The Corner (41 page)

Down here, a child is answer enough.

Once again, we know only what it is that works in our world, and so we talk welfare reform, devising middle-class solutions for a middleclass society. But, as they have with drugs and the drug trade itself, the men and women of the corner have judged our moral code useless under the circumstances. And they are right. As every fiend on Fayette Street knows that his place is at the point of a needle, so, too, does every teenager find some meaning in the obstetrics ward at University or the birthing rooms at Sinai. There, a girl acquires some womanhood; she is, for one dependent soul at least, the center of the universe. The father, a morbid and fatalistic boy, gives the infant his name and measures his doomed self to be one shade less mortal. If it didn’t do this much for them—if it was just about condoms, or abortion-on-demand, or abstinence and shame—then there might be a social strategy with some chance of success. Instead, these children have concluded that bringing about life—any life whatsoever—is a legitimate, plausible ambition in a world where plausible ambitions are hard to come by. This they can do.

To ask more from life on Fayette Street, to expect more from boyfriends, or wives, or parents—even to believe in more for one’s child—is to struggle against absurd odds, to ignore the living example of nearly everyone who came before you and who surrounds you now. Worse than that, to want more is to step beyond your own awareness—and that of everyone else on the pavement as well—about what’s possible. To do anything more than dream is to invite a crushing emotional defeat.

On Fayette Street, to struggle against the weight of circumstance—to try, in any sense—is not regarded as an act of strength. It is, instead, a public demonstration of vulnerability. Caring, expecting, hoping—these things bring only pain and contempt. Some carry that weight from one blast to the next, wrapping the pain around a syringe, transforming it from a thinking, emotional beast into something purely physical. For the fiends, the blast is the psychic safety net, the daily willingness to part with hope, ambition, and love. And for the yonger ones, for those not yet on the needle or the pipe, expectation is readily sacrificed for the leavings of the here and now; girls, props, weed, new Jordans, crew clothes, a little pocket money. Only for a rare few along Fayette Street—the churchgoers and the do-gooders, the home owners, the addicts who survived to reach recovery—does the hard business of living in the future go on. Is it the wise ones or the fools who shut down, who learn to avoid the uncommon thought, to break faith with possibility itself and take pleasure where they can?

Save for that rare handful, the children of Fayette Street employ their sexuality in a stripped-down facsimile of life. The boys limit themselves to the ambition of making it through the day without getting locked up, or stuck up, or shot down. They hope to be around long enough to see a son born, or maybe a daughter. Maybe scrape together the roll for a bassinet or a high chair, or failing that, a bag of Pampers once a week. The girls break it down to the singular, forlorn hope that the father-to-be will go to the clinic, maybe even show up at the hospital for the birth and then keep coming around for a while afterward. Maybe he’ll cover the cost of a crib or a stroller. And when the inevitable occurs, when he’s moved on to some new girl, the best that can be expected is some kind of vague alliance, some small connection to the life he created.

If things work out, he’ll show up once in a while to drag his son to the movies or down to Carroll Park for an afternoon. He’ll drift at the fringes, putting a $5 or a $10 bill into the kitty, just as she’ll feel the same cool allegiance now and then when he comes up short. They’ll manage that much, and because they’re from Fayette Street, they’ll count themselves lucky, knowing on some level that they have no right to ask more.

The end result of these adolescent pairings may seem predictable enough, but there is still something remarkable in the degree to which the participants embrace their roles. Knowing on one level that the relationship itself has no future, boys and girls along Fayette Street nonetheless take every opportunity to play at something greater, pretending to ideals and responsibilities that will ultimately be discarded. Catch up with any fifteen-year-old girl who is four months into a pregnancy, and you’re likely to hear about how the baby won’t change anything, how she plans to be a good and loving mother, how she still plans to finish high school and maybe go to college. Catch up to the sixteen-year-old father and you’re likely to hear that it’s time for him to grow up, to get a straight job somewhere and be a provider for his child. On one level, the boys and girls know how hollow these intentions are. They are painfully aware of how little is possible for them and their baby, but something deeper—some trace of an external standard, perhaps—still requires them to pretend.

In the weakest couplings, there is no time to play house. But in any relationship longer than a month or two, there can be seen all the requisite stages of serial monogamy, delivered in the most rapid-fire sequence
imaginable. Infatuation, intimacy, a period of shared commitment and then disillusion and withdrawal—such is the stuff of months, years, even lifetimes in places other than West Baltimore. On Fayette Street, though, all of the relationships are subject to unrelenting pressure and all are expected to fail momentarily. As a result, the boys and girls have learned to couple and procreate, betray each other and depart with remarkable haste. They squeeze what validation, what drama they can from the coupling. But when the child is born, it proves to be an uneven exchange.

A corner boy hovers for a moment or two, then passes out Phillie blunts to his friends and declares his offspring right and fine. Then he goes back to the corner.

But the girl—she’ll be home in bed, the baby beside her, and she’ll take that phone call from a girlfriend, the one who says he was down there not half an hour ago and went off with some new girl from around the way. She’ll play it off, saying that he can do what he wants, that they haven’t been together for weeks now. Then she’ll get off the phone, go back to bed, and feel the sting.

Next time, she tells herself, she won’t be so weak and stupid. Next time, it’s going to cost more than some Harbor Park movie tickets and a trip to Mondawmin. More than some diapers and an off-brand stroller that lost a wheel after a week or two. Next time, she’ll keep her feelings out of it and just play him the way he’s playing her. It’s a small comfort that does nothing to take her any distance from the crying baby, the room, the rowhouse, the neighborhood. She lies there on the worn mattress of her childhood bed, loving her child but half-wishing for a moment that it had never happened or, maybe, that it had happened with some other boy.

For the girls—but never for the boys—life actually changes when the child arrives. They learn some, they grow some. Most will go back to the corners, leaving the infant to be raised by grandmothers and great-grandmothers. But some will come to understand that it’s not about a newborn’s unequivocal love, but about a mother offering the same night and day, day and night.

For those girls, this is the moment of reckoning: The boy is gone. The child is here. And finally, with the end of childhood and all the work and worry in the world staring her hard in the face, it might seem possible for a fifteen-or sixteen-year-old parent to see the bargain for what it is, straight, without fantasy or pretense. It might seem the perfect moment to wish for other outcomes, other choices.

But no, this is happening on Fayette Street.

The young mother lies in her bed, her baby asleep at her side, her hopes and fears proscribed by the world she knows, her future limited to questions about where the next bag of disposable diapers will be coming from.

This, for her, is as good as it gets.

Fran Boyd is out on her usual perch, chin in hands, her face rough and her body slack from another night in the basement. It’s still early in the morning, way before the tester lines, and Fran is surprised to see Mike Ellerbee rolling past.

“Hey, stranger,” she calls out.

Mike looks up and smiles, changing direction to cross Mount on the diagonal.

“Hey, Fran.”

“Hey yo’self. Why you out early?”

Mike steps to the front of Dew Drop and smiles again. “Jus’ breakfast and all. Got to get downtown today.”

“Downtown? For what?”

“See the judge about my case.”

Fran nods. Court explains why most everyone she knows ever rises before midmorning. “You got court today? For what?”

Mike shakes his head and sits next to her. “Got my appointment to talk with Judge Johnson about my probation. You know, getting my probation changed so I can leave out.”

Fran remembers. Little Mike thinks he gonna sail away.

“You still going to sea?” she asks with a half-smirk.

But Mike doesn’t catch her tone; he nods with absolute confidence, and tells her about the ship that Ricky Sanford will soon have for him. Got his union papers in, got his physical, got things settled with Ducey, his girl.

“Got my Z-card last week.”

“What?”

Mike can’t help his pride. He stands up and reaches into the back pocket of his denims, pulling out a laminated Coast Guard identification. Fran takes it and falls silent for a moment.

“All I need is for the judge to let me be unsupervised.”

Fran hands back the card, more impressed than a moment before. Still, she can’t imagine unsupervised probation for a corner soldier convicted of nearly killing someone.

“You think he gonna let you go?”

“Got to,” says Mike, sitting down again and looking up toward Bruce Street, where the first few fiends are settling on the corners. “I need to get up from here.”

“Me too,” says Fran, rubbing her eyes.

“I’m serious,” says Mike. “I can’t be down here. There ain’t a damn thing left for me here but jail or worse.”

Fran grunts affirmation.

“Ducey say she gonna stop gettin’ high. But she might say so ’cause she don’t want me to go.”

“How long they keep you on the boat?”

“Four months,” he says, getting up from the stoop. “Five months. Sometimes for more than that. I don’t care how long so long as I’m gone from here.”

Fran hears him and thinks it a little ridiculous, as if getting out was just something you decide to do when you’ve had enough of Fayette Street. She has known Mike Ellerbee for years, watched him work the corners, counted him as no different than anyone else in the game. And now, quietly, the man is acting as if he’s actually found the exit.

It can’t be that simple; Fran knows this world well enough to see that Mike is asking too much. His suspended sentence for shooting a stickup boy was lucky enough—though Judge Kenneth Johnson was noted for leaving ten or fifteen years hanging over a defendant, then waiting for the inevitable violation of probation and banging the man with every last year. But to ask for unsupervised probation on top of that goes too far.

Besides, Mike is the same as her—he likes the coke and the corners and the party. He hasn’t done much right to deserve any second chances. But if he can talk this way, then maybe she’s entitled to the same kind of words. Either that, or she has to let the other side of her have the last say and come down on Little Mike Ellerbee for talking bullshit, pretending to a plan, thinking that he’s better than the rest, that he can make a move that no one ever makes. But shit on that, she tells herself; if Mike says he’s making the move, give him room.

“Well good luck with it,” Fran says. “What you gonna tell the judge?”

Mike shrugs. “Tell him I got a job, you know. Tell him to let me go.”

Fran looks up the street. The corner is coming to life.

“Yeah,” says Mike, smiling. “Well, I’ll holler at ya.”

He gets up and walks down to Gilmor Street, leaving Fran feeling strangely optimistic. It’s time, she tells herself, trying to believe. It’s been time for a long time. And if I don’t drag my ass away from here, nobody’s gonna do it for me. If I wait for anyone else to put a stop to this nonsense, I’ll be on these steps forever. Her whole family is lost in this shit. Most all of her friends. Neighbors. Gary, too. Only Mike seems to be trying to make any kind of move. Mike and DeAndre.

Whether it’s because he’s intimidated by his juvenile probation or because he’s genuinely tired of the corners, DeAndre is preparing for summer as if he has a plan of his own. Before his court hearing, he went to Ella asking for a job or help in finding one. Ella couldn’t afford to hire him at the rec center, but she had a sister who ran some hospice houses around the city. The sister had a man doing maintenance for her and the man was looking for some help. It sounded like a start and DeAndre took the number, hooking up with the man and working a day or two, getting paid with a $40 check, which he traded to his uncle Scoogie, for cash. But the job wasn’t steady work, and to make matters worse, the check bounced on his uncle, so that Ella had to work back through her sister to get DeAndre paid right.

Normally, this would have been enough of a setback to send DeAndre back to the corners, but to Fran’s surprise, he kept on with his hunt, asking Gary’s younger brother Ricardo if there was work down at Seapride. The crabhouse at Pratt and Monroe Streets had over the years given work to three or four of the McCullough men and Cardy had been sorting Chesapeake Bay blue shells there for years. Cardy went to bat for his nephew and DeAndre got hired a week later, just as the crab season was beginning to pick up.

Fran saw him leave the house for work three days in a row, carrying an extra pair of sweats and the thick crabbing gloves, stoic in his newfound role of working man. Having celebrated his sixteenth birthday the week before, he had finally straightened out, she told herself. And it wasn’t just the search for honest work that impressed Fran; the end of the school year is only a month away, but DeAndre is still making a class or two at Francis Woods, trying to convince Rose Davis not to drop him from
the ninth grade, maybe even give him some credit for work-study if he could hold on to the Seapride job.

A week ago, Fran made sure to walk down to Pratt Street on a lark, a proud mother, hoping for a glimpse of her son in his latest incarnation. Maybe that and a half-dozen crabs.

What she got instead appalled her. Walking up to the carryout counter, Fran’s eyes met those of her wearied son, who was drenched in sweat from the steam of the crab pots, nauseous from the fumes, and generally fixing to die right there amid the hardshell crawlers.

“’Dre,” she shouted. “C’mere.”

DeAndre ignored her, pushing an empty pot through the steam, heading for the sorting room. But Fran kept at him until he finally came to the counter, where she could look him over and see just how bad it was.

“What the hell is wrong with you, boy?” she said. “You sick as a dog.”

DeAndre shrugged. “Gotta work.”

“You crazy. You ain’t gotta make yourself sick.”

“It’s a job.”

A woman yelled at him from the register, saying she needed more number twos, and DeAndre turned away, half stumbling back toward the sorters. His face and hands were bloated, his breath came in long wheezes. And the sweats—bad for anyone working in the hundred-degree heat of the steamers—were worse for a boy made sick by the very smell.

His allergy. Fran hadn’t given much thought to it when he took the job, figuring that as long as he didn’t swallow any seafood it wouldn’t matter. But just breathing the crab smell was breaking him down. The crabhouse wasn’t for DeAndre. Fran told him so that night, though he went back to work the next day, unwilling to give it up.

Only when the crabhouse manager ordered him to clean the crab pots did he finally balk. The pots gave off a thick iodine smell when you hosed them; you were breathing in the worst of the fumes. DeAndre told Miss Mary about his seafood allergy; how he would bloat up if he swallowed even a morsel of crab, how he could barely breathe from the smell. Mary told him to sweep the floor instead, and DeAndre, looking down at the water and spice and crab mess on the floor, took this as some kind of punishment, as make-work for having complained about the pots. Why him? Why not one of the other workers?

He asked Miss Mary those questions and the next day, he wasn’t scheduled to work. Nor was he scheduled the day after. By the weekend, he learned from his uncle Cardy that he no longer had his job.

And yet he wasn’t giving up, telling Fran that he had a line on something at the McDonald’s over on the east side, the one up at North Avenue and Harford Road. The manager there was saying he needed to bring a birth certificate and social security card. He needed them by next Monday.

DeAndre is trying. And Little Mike is trying. And Fran is still out here on the steps, looking for the usual thing. She would get high today. And tomorrow. And the next day, too, though she couldn’t help but feel guilty about it if people around her insisted on making a move. They were ruining her high.

So it is that two days later, Fran Boyd goes out of the Dew Drop on a late morning, runs a game on Buster to get right, and then feels good enough to walk down to Poppleton Street and stand under a canvas canopy, staring up at the reconditioned frontage of an old city school building. From a distance, the Baltimore Recovery Center looked like a small apartment house, but the double glass doors are government-issue, and the small lobby, with its lone metal desk perched precariously on a narrow landing between two stairwells, dispels any notion of hospitality. This is a way station for people’s lives, nothing more or less.

“Can I speak to Antoinette?”

“Do you have an appointment?” asks the young man on the desk.

“I need to speak with her,” says Fran.

Antoinette is little more than a name to Fran; a friend of a friend who is now one of the intake people at the center. The man picks up the phone and punches a few numbers, then waits for a moment or two before speaking softly into the receiver, turning to the side to shield his conversation. After a time, he turns, holding the mouthpiece and raising an eyebrow.

“Your name?”

“Fran.”

“Fran …?”

“Boyd. Denise Francine Boyd.”

He hangs up and points to the only other seat in the lobby, a bench wedged against the opposite wall.

“She’s with somebody now,” the young man tells Fran. “She says she’ll come down but you’ll have to wait.”

Now it’s all about waiting. Five minutes in the lobby for Antoinette to come down the stairs and look at the desk man. A moment or two more for the desk man to point her to Fran, a minute or two for Fran to tell her story in a couple of sentences, and then a few more minutes for Antoinette to explain the process and the waiting list and the scarcity of state-funded beds.

“… usually about six or eight weeks for one of the state beds to come open …”

Fran takes this in with some irritation. She’s being played like a charity case. If she had any medical insurance beyond state assistance, BRC would probably take her today. The insurance carriers are paying up to ten thousand dollars for twenty-eight-day residential rehab. The state-funded slots, however, are few and far between.

Still, this is Fran Boyd’s plan—linear and fixed in the same way that every dope fiend’s plan ever is. I’ll do A and B and then get someone’s permission to do C so that I’ll qualify for D. If at any point something doesn’t come through, the whole enterprise comes crashing down and the fiend goes back to the nearest corner. If the judge doesn’t let Mike off probation, he’s off the ship and back to shooting people. If DeAndre doesn’t get hired at the McDonald’s, he’ll be back with the rest of his crew, slinging down on Fairmount. And if Fran doesn’t get into BRC, she’ll stay on the stoop of the Dew Drop. There is a learned helplessness to these first, small steps—a single-minded dependence on someone else’s favors. Never mind that there are other detox programs, other jobs, other alternatives. In the beginning, it’s more than enough for any fiend to make that first call or go a half-dozen blocks out of the way to ask the first question. If that doesn’t yield an encouraging response, all the more reason to surrender. If the response offers some vague opportunity, some distant prospect of change, then that’s fine too. A six-to eight-week waiting list means six to eight weeks of getting high without guilt, of telling yourself that you’re just waiting until the bed comes open.

For Fran, the minimum requirement is that she call down to BRC on Tuesdays—every Tuesday—to inquire about her status on the waiting list and to let the staff know she’s still serious about the program.

“I call you?” she asks Antoinette.

“No, just leave a message at the desk. I’ll get it.”

Fran leaves with a manufactured hope, something to get her through the rest of spring and the coming summer, something she can use to assure herself and anyone else that she’s trying, that she has a plan. DeAndre hears about her foray down to the detox facility and tells her to go for it, assuring his mother that he’ll take care of DeRodd if she has to go away. Scoogie also offers to help, and Fran begins taking their encouragement to heart. It
is
a plan; she can do this. Get some money together so she can pay Bunchie a month’s rent up front and leave something for DeAndre to live on. Now might even be the time to go up to Rosemont and get her older son put back on her social services check; he’s been off since she put him out of the house last summer and Fran, lost in the inertia of addiction, had yet to deal with the paperwork involved in getting DeAndre back on her case file. More immediately, she needs to get DeAndre that birth certificate and see if he can hook up at Mickey D’s. Then go inside and get clean, and maybe hold on to enough cash so she can get a place of her own and get the hell out of the Dew Drop. That she’ll have to do, because there’s no staying clean if she’s down on Fayette Street with the rest of them. This, she tells herself, can work.