The Corner (51 page)

“C’mon, Andre. I might not be comin’ home.”

He finally cracks his smile, folding his arm around Fran’s thin shoulders. The embrace is genuine, and when she kisses his cheek, he barely starts.

“You embarrassed?” she asks.

“Ma,” he laughs awkwardly, “we out in the damn street.”

At odd moments, life on Fayette Street isn’t any different than life anywhere else; here, too, a grown-up boy doesn’t want to be seen in his mother’s arms.

“Good luck,” he tells her.

“You too.”

They are on different missions today: DeAndre is heading east to the McDonald’s at Harford and North, where he has every reason to believe that a job is waiting for him; his mother is heading up to Wabash to deal with the first of three boosting charges from last year. She’s got one case in the city, another out in Catonsville and a third floating around in the Anne Arundel County computer somewhere. The last hasn’t popped up as a court date yet and Fran is beginning to believe that it won’t, that the security officers at Harundale are satisfied to simply bar her from the mall.

Making his way east on Fayette Street, DeAndre mulls the proba bilities in his mind. His mother is scared of court—this he knows. For all her time drugging and boosting, she’s yet to be convicted of anything, so the idea of even an overnight stay at women’s detention appalls her. But it might come to that. And if Fran gets locked up at court today, he’ll be the man of the house. He’ll have to take care of DeRodd. He’ll have to get his mother’s check money come the first of the month. He’ll be out here on his own.

The idea is unnerving and at the same time exhilarating. First thing, he’ll clean up their bedroom. Then, he’ll make DeRodd act right. And before Fran comes home, he’ll have the job at Mickey Dee’s and take a driving test and buy a car and stay up all night running the streets with his boys. He’ll bring girls up to the bedroom every damn night, smoking Phillie blunts until his eyeballs look like cherries in buttermilk. Yeah boy.

On the other hand, he realizes, if his mother has to jail, she’ll miss her chance at detox. Her number will come up on the BRC waiting list and she’ll be over on Eager Street somewhere, or trapped inside the Dew Drop, wearing one of those monitoring rings around her ankle. This alone ruins the fantasy for DeAndre. His mother was trying, or at least thinking of trying, and despite himself DeAndre has been allowing himself to hope.

“Ma,” he told her at one point, “you lookin’ better.”

“What you mean?”

“You lookin’ better is all. You doin’ better.”

He could see it. She was slowing down a bit, making enough time in her day to call the detox center, talking about the future as if she had a plan. DeAndre loved his mother; he could never deny that. But he had grown up inside the Dew Drop, and his familiarity with the crudball move gave him a wholesale contempt for her ways. DeAndre offered his mother only as much hope as he dared, bracing himself all the while for the inevitable disappointment. Apart from a few generous moments, he kept a safe distance. He knew he had to get out of 1625 West Fayette, and lately he had been telling himself that if Fran didn’t make a move soon, he would have to find his own exit.

It was strange, but he blamed his father less. Part of what centered his scorn on Fran was the familiarity, the day-in-day-out sight of Fran’s drugging. The other part came from knowing that it was his mother who fell first. He’d heard the neighborhood talk that said Fran had broken Gary’s will, that she had turned a good man out. DeAndre believed that his father was a victim, that he had been, and still could be, the solution.

A week earlier, in a quiet moment after his mother had just emerged from the basement, he ventured to suggest as much, assuring Fran that if she went through detox, she could get back together with Gary and things would be as they once were. Fran looked for a minute as though she wanted to slap him.

“Dre,” she said slowly. “You out yo’ damn mind.”

“Ma, we’d be a family.”

“Andre, your father as much a dope fiend as I am.”

He stalked out of the bedroom, but not before letting go with both barrels. He couldn’t help himself; he felt the need to defend his father.

“You always downin’ him,” he yelled at her. “He’d still be on top now if you hadn’t drug him down.”

At that, Fran was beyond hitting him. She sat there seething. If he thought Gary was the solution, she told him, then he could go live with Gary. In Miss Roberta’s basement on Vine Street. Watch Gary chase the needle. Learn just how much better his father was.

“Everyone out here doing what they do by hisself and for hisself,” she told DeAndre, her voice low and hard. “Your father don’t need my help to get high. He doin’ all right on his own.”

“You brought him down.”

“Shut up, Andre.”

And he did, for a time. But a few days later, hope again slipped into the fringes of their conversation. He saw Fran go across the street to the neighbor to make another call down to BRC; when she came back, she asked DeAndre if he could take care of DeRodd, if he would be there to help when she went into rehab.

“Yeah, you know that,” he told her.

“Scoogie’ll help,” she offered.

“I got it covered.”

He acted like it was no big thing: If she did what she had to do, then he’d surely do the same. When she mentioned that the McDonald’s job would give him more money to care for himself and his brother, DeAndre readily agreed with that as well. She’d gotten hold of his birth certificate and social security card; now, he knew, it was up to him to get hold of the job.

That meant the long hike today, down Fayette and across downtown and up past Old Town to Harford and North, where an eastside McDonald’s franchise was still hiring summer help. DeAndre had called over the week before and talked to a lady manager. She said to come Monday, talk to her, and fill out an application.

DeAndre didn’t mind the idea of slinging fast food. Fact is, he’d been raised on McDonald’s No. 2 Happy Meals. And he figured that McDonald’s had to be easier than Seapride; he was almost grateful when Miss Mary stopped giving him hours at the crabhouse—the smell alone was enough to shut his lungs down. No, Mickey Dee’s would be good for a couple months. It wasn’t close to the kind of money he could make on a corner, but they didn’t lock you up, stick you up, or shoot you down for slinging burgers. Not all the time anyway.

As for the distance, he’d have to learn the bus lines, figure out where to transfer downtown. He wouldn’t be clocking enough cash behind burgers and fries to pay for hack rides every day. There were McDonald’s outlets a lot closer—Franklin Street, Washington Boulevard—but they weren’t hiring any more summer help. So it was East Baltimore or nothing.

Today, though, he doesn’t mind the walk. He spends the time thinking about things, and he’s comfortably past Lexington Terrace and all the way downtown before the heat of the summer day begins rising up from the asphalt and concrete. It takes another forty minutes to reach Broadway and North, where the lunch rush is in full swing.

“You in line?”

“Naw,” says DeAndre, stepping aside.

He stands there for a few minutes watching the bustle around the counter, looking at the teenagers in their uniforms, watching them work the registers and chase down orders. After a long interval, he steps slowly forward.

“May I take your order, please.”

“I’m lookin’ for the manager.”

“She’s not in right now,” says the girl at the register.

DeAndre’s voice begins to rise. “She told me to come in Monday to fill out my application and get my uniform.”

The girl raises a finger and turns, walking around the burger-laden stainless steel counter behind her. She reemerges a minute later with an older, dark-skinned man.

“Can I help you, son?”

“I was supposed to come by today and put in my application. Start working here. I called last week …”

“The manager isn’t in now, but I can take your application and then you’ll have to come back to be interviewed.”

DeAndre detects a lilt in the assistant manager’s voice. Gay as I don’t know what, he tells himself. When the man comes back with the application form, he makes the mistake of giving the boy a once over. It’s scrutiny connected with the hiring process, but DeAndre takes it the wrong way.

“What? What you lookin’ at?”

The man smiles. “You might have to cut your hair.”

“Naw,” says DeAndre. “That won’t do.”

The man shrugs, telling him the manager will decide. He guides DeAndre to a table, giving him a pen and the application form.

“You’ll need a birth certificate and social security card for the interview.”

“Got it,” says DeAndre diffidently.

The man gives him a last glance and DeAndre gives him a look back. It happens all the time—not only with white people, but with black folk in any station of life above Fayette Street. With his dreds and gold front, his baggy denims and don’t-fake-the-funk-on-a-nasty-dunk T-shirt, DeAndre shows street without so much as trying. He dresses and looks and walks the same way every kid he knows does; it plays on the corner, but nowhere else. Others might find it in themselves to bow to authority,
to accept the bargain and conform, but by and large, those people have a basic allegiance to the predominant culture, and DeAndre McCullough knows no such allegiance. The world can make no legitimate demands because the world hasn’t done shit for him these sixteen years; he lives on Fayette Street.

“I ain’t gettin’ my dreds cut,” he tells the cashier, handing back the finished application.

She shrugs. He orders a large Coke and leaves.

Back across town that same afternoon, he checks in at the Dew Drop long enough to learn that his mother threw the possibility of detox at the prosecutor and managed a one-time postponement up at Wabash. Fran is perched in front of the second-floor television, watching and not watching black-and-white cartoon images racing past.

“You get that job?”

“Manager wasn’t in. She said come by and she not even there. But, you know, I filled out an application.”

“When you supposed to hear?”

“Call back tomorrow. They sayin’ I have to cut my dreds.”

“You need to get them nappy things cut.”

“I look right,” he insists, twirling a dred with one hand. “And that ain’t even the point. I ain’t gonna change who I am for no one. Nigger think he better than I am ’cause of how he look and talk. That’s how they all is. They get a little something and they get to forgettin’ where they come from. Man, to hell with that. I don’t need the job that bad.”

“Yeah you do,” says Fran.

“Not enough to have some gay-ass manager lookin’ at me that way, actin’ like he so much better. I know his faggy ass as black as mine.”

The argument usually resonates with Fran; she lives on Fayette Street, too, so she’s both heard and invoked the appeal to true blackness on more occasions than can be counted. A couple years ago, when Gary’s sister offered to let DeAndre stay at her house out in the county, to go to school there and stay off the corners, DeAndre had to lean hard on this egalitarian ideal. At first willing enough to leave Fayette Street behind, DeAndre returned from Woodlawn a few weeks later, complaining about people who were as black as he was looking down at him because they had a little money, talking about how you can take a nigger out of the ghetto but you can’t get the ghetto out of the nigger. Naw, he told everyone who would listen, fuck that and fuck them.

“You know what I’m sayin’, Ma?”

She tells him she knows. But then again, she adds, there were the days when she was working down at the phone company and the white women there would always be laughing at stupid shit. Laughing about what just wasn’t funny. And she’d laugh, too. Act like it was the funniest thing ever, because those white women ran the place. And then they’d walk away and the black workers would all be rolling their eyes, shaking their heads and laughing for real.

“Dre, I’m sayin’ you got to play along a little bit.”

“Naw. You don’t want me as I am, then I’m gone.”

Fran tries again, telling him about how there isn’t a job out there that doesn’t make you do something you don’t want to do. She tells him that growing up is dealing with that and getting past it—all of which would be a fairly good lesson if it weren’t for the fact that Fran lost the phone job for cussing a supervisor. Still, she goes all out to remind him that he needs a job, that he’s not in school and that Tyreeka—for all her insistence that she isn’t pregnant—has admitted to Fran that she’s missed her clinic appointment twice. Tyreeka is looking heavier by the day.

“You just lookin’ for an excuse to go back to the corner,” she tells him.

DeAndre shakes his head. “Naw, I’m not about that.”

“Then go back an’ get the job.”

“I said I was gonna call,” he says, his voice rising.

But he doesn’t pick up the phone the next day. The day after that, he calls but the manager isn’t in. The next day, he forgets. Three long days after he was first supposed to call the McDonald’s across town, DeAndre finally reaches the manager, who tells him that he still has to come back for the interview. Yes, she’s still got an opening. Yes, she knows he came by and filled out the application form. But she needs to speak with him before she can tell him he has a job. She tells DeAndre to come Monday.

But Monday, he’s sick as a dog, laid up with some kind of stomach bug. DeAndre calls that afternoon and leaves a message with some other girl, saying if he feels right, he’ll be there tomorrow.

On Tuesday, he gets up late, still queasy, but manages to get dressed and borrow enough money for a hack. He gets across town to the McDonald’s by midafternoon, walks up to the same girl as before, and asks again for the manager. This time, she’s there; she comes to the counter and gives DeAndre much the same look as he got from the assistant manager.

“You were supposed to come in yesterday.”

“I was sick. I called and talked to someone.”

The manager frowns. “Well, I can’t do applications today. I have to be somewhere else in fifteen minutes. You’ll have to come back tomorrow. One o’clock.”