The Corner

by David Simon/Ed Burns

  For all she knows, her children might be out in the street. DeRodd might be hurt. DeAndre might be locked up. Having consigned herself to a purgatory all her own, she has no way of knowing.

  It is late August. Fayette Street is still in the throes of its long summer, but Fran is out of the mix, alone and detached. She’s been inside the Baltimore Recovery Center six days.

  The first three were an ugly blur. Nothing that went beyond a very bad flu, but enough to make her think only of her dormitory bed. The doctor passed out Clonidine and aspirin, some Maalox to settle the stomach, but her body took every opportunity to exact retribution. The heroin-saturated cells threw a seventy-two-hour tantrum, crying and raging until they were absolutely sure that nothing more was coming. Then she started to feel a bit better. Empty, but better.

  On the fourth day, she sat up, looked around, and began meeting people. She spent a day or two learning the rules, the schedule, the geography of the center. She bummed a smoke, tasted the food, listened with a fresh ear to the redemptive new language, and took to heart the warning they give when you come through the doors: Only one of the thirty people now in the room will be clean in a year. The odds are that long.

  Once she learned the ropes, she had nothing left beyond the daily routine. Outside the walls was another world. Outside, the corners were still buzzing; the vials were bought and sold, the capers run, the game played out to the latest hour. At first, she felt disenfranchised. The race was not her own anymore; she had been abruptly tossed from the track and forced to watch from the infield grass. She was bored by this, but reconciled. She told herself that getting better required giving up not only the vials, but the game as well.

  What Fran could not endure was the silence from her children. She needed news. She needed that pay phone to ring and the counselor to pick it up and call her name. Instead, the phone stayed occupied, save for those rare moments between calls when it would ring and the call would be for some other resident.

  She had called Scoogie three days back, asking him to run down to Fayette Street and make DeAndre pick up the phone. She’d called back, too, making sure that Scoogie had done it and that DeAndre had the right number. But so far, nothing—no call, not even a message to let her know that DeRodd isn’t in a hospital emergency room somewhere. The loose ends of her life are out there, flapping in the breeze, and after a week inside, Fran feels the need to grab hold of them.

  And this is the first lie.

  Only the lowest of low-bottom dope fiends will spend a week in detox and then leave, telling himself that he needs to go out for a blast. Instead, the thirsty cells look for a back door, giving up the frontal assault after the first few days; now the attack is based on subtle appeals to guilt or conscience or material need. Fran doesn’t want to leave to get high; no, she just wants to take a walk up Fayette Street and see her children.

  On Tuesday morning, she gets to the phone and calls her brother again. Scoogie assures her that DeAndre got the message.

  “He ain’t called,” Fran says.

  “I know he tried the one day,” Scoogie tells her. “He tried but he said he couldn’t get through.”

  She hears this and knows it’s true. Yet nothing short of DeAndre’s voice will reassure her—and maybe even DeAndre won’t be enough. When one of the counselors finally calls her name at lunch the next day, she’s all but given up; she’s already telling herself that she needs only fourteen days of detox, twenty-one at the most.

  “Fran Boyd.”

  “Fran, they callin’ for you.”

  She jumps up and races for it like a game-show contestant.

  “Andre!”

  “Ma.”

  “Hey boy. How you?”

  “Fine.”

  “How DeRodd?”

  “He up at Karen’s. She gonna watch him.”

  “That’s good. That’s good.”

  So DeRodd will not be her reason; deep inside, Fran feels a twinge of regret. She asks DeAndre how he’s making it, but here, too, nothing can pass for urgent. He’s fine.

  “Dre, you wouldn’t believe it. This place a trip.”

  “Huh.”

  “I’m serious. When dope fiends first be gettin’ clean, they get to talking all this high on life stuff. Drive you crazy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then they get past illin’ and the next thing you know all them sex drives start comin’ up …”

  She’s got his interest now. “Like what?”

  “What you think? I swear, this place like a soap opera with people hoppin’ around like damn rabbits.”

  DeAndre laughs.

  “I’m serious. They gone crazy.”

  “That ain’t you, Ma,” he says. It’s almost a question.

  “Uh uh, I’m just sayin’ how wild it is. I mean, you wouldn’t believe what it’s like in here.” She tells him about all the rules. “It’s like lockdown the way they got things. The way they keep on you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You comin’ to the meetin’ Saturday? Tell Scoogie to drive you and DeRodd down for the meeting. One o’clock. I want to see you. I miss you.”

  She’s almost ready to give up the phone when she remembers:

  “Andre, I need you to do something for me …”

  “Huh.”

  “I need you to make a run for me.”

  A run. DeAndre is silent for a moment. “No, Ma.”

  Fran is taken aback. “Boy, you a trip! I’m tryin’ to get my life together. I’m talking about cigarettes and maybe some candy. Those chocolate bars I like. They sayin’ nicotine and chocolate are drugs too, but I ain’t tryin’ to hear that.”

  “Huh.”

  “I need you to put ’em in a bag and come by the alley on the side between three and four today. And when you see me, just toss it over the fence …”

  DeAndre is laughing now. He’s gonna do a drive-by with Newports and Mr. Goodbars.

  “But don’t throw it until you see me there. I got to make sure the counselor ain’t watchin’. You got it? Between three and four, right? Dre, I love you. You love me?”

  “Uh huh.”

  Later that afternoon, she’s where she said she’d be, hard by the twelve-foot chain-link fence that encloses the detox center’s rear yard. She keeps one eye on the back door and one eye on the alley, pacing impatiently until she sees a car turn from Schroeder Street into the alley. As it creeps closer, she sees her son in the passenger seat. DeAndre is slumped down and giggling.

  “Toss it!”

  As the car rolls past, DeAndre flings the small, white plastic bag. It catches the top of the fence and falls back into the alley.

  “Damn,” shouts DeAndre.

  Now Fran is laughing. “That was sad.”

  Her son gets out of the car, runs to the bag and tosses it again before fleeing. It lands in a back stairwell, where Fran collects the candy and smokes, stuffing them down her pants. After a few minutes, DeAndre comes back to the fence.

  “You look good.”

  “I feel good.”

  A counselor comes out the back door, sees them both by the fence and asks DeAndre to leave. For a moment, Fran feels queasy, as if the contraband has already been discovered.

  “You know the rules,” the counselor says. “You can’t talk through the fence.”

  Fran backs away.

  “She’s my mother,” DeAndre explains.

  “I understand. But we got rules.”

  “See you Saturday,” Fran reminds him. “I love you.”

  On visiting day, Scoogie brings DeAndre and DeRodd, showing up during lunch. Fran has held a table in the basement cafeteria for them and she lights up as the trio comes through the door.

  “Hey, you!”

  She embraces her brother, who tells her how proud he is and how much better she looks. She does, too: Her eyes have lost their yellow tinge; her hair is cut and styled for the first time in months. She’s even picked up a few pounds; the deep hollows in her face are a bit
rounded, though not even a week and a half of steady meals can make Fran Boyd look anything but thin.

  “I remember how much better I felt after comin’ in from out there,” Scoogie tells her. “Eight years ago and I don’t regret not one day.”

  Fran, for once, lets it slide. Today, all things are possible, even probable.

  DeRodd takes in the surroundings; his mother is all over him, wrapping her arms around his waist, holding him to her side. A counselor offers him dessert and he’s instantly absorbed in the geometry of an ice cream sandwich. She saves DeAndre for last.

  “Hey, boy. Get over here.”

  Assured that no one he knows will see, he leans into his mother’s embrace. Fran steps back to look, then hugs him again.

  “You look so good to me.”

  DeAndre fidgets.

  “I mean it,” Fran says. “I’m seeing you with new eyes.”

  The four of them settle down to talk for a while, with Fran extracting promises from her children that they will stay for the meeting. Scoogie begs off, saying he needs to get his car into the garage again.

  “You need a new ride,” Fran tells him.

  “I been needin’ that,” he says, getting up. “You keep on keepin’ on, Fran. You on the right road now.”

  They embrace again and he leaves the threesome at the table. When DeRodd wanders off in search of a drink, Fran and DeAndre have a chance to catch up. She fills the silence with talking, with plans, with all kinds of optimism for the future.

  “I’m not going back to Fayette Street,” she tells him.

  “I sure won’t miss that house,” DeAndre says. “Livin’ there ain’t been no joke.”

  He tells her how it’s been these last few days at the Dew Drop. More of the same old thing, he says, but now Fran shakes her head bitterly at the stories, hearing the echo of corner happenings from the other side of the fence. DeAndre catalogues the absurdity:

  “Ma, I knew not to put the snacks in the kitchen, but I thought if I hide them in the bedroom, I be all right.”

  But the bedroom door was kicked in. “Uncle Stevie or somebody went in there, took the cookies and Tastykake that I bought for DeRodd. I came back and everything was tore up.”

  “Whaa?”

  “It was messed up. After that, I used the window. I pushed the dresser against the door and left the TV on loud so it’d be like I was still in there. And don’t you know they still got me.”

  “They dope fiends,” she tells him, showing her distance. “They just always that way. But I’m tellin’ you, Dre, we not going back there.”

  She reaches into her purse.

  “This is for you, Andre,” she says, handing him a folded-over envelope. “Don’t read it now. You read it later.”

  He pockets the envelope and looks around the room. Fran can see that something else is still unsaid. DeAndre looks at his mother, then at DeRodd, who is chasing another young boy around the tables. He looks back at Fran and pouts.

  “What?” she asks. “Why you lookin’ that way.”

  “Ma,” he says, and he actually manages to smile. “I need four hundert dollars. Reeka … um … Reeka pregnant.”

  “What you need money for?”

  “Abortion.”

  Fran smiles. Tyreeka was showing two months ago; she’s been pregnant for close to six months. An abortion is an impossibility. Her son, Fran guesses, is trying to run a game.

  “Andre, where in hell am I gonna get four hundred?”

  And that settles it: There will be no abortion. DeAndre will be a father at sixteen, Tyreeka a mother at fourteen. Fran will be a grandmother at the ripe age of thirty-six. In truth, all three of them wanted this child. For DeAndre and Tyreeka, a baby meant validation; for Fran, the grandchild would be a part of starting over. She would mother parents and child both.

  “What does Reeka say?”

  “She says what I tell her.”

  Fran shakes her head, smiles, lets him pretend for a moment.

  “Really, what does she want?”

  “She want to have the baby.”

  “Well then you ain’t got a choice.”

  “It’s my decision.”

  “Please,” says Fran. “How many months is she?”

  “She say the baby due ’round Christmas.”

  “She goin’ for checkups, right? She seein’ a doctor?”

  “Her aunt got that covered.”

  She asks more questions, most of them dealing with prenatal logistics. Fran is on the case; this is her first grandchild, after all. She tells DeAndre to have Tyreeka call the detox pay phone.

  “Boy, you gonna be a daddy.”

  DeAndre smiles, stretching his arms wide.

  “I can’t believe it,” Fran says.

  DeRodd returns to his chair. Up at the front of the room, staff members are putting a string of tables together. A counselor asks everyone to give him their attention. Fran pushes her seat closer to DeAndre.

  “Listen,” she tells him. “What they gonna say, they gonna say for you, too.”

  DeAndre shrugs and slumps back as the meeting begins in the usual fashion. “All right, people, Eric is gonna lead us in the twelve steps.”

  “Hey, my name is Eric and I’m a drug addict.”

  “Hey, Eric,” the room chants in unison. “Keep comin’ back.”

  He gives them the steps in the sing-song cadence that comes from rote memorization: “… that we were powerless over our addiction, that our lives had become unmanageable … We admitted to God, to ourselves and another human being …”

  Another resident follows with the twelve traditions of Narcotics Anonymous, and by that time DeAndre is sullen and restless. This is flotsam and jetsam from someone else’s shipwreck, with as much relevance to his life as English composition or social studies.

  The leader runs quickly through the list of the chapter’s business, then introduces the afternoon’s speaker. He’s stick-thin, aged beyond his years, his arms marked by old scars. His smile is open and expressive.

  “… so I’m standing on the back porch and I’m saying to her that I got to come in, that I just need some food, that I got a chance for a job if I can just get something in my stomach and get myself cleaned up …”

  Fran nudges DeAndre. “He’s good. He spoke once before.”

  “And she believes me, right?’ Cause I’m good, right? What can I say? Ain’t no way a low-bottom dope fiend can be bad at lyin’ …”

  The meeting breaks into laughter. With the NA speakers, this business of capturing the universality of the corner is as much a gift as preaching or stand-up. Some speakers—those closer in time and distance to the pain —can’t get past their personal details; the intricacies of their own disaster still leave them in awe. But others, like today’s speaker, can make the leap to common ground. Sitting here now, no one listening in the BRC basement can stand apart from a truth revealed by shared experience.

  “… I mean, you all done it, too. You know you have. When you got to cry to get a blast, you cry. When you got to beg, you beg. When you got to lie, you lie, right? So I get in the house. I get in even after she told me I couldn’t come back. And while she at the stove, making me a plate of chicken—and Mama could burn some chicken—I’m creepin’. I’ve got the clock radio and I’m outta there.”

  He shakes his head, laughing at the horror of it. Laughing because what the hell else can you do.

  “And, people, this is my mother. This the woman who brought me into the world and raised me up and taught me right from wrong. I am a lowbottom dope fiend.”

  Even DeAndre is now showing some interest in the confessional. Fran is nodding her head, thoroughly engaged, her thoughts directed to a few dope-fiend moves of her own. For the first time in a long while, she lets in a lost memory from the days before she landed on Fayette Street, back when Gary’s salaries were still paying for the party. She remembers and wonders about the old lady at that four-way stop. The poor woman was driving some churchgo
ing car; Fran was in the Mercedes, pulling up to the intersection at the same moment. The woman waved Fran forward, and Fran waved back. In the time that it took the lady to wave again, Fran had made up her mind. You first, she signaled, coaxing the woman out.

  Then she stepped on the gas.

  The collision money on the aging luxury sedan would have been payment enough. The insurance money from the lawsuit was icing on the cake. And Fran had crowned this crudball move by jumping from her wrecked car to verbally lash the old woman, convincing the lady it was her fault.

  But now, listening to the thin man on the stage, Fran conjures the memory of the old woman’s face. The entire scene comes back to her and provokes real shame.

  Up on stage, the thin man is talking about sleeping in abandoned cars and breaking into houses and cheating his brother out of forty dollars. He’s laying himself bare, and Fran, in the fourth row, is mightily tempted to do the same. When he finishes, the meeting winds down. Key rings are distributed to those with one day, one week, one month, and six months clean-time. The group then gathers for the serenity prayer. Fran drags her sons in the circle, hugging them.

  “Thank you all,” says the speaker as chairs are rearranged.

  DeAndre stretches, yawns, looks toward the door. DeRodd wanders off to ask about a second ice cream sandwich.

  “He was good,” Fran says, “real good.”

  “Man, I seen him coppin’ the other day from Drac and them on Gilmor,” DeAndre deadpans.

  “You a lyin’ little boy.”

  DeAndre laughs. Visitation ends with friends and relatives making their good-byes and crowding the stairwell back up to the lobby. Fran gets a promise of another visit—this time with Tyreeka—and lets her children go after a long embrace.

  “You got the letter?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay then. I love you.”

  That afternoon, in the vestibule of the Dew Drop Inn, DeAndre pulls the envelope from his pocket and begins to read. He expected these sentiments from his mother—saw them coming at him like a runaway train—but still, the three handwritten pages allow him to hope, to believe a little bit in the things Fran is talking about. He steps into the sunlight, still reading, finding his seat on the steps without taking his eyes from the paper.