“Nowhere,” I said. “What you doing?”
“I live right there.”
“Okay, that’s nice.”
“You gone come sit down for a minute?”
I had to go get my check from my job, but I was like, Forget that check. I said, “Yeah, I wanna come sit down.” I mean, I wanted a check, but of course I wanted to sit down with him a minute even more. He didn’t know it, but he was inviting me back to my old life. It was an invitation I couldn’t say no to.
One thing led to another, and now I was staying with him. Everybody was teasing him because he had a ho living with him. But I didn’t care what they felt because before I left, everybody in that apartment complex liked me. At first, his landlord kept on telling him, “She gotta go.” But by the end, the landlord was like, “You okay, Breezy?”
I was still living on Cicero when I saw Sonny. I was out strolling for some money, and here he comes, looking swell. He had just gotten out of the penitentiary. I thought he was the finest thing. Pretty brown skin. He had finger waves in his head, he was cut. I was like, Oh God. I was like, I need that man.
He was giving out testers—and he handed me a bag of heroin. “I don’t do those kinds of drugs,” I told him, and I gave him the bag back.
He said, “Okay, you don’t need that, then.”
“What’s your name?”
“My name’s Sonny, baby. You?”
“You can call me Breezy.” He left and the girl he was with stayed behind.
I turned to her. “Is he a pimp?” She told me who he was, and I said, “I like him. I’m gone get him. Let me go get me some money.”
So I went and got me some money, and I looked for him for about a couple of weeks. I finally found him. I was up there near Augusta, and he was in this liquor store. I went in and I said, “Hey!”
“Hey, girl.”
“I been looking for you.”
“Well, here I am.”
“Yes, you are. With your fine ass.”
“I’m going to this clubhouse over here.”
“Can I come back and see you?”
“Yeah.”
So I went on inside the little clubhouse with Sonny, and now we were flirting with each other. I told him all about me, and Sonny was telling me how he gets down, what kind of brother he was. Stuff like that. He said to me, “Well, how you get down?”
“I get money. Do you?”
He started laughing. “Yeah. I got a little product to sell right now.”
“You do? How much you got?”
“I got rocks.”
“I said, how much you got?”
“How much you need?”
“How much you got, for real?”
“I don’t know. Let me see.” And he reached down into his pocket. “I got about three, four hundred dollars’ worth.”
“Give me all of that.”
“Oh. You got it like that?” He leaned back and started laughing. I knew what he was thinking: this big-booty bitch just doing it. Showing out.
He gave me all of what he had, and I got a lump, and this brother saw me peel off money. I gave him five hundred. “Here. Make it light on yourself.” Of course, I knew he wanted my ass.
“Okay. Okay. You ready to do something with a nigga?” he said.
“Shoot. You the only one sitting here.”
“Let me get us a ride.” He didn’t have a car because he had just gotten out the joint. He got a dude’s ride, and he took me to this hotel that was on Madison Street that was called the Grand. “So you and I gone do something?”
“You got something for me?”
“You know it.” I reached down and gave him the lump, which was about twelve hundred dollars.
“I like a lady like you. Girl, you gone make me fall in love.” I knew that was bullshit, but I also knew I had impressed this pimp. He left and was gone some hours. Then he came back, and he got in bed with me. We spent the night together. Usually, Sonny didn’t just jump into bed with girls, but I had come on pretty strong. So the next night, we were getting ready to go out, and he introduced me to this other woman named Bridget. I got in the car with her because I knew I had to take control of this situation. I needed to let this bitch know who I was. What’s going on was just a mind game between two women, and I’d played it so many times it was clockwork to me. I jumped in the car, looking at her. On a good day, she wasn’t as sharp as I was. Her good day would be my worst day.
Sonny introduced us, and then she looked at me and said, “I ain’t in on all that.” I grabbed her by her face and stuck my tongue down her throat and kissed her.
I said, “Come here, baby. You my motherfucking bitch now.”
Sonny cracked up. She was furious. “Don’t be doing that! Don’t be doing that!”
“You know you like that shit,” I told her. “I know you a freak.”
Sonny looked at us both and said, “Breezy’s something else. She strong.”
It was just a matter of mind games and letting a bitch know you. We went and got a hotel room and played around. Sonny had bought me some rock and didn’t get her nothing. Cause she wasn’t making the money I made. I was hitting this dude with money.
So I was sitting there putting my makeup on and my wig on, and this bitch put her cigarette out in my pop can. I reached over to get it and all I had was ashes in my mouth.
I turned around, “Bitch, you put your cigarette out in my pop can?” Boom. Boom. I start hitting that ho.
Sonny crossed the room. “Oh, I got to keep my tiger in a tank somewhere.”
He was talking about me because he knew I wasn’t playing with Bridget. I came in and claimed my turf. I took his ass from that bitch. Now, let me tell you something: he had known this bitch for years before I came. He still liked that bitch. But he could not turn down the type of money that I was bringing. He separated from her completely and was with me. Bridget was making good flat-back money—three hundred, four hundred—but I was coming up with fifteen hundred, two thousand, three thousand dollars on a lick. Every week. It was back-to-back, seven hundred, eight hundred. My money looked like that. She couldn’t compete. She never could. And money, that’s our power on the street. Like being the lioness with the lion. And we were together, until we weren’t no more.
I mean, I had spent all that time in California without a pimp, so when I hooked up with Sonny, it was nice. I had company again. It’s nice to have a pimp and have somebody in control. I had somebody I could go and share my shit with, instead of spreading it all over the street. I became prostitute legal then. And the thing about being on the streets, if you ain’t got nobody, other pimps put their hands on you because they could. If you get a real pimp that other people know, nobody will mess with you. I mean, if you hoing without any representation, you could be sitting up and not bothering nobody and a pimp can come in and pop you in the mouth. “Bitches need to break they self.” And I knew they were talking about me because I was the only bitch in there who didn’t have a man. And these dudes weren’t even pimps, they just acting up because they knew about me. I mean, men would take my money if they had a gun. That’s how guys would do you.
The thing was, after California, I was a bitch who really liked to squabble. One time, I was hanging out with this young girl used to be out there, kind of like a goofy me. We were out there with her man and all of us decided it was time to cop some drugs. You know when you out there, you give your money to the guy who can point out the guy who has the drugs, but before we started any transaction, I used to tell them, “Listen, if he ain’t got no drugs, I’mma come back and whoop your ass.” I was about to give some random dude some money and the other guy who pointed him out to me had to guarantee that he was, in fact, a drug dealer. Sure enough, this time the drug dealer disappeared. I turned around to the guy who had pointed him out. “I told you.”
He said, “I ain’t got nothing to do with that. Maybe he’ll be back in a minute.” I looked at that man and didn’t say nothing to him.
I went over to a car with some light-skinned dude behind the wheel.
I said, “You got a piece in your car?”
“Naw, I got a bat. What you gone do?” But he popped the trunk and gave me the bat. I went over and got two good ones in before he went vroom.
I looked around. “Anybody that fuck with my motherfucking money, understand!”
A friend came and got me. “Come on, Breezy. Let’s go get you some money, cause you gone wind up and whip the whole motherfucking block.”
Everybody has a pressure point—even in the game, you have a pressure point. You either get your ass whipped out there, or you whip some ass. You either let folks know that ain’t you, or it will be you. Sometimes you just take the bump that day. And that day, I didn’t feel like it. There were days when I didn’t feel like it. I would never tell a person that I was a total victim out there in the streets. Some days I was a victim and some days I was a victimizer. You cannot survive in the game and not be a predator, too. There were some days when I felt like everybody better watch out because I was out for mine by any means necessary. It can get dangerous for you with that mentality. It’s such a negative energy. It’s all over you. I have turned tricks and gotten into tricks’ cars with such venom inside of me that I intimidated them so much they asked me to get out of their car, but it was too late because you let me in—and now I wanted all of your money. You weren’t giving me a few fews and twos. White boys always had a real bad habit of reaching into their pocket and saying, “Here, take this and get out.” Oh, yeah? I need all that. There is something that you start to be out there, that you don’t want to be—but it pops up without your permission.
So I might have been a badass out there in the street or with Bridget, but that didn’t mean I didn’t get hurt out there.
The first time I got shot, I was next to Italian Beef’s Restaurant, right there on the corner. Here’s what happened. The potato chip man used to drop his deliveries off there, and I was always flirting with him. One day, I was standing by the end of the restaurant, where there was an alley, doing my thing, when I saw the potato chip man coming my way. He was doing his delivery, and I whispered to him, “Meet me in the alley.” He drove down the alley, and I walked on in there, and I did my thing with the potato chip man. That was the first time he had ever hooked up with me, and I bet he wished he had never dated my ass, cause I took all his money. I stole the little white bag of money that was under his seat.
When I got out of his little truck, I was trying to get down the alley because I had stuffed the sack of money down between my legs. I had the date money in my hands—two twenties, forty dollars—and I was almost down to the end of the alley and here came another guy, and he pulled a gun on me. The potato chip man was gone. The dude took the money in my hands and said, “Gone in this garage.”
I said, “I ain’t going in this garage, nigga. No.”
“You better get in that garage.”
“I’m not going in no garage. What you gone do? Rob me and make me suck your dick? Give me my money back and I’ll suck your dick.”
“I ain’t giving you shit back.” He started laughing.
“Well, fuck you, then. The gun ain’t real no way.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No, it ain’t.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No, it ain’t.”
POW. I said, “Okay.”
He shot me. In my pinkie toe. The bullet went in right there.
“Okay, where you want me to suck your dick, for real.”
“Fuck you, you crazy.”
“No, I ain’t. I’m not crazy, nigga. You the one crazy.”
“I’m getting away from you.” See, I was kind of tipsy off that Wild Irish Rose. That shit makes you fight. Fight a telephone pole, if you want to. So now I was hopping down the alley, shot in my boot. I went to the corner by the restaurant, and I grabbed the pay phone and called 911 and the ambulance to come get me. Then I called my man Sonny. And that’s the first time I got shot.
I was laid up for a minute after that. I remember, Sonny came back to the hotel room to check on me. “Guess what? I just saw Big Neecy.” Big Neecy, Denice, was a friend of mine. “Guess what she did?”
“What?”
“That bitch just gave me three hundred dollars. She told me, ‘Go take care of my friend.’”
I’ll never forget that woman. She died in my arms. She had been in the joint, and she had gotten out of jail. She wasn’t the most attractive girl, but she made a lotta money. Me and her used to sneak off when we wanted to get high. I was with Sonny and she was with this pimp name Steve Yo. When she used to take a hit off the cocaine, she would freak out. “Get it off me! Get it off me!” She’d start shaking all over.
I’d let her trip for a little bit, but then the people around us would say, “Stop her from doing that.”
“Leave her alone. She okay.” I would look at her and say, “Look at me. Look at me! Ain’t nothing on you. Take a drink of this wine. Drink this wine.” She’d drink the wine down. “Calm down, bitch. Calm down.”
Then she would look around. “Bitch, where my shit at?”
“I got it, bitch. Sit down.” People would take her shit when she was high like that. “You got to calm down off this one first.”
Anyway, because getting shot meant I wasn’t able to work, Sonny put Bridget to work and got a replacement for me. She was ugly. He came back to the hotel and told me, “You know what I just did? I just sat on the ho stroll for five straight hours and didn’t nan bitch break luck. One too ugly and one too high.” I started laughing because that wasn’t my MO when I was out there. He couldn’t damn near drive around the corner before I would be ready to go.
“I’m ready to go”—that’s what he was used to. I could go to a guy’s car, lean in, and talk to them, play with them. “Say, what you got down there?” I would be playing with his penis, but with my other hand I would steal his money. Once you have their wang in your hand, you got all their attention. Listen. I should write a book about Mr. Peter. I need to. Just like Steve Harvey wrote about relationships? I need to write a one-eyed monster book. And I can tell women how to handle that shit, how that shit goes, how you can be the queen. There are so many things you have to know how to do out there that relate to the weakness of men. And what they like. Listen: if a trick comes out on the street and leaves their house, tells their wife, “I’m going to go get a pack of cigarettes,” and she says, “Take the baby with you, so that the baby can ride and go to sleep,” and he’s riding around with his baby in the car, his seed, his child, and he tells you to get in and suck his Johnson while his baby is in the back seat, who is in control? His wang. He has stepped outside the safety of his child, and that’s what I knew. And I knew, when I stepped outside and was going to get somebody’s money, I knew the one-eyed monster was in control out there. That’s some cold shit to see. Me and some girls had gotten to a point where we said no to those tricks. We started hollering at them. We threw shit at their car. Sometimes we would tell the police, “He got a baby in that car.” We wanted to shame them so they would get out of there.
Folks want to make us the most awful things on earth. When you say prostitute, people think “nasty bitches.” But what about these nasty men who come to these nasty bitches? These men went through some changes to get to me. He came from the suburbs, he came down the highway, he had to do some shit. There were some things they had to do to pick me up. Some chances he had to take. And your wang said, “Fuck it. Let’s go for it.” People always trying to make it okay for these guys, but hos are the most awful people in the world. But that’s just not true. Bitches just looking for love in all the wrong places. And we get caught up with these guys who take advantage of us. People think, oh, these girls decide to do this, this is their choice. But what was her choice when she first started? Was it her choice then? Was she coerced? Was she kidnapped? Before this became her choice, she’s four years old and she’s gotten into this so ear
ly she doesn’t know what a choice is. I know that for a fact, because I was forced into so many different types of relationships before I got clean. Lord knows, I had to go through so much trouble before I was able to get to the other side.
Even when I wasn’t looking for trouble, for hurt, it found me. Like when I got shot the second time, three bullets in the arm. The Million Man March was going on and Sonny said he was going, but actually he was going to a bitch in St. Louis. But he wanted me to believe, like I was that dumb, that a pimp was going to the Million Man March. Said that to my face.
So I got this trick, and we were staying up at Sonny’s sister Lois’s house. The trick got me and Lois high. We made a run, but on the way back, we had a car accident. I didn’t stay because there was a warrant out for me for prostitution. I ducked down the alleyway, and Lois and the trick stayed there for the police because the trick said he had insurance. After all that, they came back to the house and we continued to get high. When he was coming to the end of his money, I felt it was time for him to go. I didn’t keep tricks around who didn’t have money. We left, and then I went back on the stroll because when Sonny came home, I needed to have some money.
I left the trick parked right there at the corner, just before Cicero and Bloomingdale, and I cut through an alley where there was a vacant lot, just down the street. I caught a Mexican trick, and then I took his money. So now I was coming back down the alley, trying to get away from the Mexican, and just wanting to jump in the trick’s car so we could get outta there. But when I got there, I saw more than one head in the car. I thought to myself, Didn’t I tell his ass don’t let nobody in the car?
Then a man stepped out the passenger side, and when he turned, I saw him come up with the pistol. I crouched down low and started running, and as I was running, I pumped my arms, and that was when my arm caught the bullet. I was running with my head down low, my arms swinging back and forth. Had I been standing up, I probably would have been shot in my back. I remember once being told, if somebody is trying to shoot you, run zigzag, don’t run straight. Zigzag and get low. I didn’t know why that came to me, but it did.
Leaving Breezy Street Page 20