Leaving Breezy Street

by Brenda Myers-Powell

  We rode around the corner, and Knox was outside his car. Great timing. Coolie went over. Knox saw him coming and backed up a little bit. “Yo, I understand, man. You know the funky bitch, that bitch. She a bitch, man.”

  From the car I noticed that even though Coolie was shorter than Tommy Knox, Coolie was the bigger man. “Hey, man, we ain’t got to go through all that name-calling.”

  “Well, can I say something to her?”

  “You can say what you want to say. But you can’t fool with her from now on.”

  “I understand, man.”

  Tommy came over to the car and leaned in. He whispered, “Bitch, get out the car.”

  I didn’t move. “I ain’t gone be with you no more, Tommy Knox.” I thought he was going to hit me in the mouth, but with Coolie standing nearby, he just looked real ugly and backed up.

  Coolie got in the car. As we rolled away, the song came on that was out by Barry White’s girlfriend, “I Belong to You”!

  Coolie looked at me and turned the song up. “You hear that, baby?”

  “Yeah!” I was all excited. I wasn’t gonna get beat up by Knox. It was like we were riding off into the sunset. Me and Coolie.

  Chapter 9

  Love in the Game

  I got with Coolie, but he wasn’t my pimp. He was just a brother in the game. Didn’t nobody know I was giving my money to Coolie, because he didn’t pull all that pimp nonsense. He was made, not a pimp. He knew my thing was prostitution, but in our relationship there was no shame in me being a prostitute. Prostitution was just another kind of hustle, one he’d prefer me not be in on, but at the end of the day, you got to do what you got to do. We got to get money—that’s the bottom line. We both understood you got to get money. You can’t leave your house every day and come back with no money. It didn’t stop him from loving me or feeling close to me. It was a job. Still. Coolie wanted me to have different things to fall back on. Nobody ever had just one trade. That was Coolie’s thing. He spent a lot of time picking my brain, trying to find out if I had it in me to do other things. He used to tell me the game was so much bigger than just prostitution.

  He didn’t want to be in the drug game. It was too dangerous, he said. But he knew all the other games that girls could get into. In his opinion, prostitution wasn’t the only way for a girl to make money. He didn’t look down on it, but I could do other things. As long as I got money, he was happy. He asked me did I know how to be a booster. He hooked me up with some major players who were confidence women and knew how to run a con game.

  There was another game called creeping. Before hotels started using the cards to get into the rooms, there were keys. Mainly we would do Holiday Inns or the kind of hotels where businessmen were. We would pick the locks quietly while people were sleeping inside. Then we would crawl in the rooms, steal their briefcases and wallets. That was a whole profession, and we were called creepers.

  Coolie put me with girls who were thieves; I learned how to steal. He would rather me be a thief, so I didn’t have to use my body so much and deal with so many guys. For him, that was just a more dangerous lifestyle. So I became a good thief. There were times where I could go and actually peep out different places and tell Coolie about it. Sometimes I came home with no money. I tried and it didn’t work out. He would ask me, “How did it go? What did you see?” He made me practice at home. We would lay in bed, and he would let me pick his pocket. “Oh, you so slow.” We would play around the house, and I would try to pick his pocket without him knowing. I became very good at it. “You got my money, don’t you?”

  “Yup. I got it.”

  “That was good. That was a good one. I didn’t feel it when you got it.” I learned to walk up to a guy who was intoxicated at the bar and pick his pocket. I was really good if I was in a car with a guy. Coolie was a brother who knew how to work a scenario: like, one time, I took a pimp’s money and his jewelry. We had smoked a joint and we drank some Dom Perignon. I took care of the business and he fell out. I took his money while he was asleep. But. There I was with his money and his jewelry. Nice stuff. Diamonds, gold chains. So what was I going to do? I called Coolie, and he said, “Get a cab. Right now.” I got a cab to his house, got some cold jewelry, and I never heard anything else about it. Not because I got a break or I got lucky and didn’t bump into the wrong people. It’s just that when the pimp woke up, he thought, “Man, I just messed with Coolie’s girl.” That alone made a lot of nonsense disappear. Coolie used to tell me, “You got to learn who is out there.” I was just out there, young and a cutie pie. Seventeen years old. I was infatuated with anything that made me look good and feel good. I wanted something good.

  Coolie was the first brother who could do that for me. Before, I had met assholes who only thought about using me for their benefit. Nobody before Coolie had thought there could be benefits all around. When I was young, I would walk down Madison Street and cause pure collisions. And I was gassing myself with it. I was having a ball. “Oh, look at that.” The men I started attracting didn’t know what to do with me.

  Let me show you what I mean. I had been with Coolie for almost a year when I figured out I made more money going out to Rush Street at lunch and meeting a guy by chance than I did on the streets. Rush Street is where all the money is. I was at this place called Magic Pan and I was eating crepes. I was down there with a stewardess girl who was my friend, and I was down there just kicking it. This white guy kept passing by our table, and he kept winking. Handsome white guy. I went into the bathroom, and when I looked up, he was coming into the bathroom with me. He came in right behind me. He said, “Girl, you fine as hell.”

  I started laughing. “Thank you.”

  He said, “You want some blow?”

  “Maybe a little bit.” You know, back in the day, dudes had coke on ’em all the time. It was polite business to do a little coke with them. Being out there was the first time I really did cocaine. And I wished I had never tried it, because I liked it. It didn’t make me sick. All that other stuff, the heroin and syrup, made me sick. So I didn’t ever do them more than once. But cocaine? I liked. We were in the bathroom, and he took the coke spoon out.

  “Here have some,” so I took a little toot. “So are you here with your friend?”

  “Yeah, that’s Ducky.” Her real name was Vivian, but we all called her Ducky and Ducky was a Pan Am ho. Spoke five languages. Fluently. She flew all over the world on Pan Am. That was when there was money in the sky, baby. She had an apartment in Paris, and she had an apartment in New York. She had a house in Chicago. She was a well-kept bitch. Nice little tight body. Educated. She took me to see people. Entertainers, baseball players, folks like that. Ducky took me to my first millionaire party. There was this diplomat from Lagos, Nigeria, throwing the party. We stayed in the Waldorf Astoria, kicking it. Frank Sinatra was up there staying on a whole floor. I kept punching the elevator to Frank’s floor, and his bodyguard kept punching me back down, “Sorry, can’t let you in.” I’m like, “Tell Frank I said hi.” That guard was cracking up. He thought I was so cute.

  Ducky and me, we were kicking it so hard, I got ten thousand dollars off that Nigerian diplomat. But he was crude, a chauvinist type, arrogant son of a bitch. He had a big Johnson, but he didn’t know what to do with it, and if he didn’t watch out, he could end up messing a girl up. I had to whoa, whoa him. He was having sex with me like he was angry at me. You know dudes sometimes want to have sex with you to see if they can hurt you? Talking about, “I’m gone tear this pussy up.” Then they end up messing up your coot. I had enough sense not to let some dude ride me like that. I was like, “Whoa. You too rough.”

  He was getting frustrated, but I still needed this money. So I pulled a slip on him. I said, “Come on, let’s do it doggy style.”

  “Huh. How you do that?” So, I showed him how to do it doggy style. I can control that junk better doggy style. When they get me from the back, I can control how much he put into me. I direct my muscles and everything
to keep him in place. First of all, when he goes in from the back, he has to go through booty and thigh, and that’s a lot before he can get to my vagina. I can control some of the shaft length I have to take. I had learned to control tricks from hurting me. Some of these assholes wanted to throw my legs up that away. I’d have female troubles for two weeks, hurting. So I learned what to do.

  You have to know I didn’t go to that party as a prostitute. I went there as Ducky’s friend, and they thought I was a daycare teacher. They wanted to give me money because I told them I needed a car to get to work. I was living with Coolie, but I was in places all over Chicago, meeting all kinds of tricks. Doing all sorts of things.

  Downers weren’t my thing. Alcohol didn’t work with me. I didn’t like the drunk feeling. The buzz is okay, but being very drunk? No. I couldn’t be sloppy. But coke? Yes, please. I think I took to cocaine so well because I had been taking the diet pills. There was a time when you could take diet pills like M&M’s. Doctors gave prescriptions for diet pills like candy. I mean, everybody was focused on the downers and heroin, but any doctor would give you diet pills. First I took them because they kept me up, and then they cut my appetite and I needed to stay beautiful and slim. I lived in two different worlds. In the Black community, the guys liked women who had a big booty, little waist, all that was popping in the neighborhood. But when I got around white people? I had to be slim. I could have my curves, but I had to be tight. White boys used to be intimated with too much booty. You needed just enough. So I had to bring it down to compete. I had it just right. Not too much, not scary. Just a nice young ass. Pow-dow. At one time, I got my waist down to twenty-two. Everything was tight. So when I tried that cocaine, it kind of coincided with what I was doing with the diet pills. It gave me a euphoria, and when I did it, it made me think I knew everything. When I snorted a line of coke, all of a sudden I got brilliant. “Well, you know the Dow Jones average…” I talked my ass off. I was making my tricks laugh with all this outrageous conversation I threw at them.

  Like the guy who I met at the crepe place, the white guy. He was in my life for many, many years.

  His name was Leonard Weinstein. Lenny had a vision. Bucktown, West Loop, all that area, he started putting money in houses down there years ago, in the seventies. He kept telling me, one day, this all be worth a lotta money. He was going to work, and you could see all the potential in the real estate he invested in. He had a vision—and he had cocaine and a whole lotta money. I could go to his house and get cocaine and money from him when I went to his house. I went to his house to get rejuvenated, and everything was high-end. When I came back to Chicago many years later, all that area was way up there, so I know he got his money’s worth. If drugs didn’t take him out, he got his money. He made money, and then he would have the urge to do drugs, and he would call me. There was a white middle-age woman who he was with from time to time. He brought me and her in the office, and he talked her into having a threesome with me. He gave me some dope I never had before to get high on, so I was sitting up there stupid. He was the only trick I used to get stupid with, because he always made sure I got home and I got my money and everything I wanted from him. I remember one time he gave me some kind of drug, and we all sitting at the table slumped over, mouths open, looking at each other, talking about, “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  “You’re great!!” We were sitting at the best table at this high-end restaurant bar, and we were all falling into each other. “I love you!” I couldn’t go to the bathroom by myself. “Take me to the bathroom, I gotta pee.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  When I went home, it took the whole next day to get off that stuff. I don’t know what he gave me, but damn it, it had me high, paralyzed, and in love.

  Of course, he had some freak in him. Lenny liked some weird shit, but it feels unfair to get into it here, because he was important to me, and he was a kind man. And brilliant, and maybe his brilliance drove him to a level of craziness. I don’t know. I do know that no one was getting hurt.

  Most of the time I was high with Lenny, and because he was so good to me, I was always kinda down with what he was doing. Yes, the weird part was weird. But most of the time, I was laughing my ass off, shouting, “We’re all in love!” Whatever we were doing, I was in love with. It was some seventies nonsense; everybody in love. But at the end, before everything was shut down, before the last person left, it was my job to get Lenny completely off the way he wanted to. That was what he was really paying me for. And the man paid me a lotta money.

  So I was happy. I was living with Coolie. The kids were with Ma’Dea. I went and visited my girls every weekend. Peaches was a beautiful little girl. Prune just made me smile for no reason. Coolie went over to my grandmother’s house and met my babies and my grandmomma. Coolie told her, anything she needed, she would have. “These babies ain’t gone be over here without nothing.”

  I worked or went out, but Coolie went out and hustled, too. We both would put the money we made in the top drawer in a dresser in the bedroom. If I needed grocery money, I took it out of the drawer. If Coolie needed the rent money, he took it out of the drawer. In the game, it was like we were a married couple. He went over my grandmother’s house and gave them money, went grocery shopping for her. He had a daughter named Tonya. Coolie would take out Tonya, Prune, and Peaches for the day. I looked up, and Coolie had taken them to Six Flags Great America and come back. He was a good-ass person.

  We were good people in a bad situation, but we weren’t bad people. We had great intentions, and we were trying to sustain a relationship, a romance, a lifestyle, a home. Coolie brought me stability. He taught me how to take a bath. My idea of taking a bath was run the water, hop in, soap up, splash the water around, then get out. Coolie said, “You not taking a bath right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Baby. You get in the tub and you get yourself wet. You need two towels. One for your face and one for your body. You take your body towel and soap it up real good. Then stand up in the tub and scrub your body all over. And then turn on the shower and rinse yourself off real good.” Otherwise, I would be sitting in dirty water. I came from the slums. We didn’t have showers when I was growing up. We had tubs and a sink. He brought colognes into my life. He used to go downtown to Marshall Field’s and pick me out nice colognes. Or take me down there to get a makeover. He sent me to the beauty shop. He told me I shouldn’t just do wigs. “Go get your real hair done.” He called the boosters over. At that time, if you were in the game, you didn’t go to stores to shop unless you went and had an outfit tailor-made. If you wanted clothes off the rack, you called professional thieves who we called boosters. They came over your place and brought all of your clothes to you in your size. Coolie bought everything they had for me. Whatever they had in my size was mine. He bought by the bulk. “Give me everything you got for her in her size.”

  Sometimes I didn’t even know if I liked the dress or not. But it was in my closet. I had outfits that were so expensive, I hadn’t realized it until later on. I’d walked by Barneys and be like, “Damn, I got that on a hanger.” I had alligator shoes. Coolie kept me pretty. And that was when my body was at its peak. I was still making the cars run off the road.

  Coolie and I were together for seven years. But then the relationship started getting rocky. I used to run away from Coolie sometimes. I didn’t know why. Or maybe I did. I was young, and Coolie wasn’t the only guy who liked me. I was still that person who wanted to be loved by everybody. And there were a bunch of guys trying to get me to be their girl. There were other places that sounded so interesting to me. I always had my kids and I had to make a decision when it came to them, but running away let me forget about it for a while. I let myself think I was running to some get-rich-quick scheme, and I would drop off a heap of money. If that worked out, that would change the game. Right? If I ran away and found a pile of gold, I could be a better mom or stay at home with them. If I ran away an
d I found the end of the rainbow, maybe I could have a baby by Coolie and not have to work the streets. But that never worked out. I would always come right back home, but I ran away to places where I had no business being. Sometimes I got myself in a situation and I was scared to go home. I would get with a guy, just partying with them and kicking it, and then the guy would want to be my man. They’d want to talk it out with Coolie. He can’t do that. He’d get us both killed. I liked the party favors. But I liked home back with Coolie, too. I’d meet new people and they’d be interesting, but more than once I stayed past my expiration date.

  Coolie did his own thing sometimes, too. Made me angry. Everybody knew we were together, but both of us had relationships outside. But the rule was: don’t bring nobody home. Like one time I was out of town working, and I came home and he had this young girl in bed with him. He knew I was on my way home. And to top it off, this was a girl he went to school with. She was a square. She wasn’t even from the streets. He wanted me to see it.

  Nobody was a saint. He was drifting and so was I. But I think I destroyed it more than anything because I was young and impressionable. There was a whole world out there. Sometimes I got locked up and went to jail, and I met hos who said they worked up in New York and there was a lotta money there. They went to Florida and there was money there, too. I started thinking to myself, why am I just working in Chicago? Because I was actually running out of Chicago space to work. When I say I ran out of Chicago space to work, I mean I could go from one side of the city to the other and get paid, but eventually, working on a regular basis, I got to be known as a prostitute. When I came up on a scene, the police were like, “Go home or go to jail.” And I had to challenge them because I hadn’t made money yet. Back then I kept bond money on me. That way, if I went to jail before the night was over, I bailed myself right back out and went back to work.