me any dope. Me and my friend, Momma Jelly, our feet were hurting. The only steady trick I had was the stalker, Alrick. This dude was staying with his momma, and he wanted me to come stay with them. He wanted me to get clean and marry him. Man, please. It was too much. This boy was crazy. I’m like, man, I’m just a ho on the streets. But I didn’t have a lot of choices. So we went to treatment, me and Momma Jelly.

  Momma Jelly stayed, but I left early, and I went back on the ho stroll. I developed this infection in my finger; I still have a discoloration on it right now. You know, when you cut up that cocaine all the time with a razor, you can get an infection. I always used this finger to cut up cocaine and I had gotten all this bacteria in it.

  One day, I was in so much pain, I couldn’t believe it. I took some crack to help with the pain. Momma Jelly was telling me I was relapsing. But really, I didn’t want to be clean in the first place. She was all in tears. She got me to go back into the little treatment stuff at the Salvation Army. And that bitch called my brothers. I go to this recovery home in South Central and I get a call the third day I am there.

  “Telephone.”

  “Okay, who is it?” It was my brother. It was Todd.

  “Hey, girl. Listen. I’m ’bout to go to the airport right now, get your ticket, and I’m going to call you back with everything. You come on home. You come on home now.”

  I was bawling like a baby. How many years? It was about fourteen years, because I left in 1980 and it was ’94 now. I had been gone all that time. When I had last left Chicago, my brother gave me his money, and I was supposed to come back but I didn’t. They kicked him out his place because I didn’t show up with his money. I couldn’t face him, so I decided to go to another town. But even with all that, he still sent for me.

  I got on that plane. I just left. I didn’t say goodbye to anybody. I didn’t tell none of the girls left in the Do-Low Crew I was leaving. There was nothing for me to pack up or pick up. My name was trash on the streets, and John Hunt couldn’t protect me. I needed to get out of California. My brothers, on the other end of the phone, told me to come on home.

  * * *

  I will say one good thing about all that mess I did in California. No one brings up your past—because they did the dirt with you. I don’t have too many people who are still able to call me. But if you don’t die, if you make it to the other side, there is redemption, and it comes to you in phone calls, and clips on Facebook, and hellos at picnics. I’m still friends with my stalker. Hey, Brenda Myers, this is your friend. How are you in Chicago? I was at the airport and I was thinking of you. I hope you and your family are doing well. His family call me. Alrick’s family adored me. Jamaican people. They call and say, “Girl, we so proud.”

  Spud, my little sweetie, called me one night. “Hey, baby, I seen you on TV. I’m telling my fiancée, you used to be my girlfriend.”

  “How you doing, Spud?” And he put his girlfriend on the phone. She laughed and told me hello.

  People still hang with me, because I’m a lotta fun to be with. Brothers remember that shit: “Baby, you was a lotta fun.” I don’t have anybody who I’m not alright with. That’s living. If you can make it, if you don’t die, such kindness can come to you. It almost makes those awful times worth it. Almost.

  Chapter 17

  Madison Street

  I came back to Chicago in 1994, stayed with my brother, went to Harold Washington College, and got my Certified Nursing Assistant degree. Graduated top of the class and started my internship at Cook County Hospital. I was working with these Jewish people out near Skokie. You know, those people take care of their old parents. I was making a lotta money. I was doing real good. I wasn’t close with my girls, but when Prune came by to see her uncle Todd, she said hello to me. Peaches was almost out of college. They both knew I was trying to make it work.

  Those old ladies I was working with were just as crazy as they could be, but they were sweet. They used to call me their girl. One lady, she had sundowns. All day we would kick it, but then at sundown she would start regressing. I would knock on the door and let myself in, and she would look at me and whisper, “Hey, there’s a Negro in the house.”

  Her daughter looked her and said, “That’s Brenda, Momma. Don’t call her a Negro.” I told her I wasn’t upset, she didn’t know. That old lady was funny. She looked like that old lady on The Golden Girls because she used to carry around this little straw purse.

  I worked with this old man who pinched on my titty while I gave him his Medicare baths. I looked at him like, Mister, but he just giggled and kept at it. Dirty old man. But I liked those old people. And I liked the money. I liked that my daughters were starting to thaw toward me.

  But I liked dope even more. I missed my old life. I started getting high again.

  You know, all that time I was clean and going to school, I don’t think I was really doing that for myself. I was doing it for my family. I wanted them to be able to say, Brenda’s doing good now. But I wasn’t ready to stop. Didn’t nobody pull me out there. I stepped out there. I set myself up. I got back out there, and I was news in the neighborhood again. I stopped going to my job because I wasn’t ready to stop hoing. I was addicted to the lifestyle. I liked the fast guys, the fast money. I wasn’t ready to be Brenda. I was still Breezy. Breezy was worldly and dangerous. Being a square, working a job, that was like wearing a costume. Life on the streets was my real life. Breezy was the real me. I needed to get back out there.

  So much had changed since I last strolled Madison Street. I heard Coolie was selling drugs. When I went back home, I ran into him there. Coolie had gotten on heroin, but you couldn’t see it. Then word was he had a stroke, and he never came back from it. Nobody told me because I wasn’t connected with people in the game anymore, but I found out through the grapevine that he passed away. They told me that at the end he was down at the shelter. Even now, I still think about Coolie. There’s something about him I can’t shake. “I gotta walk away from love”—that’s David Ruffin, and Coolie used to sing that to me. When I think of him, I remember how much music we had in our house. Coolie wa
s a hand-holding man, and he loved it when I followed him around. I went to jail for Coolie. Gladly.

  But it was more than just Coolie who had changed and passed away. The last time I was in Chicago, I had hung out with my cousin Deborah. She had a pimp named Cold Jones. There weren’t too many women I was allowed to go out with. Cold and Coolie controlled our lives. Anyway, we hung out and went out every Sunday to the North Side, the nice part of Chicago, and out to the nice restaurants. It was our Sunday out, and we could do what we wanted to do. We would sit at the bar and eat cheese, drink wine, and be toasty as hell, then go eat something. Maybe stop at a lounge on the way home. Sunday was ours.

  I didn’t hook back up with Deborah when I got back out there. I tried to look up Jackie, but I found out she died when I was off in California. Overdose. When I left Madison Street, it was my street. But coming back after California, I realized it didn’t have as many stores as it used to have when I was a child. It still had a bustle and a swing. It was still the place where everybody shopped. But it wasn’t the same. There was a tailor shop over Mr. Kim’s wig store, and everybody would go and get their clothes tailored there. I was Miss Thang on Madison Street. I was known for my jazzy walk, tiny waist, big booty. Here I go: “Hi!” That was what Madison was to me before I left. I had a lotta fans on Madison. Maybe that was why I got back out there. I missed the excitement of my past.

  * * *

  So I left what was supposed to be my good-news story and headed back to hoing. There I was, the frontline story.

  I went to do this trick on Cicero. He was a little country guy. He was hilarious. I was coming down the street, and he was standing in the alley. And he was like, “Oh, girl.” I was thick. Nice thick. “Where you going?”