But I wanted to get on the highway, too. I wanted to get on the road and make money, maybe rob up on some big money, then come back home and chill. I wanted to explore other cities I had heard about. I was infatuated by the world. I wanted to go and see what it was all about.
So I stole a credit card from a trick, and I went to New York. Caught an airplane, got me a room at the Sheraton on Lexington Avenue, and had plans to stay because I just wanted to see what New York, New York, was like. As soon as I got there, I called Coolie and cussed him out. “Screw you and your socks. I don’t care about you and your toes, my friend. Yeah. I’m in New York, so take that. You can’t do nothing about it.” I was in New York and he was in Chicago, so I was saying things I wouldn’t normally say. I was just giving it to him. “You ain’t shit, my love. Screw you in your nose. You can’t do nothing about it.” I was talking slick shit.
All Coolie kept saying is, “Yeah. Yeah? Yeah. Gone talk that shit, girl.”
And I was like, “Yeah! You think I’m playing. I’m gone find me somebody else. We gone set it off. ’Round the world.”
I hung up the phone and stepped out into the city. New York was sweet as hell to me. Everybody says New Yorkers are standoffish and mean, but that ain’t true. Everybody’s about welcome over there. I went to Studio 54. Hung out for two days with Boz Scaggs and all his boys. They treated me like a kid sister. I went to a place called Leviticus and danced all night with Joe Frazier. The guys I met were superfine. New York had so many nationalities, the melting pot there was amazing. In Chicago, we are kind of Irish, Italian, Black, Hispanic, Puerto Rican, Polish people. You go to New York and you have Hungarian, Gypsies, people from places you never heard the goddamned name of. A lot of Dominicans looked Black, but they weren’t. Fine-ass men named Jesús, and they look like Jesus, cause they so beautiful. Men with pretty eyes and long hair and pockets full of ounces of cocaine.
Sometimes they pulled out so much cocaine I got scared. “Wait a minute. I know we going to jail. You be the FBI or something? Something is going off here and I can’t stand it. Why is everybody got everything?” New York had after-hour sets that never closed. We had after-hour sets in Chicago, but not posted up like this, where they were social clubs and I could just walk in there any time of day and just get any goddamned thing I wanted. That was what New York was doing to me. I was from Chicago; my eyes were popped out. About a week into being there, I was the social butterfly of the whole set. I went up to Harlem, I was out everywhere. I done found a dude. I mean, he was square, but he took me to all the places to impress me. I was meeting everybody. I had been in New York for about three weeks and I was having a ball. So one night I came back to my hotel and who was sitting in the lobby? Coolie! You could have knocked me over with a feather. I was done, cook me.
He walked up to me. “Just keep on walking; let’s go up to your room.” I didn’t say anything. I had my mouth open, but nothing came out. Yup. I mean, he just came to take me home. “You had a lot to say, didn’t ya?” I was thinking to myself, Yes, I did, and as soon as I have the chance, I’m gone have a lot more to say. On the ride up the elevator, I kept thinking—what was he gone do, what he gone do? But he smoothed me out, and we stayed up in the room for two more days, just having insane sex.
“I missed you, Daddy.”
We went back to Chicago. But he now knew I wanted to travel. He got it. He told me, “Go work your way to work.”
“Work my way to work?
“Yeah, work your way to work, then come back home.” He said, “You know how to do whatever you want to do.”
At first, I got angry. Work my way to work? But then the concept made sense. If I wanted to go to New York, then I needed to work my way to New York. Hadn’t he taught me how to steal wallets? What was keeping me from stealing a credit card and going straight to the airport? At that time, it was easy to hop on a plane. You could be Mrs. Applebottom. Nobody was checking. And then once I was wherever I wanted to be, what was stopping me from snatching another card and getting back home? It’s all about the hustle. I was thinking traveling was this big thing I had to do, but Coolie told me it was simple. It’s all about work. I could add more money to the drawer; I could make a good life somewhere with Peaches and Prune. And I could see the world.
That’s how I ended up in places. Plane, train, kite, bike, any kind of way I could get there, I would get there. Wherever the wind blew was cool with me. And one place could lead to another. Like, I was downtown Chicago, working on Rush Street. I crossed the street to the Marriott right there, one block from Michigan. Beautiful Marriott. There was a big superbus sitting up in front of it. Inside were the Harlem Globetrotters. I knocked on the door of the bus. “Hey!”
The bus driver opened it and said, “It’s a pretty girl out here!”
I was like, “Where are the Harlem Globetrotters?”
From the inside I heard, “Here we are, baby.” I saw Curly and that was it. I started kissing on him and hugging him. He was very handsome, with the biggest smile. We started talking right in front of the bus. He was hugging me back, and he invited me up to his room.
“Sure.” I sat down, and I had these big sunglasses on because Coolie had hit me in the eye. I had done the best I could covering up with makeup, but I still needed the sunglasses to hide the bruise.
Curly said, “Relax. You can take your sunglasses off.”
“I’m cool.”
“You can take your glasses off.” He came over to me and gently slid them off my face. “Wow,” he said, kneeling down in front of me. “Who did that to you? When I see a woman’s face like that, I get upset by it. I got something for a guy who treats a woman like that. I hate men who do women like that.” I started to cry. “Don’t cry. Just relax. Women shouldn’t be treated like that.” He got up and went to the bathroom to run me a bath. I think he was trying to cheer me up. It worked. We talked for a long time. Late into the night. He ordered room service. He even listened to me talk about Coolie. I could feel that he felt kind of bad that I had to go through it. He made me feel so good. I stayed the night. It made me feel important. It wasn’t so much that he was a Harlem Globetrotter; he was a guy who was so cool and understanding. It was like I had stepped out of one world and stepped into another. I had stepped out of my chaotic lifestyle and stepped into a moment a peace. And I stayed for it.
Every time we met, it was always the same. We always had a great time together. He was a good person and so beautiful. We became friends. We laughed together a lot. I had been treated like a queen before, but Curly was a gentleman. He didn’t care about the lady of the night in me. He was like, “I just feel like women should be treated properly.” He put me in his bathtub, bathed me, pampered me. He was very old-school. I mean, I got my money, but he was just a honeybee.
He told me, “If I’m ever anywhere, this is the name I use and these are the hotels where I stay at. So if you hear that the Globetrotters are in New York or California, here’s the alias that I use.” I met up with Curly all over the country. We had a real nice relationship.
* * *
Those are the kinds of opportunities I ran into. Back in the day, it was easy to get to celebrities. It was all about being in the right place at the right time. About what you know and who you know. Like when I had my huge twenty-first birthday, a little while before I met Curly. Finally, I was twenty-one. I was grown. It was a big deal to me. We had the party at one of Coolie’s friends’ lounges, and all the players came—Bishop Wine, Big Al, Schooldolie—all the big guys in Chicago came, and the guys from out of town came to this super after-hours party.
Even though I didn’t realize it, I was outgrowing my relationship with Coolie.
I was still Mrs. Coolie, but some people were laughing at me. Coolie was stepping out on me and not making a secret about it. I didn’t know that then, but later on I figured it out. There was this girl named Joyce, and when I was gone, Coolie was always over her house. And when I was home, I was getting high. C
oolie was also having his way with her sister. He got Joyce’s sister pregnant. With twins. I found out about it and confronted him. He hit me in my eye that day. Just like any man. He had never done that before.
Things just started to get really weird around us and our relationship. Some of his friends were coming at me. I didn’t think about it at the time, but some of them were doing that because they knew more of what was going on with Coolie than I did. Around the neighborhood, it used to be, “Don’t mess with that girl. That’s Coolie’s woman. He’ll mess your ass up about that girl.” But that didn’t happen anymore, so things were probably happening that I didn’t know about. Our business got out on the street. He was hooking up with squares. Maybe he was talking to people. I don’t know. Maybe people were telling him things that I was doing. I was hanging out with drug dealers, hanging out with pimps. Things started to shake.
Then he started to ask me to bring other girls to him. And I was doing it to please him, but he was trying to replace me. We were just falling apart. I got this dude, Ricky, Pretty Ricky, out of spite. He was light-skinned and was about six-two. We used to call him Pretty Ricky because he used to wear “man makeup.” Ricky was a real punk. Coolie called him one day and told him to come over there so he could talk to him like a man. I told Ricky, “You going over there? And you gone take me with you?” I didn’t want to go. This was a trap. Coolie wanted us to meet at his friend Art’s place. And Art’s ex-police. When I walked in there and saw Coolie and Art and Connie, who was this really tall pistol-toting bitch who would shoot anything, I knew exactly what was happening. We were about to get our ass whooped. Coolie hit me first, and then he pulled a pistol on Ricky and said, “Where that money she gives you?” This stupid asshole had the nerve to have the money on him. Coolie took the money, robbed him, beat me up, and put both of us out. But I had hurt Coolie. So I hid out on the North Side, and Ricky got me a little apartment. I was really trying not to run into Coolie. But Coolie ran into Ricky again, and Coolie beat him up at a crap game.
I figured it wouldn’t be long before Ricky ran away from me. I thought, He gone get enough, cause everybody was intimidated by Coolie. Very few men were on his level.
I was looking for help and bumped into Boony Black. This guy was a big name in Chicago. Coolie had said that I couldn’t have another man in Chicago, so just to show Coolie he couldn’t boss me around, I started running with this gangster named Boony Black. Boony Black was a killer. He wasn’t intimidated by Coolie. In fact, he might have been a little more dangerous. I’m glad that it never came to that, to see who could be the most dangerous about me. I don’t know what would have happened then. Boony Black liked me, but just as a person. He didn’t want to be with me, he was just a good guy. But I was under Coolie’s brand, and Coolie made it clear that I couldn’t get with nobody in Chicago. I had no choice but to travel.
It took me a while to stop talking about Coolie, to stop thinking about him. I didn’t even know I was doing it until one guy said, “Man. Please don’t say nothing about that man no more. You talk about Coolie all the time.”
I was still stuck there, but once I got on the road, it felt like a whole new world for me. I was meeting new people. I came back to New York for a year. For a minute in New York I didn’t prostitute. I was kind of like with this dude, that dude. And I bartended. Ran into a lot of celebrities. Had a relationship with a woman, this girl named Annie. I was with her for a little bit. I never knew if anybody was gay or straight. I never had a choice to pick what I wanted to do. That was taken. Most of the things I did was survival.
I left New York and went straight to Philly. Philly to New Jersey. Ohio, Pittsburgh. I hit all the East Coast spots. And all during that time I had a safe space up in Canada. Sault Ste. Marie, Canada. It was right on the border of Michigan, but it was Canadians who came to the whorehouse. It was Canadian money we made. This was my safe place because it was in God’s country. It wasn’t a legal whorehouse, but you could go up there and hide from the police for years. The girl who ran the place, her man used to gamble with Coolie, and he was the one who told me about it. He told me if I ever needed to lay low, I should come up there. His name was MD. Serious white folks who had never did anything lived up there in this little small town. The whorehouse was part of the town culture. And they knew, if you were a Black girl, you were coming up to the whorehouse. I didn’t even have to tell the cab where to take me; he knew. Laughing all the way.
They set it up in this town that we had to go and see the doctor every two weeks. I mean prostitution is prostitution, but everybody needed to be safe. That was mandated. You went to the doctor and got checked for STDs, got your blood work, got your diet pills.
I sent back as much money as I could to Ma’Dea and the girls. When I was with Coolie, I would see the girls every weekend, but when I was traveling, seeing them often became a struggle.
Once, I had to deal with these crooked-ass cops; they were selling drugs. And they were a part of a drug ring called Market 10. Big scandal. This one time, they came up to our house on Ohio when I had just got out the bathtub and I had my bath towel wrapped all around me. I glanced out the window, and I saw a cop car outside our place. I went to the back, and I saw them sliding up. They seriously thought they sneaking. They all got guns. It was summertime, so our back door was cracked open, but Coolie had bars on the doors and had everything locked down. I looked at them and said, “What?”
“Open up the door.”
I said, “I can’t.”
“Why?”
“I don’t have the key.”
“Open the door, smartass.”
“No. You got a warrant?”
“Naw.”
“Well, then, break that door down, then. Do what you got to do.” I was always told by Coolie, don’t let the police in, let them break in. I walked away from the back door and put my clothes on. It took them a minute to take the bars off the doors. I was dressed, and I called Coolie and told him, “The police at the house. I’m going to call you back.” Coolie had guns everywhere. They were pulling out these guns. So they were going to take me to jail. But I wasn’t worried. First of all, my name was not on the lease. Second of all, screw them. They asked me questions, and I said I had no idea what they were talking about. “I’m a prostitute. The only thing I’m doing bad is right here. See this?” I pointed at my honeypot. “That’s my pistol.”
So they came out. “Ah, ah. This gun shot a state trooper. In Indiana. It’s a hot gun!”
I said, “Okay. Well. Do I look like I go on capers and shoot folks? I mean, really, come on now.” So they were like, she ain’t gone give us nothing. And they were right about that. “Can y’all please give me a bond on whatever you trying to give me? Cause ain’t none of this stuff mine. This not my house.”
Finally, after they did every intimidating thing they could do to me, the sergeant walked up and said, “Her bond is posted. You got to let her go.”
Even though this was the end of the relationship, I still felt Coolie had raised me right. Don’t ever say nothing. If y’all gone pull guns on me, so what? I was willing to go the whole roll. I’d never tell on Coolie. He was my man.
Part IV
Running
Chapter 10
Chi Town’s Finest
I was working my way to work, and I was situating. Ma’Dea was doing okay. She knew I was out there. She accepted it. It wasn’t like she liked it, but it was something she felt she couldn’t do anything about. Her baby was pretty much out there. And she damn sure was going to hold on to her great-grandbabies. I remember once, I had been out there for two nights, partying. I was still with Coolie then, but I didn’t want to go home to him, because, I don’t know, I had been out there kicking it with a dude. So I went over to Ma’Dea’s to lay down. I’m dead tired. But early, early in the morning she said, “Get up.”
“Get up?”
“You can’t be here when the girls wake up.” I was upset with her because she was put
ting me out, but I also remember how my babies looked at me every time I left. Is Momma gone stay or is she gone go? My babies were lost, I could see it in their eyes. I was lost, too. My little girls were thinking, I want Mommy to stay but she gone go. Prune, my eldest, was four and really feeling the pain. And Peaches was taking care of Prune, even though she was the baby. Prune would just lose it when I left. I never knew when I was coming back.
Coolie would drop off money to Ma’Dea, but he was in and out and nothing was steady. I wasn’t able to control any of my situations. That was how it was with us. I kept hoping that one of these days, I was going to be a momma who knew when she was coming and going. But how could I be a better momma and stay in the game? I needed peace and quiet to figure that out. So I ran off to Canada.
One day, Coolie called me. Madame Lisa got the message. She came to me, “He called for you and wants you to come down.”
“You know why he wants me?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because you ain’t making the money fast enough.”
“Maybe. It could be anything, right?” I packed and left straight for the airport. I couldn’t figure it out, but I didn’t think I was going to get the news I got.
It was morning when I got to Coolie’s. He had been drinking, and he looked at me and said, “Ma’Dea dead.” That wasn’t the best way he could have said it, but I think he didn’t know how to give me that news. My grandmother was gone. My girls, who were just five and six years old, had found her on the floor of the dining room. There was a trail of shit from the bathroom to where she had fallen.
When my aunt called, my girls picked up the phone.
“Where Ma’Dea at?”
“Ma’Dea dead! Ma’Dea!” they shouted.
Leaving Breezy Street Page 13
