He had arrived in the wake of Cloverdale, talking about having learned a lesson and wanting to put something back into the neighborhood after months of slinging and using. He had a part-time job at the bar up on Penrose, but other than that he was available. Besides, he’d done this before, he assured her. Though Ella had seen Pumpkin up on Monroe Street, she was more than pleased. From her point of view, time on the corner did not automatically disqualify a candidate; if it did, two of every three males between eighteen and twenty-four would then be disqualified. She had a coach, and when Pumpkin brought his friend Timothy to practice, she had an assistant coach as well.
“You gonna run for me like you ain’t run before,” he tells them in that first, hard practice.
Only in the last forty-five minutes do they break it down and run a game. But here again, Pumpkin stops the action to lecture and demonstrate and, on occasion, berate players for courtside sins. He is loud—at times sympathetic in his approach, at times angry—but always loud. He is, on this first day, a center to a team for which the center could never hold.
When Manny Man telegraphs a pass and blows a three-on-one break, R.C. begins his usual rant only to find six-and-a-half feet of Mt. Pumpkin looming over him, telling him to shut up and play.
“You don’t yell at him. You don’t need to yell at him.”
“But he ain’t …”
“R.C., shut the hell up and play the game. You do your job, I’ll do my job.”
Two days later, at the second practice, Pumpkin and Timothy are late to the gym. The boys, accustomed to broken promises from the grown men and women of this neighborhood, resort to the usual sarcasm.
“Where Pumpkin at?” asks Dinky, arriving late himself.
“Up on the corner coppin’,” says DeAndre.
They shoot around, run a game of fifty, then start to choose sides for a pickup contest. Finally, Pumpkin posts, storming through the door with something less than an apology and an immediate demand that they line up for windsprints.
“Tae, stop messin’ and run ’em right.”
For now, it doesn’t much matter to them that their coach was, in fact, up on the corner. It doesn’t matter that there are days when Pumpkin and Timothy both seem a little more wired and wild-eyed than usual. If they’re slinging, so be it. If they ‘re getting high, that’s their business. Even more than Ella, the boys of Fayette Street have no interest in making judgments about anything save for the basketball itself. Everyone slings. Everyone gets high. And at this point, if Fat Curt himself came into the gym, shouted them into submission, then showed them how to win a basketball game, they’d probably run for Curt.
“Look up … Look up … Brooks, you got to look down court. You had a man breakin’ …”
By fits and starts, they fall into line, grumbling at the occasional insults and humiliations but also comforted by the belief that they are now part of something a little more real. After a couple of weeks, Pumpkin brings in two ringers from one of his earlier teams—Tank and Tony—both of whom are between seventeen and eighteen years old and are full-time slinging down on McHenry Street. And the extra year or two matters: Not only do Tank and Tony bring better skills to the Francis Woods gym, they bring the calm certainty of corner veterans. They’ve been out there long enough to be hardened off, to accept the truth about where they’re going and what they’re going to get. All around them is the huff-and-puff pretense of the manchild, of adolescents still holding back a bit, caught in the no-man’s land between commitment and fantasy. But Tony and Tank have both been there; the bluster isn’t necessary or even remotely useful. When they go down to the corner, they go to sling, not play; when they come into the gym to run a game, they run the best game they’ve got. They carry themselves in absolute proportion to the event, coming at it directly, with no quarter asked for or received. Bad calls or jail time, bad passes or short counts—they deal with all of it by corner rules; if the affront is big enough, someone gets hurt, and anything less won’t get cried over. Tank and Tony speak volumes to the younger players without saying so much as a word. Their presence in the gym makes everyone else choose between growing up or getting out. Suddenly the rec center team—though no longer a strictly a sixteen-and-under affair—is fast and lethal.
Of the original members, only Tae, Dewayne, and R.C. have the skill to play at the higher level; add the three from Hilltop and the future begins to look ominous for the likes of Manny Man, Dinky, and Brooks.
“It ain’t our team no longer,” says Dinky bitterly, leaving after the last practice he bothers attending. He came to the gym for the joy of it, for nothing more or less than physical release. Though his game wasn’t as sharp as others’, he knew where to find his points and rebounds in a slower, more casual version of run-and-gun. Now, for the purpose of winning, Dinky is expendable.
As Dinky goes, so goes his cousin, though DeAndre has pride enough not to be shunted aside without the proper flourish. Shortly after Tank and Tony are brought down to the gym, DeAndre finds a few obvious ways to violate the new standards of practice, and then, when Pumpkin finally explodes, he fires back.
“You ain’t shit,” DeAndre tells him. “I’m tired of your bullshit.”
“Leave then,” Pumpkin tells him.
DeAndre does, slamming the double doors behind him. What began as an afternoon distraction last winter—a three-day-a-week digression back to fading childhood—had become some kind of job, replete with demands and standards and bosses. DeAndre wants no part of it. Neither does Dinky or Brooks—both of whom join the boycott. With Boo kicked off the team by Ella for fighting, and Brian locked up in juvenile detention behind a drug raid on his mother’s house, what’s left of the original lineup can be counted on three fingers.
The changes in the Francis Woods gym press on the old C.M.B. loyalties. Manny Man, for one, can’t understand why Tae and Dewayne and R.C. are willing to put up with so many newcomers at his expense. He used to play at least a couple quarters of every game; now his court time minutes are, well, minutes.
“It ain’t even the rec team no more,” he complains.
But Tae, R.C., and Dewayne aren’t listening. They’re finally playing basketball at a level that rewards effort. You move without the ball; you get the ball. You play defense; you get recognition and court time. You pull a rebound, outlet a pass and spark a breakaway, and as you scurry back on defense, Pumpkin is pointing you out for credit.
The talent gets so deep that R.C. is sometimes a third forward and sixth man, depending on Pumpkin’s mood. But he’s so exhilarated that the lost minutes don’t matter. When he comes out on the court, he’s instantly connected with this wondrous new machine, these half-dozen teenagers who manage, in their best moments, to think and act as a single organism.
When Ella finally gets them a game against Diggs-Johnson Middle School, they arrive to find thirteen-and fourteen-year-olds half a foot shorter than themselves. They dominate these children, running up the score even though Pumpkin holds out his best players, refusing to allow Tony or Tank or Truck to set foot on the gym floor.
“Man,” says Tae, “they was too young. We need a real game. We need to get into a winter league.”
In early October, they prove the point by once again hosting the old school in the Francis Woods gym, taking on Shamrock and Preston and the rest of the eighteen-and nineteen-year-old Fayette Street crew. This time, it’s all the older boys can do to keep it respectable, to stay within fifteen or sixteen points of the Martin Luther Kings. For Ella’s rec center team, it’s a coming of age, a rite of passage for corner kids who have looked up at the likes of Shamrock and Preston their whole lives. Now, on the court, there is no discernible difference in their game; they’ve grown.
On the court, R.C. has the world as he’s always wanted it. Against the older Fayette Street crew, he has sixteen points. He also has no clue once he steps off the hardwood floor. He has no job save for working other people’s packages on McHenry Street, no interest in sc
hool, and no plan for anything beyond this down-at-the-heels recreation center squad. Night after night, he runs wild down on McHenry Street, slinging and messing with his boys and chasing girls with the abandon of someone for whom no other possibilities ever existed. He doesn’t try to disguise the utter lack of direction in his life; if he ever speaks in future tense, it’s the same old story about how his older brothers, Ricky and Bug, were going to get him into the maritime union in a year or two. And that alone—vague as it is—is enough to excuse whatever comes before it. R.C. can profess to a future; consequently, he can fuck up until the union card arrives.
R.C.’ s latest girl, Dena, is now pregnant, too. Earlier in the fall, Treecee said she was pregnant by R.C. and, for a while, he was looking at two different babies coming at him from two different girls—a prospect that only increased his standing with the rest of his crew. But Treecee’s pregnancy never materialized and R.C. chalked it up to jealousy over Dena’s news. Dena, though, is gaining weight, and R.C. is quietly relieved. He might not be the first in the C.M.B. crew to get a girl pregnant, but he had worked hard to ensure he would not be the last.
In September, R.C. had followed the migratory pattern of the season, traveling to area malls to equip himself with supplies and material for the coming semester—not notebooks or No. 2 pencils or calculators or dividers, but new Nikes, sweats, some jewelry and—most important—a new telephone pager. In fact, the fall semester was only minutes old when R.C. got himself suspended for carrying the pager into the high school. Several years ago, the school system had banned beepers as artifacts of corner culture. Though he feigned ignorance of the rule, R.C. was fully aware of it. In fact, it was for that very reason that he brought the pager with him, then displayed it in front of a staff member, thereby solving the dilemma of what to do with the last remnant of his public schooling. He was nearly sixteen, close enough to his birthday that he could walk out of high school without regard to truancy charges or juvenile court.
But Rose Davis had no intention of allowing the pager issue to determine R.C.’ s future. She’d worked in a city school long enough to read between the lines. That same day, she called R.C. into the office and told him that it wasn’t a full suspension, that he only needed to go with his mother down to the school headquarters on North Avenue for a hearing before being readmitted. She also told R.C. that she didn’t want him to come to the school gym for basketball practice if, in fact, he was truant on the same days.
R.C. responded to her words with a firm acknowledgment that he had heard and understood her.
“Yes’m,” he said.
“So you’re going to go down to North Avenue?”
“Yes’m.”
“And I’ll see you Monday.”
“Yes’m.”
“And I won’t see you creeping into the gym after three o’clock when you haven’t been in class all day.”
“Yes’m.”
“Say what?”
“I mean, no, ma’am.”
“All right then.”
His mother dragged him to North Avenue, the suspension was lifted, and R.C. never made another day of school.
In early October, Rose Davis catches sight of him going up the front hallway stairs in his sweats, palming a basketball, then finger-rolling it against the wall.
“R.C.”
“Yes’m.”
“Young man, I’m going to have to take you off the roll.”
“Yes’m.”
She looks at R.C., knowing that there is no place left to go with him, that there is nothing to be said or done to change or improve on a disaster years in the making. He’s just a child, a big, insecure child, carrying his wounds and scars for all the world to see, and yet he’s a finished product. The horror is he’s content with this. She knows that he just wants to be left alone.
“You want that?” she asks him.
“No, ma’am.”
“Then come in and see me,” she offers. A tenth chance. An eleventh chance. Or maybe it’s the force of habit that causes her to say such things. R.C. hesitates for a moment until Rose Davis goes through the front office door. He waits there with the ball on his hip to see if she’ll toss him from the gym. When she doesn’t—when she grants him the gym because at the least, it’s not a corner—he jogs up the stairs, kicks open one of the metal doors, and spins for a jumper.
Manny Man and Dinky are there. Dinky tries to block the shot, but fouls R.C. on the forearm instead. The jumper falls.
“And one,” he says.
DeAndre McCullough is first through the door when his mother turns the key, first up the stairs, and first into the big bedroom at the front of the second floor.
“This room mine,” he says, staking claim.
“The hell it is,” his mother counters.
“Ma, you said I get my own room.”
“I didn’t say it would be this one. Young as you are, you want to take the second-floor bedroom and have me runnin’ up and down from the third floor all the damn day.”
“Be good for you,” assures DeAndre. “Good exercise.”
“Boy, get yo’ ass up them steps.”
It’s the third floor front for DeAndre, with DeRodd taking the rear bedroom across the hall. It may not be the biggest room, but it’s his, his own space—a chance to stretch out and take control.
DeAndre walks from wall to wall in his new room, judging distances, imagining furniture and possessions that he doesn’t yet own. He opens a window, leaning out the front of the rowhouse and scanning his new block all the way to Franklintown Road. A fall breeze rushes to greet him.
“Yeah boy,” he shouts.
This three-story Formstone rowhouse will be home to the three of them only; shelter and salvation for the only residents of 1625 Fayette Street with heart enough to walk away. Fran won’t go back to the Dew Drop. She’s promised; and of all the vows she’s made since coming out of detox three and a half weeks ago, this is one she has backed with precious check-day dollars. After three weeks at Scoogie’s house, Fran makes this move to a place of her own, taking herself and her sons off the Fayette Street strip, down the slope past Hilltop, and up the next side hill to the middle of a block of small, three-story rowhouses named, appropriately enough, Boyd Street. The 2500 block of Boyd—no more than an alley, really—stretches between Franklintown and Catherine, just north of the Westside shopping center; it’s far enough west to be out of the way of the corners that tempted her most, but it’s really no farther from the drugs than the Dew Drop. Franklintown and Baltimore is a corner. So is Franklintown and Lombard. Catherine and Hollins is an on-again-off-again strip, depending on which crew is working which package. Still, it seems to Fran like a clean enough break with the past.
To DeAndre and his brother, three bedrooms to be divided among three occupants amounts to unthinkable luxury. They will be living as a family does—as DeAndre himself can remember living in those years before his father left and his parents both fell into the vials.
“We doin’ good now, Ma,” DeAndre tells Fran during that first night on Boyd Street. Their furniture, or what was left of it in the basement of the Dew Drop—a glass dining room table and woodblock chairs, a few mattresses and battered dressers, the dying green-tint television, and a wobbly chrome-and-glass bookshelf—every stick of it would arrive this weekend. Gary’s brother, Cardy, had volunteered his pickup truck, but he didn’t have a day off from the crabhouse until Sunday. Still, even with an empty house, they’re too excited after getting the keys to stay at Scoogie’s another night.
They sleep that night in makeshift bedrolls on the hardwood of the second floor, listening to the unfamiliar creaks and moans of joists and walls and the rattle of the front windows in the wind of a late September night.
“This house is right,” DeAndre tells her.
“And we just startin’,” she assures him.
Money was going to be tight. Fran had hoped to line up a Section 8 housing voucher after coming out of detox, but
the waiting list for subsidized city housing was something like three years. As for hooking into a Section 8 development like the one down in the 1500 block of Fayette, where the rental company could itself get hold of a voucher or two, Fran lost out there as well. Her credit was shot: Ms. Churchill at the rental agency—the name in which she had put so much hope—couldn’t help once Fran’s credit report came back, the rental company wouldn’t risk a voucher on anything but a solid rating. That left the want ads, where any place worth renting was at least three hundred, plus utilities.
Fran spent a day or two with the newspaper, hunting a bargain. Instead, a bargain found its way to her in the form of a phone call from an old friend, a woman who knew Fran from a brief stint when the two worked for the same temp agency, just after Fran lost the phone company job. Linda had stayed in touch with Fran, even rolling past the Dew Drop now and then to treat Fran to a meal. Having heard that her old girlfriend had cleared detox and was staying with her brother, Linda called Scoogie’s house and offered a rowhouse that she’d inherited from a dead relative and had been trying to rent for weeks. Fran, in turn, gave Linda a little of the old-time’s-sake, asking for a reduced rate while she tried to get on her feet again. Still, the rent on Boyd Street would be $255 a month—more than three-quarters of her monthly AFDC check.
The food stamps would keep them in groceries for most of the month. What little cash remained—seventy or so—had to buy everything else. That meant winter coats, athletic shoes, and denims; cigarettes, snacks, and the pay-by-the-month bus passes, which were now an essential item, for Fran especially.
Only a week after emerging from detox, in early September, she had taken another small step toward change by enrolling in courses at the city community college’s Liberty Heights campus. Fran was going back to school on a Pell Grant, taking algebra and English composition at the city community college up on Liberty Heights, trying to get those first two course requirements out of the way so that maybe, in time, she could get a two-year degree in computers or health care or something that might mean real work. The English wasn’t a problem, but the algebra was painful. Fran told herself that she would deal with it, that she was going forward one step at a time. She’d hit the books before the first test, maybe find a tutor if she still had trouble with all that x and y nonsense.
The Corner Page 57
