Leaving Breezy Street

by Brenda Myers-Powell

  Oh, if someone could have directed me the right way. I spent a lotta time with nothing men. If I could have had the right director, manager—somebody putting some real weight on me—I could have been so much more. But my grandmother could have never been it, because she only saw life as one way. She never saw me as someone who could get rich. She had only struggled, so she only saw life as this struggle. And all those struggles caught up to us.

  * * *

  Good Friday, 1973. I was fourteen, and I was going to change for good. Prune, whose real name is Ernestine, was a year old. Peaches, who I named Ruth after my grandmother, had been born four weeks before. I was going out with older men, doing a hustle here and there. Just being real cute and getting a couple of things. That year it changed. I went down to the street to turn my official first trick. That day. That day we had no food and the Aid to Dependent Children check didn’t come in the mail. We used to get a check, and we got a little food-stamp book to go and buy groceries. Soon it was going to be Easter Sunday. We didn’t have nothing to eat, and usually when we were like that, we called Aunt Josie to give a few dollars to hold us over, but you know we had two kids in the house and we got Ma’Dea and we got me, so how much could she stretch us? Aunt Josie could throw us a bone every now and again, but she couldn’t float us all the way. Ma’Dea was talking a lotta shit about me and how I had brought us to a point to where we couldn’t make it. She told me, “I ain’t never had to depend on handouts. I ain’t the one who need the welfare, you the one who need the welfare.” But she was the one who needed welfare. But I didn’t need the welfare because I got a friendly coochie. I was fourteen and jumping from this bed to that one, but Ma’Dea was the grown-up; she’s really looking at cupboards that were bare. I didn’t want my babies’ Easter to be not right. I wanted Peaches to have the prettiest dress, and Prune to have the prettiest dress, the biggest bunny rabbit. They both were so beautiful; I wanted them to have little slippers to run around in. I thought to myself, You got to shit or get off the stool. The pressure was on. After Ma’Dea told me all about how the babies got to eat and we didn’t even have a cup of rice in the cabinet, I went and asked a girl in the neighborhood who I knew was a prostitute how to set up my situation. At first, she told me she would show me, but I would have to see her man. But I didn’t want to choose her man. Her man’s brother and I used to go together. I didn’t want to get that messy. She understood, and she told me where to go. She didn’t tell what to charge, but I had read enough books and magazines. Donald Goines. Iceberg Slim. Hustler. Xaviera Hollander, the lady who wrote The Happy Hooker, she was giving lessons on how to be a grand ho. After reading her, I thought all hos got a hundred dollars. That’s the kind of money I was looking for. So I took the train and transferred over there at Grand, Clark and Division, and started my little prostitution thing right there.

  It was night. I hadn’t learned yet when to come down and when not to. I was playing a dangerous game because I was new at it. And because I was fresh, nobody had caught me. If I had been a regular girl, who knows? There was a lot of police presence and there were a lotta guys out there. I found out the first night, getting that hundred dollars was not what happens in real life. The first car I got in and I asked for a hundred dollars, he said, “Honey, I’m not trying to buy you; I’m just renting you for a minute.”

  I looked at him like he had lost his mind. “Well, how much you gone give me?”

  “I’ll give you forty dollars for a BJ.” I had no idea what a BJ—a blow job—was. I was still a baby in some ways. And even though I had read about a woman sucking on a man’s penis, that hadn’t come up a lot with me in my community. We didn’t really do all that in the hood. I had had my cootie eaten two or three times, and it wasn’t a good experience. It was like they were trying to chew my clitoris off. You need to know all of this to understand what I did next. I started to blow on his penis. And he said, “What the fuck are you doing?” I looked up at him. “Just suck my fucking dick, girl.”

  “Oh.” And I did it. But I wasn’t prepared. Nobody had told me about a condom, or what to do toward the end. So just as he was about to explode, I pulled my head up. And it went everywhere.

  “Are you that new?”

  “Yeah.” And I started crying.

  “Stop crying, stop crying.” He reached into the back seat and got a towel and wiped himself. “Stop crying. How old are you?” I told him and he said, “Ah! I’ll show you how to do this shit.” Funny how he didn’t tell me to go home. He liked the fact that I was fourteen years old and gave me another twenty. I learned then that guys picked me up because I was fresh. They were giving me money hand over fist. They liked the fact that I was new out there. I got out the car, and I felt a little sick to my stomach. I stood there with the taste of him in my mouth and tried to spit it out the best I could. It was too late for me to turn around. I wanted to, but I didn’t know how to. I only had sixty dollars and that wasn’t enough. So I took a deep breath and started looking around for the next car.

  I got into the car with the next guy. He was Italian, and he did give me a hundred dollars when I asked. I was still stuck into the hundred-dollar world. And the only reason I got the hundred dollars was because I told him I was fourteen years old before we got started. I wasn’t the only girl my age out there either. I knew this pimp whose whole stable was minors. I mean, seventeen was old for him. His name was Larrod. Forty years old and a short little dude. He used to wear the pimp suits. Everybody used to talk about him. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen was the average age for his girls. He called them his hos and bitches. Somebody killed him and all his girls. Nobody was left in the house alive except a three-year-old baby. Some cold-blooded shit—they killed everybody. Shot them all in the head.

  In the beginning, I stayed away from situations like that. I just went out there to prostitute. And the tricks taught me how they wanted to have sex with me. All I had to worry about was my wardrobe. I bought this new lime-green skirt and top, which had puffy sleeves. It was from this store called Three Sisters, and you could get an outfit for $3.99, and I wore my hair in afro puffs, but I got a wig. The kind we used to call a “gypsy wig”—it was a long, wild, curly wig that hung in three layers—cost seven bucks, and I put that on. And these horrible shoes, these cheap shoes. I still remember those shoes. They looked like patent leather, but they were like rubber or vinyl or something like that, and they made your feet sweat and stink. Even the heel was made of it; they didn’t even have the respect to put a real heel on the shoe. When you walked, they scrunched. But I was out there, ready to take that direction. I wonder sometimes if my mother was looking down on me saying, “Baby, my baby.” I wonder if she was watching me and cringing. I had made like four or five tricks that night, and I made almost four hundred dollars. I cried through the first two. I had been with other guys and had slept with them, but it was more like a date before. You know, old men sniffing up my ass and liking me. But this was like impersonal, grimy in the car. I didn’t know how to talk them into going to a hotel. I didn’t think about all that. I made that money and went home, gave it to Ma’Dea, and she never asked me where it came from. One time I gave her five hundred dollars. All hundred-dollar bills. She didn’t ask one question.

  Chapter 5

  When the Gorilla Pimps Want You

  I went out there on the weekends. I didn’t go out during the week, because I would go up to Madison Street and work in the furniture store. I was a part-time prostitute. I took some money to Sears, and I got the cutest dresses for Prune and Peaches. I got Peaches a bunny, and I put it in her crib. Oh, she was so beautiful, and her diaper always sagged on her little poor self. She was a little bitty thing, and the little diaper used to just slide on down and hang on by her hips.

  I had been out there for a month. Then I ran into the pimps. Big gorilla pimps. I thought I knew the streets. I thought I knew how to be hard. But when the gorilla pimps wanted me, I got caught up. They told me I needed to have representation. �
�Your man need to be out here.” See, if you can produce a man, they weren’t gone go up against some brother and just do you like that. Dealing with the outlaws, that’s what they called it. You couldn’t be no woman out there working without a man representing you. When you on the streets back then, and your man was asked to appear, your man had to take a rag and peer on they ass. “That’s mine, man.”

  “Oh, I just wanted to know. You know how this game is.”

  Brothers wanted to know who they need to bow down to, who they need to back off from. That’s why assholes could step to you with that protection nonsense, cause there were fools out there who thought you were an outlaw, and then you would be under pimp arrest. Pimp arrest. I didn’t know anything about working massage parlors or anything like that. I knew just what I knew: girls worked that area, I saw it, and if them hos could get some money, I could get some money. I figured out how to be a prostitute from seeing what was going on outside and from blaxpoitation movies. That’s no bullshit. I was really influenced by Super Fly and The Mack and Get Christie Love! and Cleopatra Jones. Pimp pictures turned on all that. Willie Dynamite. All that was impressive to me. Sick clothes, sick life. Hos getting money, being a bottom bitch.

  The first time I ever heard of a bottom bitch was in the movie Truck Turner. Turner was played by Isaac Hayes. It was about this pimp getting murdered. His bottom bitch was played by the woman who was on Star Trek, Nichelle Nichols—Uhura. And what I learned from that movie was that the bottom bitch actually ran shit. Because when the pimp got murdered, all the hos turned to Dorinda, and she told them, y’all gone do this, y’all gone do that. And I liked a statement that she said in the movie: “I haven’t had to sell my pussy since I was fifteen and found out I could sell other bitches’ instead.” That laid me back. I thought that was so profound. That was gangster. So I wanted to be the bottom bitch; the one who didn’t have to do the work. The one who just did the handling. She’s in control. And the only person she takes orders from is the pimp. I didn’t know about the loneliness. I didn’t know about the responsibilities that you take on as the bottom bitch. Not only do you take on the control of the stable; anything that goes wrong, you’re the one who goes down for it. You are responsible for everything, but you don’t get a dime of his money. You are doing it all for him. And before you know it, you become a little him. I thought like him; I acted like him. You did things that he would do when he wasn’t around. And it becomes hard, because some of those things you don’t want to do. A bottom bitch was the best that I could see and reach for at that time. I didn’t know anything else to reach for. I didn’t realize that I was reaching for the lowest part of my life.

  What came with being a bottom bitch was losing your identity, becoming an awful person for the love of money. Even when I finally made it as a bottom bitch, it never made me happy. Because I knew when I left, everything he had would fall apart, and that’s a lot to put on somebody. That’s a lot of pressure. Pimps would come looking for blood if you left. You weren’t a bitch who could just run off. Leaving interrupted his lifestyle. Not only would your pimp be looking for you, other brothers would be looking for you, too. You worth fifty, a hundred dollars if some guy found you and brought you back. I know all this now, but back then, when I first got started, the movies made it all look really glamorous. It looked powerful. And when you are in pain, you are looking for some power and control. How can I be on top? How can I be the boss? So yeah. I watched the movies. I read Hustler magazine and took notes. The Happy Hooker, she was talking about making hundreds and hundreds of dollars and basically giving the ABCs of hoing. The rest of my learning was self-taught, and it was a hard education.

  But before I got to all that, the gorilla pimps got me first. A gorilla is a pimp who uses force and abuse to control his women. These aren’t men who are smooth and play the boyfriend part in the relationship. It’s all about fear. Gorilla pimps are brutal. And they can get creative with their violence. These pimps, they weren’t handsome; they didn’t have no swag. They were just some country-ass punks, and the only way they got hos to choose them was to snatch them, cause they had nothing else for a girl. They had to kidnap.

  I never knew what kind of relationship those two assholes had between them, but it wasn’t healthy. One of them was really dark, and he had this half-ass perm, a nappy perm. He was always putting rollers in it, and it never quite looked right, cause he had that real fly-up-and-away hair. He had a crooked tooth in the front of his mouth, and his hands were real big. When he hit you, it was like ah!, it just took over the whole head. The other asshole had a little bit of a gut. Brown skin and a ponytail. They had a Cadillac. Dark blue, and they kept it up really nice.

  I had only been out there for three good weekends when they grabbed me. I was standing in the middle of Clark Street. I had just gotten out a trick’s car in the middle of the block when they rolled up on me. Had I been on the corner I would have been around more people and they wouldn’t have got me. But in the middle of the block, it’s dark with no streetlights. Two o’clock in the morning and nobody was around. And when I got out the car with the trick, I’m walking fast to get to the corner of Clark and Division. But one of the gorilla pimps is walking super quick behind me; the other one is rolling down the street on the side of me. I see the play, but I can’t get away. And then the pimp behind me jumped and bust me in the head with the pistol. I was shocked because I didn’t know pimps wowed out like that. My uncle was a pimp. He never pulled shit like that. I didn’t know yet that stuff like that happened out in the street.

  They grabbed me and shoved me in the trunk. In that trunk. I don’t know where to put that. To this day, I don’t know where to put that experience. I was screaming and bleeding from my head where the dude had hit me with his gun. There was a blanket in there and a metal can, a tire jack handle. It was a huge trunk, and I remember getting jostled. A roll of tape bumped into my thigh. The only thing I knew was when we were moving forward and when we took a turn. God, I tossed around and around. I was paralyzed and scared. It was like being in a grave. I peed all over myself in that trunk.

  They took me to a cornfield and did Russian roulette to me: they took a pistol out and put it to my head. It was not the last time they did that. They used to do that for entertainment. Me and the two gorilla pimps were all in one hotel room. I could tell they had been snatching up girls for a while, going back and forth with some girls. Playing tennis back and forth with a bitch. It was just me at first, but then they got another girl. It was just two girls at a time because a whole lotta girls was too many to watch. I don’t care what you say, a gorilla pimp ain’t gone keep a ho long. Too much food involved. Too much fear and intimidation and physical brutality to keep up.

  They would send me out to get tricks from the trucking stations. The only time the gorilla pimps came off the major highway was at the truck stops. They would go with me. They would pull into the truck stops and park in a particular area. At that time, police weren’t messing with pimps doing business. They put me out the car and told me, “You work this side and this side only. You just work up and down this lane. When you get to the end, work yourself back down the other side.” They watched me closely. Some of the truck drivers knew the pimps I was with. I found that out because one time a truck driver walked up to the pimp to complain. I had cried the whole time I was with him because I had gotten beaten up before they put me out there. I was still upset.

  The truck driver walked up to the car and told them, “I want my motherfucking money back. That bitch cried the whole time.”

  “Okay, partner. You want her to do it again? Cause there ain’t no refunds, but she’ll take care of you.” But the gorilla pimp was looking at me like, you know I’m going to hurt you when we get back to the motel. So when I got back to the room, they beat the snot out of me. To me, that validated every threat he had ever given me. They had told me, “I know everything you do. I got people everywhere.” I felt like even the customers were in on my kid
napping. I didn’t know what was going on. Was the truck driver their friend? That just happened one time, but that was enough to keep me scared about running off. They found shit for me to get into. Sometimes they dropped me off on a street corner to work, but I didn’t like it. The truck drivers knew what the girls were doing. They were dating us really fast. You could get your money quick. But standing on the corner? It was dark and scary and you could be out there for hours and not make enough money. So the truck stops was where those gorilla pimps really got their money’s worth out of me.

  We stayed on a major road; I knew that much. Sometimes we would find a spot and we stayed because I made money there. I mean, these guys weren’t the brightest, but they knew where the money was. We worked between five or six different truck stops. When I came back to the motel from hoing, they felt like they needed to terrorize me some more. They were big on anal rape. They were big on doing terrorizing games. Make you intimidated and keep your thoughts off of planning what to do. Keep you locked up, tossed up in fear. In the beginning, I was trying to figure a way out. But those were the things that got me beat up. Bad. Every time I tried to escape, I got caught and punished. I kept thinking, If I could be out of this room, if I could get out of this cornfield, I could get around people who would save me. Every time I tried something—not showing up at the Cadillac at the end of working the truck stop, asking somebody for help—it just all went bad for me. No one was willing to step into a situation that looked like it was just between me and the gorilla pimps. I thought about my kids, but I also thought that somebody was looking for me. Ma’Dea would find me. And I thought if I could just stay strong, I would be found. I didn’t know that people don’t look for little Black girls. They didn’t then, and they don’t now. So many missing Black girls. Nobody looked for us. I didn’t know that back then. All I knew was being lost was a lot for a fourteen-year-old girl to hold on to. All that pressure gone bust a cap. I’m talking about me and all the girls they did this to. My pressure valve was going to burst. So many petty-ass mind games to throw me off and keep me unbalanced.