I went to treatment with my face still all messed up. The doctors at the county hospital had given up on me. I was a sight; I looked like a mummy. Only one of my eyes was visible, and blood and pus leaked through the bandages. This girl walked up to me. She was tall, thin, and chocolate. And she was handsome, like a man. She said in a deep brass voice, “Bitch, you look like a monster.” Finally! Someone was saying to my face—or what was left of it—what the others were saying behind my back. We both cracked up. That was how I met my Stephanie. That’s how I met my ride or die, friend for life. Stephanie didn’t know what had happened to me, but she could see I was in pain, and she wanted just to make me laugh. She looked at me like she wanted to say, “Where are those people who did that to you? Let’s go beat them up.” I could tell right away she was a good person, so good she could make me cry, because she was saying it out of love even though she didn’t know me yet. I was mostly ostracized at the treatment center. But I could do a little hair, so the girls were always bringing their gel and stuff to me. “Could you do my hair?” I would give them the pineapple waves. I was good at that. Little finger waves. I could do that one real good.
One day, Stephanie walked up to me and said, “Quit doing these bitches’ hair. They don’t like you.”
I looked at her and smiled. “I know.”
“Fuck them. You my friend. I don’t want you fucking with these hos.” I just started laughing. It was so funny, because I was thinking, They don’t like you either. We could be ostracized ladies together.
At the center, they had us two, three girls to a room. I only had one roommate. Every night, Stephanie would slide in my room. “Hey, what you doing?” She had never met a prostitute before, and she just peppered me with questions. “Girl, I keep thinking about this shit. Tell me another story.” She liked to listen to me. I told her about my childhood and life for me out in the streets. It was painful, but I made it funny, too. Because out there, sometimes it was hilarious. I needed to talk about it, and Stephanie was a good listener. A lot of times, when I tell my story, people don’t believe it because so much happened. Stephanie believed me. Believed in me, too.
I really took to treatment this time. I had some good mentors. I had this Muslim lady who was just awesome to me. She told me, “You are God’s doorway to life.” Ms. Jerry. “I want you to think about that and come back and tell me what that means.” But I couldn’t think of anything … God’s doorway. Doorway to life. God’s doorway to life. How does that feel? I couldn’t figure it out.
Three days later, she says, “So how you doing with it?”
“I don’t know.” I couldn’t figure how God’s doorway to life had anything to do with me.
She said, “Through you, God creates life. You bring life into the world. God felt so special about you, Brenda, about women, that he gave us the gift of making life. That is more important than anything. Imagine if you bring in the next Martin Luther King or the next somebody who cures cancer.” She made it sound like this grand event. Like I was a part of this spiritual thing between me and God. So I began to think of scenarios like, Damn, suppose women didn’t want to have no more babies and stop populating the world and they stop letting men get their poon. The world would be messed up. I’m God’s doorway to life. If it wasn’t for a woman like me, none of these men would be here. I began to feel special to God, more than even a man. I came from a family of Christians where men were in control. Men were head of the house. Men were the head of the church. Women didn’t have a place in the pulpit. She couldn’t even lead a damn song. That’s the way I was raised. My grandmother used to tell me that if I didn’t learn how to cook and I didn’t learn how to clean and I didn’t learn how to make a husband happy, he was going to whoop my ass. She told me that, because that’s all she knew. Men beating women’s asses. I used to wonder why she would wish that for me. She beat on me, and then she wished when I got big somebody else would beat on me? I didn’t get it.
When Ms. Jerry told me about being the doorway, a lotta stuff started poking me. If I was so damn special, why was I out on the street selling it for pennies? I was so much more valuable than that. And I started to make decisions about my body after that.
Then there was Ms. Ronnie. Ms. Ronnie had Spiritual Hour. During Spiritual Hour there was this song by Shirley Caesar called “He’s Working It Out.” When that record came on, I couldn’t maintain myself, cause I was hoping that God could work it out for me. The child who’s on cocaine, through prayer he can change. I used to hear that and say to myself, I can change, I can change.
I used to cry during Spiritual Hour. I cried because I hadn’t really cried before. On the streets, when I was crying, I would take a hit of cocaine and stop, because I didn’t want to feel that shit. I was holding in all this shit in my body from my childhood: molestation and Uncle LC, all the abuse, the beatings, the bullshit that people did to me … how unfair it felt that my mother was dead. I felt that life had really handed it to me.
I cried on that floor in that treatment center, cause all that shit was coming to me and I didn’t understand why it was happening. I cried. And Ms. Ronnie gave me a place to cry. Stephanie was in the Spiritual Hour with me. It was a help to have her there. But still … I cried all the time, till finally Stephanie would say, “Stop crying, bitch.” But she didn’t know I had never really cried; that I was always fighting, always running, always going somewhere. She didn’t know that I always had somebody’s foot on my neck. There was never freedom. And I was always scared that I might do something and somebody won’t like me. But here, I was here now and drug-free, so I was crying and crying and crying and I couldn’t stop. I didn’t know why I cried, I just knew it seemed right to cry. I wasn’t in a place where I could tear up shit or get rid of this pain, I couldn’t fight anymore, and Ms. Ronnie was giving me a venue to start getting rid of the pain.
So I did treatment, and Stephanie and I talked about being better girls, being better women. Being successful. We didn’t want to get clean and not be successful. Both of us had great ideas and we were thinkers. We were intelligent people. We said to ourselves, “Okay, let’s get clean. I’m not going to get on welfare and get a check.”
At the Genesis House, I started getting my days together. I saw a psychiatrist. He diagnosed me as being bipolar, and I thought, well, let me listen to this short white-ass man; I didn’t like him too much, but he might have a point. I was so unbalanced. They put me on antidepressants. I was on Paxil for a while. And then I said, “I don’t like this. I don’t like this medicine. I’m drug-free now, how this work?”
They told me, “You probably won’t be able to get a check if you don’t take this medicine.”
“I don’t want your check,” I said. “I don’t want to live limited.” A check limited me. If I was getting a once-a-month check from the government, that’s a limitation, cause the government doesn’t want you to make any money. I didn’t want to be under somebody’s thumb like that. No more. Plus, I was a hustler. I had no fear my bills wouldn’t get paid. I just didn’t. I’ve seen in a lotta girls’ eyes, What am I going to do? How were they gone make it when they stopped using drugs? I just knew I was going to be alright. I was willing to do whatever it took for me to make it. And it wasn’t going to be prostitution because I wasn’t going to sell my body anymore. I had made that decision when I was in the drug program. I never wanted to have sex again without loving it. For the first time in my life I was going to be in control of my body. Who got to touch it was going to be my decision alone. I was God’s doorway to life. I was valuable. My body and my mind had worth. I had been lowballing myself. I couldn’t sell my body now that I understood that. But I still needed money, and that meant I needed a job. And it wasn’t going to be illegal. I just knew I was willing to work hard. I did not want that kind of check.
My first minimum-wage job was with an agency called Help at Home. I was cleaning up houses for people who had disabilities or for the elderly. After ninety days, they dec
ided if they were going to keep you or not. After ninety days at that job, they made me supervisor. People started calling in, “We like her. Send her back.” They would send me for a couple of weeks to somebody and then change up my schedule, try to send somebody else, and the people would call in and say, “Naw. We want Brenda back.”
My supervisor, a jazzy old Black lady, was real down to earth. The first time I got a check, I told her, “This is wrong.”
“What’s wrong with it, Brenda?”
“Somebody named FICA took some stuff out of my check.”
She said, “Baby, that’s Uncle Sam. That’s the federal government.”
“Who the hell is Sam?”
Now, I had never worked “regular” jobs. I was trying to find out who these people were who were taking my money out of my check without my permission. I didn’t sign my money over. Okay?
She laughed so hard. Every time she passed me, she would whisper, “Sam.”
“Girl! Go on!” She was my mellow. She liked me a lot because I was good at my job. She had gotten so many frustrating calls from people who wanted me to come back because I would go in there and treat them like they were my momma. I would clean up their houses and sometimes I think they had me doing shit that didn’t nobody else ever do, like go under the bed and clean up. There was so much shit up under those beds. I would put a plastic garbage bag over my hair, cover up my face, and put some gloves on, and I would say, “I’m going in, Ms. Jenkins!”
I made them laugh, and I took care of them. The way they were supposed to be taken care of. Remember, I was a CNA, I knew how to take care of people.
I had some Black guys who worked for the railroad and had some very good careers and lived on the Gold Coast; they probably got a little subsidy to live in those high-rises, but they were there. They used to sit back and tell me, “Girl, if you want to, you can just come and stay with me. Cause I can pay you.”
“That’s alright, Mr. Robinson.” I always said no, because prostitution was still prevalent in my body. If I didn’t look out, I would have sat up there and smoked the man’s whole house. But I was good at work. Genesis House would take a third of my money for rent, and then they would take a portion and put it in my savings account. They were saving my money for me. And because all of my needs were met, I didn’t have to worry about food or none of that. They would give me the rest of the money that was left over. That way, I could go and get my toiletries, go and buy a little outfit from Rainbow. Rainbow was my store. I was doing okay. I stayed at Genesis House for a year. I needed that structure. I needed to learn how to live by myself, live through a job, live without any outside contributions from men. I needed to stop using myself. And I learned how to do that.
If I would have left the treatment and got an apartment with Stephanie, which is what she wanted, I would have been getting high because I wasn’t ready. I needed to be at the recovery home. Stephanie understood, but she would come knock on the door and come and see me. She came up real quick, with her little fast self. She would come switching her little ass in there to come and see me. She had all this nice jewelry on; she had a car. And I was like, “Damn, bitch. You came up fast.”
“Bitch, come on. Come on and stay with me.”
“I will. But you got to let me do what I got to do here first.”
When I got ready to leave, my program wasn’t too keen on the idea of me going to go stay with Stephanie. They knew she was still on drugs and doing some dangerous things to get it. They knew she was running with criminals, and if I hung around her, I was likely to fall back into trouble. They wanted me to do something else, but I had already decided, I was going to stay with her.
* * *
Sometimes, I can be very blind when I care about people. I knew she still was getting high. When she was high, Stephanie used to go in the bathroom and become a dermatologist. She would have hair growing out of her chin and she felt like if she could get the follicle out, she could get to the root of it. So she would have needles and razors and she would cut on her face until you could see the white. She would tell people she had a Rollerblading accident. I told her, “Bitch, ain’t nobody gone keep believing that Rollerblading shit.” Everybody knew what she was doing.
One day I came home and she had sold my jewelry. I told her, “I’m gonna leave, cause I can’t stay here, or else I’m gone whoop your ass.” And I left.
She was so broken up. She was like, “I’m going to go to treatment tomorrow, so I can straighten my life up.” I was still going to the meetings and sharing. My friends were telling me, “You got to leave, Brenda.” I didn’t really know what to do with the situation. I loved Stephanie so. On top of that, Stephanie needed me.
I used to have to get men up out of there. She would give me all her money and her jewelry when she was back there with them dudes. This one guy, he came into my room and said, “You know what? You need to go and give that girl her money and her shit.” I was laying down, watching TV, getting ready to go to bed because I had work in the morning.
I said, “You right. You right.” I got up. “I’m going to give her her shit. Don’t go nowhere.” I pulled a bat out—and he turned around and ran. Boom, boom, boom. Dude ran out the apartment.
Stephanie came out from her room. “What’s going on?”
“Bitch, quit sending them niggas in my room. Cause I’m gonna hurt them. I’m not giving them nothing. Now, if you wanted it, you could have came and gotten it. But you sent that nigga in there, cause you knew I would bust his head.”
She got raped in our apartment one day. I wasn’t there. I mean, this was a pretty man. And he raped my baby up in there. She was so vulnerable. I didn’t want to leave her.
She woke me up one morning. “Hey, come meet my friend Bob who I used to work with.” He used to work for, like, Spring Spring, back in Sprang Sprang. Okay, what? I get in there, and this little old white man look like he was about a hundred years old. He’s so frail, he’s not sitting in the whole seat, he’s sitting on the edge of the seat. Little frail guy. Stephanie’s sitting up there, getting high with him.
I looked at her and I looked at him, and I said, “Bitch, you gone kill this man. He gone sit up here and die. And, bitch, you the one who is going to jail for killing this old white man. Not me.”
She was talking about he used to work with her. Listen, this old man had retired by the time Stephanie was born. He ain’t worked nowhere, sitting up there like one of those Catholic priests or something. There was a halo around his face, that’s how close he was to Jesus. Shit. I told Stephanie, “Bitch, get this old-ass man out of here before we all go to jail.”
Stephanie, she was hilarious. She was still funny when she was high. I love that bitch. We had great days. That wasn’t one. But we had great days. I wished she didn’t have a problem. She kept promising me she was going to go to treatment. And I just thought I needed to save my baby.
Nothing made me make a decision until Prune had a baby. She was twenty-six, unmarried, working downtown at a bank, and a little girl was on the way. I was almost forty years old, and I promised myself I was going to be a better grandmother than I was a mother. Prune’s stomach was like she swallowed a pumpkin. She had this gray jogging suit that she used to wear all the time. When Peaches brought Prune by, with this pumpkin stomach, I thought, Okay, you got to walk away from this life. My girls kind of knew what was going on. And they said, “Momma, you know we can’t bring the baby over here.”
Nothing was going to stop me from being with my grandbaby. Nobody. Nothing. I loved Stephanie with all of my heart. But I had to go. Peaches lived on the North Side and was working as a therapist at a hospital. She was in a building that had a vacant apartment, and she talked to her landlord. I gave him my money, and I moved in.
Stephanie’s sister moved in with her. Stephanie’s sister always used her, even when Stephanie was high. It was easy to do because she always had a lot of money. Stephanie always had some kind of white-collar-rigmarole scam go
ing on. She was that kind of girl. You could say Stephanie did prostitution by bringing strange men in the house, but her game was always having some side shit going on. She had unlimited unemployment payments because she knew how to play the unemployment system. That sort of thing.
* * *
I was clean, and then Mimi was born! My little bundle! My grandbaby! But I still heard from Stephanie. She would call: “When you were here you broke a mirror and the mirror’s worth three hundred dollars. You need to come over. I need my money for that mirror, bitch.” She was calling me at work. I just went click, click. Stephanie thought I had abandoned her, but that wasn’t true. I loved the shit out of that bitch.
But what was going on with my friend wasn’t cute. She was almost dead. She called one morning about five o’clock. She said, “Listen. I need you to come get me and take me to treatment. Don’t come now, because I know you have to go to work. Come when you get off work.”
“That’s true,” I said. “I can’t come get you.” But I heard something in her voice, and I changed my mind. I knew I needed to go and get her right then, because if Stephanie took a nap and got her strength back, I knew she was going to buy more drugs, and she was going to die.
Leaving Breezy Street Page 22