Leaving Breezy Street by Brenda Myers-Powell

Author:Brenda Myers-Powell [Myers-Powell, Brenda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

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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.

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