It became normal for me to go to Springfield and talk to senators. They called me the senator slayer because I used to walk around the offices when we were lobbying and have no problem talking to the senators. Some of them would call me in, and I would just rev up a conversation with them. Some of those senators could be kind of colorful if you let them. Some of them could be rude. They were something else, but so was I. I remember when we were trying to pass the Predator Accountability Act. One senator said, “Well, I don’t want some poor guy to be railroaded by this bill you are trying to pass.” And I told him, “Let’s define ‘poor guy.’” This bill would allow a young woman to civilly sue anyone who had coerced her to begin or started her in a life in prostitution. They didn’t like that.
So let’s define this “poor guy” when we talk about this “poor guy.” Why and how was he involved with this woman? You’re telling me he’s this poor guy, so why is he in this circumstance anyway? How did he get from his wonderful home in Naperville to over here where this girl is? Let’s talk about that one, sir. The bill covered both the tricks and the pimps. And winning a civil suit would cover the cost of her mental health treatment. People weren’t ready for a criminal suit at that time because they were all about the poor guys. The women were the criminals. It was like folks wanted to tell me, “I mean, these girls were victims, but not really.” Know what I mean? We were just coming into the concept of human trafficking, of women being survivors, but we weren’t quite there yet.
* * *
A couple of years later, I met Obama. I only met him once. Everybody was excited about him because even as a state senator we knew he was going places—he was the bomb. We were all at the Senate, and we’re doing our thing, and here he comes, and we’re talking and he’s taking pictures with everybody. I get my chance to go up there with him, and I told him, “You know, we really need this bill passed, Senator Obama, because there’s no way I can stand out there on the street corner. My knees don’t work no more.” And he starts to laugh, everybody was laughing. So when he starts to talk on the floor, he says, “We need to get this bill passed, and we need to get this bill passed today, because Brenda’s knees don’t work.” When he said that everybody bust up laughing. And the bill passed. We came out all hugs. It was a good day.
During this time, I met a good man. Met him at a recovery meeting. His name was Keith. My brothers were telling him, “Ah, I wouldn’t fuck with her. She’s something else.”
Keith said, “I ain’t never asked any of you niggas for permission to fuck with her. Shit. I’m something else.” And he really is. Keith is something else.
The first time I met him, he caught me looking at him, and I smiled. From his perspective, he thought I was smiling at him and I was. But I was smiling because his face was interesting to me. And his eyes … he had some old eyes. Like he had seen some things.
After the meeting, I asked some other members about him. I got different stories. He was with some woman. I remember I said to the girl who told me he had a woman, “I didn’t ask you all that. I asked you about him.” I didn’t want to hear all that.
There was this skating-rink party, and we all went to the party. He was there with his kids, and I was there with my nieces. All the girls were in a circle, gossiping. I would turn my head to look at him, and I would see him looking at me. You know, we were doing the cute little shit people do when they are interested in each other. So he came over in his skates when I was in line to get some food at the snack bar.
“You got to quit stalking me,” he said.
I looked around. “Boy, I ain’t stalking you.” I laughed and he laughed. We started talking, and I told him all the stuff I was going to do for my birthday with my girls. Blah, blah, blah. Later in the evening, he asked me could he take me out for my birthday, and I said sure. So we went on our first date. I had a car, but he didn’t. So he picked me up at my house, and we left in my car.
“I’d like to buy you some flowers for your birthday.”
I told him there was a florist right there on Clark. I parked my car across the street at this lot, and we went in to get the flowers. He bought me these beautiful peach roses; they were gorgeous. We get outside, and they had towed my car. And I was livid. I was cussing up a storm. “Calm down. Calm down. Promise me you won’t let this change our date.” So while I was sitting there stomping my feet and just about to go into a heart attack, Keith was looking upside the wall where they had a sign that told drivers where they tow cars to. “They tow them to right down the street. Let’s hop the bus.” We hop the bus and went to the towing company. Keith paid to get my car out.
“I’ll pay you back.”
“I didn’t ask for you to pay me back. Let’s just get back to our date.”
He took me to this nice place to eat. We talked a lot. He told me he had a probation officer; I didn’t know he was on probation. We went to a play after dinner. And then I dropped him off at his home. Now, as he was getting out the car, he told me he was living with this girl. I told him as long as he was living with her, he was her man. I was only interested in a 100 percent man, not a 50 percent man. I wanted a whole relationship. And I knew as long as he lived in this woman’s house, that’s the kind of stuff that would be going on. I’m not a fool. I know men and I know women. And in relationships, if you accept things in the door, it’s going to continue. I wasn’t bringing any more nonsense in my life. I was too old for all that.
But because I wasn’t really thirsty for a man, I didn’t fall back into all those bad habits I had had with other men. I wasn’t going to give Keith all my money. I was going to let him take care of himself. I was feeling good about myself, and I liked being independent. My aunt Suzie was giving me advice on how to date guys. I mean, really date, like go out on dates with men to dinner and stuff like that. I didn’t go out on another date with Keith until he had moved out of that girl’s house.
Here is when I decided Keith was a keeper. I had gotten sick. I had this flu thing going on, and I had gotten a tooth pulled that day. He called me. I told him I didn’t really feel like talking.
“Well, did you eat anything?” I said I didn’t feel well enough to get up and cook anything for myself.
“Okay.”
We got off the phone, and I laid down. About an hour later, I heard a knock at the door. That was surprising, because I didn’t have people just showing up at my door. When I get to the door, it was Keith. He had a grocery bag in his hand. It was below zero outside. And he didn’t have a car. So he must have caught the train and walked to the store, then walked to my house. He had brought me cold medicine and my version of comfort food: cream of chicken noodle soup and mashed potatoes.
He was in the kitchen stumbling around, asking me where did I keep the measuring cups. He made the soup and brought it to me. We sat up there on my bed and watched the news. I started to drift off. I heard him say he was going to leave. “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?” He locked the door behind him. Aretha hopped on my lap and I stared at the door. You know what? I thought to myself. He might be a keeper. He didn’t have to do all that. And he hadn’t pressed me for sex. Not once.
* * *
So I was changing, but Stephanie wasn’t coming along for the ride. We were still friends. I would still go up over there and run men out of her house. And she knew if she called me, I was coming. She would be sitting up over there, “I don’t know what happened.” I used to call her Erica Kane, you know, from All My Children. Every time something happened to Erica, she would say, “I don’t know. Oh my God, Tom, Tom.”
I told Stephanie, “You don’t ever know what happened when I come over here.” She was a fool.
Still, Stephanie was helping me out. I still didn’t know how to manage money, and when I needed something, Stephanie always had it. She could write me out a check for a thousand dollars. “Come get it, bitch.” Or she would slide the money under the door.
A lotta people say Stephanie is so overbearing, but so what? S
he’s so my friend. With her overbearing ass. I know who she is. And you ain’t got to hang with her, I’ll be with her. Okay? That’s my friend. You ain’t got to claim her; you don’t have to like her. I do. She never left me in the cold. She was there. And I was there for her.
When she lent me money, I never wanted to pay her back because I knew she would get high with it. Her son hadn’t gone to jail yet, and he called me. “Go see Momma. She’s killing herself.” He was selling big drugs and she was stealing from him. She would just go in his room and get. The problem with Stephanie was, she had a pattern. She’s educated: South Shore High School, top of the class, A-plus student; Illinois State, business and computer science; Chicago State University with a minor in computer science. She could go and get a job. And her pattern was: get clean, get a job, get some money, get some stuff, get an apartment, get a car, get a man. And then she’s straight. Or at least she thought she was. She did that every time. The last time she did that, she married this man. Kevin. He was a womanizer, but according to Stephanie, he was such a good lover. And he provided. He liked coochie, but not just hers. Consequently, they had females coming over, females calling, bitches she had to show her marriage license to. I told her, “Why you going through all that shit?” But she loved him.
Now, in order to deal with all that, she had to get high. Kevin would try to hide his money in his pajama pocket when he slept. Stephanie’s crazy ass was taking a razor blade and slicing his pocket open. She was getting that money. She sold his jewelry. She took his mink coat to trade to a drug dealer. She had gone down the back stairs where they lived. The only reason she didn’t give it to the drug dealer was because she thought he was going to take it from her. My girl always had that keen sense of danger. She figured, “Here I am, a woman, on this shit, with this five-thousand-dollar mink coat, and that dealer would just take it from me.” So she thought, she wasn’t going to just take this coat and not have no rocks or nothing. She put the coat in the garbage and then looked up. Who’s at the top of the stairs?
Kevin said, “I know that ain’t my coat?” She didn’t sell the coat.
They stayed in this dysfunctional-ass marriage. One day, when she hit the pipe, she started throwing up. He was in the bathroom at the sink. And you know what he did? He stepped over her. As if, Bitch, die. So now she was living in the house with this, but she couldn’t leave. Cause he’s paying the bills, he’s good in bed; and it might be the cocaine that had her thinking this way. But he was a bastard. And everybody has a time; everybody has in them: no more.
So one day, Stephanie didn’t go to work, but he did, and when he got back home, she was gone. She had gone to treatment. For the fifth time. But this time, something was different. She had learned some things in those other four treatment centers. In those other ones, instead of staying those thirty, forty-five, ninety days, she had left after two weeks, against the advice of everybody. “You not ready; you’re going to use again.”
But her ass had gotten kicked and torn off. And she was older, over forty. The streets were rough. Her little yank games she was playing, that wasn’t working.
So Stephanie was in treatment. It was two weeks later, and she had a conversation with God. Ninety meetings and ninety days: “I’m going to do exactly what they say.” She didn’t know what’s ahead of her, and she was petrified. But I know that kind of fear. The what’s-next could be a step off a cliff. But you have to take it, cause you can’t stay where you are. Maybe that’s why Stephanie and I are so close. Maybe. But when I push on that thought, something pushes back.
There’s no good reason why Stephanie and I are such good friends. Our closeness is divine—real but unexplainable. It’s like God saw the two of us struggling and said, “Y’all should get together.” I remember one time, I was at the treatment center, and Stephanie came over to see me. She wasn’t stopping by to pick up any money from me; there was nothing I could have given her. She was just interested in me and how I was doing. I don’t think I had had an adult relationship like that before. Every other person I had been with was “I’ll give you this, if you give me that.” But Stephanie loved me. She was becoming the sister I never had.
Chapter 21
A Funeral for Breezy
The funeral was my idea.
There was a woman at Genesis House named Carolyn Groves. She was this middle-class woman from Evanston. She taught theological studies at Loyola University, and she was a friend of my mentor, Edwina Gateley, a woman who had become a mother to me. Carolyn believed in journaling—that it was therapeutic to write letters to or journal about people in your life. She believed that this way you were able to look at your problems from another point of view. It’s not like you are verbally talking about your problems, you’re reading back your own thoughts and words. It is a way to see the things you want to free yourself from.
She told me to write about the people who had done things to me and tell them what they did. I wrote things about my pimp or people who harmed me. I wrote about Ma’Dea. At first it was all negative, and I remember Carolyn saying, “Okay. Okay. Now write about the good things that happened when you were with her. And the good things she did do.” And I was able to write that. Ma’Dea used to say, “I’ll eat shit with a splinter before I see you go hungry.” I understand what she means now. She loved me. She loved Ernestine. I was her motherfucker. I didn’t like it when she said that, but I get it now. I was her motherfucker. Good or bad. I was hers. I loved Ma’Dea. She was hilarious. Oh my God, she was funny. And she gave me the gift of how to tell stories. I listened to her for so many years, about being down South, how she grew up, how she got married and had kids. I listened to stories about what happened before I was born or when I was a little baby.
There was abuse, yes, but there was so much love in the middle of it. And there was so much pain. I made my peace with Ma’Dea when I understood that my life and my struggles were so close to hers. Nobody can deal with something that close in a healthy way. She was damaged by life.
With Carolyn encouraging me, I wrote about all this. But then it came to the place where I realized I needed to write Breezy. I didn’t want to wear that name anymore. I wanted to be Brenda Jean. That’s my name. I’m Brenda Jean, not Breezy. But what was I going to do with Breezy? Because she was alive. I realized I had to go ahead and let her go. She had to die for me to live. I didn’t really like that. When I started to write about Breezy, all I could think of to say was that without Breezy, I probably wouldn’t be here. She protected me, because Brenda Jean was not strong enough. I started to learn that even though I was ready to be Brenda Jean, Brenda Jean was still that little girl locked inside who was protected by the creation of Breezy. Breezy had done nothing wrong. All she had done was protect Brenda Jean. Things that happened: Breezy got shot. Breezy got stabbed. Breezy was being abused again. Brenda Jean probably couldn’t have gone through all that. Breezy was this alter ego created to accept the beatings, the hits, the words, the curses, the challenges, the runaways, the moving around. To being independent, to being on the road like a hobo. Wherever I laid my head was my home. She was so wild and flamboyant, but she was always ready to come on with it. She definitely protected Brenda Jean. In those areas where I was vulnerable and soft, it was Breezy who popped out and said, “Fuck this shit!” Because Brenda Jean was about to get got. And so Brenda Jean had to step back, and I had to get Breezy. Probably in a lotta relationships, I did that. And when I came back with Breezy, it wasn’t nice. She was very unpredictable.
So here’s this Breezy girl who had been with me and to me wasn’t a bad person at all. I didn’t want to put her down. But the only hope of me becoming a strong, independent, positive woman that I needed to be was to get rid of Breezy. Breezy was too spontaneous. It was hard for me to say, “I don’t need you anymore.” Or maybe I wanted to say, “It’s not that I don’t need you, it’s that you’ve done your job. You can sit down now. You can rest. Let me deal with this now.” And that’s how I wrote the let
ter about how she protected me, and how I had needed her, and how well she did protect me. And now, I thank you, but I need you to retire. I need to let go.
In accepting how it should be, I was able to be opened-minded and willing to change. Brenda Jean was going to grow. I realized I didn’t know shit, and the shit I was going to be running into was going to be new shit. That was why I was so hungry to learn things, because I was like, Brenda Jean needs to catch up, she’s still a little girl. I realized that some of the things I was experiencing, I came to wide-eyed.
One of the things that was therapeutic out of this exercise was that you write what you write, and you write as much as you need to write. And then you take that paper—it’s almost like a ritual—and you burn it. And then you bury the ashes. It’s like bringing closure to everything. Burying that. And that’s what we did to what I had wrote about Breezy and how she needed to step back to allow Brenda Jean to take over. We buried her in the backyard of Genesis House. It was hard to do the whole thing. It was hard to burn the paper. Even if it was just a ritual, it felt very permanent to me.
Some of the girls who I was in the program with were there when I buried Breezy. Carolyn Groves was there, and some of the Genesis House counselors were there, too. It was very emotional. Afterwards, without Breezy, I felt like a punk, because people would say things to me and make me angry and I wouldn’t react. I knew if I reacted, my reaction wouldn’t be healthy and it would get me in trouble. I had been going to anger management classes twice a week at Genesis House and I’m learning how not to react in anger. I’m learning how to take a deep breath and not say crazy shit. I’m learning how to walk away and come back calm. Where I was going, I couldn’t take the anger with me. I had big plans for myself. Breezy didn’t care about none of that. Yeah, we in the police station, but you about to get your ass whooped right now. That’s Breezy. But Brenda would be: We are going to make this police visit work. Brenda needed to think her battles out and not just react to the battles that were happening. By doing that I realized how intelligent I could be. If you can just give me a second, I can think this through. I was able to figure out if the battle was even worth it. I started to smooth out and calm down.
Leaving Breezy Street Page 24