“Andre has a son,” he says, as if saying the words can make him believe it. “My son has a son of his own.”
When a ten-year-old cousin comes in off the porch, Gary struggles with a sentence or two, asking the boy to tell Tyreeka that he had to leave. The boy nods, then wanders back into the kitchen.
Gary fumbles with his coat snaps, wipes his eyes with his sleeve, pulls on his knit cap, and braces himself against the cold. It’s a good fifteen blocks south by southeast to Monroe and Fayette and it’s very late. His mother will be home. Maybe his father, too. And Ronnie—she’s probably hunting him right now. Mean and spiteful and thinking the worst.
“I chose this,” he says, turning down Riggs.
Gary puts his hands into his jacket pockets and leans forward. As he walks, the wind dries his face.
If you want shit done right, DeAndre McCullough thinks, you got to do it your own damn self.
So he’s got the drugstore out this morning, spread out across the blue shag carpet in the front room on Boyd Street. He’s got his mother’s mirror, a clean razor blade, a bag of empty red-topped vials, and about $600 worth of idiot-proof, already-stepped-on, profit-guaranteed, precut coke, straight off a weekend Metroliner from New York. Though it’s after noon, he’s still in his underwear, his eyes a dried-up pink from last night’s revelry. But he’s warm in the stream of sunlight from the front window, and he’s feasting on a breakfast of milk-sodden Cocoa Krispies and strawberry Kool Aid, and he’s taking in the boom and beat from the half-assed stereo, with Dre and Snoop and the rest of the Death Row crew telling all them other niggas to make their shit the chronic,’ cause they gots to get fucked-up.
DeAndre McCullough is getting it done. With a practiced hand, he’s severing line after line from the granular pile, filling and capping each vial in an assembly-line motion. Bottle after bottle, bundle after bundle—he can do this with a discipline and precision that never showed itself anywhere else in his life. It’s a skill. Simple, yet essential. He’ll be on the blue carpet, vialing up, for another hour.
DeAndre McCullough can break a package down and put it on the street, keep it safe and tabulate the profits. To a degree, he can lead, organize, motivate a handful of lesser corner talents. He can arrange for runners, lookouts, and touts. He can set up a stash house, establish a routine, monitor sales. More than most of those who go down to the West Baltimore corners at the end of adolescence, DeAndre can see what needs to be done, then do it himself, or better still, get others to do it for him. And when they don’t, when they fall down, or disappear, or mess the count, he can be fierce or, at least, he can pretend to be fierce. He can stand his ground against the fiends and their moves, against competitors and rivals and predators. He can, if he concentrates all his experience and abilities, go down to a corner and turn the package into spending money.
As a way of living, it’s not much; by the standards of society at large, it’s nothing at all. But DeAndre can do it. If he fashions a plan that goes beyond the everyday distractions, he has gifts enough to put some kind of run together. By rights, he should be able to get his own apartment, breaking free of Fran and controlling his own space. He should be able to keep track of his money, get it out of his pocket and into a shoebox, put that shoebox beneath his bed or in the back of his closet, and have it stay there, untouched and unmolested.
That’s the future as DeAndre now sees it. That’s his plan as he finishes with his vials, cleans the mirror, and tosses the razor in the kitchen trash. He tells himself that three bundles will be enough to start the day’s sales, provided he can get down to McHenry and Gilmor by three or so. He likes to sling during the Southern District shift-change, risking the corners only when Turner and the other bottom-end police are busy with roll call. In a good late-afternoon hour, he can make more than a week’s worth of aftertax burger-slinging money. Turning off the tape player, he gathers himself together, then runs upstairs for his winter coat, taking the bag of empty vials with him and hiding them in his dirty laundry.
He picks out his hair, slaps a cold washcloth across his face, and slides out into the late December sun, thinking to himself that the other way just won’t work, that he can’t sit up on Riggs Avenue playing house with Tyreeka and the baby. For one thing, he is still sixteen years old, and a daily routine of Tyreeka, the baby, and domestic living is likely to drive him crazy. And it seems to him like the girl is hitting his beeper five and ten times a day, crying all the time about needing this and wanting that.
DeAndre has sense enough to see that it isn’t diapers or Weeboks that Tyreeka is grasping for—it’s him. She wants to know where he’s at, who he’s with, which girls he might be messing with. Today he still claims that he loves Tyreeka, loves his son. But in the same breath, he tells himself that he’s sick of getting her pages, sick of arguing with her at pay phones and sick of being told that he owes her a package of got-damned disposable diapers.
Only last night he had called her, promising to bring a box of Pampers in the morning. But later for that; Tyreeka will keep. Instead, DeAndre walks down to Baltimore Street and gets a hack ride across Hilltop and down bottom to McHenry Street, where the rest of the C.M.B. crew has once again proved entirely capable of stealing his money, messing up his count, and generally turning profit into loss. The lesson is that you can’t remote control a corner. You have to be there, watching over the sales and counting the vials and keeping an eye on all of the players. Otherwise, you bleed out.
The years of shared history among the crew working Gilmor and McHenry don’t help either. Friendship aside, his boys have got to do some honest work for their share of the package, and lately, they’ve been letting him down.
For starters, DeAndre wants to kill Dorian; last week he disappeared between supplier and stash house with a whole quarter. Dorian was crying about how a stickup boy got him, but he has fucked up so many times in the past that he’s unable to carry that lie for any distance at all. He’s hiding from DeAndre, fearful, but hoping that after a few weeks even a missing quarter can be forgotten. And DeAndre, despite his bluster, might just have to forget. The alternative is to beat or maim or kill a boy with whom he has for years cut classes and chased girls and run the streets. Though DeAndre is physically capable of doing any or all of those three things, he cannot sustain the rage necessary to follow through.
DeAndre also has a beef with R.C., who owes him money and who has already taken one ass-whipping from Dinky for coming up light on a count. Likewise, Manny Man is hiding out with Miss Ella up at the rec, afraid to come down below Pratt Street where he’d have to deal with a long string of accumulated debts. As for the leader of the pack, Tae is off somewhere smoking rock, or so DeAndre now believes. Just as R.C. has been on the pipe as well; DeAndre is sure of it no matter how many times R.C. laughs off the accusation. Boo? That boy’s been fiending for months; Boo couldn’t look worse. And so what if DeAndre himself is snorting some dope on the weekends? Dope isn’t coke, and he isn’t about to start messing with coke.
By his accounting, the entire crew is comprised of fuckups, save for himself and Dinky. His cousin, at least, has his back; DeAndre figures it should be enough.
No, to get paid from a corner, you have to go down to the corner. There is no other way. All that one-for-all, all-for-one talk among the standing members of the Crenshaw Mafia Brothers is proving to be just talk after all. They are growing up and growing apart; the corner itself is seeing to that. When they were children, they played the neighborhood games—snatchpops, for one—grabbing ice cream or sodas out of each other’s hands, then yelling no snatch-backs and laughing. Now, they’re palming each other’s vials and running off with ground stashes. A year or two more and the petty betrayals will accumulate. Soon, they’ll be hunting each other, beating each other, maybe even shooting each other. The corner rules are inexorable.
For now, with the Southern District shift-change only a half hour away, he goes directly down to his corner where Dinky is waiting on
him.
“Turner rolled out just before,” Dinky tells him.
The bundles go fast, and DeAndre stands on post, shameless. He’s a player. A hustler. At this point, he could care less what his mother thinks. She’s the one who brought Marvin into the house. She’s the one getting high. She’s the one who’s not doing shit with her life. Last month she went through the check-day money in not much more than a week. This month, the same damn thing. And not only the check money, DeAndre knows, but a hundred that she managed to borrow from friends and relatives who still believed in her, who thought the loan was for Christmas presents for her sons. Naw, DeAndre tells himself, I’m not trying to hear shit from her about any damn thing.
He slings through the shift-change, and when he goes home to Boyd Street after midnight, Fran is upstairs, trying to sleep. In the morning she glares at him but says nothing, and DeAndre feels stronger for it.
No one is pretending anymore. No one is making threats. His mother is back in the mix and he’s free to do what he wants. A couple of days later, DeAndre catches up to his mother in her usual spot on Fayette Street, perched on the front steps of the Dew Drop with the regulars. Bunchie and Stevie, Drac and Little Roy, Ronnie Hughes and Michael and Sherry.
“Hey,” he says.
“Lemme hold ten,” she says.
“I’m broke.”
Fran gives him a cold look, but doesn’t press for the money, instead telling him that it’s fine, that she doesn’t want anything from him anyway.
“You think you big-time,” she tells her son. “You ain’t shit, little boy.”
“Yeah, all right,” he mutters, stalking off.
Fran watches her son go, her heart closed to him, if only for this moment. She’s back where she started—back to her games, her angles, her getting over on people, one blast at a time. And, she’s willing to admit to herself, she’s certainly better at the corner life than at any other kind of existence. Life without dope and coke was all complexity and aggravation. But today she made some money. She palmed some vials. She did what needed to be done.
Tomorrow, she tells herself. Tomorrow she’ll sleep in, get sick, get well. But the fall is accelerating: She’s now getting high three or four nights a week, telling herself that it’s no big thing, that she can carry this or leave it be. Incredibly, though, she’s able to slow herself down briefly before succumbing to the long descent back down to the bottom. Just before Christmas, she fashions a plan for the holidays.
Dragging herself off Fayette Street, Fran talks to Scoogie, convincing her brother to go down to the market with her for groceries. With all else around her a disaster, the idea of Christmas dinner becomes Fran’s touchstone—an emotional link with last month’s Thanksgiving feast, when the Boyds stepped off the corner and dressed themselves up for a rare moment of familial harmony. She’ll do it again, she tells herself. She’ll recreate that moment down to the last piece of sweet potato pie.
Two days after cursing her son on the Dew Drop steps, Fran is down at the market on Pratt Street, sizing up birds with her brother. Scoogie is with her in large part to see that his money goes toward actual groceries, though it’s true that he’s as captivated as Fran is by the memory of his family’s Thanksgiving epiphany.
“Even Stevie looked good,” he tells her.
“Yes indeed. Cleaned up and all.”
All day on the twenty-fifth, she burns her heart out in Scoogie’s kitchen. If redemption was a matter of bread dressing and brown gravy, Fran Boyd would be a woman saved.
Laying down dish after dish on the dining room table, she waits for the others to drift in from Fayette Street. As for Marvin Parker, she dealt with him the best she could, telling him she wouldn’t be around Boyd Street much during the holidays and that he needed to get his shit in order by the new year. Marvin threw her the same old bone about having called the detox clinic, telling her his name was definitely on the waiting list. In her mind, Fran is through with Marvin, but she can’t put him out just yet—not during the holidays, not while the weather’s bad and he’s got nowhere to go.
The Christmas feast is every bit as awesome as Thanksgiving, except that this time Bunchie, Sherry, Alfred, and Kenny rush in at the last moment in worn denims and sweats. Stevie wanders in late, pupils wide, eyes heavy-lidded, his gaunt frame leaning at improbable angles, swaying precipitously in the gale force of a good package.
And DeAndre. The boy staggers in when the food is half gone, brushing past aunts and uncles with scarcely a word. He grabs a plate, fills it, and lumbers into the living room.
Tyreeka is waiting on the sofa, with their son sleeping soundly in his carrier at her feet. She has been sitting there for three hours, staring morosely at music videos, pretending to be waiting for anything in this world other than DeAndre McCullough.
She barely looks up when he steps in front of the television and hits the buttons on the top of the cable box, changing up to an action movie.
“I was watching that,” says Tyreeka softly.
“Not no more,” says DeAndre.
Tyreeka fights back tears, still refusing to look anywhere but at the television. DeAndre gives the top of DeAnte’s head a quick rub, puts his plate on the coffee table and settles into the sofa. Fran can see he’s high, and complains to Scoogie that it’s just like DeAndre to mess up Christmas dinner with a forty-ounce. But moments later, with a half-full plate in front of him and the family bustling around the dining room table and television, DeAndre leans back on the couch and slips into a gaping, openmouthed nod.
Fran looks at him, sees that the denims are soiled, that the army jacket has stains on one shoulder, that the dreds are matted flat. Is this DeAndre, who takes such pride in his clothes, his appearance, his look? And his skin—DeAndre actually looks dusty, his face and neck showing that dull, sheenless pallor that can only come from a hard drug sucking at life itself.
“How Andre look to you?” she asks Scoogie in a whisper.
“Messed up,” says her brother.
“I mean, if I didn’t know better, I’d say he was using dope.”
She lets her own words hang, contemplating them from a distance, as if she’s on the outside of the problem looking in. DeAndre swore he’d never have shit to do with dope or coke. He saw what it did to his father, to her, to everyone else in her family. But that’s him nodding on the sofa, drooling and breathing deep, his food going cold in front of him.
“He just drunk is all,” says Bunchie.
A few minutes more and the boy stirs himself and picks up his fork. He finishes the plate, then shoves DeRodd and Little Stevie off the end of the sofa so he can lie down. When Tyreeka hears him snore, she gets up to change the channel.
Ten minutes later, Bunchie’s daughter, Nicky, arrives with her boyfriend, Corey, and their baby, DeQuan, and with their arrival, DeAndre begins to show signs of life. He greets Corey and his cousin, then notices DeAnte awake and staring up at him mournfully. He squats beside the baby carrier to play with his son.
“Hey, boy.”
DeAnte gurgles.
“Hey, boy. Who you lookin’ at?”
He still says nothing to Tyreeka, who keeps to the television, watching to see how the Grinch stole Christmas, avoiding all eye contact with DeAndre. Corey finishes his plate, nudges DeAndre, and the two of them gather up their coats.
“Where you going at?” asks Fran.
“Out clubbin’,” says DeAndre.
Fran looks over at Tyreeka. The girl is melting into a corner of the sofa, trying hard not to look up from the cartoon.
“Dinner’s great, Ma,” says DeAndre, turning to leave.
“You not gonna stay around with your son?” asks Fran.
DeAndre bristles. “I see him when I get back.”
He goes. When Fran turns back from the door, she sees Tyreeka, her face half-hidden beneath her open hand, crying.
“Reeka. You and the baby going to stay with me tonight, ain’t you?”
The girl leans
over and picks up her child. She manages to nod.
“You’ll see him tonight,” Fran tells her, trying to soften the hurt, but Tyreeka says nothing. Fran walks back into the dining room, where Bunchie, Sherry, and Scoogie have pushed their chairs back from the table and are reliving a shared bit of sibling nostalgia. Pulling a chair close to Bunchie, Fran joins them, content for now just to listen to their meanderings. She wants this moment, and she’s not about to let her son rob her of it. Even Stevie comes alive, rousting himself from his own nod, joining them somewhere along memory lane.
Despite the shaky start, the evening holds Fran’s small desire. Not until well after midnight, with dishes clean and drying, do Fran, Tyreeka, and DeRodd struggle down Saratoga Street with DeAnte and the several plastic bags stuffed with his paraphernalia.
“DeAndre be in a better mood when he gets home,” Fran assures Tyreeka. “You know how he be acting around Corey.”
It doesn’t play out that way, though. Tyreeka hangs around Boyd Street for a couple of days, but DeAndre barely acknowledges her presence in the brief stretches of time when he shows himself. Otherwise, he’s down on McHenry Street with his boys, or clubbing and partying at night. Fran tries to intercede, but DeAndre is unreachable.
When Tyreeka is finally ready to go home to Riggs Avenue, Fran helps her pack her things and arranges for a hack. The young mother leaves with the baby just after dinner; the father is still running the streets somewhere.
“I’ll tell him you waited as long as you could,” says Fran.
“Don’t even bother,” says Tyreeka.
That night, DeAndre doesn’t come in. The next night, he comes home in the early morning hours, long after Fran has gone to bed. When she gets up in the morning, her son is lost to the world, sprawled half-dressed across his mattress.
The Corner Page 73