Leaving Breezy Street

by Brenda Myers-Powell

  Now, there were three dudes with the same kind of car. Tennessee, who had come back, had a steel gray Coupe DeVille, and so did Tommy Knox. And so did one brother up on the set. But Tommy’s was a Coupe DeVille with black trim, and this dude’s was a Coupe DeVille with silver trim. But the homies didn’t know the difference, so when they all hooked up, they ran into that boy instead of Tommy Knox and they killed that boy. Tennessee moved out the building that evening and left town, cause he had the same car, too. Tommy never did anything about it. All he kept saying was, “That funky bitch should have never said anything to them dudes. I’m ’bout to get killed over a funky bitch.” That’s how he backed down off of them. He got mad at Jackie.

  * * *

  So I was like, I’m going to leave Tommy Knox. I was with Tommy a year and a half. Jackie was his wife, and I was the moneymaker. She went out with me, but I was a young bitch, tearing them off. I had five-hundred-dollar days, thousand-dollar days. If I rob the right white boy, I came home with five thousand dollars. Jackie and Tommy Knox went from just buying bags to buying spoons to buying halves, because that was just the way I worked. I could have been a stock-market bitch or something like that with my work ethic.

  With all the shenanigans, I wanted to get back in touch with my family. I started slipping between family and the game. I had started to get close to my dad. I had been seeing him once or twice a year since I was a kid, but when I lived with Aunt Josie in Evanston, she would let me go over his house on the weekends. When I was out in the streets, I would stop by their house to visit. My daddy kind of knew I was hooking, but he was the kind who didn’t ask questions that he didn’t want to know the answer to. He didn’t like my lifestyle, but they had their own troubles, so they felt they couldn’t judge. On any given day, when I couldn’t take any more of Tommy, I went over there with my daddy and my brothers. Jethro, Jerome, Wiley, Terry, and Todd came and got me when I was in tough situations. I was making regular appearances over at my father’s house, so they were getting to know my wife-in-law, Jackie.

  * * *

  Tommy Knox came out of his nod and realized I had been missing for a while.

  “Somebody at the door for you,” my brother Jethro called out to me. It was Tommy.

  I went to it. “What’s up?”

  Tommy leaned in. “Come on out and talk to me.”

  “I ain’t got no clothes on,” I said. “You gone have to talk to me in the hallway.”

  He didn’t make a move to come inside. I knew he was teed up. I stepped outside on the porch and looked back to the house. My brother Terry came to the door, cause me and Tommy Knox out there talking.

  “You serious, you don’t want to fool with me no more?”

  “Don’t, Tommy.” Without my knowing it, I had walked down a couple of steps from the porch. I took a good long look at Tommy Knox and all I could see was Jackie and her gang rape, the pool stick he used on me, all the dope. I turned around to get back inside. “Bye.”

  “Bitch, get your ass down these stairs.” And pow! He bust me in the head with a pistol.

  “Daddy!” I screamed. I made a distress call. Boom! All you hear was footsteps. Jethro, Terry, Wiley, Jerome were hitting the door. My brothers were running down the street chasing Tommy Knox.

  I called out to Terry, “Terry, get him!” and my brother’s pistol went ka-ka-pow as Tommy was making that turn around the corner, his coat flaring up behind him. That’s what caught the bullets.

  So of course, I went by Tommy’s the next day to see if he was okay and that he was still alive.

  He showed me his coat. “Your daddy gone have to get me another coat. He shot my coat up.” He turned to Jackie and said, “She got some real wired-up family over there. Her daddy be running around with six-shooters and everything. Brother named Jethro. What kind of name is that?”

  Tommy was talking about he shot my brother in his ass. I told him not to get too far out on that kind of rumor. See, Tommy didn’t know Terry. Let me tell you about Terry. Terry was good-looking, fine as hell. Hazel eyes. But he had a short fuse. Before he went to California and went to jail, he told me, “One time, there was some people over there in Jackson. I was in the park, and I was waiting on somebody to come by so I could get ’em.” He hid in the park, in the middle of the projects, ducking down, waiting on prey. “I saw you and your girlfriends come outta that building. Y’all all had fur coats on and y’all was looking good, and I was mad at you. And I thought to myself, I should go over there and rob all your asses. But I let you alone that night.” I was like OMG! My brother was thinking about robbing my ass! And I had only owed him five dollars.

  * * *

  That’s who Tommy Knox was trying to talk big to. I knew if he pushed it, he was going to get jacked up. Somebody needed to protect Tommy from himself. That might as well be me, I thought. I went back over to Tommy’s after that shootout because I felt like that’s where I belonged. I didn’t belong anywhere else except with those people. It sounds crazy, but we were a family over at Knox’s. What was happening to them was important to me. Over at my daddy’s house, babies were crying, kids were going to school—that didn’t feel real. If I stayed for too long, somebody would have gotten around to asking when I was going to get a regular job. That was square life. I was a street person, and I wanted to be around street people. I needed to get back to the family I knew best. It’s a street family, but it’s a family. You form allegiances to them. They become as important to you as your own personal family. That’s what I became when I was with these pimps. Tommy was the head of the family, and Jackie was a sister to me. And I worried about Jackie. Jackie was the best friend I had. Would he take all this mess out on her? It didn’t matter that she was a dope fiend. I loved her. I wanted to get Jackie out. And even if I didn’t know it, I needed to get me out, too.

  Chapter 8

  The Gangster Pimp

  A couple of months later, I was on the street with Jackie, just talking, drinking wine, or whatever, and a car pulled up with Jackie’s old friends off Poke Street in it. And Coolie was in there, too—Jackie had just been telling me about Coolie, how he’d just got out the federal joint. “Who’s your girlfriend?” he said to Jackie. He had this beautiful smile. He had lips like James Earl Jones. Super-soft lips.

  I was just standing back there smiling, I didn’t know what to say. I was young. Sixteen. I was still a baby.

  Coolie was light-skinned but on the brown side of all that. Even sitting in the car, I could tell he was muscular. About five eleven, with a husky build. I could see he was interested in me. Everything Jackie had been telling me about him was really exciting to me. She was telling me about what a sweet brother he was, but that he wasn’t one to mess with. That was a known fact. She had told me little stories, some nice and pleasant stuff, but I also got from her that if I got with this man, wouldn’t nobody mess with me. If I got with him, he’d be my protector, cause didn’t nobody fool with Coolie.

  I knew it was time for me to separate from Tommy Knox. I had been with him for almost two years. Everything about him was so raggedy. His pimping was raggedy. Two or three other pimps had moved into our building with their hos and disrespected the neighborhood. We lived on Parkside, two blocks west of Central Avenue. Yeah, we worked out of that place, but we were discreet with our tricks; we respected the neighborhood. But these new hos turned the neighborhood into a ho stroll, a track. Eight to twelve hos were standing right where they live, turning tricks, ripping customers off. So if somebody got robbed, they knew where to come back. That was a whole deal right there; it made me feel unsafe. What if somebody ripped somebody off and they came back shooting at the building? And the whole business was starting to depreciate because bitches would underbid. Everything was just going downward.

  I was looking for a way out. So I started making money and stashing it. I gave Tommy some, but I kept on saying, “It’s slow; it was a bad night.” I found out Coolie lived around the corner on Ohio, like two blocks away fro
m us. I found that out from Jackie. She was real mad at me when she found out that I went over there. On this particular day, I told Knox I was going to the cleaners. See, I had this rabbit fur coat that I loved. This was when rabbit coats were in. It was a three-quarter-length coat; I thought I was styling. Later, when I got with Coolie, he threw that coat away, cause he thought I had graduated to fox and mink. But I thought that little funky coat was the bomb.

  So I told Tommy I was going to the cleaners to get some clothes out of there. I had to get out of the building fast before somebody said, “Take my shirt, take my pants.” Coolie didn’t know I was coming. He didn’t know anything was going on. This is what I did: I had my little bag, I took it around back, and I set it by the back door. Then I went around the front and rang his bell. “Who’s that?” He looked out the window and said, “Hey! Cutie pie!” He had company and he was talking to his friends. “Must be Christmas, cause I think I got a Christmas present down here.” I was blushing. I went up the stairs and he said, “What’s up, baby?”

  I whispered, “Could I talk to you?”

  “Yes, ma’am, you can. You can talk to me anytime.” He had all these locks on the door. He locked all the bars behind me. From his living room to his dining room, all you could see was a bunch of men up in there around the table, and they were shooting craps. Tyrone Davis was there, all the big drug dealers.

  This one drug dealer named Big Al, big ol’ teddy bear, looked at me and said, “What you got there, Mr. Coolie? You got Christmas?” I was a little sweet thing, and everybody was like, hmmm. All the guys had a little statement about me coming up in there.

  Coolie said, “Let’s go to the bedroom and talk.” I went in, and I sat down on his bed. He started chopping up some white rocks. It was cocaine. “You want some?”

  “I don’t do that.”

  He said, “Oohh. That’s nice. No shit?” He ain’t saying it, but he was happy I didn’t do drugs. “So what’s going on?”

  “Well, I was thinking you and me could do something together.”

  “Ah, yeah? Really? And what make you feel like that?”

  “When I met you, it was just something about you. I done heard Jackie talking about you. And I felt a drive to come here.”

  “Okay. Okay.” We start talking. “What you do?”

  “I don’t do a whole lot of nothing right now, but you know what I do. But I’m open to whatever.” We were just talking. He asked did I have kids. Asked about Ma’Dea. He was asking all these great questions, like he couldn’t wait to figure out who I was. It was almost like we were two girlfriends talking. He was so different from Tommy Knox.

  “How old are you? For real?” I was going to be seventeen. I hadn’t made it to April yet. He wasn’t intimidated by that, cause Coolie liked young girls. I found that out later. There was a little pedo in him. But a lotta men had that. Cause it was all about power and control. Get you a young girl and you can train them, almost like you can a dog. Now that I think about it, it’s almost like, Train me? What? But at the time, it was the thing to say. That’s how conversation went about women. Get them young and train them into what you want them to be. And you have her where you want her.

  “Well, where your clothes at?”

  “They on your porch.”

  “Where?”

  “Out on the back porch. I didn’t know if you was gone say yes or not.” Coolie started laughing and I said, “Oh, and I got something else for you.” And I went down in my panties and I pulled out a wad of money.

  He said, “You had this really thought out, huh?”

  “Yep. You didn’t think I was just gonna come here empty-handed?” I probably couldn’t work for a couple of days until he got everything squared with Tommy Knox, because basically, I still belonged to Tommy Knox.

  Coolie smiled—he had this great big ol’ smile—and we went to the back door and pulled my little bag in. He ended up throwing all those clothes away. Then he had somebody go get me something to eat. And I said I really want to take a bath, to be fresh. He gave me a towel, all kind of stuff.

  He went back out, and he was gone for about an hour; then he told his friends, “I got some business to take care of.”

  All those guys were cracking. “Yeah, yeah, now you wanna put us out!”

  I was excited. I could hear what was going on. Sounded real positive, sounded like I was the conversation. I liked it.

  Them dudes were drinking, snorting cocaine. Lotta pistols in there, everybody had a gun. Some of Chicago’s finest. Some of them were well-known criminals, some were celebrities, some of them were politicians, and yes, some of them were police. It was hilarious. They were all sweet guys, all old middle-age men; they all became protectors of me.

  One of them was Coolie’s brother, Cicero. Cicero had ties with the old Chicago crime family, people like Sam Giancana. Cicero was Giancana’s boy, the Black guy for Giancana. He ran policy for Giancana for years before all of that gambling faded out, and he had connections on other crimes, too, like if they were going to do a job or do something illegal. I don’t think there was too much drugs going on from them. I think they were getting their drugs from the Herreras, from Mexico. The conversations I heard at Coolie’s were stories I would hear later on, on TV news or reading the paper. Coolie started me reading the newspaper. He said you had to read major news every day. “Read the news and current events so you’ll know what going on in the world. Plus, it heightens your conversation. You don’t want to get around people and not know nothing. You won’t have nothing to talk about.”

  He didn’t let me work at first. He took me to the doctor. There was some things going on with me that hadn’t been taken care of, cause I was with a pimp who didn’t care. I had a little thing with my cervix. And I had a STD. He made sure all of that was taken care of. And he paid for all that. He took me to the dentist. Took me to the eye doctor, because once, he saw me outside, doing my thing, and he said, “I saw you, the police rolled right up on you and you was squinting. You didn’t see them.”

  I started laughing. I said, “Nuh-uh.”

  “Yeah, you did. I saw you. That’s how come they rolled right up on you and you went to jail.” So we went to the eye doctor, and sure enough, I needed glasses. They had put those drops in my eyes, so when I went outside, I couldn’t see. But Coolie guided me home.

  Not too much longer after that, my tonsils were inflamed. I had had tonsillitis almost my whole life, and he took me to the doctor for that. I mean, he just literally took care of me. That was why I fell in love with Coolie. And Coolie fell in love with me. We were Mr. and Mrs. Coolie, and we were happy. We were happy like that for years, five, six years. We went to the movies. He took me to the museums. He took me to the other side of town to the best restaurants. We went to the park. We went grocery shopping together. We went places together, and people looked at us and asked us if we were brother and sister, cause, you know how when you with somebody, you sort of start to look alike? “Y’all look like y’all together.”

  Coolie could tell me anything. We sat up at night and talked way into the morning. I used to ask him questions. “How it feel to kill somebody?”

  He looked at me and said, “It’s a feeling you never wanna have. Lotta people talk about ain’t nothing to take a life, but that ain’t true.” A lotta times he had nightmares, and he’d grit his teeth real hard at night. There was turmoil inside there. He had a lotta dead bodies on him.

  Coolie had a jean jumpsuit and a cap and some shoes he put on when he was going to go put in some work. That’s what he called it: putting in work.

  Like, once, when I was working the stroll, this guy walked up on me and beat me up. I didn’t even know him. He just felt like it because he saw me as one of the girls out there. I went home crying and told Coolie, “He beat me up. I don’t know him and he just put his hands on me.”

  “Okay, okay. Calm down,” Coolie said. He calmed me down from crying. Later on that night, he put on that jumpsuit. I never s
aw that dude again. I can’t tell you if anything happened because Coolie told me this: “The less you know, the less you can tell. This ain’t something you need to know. I wouldn’t put that on you for nothing. For you to know. Why you keep asking me?”

  “Cause I, like, got, you know … I can ask, right? We in love.” But I understood. By the end, Coolie and I had this relationship that was peas and carrots, fingers and a hand. You couldn’t get around it. Jackie came in and looked at all this that was me and him, our relationship between each other, and was like, “Well, damn.” He had messed around and fallen in love with me.

  * * *

  It was real, but I was too young to take on the responsibility this man was trying to put on me. I couldn’t be in a relationship and be in the game. Settle down? Be a wife? I hadn’t thought about none of that. Kidnappings, having babies was still following me around, eating me up. I didn’t know. I knew I just couldn’t do it right. Live the right way. Several times, I had something right in my hands that could have made me end up really well off, but I couldn’t maintain my own self to do it. I couldn’t look that far ahead in life.

  * * *

  Coolie used to tell me, “Don’t think people always like you. Sometimes folks want to know if they can get to me through you. See, if they can get to you, they can get to me.”

  “Okay.”

  Sometimes I think I loved Coolie so much because when he was telling me one thing, he was actually telling me another thing. Coolie had told me that “sometimes folks want to know if they can get to me through you,” but what he was also saying was: This Tommy Knox business has got to stop. All that coat shooting and Jackie nodding. I was living with Coolie, but I would stop by the old building to check in on Jackie. Sometimes Tommy would be there. He was telling me to come back. And when I said no, he’d smack me in the head or pop me in the mouth. Coolie was like, alright, I’m gone go talk to him. I was more nervous than he was. He wasn’t ever nervous, cause he was cool.