The Corner

by David Simon/Ed Burns

  On Fayette Street, you had to put hope in the margins. That’s what she did last week, when she spotted Dinky behind the wheel of someone else’s automobile. Caught by someone who mattered in his life, someone who never ceased to believe in him, DeAndre’s cousin found that Ella’s reproach hurt the most. A few days after the joyride, on these same rec center steps, Dinky had actually come to her with an apology and an assurance that he had returned the car to the proximate place where he stole it. Then the sixteen-year-old listened with respectful patience to the inevitable lecture.

  “You right,” he told her. “You always right, Miss Ella.”

  Ella Thompson’s love would produce no miracles. But on Fayette Street, she had done about as much as any person could.

  Tonight, when she finishes dispensing snacks, she pokes her head out of the recreation center doors and sees, to her pleasure and relief, that the Buick is no longer on Mount Street. No stickup. No shooting. No problem.

  “They’re gone,” she tells the younger boys. “It must not have been what you all thought.”

  Daymo leaves the rec and jogs to the fence. He peers through chain-link, looking up and down the block.

  “Man, they rolled out.”

  “Maybe they comin’ back,” says Stevie, hopeful.

  “They shoulda waited,” says T. J., “Mike and his boys gonna be comin’ past any time now and they ain’t gonna be here for it.”

  The trio waits on the vacant lot for a time, looking both ways on Mount. Down at Fayette Street, a tout for the Death Row crew is calling the product name over and over.

  “They long gone,” says T. J., disappointed.

  “Me too,” says Daymo, putting up his hood and walking.

  “Wait up,” says Stevie.

  Ella watches them go, turning off the rec lights only when the last of her charges has cleared the playground.

  A few days later, she’s at it again with the proud and few of the neighborhood association, up at Fayette and Monroe to take back that corner for one crisp autumn day. Some of Franklin Square’s remaining citizens are perched on the northside corners, fifteen or twenty strong, carrying posters emblazoned with drug-free-community and honk-if-you-are-against-drugs messages. They’re out there making all kinds of noise, shouting slogans to the rhythm of a bass drum borrowed for the occasion from the local drum-and-majorette corps. The mayor shows up, too, alighting on the corner from his city limo with a full entourage. For a time, he holds one of the placards, stepping into the street at every red light, urging the idling motorists to hit their horns for the cause.

  The rally goes on for much of the morning and afternoon. By day’s end, most of the corner players on Monroe Street have to acknowledge the heart of their neighbors, their ex-friends and relatives who stand out there in the chill air, demanding something more. A few actually respond. Smitty, for one, crosses Monroe Street and joins the rally, carrying a down-with-drugs poster through the southbound lanes and cheering those drivers who sound support. The rest do what they always do when confronted by such events: They take the day’s transactions around the corner to Lexington and Fulton, or down to the other end of Vine Street.

  That afternoon, before giving back the corner, Ella takes care to glean as much joy as possible from the effort. She has no illusions: She has lived in this place too long to mistake the rally for some kind of solution. Yet she walks home delighted with the day for its own sake.

  “I’m saying it’s only one day, but it gets you to thinking how great it can be,” she tells Myrtle Summers on the walk back down the block. “Those corners, I mean, it just reminds you how wonderful it would be without all of that.”

  That night, she makes a point of sitting out on her steps for two hours, drinking hot chocolate and listening to the radio. Touts and runners on Fulton show a small measure of respect.

  They move halfway down the block.

  More than anything, Fran Boyd loves the victory lap.

  She loves the look on people’s faces, the quiet acknowledgment of her new status. She loves the special feeling that comes from being apart and above the usual along Fayette Street. It is, she feels, her due for having come this far.

  On a brisk October day, six weeks after emerging from detox and about a fortnight after moving to the house on Boyd Street, Fran is coming through Vine Street on some errand and is blessed with a truly righteous moment, a street corner epiphany that would give any ex-addict her share of pride.

  The action is deep at Vine and Monroe, but Fran cuts past the clutter of touts, shaking her head thank-you-no at this product and that, feeling strong and above it all.

  And there, coming up Monroe from the other direction, is George Epps, smiling at her and wishing her well. Blue has been clean for a couple months now; he only comes past these corners on his way to Ella’s rec center, where, once again, he’s picked up his art class.

  “Hey, girl.”

  “Hey yo’self.”

  “You look real good.”

  “You too.”

  They embrace, two old soldiers in a moment of easy peace, while all around them, the touts continue to bark brand-names and the runners go to the ground stashes.

  “You down at the rec now?” Fran asks.

  “Yeah, giving a little something back.”

  Fran nods, chats a while longer, then looks around.

  “Same ol’ thing,” muses Blue.

  “Always,” says Fran.

  They’re about to part ways when one of the New York Boys slips off the liquor store wall to tell Blue about the Jumbo Sixes: “They right as rain.”

  “Naw,” Blue tells him quietly. “I’m not doin’ that anymore.”

  “Yeah?” asks the New Yorker, surprised.

  “Right as rain.”

  “Good for you, man.”

  “Yeah.”

  Blue turns away, smiling just a bit. But Fran is beside herself with glee at the moment.

  “It feels good,” she tells Blue.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I guess it does.”

  “You come through here and tell them no like that. I know that feels good.”

  But for Blue, there is that element of humility at work. He’s still going to the meetings, still struggling with the very idea of his new self, still talking about the grace of God and living life in single-day installments. For him, the tout and his news about the black tops was simply another hurdle in a long steeplechase.

  Fran says good-bye and watches Blue move on. She stays on the corner for a good while, exulting.

  Even so, much of the victory lap is decidedly over. By now, she’s been seen and praised and marveled over by most everyone she knows. When Fran walks down the street these days, she’s ordinary scenery. The corner is the same; it has simply turned away from her and gone about its business elsewhere. A quick compliment, a few good wishes and the world she knew and all those in it are finished with the ovation.

  The new world seems to her less than welcoming, though in fairness, allowances have been made for a woman trying to find her way. One after another, her outstanding court cases for shoplifting have been bartered down to unsupervised or mostly unsupervised probation. Fran played the district court judges well, telling them about her successful recovery, her new house, her willingness to put her life back together now that she is done with the drugs.

  And not only is she getting by on bad credit, renting the Boyd Street rowhouse from an old friend, but when money got short at the end of September, friends and relatives had come up with ten or twenty dollars or a bag of groceries, offering such help in the belief that the cash would not go to glassine bags and vials. Likewise, the U.S. government had kicked in her $1,400 Pell Grant, allowing her to keep at her college classes.

  All of which is enough to keep running in place. Now, for the next step, she needs to pass her classes. Or find a job. Or get some of those things—a new TV, a winter coat for DeRodd, new Nikes for Dre—that show material progress.

  And all
of that, unlike the victory lap, involves struggle.

  For starters, college isn’t what she thought it would be. Algebra is proving to be hellishly difficult for someone whose formal education had concluded a couple decades back. It’s so difficult in fact that a month into the semester, she’s no longer able to keep up with the classwork. English is easier, but even so, she can’t find it in herself to do the reading. Night after night, Fran leaves her schoolbooks on the dresser, wasting the evening hours on sitcoms and late-night movies.

  Instead, she tries to scrounge a job. Beginning at Westside and working her way east to Mt. Clare, Fran fills out applications at a dozen stores—most of which have barred her for shoplifting. When no calls come back immediately, she tries the want ads, circling everything from route driver to telemarketer. A company in Woodlawn gives her an interview, but it’s sales work on commission only. A store manager at Westside calls, then realizes that Fran is barred for thieving and cancels the interview. Finally, she lands an interview with a company out in Hunt Valley, miles north of the city. On a Thursday morning she spends two hours fixing her hair and makeup and dressing in a pants suit, eager to make the best first impression.

  That afternoon, she’s sitting at the kitchen table when DeAndre comes in. Taking in a Newport, she looks completely at ease.

  “Got a job,” she tells him.

  DeAndre doesn’t miss a beat. “Ma,” he says, “I need new shoes.”

  “Got-damn, Dre. I don’t even start ’til Monday.”

  He laughs.

  But nothing comes easy for Fran Boyd. The work isn’t clerical, like all of her previous jobs had been; instead, it’s factory floor work for Revlon. Come Monday morning, Fran spends two hours catching bus transfers from West Baltimore out to northern Baltimore County before she arrives at her place on an assembly line in the bowels of a Hunt Valley industrial park. Then, for six hours, she and about forty other laborers cramp their fingers by snapping small disks of eyeshadow into plastic compacts. The next day, the alarm rings and she turns it off, sleeping until noon. That night she watches television until three in the morning.

  There are better jobs, she tells herself. And when Marvin Parker comes calling, she’s done with the want ads for good. They had met in recovery in September, taking to each other in that first rush of freedom. Marvin was thirty-five, with more than a decade on the corners, but lately he had become a regular at the St. James NA meetings. Fran, who had neither the time nor the patience for romance when she was chasing dope, suddenly found herself interested again. It seemed right somehow—both of them rediscovering themselves, both of them trying to do something with their lives. And it might have stayed right, save for the fact that by the middle of October, when he finally gathers his things together and moves into Boyd Street with Fran and her sons, Marvin Parker is once again slinging vials at Franklintown and Baltimore.

  Fran knows it when she lets him in the door, yet allows it anyway on the argument that the man isn’t getting high, that he might as well work out on a corner and bring some dollars home. Marvin had teamed with an old-school dealer and stickup artist by the name of Shorty Boyd, who was no relation to Fran though they had known each other for years.

  Shorty had done pretty much everything on a corner and lived to tell about it. He was hardcore and famous for using a gun to take packages off weaker and younger dealers, then selling their wares himself. Shorty was a survivor and a user; in time, Marvin Parker would get used.

  By the last of October, Fran’s new boyfriend is getting high, using as much as he sells and behind the eight ball when it’s time to pay off a piece of Shorty’s package. Soon enough, there isn’t a dollar coming back home from Franklintown and Baltimore. Only Marvin, high and useless.

  Fran knows that DeAndre hates Marvin for his drugging, and day by day, the tension in the house grows. Outside of Fran’s earshot, Marvin is belligerent with the others, ordering Tyreeka and DeRodd around. On occasion, DeAndre challenges him, angrily declaring that if Marvin wants to make the rules, then he can damn sure pay some rent or put something in the refrigerator. But Marvin plays it off, or worse, brings the problem back to Fran, who asserts his rights for him. Then things start disappearing. Cash from DeAndre’s denim pockets. Cassette tapes. DeRodd’s Sega Genesis cartridges.

  “Ma,” says DeAndre, “he stealin’ from us.”

  “Andre, you don’t know what you talkin’ about.”

  But Fran knows, and she knows DeAndre knows. Her son is soon looking at her in a different way, scoping for signs that she’s slipping as well. Once, when she’s in the bedroom, telling Marvin that if he’s got to have his blast, he’s got to do it out of sight of her, DeAndre comes up the stairs. Fran sees him, listening intently on the stairwell landing, and she feels good for having reassured her son that she is still trying for clean. Still, she knows that there is a progression here, a backward movement that can’t be denied much longer.

  In those first weeks of freedom, Fran had launched herself wholeheartedly into the after-care sessions at the recovery center and the NA meetings at St. James at Lexington and Monroe. Since discovering the twelve-step gospel at the detox center, she had devoutly attended these gatherings; the confessionals and testimony gave her a feeling of connection. And if one meeting wasn’t enough in those first days, Fran would find another, and another after that. There were nightly sessions at St. James, or at Almost Family at Saratoga and Fremont. There were afternoon meetings at James McHenry and morning meetings at a half-dozen places if you woke up feeling weak. Fran had not been to church for a long while, but what she remembered of the Christian faith could not rival the power she felt at a good meeting. Up at St. James she could go inside the basement doors and hear, not leaden homilies of prophets and saviors, but the simple truth of drug addicts, speaking not about life to come, but life as they had known it.

  At first, Fran had felt energy and warmth in the crowd; strength itself seemed to follow her out the door with the last words of the serenity prayer. At many of the gatherings, she met people she knew, people who had been down on Fayette and Mount Street with her. Some were more lost and desperate than she had ever been, now using the meetings to reorder their lives. Many fell, but others seemed to be growing, getting stronger as they collected their thirty-day and sixty-day and six-month clean-and-sober key chains. On the evening when she had walked to front of the room at St. James to get her two-month keepsake—twentyeight days clean in detox and thirty-two more on the street—Fran was proud to the point of tears. Yet she balked at what should have been the next step: finding a sponsor, a fellow addict to rely on, to share her fears and hopes and frustrations.

  From the beginning, Fran had resisted the idea that she was dependent on any process outside of herself. When pressed, she had argued that she could manage her own recovery without having to share secrets with anyone else. She told the NA organizers that she would keep with the meetings, that she was on the right road whether or not she was sponsored.

  For a time, she had kept that promise. Only after a good month of meetings did she begin to bridle at all the rules and requirements, at the repetition that was at the heart of every NA gathering. By degrees, she became bored with all the talk, all the stories that always ended the same way. She began skipping meetings. And when DeAndre noticed and said something, Fran explained that she was past it now, that all of those people up at St. James were just chasing meetings the same way they used to chase the blast. They weren’t doing anything with their time but being exaddicts, and she wanted something more than that, some of the new life that was supposed to be there when you leave the vials alone.

  By the time Marvin Parker moves in, Fran has stopped going to the meetings at St. James, or to any of her after-care sessions down at BRC. With DeRodd in school, she sometimes stays away from Boyd Street for the entire day—either up the hill at Scoogie’s watching cable movies, or worse, down on Fayette with Bunchie and Stevie, hanging near the Mount Street corners just to ge
t away from her empty house and see what the action is like.

  For a long while, she is on her old perch as a spectator only, watching the familiar chaos from a place apart, sitting on the Dew Drop steps, living each day with the Mount Street regulars and squeezing a few last accolades for her victory.

  “You lookin’ right, Fran,” someone would say.

  “Feelin’ right,” she’d reply.

  But it isn’t quite true. Once, in September, when she was still staying at Scoogie’s house, she gave in to the hunger, marching back down to Mount and Fayette—back past Buster and Little Roy and Ronnie Hughes, back into the Dew Drop and down the steps to find her sister hunkered in the usual corner.

  “Hey, Fran.”

  Bunchie said nothing more. It was enough.

  Three lines were waiting when Bunchie passed her the mirror. Fran snorted one and waited for the rush; when it came, she surprised herself by feeling ashamed. She stood up, leaving the other two on the mirror.

  “Where you goin’ at?”

  “Out,” she said, leaving.

  That afternoon, she found an NA meeting. That night, she went to bed angry at herself for slipping, for gratifying all those fiends down on Mount Street who were so damned happy to see her lose. She lay in bed remembering Bunchie, damn near smirking at her as she did the line.

  She couldn’t go back there. She had sworn this to herself. Her old world was lethal to her, but the new one was proving so empty and desolate, and her journey into it would be a solitary one. From the beginning, from those first days out of detox, Fran had sensed this. She knew Fayette and Mount, but what else—who else—did she know? For a time, she tried hard to believe that scraps of the old world could be carried forward into the new. In fact, she tried for a time to use some of her newfound strength to salvage other souls. After all, she had done these things for herself. She could, by force of will, make the rest of the neighborhood do the same.