The Corner (64 page)

It’s come down to blaming the DeAndre McCulloughs and Richard Carters of the world for being born on Fayette Street, for being raised within the new culture of the corner, for failing to see beyond the boundaries of their world, for making ordinary and disastrous choices that were never really choices at all. We blame them for surviving despite themselves, for creating the corners and then taking the corner logic to its inevitable extreme. We’re furious at the drugging and terrified by the shooting and unnerved at the notion that unless something is done, it won’t be contained, that this horror show will creep beyond the rotting cores of cities. We have lost patience with the idea of our own culpability, with the corruptive message that accompanies the bribe. For three decades, we bought them off with the small coinage of charity at the beginning of every month, telling them they were not necessary, that their nation could do without them. Now, with that lesson of helplessness learned and learned well, we feel entitled to say that we can no longer afford the coins.

That the debate over welfare reform is couched in better language than this is testimony only to the subtlety of politics. It’s one thing to recognize the chasm between Fayette Street and the rest of the social order, to anticipate just how much time, effort, and money will be required to dismantle the culture of the corner and return those trapped there to the mainstream. It’s quite another to tell people who have been systematically stripped of discipline, purpose, and meaning that they have eighteen months, or two years, or even three years to get up off their asses and find a job.

It won’t work. And when it doesn’t work, there will be even more cause to lose patience, to blame them, to cut more and more from the
monthly checks. Soon, the ten or twelve days bought and paid for will be eight, or six, or four. For some, there will be no days at all. And God help us then—particularly those of us living in general proximity to a rust-belt American city. Because the corners are still going to be there and the corner rule dictates that no one will miss his blast because check day is late or gone. Whatever else falls through the cracks, the blast money will still have to be there every day, because blast money is the stuff of desperation and identity. The rational forces of economic theory don’t apply.

The corners now constitute a world apart, a rock-hard subculture formed in the crucible of lost America. Fayette Street and places like it are no longer accidents of race, or geography, or poverty. By generations, they have become all of those things and more, so that simple, seemingly reasoned changes in government policy or economic priority no longer achieve the intended result—or, in many cases, any result at all. Fayette Street is an ecosystem as complex as any in the natural world, as distinct and separate from the middle-class experience as can be imagined. Just as no right-thinking environmentalist would think of applying the ecology of a mountain stream to a tidewater marsh, so, too, should no politician or ideologue believe that what works elsewhere can or should work in the drug culture.

Mess with check day and we mess with the food chain; mess with the food chain and the consequences are necessarily profound. From on high, the intent is to end the dole and turn people toward work on the argument that those offered less will squander less. But from the inside, welfare reform doesn’t address itself to the essence of the drug corner. Cut the flow of government dollars, and the capers and dope-fiend moves will become more desperate; the corner violence will intensify and the assault rate will jump and the bleeders will begin washing up at the emergency rooms in waves. And more hustles mean more lockups, which means more cops, judges, lawyers, jail guards, and probation officers. More prisons, too—that’s the ultimate in societal cost, to the tune of an additional thirty thousand dollars or more annually to take hold of a solitary shoplifter or half-dead tout. Ultimately, we’ll feel gratified by demanding more for our dollars, denying the coinage of welfare even as we’re compelled to spend billions more on everything from Medicaid to foster care to boot camps.

The point is practical, not moral: For the money we throw down the welfare hole, we don’t get miracles; in fact, we get pretty much what a
backhanded bribe warrants. But if we tempt ourselves into believing that we’ve done more than we have and deserve more for our trouble, then we will surely find a way to get even less.

End welfare, or curtail it, or replace it with some crude carrot-and-stick approximation of workfare and the result is unpredictable. What passes for welfare reform will surely provoke some people to lift themselves up and escape the dole. But for the rest, it will likely solve nothing, and make the cities less livable than they already are. When the money dries up on Fayette Street, the corners will reach out and take their share from the next neighborhood over, and the next after that, until a problem that once seemed distant becomes a collision of worlds.

When things get worse—and they will—we’re likely to tally our losses and assess the damage done and conclude—as we always conclude—that the fault isn’t ours. We’ll continue to justify our limited commitment, to assure ourselves that we did everything we could for these people and somehow they managed to fail us.

The choice then will be the choice now, just as it was the choice twenty years ago. We can commit to the people of Fayette Street—to the notion that they are our own and that their future is our future—or we can throw the problem back on them, arguing about smaller carrots and bigger sticks. Then as now, we’ll make the worst choice, almost by habit.

Unless and until we have a change of heart, we should stop complaining. And come the first of the month, we should pay the bribe. To do less is to compound the tragedy; to do more—well, that road is the one never taken because we are moral pretenders to a war on poverty. We have been pretenders for three decades now, ever since the Vietnam War swallowed whole the ideals of the Great Society. To do more than tender the bribe would require empathy, charity, and connectedness, and in thirty years we have summoned up nothing close.

Empathy demands that we recognize ourselves in the faces at Mount and Fayette, that we ackowledge the addictive impulse as something more than simple lawlessness, that we begin to see the corner as the last refuge of the truly disowned. Charity asks that we no longer begrudge the treasure already lost. And connectedness admits that between their world and ours, the distance, in human terms at least, is never as great as we make it seem.

Getting near the basement pay phone was no small feat. Getting on it was damned near impossible. But getting a call back was almost beyond imagination. Fran had given the phone number to DeAndre days ago,
telling him when to call, trying for that one-hour window each day when she didn’t have meetings or counseling sessions. For three days she’d waited on that call. And for three days, nothing.

For all she knows, her children might be out in the street. DeRodd might be hurt. DeAndre might be locked up. Having consigned herself to a purgatory all her own, she has no way of knowing.

It is late August. Fayette Street is still in the throes of its long summer, but Fran is out of the mix, alone and detached. She’s been inside the Baltimore Recovery Center six days.

The first three were an ugly blur. Nothing that went beyond a very bad flu, but enough to make her think only of her dormitory bed. The doctor passed out Clonidine and aspirin, some Maalox to settle the stomach, but her body took every opportunity to exact retribution. The heroin-saturated cells threw a seventy-two-hour tantrum, crying and raging until they were absolutely sure that nothing more was coming. Then she started to feel a bit better. Empty, but better.

On the fourth day, she sat up, looked around, and began meeting people. She spent a day or two learning the rules, the schedule, the geography of the center. She bummed a smoke, tasted the food, listened with a fresh ear to the redemptive new language, and took to heart the warning they give when you come through the doors: Only one of the thirty people now in the room will be clean in a year. The odds are that long.

Once she learned the ropes, she had nothing left beyond the daily routine. Outside the walls was another world. Outside, the corners were still buzzing; the vials were bought and sold, the capers run, the game played out to the latest hour. At first, she felt disenfranchised. The race was not her own anymore; she had been abruptly tossed from the track and forced to watch from the infield grass. She was bored by this, but reconciled. She told herself that getting better required giving up not only the vials, but the game as well.

What Fran could not endure was the silence from her children. She needed news. She needed that pay phone to ring and the counselor to pick it up and call her name. Instead, the phone stayed occupied, save for those rare moments between calls when it would ring and the call would be for some other resident.

She had called Scoogie three days back, asking him to run down to Fayette Street and make DeAndre pick up the phone. She’d called back, too, making sure that Scoogie had done it and that DeAndre had the right number. But so far, nothing—no call, not even a message to let
her know that DeRodd isn’t in a hospital emergency room somewhere. The loose ends of her life are out there, flapping in the breeze, and after a week inside, Fran feels the need to grab hold of them.

And this is the first lie.

Only the lowest of low-bottom dope fiends will spend a week in detox and then leave, telling himself that he needs to go out for a blast. Instead, the thirsty cells look for a back door, giving up the frontal assault after the first few days; now the attack is based on subtle appeals to guilt or conscience or material need. Fran doesn’t want to leave to get high; no, she just wants to take a walk up Fayette Street and see her children.

On Tuesday morning, she gets to the phone and calls her brother again. Scoogie assures her that DeAndre got the message.

“He ain’t called,” Fran says.

“I know he tried the one day,” Scoogie tells her. “He tried but he said he couldn’t get through.”

She hears this and knows it’s true. Yet nothing short of DeAndre’s voice will reassure her—and maybe even DeAndre won’t be enough. When one of the counselors finally calls her name at lunch the next day, she’s all but given up; she’s already telling herself that she needs only fourteen days of detox, twenty-one at the most.

“Fran Boyd.”

“Fran, they callin’ for you.”

She jumps up and races for it like a game-show contestant.

“Andre!”

“Ma.”

“Hey boy. How you?”

“Fine.”

“How DeRodd?”

“He up at Karen’s. She gonna watch him.”

“That’s good. That’s good.”

So DeRodd will not be her reason; deep inside, Fran feels a twinge of regret. She asks DeAndre how he’s making it, but here, too, nothing can pass for urgent. He’s fine.

“Dre, you wouldn’t believe it. This place a trip.”

“Huh.”

“I’m serious. When dope fiends first be gettin’ clean, they get to talking all this high on life stuff. Drive you crazy.”

“Yeah.”

“Then they get past illin’ and the next thing you know all them sex drives start comin’ up …”

She’s got his interest now. “Like what?”

“What you think? I swear, this place like a soap opera with people hoppin’ around like damn rabbits.”

DeAndre laughs.

“I’m serious. They gone crazy.”

“That ain’t you, Ma,” he says. It’s almost a question.

“Uh uh, I’m just sayin’ how wild it is. I mean, you wouldn’t believe what it’s like in here.” She tells him about all the rules. “It’s like lockdown the way they got things. The way they keep on you.”

“Yeah?”

“You comin’ to the meetin’ Saturday? Tell Scoogie to drive you and DeRodd down for the meeting. One o’clock. I want to see you. I miss you.”

She’s almost ready to give up the phone when she remembers:

“Andre, I need you to do something for me …”

“Huh.”

“I need you to make a run for me.”

A run. DeAndre is silent for a moment. “No, Ma.”

Fran is taken aback. “Boy, you a trip! I’m tryin’ to get my life together. I’m talking about cigarettes and maybe some candy. Those chocolate bars I like. They sayin’ nicotine and chocolate are drugs too, but I ain’t tryin’ to hear that.”

“Huh.”

“I need you to put ’em in a bag and come by the alley on the side between three and four today. And when you see me, just toss it over the fence …”

DeAndre is laughing now. He’s gonna do a drive-by with Newports and Mr. Goodbars.

“But don’t throw it until you see me there. I got to make sure the counselor ain’t watchin’. You got it? Between three and four, right? Dre, I love you. You love me?”

“Uh huh.”

Later that afternoon, she’s where she said she’d be, hard by the twelve-foot chain-link fence that encloses the detox center’s rear yard. She keeps one eye on the back door and one eye on the alley, pacing impatiently until she sees a car turn from Schroeder Street into the alley. As it creeps closer, she sees her son in the passenger seat. DeAndre is slumped down and giggling.

“Toss it!”

As the car rolls past, DeAndre flings the small, white plastic bag. It catches the top of the fence and falls back into the alley.

“Damn,” shouts DeAndre.

Now Fran is laughing. “That was sad.”

Her son gets out of the car, runs to the bag and tosses it again before fleeing. It lands in a back stairwell, where Fran collects the candy and smokes, stuffing them down her pants. After a few minutes, DeAndre comes back to the fence.

“You look good.”

“I feel good.”

A counselor comes out the back door, sees them both by the fence and asks DeAndre to leave. For a moment, Fran feels queasy, as if the contraband has already been discovered.

“You know the rules,” the counselor says. “You can’t talk through the fence.”