The Corner

by David Simon/Ed Burns

  This, for her, is as good as it gets.

  FIVE

  Fran Boyd is out on her usual perch, chin in hands, her face rough and her body slack from another night in the basement. It’s still early in the morning, way before the tester lines, and Fran is surprised to see Mike Ellerbee rolling past.

  “Hey, stranger,” she calls out.

  Mike looks up and smiles, changing direction to cross Mount on the diagonal.

  “Hey, Fran.”

  “Hey yo’self. Why you out early?”

  Mike steps to the front of Dew Drop and smiles again. “Jus’ breakfast and all. Got to get downtown today.”

  “Downtown? For what?”

  “See the judge about my case.”

  Fran nods. Court explains why most everyone she knows ever rises before midmorning. “You got court today? For what?”

  Mike shakes his head and sits next to her. “Got my appointment to talk with Judge Johnson about my probation. You know, getting my probation changed so I can leave out.”

  Fran remembers. Little Mike thinks he gonna sail away.

  “You still going to sea?” she asks with a half-smirk.

  But Mike doesn’t catch her tone; he nods with absolute confidence, and tells her about the ship that Ricky Sanford will soon have for him. Got his union papers in, got his physical, got things settled with Ducey, his girl.

  “Got my Z-card last week.”

  “What?”

  Mike can’t help his pride. He stands up and reaches into the back pocket of his denims, pulling out a laminated Coast Guard identification. Fran takes it and falls silent for a moment.

  “All I need is for the judge to let me be unsupervised.”

  Fran hands back the card, more impressed than a moment before. Still, she can’t imagine unsupervised probation for a corner soldier convicted of nearly killing someone.

  “You think he gonna let you go?”

  “Got to,” says Mike, sitting down again and looking up toward Bruce Street, where the first few fiends are settling on the corners. “I need to get up from here.”

  “Me too,” says Fran, rubbing her eyes.

  “I’m serious,” says Mike. “I can’t be down here. There ain’t a damn thing left for me here but jail or worse.”

  Fran grunts affirmation.

  “Ducey say she gonna stop gettin’ high. But she might say so ’cause she don’t want me to go.”

  “How long they keep you on the boat?”

  “Four months,” he says, getting up from the stoop. “Five months. Sometimes for more than that. I don’t care how long so long as I’m gone from here.”

  Fran hears him and thinks it a little ridiculous, as if getting out was just something you decide to do when you’ve had enough of Fayette Street. She has known Mike Ellerbee for years, watched him work the corners, counted him as no different than anyone else in the game. And now, quietly, the man is acting as if he’s actually found the exit.

  It can’t be that simple; Fran knows this world well enough to see that Mike is asking too much. His suspended sentence for shooting a stickup boy was lucky enough—though Judge Kenneth Johnson was noted for leaving ten or fifteen years hanging over a defendant, then waiting for the inevitable violation of probation and banging the man with every last year. But to ask for unsupervised probation on top of that goes too far.

  Besides, Mike is the same as her—he likes the coke and the corners and the party. He hasn’t done much right to deserve any second chances. But if he can talk this way, then maybe she’s entitled to the same kind of words. Either that, or she has to let the other side of her have the last say and come down on Little Mike Ellerbee for talking bullshit, pretending to a plan, thinking that he’s better than the rest, that he can make a move that no one ever makes. But shit on that, she tells herself; if Mike says he’s making the move, give him room.

  “Well good luck with it,” Fran says. “What you gonna tell the judge?”

  Mike shrugs. “Tell him I got a job, you know. Tell him to let me go.”

  Fran looks up the street. The corner is coming to life.

  “Yeah,” says Mike, smiling. “Well, I’ll holler at ya.”

  He gets up and walks down to Gilmor Street, leaving Fran feeling strangely optimistic. It’s time, she tells herself, trying to believe. It’s been time for a long time. And if I don’t drag my ass away from here, nobody’s gonna do it for me. If I wait for anyone else to put a stop to this nonsense, I’ll be on these steps forever. Her whole family is lost in this shit. Most all of her friends. Neighbors. Gary, too. Only Mike seems to be trying to make any kind of move. Mike and DeAndre.

  Whether it’s because he’s intimidated by his juvenile probation or because he’s genuinely tired of the corners, DeAndre is preparing for summer as if he has a plan of his own. Before his court hearing, he went to Ella asking for a job or help in finding one. Ella couldn’t afford to hire him at the rec center, but she had a sister who ran some hospice houses around the city. The sister had a man doing maintenance for her and the man was looking for some help. It sounded like a start and DeAndre took the number, hooking up with the man and working a day or two, getting paid with a $40 check, which he traded to his uncle Scoogie, for cash. But the job wasn’t steady work, and to make matters worse, the check bounced on his uncle, so that Ella had to work back through her sister to get DeAndre paid right.

  Normally, this would have been enough of a setback to send DeAndre back to the corners, but to Fran’s surprise, he kept on with his hunt, asking Gary’s younger brother Ricardo if there was work down at Seapride. The crabhouse at Pratt and Monroe Streets had over the years given work to three or four of the McCullough men and Cardy had been sorting Chesapeake Bay blue shells there for years. Cardy went to bat for his nephew and DeAndre got hired a week later, just as the crab season was beginning to pick up.

  Fran saw him leave the house for work three days in a row, carrying an extra pair of sweats and the thick crabbing gloves, stoic in his newfound role of working man. Having celebrated his sixteenth birthday the week before, he had finally straightened out, she told herself. And it wasn’t just the search for honest work that impressed Fran; the end of the school year is only a month away, but DeAndre is still making a class or two at Francis Woods, trying to convince Rose Davis not to drop him from the ninth grade, maybe even give him some credit for work-study if he could hold on to the Seapride job.

  A week ago, Fran made sure to walk down to Pratt Street on a lark, a proud mother, hoping for a glimpse of her son in his latest incarnation. Maybe that and a half-dozen crabs.

  What she got instead appalled her. Walking up to the carryout counter, Fran’s eyes met those of her wearied son, who was drenched in sweat from the steam of the crab pots, nauseous from the fumes, and generally fixing to die right there amid the hardshell crawlers.

  “’Dre,” she shouted. “C’mere.”

  DeAndre ignored her, pushing an empty pot through the steam, heading for the sorting room. But Fran kept at him until he finally came to the counter, where she could look him over and see just how bad it was.

  “What the hell is wrong with you, boy?” she said. “You sick as a dog.”

  DeAndre shrugged. “Gotta work.”

  “You crazy. You ain’t gotta make yourself sick.”

  “It’s a job.”

  A woman yelled at him from the register, saying she needed more number twos, and DeAndre turned away, half stumbling back toward the sorters. His face and hands were bloated, his breath came in long wheezes. And the sweats—bad for anyone working in the hundred-degree heat of the steamers—were worse for a boy made sick by the very smell.

  His allergy. Fran hadn’t given much thought to it when he took the job, figuring that as long as he didn’t swallow any seafood it wouldn’t matter. But just breathing the crab smell was breaking him down. The crabhouse wasn’t for DeAndre. Fran told him so that night, though he went back to work the next day, unwilling to give it up.


  Only when the crabhouse manager ordered him to clean the crab pots did he finally balk. The pots gave off a thick iodine smell when you hosed them; you were breathing in the worst of the fumes. DeAndre told Miss Mary about his seafood allergy; how he would bloat up if he swallowed even a morsel of crab, how he could barely breathe from the smell. Mary told him to sweep the floor instead, and DeAndre, looking down at the water and spice and crab mess on the floor, took this as some kind of punishment, as make-work for having complained about the pots. Why him? Why not one of the other workers?

  He asked Miss Mary those questions and the next day, he wasn’t scheduled to work. Nor was he scheduled the day after. By the weekend, he learned from his uncle Cardy that he no longer had his job.

  And yet he wasn’t giving up, telling Fran that he had a line on something at the McDonald’s over on the east side, the one up at North Avenue and Harford Road. The manager there was saying he needed to bring a birth certificate and social security card. He needed them by next Monday.

  DeAndre is trying. And Little Mike is trying. And Fran is still out here on the steps, looking for the usual thing. She would get high today. And tomorrow. And the next day, too, though she couldn’t help but feel guilty about it if people around her insisted on making a move. They were ruining her high.

  So it is that two days later, Fran Boyd goes out of the Dew Drop on a late morning, runs a game on Buster to get right, and then feels good enough to walk down to Poppleton Street and stand under a canvas canopy, staring up at the reconditioned frontage of an old city school building. From a distance, the Baltimore Recovery Center looked like a small apartment house, but the double glass doors are government-issue, and the small lobby, with its lone metal desk perched precariously on a narrow landing between two stairwells, dispels any notion of hospitality. This is a way station for people’s lives, nothing more or less.

  “Can I speak to Antoinette?”

  “Do you have an appointment?” asks the young man on the desk.

  “I need to speak with her,” says Fran.

  Antoinette is little more than a name to Fran; a friend of a friend who is now one of the intake people at the center. The man picks up the phone and punches a few numbers, then waits for a moment or two before speaking softly into the receiver, turning to the side to shield his conversation. After a time, he turns, holding the mouthpiece and raising an eyebrow.

  “Your name?”

  “Fran.”

  “Fran …?”

  “Boyd. Denise Francine Boyd.”

  He hangs up and points to the only other seat in the lobby, a bench wedged against the opposite wall.

  “She’s with somebody now,” the young man tells Fran. “She says she’ll come down but you’ll have to wait.”

  Now it’s all about waiting. Five minutes in the lobby for Antoinette to come down the stairs and look at the desk man. A moment or two more for the desk man to point her to Fran, a minute or two for Fran to tell her story in a couple of sentences, and then a few more minutes for Antoinette to explain the process and the waiting list and the scarcity of state-funded beds.

  “… usually about six or eight weeks for one of the state beds to come open …”

  Fran takes this in with some irritation. She’s being played like a charity case. If she had any medical insurance beyond state assistance, BRC would probably take her today. The insurance carriers are paying up to ten thousand dollars for twenty-eight-day residential rehab. The state-funded slots, however, are few and far between.

  Still, this is Fran Boyd’s plan—linear and fixed in the same way that every dope fiend’s plan ever is. I’ll do A and B and then get someone’s permission to do C so that I’ll qualify for D. If at any point something doesn’t come through, the whole enterprise comes crashing down and the fiend goes back to the nearest corner. If the judge doesn’t let Mike off probation, he’s off the ship and back to shooting people. If DeAndre doesn’t get hired at the McDonald’s, he’ll be back with the rest of his crew, slinging down on Fairmount. And if Fran doesn’t get into BRC, she’ll stay on the stoop of the Dew Drop. There is a learned helplessness to these first, small steps—a single-minded dependence on someone else’s favors. Never mind that there are other detox programs, other jobs, other alternatives. In the beginning, it’s more than enough for any fiend to make that first call or go a half-dozen blocks out of the way to ask the first question. If that doesn’t yield an encouraging response, all the more reason to surrender. If the response offers some vague opportunity, some distant prospect of change, then that’s fine too. A six-to eight-week waiting list means six to eight weeks of getting high without guilt, of telling yourself that you’re just waiting until the bed comes open.

  For Fran, the minimum requirement is that she call down to BRC on Tuesdays—every Tuesday—to inquire about her status on the waiting list and to let the staff know she’s still serious about the program.

  “I call you?” she asks Antoinette.

  “No, just leave a message at the desk. I’ll get it.”

  Fran leaves with a manufactured hope, something to get her through the rest of spring and the coming summer, something she can use to assure herself and anyone else that she’s trying, that she has a plan. DeAndre hears about her foray down to the detox facility and tells her to go for it, assuring his mother that he’ll take care of DeRodd if she has to go away. Scoogie also offers to help, and Fran begins taking their encouragement to heart. It is a plan; she can do this. Get some money together so she can pay Bunchie a month’s rent up front and leave something for DeAndre to live on. Now might even be the time to go up to Rosemont and get her older son put back on her social services check; he’s been off since she put him out of the house last summer and Fran, lost in the inertia of addiction, had yet to deal with the paperwork involved in getting DeAndre back on her case file. More immediately, she needs to get DeAndre that birth certificate and see if he can hook up at Mickey D’s. Then go inside and get clean, and maybe hold on to enough cash so she can get a place of her own and get the hell out of the Dew Drop. That she’ll have to do, because there’s no staying clean if she’s down on Fayette Street with the rest of them. This, she tells herself, can work.

  The first Tuesday she makes the call down to BRC.

  Two days later, she arranges a ride up to the Bureau of Vital Statistics office in Northwest, where she waits out the bureaucracy to get a copy of DeAndre’s birth record. And she feels good when she hands it to him the next day; she’s getting it done, showing her son and herself that she can provide.

  But the weekend comes, and weekends are always rough on Fayette Street. Fran gets up on Monday feeling like death itself, her eyes bloody and stinging from the night before. She gets a wet towel and goes back to bed until ten. Still, when she does get up, she gets herself right and makes the trip up to Rosemont, to take care of business that she hasn’t dealt with in almost a year. It’s been that long since she put Andre out of the house and lost sixty a month on her check; it’s time now to get all of that back.

  Six hours later, Fran Boyd drags herself up the stairs at 1625 Fayette, too tired for life. She’s had a day of genuine striving, of venturing beyond the corner and dealing with the plan, of putting the blast second.

  “Hey, Fran,” says Stevie, watching her slope into the living room. Fran grunts softly to her brother, then pitches forward into the frayed cushions of the sofa. She pries her running shoes off and props her feet on the arm of the couch.

  “Where you been at?”

  “Lord,” says Fran. “You know what it is I don’t understand?”

  “Hmm,” says Stevie.

  “People who have days like I just had and then don’t get high. I swear I cannot understand that. People actually go through this shit and not get high.”

  Stevie laughs.

  “I went up to Rosemont to see about my check,” she explains, rolling over on her stomach, feeling the scratch of the ruined fabric on her cheek. “I’m wai
ting there on those damn plastic chairs for hours.”

  Stevie clucks softly.

  “Four hours so that the woman can tell me that they can’t do nuthin’ ’cause my worker is off today. Sayin’ she’ll call me back and shit. I’m sayin’ look, Andre is my child and he back livin’ with me and been livin’ with me for months…”

  She sinks her head into the cushion, tired of her own tale.

  “Yeah,” her brother drawls, “you know I got to get up Rosemont and ask about that check for Little Stevie.”

  “You want my knife?” asks Fran.

  Stevie laughs. It’s a standard joke around Fayette Street: The straight line says you’re going up Rosemont; the punch line always comes when someone offers a blade. Whatever humor can be gleaned from this comes at the expense of Crazy Arnold, who left Fayette Street the summer before last, walked the half-mile north to the city social services office at Rosemont, argued briefly about his food stamp application, then stuck an eight-inch kitchen knife into a twenty-nine-year-old caseworker. On Fayette Street, the murder tested essential loyalties. Arnold Bates was a stone mental case, living in his mother’s backyard and wheeling his pushcart around the neighborhood in search of enough aluminum cans to pay for his coke and phencyclidine. But when it came to food stamps, or AFDC, or dealing with the general indifference of the city welfare bureaucracy, the people of Fayette Street had experienced enough of Rosemont to give the benefit of the doubt to whichever poor bastard might be trying for a check. Fran had heard that Crazy Arnold’s caseworker had run him around, asking for more and more documentation to accompany his food stamp application, until one fine day, Arnold gave her all the proof anyone ever needs. In real terms, it was shocking and sad—the DSS employee who got killed was hardly the worst caseworker at the Rosemont office—but in the abstract, the slaying connected a lot of West Baltimore welfare recipients to Crazy Arnold Bates, that most unconnected of souls. Arnold was living proof of that thought in the back of every Rosemont client’s mind—the ugly notion that you can carve your way through a caseworker faster than you can hack past the paperwork.