The Corner (67 page)

The changes in the Francis Woods gym press on the old C.M.B. loyalties. Manny Man, for one, can’t understand why Tae and Dewayne and R.C. are willing to put up with so many newcomers at his expense. He used to play at least a couple quarters of every game; now his court time minutes are, well, minutes.

“It ain’t even the rec team no more,” he complains.

But Tae, R.C., and Dewayne aren’t listening. They’re finally playing basketball at a level that rewards effort. You move without the ball; you get the ball. You play defense; you get recognition and court time. You pull a rebound, outlet a pass and spark a breakaway, and as you scurry back on defense, Pumpkin is pointing you out for credit.

The talent gets so deep that R.C. is sometimes a third forward and sixth man, depending on Pumpkin’s mood. But he’s so exhilarated that the lost minutes don’t matter. When he comes out on the court, he’s instantly connected with this wondrous new machine, these half-dozen teenagers who manage, in their best moments, to think and act as a single organism.

When Ella finally gets them a game against Diggs-Johnson Middle School, they arrive to find thirteen-and fourteen-year-olds half a foot shorter than themselves. They dominate these children, running up the score even though Pumpkin holds out his best players, refusing to allow Tony or Tank or Truck to set foot on the gym floor.

“Man,” says Tae, “they was too young. We need a real game. We need to get into a winter league.”

In early October, they prove the point by once again hosting the old school in the Francis Woods gym, taking on Shamrock and Preston and the rest of the eighteen-and nineteen-year-old Fayette Street crew. This time, it’s all the older boys can do to keep it respectable, to stay within fifteen or sixteen points of the Martin Luther Kings. For Ella’s rec center team, it’s a coming of age, a rite of passage for corner kids who have looked up at the likes of Shamrock and Preston their whole lives. Now, on the court, there is no discernible difference in their game; they’ve grown.

On the court, R.C. has the world as he’s always wanted it. Against the older Fayette Street crew, he has sixteen points. He also has no clue once he steps off the hardwood floor. He has no job save for working other people’s packages on McHenry Street, no interest in school, and no plan for anything beyond this down-at-the-heels recreation center squad. Night after night, he runs wild down on McHenry Street, slinging and messing with his boys and chasing girls with the abandon of someone for whom no other possibilities ever existed. He doesn’t try to disguise the utter lack of direction in his life; if he ever speaks in future tense, it’s the same old story about how his older brothers, Ricky and Bug, were going to get him into the maritime union in a year or two. And that alone—vague as it is—is enough to excuse whatever comes before it. R.C. can profess to a future; consequently, he can fuck up until the union card arrives.

R.C.’ s latest girl, Dena, is now pregnant, too. Earlier in the fall, Treecee said she was pregnant by R.C. and, for a while, he was looking at two different babies coming at him from two different girls—a prospect that only increased his standing with the rest of his crew. But Treecee’s pregnancy never materialized and R.C. chalked it up to jealousy over Dena’s news. Dena, though, is gaining weight, and R.C. is quietly relieved. He might not be the first in the C.M.B. crew to get a girl pregnant, but he had worked hard to ensure he would not be the last.

In September, R.C. had followed the migratory pattern of the season,
traveling to area malls to equip himself with supplies and material for the coming semester—not notebooks or No. 2 pencils or calculators or dividers, but new Nikes, sweats, some jewelry and—most important—a new telephone pager. In fact, the fall semester was only minutes old when R.C. got himself suspended for carrying the pager into the high school. Several years ago, the school system had banned beepers as artifacts of corner culture. Though he feigned ignorance of the rule, R.C. was fully aware of it. In fact, it was for that very reason that he brought the pager with him, then displayed it in front of a staff member, thereby solving the dilemma of what to do with the last remnant of his public schooling. He was nearly sixteen, close enough to his birthday that he could walk out of high school without regard to truancy charges or juvenile court.

But Rose Davis had no intention of allowing the pager issue to determine R.C.’ s future. She’d worked in a city school long enough to read between the lines. That same day, she called R.C. into the office and told him that it wasn’t a full suspension, that he only needed to go with his mother down to the school headquarters on North Avenue for a hearing before being readmitted. She also told R.C. that she didn’t want him to come to the school gym for basketball practice if, in fact, he was truant on the same days.

R.C. responded to her words with a firm acknowledgment that he had heard and understood her.

“Yes’m,” he said.

“So you’re going to go down to North Avenue?”

“Yes’m.”

“And I’ll see you Monday.”

“Yes’m.”

“And I won’t see you creeping into the gym after three o’clock when you haven’t been in class all day.”

“Yes’m.”

“Say what?”

“I mean, no, ma’am.”

“All right then.”

His mother dragged him to North Avenue, the suspension was lifted, and R.C. never made another day of school.

In early October, Rose Davis catches sight of him going up the front hallway stairs in his sweats, palming a basketball, then finger-rolling it against the wall.

“R.C.”

“Yes’m.”

“Young man, I’m going to have to take you off the roll.”

“Yes’m.”

She looks at R.C., knowing that there is no place left to go with him, that there is nothing to be said or done to change or improve on a disaster years in the making. He’s just a child, a big, insecure child, carrying his wounds and scars for all the world to see, and yet he’s a finished product. The horror is he’s content with this. She knows that he just wants to be left alone.

“You want that?” she asks him.

“No, ma’am.”

“Then come in and see me,” she offers. A tenth chance. An eleventh chance. Or maybe it’s the force of habit that causes her to say such things. R.C. hesitates for a moment until Rose Davis goes through the front office door. He waits there with the ball on his hip to see if she’ll toss him from the gym. When she doesn’t—when she grants him the gym because at the least, it’s not a corner—he jogs up the stairs, kicks open one of the metal doors, and spins for a jumper.

Manny Man and Dinky are there. Dinky tries to block the shot, but fouls R.C. on the forearm instead. The jumper falls.

“And one,” he says.

DeAndre McCullough is first through the door when his mother turns the key, first up the stairs, and first into the big bedroom at the front of the second floor.

“This room mine,” he says, staking claim.

“The hell it is,” his mother counters.

“Ma, you said I get my own room.”

“I didn’t say it would be this one. Young as you are, you want to take the second-floor bedroom and have me runnin’ up and down from the third floor all the damn day.”

“Be good for you,” assures DeAndre. “Good exercise.”

“Boy, get yo’ ass up them steps.”

It’s the third floor front for DeAndre, with DeRodd taking the rear bedroom across the hall. It may not be the biggest room, but it’s his, his own space—a chance to stretch out and take control.

DeAndre walks from wall to wall in his new room, judging distances, imagining furniture and possessions that he doesn’t yet own. He opens
a window, leaning out the front of the rowhouse and scanning his new block all the way to Franklintown Road. A fall breeze rushes to greet him.

“Yeah boy,” he shouts.

This three-story Formstone rowhouse will be home to the three of them only; shelter and salvation for the only residents of 1625 Fayette Street with heart enough to walk away. Fran won’t go back to the Dew Drop. She’s promised; and of all the vows she’s made since coming out of detox three and a half weeks ago, this is one she has backed with precious check-day dollars. After three weeks at Scoogie’s house, Fran makes this move to a place of her own, taking herself and her sons off the Fayette Street strip, down the slope past Hilltop, and up the next side hill to the middle of a block of small, three-story rowhouses named, appropriately enough, Boyd Street. The 2500 block of Boyd—no more than an alley, really—stretches between Franklintown and Catherine, just north of the Westside shopping center; it’s far enough west to be out of the way of the corners that tempted her most, but it’s really no farther from the drugs than the Dew Drop. Franklintown and Baltimore is a corner. So is Franklintown and Lombard. Catherine and Hollins is an on-again-off-again strip, depending on which crew is working which package. Still, it seems to Fran like a clean enough break with the past.

To DeAndre and his brother, three bedrooms to be divided among three occupants amounts to unthinkable luxury. They will be living as a family does—as DeAndre himself can remember living in those years before his father left and his parents both fell into the vials.

“We doin’ good now, Ma,” DeAndre tells Fran during that first night on Boyd Street. Their furniture, or what was left of it in the basement of the Dew Drop—a glass dining room table and woodblock chairs, a few mattresses and battered dressers, the dying green-tint television, and a wobbly chrome-and-glass bookshelf—every stick of it would arrive this weekend. Gary’s brother, Cardy, had volunteered his pickup truck, but he didn’t have a day off from the crabhouse until Sunday. Still, even with an empty house, they’re too excited after getting the keys to stay at Scoogie’s another night.

They sleep that night in makeshift bedrolls on the hardwood of the second floor, listening to the unfamiliar creaks and moans of joists and walls and the rattle of the front windows in the wind of a late September night.

“This house is right,” DeAndre tells her.

“And we just startin’,” she assures him.

Money was going to be tight. Fran had hoped to line up a Section 8 housing voucher after coming out of detox, but the waiting list for subsidized city housing was something like three years. As for hooking into a Section 8 development like the one down in the 1500 block of Fayette, where the rental company could itself get hold of a voucher or two, Fran lost out there as well. Her credit was shot: Ms. Churchill at the rental agency—the name in which she had put so much hope—couldn’t help once Fran’s credit report came back, the rental company wouldn’t risk a voucher on anything but a solid rating. That left the want ads, where any place worth renting was at least three hundred, plus utilities.

Fran spent a day or two with the newspaper, hunting a bargain. Instead, a bargain found its way to her in the form of a phone call from an old friend, a woman who knew Fran from a brief stint when the two worked for the same temp agency, just after Fran lost the phone company job. Linda had stayed in touch with Fran, even rolling past the Dew Drop now and then to treat Fran to a meal. Having heard that her old girlfriend had cleared detox and was staying with her brother, Linda called Scoogie’s house and offered a rowhouse that she’d inherited from a dead relative and had been trying to rent for weeks. Fran, in turn, gave Linda a little of the old-time’s-sake, asking for a reduced rate while she tried to get on her feet again. Still, the rent on Boyd Street would be $255 a month—more than three-quarters of her monthly AFDC check.

The food stamps would keep them in groceries for most of the month. What little cash remained—seventy or so—had to buy everything else. That meant winter coats, athletic shoes, and denims; cigarettes, snacks, and the pay-by-the-month bus passes, which were now an essential item, for Fran especially.

Only a week after emerging from detox, in early September, she had taken another small step toward change by enrolling in courses at the city community college’s Liberty Heights campus. Fran was going back to school on a Pell Grant, taking algebra and English composition at the city community college up on Liberty Heights, trying to get those first two course requirements out of the way so that maybe, in time, she could get a two-year degree in computers or health care or something that might mean real work. The English wasn’t a problem, but the algebra was painful. Fran told herself that she would deal with it, that she was going forward one step at a time. She’d hit the books before the first
test, maybe find a tutor if she still had trouble with all that
x
and
y
nonsense.

By early October, she was not only in a place of her own, but she’d been on the street thirty days without a blast, getting the one-month-clean key ring and all the bromides and encouragement she could stand at the Narcotics Anonymous meeting up at St. James. She missed getting high; every day, she missed it. But she kept telling herself she’d seen enough of bottom.

Then there was DeAndre. Her son, she knew, was watching.

Not that he made it obvious. What passed for encouragement or hope or fear in DeAndre’s conversation was little more than a word or two, spoken in a quiet moment on the stairs or at the bathroom door.

“You look good, Ma.”

Or: “You gain’ back some weight.”

Or, once: “Ma, I’m proud of you doin’ what you doin’.”

More than that, DeAndre was responding in kind, showing a little more fealty to the idea of family. At summer’s end, he had slowed his weeding and drinking and carousing on McHenry Street. That was Fran’s doing. She had continued to insist on a midnight curfew, telling DeAndre that he needed to do one of two things to earn his keep on Boyd Street.

“Either you going to school or you getting a job,” his mother told him. “You ain’t gonna stay here, eating and sleeping and running the streets to all hours. You gonna school or you gonna work.”

After again testing her with one or two late nights—and once finding himself locked out of the Boyd Street rowhouse—DeAndre seemed to concede his mother’s newfound authority.