The Corner

by David Simon/Ed Burns

  By early October, she was not only in a place of her own, but she’d been on the street thirty days without a blast, getting the one-month-clean key ring and all the bromides and encouragement she could stand at the Narcotics Anonymous meeting up at St. James. She missed getting high; every day, she missed it. But she kept telling herself she’d seen enough of bottom.

  Then there was DeAndre. Her son, she knew, was watching.

  Not that he made it obvious. What passed for encouragement or hope or fear in DeAndre’s conversation was little more than a word or two, spoken in a quiet moment on the stairs or at the bathroom door.

  “You look good, Ma.”

  Or: “You gain’ back some weight.”

  Or, once: “Ma, I’m proud of you doin’ what you doin’.”

  More than that, DeAndre was responding in kind, showing a little more fealty to the idea of family. At summer’s end, he had slowed his weeding and drinking and carousing on McHenry Street. That was Fran’s doing. She had continued to insist on a midnight curfew, telling DeAndre that he needed to do one of two things to earn his keep on Boyd Street.

  “Either you going to school or you getting a job,” his mother told him. “You ain’t gonna stay here, eating and sleeping and running the streets to all hours. You gonna school or you gonna work.”

  After again testing her with one or two late nights—and once finding himself locked out of the Boyd Street rowhouse—DeAndre seemed to concede his mother’s newfound authority.

  During the early part of September, as his mother was looking into the community college, DeAndre had checked in with Rose Davis only to learn that he was still a ninth-grader at Francis Woods. Professing disgust, he did not immediately go back to class. A few weeks later, however, with his mother continuing to press him, DeAndre returned to the school, asking Miss Davis if he could take work home from his core-class teachers, maybe do enough to move toward his high school degree as a kind of work-study type of thing.

  “Are you working?” she asked him.

  “Looking for work,” he told her.

  So DeAndre’s teachers prepared home assignments that he would occasionally pick up and occasionally complete. This was the school system’s most tenuous hold yet on DeAndre McCullough, though Rose Davis readily agreed to home study, presumably because it was better than the alternative.

  In the first days on Boyd Street, DeAndre made a show of doing some of the schoolwork at the kitchen table, assuring his mother that he, too, was trying. Fran, however, was not entirely convinced. She saw him labor over one assignment only to find the papers forgotten a few days later beneath a stack of skin mags in his bedroom. Nor did her son seem to be on the hunt for a job.

  As to the nights on McHenry Street, Fran gave him some credit for upholding the curfew and respecting her. The change in the weather itself hadn’t brought the C.M.B. crew off the McHenry Street strip; the boys were now of an age to ignore the school semester entirely and sling drugs into the dead of winter if they chose. But DeAndre continued his low-profiling, telling his crew he needed to be home when his child was born, and he somehow managed, night after night, to throw himself off McHenry Street by half past eleven, arriving on Boyd Street a half hour later.

  Finally, at the beginning of October, as Fran was laying out the first full month’s rent to Linda, her son actually started making noises about pitching in with his own roll—helping his mother with the gas bill or the rent money, maybe putting some food in the refrigerator at the end of the month.

  He’d been only halfheartedly looking for a paying job since the fiasco at McDonald’s in the summer, making a few random rounds of the area dollar stores and fast-food emporiums. He’d filled out applications at some of the temp places, too, and tried a few of the clothing and shoe stores at Westside and Mt. Clare Junction. Once, he’d even taken a shot at the Inner Harbor, going all the way downtown to fill out an application at the Pizzeria Uno at Harborplace. But there, as everywhere else, his bottled-up, monosyllablic performance soured the assistant manager, who took DeAndre’s insecurity as evidence of chip-on-the-shoulder sullenness. There was no call back, no second interview, nothing by which he might justify a clean break with whatever limited money he clocked from the McHenry Street trade.

  In early October, though, DeAndre walked into the Wendy’s at Westside and from the start, it was altogether different. The manager and staff were entirely black, putting DeAndre at some ease. He even knew some of the other kids working the grill. But most of all, he felt desperate enough for the job to go to the counter with his heart on his sleeve, looking the lady manager in the eye and telling it true.

  “I need a job bad.”

  She had an opening. And she spared DeAndre the prolonged process of application and interview that never failed to play out both his confidence and patience. She said she’d give him a chance; he only needed to come back the next week and bring both a birth certificate and social security card.

  “Get my uniform next week,” he tells Fran proudly.

  DeAndre would be bussing tables and cleaning up and, if that went well, he might learn to work the grill or maybe a register.

  “What you gonna do about school?” Fran asked.

  “Gonna do that, too. Gonna keep up with my assignments.”

  Soon enough, pride in the family runs both ways. When DeAndre gets the uniform—blue pants, blue-striped top, blue-and-white hat—he fairly parades through the front room and kitchen of the rowhouse, and Fran is looking at DeAndre with unalloyed wonder. At this moment, he’s no longer of and about the corner. She’s been telling him to do right, and now, he’s actually listening.

  “You look good.”

  DeAndre laughs and adjusts the hat amid his dreds.

  “You turnin’ back into my child again.”

  “Please.”

  “I’m serious, Dre. You actin’ right.”

  “Ain’t no child. You can stop callin’ me a child.”

  “You a man, huh?”

  “I’m a workin’ man. I’m gonna show you by helpin’ out with the bills,” he tells her. “But first thing is I got to save enough for a bassinet. Maybe some clothes and toys and stuff. Reeka expecting me to come up with something.”

  The baby is due around Christmas, or so Tyreeka says.

  For nearly three months now, the baby had kept DeAndre half thinking in the future tense, but, as usual on Fayette Street, nothing had come of such thoughts. Now, his mother’s detox and recovery had given him Boyd Street and a leasehold on ordinary life. Now, there seemed to be room enough for a dream or two.

  The plan was practically epic, calling for a job, a girlfriend, a son, and ultimately, a place of his own. In his mind’s eye, DeAndre could see himself slinging Wendy’s doubles and triples and saving enough of his pay to take care of Tyreeka and the baby. Maybe buy a car, too. And then move out into an apartment with his new family. Not right away, but in time; the first thing was getting a job, and now the first thing was set.

  Next was Tyreeka. Fall had arrived, and DeAndre, true to form, was done playing dog. He wanted his steady girl. But from what DeAndre had seen since the summer, everything Tyreeka said on those warehouse steps had been true. She was having his child, but from what he’d seen, she wasn’t having him. In fact, she’d kept more distance from him in the last few months than any time since they’d met more than a year ago—and no wonder, since she’d caught him messing with other girls so many times he’d lost count. As alone and frightened and pregnant as Tyreeka was, she had, over the summer, acquired enough hurt and anger to quit him. She was back in school, living with her aunt up on Riggs Avenue on the other side of Route 40, coming down bottom to visit the Fayette Street boys less and less.

  He’d called her a couple times before Labor Day, but she played cold. Then he’d seen her once down on South Fulton. Tyreeka was hanging with R.C.’ s girl, Dena, and the rest of that crowd. DeAndre reasoned that if she came down to the old neighborhood, she must be hoping to m
eet up with him.

  “Lemme holler at you,” he said.

  “You can holler all you want. I don’t care.”

  “Wait up, Reeka. I’m talkin’ to you.”

  Back in the winter, when he’d been locked up, she’d come down to Boys Village to stand by him. Back in the spring, he’d held her heart in his hands while chasing half the girls on the strip. Now she was making him work, playing him off, and by the end of the encounter on Fulton, it was DeAndre who had to give up the front, who was reduced to professing true love and asking for a second chance. Tyreeka heard him out, arms crossed, smug, and said she’d have to think it over.

  DeAndre paid the price, figuring that if she was thinking it over, he was sure to win her back. He knew Tyreeka loved him—he’d been her first and only—and she’d be with him again soon enough. In DeAndre’s mind, she’d taken him back so many times before that the pattern was fixed. Just his luck that a few days later, she came back down to the strip and caught him hanging with some other young thing from Gilmor Street. He blustered and insisted on his innocence, but Tyreeka wasn’t so young anymore. She rolled out, and when he called her at home that night, she cussed him and hung up.

  But now he has a job, a plan. Now he’s a working man. DeAndre knows that all he needs is to show Tyreeka that blue Wendy’s outfit. She’ll see he’s trying. She’ll find reasons to believe.

  “Ma, you gonna talk to Reeka?”

  “Yeah, I need to talk with her.”

  “When?”

  “Why’nt you tell her to come down this weekend?”

  “You tell her. We ain’t talkin’.”

  “You ain’t talkin’? She got your child, don’t she?”

  “She actin’ like she don’t wanna have a damn thing to do with me.”

  He leaves it to Fran, knowing that his mother wants everything to do with the grandchild. Fran is ready to mother Tyreeka, to coach her through the birth, to make her as much a part of the family as possible. The next weekend, Fran has no trouble convincing Tyreeka to come down and visit for a few days on Boyd Street. The pretext is a heart-to-heart about motherhood and Fran’s insistence on helping with the baby, but for DeAndre and Tyreeka both, the subtext has nothing to do with Fran.

  On his first pass, DeAndre acts as if he didn’t even expect to see Tyreeka down this way.

  “Well I ain’t here to see you either,” she tells him.

  “Oh, you come all the way down here just to see my mother.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Shheeeet.”

  On the second pass, with Fran down at the Farm Fresh picking up groceries, DeAndre comes back into the house, sits next to her at the kitchen table, and listens quietly as Tyreeka talks on about all the things she’ll be needing for the baby. DeAndre takes the cue, telling her almost too casually that he’s got a job now. He’ll come up with the bassinet and some other things too. He’ll do what’s right.

  “You know I’m done with Shanelle,” DeAndre tells her.

  Tyreeka looks doubtful.

  “Man, we been broke up,” DeAndre insists. “I ain’t got nuthin’ more to do with that girl.”

  “Dena says …”

  “Dena don’t know shit. I ain’t been with Shanelle since, like, I don’t know when.”

  DeAndre tells her how it’s different now, how she can come down here to Boyd Street and live with them if she wants. She and the baby. He tells her that he’s ready, that he’s done all his dogging, that he’s here for her and the baby. And Tyreeka does what she always does. She comes back.

  They spend that Saturday night upstairs in DeAndre’s room. Fran lets it happen because what the hell else should she do; besides, it isn’t as if Tyreeka could get any more pregnant. By morning, DeAndre is calling Tyreeka his girl again, and Fran is calling her daughter. That week, the three of them get a ride up to Sinai Hospital for a last sonogram, to ensure that everything is as it should be. Since July, DeAndre has been referring to the child-to-be as his son, declaring that it has to be so because he has no use for a daughter. But coming out of the exam room on this rainy fall afternoon, his face is locked rigid, his expression a perfect blank as he strolls toward his mother in the visitor’s lounge. Fran, hoping for a girl, picks up on it.

  “Well?” she asks hopefully. “A girl, right?”

  DeAndre tries to hold the empty look but can’t. His face crumbles into adolescent laughter.

  “You got a son,” says Fran flatly.

  “Damn right I got a son.”

  “You so got-damn lucky it make me sick.”

  “My boy gonna be a roughneck too. He was jumpin’ all over that television screen. He doin’ backflips and all, kickin’ and punchin’. My boy not takin’ too much shit.”

  “Puh-leeze.”

  “Ma, you shoulda seen him. He was rockin’.”

  “He a little gangster, huh?”

  “He was freakin’. He gonna be worse than his father.”

  For a time, the prospect of a child seems to give both order and possibility to their lives. For Tyreeka, it’s high school on the weekdays, then down to Boyd Street on the weekend to play house with her boyfriend. And by late October, she’s as heavy as Fran can imagine her getting. If late December is the due date, then DeAndre isn’t overstating the case by much: Junior is definitely a roughneck.

  For his part, DeAndre is giving the Wendy’s gig his best shot. He’s working afternoon and evening shifts; sometimes, he’s back in the kitchen area, but usually he’s out in front, cleaning tables or keeping the salad bar straight and stocked. He wants to make the most of it, but there’s no getting around the sheer boredom involved—particularly since business is slow at the Westside franchise. Still, he’s working hard, especially for one of the assistant managers, a younger man with whom DeAndre had quickly connected. But the lady manager aggravates him—she insists that he do things a certain way and she is unwilling to give him more than a handful of four-or five-hour shifts every week. And DeAndre needs hours. He needs money.

  When he finally complains, the manager grows colder, offering only criticism. The assistant manager tries to shield DeAndre, to cajole him into giving the franchise his best work regardless of the growing hostility between him and the manager. It works for a while, but eventually the lady manager gets the ammunition she’s been seeking.

  It happens a little more than three weeks on the job, when DeAndre is confused about the weekend schedule and misses a Saturday, thinking he is supposed to work the following day. When he shows up Sunday afternoon, he’s told that he was needed the day before and that he can go home because there is a full complement ready to work the Sunday dinner shift.

  DeAndre stalks off angrily, returning Monday to learn that he has no hours until at least Wednesday. When he calls the next day, he’s told that Wednesday and Thursday are filled. On Friday, he goes to get his paycheck and find out when he’ll be working next. The lady manager says she’ll call.

  But she doesn’t call and he doesn’t work the weekend. He’s shut out on Monday, too. On Tuesday, he’s given a few hours, but sent home early. It’s the same on Wednesday.

  “I can’t make it on this kind of money,” he tells his mother. “I ain’t tryin’ to get locked up, but I need real money.”

  A week more and it’s clear that he’s out of work. DeAndre sulks for a day or two, then goes back down to McHenry Street, staying out until the early morning hours with Tae and Dinky.

  Fran catches him in his bedroom the following morning, counting cash.

  “You got a roll, huh?”

  DeAndre shrugs, looking guilty.

  “You back to slingin’ then.”

  He explodes, railing against the accusation, declaring that the money is payment on a debt Dinky and Dorian owed him from summer.

  “Who the hell you think you foolin’?” Fran asks, walking away. “You think I’m going to believe you ain’t hustling when you out all night long?”

  DeAndre ignores her, staying out the n
ext night and the night after. Fran locks the door and her son spends the next night on Scoogie’s couch. When he shows up again the following afternoon, Fran shouts him down, assuring her son that he will not stay on Boyd Street unless he’s working a straight job or attending school.

  “I am in school,” he protests.

  “Andre, you ain’t even doing what little work they sending you. I swear, you must think I’m stupid.”

  DeAndre pouts.

  “You either get your shit together or you get out. You want to hustle in the street, you can live in the street then.”

  Fran leaves the house, slamming the door behind her. When she returns an hour later, she’s even angrier than when she left. She’s off drugs. She’s in school. She’s trying. For once in her life, she has the high ground with her oldest son, and she intends to keep it.

  “You pack up your shit yet?” she yells from just inside the front door. DeAndre sits at the kitchen table, his back to her, smoking a Newport.

  “You hear me?”

  He says nothing.

  “Boy,” she yells, “I said do you hear me?”

  She stalks into the kitchen, ready to slap the back of her son’s head, ready to throw his ass out onto Boyd Street.

  “Boy …”

  Through the curl of cigarette smoke, Fran looks down and sees a short-answer quiz on American government. DeAndre is halfway through and still writing. And just beneath the quiz is a vocabulary assignment, neatly completed.

  At the sight, Fran grows more furious than ever.

  “Boy,” she shouts. “Don’t you play me like that!”