Carnival of Desire

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THE HAPPY EX-HOOKER
Her mission: coaxing prostitutes away from the sex trade

Of prostitutes trying to leave the streets, Myers-Powell says, “I want to be a beacon of hope for them.”

During the 25 years she peddled her body for money, Brenda Myers-Powell mostly seethed. “I was angry at everyone,” she says, “my family, God, but mostly myself because I couldn’t stop.” Today, Myers-Powell is at peace and brimming with purpose, not just because she escaped a life of prostitution and drugs but also because she is now using that experience to help other women do the same. In October she joined the Women’s Justice division of the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, serving in a new program aimed at helping women leave the sex trade. When a prostitute is arrested, Myers-Powell and another former prostitute are there to show her a different path. They offer access to counseling, social ser-vices, temporary housing, and other help in getting off the streets. Myers-Powell calls the work her “mission on earth.”

Raised on the West Side by an alcoholic grandmother, Myers-Powell began turning tricks on weekends at 14. On Good Friday in 1973, when she was 15 and the mother of two infant girls, she “turned professional,” she says, meaning she began working full-time as a prostitute. Wearing a green two-piece outfit, rubber shoes, and a $7 wig, she went to work in front of the Mark Twain Hotel on Division Street. She made more than $300 that night, enough to pay that month’s rent and buy groceries for her daughters. “I felt like I’d made it,” she recalls.

Two years later Myers-Powell became a call girl, working for a pimp and servicing a higher-end clientele at plush downtown hotels and suburban cathouses. At her peak, she was pulling in more than $1,000 a night, though she took home less than half that after her bosses took their cut.

Over the next decade and a half, she worked as a stripper in New Orleans, got lured to Los Angeles by a man who appeared to have good intentions but turned out to be another pimp (“I was looking for my Richard Gere even before Pretty Woman”), and stripped at clubs in South Central Los Angeles. There she developed an addiction to crack cocaine and wound up unemployed, homeless, and prostituting herself on violent streets (she was stabbed several times). In 1994, she returned to Chicago and tried to go straight—she earned a nursing certificate and briefly found work—only to relapse into drug use and prostitution.

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Her life changed irrevocably one night in 1997, when she got into an argument over money with a john. After he shoved her from his car, her clothes got caught in the slammed door. The black Mercedes sedan sped off, dragging her for five blocks and leaving her face and left side mangled. Following a stay in the hospital, she made the decision to get clean. “I knew I was going to die if I didn’t do something,” she says.

She checked herself in to the residential treatment program for prostitutes at Genesis House on the North Side. After a year and a half of rehab, she dedicated her life “to helping other women unconditionally.” She volunteered at Genesis House, answering phones, cooking meals, and mentoring other women. That experience served as perfect training for the intervention work she’s now doing at the sheriff’s office. While it’s still too soon to gauge the program’s effectiveness, Myers-Powell sees glimmers of hope—as of mid-May, two prostitutes had started using the program to transition to a new life. “Most women think they can’t make it or they won’t be accepted in society after they’ve been on the streets,” she says. “I want to be an example of hope for them.”

Today Myers-Powell wears faint scars on her nose and forehead from the accident—remnants from her life as a prostitute but also a source of pride. “I couldn’t be doing what I love to do now without those years,” she says. Clean for 12 years, married, and raising a recently adopted son in Calumet City, she enjoys a contentment she was once afraid could never be hers. “I’m happy,” she says. “And I like being happy.”

—Ben Strauss

Photograph: Joe C. Moreno