The Corner
Page 48
Normally the idea of her brother wrongly arrested for someone else’s package, and by Stashfinder especially, would send Fran—or anyone else at Mount and Fayette—into paroxysms of rage. The idea that the police were lying, that they always lie, was a recurring theme. And while much exaggeration went into this, there was enough that was true. A day in Western District courtroom saw enough perjury to make any lawyer think twice about asking anyone in a police uniform to take the oath. Street-level police work on many Baltimore corners had come to mean jacking everyone up, finding a stash, and then deciding at random who would eat the charge. This would infuriate the corner veterans, who liked to insist that there were standards. Of course they were all guilty in the larger scheme of things, but that was never the point. The touts and fiends weren’t asking for some overall judgment; they simply wanted the police to play the cards dealt. But Fran had now lost her sense of outrage, so that after Little Roy, Stevie’s supplier, put up the money to bail her brother out, she shrugged and chalked up the whole mess to raw chance.
“They locked up Stevie for Alfred’s shit,” Fran told people. “But you know Stevie got no right to complain. They might like to come back around five minutes later and lock his triflin’ ass up for something else.”
It was that old proverb: Beat your child once a day; if you don’t know what for, he does. It was also, in the psychology of the corner, absolute apostasy. Get it straight, Fran: Police lie, and the corner can’t be wrong.
She is slipping, and those around her begin to take notice of this at odd moments. On the day after Little Stevie sees Mr. Eddie throw a cap into some unlucky opponent, Gary arrives on the steps of the Dew Drop with a Double Shield tester, looking to fire up in the midst of a terrifying asthma attack. Out of nowhere, Fran ambushes him with an anti-drug lecture:
“… and you standin’ there, barely able to get your breath, thinkin’ that shit gonna make you better. Gary, you killin’ yo’self with that shit.”
Fran Boyd as Nancy Reagan.
“Dag,” Gary wheezes.
“I’m serious, Gary. You gonna die behind that shit.”
Gary shuffles around for a moment, looking for an out. “So,” he says, feeling deep in his pocket, “you sayin’ you don’t want to go down to the basement then.”
“Sheeet,” says Fran, following him inside. “I ain’t the one coughin’.”
She still had to get over every day, but now, in her mind she was rebelling. Now, Fran would witness a beating and wonder aloud: Why they got to beat a man for being short on the count when he’s always short on the count? They know he’s a dope fiend. They know what’s going to happen when they give him the vials. Now, Fran would hear about a shooting and ask what shooting people had to do with selling drugs. Everything else in this world gets sold without store clerks and customers getting killed behind it. Why couldn’t the people at Mount and Fayette get their shit together?
And at the end of the month, when Bunchie had gone through her own check money and whatever rent her siblings have paid and is still unable to come up with the $30 rent on the Section 8 apartment, Fran expresses amazement. Is her sister that trifling? How could she go through every last dollar? How could she spend it all and not even be able to make the Dew Drop’s paltry rent?
“I mean, she got to know that the end of the month is coming. And she talkin’ about she can’t even come up with thirty dollars?” Fran would wail. “What little shit we got left gonna be in the street … I got to get up from here.”
This was the reconstituted Fran talking, the newly baptized soul who has been making those calls down to the detox unit, the one who now believes she could fall no farther. Bunchie hasn’t changed; she is a fiend in good standing, and her job is to get the blast. It’s Fran who is forgetting Rule One.
The following week Fran manages to get Antoinette from BRC on the phone. For her trouble, she learns that her name is nearing the top of the waiting list.
“I’m sure we probably gonna have a bed for you next week.”
Fran can’t believe it when she hears it.
“Next week?”
“Next week.”
She hangs up the phone elated. One week.
Now she has a lot to get done. First, she’ll have to scratch together enough money so DeAndre and DeRodd can make it to the end of the month. Then, she’ll have to give her Independence Card to DeAndre and show him how to use the card in an automated bank machine. In Maryland the social service agencies had gone to the equivalent of ATM cards rather than mailed monthly checks, thereby liberating recipients from the usury of check-cashing outlets and rampant check theft. The irony in the name of the new mechanism notwithstanding, Independence Cards have been designed to carry the economy of West Baltimore into the millennium.
She’ll need some things for herself as well. Bath stuff and some new tennis shoes and slippers and some fresh clothes and assorted other sundries. She is cleaning up here, starting fresh. She might wear the same rags going into detox, but she plans on coming out brand spanking new. Normally, this would require a boosting run to a county mall, but Fran has sworn off her discount shopping sprees for months now—not only in deference to all the upcoming trial dates she’s collected, but for fear that the next arrest will mean jail time, costing her this chance at drug rehab. Her last boosting venture had been at Easter, when she had worked the department stores long enough to acquire a new set of sweats for DeAndre’s holiday promenade down to the Inner Harbor.
Now she’ll have to shop from register to register, like a chump. That means more money, and that, in turn, means reaching out to anyone and everyone for whatever she can get. Suddenly, Fran’s best dope-fiend move is to claim her place as an ex-dope-fiend-to-be. For the next full week, she plays her new status for all it’s worth, leaning on her brother Scoogie for cash and a commitment to watch out for her children while she’s detoxing. And Scoogie—he can’t possibly say no, not after insisting that he’s been clean for years. With his sister finally making the move, Scoogie will have to pay.
She also works Gary for the promise of a little money for his son. Michael, DeRodd’s father, gets a call as well. And Karen, Scoogie’s love and Fran’s best friend from the good old days, offers to take DeRodd if necessary. Fran works anyone at all sympathetic to her new found cause. It’s loaned money, she tells those willing to front a few bills; when she’s back on her feet, the cash will come back. Even if few seem to believe her, Fran hears her own charity pitch and begins to believe it herself.
One day she actually goes to Bunchie and asks for a pass on next month’s rent, but Bunchie stays firm. Her older sister seems a little put out by Fran’s change of heart; in fact, her family—with the possible exception of Scoogie—is decidedly unenthusiastic about the whole endeavor. Stevie and Sherry are able to mouth the called-for platitudes, but Fran can see something else in their tired eyes. They don’t want her to go. If she gets out, it will be, to them, a judgment.
As for Bunchie, she doesn’t believe it for a second.
“You think you goin’ next week, huh?” she asks Fran.
“Tuesday,” Fran says. “BRC has intake on Tuesdays.”
“Well, we all could use a break.”
A break. The word meant exactly that—a pause in the action, a temporary respite from the ordinary grind. Bunchie doesn’t need to quit snorting heroin and smoking coke altogether; she just needs a break. The same for everyone: Fiends don’t need to give up the needle forever, they just need some time off for good behavior. Fran had been in treatment years before so she knows from experience what the word means and what it doesn’t mean. She remembers being out at Oakview with the rest of them, talking the talk, telling stories and hearing the stories told. She can recall how many people came into detox with only the merest pretense of changing, when the real agenda was getting a brief vacation, a chance for the body to regain some strength before the next deluge. She had thought that way herself.
This time would be diffe
rent, though. She’s thirty-six years old; she’s had her fun, and finally, she’s ready. This is bottom. She can feel it.
On Saturday, when Gary comes down Fayette to the Dew Drop to share his morning blast with Fran, he hears the big news and is immediately suspicious—especially when he gets hold of the dollars-and-cents angle to Fran’s sudden renewal. Yeah, he’ll try to help DeAndre out a little bit, he says vaguely. Naw, he doesn’t have ten dollars that Fran can hold right now. Later, when he goes upstairs and sees Fran packing her belongings in a green plastic garbage sack, he comes around.
“You really gonna do it,” Gary says softly.
“Got to,” she tells him. “You should go down there, too.”
“I’m gonna,” he insists. “You’ll see. I’m gonna get past this for real. You gonna see.”
She hears him and shakes her head dismissively. Dope fiends are always going to get past it. Twenty times in a bad day they’re talking that shit to someone, usually to themselves. Miss a vein, you gonna quit. Shoot baking soda, you done. Get yourself stuck up, or fall out from an overdose, or have your money walk away—all are reasons to declare that you’ve had enough, that you’re ready to get your name on a waiting list somewhere. Only it doesn’t happen that way—the corner never gives anyone enough reason. It comes from within, or it doesn’t come at all.
“Gary, you talkin’ out your ass.”
He gets mad, but Fran is feeling too different these days to care. And she isn’t about to let Gary McCullough off with a mere lecture.
“You workin’ now, right?”
“Down the crabhouse. Cardy got me some days.”
She just looks at him. Too late. Gary sees the trap. True, after the Baker Street junkyard debacle, he’d found steady work at Seapride. And true, the crabhouse has for a couple weeks now been paying him six an hour, six shifts a week. But these are hand-to-spike dollars for Gary’s habit, not for Fran’s redemption.
“Lemme hold ten,” she says.
Gary starts shaking his head, backing up, telling her that he doesn’t get paid until whenever, that it’s got to last him until God knows when.
“C’mon, Gary, I’m tryin’ to do something here. I got to look out for Andre while I’m gone.”
Gary has one hand to his forehead, trying to think of words that won’t come fast enough.
“Gary, for your son.”
“I’ll get with Andre and help him out.”
“Gary, c’mon.”
“I will.”
“Gary.”
He looks up at her, angry and defeated. She has his number and he knows it. She’s always had his number.
“Fran,” he says, with a nod to the blast shared. “I just treated you and you askin’ for more. I ain’t got it.”
“Lemme hold five then.”
Gary takes the deal. Five dollars is the price for walking away from the Dew Drop Inn with some small piece of conscience intact. But he leaves feeling scammed, unable to find the words to wish her good luck or bon voyage or break a leg. He’s halfway down the steps before Fran makes him come back.
“Where you goin’ at?”
“What do you mean?” asks Gary.
“I be gone a long while,” she says. “Don’t I get a hug?”
Yes she does; she always does. They embrace at the top of the stairs and Gary can’t keep the smile from his face.
“Why you mess with me so bad?” he asks her.
Fran laughs. Finally, she lets him go, promising that she’ll keep one eye on the men’s dorm and see if there’s a bed for him. If not, she’ll get him on the waiting list.
“You gonna look in on Andre, right?”
Gary says he will.
“Okay then.”
For a few minutes, at least, she’s alone. Spreading the bills out on the worn bedsheet, she calculates the necessities. This much for food money. That much to get some lotion and towels. This much she has to give Bunchie.
She’s got sixty left. Party time.
And why should anyone be suprised at the notion? If she didn’t have a problem in the first place, she wouldn’t need detox. So the least she can do—the least anyone could expect her to do—is to step off Fayette Street in as fine a fashion as possible. For most of the city’s drug rehab facilities, the pre-intake party is not a possibility; lacking medical staffing, they aren’t willing to take people wet and then detox them. At Tuerk House or Francis Scott Key, you have to dry yourself out before going inside. But BRC has a medical unit and a doctor on call; they take fiends as any self-respecting fiend would want to be taken.
Come that first Tuesday in August, the sixty dollars is a memory and Fran is out on the steps, her bloodied eyes squinting in the morning sun. Her joints ache and her head is on fire. She presses a damp washrag to her eyes as she sits there, showing no more life than the green plastic sack at her side. She waits for the hack, thinking to herself that she’s had her fun, that she feels so bad that even her morning snort can’t set her right. She’s wrecked. It is, in short, a beautiful day to detox.
“Ma.”
“What?”
DeAndre pads down the steps wearing gym shorts. He rubs his eyes and peers out at the morning.
“When you leavin’ out?”
“In a couple. Your brother up?”
“He still ’sleep.”
He sits beside her on the steps, watching the street stir. There’s nothing said—DeAndre isn’t like that—but Fran can tell he’s with her, that after all this time, he’s still willing to believe.
“You got what you need?” he asks, gesturing at the bag.
“Yeah, mostly. You gonna visit?”
“I be by.”
She puts an arm around his shoulder. He lets it stay.
“Well, you take care of DeRodd. You can take him to Karen’s if you need to. You gonna go back to the McDonald’s?”
DeAndre shrugs. “Man, to hell with that. I might make an appointment to go back and beat that faggy manager’s ass.”
Fran grimaces and DeAndre picks up on it. He tells her that he’ll keep trying, that he plans to take a walk down to Mt. Clare and Westside and see if any stores are hiring.
Stevie comes down the stairs and gives her a hug. So does Sherry. Eventually, Fran hears that her youngest is up and she goes back upstairs to cuddle DeRodd a bit.
“You gonna come past and see me, right?”
“Yeah.”
DeRodd doesn’t have a clue, thank God. His mother’s going away for a while for some kind of program, and he’ll be staying with DeAndre or his uncle. Karen is the backup plan.
“You don’t go runnin’ off. You stay around here or up on Saratoga. You hear me?”
DeRodd pouts and nods.
She goes back downstairs where the hack is idling. She takes some last good-byes from Black Donnie, Alfred, and Ronnie Hughes, then she rolls out. On Mount Street, even Drac waves at her—a good-luck gesture to one of his more durable customers. They’re turning down Baltimore Street when Fran sees her father on the stoop across from the supermarket, the paper bag in his hand. She waves but he doesn’t see. At Gilmor, she sees Bunchie on the corner. She doesn’t wave.
“I’m gone,” she says, more to herself than anyone, as if she needs convincing.
Down at BRC, she nods to the receptionist, gives him her name, and slumps into the same chair where she waited for Antoinette on the last goround. She leaves her bag on her lap; biting her nails, she waits quietly.
“You have an appointment?” the man asks.
“I’m checkin’ in. My bed came up.”
The man nods, then pages Antoinette. Fran reaches into the sack for the wet rag, which she uses to daub her eyes again. The receptionist looks at her, then looks away quickly, but Fran catches it. She knows she looks like hell, and not just because of the weekend party either. She’s been on the corners so long that she’s skin and bone. Her weight is down near ninety-five, her face a gaunt, spare package of lines and hollows. Her hair is p
ulled back tight, sharpening those lines.
Five minutes pass. Fran goes back into her plastic sack for a pearl-handled penknife. She starts digging at her nails.
“She comin’?” she asks.
“I left a message at her office.”
Five minutes more and Antoinette finally emerges at the top of the flight of steps. Fran pulls herself up.
“Can I help you?” Antoinette asks, coming down.
“Uh, Fran, I mean, Denise Boyd. I check in today.”
Antoinette looks perplexed. “Checking in today?”
“Yeah.”
“Who told you that?”
“You did last week. You said to come in Tuesday. Don’t you remember. I talked to you last week.”
“Um … I don’t know, Fran. I don’t think so. You’re on the top of the list, but we aren’t expecting anyone today.”
“You said …” Fran stammers, looking for words, pacing in the lobby as it starts to sink in. “You said …”
“Fran, there’s been a mistake.”
“You damn right,” Fran wails. She’s waving her hand angrily, puncturing the air with that tiny penknife. “You damn right it’s a mistake. You told me last week.”
Antoinette catches the glint of the knife and backs up toward the receptionist’s desk.
“Fran, I’m saying there must be some misunderstanding.”
“How’m I … I told … I don’t believe this shit,” Fran says bitterly. “I told everyone I was gone.”
“Fran, I’m sorry.”
She’s standing in the middle of the lobby, her sudden anger betrayed by an equally sudden wave of tears. Antoinette takes one last nervous look at the penknife, then crosses into the breach, taking the smaller woman in her arms. Fran lets go, crying into Antoinette’s shoulder.
“What am I going to tell them?” she cries.
“Fran, you’re on the top of the list,” Antoinette assures her. “We’ll definitely have a bed next week.”