Amidst a dirty mop and stacks of toilet paper in a 4 by 5 bathroom in the back of The Wieners Circle, a hot dog stand on Clark Street in Lincoln Park, Roberta “Poochie” Jackson told me her life story.

Wearing a blue track suit with navy capital letters spelling “LOVE” across her chest, Poochie sat on the covered toilet with her hands crossed on her lap and told me about Roberta Jackson, the woman behind “Poochie.”

The Wieners Circle is an infamous hot dog stand on Clark Street in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago, known for its Maxwell Street Polish, Char-dogs, hamburgers, cheese fries, and what wikipedia calls “the mutual verbal abuse between the employees and the customers during the late-weekend hours.”  

“I am just not like that loud-mouth ghetto girl,” Jackson said. “I really am a sweet lady. I give everyone my last. But I will curse your — out at the end of the day. But, you know, I am just somebody that is trying to be somebody like everybody else. I just never was taught as a little girl to follow your dreams.”

Jackson was born in 1977 in Chicago and has lived near Stormy Island and Woodlawn her entire life. She grew up with two fathers and one mother. Her biological father, Robert Lee, was what she described as a “Sugar Daddy” to her mother. Her second father, who was with her mother for several years, was the “young teenage sweetheart.”

Her mother, a “closet smoker,” was also a part of Jackson’s upbringing. By “closet smoker,” Jackson meant her mother’s drug addiction to crack cocaine, which, she said, her mother never allowed to control her.

Although an “angry child” with a mother who did illegal drugs, Jackson believes that she was lucky. “I never went hungry,” she said. “I never was molested, or put in harm’s way. I don’t knock nobody that has because everybody goes through something.”

Out of love for comedy and comedians, including Red Foxx and Richard Pryor, Jackson’s dream was, and still is, to be a famous comedian. And in the back-bathroom, one-night only, one-hour comedy special in which she told me about her life, she featured a bit about the time she was 14 and attempted to steal canned goods from her friend April Hummel’s house to sell for money to support her mother’s addiction.

Jackson took a bunch of canned goods out of the pantry and left through the back door. Seeing stacked canned goods like she had never seen in her own home, Jackson continued to steal until–and here she clenched my arms to signal the suspense–she was caught.

“When I got busted, I remember her big cousin named Taya,” Jackson said. “She wanted to beat me up, like fight me and stuff. Saying, ‘You came into my auntie house and stole.’ We got into it. I just really never got a chance to explain because they big cousin trying to fight me or whatever. It was the most embarrassing —- ever.”

Looking back, she laughs. In a follow-up interview, she told me that she apologized to the mother, since it was of course her house. Jackson explained her situation to the woman, who responded that Jackson should have just told her that in the first place.

But back then Jackson was, and remained,  embarrassed. She stopped hanging out with April Hummel, and became afraid that people would perceive her as a thief. “I did not want anyone thinking that they can’t leave their purse around me,” Jackson said. “That wasn’t the case. It was just some —- that I should not have ever done.”  

Jackson’s mother had a more complex backstory than “drug addiction” might seem to present. Jackson’s grandmother died when her mother was only 13, and in order to take care of her siblings, Jackson’s mother dropped out of high school during her sophomore year.  
In her freshman year at South Shore Academy in 1991, fresh out of 8th grade, Jackson was excited. But soon that excitement dwindled because of that “gang here, and this gang there,” and she ended up dropping out during her junior year because she didn’t “want to be the type of girl that gets shot or gets jumped on.”

Another reason she dropped out was that “no one really stood on her” to get an education. “My life would probably have been different,” she said.  “Maybe I would have been the girl that went to college, maybe I would have been the girl that was a successful lawyer or a doctor. Well, nah, I didn’t really want to. Well, maybe. Maybe the nursing field, but I didn’t want no one’s life in my hands.”

Jackson began working at The Wieners Circle in 1998. She was 21 years old. “Growing up 18 to 21, you know, I wanted to be grown,” Jackson said. “Pretty much still rough, in the streets, not like selling drugs or anything. But I had a quick temper, you know, quick to fight.”

Lisa, an old friend, suggested the job after noticing that roughness. When Jackson first heard about it, she was taken aback by its Lincoln Park location. “When she said it was close downtown, up north, I was thinking it’d be like a five star restaurant,” Jackson said. “I got manners, but I’m a klutz, I’m not going to be able to carry stuff. She was like, ‘No, it’s just a little hotdog stand.’”

So Jackson met with the boss on a Sunday, got the job, and started on the day shift the following Sunday.

Unlike the night shift, which often includes a lot of customers coming from the bar and what Jackson calls “buck wildness,” the day shift is a different speed. “On a day shift you have to be like, ‘Hi, how you doing?’” Jackson said. “You have to be more polite.”

Jackson joined the night shift, working from 10 P.M. to 5 A.M., after a day-shift altercation with a customer in 2000. The customer called Jackson “a fat —–,” and they began exchanging words. Her boss took notice and said to Jackson, “With your mouth, I’m going to put you on the night shift.”

Partly due to an abusive relationship Jackson was in, and partly because of the new-found freedom that came with turning 21, Jackson often skipped work in her first months at The Wieners Circle. She ended up quitting in 2000–but returned two weeks later.

Over the years, Jackson has created quite a spectacle around herself for her language and loud antics. Jackson appeared on Conan, cursing out a shy Jack McBrayer, and has continued to grow her fame, even snapping pics with Jeff Garlin, Joel Mchale, and McLovin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s character in “Superbad”).

But Jackson wants people to know the real her. “Like, know me,” she said.  “Don’t judge me, when you see that I am loud and cursing somebody out. I’m not trying to hurt anyone’s feelings, but keep people happy, and keep people laughing. Laughter is healing to me.”

Another reason Jackson has become a spectacle is for the “Chocolate Shakes,” performances in which an employee, usually Jackson, lifts up her shirt and does a sort of dance for the customer for $20.

The tradition started with her friend Jasmine, who, Jackson said, had large breasts. One night a group of men came in, and one man, a regular, said to Jasmine, “Damn, them some big ——-.” Jackson replied, “We at a restaurant, ————. These ——- is called chocolate shakes.” The customer requested to see them. Jackson and her coworkers were trying “to get that tip money,” so Jackson said that for $40, he could see Jasmine’s breasts.

I saw two Chocolate Shakes while on a recent Saturday night trip to The Wieners Circle, but instead of watching the show itself, I watched the customers.  They screamed and laughed as Jackson did her performance under flickering lights to a beat made by the pounding fists of other employees.  Present for the show was a group of four teenage girls all wearing sweats. Another was comprised of three middle school-aged kids just come from a Bar Mitzvah party wearing their newly acquired monogrammed black sweatshirts.

Although people have questioned her Shakes ethically, Jackson insists that she does it purely in good fun. “It just started as a joke, and it ended up being a thing,” Jackson said. “I’m kind of proud of myself for that.”

But racism comes with the territory, Jackson said.  Being an “all black crew in Lincoln Park,” Jackson and other employees have been called the N-word and been on the receiving end of jokes about “black people on welfare.” Customers have also told Jackson that she looks like Queen Latifah or another “heavy set, pretty, dark skin girl, or black girl that they see on TV.”  To those people, Jackson likes to flip it into a sort of history lesson.

Amidst the explicit language and the Chocolate Shakes, Jackson believes that The Wieners Circle is a place where someone can escape their corporate job and tell people to “shut the —- up.”

“When you come in, it’s like a different world,” Jackson said. “When you come in here, no matter what you going through, when you come in here, our job is to make you laugh and give you good ——- food.”

By the end of the interview, Jackson’s co-workers were banging on the bathroom door telling her to get out. For the forty five minutes that we were talking, I’d forgotten that she was in the middle of her shift.

As I was walked out, one of Jackson’s co-workers turned to Jackson and said, “Dang, she gave you a full Rolling Stones interview.”