“Quit playing, put your granny on the phone.”
“Ma’Dea!” My grandmother was a pillar of strength. She was in her late fifties, tops. I lost it.
There was a funeral.
After Ma’Dea died, everything changed. Everybody just assumed I was going to take care of my kids. But at twenty-one, I needed help, but I didn’t know how to say that. I wanted somebody to say, “Let me help you.” I brought the kids home, into the life that Coolie and I had. He started staying away from the house more. And I didn’t want him to stay away. But he did. It was a different life now.
The girls spent a lot of time over my dad’s house. I was always dropping them off so I could go to work. But sometimes I wouldn’t go to work because I would look in their eyes and see they needed me to be there. But even when I was there, I was screwed up. I was torn up inside. It was too much. All that was too big for a little girl like me. It was a lot of big stuff going on. I was twenty-one, but I wasn’t twenty-one, you know what I mean?
I loved my daughters, but I just didn’t know how to deal with the responsibility of two children. I look at it now, and I see I could have gotten on welfare, on public aid. I could have gotten my rent and everything, because they were doing that then. I could have gotten food stamps. I probably could have gotten some good-ass job, because they were giving jobs to single moms. Some of them have even retired from them jobs they had up there in City Hall. All those good little clerk jobs. I could have done something like that. But I was enmeshed in street life.
I knew people who had kids in the street life, and I had always thought, That isn’t gone be me. But this was a rollback that I wasn’t prepared for at all. I was not prepared to be a mom, so I half-assed raised my own kids. Life was trying to make me ready, and I wasn’t ready. I was making some bad mistakes with my kids because I was grieving. I didn’t realize I was grieving like I was. My grandmother was dead and buried.
Nowadays, Peaches and Prune go and visit her, but I don’t. I visit her in my own way. I talk to her from time to time in my mind. I look in the mirror, and I see her in my face. Sometimes I hear her say shit she definitely used to say. It took years and years, but I finally understand her. She was a woman who was abused, too. And because of that, she became an abuser. I understand her being frustrated with me; I understand how life frustrated her. She was a woman who worked hard as hell all her life and all she had to show for it was the bare minimum. She was a woman who made lemonade out of lemons. That’s what she did. She was an excellent homemaker. We would go into these hole-in-the-wall shit apartments and Ma’Dea would turn it into a home. But that’s what I know now. Back then, I was clueless.
My girls started going back and forth from my house to my daddy’s. I went on the road. There was a hardness between me and Coolie. I started snorting cocaine a lot. That became my downfall. I was running.
I was getting cocaine from everywhere. This was the party scene now. It was disco and cocaine. I had customers who were on the stock market; they always kept cocaine and marijuana. White people were having so much cocaine, and I was dating customers from the street who always had these party favors. They gave me cocaine along with giving me money. They would give me money and then lay out these lines of cocaine. Folks were wearing the gold coke spoons around their necks with the shirts all open and the disco suits. That was what was going on. Everybody wanted a bunch of pretty girls on their arm and their little buddy cocaine in their pockets. “We’ll go here and do that and toot to the highest and have some fun.” Nobody was saying, let’s go home and be responsible. I used to be that person who went to work and came back home. Real responsible shit. The only way I didn’t come back home was if I was in jail, and if I was in jail, well, eventually I’d get out, cause at a certain time they just released you.
But the cocaine changed all that. With cocaine, there was a euphoria, but when you came down, you crashed, and when I crashed, I couldn’t deal with kids. So I was neglecting my kids, and they were being left with everybody, and they were everybody else’s responsibility. It’s a blessing they are still intact, because I lived a life where my kids could have been my collateral damage. I’m so glad that God and my momma up there were looking out for me.
I did some dumb shit. If there was dumb shit to do, I would do it. I would get myself into a fix, and my brothers would come and rescue me. I would call them and say, “This guy got me and won’t let me go blah, blah, blah.”
“Where you at? Just tell us where you at.”
One time, I had told this guy I would deal his drugs and I would give him his money later. When it was time to pay the piper, I didn’t have the money and I was sitting up there looking stupid. The dealer sitting up there talking about how he gone mess me up. I told him, just let me make a phone call. I told him I was calling for some money, but I was calling my brothers.
A little later, my brothers knocked on the door, and the dealer was like, “Yo, who at the door?” There were some words and then there was a kick in the door, and my brother had the sawed-off shotgun and put everybody on the floor.
My brother told the dealer, “You just let her go.” My brother Terry, who is in jail in California, wanted to put everybody down, and my other brother was like, “Naw, man, we didn’t come here for all that.” But that was what type of guy my brother Terry was. Terry took some convincing. “Man, let’s kill these niggas. Come on.”
My other brother was like, “Man, we didn’t come to kill these niggas, we just came to get our sister.”
I drifted. I had this white guy, this trick Jack, who wanted to marry me. Had I been a little bit more mature, that woulda been a good way to get my kids back, have a nice home, and lay back and be taken care of. Instead, I didn’t have time for Jack. I let Coolie’s other girl date him. I left Chicago, and she ended up marrying that dude, and he sent her to nursing school, and when he died, he left her all his money. But that wasn’t mine; that wasn’t me. Guys would want to make a ho into a housewife, but I wasn’t ready. And when my ho friends got married to these tricks, they wouldn’t talk to me anymore. I thought to myself, Bitch, if it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t be where you at. Look at you with your stanking ass. You keep him.
Jack was crazy about me. Jack married her because I didn’t have enough sense to keep him. All the pain, all the molestation, all the beatings that had come to me way too early in my life, I was just a ball of confusion walking around. To look at me, you would think I had it all together. But my life was so jumbled and chaotic and crazy, I couldn’t make a clear choice if my life depended on it because nothing was clear. All I was thinking about was running. Running from Chicago. Running from Coolie. Running from the responsibilities of my kids. Running. Running from Ma’Dea’s death. Running. Not thinking of the collateral damage I left behind. The conditions that my kids were living in. I was running from my life. Let’s face it, whatever Ma’Dea was, she was a crutch for me. She had my back; she had my slack. She wasn’t going to allow me to drag my babies around from pillar to post. Now that she was gone, that was exactly what I did to them. Some days it would hurt me to know that she was right about me. She used to say, “Girl, if I wasn’t here, you would drag these babies around from pillar to post, Brenda Jean.”
“Naw, I wouldn’t.” But she knew that I would.
That’s when my cocaine started getting out of control. Before that, I could take it or leave it. Now getting high was the thing I wanted to do best, as opposed to being a good ho, a good lady. I was just another bitch out here. My kids were around me, but I didn’t hear them. I would see them, but I was disconnected. I tried to transition away from Coolie, I tried to transition away from Ma’Dea’s death. But I just couldn’t. Every time I looked at my babies, I saw pain. What am I supposed to do with these kids? I couldn’t bring them back over with me and Coolie. They were an interruption into his lifestyle, too. Driving a Cadillac, he was getting a lot of attention from girls. They all knew about me, and I still had my position, but I was losing it. I kne
w the slip was coming.
Even now, all these years later, I can find myself scratching at some old pain that won’t leave me alone. I’ll ask my daughters about it, but their memories are so different from mine. “I don’t remember nothing special. I just thought Coolie was your boyfriend. He had a daughter that he used to bring over. I would cry really hard when you would leave and Peaches would calm me down.” (Coolie had a daughter, but her momma was a dope fiend, so he had his baby over at his sister’s house.)
I can’t help it; I scratch at another memory. “I liked being over Uncle Jethro’s house because they treated us like their kids.” My babies. My sweet babies, is that all you can conjure up from that time? “Coolie never said much. Laid-back.” And? “You used to have clients come to the house. Sometimes you would leave town. I remember my grandfather came and got us one time. I don’t remember much. I don’t remember talking to Coolie.”
When I step back and think about it, I realize God blessed my two girls and let them only remember what was harmless in their childhood, that their adult lives wouldn’t have anything awful snatching them out of their dreams. “A lotta stuff I blocked out, Momma. I blocked my feelings out.” I listen to my babies, and think there is a God and He loves me and mine. He knew only His love and grace could help my girls put head to pillow and sleep through the night.
Even when I try to give myself comfort with all of that, when I talk to them, it is hard to hear because I wanted to be a good person. I wanted to be a good mother but I didn’t know how. I was supposed to protect these two kids, but because of the life I was leading, they needed to look after each other. And they did. They are as close today as they were when they were little kids, and Peaches will tell you that. Peaches will tell you, “I never fought. I never had a fight cause my sister fought for me.” Prune did all the fighting. If you wanted to mess with Peaches, you had to go through Prune. Even when I came back into their lives, if Prune thought I was stepping out, she would tell me off. She was protecting Peaches because they didn’t know if I was going to stay or go or what motivated me to come back into their lives.
They are like two big sisters to each other. My granddaughter Mimi has two mothers; she doesn’t have a mother and an aunt. That’s the way they take care of their kids, that’s the way they take care of each other, and that’s a blessing. I have a picture of them holding on to each other, and you can see everything in that picture. Prune is the taller one, and she’s looking down at her sister, and you can almost hear the expression on her face: “I got you.” Their arms are on each other waists, but Peaches’s eyes tell the whole story. “No, I’m gone take care of you.” Kids shouldn’t have to go through that.
It didn’t help matters that my relationship with Coolie was falling apart. Coolie left me. I didn’t leave Coolie. Coolie went and got another partner somewhere. Like I said, he had other interests. I was very hurt by it all. He was still dealing with me, but like I was an option and not a priority. I was his girl in name only. Everybody thought I was Coolie’s girl, but he was gone by then. He was a selfish son of bitch by the end. I had brought him up, when he had two, three dollars in his pocket, and now he had a Cadillac. Bitches were all up in his face, and somebody had given him an opportunity to sell a lotta dope, so he had a lotta dope. Our relationship kept falling.
I left town to work, and when I came back, the apartment was gone and Coolie had given away all the furniture we had bought together. That’s when I really started running.
I was able to get an apartment in Rick Miller’s building. Rick Miller was a big drug dealer at that time. He was ex-police. He was selling a lotta drugs, and he had this building over there on Washington and Central, and I was the kind of girl Rick wanted to rent an apartment to. Pretty and young. I started going back and forth from Chicago to New York. Sometimes my kids were over at Rick Miller’s building and sometimes they were over at my dad’s. Sometimes I would just pick up and hop on a plane or a bus. And not just to New York. I traveled to Charleston, West Virginia, to a place where this guy named Wilson, Black guy, had these truck stops and whorehouses. I heard there was a lotta money there, so I went, and I made a nice amount of money, but I kept on running. I ran back to Chicago just to show Coolie I could.
That was the kind of dangerous game I was playing. I was just trying to survive one day at a time, trying to keep my head above water. Trying to outthink these fools, trying to stay one step ahead. Everywhere I went, I left collateral damage behind me. I just kept moving. Everybody was saying about me, “Yep. There go Brenda, I heard she done fucked up stuff again.” And I felt it. Every time I left another place, it was because I had suffered a major failure and I had to get outta there or I had to leave in the middle of the night. I would choose a pimp and act as if I was going to stick there with them—getting high, having sex, being introduced to their street games—but even though I hadn’t left yet, I was already out the door. I was burning bridges and damaging myself. It was a critical time. Good damn thing I moved on or snuck out in the middle of the night, cause if I hadn’t, someone was going to really, really hurt me. I was playing games and just doing shit that could get a girl hurt, cause I was hurt. I was hurting.
Sometimes I would find somebody I liked. I had gone to Ohio to work, and I met this new guy, Ricky, who picked me up there and took me to Philly to work. I have his name tattooed on my butt. He was a real charismatic young boy, wore business suits even though he was a pimp. I became one of his ladies.
I remember being in Philly; this was around 1979, ’80. I was working at the bar on North Tenth and Race. It was like a tavern, with barstools all around in a circle. It was a real dump, but I was making great money. We worked during the daytime, in the afternoon. We waited for the customers to come in. They knew that whatever girl you sat with was the girl you could buy. Girls couldn’t leave the bar till the guy bought them a drink, and all the drinks cost ten bucks—if it was water or juice, it was ten bucks. That was all the bar asked for: ten dollars for a drink. Then hos took the trick, and we got all the money. I could get two, three hundred dollars per guy.
I would always take my tricks to my hotel over across the river in Camden because it was harder to get a hotel in the city. Camden was off the turnpike, and the city was broke and run-down, and that was the nicest hotel over there back then. It was right by one those silver diners. It had the worst food, raggedy-ass food, but they were open twenty-four hours.
I remember I had five, six thousand dollars holed up in my room. I was working and saving my money, sending the rest to my girls. But I was so lonely. New Year’s Eve, I got through working and I came back to my hotel room because, you know, girls didn’t work right up until midnight on New Year’s Eve, because things get too rowdy, people get too drunk on New Year’s Eve. They shoot on New Year’s Eve!
I had a bottle of champagne, but I didn’t have shit to do, so I went down to the desk. The desk guy knew me and I told him, “Well, we might as well toast it.”
“Alright, well, look at that! That’s some real champagne.”
“Yeah, it is. Let’s drink it up.” He had this little TV and we toasted the New Year. We just kicking it and talking. But then he got real busy, and I said, “You want me to help you?”
“You can, if you want to.”
The folks were coming in and were renting the rooms. Coming and having sex, and coming back out, so he was renting the rooms hourly. I would run up, tidy up the room, throw a new pillowcase on, run back down, and tell the desk man, “Now that’s ready for another motherfucker.” And that’s how I spent one New Year’s—kicking it with an old, bald-headed white man because I didn’t want to be in my room by myself. I was so lonely.
At least when Ricky was in town, I didn’t feel by myself. He was so tender. He was different. He made me feel good. He was giving of himself, not like the normal dudes who want to be ice-cold, and “bitch, this,” “bitch, that.” We were never like that.
Ricky had another lady who had been
with him. All three of us used to have sex together, cause, you know, it felt good. But that was so unhealthy. I was covering up all the pain with the physical shit. With the money, with the sex, with the laughter and the instant shit that happens with you involved with those types of things. I was numb across the board. I was a zombie; the only thing I was good for was eating up the living.
* * *
When I was with Ricky, I felt good. But he would leave me for two, three weeks at a time because I was supposed to be working. But that meant I was left to my own devices, and I was very lonely. I was a very good ho; I would do my work. I would get my money, put it up, come to my room, get me a little something to eat, sit up, and watch TV. And I would cry. I was grieving Ma’Dea; I was grieving Coolie. I really loved Coolie, and Coolie had quit me.
At that time, I contracted hep C. I was working at a massage parlor on Broad Street in Philadelphia. This guy named Bart was the manager. Bart shot up methamphetamines. I had never had that shit, and I remember the first time I ever did, I drank it. You could snort it; you could drink it; you could shoot it. I drank it in a soda, and it kept me hyped for like three days. I was like zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom. Which was okay by me because I could work at the massage parlor all night. Stayed up and got this money.
Bart saw that I didn’t have a man—Ricky was out of town all the time—and I was free and loose and was game for anything. “Come with us,” he told me.
Bart had a woman who looked like the walking dead. Everybody said, “She used to be beautiful.” But she had been doing these methamphetamines with him and had turned into a creature feature. It didn’t register with me that if I did that shit, that could be me one day. We went over there to his nice little apartment in a high-rise. Nice for a dope fiend. We sat in the middle of the floor. They were shooting up. So I stuck my arm out. Just that easy, just that quick. To look back on it, I didn’t know shit about shooting. I used after both of them had used. You feel what I’m saying? They told me it was fine. “Oh, you just do it like this and like that. And then you just clean it up like this.” Later on in my life, I found out about dirty needles. See, education wasn’t out there like that. I let this dude stick me with a dirty needle. A hot needle, an on-fire needle. Needle was flaming, tower inferno. There were probably a hundred people who had used that needle before me, and I was sitting there with my arm stuck out. But I was in pain, and all I wanted was for the pain to go away. Of course, all I was good at was putting more on top of it.
Leaving Breezy Street Page 14
