The Corner (87 page)

Fran glowers for a moment, then runs upstairs. She finds DeAndre asleep on the third floor and Marvin nowhere to be seen. Marvin Parker.

“Got-damn,” she says, drifting listlessly back down the stairs. DeRodd stands in the kitchen, looking at her curiously.

“Ma?”

“Shut the damn door.”

DeRodd closes the refrigerator.

“Ma? Did Mister Marvin take the food?”

Fran doesn’t answer, leaving DeRodd to wonder at what everyone else in this house immediately understands.

“Ma?”

Fran closes her eyes, drops her elbows on the table, and holds her head in her hands. She feels like crying, but tears won’t come. DeRodd stands looking at her.

“Get your coat on,” she tells him.

DeRodd obeys, then waits patiently while his mother sits staring blankly at the kitchen wall. Uncomfortable in the silence, he creeps past her and heads slowly up the stairs. Fran sits at the table for what seems to her to be hours, sits there wondering how in the hell it could come to this. She isn’t going to make it to check day. Or New Year’s. Or anything else.

When DeAndre comes down in his socks and underwear, she barely has strength to look up, much less to tell the tale with the anger it deserves.

“Marvin took the groceries,” Fran says softly.

Even DeAndre is amazed.

“That man stole our got-damn food,” she says. “He cleaned our shit out, took it up to the corner and sold it.”

DeAndre walks to the refrigerator, opens the door, then closes it. He stands there for a moment more, then turns and walks back to the stairs.

“He took the food,” Fran says, incredulously. “I can’t believe he would do that.”

“Ma,” says DeAndre quietly, “he got to go.”

Fran stares at him and says nothing. She looks away slowly, her body slack. More to herself than to DeAndre, she admits to absolute defeat, muttering an answer just over her breath:

“So do I.”

DeAndre sits on the stairs, saying nothing more.

After a long while, Fran stands, walks to the stairs and shouts for DeRodd to come down. The boy steps nervously past DeAndre, sensing the ugly mood that has settled in this kitchen.

“C’mon, DeRodd,” says his mother. “You goin’ back up Scoogie’s.”

DeAndre looks up. “Ma, where you going at?”

Fran doesn’t answer. She doesn’t have to. DeAndre knows.

“Ma …”

“Andre, don’t try to tell me what to do.”

“But Ma …”

“’Cause I’m not even trying to hear it from you.”

Fran leaves him there on the stairs, alone in his boxers and socks. He hears the door slam and the sound of footfalls as his mother and brother go down the front steps and out into Boyd Street. He imagines his brother washing up twenty minutes from now on Uncle Scoogie’s doorstep and he imagines his mother pausing not a minute more before taking herself the rest of the way up Saratoga, then right at Monroe and down the way to Fayette. Then down the strip to the Mount Street crews and the worn marble steps of the Dew Drop. He can see his mother, lost in the basement with Bunchie. Or upstairs with Stevie, maybe, planning a fresh move.

He’s alone. He feels his stomach growl, gets up, walks to the cupboard. He still can’t believe it: Low-bottom motherfucker even snatched the cereal. How much can a nigger get for a box of Cocoa Krispies?

DeAndre shakes his head and goes back upstairs to wash and dress, telling himself that he’ll kill Marvin Parker next chance he gets. And he promises himself that no matter what his mother does or says, he won’t go back down to Fayette Street.

By midafternoon, he’s put the morning melodrama behind him. He’s down on the strip with Dinky, looking for R.C. and Dion, hoping to get all the necessary business done before the Southern’s third shift hits the street. Half an hour later, R.C. and Dion post, each carrying a forty, Dion drinking his more for show than anything else. Together the four walk up Gilmor Street to the pink house in the middle of the block. They’ve paid the woman in the neighboring apartment a few dollars to use the second-floor rear for their stash. But after a few weeks’ caution, they’ve already gotten slack about things. DeAndre and the others barely pause to look around before entering, much less take the trouble to go around the alley and use the back door. Inside, they’re full of play, more intent on getting blunted than on vialing up. Dinky has a Kevlar vest that he bought off the street. He wants to wear it and have someone shoot at him.

“Nothing big. A twenty-five be good.”

DeAndre smokes a blunt. R.C. starts arguing with Dinky about yesterday’s count. “You the fuckup, R.C.,” says Dinky. “You always fucking up.”

DeAndre passes the weed, then folds himself onto the battered couch as Dion starts to vial. The blue-gray smoke curls around his head. He sleeps.

This is how the days at McHenry and Gilmor will turn to weeks and the weeks to months. Before anyone can think a fresh thought, it will be spring. The strip will be humming with warm-weather action. The Southern troops will be deep. From radio cars and unmarked Cavaliers, Turner and Hurricane and all the other jump-out boys will be watching the crew, waiting, even pulling DeAndre up and giving him fair warning of what’s to come. And all of it will pass as if in a dream—the vials going out, the dollars coming back, the profits going for weed or whores or up to Park Heights in a hack with DeAndre, where the fiends all say you can find the best snorting heroin in the city.

But now, on the next to last day of the year, DeAndre McCullough sleeps. Tomorrow, he will be here on the stash house sofa, nodding, waiting for the shift change. Just as he’ll be here the day after, and the day after that, and all the days after until one afternoon in May, when he will wake at last to the sound of a jump boot making the stairway landing creak in a strange way. Half-asleep and blunted, DeAndre will gaze up at the apartment door and see Turner with his gun out, pressed against the door frame and peeking into the room.

Their eyes will meet and Turner will actually smile, then press a forefinger to his lips. Quiet please.

And DeAndre, thinking it all a part of the dream, will not even move off this rotting couch. He won’t have sense enough in him to shout out to Dinky over by the window, or to R.C. in the broken-backed chair, or to Dion, who will be sitting at the old Formica table with half a dozen bags of heroin and three bundles of coke caps arrayed in front of him. When Turner finally turns the corner and puts his Glock nine on Dinky, DeAndre will simply watch the last moments play out as if it’s someone else’s life on videotape.

Dope on the table. Coke on the table. Packaged for sale. Conspiracy to distribute and possession with intent. And DeAndre McCullough will by then be seventeen. Might gonna go to adult court. Might gonna finally see them jail tiers on Eager Street.

Come spring, they’ll be old enough to know their place in this world,
young enough not to argue. Come spring, the corner will call in all notes and debts and claim them, every one. Come springtime at McHenry and Gilmor, there will be a brief graduation ceremony in this very room, marking the passage of DeAndre McCullough into manhood. The Southern boys will bring the diploma.

“Gotcha,” says Turner, yanking him off the couch.

Fat Curt went back to the corner.

In the three and a half years since the doctors at Bon Secours deposited him at the Seton Manor nursing home, he slowly wore away. By the spring of 1997, his hands and feet were still swollen, but otherwise little poundage remained to justify his street name.

In the winter and early spring of 1994, he laid low at the nursing home, conserving his strength. But in spring, as the weather broke, Curt snuck away for a quick celebration or two on Fayette Street. When the staff at Seton Manor realized that Curt was roaming the corners, having cake and eating cake, they quickly bounced him from his fourth-floor room. One morning, after staying out all night on a daytime-only pass, Curt returned to the nursing home to find his belongings stacked up in the lobby doorway.

Pimp lasted a week longer before the nurses realized that he, too, had been spending mornings in a few Fayette Street tester lines. Expelled from his room, he returned with Curt to Blue’s empty house.

That summer the case against Smiley, who was charged with the stabbing murder of Hungry, quickly collapsed. Prosecutors placed the case on the inactive docket after the police were unable to locate their witnesses. Detectives spent a few days walking Fayette Street looking for Robin and Blue and the others, but they found no one. Robin was in the wind. So was another Vine Street kid, who had given detectives a complete statement. And Blue—the third prosecution witness—wasn’t where anyone expected to find him either.

By then, George Epps was living in a group home on South Hanover Street, miles from the old strip. He was working, too, bringing home a weekly paycheck as an employee of the Downtown Partnership, a consortium of businesses that pay people to patrol the center of the city. Partnership employees wear brightly colored jackets; their job is to
remove refuse, discourage vandalism, help tourists, and stand on street-corners with a vague sense of authority. Blue had been led to the job by the staff at the South Baltimore Homeless Shelter, and he was horrified at the notion of being caught wearing a clown suit and pretending to some kind of pseudo-policing. Maybe, he hoped, he would get through this gig without seeing anyone he had ever known.

Yet Blue endured, got paid, got another job, and then a better job after that. Eventually he rented his own apartment downtown and found work—coincidentally enough—on the maintenance staff at Seton Manor, where he spent time with dozens of men and women he had known from the corners. All were ailing, many were dying; to Blue, it seemed that God had put him at Seton Manor for a purpose. To be sure, he was there to paint and repair drywall and get paid. But for Blue, it was also a chance to stand back and consider the life left behind. Perhaps, he thought, he was there in Seton Manor to witness.

In time, Blue joined an outreach ministry at Bethel A.M.E., one of West Baltimore’s strongest black congregations, where he began bringing God’s word to others struggling with addiction. Last fall, he celebrated three years of living clean.

By then, Rita was dead from the infection in her arms. Shardene had passed the previous year. Scalio was gone, too, as was Ty Boice and Pimp, who went back to Fayette Street after getting booted from Seton Manor, but then found God in his last days and died quietly in a clean bed, reading the Bible in another nursing home in another part of the city. In 1994, Eggy Daddy sold a burn bag of Arm & Hammer to an undercover cop and was looking at five years mandatory under the state’s three-time loser statute. He begged a city judge for the change to follow Blue into the homeless shelter; the judge, giving him one last bite of the apple, agreed, and suspended the sentence.

Earlier this year, Eggy was named employee of the month at the Downtown Partnership. He’s been drug free for a couple years.

Consequently, Curt was left ever more alone at the crossroads of Fayette and Monroe. In early 1995, he finally had his appeal hearing with Social Security, and after the hearing officer got a quick look at the swollen legs and twisted ankle, Curt was awarded a $459-a-month government stipend, coupled with a second monthly check in the same amount, representing back money for all the months in which his appeal had languished. In short, Curtis Davis—by trade a tout and confirmed dope fiend—was being given more than nine hundred dollars a month
for his disability, which was defined as being, well, a confirmed dope fiend.

At Fayette and Monroe, nine hundred dollars is a lot of money, and having waited nearly two years for any kind of government help whatsoever, Curt nearly became a victim of check day. When the first two SSI checks arrived, it was as if a government-issue sedan had rolled up on Fayette Street with a six-foot syringe strapped to the roof. To Curt, it seemed like Jubilee.

Within a year, he was back in Bon Secours, his liver enzymes in absolute riot, his body withered to near nothingness. In time, the back-money checks stopped coming and Curt learned to pace himself on the rest, to give himself some time off from the game.

For more than a year, he lived on Mount Street in a second-floor walk-up with Rose, his woman. He had a television, a video recorder, and a few good changes of clothes. He got in a methadone program, tried to do better, tried to keep the needle chase to a sometime thing. And because some check money was there to back him up, Curt didn’t spend quite as much time touting. Still, there were days when he walked up to Monroe Street and stood his ground. He hung, signified, watched the to-and-fro.

“Faces are different,” he would explain. “Nothin’ but a bunch of young boys, hoppers who just don’t know.”

In the early summer of 1997, Curt collapsed for the last time. He went from the Bon Secours emergency room to a nursing facility at Carrollton and Fayette streets, seven blocks east of his corner. He died there of liver disease on June 9.

The small funeral service brought together remnants of Fat Curt’s real family and the Fayette Street clan that had a stronger claim on him.

“He was a junkie, one of the original junkies,” Curt’s younger brother told the gathering. “But,” added Randy Davis, who has lived life free and clear of the corner, “we can thank God he never did lose all of what he was about.”

Meanwhile, Curt’s brother Dennis is still on Monroe every day, refusing to lay down to the virus, claiming surprise and a little shock at having been deserted by so many soldiers.

“I be the last man standing,” Dennis says proudly. “You gonna see.”

For years, Ella Thompson resisted seeing her neighborhood as a place beyond redemption. Her stolen car was recovered. The rec center remained functional. Her apartment had never been violated.

But one afternoon in 1994, Ella was working at the rec center and looked up to see DeAndre and Preston standing together in the doorway. She invited them inside, but DeAndre merely waved and the two young men walked on.

That evening, she returned to her apartment and found that the place had been ransacked. Someone had broken in through a window that opened on the rear alley, rooted through her house, and taken a couple hundred dollars from a drawer. Only one room—Kiti’s—was undisturbed, and Ella realized that his friends would know that anything of value in that part of the house was now with her son in California. All of which led her to suspect Preston and DeAndre, though she didn’t confront either of them; she had no proof and so she held her tongue. But she knew Preston was getting high; DeAndre too. Ella had for years found ways to believe in the idea of Franklin Square. After the burglary, her faith seemed to her, for the first time, to be misplaced.

The following winter, when the police boarded up Blue’s and a couple other vacant-house shooting galleries on Fayette, many of the hardcore fiends moved the needle palace to 1804 Fayette—a vacant property next door to Ella’s apartment. Twice she awoke to the smell of smoke. Twice the fiends set fire to the vacant shell and nearly burned down the block.

She began buying the Sunday papers on Saturday, checking the early real estate listings. Finally, in 1996, she moved from Fayette Street to a redbrick duplex on a quiet street in Hamilton, a working-and middle-class tract in Northeast Baltimore. And Ella is no longer renting; for the first time, she owns her home.

Kiti is living with her. He came back from Los Angeles after the earthquake in 1994—Fayette Street might be hell, but not even the devil messes with
terra firma
. At first, Ella’s fears about her youngest son’s return to the the neighborhood seemed justified. He began hanging with Preston down on Fulton, drinking in front of the liquor store. A few months later, Ella found a handgun in his room. Kiti swore that he wasn’t slinging, that he had the weapon only to protect himself from street robberies. But Ella pressed him to come up with some better plan, to go back to school or take up a trade or do something that would change his direction.

When Ella left Fayette Street, Kiti moved with her, and he immediately began to respond to the change. A few months ago, he completed certified training in carpentry, after having traveled all the way to
northern Virginia by train to attend some of his classes. At this writing, he is wearing a hard hat and mastering his craft on a construction site at Charles and Lexington Streets downtown. More surprising is that his friend Preston has managed to right himself as well, notably by taking up with a young woman from a churchgoing family. He is married, working, and living in a quiet Reservoir Hill apartment house.

Giving up on her apartment was hard enough for Ella, but it was nothing compared to what it cost her to leave behind the Martin Luther King Jr. Recreation Center. Even as she planned her move from Fayette Street, Ella never had any intention of giving up the rec. All along she imagined commuting down to the center five days a week and keeping hold of that which most connected her to her daughter’s memory. Instead, Ella ran afoul of some neighborhood politics: A secret vote to elect a paid executive to direct the neighborhood group proved less than secret, and Ella had supported the loser. The incoming executive, Joyce Smith, was a longtime friend and ally, but to Ella, the election seemed to cast a pall over the friendship. At board meetings, Joyce became increasingly critical of both the rec program and Ella’s stewardship—or at least it felt that way to Ella.

At the same time, colleagues in the city parks department who knew of Ella’s work at Martin Luther King began talking with her about doing similar work for better money. The job offer she received in 1996 was tantalizing: She would be supervising children—at a string of West Baltimore rec centers—who would be part of Kids Grow, a new grant-funded program dealing with urban ecology and agriculture. Ella brooded for more than a week, and then, after talking with friends on the Franklin Square board, she gave notice.

At this writing, she has been working with Kids Grow for more than year. The city has plans to expand the program—which emphasizes gardening, forestry, and environmental learning—to a number of other recreation centers. Ella, still holding a place in her heart for Fayette Street, recently convinced officials to fund the program at Martin Luther King.

As for the recreation center itself, its leadership passed for a time to Blue, who spent several months as rec director before the kids ran him ragged and he moved on to other jobs. After that, when the neighborhood association was awarded a larger city block-grant, people from outside the neighborhood were hired. Three staff members are now paid to do the work once performed by Ella and Marzell Myers. But Ella’s idea
of a boy’s basketball squad outlasted her, and the rec center’s playground was finally rehabilitated several months ago. In fact, city parks officials adorned the lot with one of the better outdoor ball courts on the west side.

On the day that Ella drove past Mount Street and caught sight of the fresh clay and white backboards, she couldn’t quite believe it. She had asked for that basketball court for years, begging Joyce and Myrtle and any city official she ever encountered. Always the playground improvements were planned; always they were delayed. Now she was gone, as were the boys she had tried to rescue with her fledgling basketball squad. Yet here was the court she had always imagined. A group of older boys was on it, running full-court. She remembered R.C. taking imaginary shots off the broken backboard. She remembered DeAndre and his father trying to attach a loose rim with screws and washers.

On that day, with change staring her down, she saw the rec as she never thought she would again—from the outside, looking in. Still, she couldn’t be bitter. That gray block of building was too much a part of Ella for her to begrudge it anything. Besides, that isn’t Ella’s way.

“I knew it,” she said later with pride. “I always knew we’d get that basketball court built.”

Two years after defending its McHenry Street territory against the intruders from D.C., the Crenshaw Mafia Brothers ceased to exist. What began as a collective act of belonging ended amid the bickering, bitching, and betrayal that marks time on any drug corner.

R.C. started hitting the pipe, messing up the count, and stealing stashes. Dorian ran off with another package. Tae was losing weight and acting crazy. All of them—R.C., Tae, Boo, Dinky, Brooks, and Manny—began to accuse each other of getting high and thieving, even as they took pains to deny the same allegations themselves.

And sometimes, they got their guns out.

In 1995, during a running dispute between the B-and-G crew at Baltimore and Gilmor, and some of the Lexington Terrace boys, two young men rode up to Gilmor and Hollins on bikes and fired several shots. One caught Dinky, DeAndre’s cousin, in the chest. He staggered a few steps to Baltimore Street and collapsed. Hours later, Dinky, age seventeen, was pronounced dead at University Hospital’s trauma center. Although the daylight murder was witnessed by half a dozen B-and-G
regulars, little accurate information came back to detectives. Eventually police charged a Terrace boy widely regarded to be innocent. The case was dropped several months later and no further investigation of the crime followed.