The Corner (56 page)

Curt nods.

“Around here,” says Kathy, “I’m known as the bitch.”

“You the bitch, huh?” says Curt, now laughing. “I best watch out for myself then.”

“You better watch out if you’re wasting my time,” she says. “You say you want to change, but I can’t do this for you.”

“I know,” says Curt. “It’s all about me.”

“That’s right.”

“I got to want to change.”

“Right.”

The room goes silent. The social worker waits for the next logical assertion, but it never comes. “Curtis,” she says, finally. “Do you want to change?”

“I need a break,” he says grudgingly.

It’s as close as he dares come. Still, Kathy offers to get him started. If he promises to attend the group sessions at Tuerk House every day, she can get him on the waiting list for the twenty-eight-day program there. She’ll also help him fill out the applications for state social services, medical assistance, and federal disability through Social Security.

“What I need is a place of my own,” says Curt.

“Well, that’s something we can work on. But you’ve got to show me that you’re serious. Are you going to go to these meetings and get yourself into Tuerk House?”

“Yeah. I’m tired. I’m tired of bein’ tired.”

He’s discharged a week later, sent back out into the street with what’s left of his liver and the same wreck of an ankle as before. For now, he’ll stay with a sister up on Ellamont Avenue, using her rowhouse for his address on all the applications to be filled out at Rosemont and the Social Security branch office on Frederick Avenue. The caseworkers are not hopeful. Maryland is cutting back public assistance for adult males, and, as for federal disability benefits, it’s a dead certainty that any applicant will be turned down for SSI benefits on the first attempt unless he’s stone blind or quadriplegic.

So Curt stays on Ellamont, waiting for a check that may never come, rising late each morning to fight his sweatpants over the top of his bloated legs, then struggling to get his foot inside a pair of running shoes three sizes too large. Most days, Curt makes the noon meetings at Tuerk
House, the detox facility across the street from the Rosemont social services office, where he sits in a room with two dozen other wounded souls, most of them names and faces he knows from a life on the corner. They charge two bills for the Tuerk House meetings; two dollars to tell your true story and hear other people do the same. The reasoning is that after all these years of scratching out blast money, only a no-hustling dope fiend can’t come up with two bills. Either that, or a dope fiend who isn’t serious about changing, and therefore has no need for meetings. But if you pay your money and catch enough sessions, the social worker makes a call and you’re off the waiting list. Then comes four weeks inside—enough time for some people to call themselves clean.

With every meeting, Fat Curt learns more of the cadence of a new language. And after three weeks in the back of the Tuerk House meeting room, he finds it in himself to stand and be heard.

“Name’s Curt,” he tells them. “I’m a drug addict.”

“What’s all the damn commotion?”

Fran Boyd is on the steps, joining the rest of the neighborhood, peering up Fayette Street at a cluster of police cars, their blue strobes flashing.

“Turtle, what happened?”

Little Stevie looks up at his aunt in absolute earnest, delivering what he knows in the most ordinary tone an eight-year-old can manage.

“Mr. Eddie shot somebody.”

Fran glances back up the street then turns to her nephew, who looks back at her with complete dispassion. Stevie might as well have told her it was going to rain.

“Get in the house,” she yells at him.

“Yes’m,” says Stevie, stung by her harshness.

As another day begins on Fayette Street, Fran Boyd is still here in body, if not spirit. She’s still scoping the terrain, still taking the shit as it comes. In her heart, though, Fran has taken the first few small steps on that long road to somewhere else. As the usual summer mayhem swirls around her doorstep, she finds it harder to manage the mind-set that sees everything as the stuff of low comedy or high drama. Increasingly, what she manages amounts to disgust, a lingering emotion she can’t shake even in her sessions in the basement—sessions over which she’s made an honest effort to gain some control.

She’s still in the mix, of course—until the people from BRC call, Fran
has got to negotiate her world—but lately, Fran has been talking about the corner more as a thing despised than as a thing mastered. She was good at the game, better than most, but the hot months bring a crazed senselessness. It makes even the best and most devoted players uneasy; it makes anyone thinking about change think a little harder. Today’s distraction is a shooting. The day before, it was a police sweep. Tomorrow there will be something else. Now, since seriously beginning to contemplate her own escape, Fran sees less sense to this life than ever before. Day after day, she sits on her steps and watches the big-tent circus, still alert for her angles, but now she does so with a heightened awareness of the horror.

A week ago she saw a Mount Street regular named Clyde, home from the charge he took over the winter, arriving at his corner just in time to get snagged with some vials, tossed in the Western District wagon, and returned to the detention center.

“He came to visit for just a little while,” Fran deadpanned. “Now he gone back home.”

After that she witnessed R.C.’ s sister Darlene go after another girl on Mount Street with a baseball bat and felt only broken nostalgia: “You know I used to baby-sit for her and Ricky and Bug. She was sweet back then. She crazy now.”

More recently Fran was out on the steps when Stashfinder, one of the Western District’s finest, came charging up Fayette to grab some pink-top vials off the vacant lot and give them to her brother, Stevie.

“What you doin’, officer? They ain’t mine,” Stevie Boyd implored as they cuffed him up. “I swear to you, they ain’t mine.”

And they weren’t. In point of fact, Stevie was touting heroin, not coke on this particular day. He was on the way out of the house wearing a green brim and black sweatshirt when the police snatched him. Alfred, Bunchie’s better half, who was selling the Pink Tops, was also wearing a green cap and black hoody, but he had stepped back inside the Dew Drop to take a leak. It was a rare miss for Stashfinder—Sgt. Timothy Devine, by name—a veteran who had worked the bottom end of the Western District for years.

Devine had earned his nickname from the locals by doing police work the old-fashioned way. Stashfinder wouldn’t simply throw probable cause to the wind, rolling up on a corner and diving into everyone’s pockets. He’d get out of his car and creep. He’d watch a corner for hours from inside a vacant rowhouse, or from a rooftop, using a blanket that he kept
in his cruiser trunk. He’d wait awhile, letting all the pieces come together. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, when he did come down on the corner, he’d walk straight to the ground stash, pick it up, and bring it back to the right slinger. If he’d seen the money go from the tout to dealer, he’d follow that too, so that a supplier took his rightful charge.

Normally the idea of her brother wrongly arrested for someone else’s package, and by Stashfinder especially, would send Fran—or anyone else at Mount and Fayette—into paroxysms of rage. The idea that the police were lying, that they always lie, was a recurring theme. And while much exaggeration went into this, there was enough that was true. A day in Western District courtroom saw enough perjury to make any lawyer think twice about asking anyone in a police uniform to take the oath. Street-level police work on many Baltimore corners had come to mean jacking everyone up, finding a stash, and then deciding at random who would eat the charge. This would infuriate the corner veterans, who liked to insist that there were standards. Of course they were all guilty in the larger scheme of things, but that was never the point. The touts and fiends weren’t asking for some overall judgment; they simply wanted the police to play the cards dealt. But Fran had now lost her sense of outrage, so that after Little Roy, Stevie’s supplier, put up the money to bail her brother out, she shrugged and chalked up the whole mess to raw chance.

“They locked up Stevie for Alfred’s shit,” Fran told people. “But you know Stevie got no right to complain. They might like to come back around five minutes later and lock his triflin’ ass up for something else.”

It was that old proverb: Beat your child once a day; if you don’t know what for, he does. It was also, in the psychology of the corner, absolute apostasy. Get it straight, Fran: Police lie, and the corner can’t be wrong.

She is slipping, and those around her begin to take notice of this at odd moments. On the day after Little Stevie sees Mr. Eddie throw a cap into some unlucky opponent, Gary arrives on the steps of the Dew Drop with a Double Shield tester, looking to fire up in the midst of a terrifying asthma attack. Out of nowhere, Fran ambushes him with an anti-drug lecture:

“… and you standin’ there, barely able to get your breath, thinkin’ that shit gonna make you better. Gary, you killin’ yo’self with that shit.”

Fran Boyd as Nancy Reagan.

“Dag,” Gary wheezes.

“I’m serious, Gary. You gonna die behind that shit.”

Gary shuffles around for a moment, looking for an out. “So,” he says,
feeling deep in his pocket, “you sayin’ you don’t want to go down to the basement then.”

“Sheeet,” says Fran, following him inside. “I ain’t the one coughin’.”

She still had to get over every day, but now, in her mind she was rebelling. Now, Fran would witness a beating and wonder aloud: Why they got to beat a man for being short on the count when he’s always short on the count? They know he’s a dope fiend. They know what’s going to happen when they give him the vials. Now, Fran would hear about a shooting and ask what shooting people had to do with selling drugs. Everything else in this world gets sold without store clerks and customers getting killed behind it. Why couldn’t the people at Mount and Fayette get their shit together?

And at the end of the month, when Bunchie had gone through her own check money and whatever rent her siblings have paid and is still unable to come up with the $30 rent on the Section 8 apartment, Fran expresses amazement. Is her sister that trifling? How could she go through every last dollar? How could she spend it all and not even be able to make the Dew Drop’s paltry rent?

“I mean, she got to know that the end of the month is coming. And she talkin’ about she can’t even come up with thirty dollars?” Fran would wail. “What little shit we got left gonna be in the street … I got to get up from here.”

This was the reconstituted Fran talking, the newly baptized soul who has been making those calls down to the detox unit, the one who now believes she could fall no farther. Bunchie hasn’t changed; she is a fiend in good standing, and her job is to get the blast. It’s Fran who is forgetting Rule One.

The following week Fran manages to get Antoinette from BRC on the phone. For her trouble, she learns that her name is nearing the top of the waiting list.

“I’m sure we probably gonna have a bed for you next week.”

Fran can’t believe it when she hears it.

“Next week?”

“Next week.”

She hangs up the phone elated. One week.

Now she has a lot to get done. First, she’ll have to scratch together enough money so DeAndre and DeRodd can make it to the end of the month. Then, she’ll have to give her Independence Card to DeAndre and show him how to use the card in an automated bank machine. In
Maryland the social service agencies had gone to the equivalent of ATM cards rather than mailed monthly checks, thereby liberating recipients from the usury of check-cashing outlets and rampant check theft. The irony in the name of the new mechanism notwithstanding, Independence Cards have been designed to carry the economy of West Baltimore into the millennium.

She’ll need some things for herself as well. Bath stuff and some new tennis shoes and slippers and some fresh clothes and assorted other sundries. She is cleaning up here, starting fresh. She might wear the same rags going into detox, but she plans on coming out brand spanking new. Normally, this would require a boosting run to a county mall, but Fran has sworn off her discount shopping sprees for months now—not only in deference to all the upcoming trial dates she’s collected, but for fear that the next arrest will mean jail time, costing her this chance at drug rehab. Her last boosting venture had been at Easter, when she had worked the department stores long enough to acquire a new set of sweats for DeAndre’s holiday promenade down to the Inner Harbor.

Now she’ll have to shop from register to register, like a chump. That means more money, and that, in turn, means reaching out to anyone and everyone for whatever she can get. Suddenly, Fran’s best dope-fiend move is to claim her place as an ex-dope-fiend-to-be. For the next full week, she plays her new status for all it’s worth, leaning on her brother Scoogie for cash and a commitment to watch out for her children while she’s detoxing. And Scoogie—he can’t possibly say no, not after insisting that he’s been clean for years. With his sister finally making the move, Scoogie will have to pay.

She also works Gary for the promise of a little money for his son. Michael, DeRodd’s father, gets a call as well. And Karen, Scoogie’s love and Fran’s best friend from the good old days, offers to take DeRodd if necessary. Fran works anyone at all sympathetic to her new found cause. It’s loaned money, she tells those willing to front a few bills; when she’s back on her feet, the cash will come back. Even if few seem to believe her, Fran hears her own charity pitch and begins to believe it herself.

One day she actually goes to Bunchie and asks for a pass on next month’s rent, but Bunchie stays firm. Her older sister seems a little put out by Fran’s change of heart; in fact, her family—with the possible exception of Scoogie—is decidedly unenthusiastic about the whole endeavor. Stevie and Sherry are able to mouth the called-for platitudes,
but Fran can see something else in their tired eyes. They don’t want her to go. If she gets out, it will be, to them, a judgment.