The Corner

by David Simon/Ed Burns

  Today, though, he doesn’t mind the walk. He spends the time thinking about things, and he’s comfortably past Lexington Terrace and all the way downtown before the heat of the summer day begins rising up from the asphalt and concrete. It takes another forty minutes to reach Broadway and North, where the lunch rush is in full swing.

  “You in line?”

  “Naw,” says DeAndre, stepping aside.

  He stands there for a few minutes watching the bustle around the counter, looking at the teenagers in their uniforms, watching them work the registers and chase down orders. After a long interval, he steps slowly forward.

  “May I take your order, please.”

  “I’m lookin’ for the manager.”

  “She’s not in right now,” says the girl at the register.

  DeAndre’s voice begins to rise. “She told me to come in Monday to fill out my application and get my uniform.”

  The girl raises a finger and turns, walking around the burger-laden stainless steel counter behind her. She reemerges a minute later with an older, dark-skinned man.

  “Can I help you, son?”

  “I was supposed to come by today and put in my application. Start working here. I called last week …”

  “The manager isn’t in now, but I can take your application and then you’ll have to come back to be interviewed.”

  DeAndre detects a lilt in the assistant manager’s voice. Gay as I don’t know what, he tells himself. When the man comes back with the application form, he makes the mistake of giving the boy a once over. It’s scrutiny connected with the hiring process, but DeAndre takes it the wrong way.

  “What? What you lookin’ at?”

  The man smiles. “You might have to cut your hair.”

  “Naw,” says DeAndre. “That won’t do.”

  The man shrugs, telling him the manager will decide. He guides DeAndre to a table, giving him a pen and the application form.

  “You’ll need a birth certificate and social security card for the interview.”

  “Got it,” says DeAndre diffidently.

  The man gives him a last glance and DeAndre gives him a look back. It happens all the time—not only with white people, but with black folk in any station of life above Fayette Street. With his dreds and gold front, his baggy denims and don’t-fake-the-funk-on-a-nasty-dunk T-shirt, DeAndre shows street without so much as trying. He dresses and looks and walks the same way every kid he knows does; it plays on the corner, but nowhere else. Others might find it in themselves to bow to authority, to accept the bargain and conform, but by and large, those people have a basic allegiance to the predominant culture, and DeAndre McCullough knows no such allegiance. The world can make no legitimate demands because the world hasn’t done shit for him these sixteen years; he lives on Fayette Street.

  “I ain’t gettin’ my dreds cut,” he tells the cashier, handing back the finished application.

  She shrugs. He orders a large Coke and leaves.

  Back across town that same afternoon, he checks in at the Dew Drop long enough to learn that his mother threw the possibility of detox at the prosecutor and managed a one-time postponement up at Wabash. Fran is perched in front of the second-floor television, watching and not watching black-and-white cartoon images racing past.

  “You get that job?”

  “Manager wasn’t in. She said come by and she not even there. But, you know, I filled out an application.”

  “When you supposed to hear?”

  “Call back tomorrow. They sayin’ I have to cut my dreds.”

  “You need to get them nappy things cut.”

  “I look right,” he insists, twirling a dred with one hand. “And that ain’t even the point. I ain’t gonna change who I am for no one. Nigger think he better than I am ’cause of how he look and talk. That’s how they all is. They get a little something and they get to forgettin’ where they come from. Man, to hell with that. I don’t need the job that bad.”

  “Yeah you do,” says Fran.

  “Not enough to have some gay-ass manager lookin’ at me that way, actin’ like he so much better. I know his faggy ass as black as mine.”

  The argument usually resonates with Fran; she lives on Fayette Street, too, so she’s both heard and invoked the appeal to true blackness on more occasions than can be counted. A couple years ago, when Gary’s sister offered to let DeAndre stay at her house out in the county, to go to school there and stay off the corners, DeAndre had to lean hard on this egalitarian ideal. At first willing enough to leave Fayette Street behind, DeAndre returned from Woodlawn a few weeks later, complaining about people who were as black as he was looking down at him because they had a little money, talking about how you can take a nigger out of the ghetto but you can’t get the ghetto out of the nigger. Naw, he told everyone who would listen, fuck that and fuck them.

  “You know what I’m sayin’, Ma?”

  She tells him she knows. But then again, she adds, there were the days when she was working down at the phone company and the white women there would always be laughing at stupid shit. Laughing about what just wasn’t funny. And she’d laugh, too. Act like it was the funniest thing ever, because those white women ran the place. And then they’d walk away and the black workers would all be rolling their eyes, shaking their heads and laughing for real.

  “Dre, I’m sayin’ you got to play along a little bit.”

  “Naw. You don’t want me as I am, then I’m gone.”

  Fran tries again, telling him about how there isn’t a job out there that doesn’t make you do something you don’t want to do. She tells him that growing up is dealing with that and getting past it—all of which would be a fairly good lesson if it weren’t for the fact that Fran lost the phone job for cussing a supervisor. Still, she goes all out to remind him that he needs a job, that he’s not in school and that Tyreeka—for all her insistence that she isn’t pregnant—has admitted to Fran that she’s missed her clinic appointment twice. Tyreeka is looking heavier by the day.

  “You just lookin’ for an excuse to go back to the corner,” she tells him.

  DeAndre shakes his head. “Naw, I’m not about that.”

  “Then go back an’ get the job.”

  “I said I was gonna call,” he says, his voice rising.

  But he doesn’t pick up the phone the next day. The day after that, he calls but the manager isn’t in. The next day, he forgets. Three long days after he was first supposed to call the McDonald’s across town, DeAndre finally reaches the manager, who tells him that he still has to come back for the interview. Yes, she’s still got an opening. Yes, she knows he came by and filled out the application form. But she needs to speak with him before she can tell him he has a job. She tells DeAndre to come Monday.

  But Monday, he’s sick as a dog, laid up with some kind of stomach bug. DeAndre calls that afternoon and leaves a message with some other girl, saying if he feels right, he’ll be there tomorrow.

  On Tuesday, he gets up late, still queasy, but manages to get dressed and borrow enough money for a hack. He gets across town to the McDonald’s by midafternoon, walks up to the same girl as before, and asks again for the manager. This time, she’s there; she comes to the counter and gives DeAndre much the same look as he got from the assistant manager.

  “You were supposed to come in yesterday.”

  “I was sick. I called and talked to someone.”

  The manager frowns. “Well, I can’t do applications today. I have to be somewhere else in fifteen minutes. You’ll have to come back tomorrow. One o’clock.”

  DeAndre nods and backs away from the counter, listless in his movements. “You … um … you think I can get my uniform and start work tomorrow?” he finally offers.

  At last, the manager seems to sense more fear than menace from this manchild. Suddenly charitable, she tries to put him at ease. “First we have to have the interview, then we’ll talk about when you start. Understand?”

  DeAndre nods.

>   “And, young man,” she says, half smiling, “we’re going to have to talk about that hairstyle.”

  DeAndre manages to nod at that as well.

  The following day, he’s late getting across town, arriving at the restaurant a little after two-thirty. Though a delay of an hour and a half is fairly punctual by corner standards, DeAndre understands that he’s already testing the manager’s patience. Still, he can’t bring himself to conjure an excuse or—even less likely—an apology. He saunters to the counter wearing baggy shorts and a tank top, his Nikes unlaced, as if to declare that it makes no difference, that the world can take him or leave him.

  But inside, he’s churning. Inside, he knows that today he will be judged. In a moment or two, the manager will stare him down and size him up and render a verdict as to whether he’s worthy enough to flip burgers and salt fries. For all the street-corner arrogance that DeAndre McCullough can project, the fear inside him is much the same as for any adolescent. In a moment or two, he’ll be made to answer questions, to state his needs, to ask someone from the external world for a chance.

  He waits like a condemned man, staring down at his warped reflection in the silver sheen of the counter, waiting for the girl at the register to finish serving a customer. He looks past her, counting heads in the kitchen area, strangely gratified to see that the manager isn’t around.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Manager here?” His voice is a mumble.

  The cashier points out into the restaurant area, where the woman is seated at a table, paperwork spread before her. A young girl is sitting opposite, hands in her lap, ankles crossed. The girl is talking; the manager is nodding her head.

  DeAndre takes a few steps toward the woman, catching her eye. She looks from the young girl to check her watch.

  “You’re late,” she says.

  DeAndre nods.

  “Well, you’ll have to wait until I’m finished here.”

  He backs away, finding himself against the condiment counter. Breathing deep, he scans the ebb and flow of walk-in business, watching the manager out of the corner of his eye. The girl says something and the manager smiles. DeAndre paces a bit, until after a few minutes, the crowd thins, leaving him nearly alone in front of the counter. He feels foolish and exposed; the fear he’s been holding down breaks free.

  “Can I take your order?” asks an employee.

  It’s a heavyset boy this time, working the middle register.

  “Yeah,” says DeAndre, stepping forward. “Double cheese. Small fry. Medium Coke.”

  “Is that here or to go?”

  “To go.”

  And when the food slides across the counter, he does.

  “Let’s go,” says Tony.

  “Awright then,” Gary agrees.

  Lump just nods.

  As with all great journeys, it begins with a simple willingness, with an abiding faith in the unknown. Treasure and glory are not for the faint of heart; a crusade requires good knights of the realm. With his California Angels brim pushed low and a satchel of metaling tools gripped in his hand, Gary McCullough is on the road to Jerusalem. He and his two confederates are going to take off the Baker Street scrap yard.

  It means traveling beyond the pale of the Fayette Street fiend, north beyond the expressway, beyond Edmondson Avenue and Lafayette, extending their hustle. It means doing deeds in Rosemont, the largest stable enclave of homes in the Western District and a neighborhood with no strong drug corners closer than its edges. The residents there are mostly home owners, more likely than not to mark the comings and goings of strangers or to call the police on a guess. The police, too, are more likely to come when called.

  For Gary and Tony and Lump, lumbering down Lexington, trailing two empty shopping carts, the very idea is fat with risk. But the bottom end of the west side—the area closest to United Iron and Metal and the other area scrap yards—has by now been picked clean of copper and aluminum; too many scavengers working too many days have reduced the metal game south of the expressway to short-money scraps. For want of more valuable stuff, many harvesters are now tearing radiators and cast-iron sinks out of vacant houses, trying to make four or five dollars on bulk weight alone. Above the expressway and Edmondson is still virgin territory, though, and Tony Boice’s brother had told him of an unwatched and seemingly unmanned scrap yard, a Sutter’s Mill of old aluminum, copper, and cast iron that backed up against the railbed near the Baker Street underpass. Tony had been there once, creeping out with $30 worth of clean aluminum siding. If they could find it again, plunder it, and make their way back south, they would surely arrive at the scales on McPhail Street or down at United Iron with so much good weight that not even the Engineer, with his train of carts, could deny them their due. And if they did it once, they could always go back and do it again.

  Gary’s head spins with possibilities as the trio turns up Warwick and waits for the light at Franklin. They cross quickly—Gary and Lump each with a cart, Tony in front like an Indian scout—and continue north on Bentalou. After Edmondson, they’re beyond the most blighted blocks, easing into a neighborhood of colored window awnings and plastic porch furniture. They rattle past the bus shelter, nodding generously to the older women who wait with shopping bags for downtown routes.

  Near Winchester Street, Gary pulls up his cart, takes off his hat, and wipes his forehead. He’s breathing hard, his asthma choking him in the heat of late June. He leans on the handle of the cart, looking over at the garden work adorning a half-dozen of the Bentalou rowhouses.

  “That’s nice,” he says to no one in particular.

  “Huh?” says Lump.

  Gary points to a rose-covered trellis. “It’s beautiful. The way they got the roses fixed up.”

  Lump says nothing and looks up the block at Tony, who has stopped short of the corner. Gary steps away from the cart to get a closer look.

  “C’mon,” Lump says, “we almost there.”

  Gary nods vaguely, still taken by the roses. Finally, he turns away, wiping the sweat from his face and returning the Angels cap to his head.

  “Okay, Boss.”

  They power up the rest of the hill, past Carver High, turning at Baker Street, where gravity takes over and the carts run gently down the slope. An old woman watches them pass from her front porch. Gary nods and smiles, trying hard to make the shopping-cart caravan seem like normal business.

  Tony points to a patch of scrubs and trash, just off the sidewalk beneath the railroad overpass. “Carts stay here,” he says.

  They shove the metal carts deep into undergrowth, then scramble up the dirt path to the top of the railbed. From there, it’s a couple hundred yards, maybe more, down the Conrail tracks, and then another forty feet through brush and vines and thorns. They’re pushing through a jungle in ninety-degree heat, with insects jumping all over them. Gary looks down at his hand in time to see a tick crawling for the soft skin between his thumb and index finger.

  “Dag,” he says, flicking the bug away.

  “This is fucked up,” says Lump.

  “You gotta pay to play,” Tony assures them.

  “We gonna carry all of it back through this?” asks Gary. He feels something on the back of his neck and gives an involuntary shiver. “We workin’ for real.”

  “We soldiers,” Tony assures him.

  “We Vikings,” says Gary, laughing.

  They reach the back fence of the lot and find the hole from the last time Tony made the run. One by one, they crawl through and emerge in a metal harvester’s heaven. Stacks and stacks of old batteries, aluminum siding, aluminum trim, storm doors—and no one guarding any of it, not even the proverbial junkyard dog. Gary walks around the scrap piles like an art collector at the Louvre, admiring this, coveting that.

  “Ho, it’s the Big Rock Candy Mountain,” he says.

  “I told you it was right,” says Tony, proud.

  Lord. If they could levitate this yard and deliver it whole to United Iron or to the scale
s on McPhail Street, they’d be instantly rich. More than rich, they’d be dead from more dope and coke than any fiend needs.

  “Get them batteries first,” says Tony.

  George on McPhail Street pays a dollar apiece for old car batteries, so with each of them carrying three stacked batteries on their sortie from the yard, they’ve quickly liberated the rough equivalent of a blast. After that first run, they decide to divide the labor: Tony and Gary will bring the weight out of the yard and then haul it down the railbed to the overpass. Once they’ve had their fill, they’ll roll the batteries down the dirt slope to Lump waiting on the sidewalk below. Lump will load the carts.

  It’s hellacious work, with the midday sun beating down and the heat radiating up from the gray-blue stone and creosote ties of the railbed. Gary and Tony trudge back and forth, carrying the batteries two-to-a-trip, ankles twisting as the railbed stones slip beneath their jump boots. In the yard, there’s the vague fear of being watched, and in the jungle, there’s the insect swirl—gnats, mosquitoes, and who knows what else buzzing around their eyes and ears, drawn by the sweat. But the stack of batteries that takes shape atop the overpass is gratifying. Twenty, then twenty-six, then thirty-two batteries—followed by some long pieces of aluminum trim.

  “Enough for this run,” says Tony.

  With his breath coming in wheezes, Gary agrees, though there is a part of him that wants to keep going back. Get more while the getting is good.

  “Heads up.”

  They begin rolling the car batteries down the dirt slope one at a time, giving Lump a chance to weight them evenly on each cart. But thirst and heat make for impatience, and after a dozen or so batteries, Tony gives the battery pile a kick, sending four or five down at once.

  “Ho now,” says Lump.

  One battery catches a corner and goes bounding left, glancing off the overpass abutment and landing hard on the sidewalk below. Up top, Gary and Tony wince at the shriek that follows.