Dancing on the Edge

I’m not sure I could have ever been Leslie Bradley.

I couldn’t have been so battered by life and still have managed to pull myself together the way she has.

Scarred by deep emotional wounds, this slim, pretty woman of 39 has spent most of her adulthood dancing precariously on the edge of an abyss.

Beaten, drug-addicted, imprisoned and raped, she was driven twice to attempt suicide, but each time an awesome inner strength brought her back.

She’s thankful, this Thanksgiving eve, that her life has begun anew.

Ironically, Bradley’s trauma is rooted in a stable childhood. Her father was a mail carrier for 35 years. Her mother, a bright and bustling woman, had her own catering service.

Bradley was close to her mother. They shopped together and laughed together. They were pals. She was equally close to her two brothers, Tony and Clifford, especially Tony.

“We were like two peas in a pod,” she says, remembering with a smile. “We’d go to the beach together, go out to dinner together . . . it was fun.”

We’re in a Creole restaurant called Gumboz in the Baldwin Hills Mall, where Bradley is executive chef. Remodeling is in full swing, working toward an opening this month.

She listens for a moment to the sounds of construction, still thinking about Tony. The smile fades. “Soon,” she says, “it all fell apart.”

*

Tony was 27 when he was murdered by a drug dealer in 1987. The trauma shook the family to its core. Bradley has never stopped grieving.

Already using drugs herself, she moved closer to Clifford, a talented artist, who shared her grief. Her use of drugs intensified, despite his effort to have her stop.

Bradley’s life had begun to slowly unravel.

A year after Tony’s murder, fate caught her by the throat again. She was working for a San Fernando Valley telemarketing company when it was raided by federal agents.

The company was involved in a scheme to defraud customers of their money by promising prizes that were never delivered.

“I didn’t know what they were doing at first,” Bradley says, “and then I was drinking and doping and didn’t care.”

All were sent to prison, Bradley for 22 months. While there, she says, she was sexually assaulted by other inmates. Another scar was left on her already fragile psyche. But that wasn’t the end of it.

After prison, she was married to a man who beat her so badly she lost the sight in her left eye. A year later, her mother, her best friend, burdened by a failing family, died.

Bradley by then was in a twilight world of narcotics. She tried suicide and was saved, but still continued trying to kill herself with drugs. In the midst of her darkness, her other brother, talented but equally burdened, OD’d on heroin.

Her mother and both her brothers gone, she tried once more to take her life. But instead of darkness, she opened her eyes to a new world.

*

The year was 1994. At the edge of death, she came back to undergo psychiatric counseling. And she found God. It was God, she says, who told her to quit alcohol and drugs, and she did. Her dance on the edge of the abyss was over.

The next step would shape her future. Always interested in cooking, she took jobs in fast-food restaurants over the years. Her father had taught her to prepare gumbo when she was 9. Her goal was to have a restaurant of her own.

Ambitions are shaped by the effort put into them and during her drug years, Bradley did little to pursue them. But, once sober, it was different.

A bright woman, she was accepted in the culinary arts program at Trade-Tech College and shone. In her first year, she made the dean’s list. At the end of three years, she had a diploma, a $3,000 prize and a job at a small restaurant.

Then one day she saw a sign in the Baldwin Hills Mall that a place called Gumboz was opening. She went inside and asked owner Jude Mouton for a job. When he questioned her experience, she invited him over to taste her gumbo.

He tasted it, looked at her and said, “What’re you doing here?”--and hired her on the spot as his executive chef.

Life for Bradley now is as sweet as her peach cobblers. Last month, she spoke before the board of the L.A. Community College District to thank them for the chance Trade-Tech gave her.

“I should be dead by now,” she said, standing tall and looking every bit the sophisticated entrepreneur her mother was. “God has brought me a mighty long way.”

Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.