The Corner

by David Simon/Ed Burns

  “Fuck ’em up,” says Boo. “Fuck ’em up bad.”

  Simple solutions to simple problems, but Tae has to fret the details. In DeAndre’s absence, he stands alone as leader of the crew.

  “Where we gonna find ’em?” he asks.

  They’re game for an all-out offensive and they’ll settle for an evenhanded beef. But in this instance, the D.C. boys are playing with certain advantages. For one thing, they’re from somewhere else, so there’s little possibility of setting up on them, getting a drop at this address or that. For another, they’re apparently mobile, rolling around in that Acura.

  “They do that drive-by shit in Washington,” says Manny Man.

  “Then we wait,” says Dinky, showing heart.

  “We wait?” asks Manny.

  “If them niggers for real, they sure enough comin’ back,” says Dinky. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

  All strategy ends on this unsettling note. Whatever else might stand to their credit, the Crenshaw Mafia Brothers are not accustomed to playing defense—a point readily proven on the basketball court over the last several months. Their best game is run-and-gun, and now, they’re compelled to stand at a South Baltimore crossroads and wait to see if their opponents will return to shoot bullets at them.

  There’s no question that Dinky has been hungry for this kind of thing, and he’ll take it as it comes. DeAndre’s cousin has been looking for reasons to step up, to explode, to magnify and exaggerate any insult until it becomes sufficient cause for violence. Among his own, Dinky is loyal, quiet, and polite. On the corner, he’s the first to throw a punch or let go of a bullet. He’s been ready to catch a body for a year now, so that some of the boys are actually starting to worry, thinking that Dinky has some kind of death wish.

  Brooks is indifferent, showing no fear and less thought about the matter. Boo is altogether lost, unable to gauge probabilities. The fact that he’s been thinning down, too, makes his judgment even more suspect; Tae and R.C. are both convinced he’s smoking up his own profit.

  For Tae, the choice is deliberate. He’s rational about the risks and rewards, but he sees himself as smarter and more aware than the rest, the soldier least likely to become an early casualty. He’ll take things as they come, reassessing on a day-by-day basis; for now, though, he’s not running. Manny Man is scared and shows it; he’s been playing at this corner game, following Tae, trying to belong to something a little bigger than himself. Now, the idea of confronting a lethal unknown unnerves him.

  And then there is Richard Carter.

  R.C. mostly keeps his own counsel; he listens more than he talks, leaving his usual bluster behind. He’s been a centerpiece of C.M.B. since Tae first came up with the idea for a Fayette Street crew, and in the past he’s not been slow to find misadventure. But now, the gangster ethos is becoming something more than a fantasy. Before, it was always show-and-tell for the neighborhood adolescents, a dabbling with guns and vials and glassine bags that fairly reeked of dare and double-dare. Now, they are on a corner—their corner—confronting something far less predictable than a rival neighborhood crew. Whatever else the D.C. boys are, they are not pretending to adulthood; they are eighteen and nineteen—some look to be in their early twenties. They’ve come up to McHenry Street with some kind of plan, and they’ve thrown down their gauntlet for some kind of reason.

  For R.C., this threat is something of a litmus test, a turning point in his relationship to the corner. He’s had his share of short runs, selling gypsy packages until he gathered enough for girls or weed. He’s played at violence, chasing and beating rivals as a pack, posing with street-bought guns, or maybe punctuating some small gang dispute by letting go of a round or two from a block’s distance. He’s had his fun playing cat-and-mouse with Bob Brown and the rest, knowing in his heart that a juvenile charge would not break him, that a month or two at Hickey School or Boys Village would be as rough as it gets. And when the risk becomes real, when fear or boredom begins to oppress, he knows he can simply walk away, heading up to his mother’s apartment to get blunted and watch cartoons, or back to the rec center for hoops or touch football or Connect Four.

  Now he’s arrived at a real crossroads, a term both precise and symbolic. They all have, actually. As a crew, the only lasting collective accomplishment of the Crenshaw Mafia Brothers is that they have made McHenry and Gilmor. Since summer, not a week has passed that someone with C.M.B. credentials hasn’t been down here representing. Some made money, others went broke, and quite a few proved themselves absolute fuckups; but the corner itself flourished. It was there for them every day, ready and willing to give them another turn. Yet suddenly, interlopers have arrived to take it all away.

  Not much is known about the D.C. contingent, but the mystery itself is intimidating. If they’re anything like the New York Boys who started showing up along Fayette Street four or five years back, then they’ll be in force. They’ll be out there twenty-four, seven, working the corners like it’s a job. To counter that, C.M.B. will have to step up; Tae and R.C. and Dinky—all of them. For C.M.B., the amateur hour is over.

  R.C. senses this. So does Tae. The rest are only vaguely aware that something in their lives has changed.

  “We got to get everyone down here,” says Tae.

  R.C. agrees: “If we coming back tomorrow,” he says, speaking in subdued tones, “then we got to come deep.”

  And they do. The B-and-G boys come off their corner to assist, as does the younger C.M.B. clique—Manny’s younger brother, Dion, Travis, and the rest. Brian comes down from Lemmon Street. Boo brings some people from Ramsay and Stricker. The only notable absences are Dewayne, who is working with Tank and Tony and is therefore linked in some awkward way to the D.C. crew, and DeAndre, who hears of the beef from Dinky, but stays with his baby up at Tyreeka’s house, where he’s still promising to get a job and go back to school and do right by his new family. He sends word back that he’ll be there if any of his boys get hurt.

  The rest post early, showing up on Gilmor Street just after noon, when trade on the lower strip is still slow. Each of them seeds a cracked doorway, or paper bag, or the tire of a parked car with a weapon or two, then takes a turn standing in front of the carryout at the southwest corner. By late afternoon, the adrenaline begins to jump and flash, sparking the false sightings that set them darting—movements that end just as quickly with a burst of nervous laughter and the inevitable pushing and shoving. Only Dinky stands aloof, immune to the antics, braced yet oddly calm. At sixteen, and already with a soldier’s temperament, he’s found his element in crisis. His presence begins to take hold and settle the others.

  They work the shop, sell some vials. As time wears on them, they grow restless waiting and wondering.

  “We got to keep spread out,” Tae insists, thinking tactically. “Not bunch up and shit. And we got to be watchin’ out.”

  There’s general agreement on this much, though no one moves until Dinky steps up, declaring that the carryout corner will be his. Dinky, with his nine tucked into the back of his stonewashed denims, is the anchor in any defense.

  They disperse. And wait. And watch for the Acura, though it’s soon late evening and the car is nowhere to be seen. When something does finally happen, it surprises everyone.

  “Aw shit,” says R.C.

  A string of regular pops, four or five, are heard down near Stricker. R.C. sees shadows cresting the hill from Carey Street, and then a muzzle flash. Next come shouts and scared laughter and Manny Man running back down the block, back past R.C. and a rigid, unmoving Dinky. Then Tae shouts out the lyric of last winter’s soundtrack: “Get ya guns out.”

  At first they’re hearing gunfire behind them, and they’re running, ducking into alleys and behind parked cars and trying to figure out what the hell is happening. D.C. boys? Must be. But no one sees much. Someone yells a curse, then lets go of what seems like a whole clip. R.C. is rushing around the corner onto Gilmor, right behind Boo, trying to find purchase as he jumps t
he curb in front of a parked pickup. He slips and falls, cursing.

  “Aw shit.”

  They’re being routed. Or so it seems until most of them get up across Pratt Street, where they find heart in their own numbers.

  “They was over on Stricker,” says Tae.

  “Where’s Dinky?”

  “Man, they was shooting right over my head.”

  “I think Eric went down.”

  “Where at?”

  “He was behind me and I hear him go, ‘Shit!’ and he’s holding his leg and shit.”

  “Where Dinky at?”

  They talk it through, gathering up nerve in their still-solid numbers. They go back down Fulton, then come up McHenry from the west. Dinky is still standing there, waiting for them.

  “Yo,” Dinky says. “They back down the hill.”

  “Eric get hit?” asks R.C.

  Dinky shrugs. “Ain’t nobody come through here.”

  Who started the shooting? Half a dozen of them want to know the answer to that question.

  “Them D.C. niggers,” says Boo.

  But when pressed, Boo admits to seeing little.

  They move down McHenry, some in the street, others fanning out into the back alleys. Behind the rowhouses on the south side of the street, R.C. is halfway to Stricker when he sees someone race past in the connecting cross-alley. He fires off his .25 and it starts again, but this time with the confusion running the other way, down the hill toward Carey.

  “They runnin’!” shouts Boo.

  From Calhoun Street comes a long string of shots and more shouts—then quiet. Slowly, by twos and threes, the boys drift back to Gilmor, retreating to their original positions and no farther. When the police finally roll through, they’ve stashed their guns on top of the tires of parked cars and behind rowhouse stoops. Some duck into the carryout, others walk across Pratt to the alley basketball court on Lemmon Street, where after-action reports are delivered.

  “Motherfuckers ran and shit,” says R.C.

  Eric is grazed in the calf. No one else seems to be hit.

  “I think I hit one of them niggers in the alley,” says R.C. “He didn’t stop though.”

  “Bullets all around me,” says Boo, elated. “I’m runnin’ up Stricker and they just missin’ me.”

  Beyond that, no one has much of a clue. How many? From what direction? Who shot first? Who was where? Was there even a D.C. boy within half a mile of McHenry Street? It doesn’t make any difference now that the battle is over. What matters is that on this night some crew tried to press them, but they stayed put and kept a corner; all else is mere commentary.

  “They might gonna come back,” says Manny Man.

  “Then we be right here,” says Tae.

  They smoke weed and talk up their heroics until long into the night, secure in the company of each other and enjoying tales of the battlefield that grow bolder by the minute.

  It’s after three when R.C. finally creeps into his mother’s apartment, blunted and drunk from celebrating. The next day, he doesn’t open his eyes until nearly noon. He gets up off his mattress to kill the sound on an X-Men cartoon, then pads out from his bedroom in T-shirt, boxers, and sweat socks. He goes to the kitchen phone, punches the digits for Tae’s beeper, hangs up, then wanders over to the living room, slumping down on the sofa.

  The apartment is empty. His mother is hard at work at the dry cleaner; his brother Bug is now overseas on a ship; Darlene, his sister, is out running the streets somewhere. Without anything or anyone else to occupy his mind, R.C.’ s thoughts run beyond his afternoon hangover.

  He’ll have to go back. Today and tomorrow and the next day, if he’s really a gangster beyond pretending. He’ll have to be down at Gilmor and McHenry every day, or almost every day, if he’s going to do this thing for more than pocket money.

  Yet R.C. has no strength in him this morning, no reservoir of confidence that he can draw from. Last night he was scared. Real scared. Here, alone, he admits this to himself. Who the fuck wouldn’t be scared with people shooting at you. When the guns started going off, he was half-relieved to be past the waiting, to be dealing with it at last. Afterward, with all of his boys around laughing and bragging—then, too, he felt some elation. But now, by light of day, he can’t manufacture any emotion beyond a vague, queasy terror.

  He could have died. Any one of them could be dead now.

  The worst part is the sense that nothing else remains for him, that all of life’s other doors have been slammed and sealed. It isn’t just last night or tonight. The corner now looms as a workaday world, and he knows in his heart it will wear him down to nothing.

  He doesn’t have Dinky’s soldier’s heart; none of them do, really. He can’t be as clever and subtle as Tae, nor can he muster the blind obedience of Boo or Brooks. He isn’t good with the money like some of them are. He’s not like DeAndre; he can’t really lead others or intimidate.

  And then there’s the lure of the vials. In the last few months, R.C. has messed with that shit now and again; he knows he has enough of a taste for it that if he stays out on the corner, he’ll be finding new ways to come up short on the count. He can’t fool himself like Boo does; Boo is smoking up product all night long and then lying about it, swearing he isn’t puffing anything beyond blunts. R.C. might lie to everyone else, too—everyone lies about it in the beginning—but now, conjuring the future, he’s willing to admit to himself that it’s a real problem. Being around the vials will bring him down quick.

  He is not, he has to concede, very good at the corner. Yet the corner is all he has left. School has always been little more than a bad joke, and now that he’s turned sixteen, any effort to return to the rolls of Francis M. Woods would be an act of absurd volunteerism. R.C. can’t imagine what he might say to Rose Davis to convince her of his commitment, nor does he particularly want her convinced. His earlier promises had generally been made under duress, usually when Miss Davis caught him sliding into the gym for rec center basketball practice on days when he had missed every class.

  Now there isn’t even a point to basketball practice. For one thing, Pumpkin had half emptied the gym when he decided to charge his players a dollar each to attend every practice session. For another, R.C. had tired of the rec center team at the very moment the star-crossed squad managed to do the unthinkable.

  They won a game.

  It was not just a contest against some neighborhood pickup team, either. With Miss Ella’s support, they had entered the mayor’s invitational tournament, an annual event that brought out the best rec center and community teams in the city. The Martin Luther Kings, unheard of and unheralded, arrived on a November night in the vast expanse of the Lake Clifton High School gymnasium, sized up the competition, and went to work.

  They were an altogether different unit than in the Cloverdale summer league; still inconsistent, to be sure, but now capable of more than momentary flashes of brilliance. Now, with Tank, Tony, Truck, Twin, and Mike as the starting five—and R.C. and Tae as sixth and seventh men off the bench—they were big enough not to be overpowered, deep enough not to tire, and fast enough to run with any rec team in the city.

  Months of playing together in the Francis Woods gym had given the squad confidence, as well as an instinctive feel for each other. There was still no strategy to their game; it was playground ball with better uniforms. But now, when R.C. came down with a defensive rebound, he fairly knew where Tony would be at midcourt, waiting for the outlet. Now, when Tank put his head down and drove the lane, Mike could drift to the baseline behind him and know that if the shot wasn’t there, Tank would kick the rock back out for Mike’s soft jumper. When the Kings were bad, they were still godawful. But when they were good, their game was right.

  The first round showed the tournament that much, when the Kings beat a Pimlico squad by eighteen. By contrast, the quarterfinal contest against John Eager Howard began with a sudden loss of confidence. The Howard squad had tortured them twice during Cloverdale, an
d the rec team, intimidated, was down by eight—ten to two—early in the first quarter when Pumpkin stopped screaming long enough to sub R.C. for Truck.

  With a rebound, an interception, another rebound, and a quick, half-court outlet pass, R.C. managed to stabilize the team, providing the hard in-the-paint work that made the running game possible. Soon the score was tied, and at the half, the Kings were up by six—a circumstance that led to the kind of bitter recrimination from their opponents that had for almost a year been the lament of the M.L.K. crew.

  “That one there run with my brother,” one of the Howard forwards wailed, “and he nineteen.”

  “All them players is wrong. They all too old.”

  Pumpkin huddled them together, ranted at botched plays and missed opportunities for a few minutes, railed at them for ignoring his commands from the bench, then concluded with a declaration that seemed to surprise everyone; “You all got a chance to win this.”

  But the starting five began the second half cold, and before long, Pumpkin was sputtering and shouting at the edge of the court. When R.C. came in for Twin with most of the third quarter gone, they were down by three and playing tame.

  Again he stepped in and raised their game, centering the defense, covering the paint. At three minutes into the last quarter, they were up by six and Pumpkin was shouting at Mike to slow their game, to force the Howard players to work for their shots. Instead, the Kings ran. It’s what they do best.

  Ignoring their coach, they were soon up by eleven with five minutes left. But Pumpkin was livid. He turned his fury on the referees, badgering them about a traveling call.

  “I’m asking what kind of shit is that?”

  Technical. The M.L.K. players were glaring at their bench.

  “What the hell you lookin’ at?” Pumpkin shouted.

  No one answered. For once, the team was utterly composed. The same R.C. who would scream at other players for imaginary errors was now calm and quiet, responding to Pumpkin’s tantrum with nothing stronger than a sad shake of his head. Ever more furious, Pumpkin turned his attention back to the ref, then to the failings of his players, then to the whole assembly in general: “No one listens to a fuckin’ thing I say.”