The Corner Read online

  Fairmount had been slow going at first. He had to get the word out, draw the fiends in to sample his product. He and his cousin’s boyfriend, Corey, spent a lot of time out on the corner, working hard to get the shop up and running. The knockers had mostly moved on to other hot spots, but the stickup boys were a bitch, feeding in a frenzy once they discovered the new market. He got jacked once, and he lost a ground stash or two, but by and large, most of the profit was realized. In August, he got caught by a couple knockers with a handful of pills, but no matter—DeAndre played that, too, to his advantage, showing Bugsy the juvenile court papers and telling the dealer he got nailed with the whole bundle. Bugsy took it off the account; DeAndre then emptied the blue-tops into pinks and sold off pure profit behind his supplier’s back.

  Until his big setback, it was a fine summer. And when his number came up, it was the result of neither a Western District patrolman’s vigilance, nor the business end of a stickup boy’s nine millimeter. Ultimately, DeAndre McCullough fell at the hands of his own mother. Fran copped his stash.

  There is precious little privacy on Fayette Street, which is a problem for a young corner boy looking to hide inventory. Try to be invisible around here, try to tiptoe into a vacant house, and someone is always watching, clocking your moves, hoping you slip. Leave a ground stash unattended and Little Kenny or Hungry or Charlene will be quick to carry it off. Trust a tout like Country or Tyrone and your package will be nothing but memory. Rent an apartment from one of the regular stash-house girls and you better pay someone to sit in there or the bitch will blow profit up her nose and lie about it later. For DeAndre, the possibilities are limited to a single option: his mother’s room. It’s not much, but Fran Boyd is lucky to have that: one rear bedroom at what the Fayette Street fiends like to call the Dew Drop Inn, the closest thing to a shooting gallery east of Blue’s.

  The three-story rowhouse in the 1600 block of West Fayette is the last stop for all the Boyds, save Fran’s older brother, Scoogie, who got their grandmother’s house up on Saratoga. For the two upper floors of 1625, Fran’s sister, Bunchie, pays thirty-two dollars a month under a federal Section 8 housing reimbursement. She, in turn, pushes that weight off onto three siblings—Fran, Stevie, and Sherry—charging each fifty a month for a bedroom. For Fran and her two sons, home is the second-floor rear room, all eight-by-ten feet of it.

  They share a cluttered cubicle coated with the acrid tang of Newports and crammed with a single bed, a battered dresser, two chairs that are oozing their stuffing and, of course, the sleepless television. The bed usually goes to DeRodd and DeAndre, with Fran making do on the old sofa in the front room. Some nights, though, the bed mattress is taken by Fran and DeRodd, with DeAndre in a bedroll on the floor. Other times, it’s Fran on the bedroll, giving her sons the better chance at a night’s sleep. On the worst of nights—weekends or check days, perhaps, when pipers and gunners are ranging ceaselessly through the second-floor apartment—it’s all three of them together, fighting for a thin sliver of the single mattress as myriad forms of human dysfunction take place just outside the bedroom door.

  Beyond the bare necessities, the back room features little else: an overstuffed closet; a makeshift nightstand on a milk crate, where Fran can chase her lines if the basement is otherwise occupied; a couple of Polaroid shots pinned to the walls, hinting at some better time; a funeral home pamphlet from the service for Fran’s mother last year. This is the space that DeAndre can pretend to control, and it’s therefore where his stash has to go.

  Not that it had always been so. Early last fall, DeAndre thought he had it made when Fran, angry at his drug slinging, put him out of the Dew Drop. Summarily evicted from 1625, DeAndre went immediately up the block to 1717 Fayette, where his father was haunting what was left of the old house. Gary gave up the master bedroom and DeAndre suddenly found himself in a teenager’s dream, a paradise of unencumbered real estate that he was quick to turn into his clubhouse, decorating the walls with raw centerfolds, smoking blunts and downing forties with the other C.M.B. boys, and generally doing as he damn well pleased at the ripened age of fifteen. Yeah boy.

  There was a downside. The plumbing didn’t exist and the electric was shut off, which made for some chilly nights. Not much in the way of furnishings either. And then there were the house guests, if you could call them that. For some months, Gary McCullough had been shuttling between 1717 Fayette and his mother’s house on Vine, staying the cold nights in his mother’s basement, but running the remnant of his former home as a kind of low-bottom rooming house. Trouble was, Gary, being a fiend, couldn’t afford to offer any of the usual amenities, and his boarders, being fiends, couldn’t afford to pay rent. Nor was anyone inclined to leave.

  There was some young white girl from the county on the run for bad checks; with her was her dark-skinned boyfriend, who fed off her and occasionally touted for Diamond in the Raw. They shared the third floor with an older woman who haunted the Baltimore Street strip, trading her body for shot money. On the second floor was Arthur, a stone psycho whose room was closest to the front. Having supped heavily on the gore of Harbor Park slasher movies, DeAndre had no illusions about Crazy Arthur, not after he accidentally on purpose stuck his head into Arthur’s room one morning to find a stained mattress, a green garbage bag leaking moldy clothes, and a forest of glass bottles in all shapes and sizes, hundreds of them, some capped and some open but all of them filled to the brim with piss. Before that day’s night, DeAndre had rigged the connecting walkway with an assortment of boards, bits of fencing, strips of metal, and a tangle of rope—all of it woven into a kind of homemade tripwire to discourage Arthur from any midnight stroll toward the front bedroom.

  Instead, the real peril at 1717 Fayette turned out to be his father. No matter how carefully DeAndre hid his stash, Gary found a way to the vials. His father didn’t skim a whole lot at first, but it was enough eventually to cut through DeAndre’s margins and enough finally to drive him back down the street to Fran and that godforsaken second-floor room.

  Since moving back with his mother before Thanksgiving, DeAndre had been working Fairmount from package to package, more part-time than in the summer, but still enough to keep the roll fat. For a fifteen-year-old, the corner was not yet a job, and DeAndre, for all his pretense, could play at gangster for only as long as it took to get spending money. When he wanted to work, he and Corey would go to Bugsy or some other connect for a G-pack or a New York Quarter. Then they’d sell off. Then they’d play.

  Short of the occasional juvenile charge or stickup, DeAndre had life pretty much the way he wanted it, provided there was a place on this earth where he could keep a stash. At the old house, it was his father helping himself to a few vials here, a few there. At the Dew Drop, it was cat-and-mouse with his mother. In December, when no one was around to watch, DeAndre did the only thing he could think to do: he hid the coke, the cash, and the .38 that Bugsy had given him for muscle in the closet, inside the sleeve of a leather jacket, which he then stuffed deep in a mass of balled-up laundry.

  There wasn’t any better choice. Uncle Stevie’s room next door was more a shooting gallery than a bedroom, with Stevie, a certified welder, now torching nothing larger than a bottle cap. Same with upstairs, where Aunt Bunchie and Alfred and Aunt Sherry and her man, Kenny, were keeping house. Sherry might not be a worry; she was a drinker more than anything, but the other three were hardened players who wouldn’t hesitate to move on him. As for the second-floor living room, that was also out of the question. Too much foot traffic and besides, little Ray Ray was now sleeping there, hitched to a cardiac monitor because Aunt Sherry’s last baby was a crib death. You never knew when someone might come stumbling past to check on Ray Ray.

  So it was the closet and hope for the best. But Fran was bolder than Gary, and it wasn’t a week before DeAndre walked into the rear bedroom and sensed disaster the minute he caught sight of the leather jacket lying cold and lonely on the bed.

  Damn. He raced out of t
he room, down the stairs and into the basement, where he found Fran and Bunchie. Two cats who had swallowed the canary.

  “Where my stuff?”

  Just seeing them sitting there together in the basement was answer enough.

  “DeAndre, you got to be joking, leaving that shit in there. Suppose DeRodd found it.” Fran played it easy, holding in her fangs.

  “Where my stuff?” he persisted.

  “Where you think?”

  “I ain’t joking. That’s not my shit.”

  “I don’t care. It’s gone.”

  “Then you’re gonna pay.”

  “You threatening me?” Her anger began to show.

  DeAndre turned away. “That’s all right. It ain’t on me. It’s Bugsy’s shit.”

  He was determined not to let it drop. He knew his mother, and if he had any hope of using that room in the future he had to let her know how far he was willing to go.

  “So what you saying? You gonna tell him?” she exploded. “You little shit. You gonna tell him? I’ll tell him. Tell him about using a minor to sell drugs. Tell him about going to jail. DeAndre you must be joking.”

  “Yeah,” he said, stalking out. “We’ll see.”

  Two days later, Bugsy showed up on the front steps asking for Fran. Scared her, too, it seemed to DeAndre. Scared her enough to get the.38 back and keep her from his stash.

  So now, with the turn of a new year, the stash problem seems settled and things seem to be working as if by plan. Half of the Fayette Street regulars are rolling down the hill to little old Fairmount, looking for blue tops, looking for DeAndre. The white boys, too, are scurrying across the DMZ from South Baltimore, ducking Bob Brown and his puppies, coming north for better vials. And young DeAndre McCullough is carrying it like he’s King of the Strip.

  “Got them Blues.”

  “Got the Ready Rock.”

  “Blues. Right here for them Blue Tops.”

  All along Fairmount and Gilmor, brand-name recognition rings in the night air. DeAndre’s got a bomb and the fiends know it. He’s moving two, sometimes three G-packs a night with the lion’s share going to Bugsy, but still he’s pulling in six, maybe seven or eight hundred on a good night, less the spillage and expenses. He was here yesterday. And the day before. And the day before that. And today he’s back at it again, waiting on one of the Fairmount stoops for the next customer, taking stock of his position. He checks in with Boo, who’s been working for him this last week, moving half a pack for DeAndre as a sixty-forty subcontractor.

  “How many from what I gave you last night?”

  Boo counts in his head.

  “How many from the fifty?”

  Boo is lost in the math. Twelve, he guesses.

  “Twelve?”

  “Um.”

  If you want a job done right, DeAndre thinks, you got to work alone. Oblivious to the bite of the winter wind, he settles in to mind shop, working through the afternoon and into the early dark. Eyes darting, he’s alert to the flow of the street.

  A minute or two more and his attention focuses on a shadow that jerks its way up Gilmor. A white boy, a reed-thin piper, creeping his way north. The stick man hesitates and half turns back to Baltimore Street, then turns once more toward Fairmount. DeAndre stands, revealing himself. Stepping off the stoop, he gives a slight wave before moving around the corner into the darkness of Fairmount Avenue. The piper locks onto the motion and stumbles forward on the new vector. DeAndre leads down Fairmount to the lip of a side alley, away from the crowd on Gilmor.

  “What up,” DeAndre asks, voice neutral.

  No sales pitch. No need.

  The stick man bends into DeAndre, a supplicant extending a small wad of bills. DeAndre takes the offering and steps into the middle of the street to catch a bit of the street lamp on Gilmor. Slowly he smooths the money and makes the count. Satisfied, he pockets it, and without a word, he’s down the alley. The stick figure presses against a brick wall, seeking protection from the wind, no doubt worried that the black kid is gone with the dollars.

  But DeAndre is straight up. He won’t shake the vial or cut the product. He’s not greedy that way. Wired and twitching, the stick man gets served and slips offstage quickly, bolting around the corner and southward. He’s a charged particle loosed beyond the human condition, frenzied, spinning through the streets from one vial to the next. Those on the pipe are so coke-crazed, so hungry for that ready rock that even hardcore dope fiends are apt to show disgust. A man can carry an addiction to heroin, or at least he can pretend to carry it; cocaine always carries the man.

  The sale registered, DeAndre returns to his stoop, waiting in the night’s cold for the next customer and the next after that. He’s a player here. On this small corner, at least, he’s the shit.

  When things are going bad, the question for DeAndre McCullough is always, where in hell is the money going to come from? But when things are going good, it’s exactly the opposite: Where do the money go? Nike high-tops. Timberlands. Tommy Hilfigers and Filas. Weed from the E.A.B. crew up on Edmondson. Quarter-pounders and Happy Meals from McDonald’s. Cheesesteaks from Bill’s. Movies downtown at Harbor Park with one of the neighborhood girls. Video games on Baltimore Street. As fast as he makes his money, he spends it—and the more money he makes, the more shit he manages to buy. Like now, with so much cash coming at him from Fairmount Avenue, he can’t even get mad on waking to find half his roll missing; he’d make that back again in an hour or two. Even DeAndre has to admit that it’s too much wealth for any fifteen-year-old to handle. He’s fucking up and can hardly bring himself to worry it.

  And it’s all so damn easy. He could walk off this corner now and have money enough to carry him through a week or two. Come back with another package and he’d be flush again in a day. With the right connect and a little bit of rep, there isn’t anything so right as the corner. Time and again, he would finish a run with a nice, fat roll and tell himself that he was done, that he would go back to school and maybe get a straight job and be satisfied with a little less adventure, a little less pocket money. Then he would spend, and spend some more, until the only way he could right himself was to get back on Fairmount. Compared to that, the school-work meant nothing, and a minimum-wage job even less. Still, there was something inside that made DeAndre hold back, something that kept him from declaring once and for all that the corner would be his place in the world. In the back of his mind, he told himself that he hadn’t yet made a choice. He was fifteen; a distribution charge still meant nothing worse than a juvenile petition. And he was smart—all his teachers said so—and still on the rollbook at Francis M. Woods. He could bear down, get some class time, maybe make the tenth grade with a social promotion. He could play at this corner, but step off when it was time. And DeAndre trusted himself; he would know when it was time.

  The night before, in fact, the knockers rolled past on him on Fairmount. No big thing. It wasn’t like he was dirty when they came through, but he got a good once-over from Collins. And he knew Collins wanted to beat on him; he would have beat on him that one time if Fran hadn’t been around to stop it. The roll-past gave DeAndre something to think about, and he’s thinking about it still. It isn’t so much a question of fear; DeAndre is grown enough to take either a charge or a legal ass-whipping if need be. But still, last night seems like warning enough. He’s poor no more; he’s got all the Tims and Nikes and designer wear he needs. And Fairmount is up and running; it will be here for him whenever he’s ready to move back into the mix. Now might be the time to step off, before Collins and the rest get their chance. Now might be the time to go see Miss Davis and make sure he’s still on the class rolls.

  Sitting on the stoop, DeAndre decides that this is his last night on Fairmount. He works his package down that evening, and the next morning, he does his laundry in the tub. Dressed in still damp clothes, he heads down Fayette Street past the Fairmount corner and two blocks farther to Francis M. Woods Senior High School, the only school in Baltimore
that would consider for more than a second the idea of enrolling DeAndre McCullough. Chin to chest, eyes cast down, he is deep inside himself as he walks stiff-legged, driving his heels mechanically into the pavement.

  He climbs the school steps like he belongs, trying several of the front doors. All locked. He rings the buzzer, content to wait. He’s spent an inordinate amount of time on the wrong side of a locked school door, in most cases accompanied by his mother, waiting for the authorities to reach a decision, waiting to start again. Standing here today in the January cold, he stares indifferently into the lens of the security camera. Finally, he hears the buzz of the door release and snatches the handle.

  Inside, he’s greeted by Gould, the school security officer.

  “Good to have you back, brother.”

  DeAndre smiles sheepishly, then enters the front office to wait for Miss Davis. He’s sure she will claim him, his confidence secured, at least for this moment, by his newfound resolve to attend class and do the work. For his part, he’s willing to let bygones be bygones, and he’s hoping the assistant principal sees it the same way.

  Rose Davis has created a haven at Francis M. Woods for those rebellious, damaged spirits shipwrecked and abandoned by the rest of the city school system. She is everywhere at Francis Woods: a calming influence, encouraging and chiding, trying to get her charges to realize some of their potential, or at least some of their value, fighting what amounts to an endless rearguard action against the corner itself. She makes it her business to travel the local markets, where she sees many of her students and former students hanging. She’s seen DeAndre on Fairmount; she knows what that’s about.

  He sits there in the office, wrapped in an unlikely innocence, waiting to be given yet another chance, accustomed to this moment of feigned redemption. DeAndre is forever in a school’s administrative office, forever waiting to talk to an administrator. His academic standard is defined by a long streak of second-day suspensions, allowing him the opportunity to attend the first day of every semester, showing off new outfits and high-tops, fronting for the girls. Once all joy is squeezed from that first day, DeAndre follows up by quickly scuttling the academics with a disciplinary suspension of no less than two weeks, or with any luck at all, a month or more. His friends’ school disciplinary sheets aren’t shabby, but DeAndre always manages to go them one better. For all of them, school is something to endure until the age of fifteen and a half; the law says sixteen, but the children of Fayette Street have the juvenile court backlog figured into the equation. Within that framework, most learn to at least go through the motions. A few of the C.M.B. regulars—R.C., Dorian, or Brooks—don’t bother showing up, preferring to take their chances with the juvenile system. But the rest manage, with some regularity, to take a seat in classrooms that seem to them entirely disconnected from the facts of their world.