The Corner

by David Simon/Ed Burns

  That same afternoon, before going down to the rec, she sits out on her front steps with a glass of tea, making the most of a beautiful spring day. And most of the time on the steps is just that—absolutely beautiful—with the sun warming the pavement, and the schoolchildren drifting slowly into the block, coming up the street from Steuart Hill Elementary after a halfday session.

  This, too, is a small victory for Ella. Last summer, the overflow from the Family Affair and Diamond in the Raw crews found its way up Fayette Street, with touts and lookouts settling on the Fulton corners. Ella and a handful of neighbors spent weeks trying to push the crews back down the hill, calling the police on them so often that the Western District officers and Fayette Street slingers were, for once, in absolute agreement: The Thompson woman was a damned nuisance.

  Now, with the vials trading hands a good half-block away, Ella watches the glint of the chrome as the cars roll past on Fulton, then hears the music-box jingle of the ice cream truck all the way at the top of the block.

  “Hey, Miss Ella.”

  “Hi, Dion.”

  “Rec open today?”

  “Three o’clock.”

  She’s watching the neighborhood as Baltimore people have always watched the neighborhood, living life at the front steps of a rowhouse. And today, at least, it’s soothing the way it used to be, so right and fine that she can’t yet bring herself to go back inside and ready herself for the rec. Sipping her tea, she watches a young white girl, freckled and athletic, weaving up and down the 1700 block on her ten-speed. The girl just seems to be riding aimlessly, cruising the neighborhood with no set purpose, just out to soak up that good sunshine.

  A few minutes later, Kiti comes in from Francis Woods, then goes right back out again looking for Preston and the rest of his crew. Then Ella’s grandchild, Tianna, pops out of the apartment, asking for help with a broken toy. When Ella looks up again, the Death Row touts and runners are chasing the white girl up Fayette, gaining as she struggles with the gears of her bike.

  They catch her at Fulton, just in from the corner. They yank at the handlebars and knock her to the ground. Two of the younger ones kick and grab at her until she rolls over and they can snatch at the edges of a glassine sandwich bag beneath her sweatshirt. The girl is bloody and crying, but the attack continues as she tries to cover the bag.

  Ella watches it all from her steps with a feeling of utter helplessness. The touts finally liberate the baggie and its load of vials, carrying the stolen-for-a-moment ground stash back where it belongs. One of the young runners takes the ten-speed, declaring the bike as punitive damages. Business slowly returns to normal for the Fayette Street crews, though the white girl sits on a curb, crying and nursing her wounds.

  Ella calls the police. After a long wait, a radio car pulls to the curb at Fulton and two officers pick up the white girl. Ella follows the petty drama to its conclusion, then files the episode with a hundred others in the far reaches of her mind. As the radio car rolls off, she also takes leave, going inside her apartment to heat up a macaroni-and-cheese lunch for her granddaughter. Tianna has been staying with Ella on weekdays while her mother, Donilla, works. The four-year-old is a joy and great company for Ella in the mornings. But at odd moments, she is reminded that Fayette Street is no place for any child.

  “What are they doing outside?” Tianna asks.

  “Who?”

  “The police and the lady.”

  “Nothing,” Ella tells her.

  But how much can you ignore? Three days after the white girl is beaten for stealing a stash, the Martin Luther King Jr. Rec Center is itself burglarized. Suddenly, the menace is not just in the street among the corner players, but within the safehouses where Ella lives and breathes. And from what she gathers, the thieves knew their way around the cinder-block building, creeping into the back alley between the rear walls of the rec and one of the vacant Lexington Street houses. Once there, they knocked a plywood board from the outside of one of the small, high windows that had long ago been nailed and mortared shut, then kicked through the old brick, jumped down into the small library area, and grabbed the television and the VCR.

  Ella herself discovers the mess late the following morning, after pulling up the grate to begin her day. The police are called for no apparent purpose other than the creation of a police report. This time, the responding officer happens to be named Huffham. Ella greets him at the door, talks it through for him, then volunteers to share her desk as he goes to work on his incident report. When his writing hand tires, Huffham pauses to take in the clutter of the rec office.

  “That list,” he says at one point, looking at a phone list for the rec center basketball team. “What’s that about?”

  “That’s our team,” says Ella, with some pride. “That’s going to be the basketball team for the older boys.”

  “DeAndre McCullough,” says the officer, reading from the list. “Him I know.”

  Ella looks up sadly. Huffham goes on, a bit embarrassed, perhaps, for Ella’s sake. “I, ah, I locked him up a few months back,” says Huffham, trying for a tone of casual conversation. “Got him for distribution down on Fairmount.”

  Ella says nothing.

  “DeAndre’s a smart kid,” Huffham adds.

  Ella nods politely.

  “I’m serious,” Huffham says, finishing up the report. “He’s a very smart kid.”

  “Yes,” says Ella. “He is.”

  “Well,” adds Huffham, gathering up the paperwork. “I hope you get a chance to straighten him out.”

  Later that day, Myrtle Summers sends over a workman to board up the gaping hole in the alley wall, but the theft of the television and tape player isn’t so easily repaired. The rec has a high insurance deductible and no rainy-day money to make good the loss, and so the Friday night movies—featuring rentals from the Route 40 Blockbuster—come to an abrupt end. The older boys are dismayed and there is some early talk about tracking down the culprits and exacting retribution. Word from the corners is that Dink-Dink, Eric, and Lamont might have had something to do with the theft, that they were seen down on Baltimore Street trying to sell a television.

  “That shit ain’t right,” Tae declares.

  But in the end, nothing much comes of it. The boys vent their indignation and move on to new business, uneasy about the notion of playing detective and confronting Dink-Dink or anyone else with C.M.B. credentials. The police don’t call back. The Baltimore Street pawnshops ask no questions. About the burglary of its recreation center, the neighborhood speaks only in silences.

  * * *

  Fat Curt and Hungry stumble up Vine from Fulton Avenue, both acknowledging June Bey McCullough with a quick nod.

  “Wassup, wassup,” shouts June Bey.

  Hungry smiles. Curt looks over at June Bey and wonders the same thing. June Bey is standing amid a huge pile of fetid trash, broken bricks, and shattered furniture, sorting it as if it was somehow important to know the contents of the pile. Just in front of June Bey, in one of the open garages across from the McCullough home, is more of the same. It seems as if trash has been accumulating in the Vine Street garages since before the Earth cooled.

  “Man,” says Curt, “what the hell you lookin’ for?”

  June Bey laughs.

  “You lose your stash again?”

  June Bey shakes his head. “Cleaning,” he says.

  The tout ponders this for a moment, reasons quite correctly that there isn’t a dollar’s profit in cleaning a vacant garage on Vine Street, and wanders up to Blue’s, shaking his head. Hungry follows him as he slips through the broken back door. June Bey watches them go, and, sensing that they are flush and ready to load up, he feels his lips go dry.

  “Ol’ man river,” sings June Bey, trying hard for a stereotype. He slogs into the trashed garage, pulling out pieces of a broken oven and tossing them into the pile. Then he pulls off his knitted cap, wipes his head and saunters a few steps down Vine, telling himself that the job is more than
half finished. He starts toward the far corner, wondering if Curt and Hungry know something he doesn’t, if maybe there’s a tester line down on Fulton.

  “June Bey!”

  His mother’s voice. June Bey turns abruptly on his heels and winces, one swollen hand raised in a gesture of mollification. He tries to smile back through the window, his eyes glancing off Roberta McCullough’s fretful face.

  “William,” she says, cracking the storm door and resorting to for malities. “Where you goin’?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “You know that you not close to done yet.”

  “Yes’m,” says June Bey. “But I will be. I will be done, on earth as I am in heaven.”

  He’s responsible not only for the small patch of pavement behind the McCullough rowhouse, but the garages on the north side of Vine to boot. He’s doing his mother’s bidding today: removing the dump piles, bagging the trash, sweeping the dog and rat droppings out from the corners of the empty garages. Alas for June Bey McCullough, a prodigal son suddenly in his mother’s eye; it’s spring, and along Fayette Street, that means spring cleaning.

  In these fine late-April days, it’s not just June Bey, but the whole neighborhood that is engaged in a ritual echoing from some earlier epoch, some time and place in which seasonal renewal was still a possibility. Now, with the sun warm on the Formstone and asphalt, the men and women along Fayette Street—even some of those long narcotized—are feeling the gentle sway. The days of communal litter marches and clean-block campaigns may be a generation gone, but the trace memory is still there in the season’s warm breezes.

  Around the corner, Blue is out on the front steps of his broken home, going through the only possessions that still have any meaning for him. With almost reverential care, he opens up his satchel and art supply box, then begins sorting his brushes, pencils, and drawing pads, taking inventory and preparing for the season to come.

  The jail time cleared his head enough to allow him to hear a voice inside screaming to put a stop to all this nonsense. And Blue was able to abide that voice, for a short time at least. A month earlier, he had come home to his brother’s house on the other side of the boulevard, where his brother had a working phone and the pretrial division was therefore able to place him on home monitor. But his brother had limited patience and soon enough, with no other location at which he might be detained, Blue was returned to the city jail. A week or so back, when the jail finally kicked him loose, they forgot to take the home-monitoring bracelet from his wrist. Now, he’s back in the mix, still wearing his state-supplied jewelry as if it can pass as a corner fashion.

  For Blue, it’s back to square one, though the better half of his nature uses the early part of this day to take stock of his art supplies and talk to himself about scrounging up some sign-painting business, maybe even opening up a shop of his own in one of the vacant storefronts down on Pratt Street. Change is in the breeze, and Blue, though the same as he ever was, still feels the need to clean house.

  “Hey,” says Eggy Daddy, cruising up with Scalio.

  “Mmm hmm,” offers Blue, replacing the satchel’s contents.

  “Where you goin’ at?”

  “Down Pratt Street,” says Blue, flush with purpose.

  “Not now you ain’t. We’re sick.”

  Blue smiles. After the usual suspects began tearing down Annie’s house, she made the supreme effort of forcing the shooting gallery to move once again, and so, Blue came home from courtside to a crowded house. Today, though, Rita isn’t around, having come out of her lair to hunt down some antibiotics for her arms.

  “Awright,” he tells the two. “Go on inside and I’ll be with you.”

  He picks up the satchel and follows, then returns to the steps a few minutes later, once again prepared for the sortie to the Pratt Street shops. “Hey, what can I say?” he tells no one in particular. “I’m a doctor.”

  Blue starts again across Fayette, but this time it’s Fat Curt and Hungry coming at him, with Curt holding a bottle of wine. An hour earlier, three white boys had pulled up in a Ford Escort, made the connect with Curt, and had given him eight dollars for the trouble. It was enough for a Spider Bag, so Blue goes back inside his house and hits them with it, and only then does he make his way out the door and down the hill to the commercial strip with the satchel of new business slung heavy across his shoulder, thinking to himself that beginnings are always harder than they seem.

  Another seasonal cleaning is taking place a block down Fayette Street, this one courtesy of the Franklin Square civic leadership. Down near the Mount Street corners, an old fiend named Gene lays claim to the most broke-down needle palace and it’s his misfortune to be at 1702 Fayette, directly across the street from the Echo House community center. By virtue of that geography, Gene is about to be seasonally adjusted, though he doesn’t know it yet. Across the street, out in front of Echo House, Joyce Smith and Myrtle Summers are standing with a young attorney from a legal aid group, taking stock of the wreckage at 1702 and wondering whether it might be possible to have the place condemned.

  As officers of the Franklin Square board, Joyce and Myrtle are what remains of bedrock in the Fayette Street community; they are therefore more inspired than the average resident when it comes to the spring rites. Myrtle, for one, has been keeping an eye on Gene’s battered shooting gallery for months now and she’s been talking to people about the public nuisance statute, a relatively new section of civil code that allows the city to take control of properties that have become the source of chronic criminal problems. If Joyce and Myrtle can get the Western District commanders to raid 1702 Fayette, they’ll surely come up with some drugs. And if they do that much, then the city might be able to take the rowhouse and put it to some better use. Myrtle is thinking about a men’s shelter.

  Around the corner from Gene’s, Ella has shut down the rec center on this Friday afternoon so she can haul every stick of furniture to one side of the bunker and scrub and polish the walls and floors to a more perfect gloss.

  She’s got Marzell and Neacey helping her, with Neacey employed for the cost of lunch at McDonald’s.

  “Can Tosha get lunch, too?” asks Neacey.

  “Is Tosha working with us?” asks Ella.

  “No. She up at her mother’s house.”

  Ella gives Neacey a look.

  “Miss Ella, I was just askin’ is all.”

  To the north on Lexington Street, the urban renewal project is now in full swing, with yet another nonprofit developer using government money to rehab a few dozen vacant rowhouses, proving once again that while no social problem can be solved, there is always money enough to gild a ghetto. Few along Fayette Street will be able to afford the rehabbed houses. Those with money enough for the mortgages will be from outside the neighborhood, and, naturally, when many of them get a look at the mayhem of the corners, they’ll decide to own a home elsewhere. But it’s spring, and the contractors are as busy dreaming of rebirth as everyone else in the neighborhood.

  Farther down Lexington, Rose Davis and the rest of the faculty at Francis Woods are doing some housekeeping of their own, dusting off the attendance rolls and discovering just how many dozens of their charges have effectively ceased to be students. The warning letters are about to begin rolling out: DeAndre will get a couple from his math and science teachers; R.C. will hit for the cycle, getting you’re-going-to-fail notices in all four of his core courses, with every teacher unable to evaluate his work because, well, they don’t quite know who or where Richard Carter is or when he might actually appear in a classroom.

  On the other side of Fayette Street, Fran Boyd feels enough spring in her blood to spend a day primping and dressing in one of her old downtown business suits, readying herself for a grandmother’s funeral she has determined not to miss. She’s had her hair done and now looks like a creature visiting from another world entirely. All the regulars at the Dew Drop Inn notice, a few actually going out of their way to say something kind. Scoogie comes aro
und with his car to pick her up for the church services, leaving the rest of the Boyd family behind to contemplate their own inertia.

  “I don’t do funerals,” Bunchie declares.

  “Fran looked good though,” says Sherry.

  Although the Boyd clan is hard into the game by late afternoon, there are other signs of spring at the Dew Drop. DeAndre shows up with a dog, a small pit bull purchased from a litter for a few dollars. He ties the animal to a chain-link fence in the rear alley and begins feeding it lovingly, then washes it, then feeds it again. A boy and his dog on a warm afternoon.

  “He loves me,” DeAndre says.

  “He don’t know you,” his neighbor Malik assures him.

  “Yes he do,” says DeAndre. “He knows me ’cause I feed him.”

  Later that day at the Dew Drop, Skip makes an appearance fresh from the Mount Street tester line, grandly attired in a grey tweed sports coat and pleated slacks, his shoes spit-shined, his freshly manicured hands gripping a crushed leather briefcase, an afternoon newspaper tucked under one arm. Skip, who’s been living in a vacant house on Fulton Avenue, now looks as if he’s just stepped out of the Legg Mason Tower downtown.

  “What’s up?” asks Stevie, impressed.

  “Job interview,” says Skip casually.

  “Huh?”

  “Only chumps go out and soldier in the warm weather,” explains Skip, who nearly froze to death on Fulton in the winter months. “Time for me to put this ridiculousness behind me and do something new.”

  Stevie can only wonder at such a notion. Skip, like Gary McCullough, is the rarest breed out here, the thinking man’s dope fiend. His last full-time position was as an executive assistant to a vice president at the Urban League—a nice gig until the boss came in after lunch one afternoon and found him drooling on his desk in a twenty-on-the-hype nod. But it’s the season of new beginnings, and more than anyone out here, Skip can walk the walk and talk the talk. He’ll need a new résumé, he tells Stevie as they go upstairs to fire, but that can wait. Tester first, then the vitae.