The Corner (88 page)

And last summer, in a dispute with a South Vincent Street crew, Boo was shot to death by a sixteen-year-old girl on McHenry Street. But the Vincent Street crew—which included Tank and Tony, members of the old rec basketball squad—wasn’t finished. Two days later, Tae and R.C. were both wounded in an ambush on McHenry Street, with Tae hit in the shoulder and arm and R.C. taking bullets in the hip and hand. Both were treated and released from Bon Secours Hospital.

Tae, Manny Man, Dion, Dorian, Dewayne, and Brooks are still in the neighborhood; for the most part, they don’t pretend any plan, though Tae credits himself with getting his high school G.E.D. at Francis M. Woods and insists he will be going to college this fall. For now, though, he spends much of his time at Pratt and Gilmor and drinks a great deal. Brooks did almost a year in juvenile custody before coming home last month. Dorian served longer than that. Brian is incarcerated at New York’s Rikers Island for drug charges.

For R.C., the shooting incident last year proved pivotal. Before then, he had been doing well. In fact, he had slowly pulled himself out of his spiral, walking away altogether from drugs and slinging and the corners along McHenry Street. Taking up with a Mt. Winans girl two years his senior, R.C. found himself long enough to move from his mother’s apartment and secure steady, reliable work.

At first, a temp agency placed him among laborers at the Maryland Wholesale Food Market in Jessup, a dozen miles south of Baltimore. When a supervisor there asked if R.C. could operate a forklift, the eighteen-year-old responded with his usual bluster.

“Think I can,” R.C. said.

“What does that mean? You ever used a forklift or not?”

“Where one at?”

The supervisor gave R.C. a chance to prove himself, and he handled the forklift well enough to win a permanent job.

Every working day, R.C. left his girlfriend’s grandmother’s house and ventured out to the county. Every week, he brought his pay back to his girl and gave her half, helping to send her through school to be a medical assistant. To his own amazement, he was making it.

This remarkably stable life continued for almost ten months. Then
Boo got killed and the beef with the Vincent Street crew boiled over and R.C. returned to McHenry Street to learn the story. Typically, the old C.M.B. crew laid it on thick, greeting him with guilt and derision for leaving the neighborhood in the first place. Two days later, R.C. was in Bon Secours, watching an intern pull a spent bullet from beneath the skin of his left hand.

After the shooting, he fell back into his old pattern: hanging on Mc-Henry; missing work until the Jessup job was no longer there; telling lies to his girl. Working with Tae, Manny Man, and the rest, he began turning one package after another at McHenry and Gilmor, at one point, putting together a roll of nearly five thousand dollars. He started getting high again. Eventually, he took a distribution charge. At this writing, he has recently seen the inside of city jail twice for a total of three and a half months. He is currently out on bail, with one drug charge still pending. He is looking for work, looking to get back with the girl who had him doing right for nearly a year.

“I had it going on,” he says now. “I was doing everything right and I just messed it up. It was like I couldn’t stand to be doing good like that.”

Nowadays, he doesn’t play much ball.

Fran Boyd used to tell herself that she had rules about chasing the blast, that there were standards of behavior that she would always maintain. But the corner has its own rules, and number two—never say never—is always in full effect.

In 1994, when Fran lucked into a subsidized rowhouse and moved from Boyd Street to Lorraine Avenue in East Baltimore, she finally got rid of Marvin Parker—who would himself be dead of an overdose within a year. As someone still nominally identified as a recovering addict, Fran, along with her sons, was placed in the fully rehabbed home through a nonprofit housing cooperative geared to support such people. There were two problems, however. First, Fran was no longer recovering. And second, a prolonged police crackdown on lower Greenmount Avenue had pushed the corner traffic several blocks to the north and east, turning the 400 block of Lorraine Avenue into one of the most active drug strips in the area.

Fran had always told herself that she would never encourage DeAndre in his drug slinging, that she would never take profit from it or allow him to use her home as his stash house. On Lorraine Avenue, she did
all these things. More than that, she robbed him blind, creeping into his room so many times that once, in frustration, DeAndre threw a punch through the bedroom drywall.

“You got me again!”

“What the hell you talking about?”

“My money! You just a thieving dope fiend!”

“Boy, I don’t know what you talking about.”

Once, she waited for four hours by DeAndre’s bedroom door, listening to his breathing, waiting patiently for the moment when he would fall asleep and she could go through his jacket pockets for money or product or both. But DeAndre, burned five nights in row, forced himself to stay awake, hoping to catch her doing the deed. The standoff continued until dawn, when DeAndre finally got up to use the bathroom. Fran retreated to her room, waited for the sound of prolonged urination, and then ransacked her son’s room in under twenty seconds. She got forty dollars and felt no shame whatsoever. Her game was her game; what her son brought home had to get past that simple fact.

Similarly, Fran had told herself for years that she was more about heroin, that she wasn’t going on the coke pipe every five minutes like the rest of these crazed fiends. On Lorraine, though, she went through her check money like water; within months, her face was a death mask, her weight down below ninety pounds. Worst of all, Fran had always told herself that no matter what, she wouldn’t trick. But on Lorraine Avenue, Fran let some of the old men think she was with them; she played them for blast money by using herself in ways that finally brought a quiet, caring reproach from her son.

“Ma, you better than that.”

Badly shaken, Fran called the detox center. She waited the wait—four months this time—then left her house key with DeAndre. Twenty-eight days later, she returned to Lorraine and began looking for a new home, a place in any neighborhood where the corners were simply intersections. Instead of drugs, she chased meetings. And when that failed to occupy all her time, she volunteered down at BRC, spending as much time as she could around the detox center.

After a month or so, she found a subsidized apartment in Baltimore County, up off Loch Raven Boulevard. A few months later, BRC rewarded her volunteerism by hiring her—first to assist in the center’s medical department, and later to monitor residents as a drug counselor. And Fran, like any ex-fiend, was no fool when it came to working with addicts:
Having played all the games so well and for so long, she was not about to let the BRC clients run anything past her. Or, for that matter, themselves.

Just before last Christmas, a few months after Fran had celebrated a full year of being clean, she was laid off—the result of a federal audit of the detox center. It seemed that the grant money funding BRC required all counselors to be fully trained and qualified; to preserve its budget, the center was forced to let go some of its best and most reliable staffers, men and women who had survived the corner and were now using that experience to great effect. Fran, Antoinette, and about a dozen others were corner veterans on a hero’s journey, trying to salvage something of themselves, trying to give a little back. The government, being the government, could not see it.

Fran was stunned. For a couple months, she holed up in her apartment, chain-smoking and biting her nails down to nothing, waiting, presumably, for her unemployment benefits and tax refund to run out. In the past, such a setback would have been more than enough to send her sprawling. To her credit, Fran sensed as much and fought back.

At first she went to more meetings than usual. Then she enrolled in courses at a county community college, determined to get some of the training that might have enabled her to keep the job at BRC. Two months after that, she found part-time work at a residential facility for troubled teenagers. At this writing, Fran is beating the streets, looking for something better.

She also is coming up on two years clean, a span of time that can no longer be mistaken for a victory lap. Her one-year celebration was at a BRC meeting and lasted nearly two hours. This year she’s ambivalent about whether to have a party.

“I don’t think I want to do anything big,” she says. “I just want it to be a regular day.”

William and Roberta McCullough remain on Vine Street. Now just short of seventy, W.M. continues to drive every day for Royal Cab, while Miss Roberta volunteers at St. James.

Most of their many children give them great joy, and grandchildren are arriving regularly to add to that pleasure. But more and more of the corner world has found its way into their home.

June Bey is still a prisoner of his addiction. And Kwame, always so angry at the world, saw his domestic assault charge dismissed when
Regina, his girlfriend, refused to testify, but soon enough landed in more trouble. Kwame received probation for a drug distribution charge in 1995. That same year, he was wounded in a robbery on South Gilmor Street. Recently, he was arrested and charged by homicide with two separate drug-related shooting deaths. He is currently being held, without bail, on Eager Street pending trial.

For two more years, Gary McCullough worked the warm months at Seapride and spent the winters making his way on capers, from one day to the next, while on occasion relying on Ronnie Boice and his mother’s generosity to get him over. He continued to live in his parents’ basement, to wrestle the snake, to chart his orbit around vials and glassine bags.

In late 1995 he bought a cap of cocaine at Fayette and Mount, went home, fired it up, and got nothing for his trouble. Another burn bag for Gary.

Two days later a fifteen-year-old street dealer offered to sell him more of the same.

“Naw,” Gary replied. “It was doo-doo.”

“Say what?”

“There wasn’t nothing to it.”

Two other young slingers suddenly appeared, and without another word, the trio knocked Gary to the ground, beating and kicking him into unconsciousness. For weeks afterward, Gary suffered from a ringing in his ears and a bright glare that made his left eye useless. Oddly, though, Gary seemed to draw strength from the experience, to see himself and his condition in a new light.

“They was children,” he said, shaking his head. “Children beating on a grown man for nothing.”

For three days straight, he walked downtown to Mercy Hospital, hoping to get a state-funded bed in the four-day detox unit. When nothing opened up, Gary begged. A friend volunteered to loan Gary five hundred dollars toward the cost of the bed—an offer that pushed Gary to the front of the hospital’s waiting list.

After two delirious days in Mercy’s detox unit, Gary walked away, returning to West Baltimore and scoring a shot of cocaine. Then, without any regard to the contradiction, he headed down to the South Baltimore Homeless Shelter, saying he wanted to clean up, as Blue and Eggy had done.

At that point, Gary had been shooting speedballs every day for more than five years. And when the last rush from the last shot of coke left
him, he found himself struggling with an incredible depression. At times he became delusional.

The shelter referred him to the Walter P. Carter Center, a state psychiatric facility downtown. Staff at the center prescribed an antidepressant, and eventually Gary went to stay with his brother Chris in Northeast Baltimore. During the days, he would baby-sit his brother’s children; at night, he would share their company. In return, they would not give Gary money, and they would not drive him back to Vine Street.

For a month, Gary battled his demons on his own. But when it snowed that February, Gary shoveled a dozen walks and made more than twenty dollars. He left the children alone, wandering until he found a corner and a speedball. That evening, saddened at the sight of his brother, high once again, Chris threw Gary out of the house.

The choice then was his mother’s basement or another attempt at detox. “If I go back to Vine Street,” Gary admitted to a friend. “I’m gonna die there.”

He returned to the homeless shelter. He stayed inside for a week. He started struggling through the meetings, the counseling, the group therapy. Once he got a month clean under his belt, he began going out on neighborhood work details with other residents.

In March 1996 Gary slipped away from a work crew and walked from South Baltimore to the Fayette Street strip. Fat Curt was on post when Gary came through asking about product.

“You ain’t been around.”

“I know it. What’s good?”

Curt looked at him. “You sure you up?”

“Yeah,” said Gary. “I’m up.”

Ten minutes later, Gary and his brother June Bey were down in the basement at 1827 Vine Street, cooking and poking and firing. After nearly three months in which he had used only a handful of times, Gary’s body couldn’t handle the usual dose, and suddenly he fell from the bed to the floor.

June Bey panicked. Rather than call 911 immediately, Gary’s brother tried to clean up the mess, to keep a secret that had long been known to everyone in the family. He splashed water on Gary. He picked Gary up and put him on the bed. He spent half an hour getting his brother out of the basement and down Vine Street to another address, and then, finally, he called for an ambulance.

Gary was dead on arrival at Bon Secours.

The funeral at St. James drew more than two hundred mourners, testament to the standing of the McCullough family in that church. Fran could barely walk past the open casket. Miss Roberta was utterly broken. DeAndre swore that for the sake of his father’s memory, he would never use drugs again. He stopped at the casket, touched Gary’s face lightly, and fought back tears. In the back of the church, Ronnie Boice took an aisle seat and wailed her grief.