The Corner

by David Simon/Ed Burns

  Fran’s advice goes unheeded, her experience counts for little. And when she asks to feed her grandson, DeAndre tells her she can’t.

  “You not supposed to let anyone but the mother feed the baby,” he tells her. “Otherwise, the baby won’t learn to know its mother.”

  Fran goes off into a rave. “Who in hell have you been talking to? You don’t know what the hell you talking about.”

  DeAndre stands his ground; Tyreeka told him this and Tyreeka’s word is enough for him. Only the mother feeds the baby.

  “So you can’t give him a bottle neither, right?”

  “The father can do it sometimes.”

  Fran rolls her eyes and stalks around the kitchen, savaging her son’s assertions, talking about how she raised DeAndre up and raised DeRodd up and knows more about mothering than the two of them will ever know. DeAndre retreats upstairs.

  “For all I get to do with that baby, why you even come down here?” she shouts after him.

  “You think you so damn smart.” DeAndre yells back. “You got something to say about everything. You can’t run your own life but you tryin’ to tell us how to raise our child.”

  Fran follows him up the stairs. “Andre, that child gonna know his mother no matter what. You all is bein’ ridiculous.”

  Ridiculous or not, they shut Fran out, returning after the weekend to stay with Tyreeka’s aunt and enjoy another week of fairy-tale existence.

  For many of Tyreeka’s friends, the arrival of a baby is treated with similar delight and absorption for a period of weeks or months at most. Then, the distractions of adolescence take hold and they go back to the corners, to the dance clubs, to the house parties and movies and new trysts with new boys. The babies go to grandmothers, or great-aunts, or great-grandmothers—to be raised with their birth mothers serving, at best, as older sisters and, at worst, as casual acquaintances.

  Tyreeka, by contrast, chooses to stay at home, day after day, and do the work of raising DeAnte. As she sees it, the school semester can still be salvaged: She’ll miss three weeks, ask for makeup work and extra credit, then take finals with the rest of her class. Come January, she will get the baby up in the morning, feeding and dressing and playing with him, then dressing herself and catching the bus to Carver. With her aunt working, it will fall to her grandmother to watch DeAnte for as long as it takes Tyreeka to attend school and then catch the same bus back. It will be doubly hard for her to study and graduate, but now, for herself and DeAnte as well, she feels compelled to try. A year ago she was out on the corners with DeAndre and his boys, cutting class, forgoing class for a trip to the harbor or an afternoon movie. Now, because of DeAndre’s son—her son—she’s thinking and talking in the future tense.

  “I’m not quitting school,” she tells DeAndre. “I’m not goin’ to end up on welfare like all these other girls, sittin’ out on the steps every day with their babies.”

  And DeAndre, still in the thrall of this domestic interlude, can only agree. Stores have been hiring for Christmas shopping season; he’ll go out and get a job, maybe even talk to Rose Davis about finishing school.

  “We get enough money, we get a place of our own,” he tells his girl.

  Once, such a fantasy would have meant everything to Tyreeka, and when DeAndre speaks the words, she gives him casual agreement. But Tyreeka is still worried about DeAndre, worried that he’ll drift back to the corner, and worried, too, that she’ll be drawn into that world with him. Here, at her aunt’s house, she’s on the bus route to her high school. Here, she gives a share of her AFDC check to her aunt and has room and board and her grandmother to watch the baby when she’s in class. At long last, she has something approaching adult guidance and support. But with DeAndre, she knows, every day would be a question.

  “I don’t want our son growin’ up like we did,” she tells him. “I don’t want him to be doin’ the things we did.”

  For a while longer, DeAndre spends days and nights in the makeshift nursery, assuming the role of father to the extent he understands it. This means providing, and for a time, DeAndre is able—by loan and by barter, by begging from his mother and by calling in some small profit from Dinky—to spring for Pampers and some baby outfits. Everything else is soon beyond his means. Shoes, car seats, jolly jumpers, toys: DeAndre feels the pressure with every need or want Tyreeka can express or he himself can imagine. Worse, he’s governed by his standing obsession with material status, his best-brand, damn-the-expense insistence on Weebok or Nike shoes or Disney store clothes, and yes, a gold name-necklace for his child.

  “My son,” he tells Tyreeka one day, “won’t be wearing off-brand shit.”

  “Andre, how that baby gonna know what he’s wearing?”

  “I’ll know.”

  “And what about when you locked up?”

  “He’ll know I was out there makin’ money for him.”

  Tyreeka balks. The same girl who used to measure DeAndre’s devotion in the money she could make him spend, now tells the father of her son that all those things would be nice and fine, but what the child needs more is a father’s presence.

  “You go back on the corner, you might get shot or locked up,” she argues. “How you gonna help your son if you dead? How you gonna help him if you in prison?”

  DeAndre, who can sense what’s coming, begins to battle with her on this point. He cannot lose himself forever on Riggs Avenue. He cannot stay in this nest, changing diapers and warming formula and burying himself in domestic quietude. He has tried the straight way before, wearing Wendy’s blue pinstripe and taking home minimum wage for a handful of work shifts. And for a few days shortly before Christmas, he drifts around West Baltimore and the near suburbs, filling applications—the stores at Westside, the Toys ’R’ Us on Route 40—but he’s pretending to a plan for which he has neither faith nor patience. His mother, he knows, is slipping; she can’t sustain the promise that she brought out of detox. And his father is more lost than ever; Gary has been so hungry for capers lately that he hasn’t even found the time to come see his grandson. Come right down to it and nothing is waiting on DeAndre McCullough save the corner itself.

  He tells himself that it’s just temporary, just a quick run to turn a few packages and get enough money together. After that, all the better plans will be back on the table. But no one ever goes down to the corner telling himself anything different. No one tells himself the truth, though many do think it. Outside of the game, people always make it sound like it’s a decision to sell drugs, or get high, or take to violence. But that’s the way the outside world can afford to view it: As if the same free will that makes life worth living elsewhere can strut down to Mount and Fayette without getting its ass beat bloody. The fact is, it’s never so much a decision as the absence of a decision. It would require Herculean strength for DeAndre to find a new moment, to pivot and walk away from the only world he’s ever negotiated—a world that guarantees him some kind of standing. And now, with Tyreeka and his son and his own future at stake, that moment simply doesn’t come.

  By Christmas week, he’s back down at Gilmor and McHenry, making real money the way he knows how. He’s seen his son born; he’s made sure that DeAnte McCullough knows him, that should he catch a bullet or go away for some years in Jessup or Hagerstown, there is a thin but basic bond on which he can rely. Since his Fairmount Avenue arrest, he’s held the corner at arm’s length, either staying away entirely or leaving it to friends to do most of the street-slinging on a package. But now he’s come back big time. He tells himself that when Tyreeka sees the money, when she’s up to her ass in paid-for Pampers and toys and designer baby apparel, she won’t say shit. This he believes. Deep down, DeAndre tells himself, Tyreeka is still the greedy little girl he used to know.

  The week he goes back to the corner, DeAndre visits Riggs Avenue only three times, sometimes bringing Pampers and once, at Tyreeka’s urging, showing up with winter shoes—miniature Timberlands—for the baby. But emotionally he’s elsewhere; i
n his heart, he’s down at McHenry and Gilmor with his blunts and his forties and all those corner girls looking good to him. And when he pulls out his roll and peels off a five or a ten, Tyreeka can’t help resenting the fact that DeAndre is keeping most of the money for himself. Most of all, she resents him for giving up so quickly.

  Despite the baby, she is once again losing him. Bitterly, she begins calling Fran’s house or throwing pages out to DeAndre on his new beeper.

  “Your son needs diapers.”

  “Your son needs a snowsuit.”

  “Your son needs cab fare to the clinic.”

  The needs are genuine enough, and now that DeAndre is steady slinging, Tyreeka makes no more speeches about the evils of the corner. She knows that a decision has been made, that DeAndre will be on McHenry Street no matter what she says, that she can either waste her time arguing or she can keep a hand out and take what money is offered as a practical, get-it-while-I-can matter. But her constant calls and pages are about more than material need. They are Tyreeka’s last-ditch effort to hold onto the fragments of a family life that she herself has never known but has tried, against all odds, to create.

  With DeAndre back on the corner, it becomes Tyreeka’s task to get the baby to his clinic appointments. Or to go to the market and haul back all those cans of formula. Or to lug DeAnte and all his accessories around the west side, bringing him by bus or hack to see Fran, or to stay with DeAndre’s cousin Nicky and her baby, DeQuan, or with her girlfriends along Fayette Street. She’s alone, save for the company of so many others like her, all of them stumbling down the same road, trying hard to remember to forget whatever it was they once believed.

  Just after Christmas, Tyreeka has the baby with her at the WIC clinic in Edmondson Village, waiting for her appointment with a program intake worker, hoping to get on the voucher system for free formula. In the waiting room with her are a half-dozen girls—three older than Tyreeka, two the same age, one a year younger—all with babies in tow, their eyes heavy-lidded from waiting-room torpor, their bodies round and fleshy from recent pregnancy.

  “How old yours?” one asks Tyreeka.

  “A month.”

  “Mine three months in a week.”

  “She pretty,” says Tyreeka. “That’s a pretty child.”

  “You got them marks?” the girl asks.

  Tyreeka shrugs, confused. The girl lifts her shirt and unhooks the top button of her denims, pulling the waist down to reveal her stretch marks.

  “Oh them,” says Tyreeka. “Yeah. I got them.”

  “When they gonna go ’way?” the other girl asks.

  Tyreeka doesn’t know. But seeing these girls offers some comfort; she senses that she’s doing no worse than anyone else. For Christmas, she bought toys and clothes enough on layaway, though it means she’ll be paying off stores right through spring. Come this afternoon, she’ll be up at the market on Poplar Grove, loading up her cart with formula, her WIC voucher in hand. And next week, she’ll have DeAnte back at the clinic for his well-baby checkup. She’ll do it all and still find power and conviction within herself to love and nurture a child. Born at the wrong time to the wrong people and for the wrong reason, DeAnte McCullough is, perhaps, fortunate enough to be wanted and cared for by a child who, if not entirely schooled or realistic, is nonetheless proving capable.

  “McCullough,” says the WIC program worker, carrying a manila file folder into the waiting room. “DeAnte McCullough.”

  “Here,” says Tyreeka, rising.

  “You’re the mother?”

  “Yeah,” says Tyreeka, “I am.”

  Blue enters his mother’s house from the back, ducking his head beneath the cracked plywood, looking around at the broken shell of the kitchen, seeing it with new eyes.

  “Ho, who’s in there?”

  “Who dat?” comes a rough voice.

  “Blue.”

  Fat Curt pops his head out of the front room, looking down the hallway at the onetime proprietor of this West Baltimore rowhouse. Blue tries to smile, as if to keep the encounter benign. But Curt is embarrassed; now that Blue has crossed over, there’s no other way to feel.

  “Man, I’m gone. I’m doin’ what I shouldn’t be and I’m gone,” says Curt, shuffling past Blue, making for the alley.

  “Curt, man …”

  “Naw, I’m gone,” his breath freezing in the early December cold. “This is all messed up.”

  Curt leaves, but Rita is going nowhere. She’s still on station in the front room, poking the raw meat of her upper arm, trying to lure blood into the bottom of the syringe. She sees Blue and stops, refraining politely in his presence.

  “Hey, Blue. How you been?”

  “Makin’ it, you know, with the help of the Lord.”

  “Well, the Lord must know somethin’,” muses Rita, “’cause you lookin’ good.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I know I ain’t lookin’ so good.”

  Blue smiles, trying for a response.

  “I’m lookin’ rough,” Rita says. “Feelin’ rough, too.”

  Pimp sits in a three-legged chair in the corner, the chair wedged against the wall for balance, a torn and stained blanket around his shoulders for warmth. Shardene is next to him. Eggy Daddy joins the group, coming down the stairs at the sound of Blue’s voice.

  “Eggy.”

  “Hey, Blue.”

  “Hey.”

  For George Epps, redemption has been a journey of a thousand small steps, each undertaken in its. proper time. Back in August, the necessary action—perhaps the only action for which he had strength enough—was simply walking away, leaving what remained of his childhood home and transplanting what remained of his life to a cot at the South Baltimore Homeless Shelter. Then came the counseling. Then the meetings. Then a sponsor. And eventually, when he felt stable enough, he began the search for something else to do with his days and a way to see himself as something more than a recovering addict.

  He found his way back to the rec center, keeping a promise made long ago to Ella Thompson and taking hold of the arts and crafts sessions with the younger children. Blue found some joy there, some stirring of hope in the faces of the little ones, perfectly oblivious in the laughter of the moment, their hands wet with finger paint or sticky with Elmer’s glue. At the rec center, too, he found a friendship with Marzell Myers, Ella’s assistant, who went out of her way to encourage him and became one of the first people to make him feel at ease in a world from which he had long been absent.

  Meanwhile, down at the shelter, the counselors talked about job training, about maybe taking that next step and hooking into the working life. Blue told them he didn’t yet feel strong enough for that, though he had become less resistant to the idea over the last few weeks. Perhaps they’re right, he began telling himself. Perhaps it was time for another risk. After all, he had learned to trust the people at the shelter, to balance his own desires with a new awareness of his own limitations and the raw power of addiction. Come what may, Blue promised himself, this time he would not bullshit himself back to Fayette and Monroe.

  For weeks now, he had been firm enough in his purpose to walk the old neighborhood, traveling from corner to corner along Fayette Street with eyes shaded by wide-frame sunglasses, an African kufi perched on his head, the earphones of a Walkman tape player serving to tune out the chanting and chirping of the touts. The tape player said it all: Anyone sporting such on these corners could not be getting high; a true fiend would trade a $40 Walkman for one-and-one in a heartbeat.

  To those he passed on his daily tour, Blue’s abrupt restoration seemed unlikely enough. This was the same man who took two bills a customer at the door of the needle palace all those years; it was the same man who cannibalized the home of his departed mother. That he could find a way to walk among the living anywhere deserved a certain amount of attention. That he could stroll along Fayette Street, where all the old temptations awaited him, seemed bold and remarkable.

  Yet nothing
about Blue’s recovery could be credited to boldness. He had, in these past few months, abandoned the idea that he could assert himself or that his addiction could be manipulated. Instead, Blue had fought through every trick of his own mind, every rationalization and denial, to reach the most essential conclusion: With regard to vials and glassine bags, he was powerless. He could not, after so many lost years, believe that he knew what he was doing. He could not trust in his own judgment and, like it or not, he would have to trust in the judgment of others.

  Armed with that much understanding, he had ventured from the homeless shelter in ever-lengthening sorties, first skirting the old haunts, then glancing past them, then—as he found the strength—gliding right through them, carrying himself through corners fat with coke and dope.

  But on this December day, the small step forward involves the shooting gallery that he is obliged to call his own.

  “What’s up?” he asks the crowd that gathers in the front room of the derelict house.

  “Same ol’ thing,” says Eggy. “You know that.”

  “Yeah,” says Blue, “well that’s the thing. That’s definitely the thing I want to get at.”

  There is so much that ought to be said now, so many arguments that Blue could make. Moments earlier, before walking back through the alley and into this house, he told himself that this act was more than symbolic. I started this nonsense, he reasoned. I damn sure ought to finish it.

  What had once stood as brick-and-mortar testament to his mother’s life work had long since become a blighted monument to his own life’s waste and pain. That Blue had moved on, that he’d given up paying the back taxes on 1846 Fayette and that the city probably owned the broken shell—all this was somehow beside the point. Blue knew what this house had been and he knew what he had done. For his own sake, for the sake of what remained of the neighborhood and for the sake of the lost souls in the shooting gallery, he had to shut this thing down.

  “I jus’ wanted to say …”

  Speech coming. The old crew looks at him as if from the end of some long, deep tunnel. Blue senses the distance involved and feels the necessary words drying in his throat.