Leaving Breezy Street

by Brenda Myers-Powell

  But the entire time, Stephanie and I were still talking about starting our own thing. Both of us were thinking, What kind of population are we going to serve? Stephanie thought pregnancy prevention or some type of services for teens to prevent them having babies and help teens who already have babies. She told me about it, but I thought we should do something in prostitution prevention. The term human trafficking hadn’t been invented yet. Now that’s the term—human trafficking—to be politically correct, but back then it was just prostitution prevention.

  It’s all so polite now, so that’s what everybody says. Nobody can say dick anymore; they want to say penile connection to the body. Girl, please. Anyway, I thought about serving prostitutes. Something like Genesis House. Like Christian Community Help Center. Those were places that helped women who were on the stroll, who had formed an addiction, who had developed an addiction to the lifestyle. We wanted to work with all of those women. Stephanie ran off and did more research. There were a lot of services being done for prostitutes, but there were not any services for the youth. No one was really servicing the twelve-to-twenty-four-year-old population, and there weren’t any services being delivered by survivors.

  One day Stephanie said, “Friend. We can do this shit. You are the expert. And everywhere I look, your name pops up attached to some TV show or organization.”

  That’s where it all started. After that, we started evolving. We understood that we had an eclectic approach. It was both practical and clinical. We understood we had a lot of information that social clinicians didn’t have, and that was the practical application in this arena. I knew this world, inside and out. I was doing my thing, but I was ready to take the next step. I knew I could help girls who were caught out there the way I was.

  * * *

  We were unique. We were survivors, and we made an organization. We would be run by survivors. Everything would be done by survivors. And we started to get our shit together. Stephanie was still working her job. She would come in, do her clients in half a day, and then the rest of the day she’d do Dreamcatcher. And I would go over there, and we would work together. All those people in the office would get uncomfortably quiet when we were working. But Stephanie didn’t care. She had four desks in her little area, and she used them all. Once, this guy took me to a woman who was a millionaire, for me to cosign his project. But when he got up and went to the bathroom—he was gone for about fifteen minutes—when he came back, I had the bag for Dreamcatcher. And when the millionaire met Stephanie, guess what she said? “If nothing else, Brenda is persistent.” We came about this shit so funny, we didn’t have a plan, but we had an idea. We would get in Stephanie’s car and just ride around and laugh and talk to young girls.

  “You alright?”

  “You know how it is, Miz Brenda.” And I did. It just came to be okay. I’m a character. And I love being a character. I love people. I think people are one of the best gifts God put on the earth. And because of that, we need to treat each other better. I like to treat people better. Girls gravitated toward me because I was the lady on the Maury Povich show. Girls would say, “Oh, we seen you on the Maury show.” And I would say, yeah, that’s me. And those girls wanted to tell me their stories. How people don’t listen to them and their momma didn’t listen to them. They needed a place for somebody to hear what they were talking about. “That happened to me, but I couldn’t tell nobody about it.”

  And that’s how that happened.

  * * *

  Life doesn’t stop happening just because you’ve got your act together. Life just keeps coming at you. During Stephanie’s clean time being with her man, her mother left first. And then her dad left. Then she had to watch her husband make that transition in that same house. Michael was like that Prince song, “If I was your girlfriend, would you let me help pick out your clothes?” He would do that. He was a lovely man.

  I’m grateful that God allowed her that time to be with him. And let her know what real love is. They had unconditional love. They weren’t perfect, but they were perfect for each other. She misses him. But she’s not going to destroy herself because he’s not here. He would hate that.

  I was afraid of losing her, but she would always reassure me. “Bitch, I might do a lot of things, but I’m not fucking with that cocaine.” She would always tell me that. And I believed her. This has been a woman who has never been uncomfortable enough to not tell me the truth. Because now we are married as people. As two girlfriends, do or die. We like Thelma and Louise. And we went off the edge together. So when she was hurting, I was hurting. Am I going to lose my friend? Are we going to lose everything we worked for?

  Sometimes Stephanie was mean. One time she ate me up during a cab ride. “Motherfucker, kiss my ass.” And she said some more shit to me, and I was upset. Later on, she told me she was sorry, but I told her, “You already said that before, bitch. I forgive you. You said you were sorry that night. I got it.”

  I think about the women Stephanie and I are now. We are these ladies who married men who loved us; we speak for the voiceless; we get to have grandbabies sitting on our knees. Such joy. It took almost a lifetime, but I’ve learned I have to teach people how to treat me. I used to allow people to treat me any kind of way. I don’t do that anymore. Sometimes I don’t hang with folks no more, but sometimes I feel like, you don’t know any better, so let me tell you how it is and how it’s going to go. And then, if you don’t like it, we don’t have to hang out with each other. If I am telling you how to treat me and you are treating me in another way, we can’t be friends no more. The only people who get away with that is my son and my husband.

  * * *

  But more than anything, I am now in a place where I get to live my life and have my own opinions. My life is full of choices. Some choices are hard to make, others are easy, but I can’t get over, this late in the game, how good it feels to choose something and live with it. Every day, I make a choice. Sometimes I can’t make myself happy and my husband happy. I can’t make Jeremy happy and me happy. Or Stephanie. Or even my daughters. I can’t make people happy and me happy. But every day, I choose me.

  Afterword

  I Make Plans, God Laughs

  My life is now what I never expected it to be. I am surrounded by my family and loved by my daughters. I’m in love and married to a good man. My best friend and I help girls stay off the terrible road I walked, and for the women on the stroll, abused and drugged, we give them counseling and steer them to treatment when they are ready. I have a full life. And when I met Kim Longinotto, the director who wanted to capture a portion of my life on film, she thought so, too. The film, Dreamcatcher, followed me and the girls I help. I meet these young ladies in high school and some in junior high. Some of them are as young as twelve years old. They are already professionals. I’m not surprised. I started that young. Each of them is just about to start down the dark road I walked on. It’s hard to speak to a child who is going through adult stuff. They’ve got complicated families and bad boyfriends. They’re trying to juggle staying in school and having babies. You can still make a good life, I tell them. The work is rewarding, and I guess when other folks took a look at how Stephanie and I spend our days, they agreed.

  The film won a Sundance Film Festival award in 2015 and was nominated for a NAACP Image Award. I was walking down red carpets and flaunting it. For a minute, I thought life couldn’t get more exciting. Boy, was I wrong.

  I remember at the time, I felt unbalanced. The producer on the film, Lisa Stevens, she had a new idea. She wanted to do another documentary with me, this one about me looking for the daughter I abandoned twenty-seven years ago in Los Angeles. She approached Stephanie with the idea, and I guess Stephanie told her she thought that was a great plan and that I should be a producer on it, too.

  Well, Lisa called me and told me all about it. Oh, I was so mad at Stephanie. I went over to where she lived, stormed up to her door, and proceeded to cuss her out. “You can’t have no conversation with n
obody about my daughter. You need to stop advertising about my daughter.”

  If my daughter was out there, this was not the way I wanted to meet her—on live television. I felt like my punishment was not to know if she were living or dead. It was hard to even talk about her or think about her. I got so belligerent that Stephanie had to put my ass out.

  She looked at me astonished. “Really, bitch? You think I would do something like that to you? Get the fuck up out my house.”

  “I ain’t going nowhere.”

  “Get on out of here. Like I would do something to you.” I left, but I was still fussing with her out the door. I was at such an emotional low with this. All you had to do was say something about it and I would have started a fight. It was unresolved and it was hurting me on the inside. Of course, Stephanie got that. Well, we made up. Cause we fall out, we make up all the time.

  Later on, we had a brunch on Sunday, and there were some Hispanic people around and I started feeling emotional, and I told Stephanie, “That’s what my baby probably looks like. She had coal-black hair. And she looked like a Hispanic. The only thing I could give her was my name, so I named her Brenda.”

  At the same time, my daughters were researching some things in their own lives. They wanted to find out the history about their dads. Peaches wanted to find out about her roots. About her dad. I didn’t have anybody’s last name. What my boyfriends told me, what their friends called them—that’s the name I had. All I had was Spoon, so that was all Peaches had to work with. She was trying to find out through her DNA could she find him. Through Ancestry.com. She was searching and telling me all her background. She was part English and Indian and of course African, and she had some other things in her. She was telling me about that, and I was telling her, “Oh, that’s so interesting.”

  * * *

  A couple of weeks later, my daughters and Stephanie told me that they were going to have a “Love Day.” We do little stuff like that. We all get together and have wine and some snacks. Sometimes we call it Wind Down, but we wine down. Okay? Wind Down Wednesday. We do little stuff like that to rejuvenate ourselves. They said, we are having a Love Day.

  That day at my house I was cleaning up and fussing around. You know how you try to get everything tidied up before you walk out the door? That was what I was doing. But everybody was needy that day. My husband, Jeremy. I wanted to lock them out the door. Finally, I realized, shoot, I had to get out of there if I was going to be on time. I just grabbed my clothes and left because I thought I could change over at Peaches’s house. Peaches had already commented, “You be on time.” I went over my daughter’s house looking a sight for sore eyes. I had just gotten through cleaning, so I had my cleaning clothes on. When I got there, they met me at the door. Peaches and Prune shuffled me in. “Come upstairs.” And they took me up the stairs real fast. I put my clothes on. “Hurry up, Momma.” So now I was wondering what they had up their sleeves because they were rushing me so. I knew they were planning something, but I didn’t know what it was. We do nice things for each other. Maybe they had somebody who was going to read some poetry, or maybe they had somebody who was going to sing. That’s what was in my mind. For my birthday, they had had somebody come and sing to me. It’s Love Day, so I’m thinking about a lot of things, but mainly I was thinking about my lost daughter.

  This girl. I had come to a peace about her. I thought, she’s my daughter, no matter who she’s with, and one day I’ll be able to see her and that will probably be in heaven. I had gone to a clairvoyant, and she told me my daughter was doing well. She was doing very well. In fact, the clairvoyant told me, she’s looking for you. But I didn’t really believe all that. Plus, what everyone wanted to do with the story, I wasn’t ready to deal with all of that. I wasn’t going to let anyone make a mockery of it. It was one of the hardest things I ever had to deal with. So my daughters were hurrying me to come downstairs, and then they shuffle me into my daughter’s living room. First of all, we never hang out in that room. We usually do stuff in the dining room, right by the kitchen. We’re women, we are always right by the kitchen. I’m thinking, Why we going in here? We were going into the good room. They sat me down in the chair. Stephanie’s there sitting on the couch. Mimi’s there. And my other granddaughter, Avery, she was there, too. They were all in the living room.

  Now here came Peaches with this speech. “On this Love Day, we love the people of the world and the United States of America…” No, I’m just kidding. But she gave a little speech. Peaches kept saying stuff like, “Momma. We want to tell you that we share you, we see you, and we feel you.” And I was like, oh, that’s beautiful. She had put emphasis on “we hear you.” They heard my pain. They had heard my heart.

  Then Prune gave her speech. Hers was like, “Momma. You deserve to come full circle. Your life deserves to come full circle. And that means everything in your circle needs to come together.” And I was thinking, yeah, that’s right. “Momma. Someone wants to meet you.” And then this girl walks in the room. I looked at her, and it was just two seconds, but I knew who she was. She was my daughter. I fell on the floor and I started to cry. I just couldn’t hold it together.

  “Are you—? Is that—?” I almost had a heart attack. I thought we were going to have to have the paramedics there.

  I looked at Stephanie. “You knew all the time!”

  “What can I tell you?”

  * * *

  I turned to this beautiful girl and told her, “I prayed. I prayed for God to take care of you.” She was holding on to me; I was holding on to her.

  She looked at me and said, “I was very well loved and taken care of.”

  I wept. “You were?”

  “I was.” She was hugging me, and I started to smell her. Do you know how when you have a baby, you smell them? It was like I got her all over again that day in that hospital. I needed to smell her. She said, “Oh my gosh, you smelling me.” I needed to inhale her.

  That was a beautiful day. Her name was Brenda, but everybody called her Bree. That she had kept the name I had given her at the hospital felt like a miracle. They had kept my baby’s name. It was the only thing I could give her. The woman who adopted her was named Brenda. How could God get so close? She’s wearing the name of both her mothers. Bree had a sister, who she had brought along. Jenna. They are total sisters. Jenna was so great. So supportive. I was just admiring Bree the whole time. Looking at her face. I was looking at the smallest things. And I saw things that felt like her inheritance. The similarities. And I thought, That’s my baby. You could just see it. It was nice.

  Bree told me she found her father, too. He was a Mexican guy. My daughter approached him and said, “Hey, I think you’re my daddy.” And he said, “I probably am. I got about thirteen, fourteen kids.” My daughter told me he was a tall Mexican. She told me some other things about her birth, and even though she didn’t know it, she was explaining where I was in my head all those years ago, things I never knew until my daughter came back. You know, I do inventory on my life when someone comes from my past. I try to understand myself, then put it in a box. She said that I named her Brenda Market. My name is Brenda Myers. Her first name is mine, but I named her last name after Coolie. I’m in California, a hundred years later, and I was still … still …

  That’s some crazy shit about where I was and where my thinking was. Today in my life, I have dreams of Coolie, I have dreams of Sonny. I have dreams of some of the guys I been with. And sometimes I wake up and they’re all interconnected, and I feel in a melancholy way about it. And that’s why I have to put it in place, to where it really is and really was: these men used me. They used me to the point where I thought it was okay as to how they used me. And it’s hard to separate the love I had for them with the part where they abused me. It’s hard. That’s why this shit is hard. That’s why this lifestyle is hard for a girl. It’s not a night where you don’t lay down and wake up with feelings unless he’s just really dogging up out. Tommy Knox? I could take him o
r leave him any day. Tra-la-la. But there are some relationships that I had with these pimps, players, that were intimate in their own way. No matter what over-the-top shit happened. There was some real intimacy, conversations, connections.

  Sometimes I touched some pimp in his heart, sometimes he touched me in my mine. But neither one of us never loved each other more than we loved the game. Addicted to the lifestyle, and if the drugs don’t kill you, the lifestyle will. The lifestyle comes with a deeper addiction and package, more than the drugs and all the other shit. It’s an irresponsible lifestyle, and when it’s good, it’s real good, but the pleasure, the success is bad for you. You know how you’re addicted to sugar and chocolate and shit like that makes you feel happy, makes you feel good? Those are the times in your brain, these things that you are doing in your lifestyle that tick off that area in your brain. The lifestyle is like a super-exciting rush. You get what you want when you want it. You do what you want to do when you want to do it. You start to accept the fact that I need to go to jail. You say shit like, “Shit, they can hold me but they can’t keep me forever.” You accept that you get robbed, you accept that bad things happen in the game. If you are a good hustler, you can recuperate from that shit. That’s just a temporary day, I’ll be back on my feet in no time. Cause that’s a part of the game you have to accept. All you got to do is live through it. So I can’t sit here and tell folks that I didn’t love it. All that shit that was going on, it was like feeding a part of me. And it was always, but always, a distraction from the pain that was going on inside of me.