The Corner

by David Simon/Ed Burns

  “Where Bunchie at?” asks Fran, sitting up slowly.

  “Downstairs.”

  Fran drags herself off the sofa, then stalks downstairs in search of a blast, which to her mind at least, she has earned. She’s been trying—not every day, not all of the time, but enough that her brothers and sisters are starting to look at her differently. Only trouble is, she’s tired. More tired than she’s ever been.

  She goes down to the basement where she finds Bunchie well into the game. Fran gets her share, emerging on the front steps a moment or two later, carrying the worn print cushion atop which she has marked countless hours of the street parade. She drops it on the top step and sits.

  “Hey, Fran.”

  “Hey, you.”

  And so it continues, with the touts chanting their products and the buyers sliding up and the time-out calls when the occasional police cruiser lumbers past. The next morning, Fran forgets to call down to BRC, but she manages to do so on Thursday, two days late. The next week, she doesn’t phone at all.

  The plan is on hold, the corner world having reclaimed her attentions entirely. Until the next weekend, when she’s on her way down to Kevin’s store and she runs into someone who lets go with the news that Little Mike has actually left.

  “Say what?”

  “He gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “He went to somewheres to get on a boat.”

  The idea of it pulls Fran up short. Mike gone.

  He convinced the judge to let him be, then packed his bags and took himself a new life. Standing there in Kevin’s, waiting for change to come back to her through the Plexiglas, Fran can almost feel the universe slipping out of gear.

  That afternoon, Fran asks around and hears that Mike took a plane to New York and then another plane to Europe somewhere and then got on a boat in Poland. She’s amazed; all that talk wasn’t just talk. Mike’s plan was really a plan. And the thing is, Fran thinks, Little Mike just did it. He went from one step to the next like the end result was assured. To Fran, it seems so perfectly simple: a plan that was straight and true, a bullet-path from one world to the next.

  “Mike a sailor,” says Fran, finally. “Damn.”

  But nothing on Fayette Street is ever straight or true. The truth that never made it to Fran’s ears was that Mike Ellerbee’s plan was always—even down to its last moments—a wisp of a thing, frail enough to fall apart at any one of a hundred moments. On the night before he left, Mike was down at Fulton and Vine, hanging with some of his boys, when one of the dealers rolled up and berated everyone for standing around bullshitting on company time.

  The dealer stepped out of his raggedy Lincoln and walked across the street, shouting to touts and lookouts that they were bitches, that they were supposed to be about his business.

  “I know you not talkin’ to me,” Mike said.

  Suddenly it was the old Mike, the one who would never be trifled with, who couldn’t stand on a corner and let a slur like that go past him. The dealer walked back to his car trunk, popped it open and pulled out a statement-maker. Sawed-off, taped, and ugly. Thirty-aught.

  “I’m sayin’ bitches.”

  And bitches it was, with no one speaking a word until the dealer put the shotgun back, slammed the trunk shut, and walked into the liquor store. Then the boys looked at Mike.

  “Ain’t got my gun,” he told them lamely.

  But Anthony pulled up his shirt to show a.380. Still, Mike wouldn’t budge. For six months, he had written letters and turned in paperwork and taken physicals so that tomorrow he would be leaving the country for something new. He was backing up ten years for the last shooting; throwing down now might mean all that time and more. He tried to say some of that to his friends.

  “I shoot his ass for you,” offered Anthony, sympathetic.

  Mike was on the edge.

  “He ain’t shit,” Anthony prodded. “He can’t talk to people like that.”

  “Naw, man,” said Mike finally. “Jus’ let it be.”

  The dealer walked back out to his car, turning to say he’d be coming back through and wanted to see what he was supposed to see on this corner. Mike swallowed that too—swallowed it for all of twenty minutes, which was about as long as it took for the scales to tip.

  “I be back,” he told the others.

  He went home and got the big gun, the four-four. Then he walked back down to the mouth of the Vine Street alley where he waited in deadly earnest for the dealer to return. But the man did not come back, and the next afternoon, Mike Ellerbee was in a window seat, looking down at the Atlantic.

  That was the real story. That was the plan—thin, precarious, and in the end, more a twist of fate than anything else. But coming back from Kevin’s grocery, Fran can only see the Disney version, the one that says you succeed by simply wanting, by putting one foot in front of the other and waiting for the good things to happen.

  “You got a quarter?” she asks Stevie.

  “Naw.”

  “Kenny, lemme hold a quarter.”

  He gives her a dime, and Ronnie Hughes kicks in a nickel.

  “Bunchie,” she says. “I need a dime. Gotta make a call.”

  “Gimme the rock.”

  R.C. powers up over top of Manny Man to snag the rebound. He wheels left, then cuts back under the basket, emerging in front of Dewayne for a reverse, no-look layup. Dewayne hacks him good, but the shot goes in.

  “Thirty-five,” says R.C.

  “You got thirty,” DeAndre counters.

  R.C. struts to the foul line, takes the ball and cocks his head sideways, a look of disgust on his face.

  “You had twenty-five and that shit you threw up makes thirty,” DeAndre insists.

  R.C. shakes his head, chews his lower lip, dribbles twice, and lofts a perfect free throw. “There, bitch. Forty.”

  “You the bitch.”

  “Gimme the rock.”

  DeAndre fires it at him. Hard.

  “Forty-five,” he says, after dropping another from the line. “Or forty, it don’t make no never mind.”

  This is where R.C. thrives, where he is at ease with himself and his place. He’s got the best game on this court and he knows it. Tae is quick but thoughtless with the ball, DeAndre can’t dribble, Brooks is too small, and Manny Man—he’s best off with a football. On this court and for these few hours of so-called practice, R.C. sets a standard. More important, there is a purpose to his time on the court, a reason for being that transcends every other questionable moment. Here, it’s win or lose.

  He sinks another from the line. “What’s the score. You tell me.”

  “Fuck you,” says DeAndre.

  And another. “Fifty.”

  Fifty is the name of the game being played as they wait for enough bodies to run full. They’re up to six—R.C., DeAndre, Manny Man, Tae, Dewayne, and Brooks—when the interlopers slip through the gym doors.

  Mike from Payson Street. Truck. Twin. These are the boys from Hilltop, the neighborhood due west of Monroe and the Fayette Street strip, the crest of the hill that slopes gently upward from Martin Luther King Boulevard and the city’s downtown. Hilltop marks the frontier of blight in this quadrant of the city, its rental rowhouses only a little more livable than those down the hill. There’s no reliable drug corner in the neighborhood proper; the Hilltop fiends have to cross Monroe Street, or go south below Baltimore Street to get full service. The violence, too, is still for the most part down the hill, between Monroe and Mount. Beyond Hilltop, there is the slope back down to Warwick Avenue, with its greenery and open porches and well-kept rowhomes. This is for the most part a neighborhood of home owners—black working-class, with a few middle-class families in the mix—holding fast to a small island in a roiling sea. In these few blocks, the grass is lush and freshly cut on postage-stamp lawns; the gardens, newly planted and cheerful. On this side of the hill, the residents are tightly knit and very conscious of the long odds against them. They are, quite simply, what Hilltop was ten y
ears ago and what Fayette Street was twenty years back.

  Some natural enmity exists between the C.M.B. boys and the Hilltop crew, with the Fayette Street contingent counting itself superior for living at the heart of the disaster. They don’t live near a corner; they live on it. They don’t hear the nightly echo of gunfire from down the hill; they see the muzzle flashes. More to the point, they know they aren’t living in a neighborhood going to hell; no, they were born into a place that had already arrived there. It was their home that was the stuff of song this year. Mount and Fayette: Get ya guns out.

  But in fairness, Hilltop has been in decline long enough that it can’t really be counted as a world apart. When its children walk into the gym, they carry enough attitude to get over. Mike surely knows the game; Truck, too. Only last summer, R.C. tangled with Mike and his brother, beefing with them after C.M.B. moved over to work a package at Hollins and Payson, a corner that was more Hilltop than anything else.

  And now, on a warm afternoon in May, Mike and Truck and Twin have crossed Monroe Street. They strip off sweats, lace new high-tops, and stretch against the bleachers in the Francis Woods gym—all of them carrying it like they could go either way. Fuck it, their faces say, we can run a game or we can beef. Your choice, motherfucker.

  “Big Truck,” says Tae without rancor, watching the largest of the three lurch onto the court. Truck was named right.

  “Hey,” says Truck.

  The others follow Tae’s lead. The game of fifty continues, with Truck and Tank, and finally Mike crowding under the basket with the rest, waiting for rebounds. The hatchet seems to be buried, at least until R.C. goes to the top of the key, where he ices his victory.

  “What can I say,” he says, half-shrugging. “I got skills.”

  A few seconds later, he brings down a rebound only to have Mike skirt behind him and strip the ball cleanly. R.C. glares over his shoulder as Mike spins into the corner for a long baseline jumper. Nothing but net.

  DeAndre taps the ball back for the courtesy, but R.C. is there to intercept it. He dribbles off in the other direction, leaving Mike waiting in the corner.

  “Ball up,” says Mike.

  “Man, fuck you,” replies R.C.

  And it begins—a fight that has something to do with whatever happened on that corner last summer, but much more to do with whatever status derives from this rec center team. Until today, R.C.’s standing on this court was unquestioned, but Mike is a good shooting guard and both Truck and Twin are six inches taller than anyone else. For R.C., their presence marks something of a challenge. What results is not so much a physical confrontation as a symphony of threat and counterthreat, an airing of grievances too ancient and petty to require open warfare, but sufficient to fill the gym with ripe insults. Whore. Bitch. Punk-ass mother-fucker. The usual verbiage boils down to Mike and R.C. leaning hard into each others’ shoulders: R.C. showing his fiercest mien, eyes bulging, nostrils flaring, fists clenched; Mike, a half-foot shorter and maybe thirty pounds lighter, gives no ground, staring back with cold contempt.

  R.C. rolls away from Mike’s shoulder, then shoves the Hilltop boy backward. That brings up Truck into R.C.’s face, fists cocked at his sides. R.C. takes a half-step backward, but ends the retreat when Tae and DeAndre pull up next to him. DeAndre steps between Truck and R.C.; Tae pulls R.C. away.

  “You down the hill now, motherfucker,” says R.C., yelling past Tae’s shoulder.

  “Bitch,” says Mike. “I ain’t afraid a yo’ punk ass.”

  “You ought to be after how I kicked your ass last time.”

  Mike’s eyes go wide. “You kicked my ass?”

  R.C. nods knowingly. “Sure as shit.”

  “You kicked my ass?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Man, I kicked your weak ass up and down the street.”

  By now it’s clear that this is going nowhere, that these two aren’t quite ready to ratchet up. Truck, DeAndre, Tae—the rest of the troops drift back under the basket, waiting for rebounds, certain that while this afternoon might still promise a good hoop game, a good fight is out of the question.

  To hear it with the logic of the external world, the threats and counter-threats sound like a prelude to war. But on Fayette Street, this is business as usual. It’s gut-level knowledge for all them: Two boys get to beefing, throwing words, posturing, talking about how they’re gonna come back with their Tec-Nine, and everyone else stands around for a minute or two trying to gauge whether the wait is worth the show. The bluster and brinksmanship is constant, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the thing ends with traded insults and maybe an unkept promise to come back with a gun or an older brother or the rest of whatever corner crew is involved. The hundredth time someone comes back in the worst way, but that’s what the corner is about. And when the worst finally happens, of course, a homicide detective is left standing over the corpse, trash talking with his partner about the stupidity of the victim, about how the shooter promised to come back with a gun and the victim didn’t do shit but wait for him. But the cop doesn’t understand: In his world, the threat of a gun would be an epic event, something to bring the adrenaline to a boil. In West Baltimore, a suggestion of violence is the standard terminus to any dispute lasting more than four minutes. People live—and, on occasion, die—trying to sort the genuine threat from the usual rank corner talk.

  “Don’t make me come back down here with my MAC-10,” says Mike, playing out the string.

  “Man, sheeeet,” replies R.C. “Go get your gun, motherfucker. Go get what you need and stop talkin’ bullshit.”

  “Blow yo’ ass up.”

  “Sheeeet.”

  And so it goes. R.C. delivers his last few insults from the bleachers, where he relaces his new Nikes; Mike is talking about murder even as he’s fighting for a rebound at the far basket.

  Dinky arrives to make ten.

  “Let’s run,” says Tae.

  “Choose up,” says DeAndre.

  “Tae and Dewayne. Choose.”

  They go to full court, two pickup teams with the C.M.B. and Hilltop contingents mixed. They run wild, with long alley-oop passes, cherry picking, and absolutely nothing resembling defense. But the new blood shows itself in odd moments of grandeur: Mike penetrates the lane time and again, only to dish off at the last second. Twin dominates the offensive boards. Truck muscles down low, using his size. The general level of play is still sloppy, but occasionally something happens on the court to show all of them that, taken as a whole, they’re a better team.

  Something else becomes painfully obvious. The marginal C.M.B. players—Manny Man, Brooks, Dinky, even DeAndre—are no longer as vital with the Hilltop boys on the court. DeAndre still has his shot, but with both Mike and Tae running point, his weak ballhandling is a liability. Brooks can’t penetrate or connect with anyone’s passing game. Dinky has his moments—he moves constantly without the ball, crashing the boards, stealing rebounds from taller players—but he can’t finish; his shot is rushed and awkward. Manny Man is barely there.

  On the other hand, the challenge brings R.C. to a new level. Mike can see the court the way R.C. sees it; the two of them, playing together in the last of three games, manage to get it done. With Mike regulating the offense, R.C. is rewarded for his rebounding, his defense, his movement without the ball.

  Once, after fighting Truck successfully for an offensive rebound, R.C. turns under the larger boy, double-pumps, then dishes the ball to Mike, who cuts the lane for a layup. Two plays later, Mike drives to the hoop, drawing Truck and DeAndre, before tapping the ball back out to R.C. at the key. R.C. pumps, then shoots a no-look pass back to Mike, who’s behind the basket. Mike fools what’s left of the defense, then fires it back to a charging R.C. for an elegant finger roll.

  Backpedaling downcourt on defense, R.C. wordlessly extends his hand to take five from the kid who was going to go home for his MAC-10.

  “Good pass,” says Mike.

  Like R.C., Tae and Dewayne can k
eep pace with the Hilltop talent, but it’s R.C. alone who manages to grow as a player, to fully integrate himself as part of a team. He’s throwing his body, blocking out, setting piks, diving for loose balls—and sometimes congratulating others when they manage to do the same. At the end of practice, R.C. steps off the court in a rare humor, relaxed, even a little expansive.

  He walks up Fayette with the rest of them, laughing at Tae’s jokes, his loudspeaker of a voice modulated to a conversational tone. For R.C., basketball is the only affirmative act in his life. When practice goes well, he can live with himself. When it goes poorly, he can’t live with anyone.

  More than anyone in this crew, Richard Carter carries with him a mantle of fatalism of a kind rarely seen even along Fayette Street. In his every act, there is a show of insecurity, a complete unwillingness to accept for a moment the possibility that his fifteen-year-old life might be worth something, that existence itself isn’t a game rigged to ensure his failure.

  He has been loud ever since he could talk, literally shouting for attention as the youngest of five children. Before R.C. was born, his mother had fled to Baltimore from Vineland, New Jersey—a last-ditch effort to end a violent relationship with the father of R.C.’s older brothers —settling eventually into a third-floor apartment on Fulton Avenue. The building was a housing project subsidized by the archdiocese, and the Carter apartment was, by neighborhood standards, well-furnished. But R.C.’s mother, who worked hard at a Pimlico dry cleaner and was churchgoing, wasn’t often around during the day. Carrie Carter was, ultimately, less of an influence on the youngest child than R.C.’s father, whom she had met and married shortly after coming to Baltimore.

  Richard Junior lived to be in Richard Senior’s eye, waiting for those moments in the day when he could turn his father’s head with something new. He would sit on the living room sofa every evening, waiting for his father to come through the door. And in those early days, R.C.’s father was a thing to behold, strutting around in a full-length leather coat with a matching brim, cutting quite an image along Fayette Street. DeAndre could remember thinking that his friend’s father was just about the slickest thing he’d seen, a sportsman with so much more style than anyone else on the corners. And for a long time, R.C.’s father was indeed a cut above the usual streetcorner slinger. He had connections; he was buying wholesale, dealing with Jamaicans and Dominicans and the other New Yorkers who were true players in the local trade.