The Corner

by David Simon/Ed Burns

  The following winter, when the police boarded up Blue’s and a couple other vacant-house shooting galleries on Fayette, many of the hardcore fiends moved the needle palace to 1804 Fayette—a vacant property next door to Ella’s apartment. Twice she awoke to the smell of smoke. Twice the fiends set fire to the vacant shell and nearly burned down the block.

  She began buying the Sunday papers on Saturday, checking the early real estate listings. Finally, in 1996, she moved from Fayette Street to a redbrick duplex on a quiet street in Hamilton, a working-and middle-class tract in Northeast Baltimore. And Ella is no longer renting; for the first time, she owns her home.

  Kiti is living with her. He came back from Los Angeles after the earthquake in 1994—Fayette Street might be hell, but not even the devil messes with terra firma. At first, Ella’s fears about her youngest son’s return to the the neighborhood seemed justified. He began hanging with Preston down on Fulton, drinking in front of the liquor store. A few months later, Ella found a handgun in his room. Kiti swore that he wasn’t slinging, that he had the weapon only to protect himself from street robberies. But Ella pressed him to come up with some better plan, to go back to school or take up a trade or do something that would change his direction.

  When Ella left Fayette Street, Kiti moved with her, and he immediately began to respond to the change. A few months ago, he completed certified training in carpentry, after having traveled all the way to northern Virginia by train to attend some of his classes. At this writing, he is wearing a hard hat and mastering his craft on a construction site at Charles and Lexington Streets downtown. More surprising is that his friend Preston has managed to right himself as well, notably by taking up with a young woman from a churchgoing family. He is married, working, and living in a quiet Reservoir Hill apartment house.

  Giving up on her apartment was hard enough for Ella, but it was nothing compared to what it cost her to leave behind the Martin Luther King Jr. Recreation Center. Even as she planned her move from Fayette Street, Ella never had any intention of giving up the rec. All along she imagined commuting down to the center five days a week and keeping hold of that which most connected her to her daughter’s memory. Instead, Ella ran afoul of some neighborhood politics: A secret vote to elect a paid executive to direct the neighborhood group proved less than secret, and Ella had supported the loser. The incoming executive, Joyce Smith, was a longtime friend and ally, but to Ella, the election seemed to cast a pall over the friendship. At board meetings, Joyce became increasingly critical of both the rec program and Ella’s stewardship—or at least it felt that way to Ella.

  At the same time, colleagues in the city parks department who knew of Ella’s work at Martin Luther King began talking with her about doing similar work for better money. The job offer she received in 1996 was tantalizing: She would be supervising children—at a string of West Baltimore rec centers—who would be part of Kids Grow, a new grant-funded program dealing with urban ecology and agriculture. Ella brooded for more than a week, and then, after talking with friends on the Franklin Square board, she gave notice.

  At this writing, she has been working with Kids Grow for more than year. The city has plans to expand the program—which emphasizes gardening, forestry, and environmental learning—to a number of other recreation centers. Ella, still holding a place in her heart for Fayette Street, recently convinced officials to fund the program at Martin Luther King.

  As for the recreation center itself, its leadership passed for a time to Blue, who spent several months as rec director before the kids ran him ragged and he moved on to other jobs. After that, when the neighborhood association was awarded a larger city block-grant, people from outside the neighborhood were hired. Three staff members are now paid to do the work once performed by Ella and Marzell Myers. But Ella’s idea of a boy’s basketball squad outlasted her, and the rec center’s playground was finally rehabilitated several months ago. In fact, city parks officials adorned the lot with one of the better outdoor ball courts on the west side.

  On the day that Ella drove past Mount Street and caught sight of the fresh clay and white backboards, she couldn’t quite believe it. She had asked for that basketball court for years, begging Joyce and Myrtle and any city official she ever encountered. Always the playground improvements were planned; always they were delayed. Now she was gone, as were the boys she had tried to rescue with her fledgling basketball squad. Yet here was the court she had always imagined. A group of older boys was on it, running full-court. She remembered R.C. taking imaginary shots off the broken backboard. She remembered DeAndre and his father trying to attach a loose rim with screws and washers.

  On that day, with change staring her down, she saw the rec as she never thought she would again—from the outside, looking in. Still, she couldn’t be bitter. That gray block of building was too much a part of Ella for her to begrudge it anything. Besides, that isn’t Ella’s way.

  “I knew it,” she said later with pride. “I always knew we’d get that basketball court built.”

  Two years after defending its McHenry Street territory against the intruders from D.C., the Crenshaw Mafia Brothers ceased to exist. What began as a collective act of belonging ended amid the bickering, bitching, and betrayal that marks time on any drug corner.

  R.C. started hitting the pipe, messing up the count, and stealing stashes. Dorian ran off with another package. Tae was losing weight and acting crazy. All of them—R.C., Tae, Boo, Dinky, Brooks, and Manny—began to accuse each other of getting high and thieving, even as they took pains to deny the same allegations themselves.

  And sometimes, they got their guns out.

  In 1995, during a running dispute between the B-and-G crew at Baltimore and Gilmor, and some of the Lexington Terrace boys, two young men rode up to Gilmor and Hollins on bikes and fired several shots. One caught Dinky, DeAndre’s cousin, in the chest. He staggered a few steps to Baltimore Street and collapsed. Hours later, Dinky, age seventeen, was pronounced dead at University Hospital’s trauma center. Although the daylight murder was witnessed by half a dozen B-and-G regulars, little accurate information came back to detectives. Eventually police charged a Terrace boy widely regarded to be innocent. The case was dropped several months later and no further investigation of the crime followed.

  And last summer, in a dispute with a South Vincent Street crew, Boo was shot to death by a sixteen-year-old girl on McHenry Street. But the Vincent Street crew—which included Tank and Tony, members of the old rec basketball squad—wasn’t finished. Two days later, Tae and R.C. were both wounded in an ambush on McHenry Street, with Tae hit in the shoulder and arm and R.C. taking bullets in the hip and hand. Both were treated and released from Bon Secours Hospital.

  Tae, Manny Man, Dion, Dorian, Dewayne, and Brooks are still in the neighborhood; for the most part, they don’t pretend any plan, though Tae credits himself with getting his high school G.E.D. at Francis M. Woods and insists he will be going to college this fall. For now, though, he spends much of his time at Pratt and Gilmor and drinks a great deal. Brooks did almost a year in juvenile custody before coming home last month. Dorian served longer than that. Brian is incarcerated at New York’s Rikers Island for drug charges.

  For R.C., the shooting incident last year proved pivotal. Before then, he had been doing well. In fact, he had slowly pulled himself out of his spiral, walking away altogether from drugs and slinging and the corners along McHenry Street. Taking up with a Mt. Winans girl two years his senior, R.C. found himself long enough to move from his mother’s apartment and secure steady, reliable work.

  At first, a temp agency placed him among laborers at the Maryland Wholesale Food Market in Jessup, a dozen miles south of Baltimore. When a supervisor there asked if R.C. could operate a forklift, the eighteen-year-old responded with his usual bluster.

  “Think I can,” R.C. said.

  “What does that mean? You ever used a forklift or not?”

  “Where one at?”

  The superv
isor gave R.C. a chance to prove himself, and he handled the forklift well enough to win a permanent job.

  Every working day, R.C. left his girlfriend’s grandmother’s house and ventured out to the county. Every week, he brought his pay back to his girl and gave her half, helping to send her through school to be a medical assistant. To his own amazement, he was making it.

  This remarkably stable life continued for almost ten months. Then Boo got killed and the beef with the Vincent Street crew boiled over and R.C. returned to McHenry Street to learn the story. Typically, the old C.M.B. crew laid it on thick, greeting him with guilt and derision for leaving the neighborhood in the first place. Two days later, R.C. was in Bon Secours, watching an intern pull a spent bullet from beneath the skin of his left hand.

  After the shooting, he fell back into his old pattern: hanging on Mc-Henry; missing work until the Jessup job was no longer there; telling lies to his girl. Working with Tae, Manny Man, and the rest, he began turning one package after another at McHenry and Gilmor, at one point, putting together a roll of nearly five thousand dollars. He started getting high again. Eventually, he took a distribution charge. At this writing, he has recently seen the inside of city jail twice for a total of three and a half months. He is currently out on bail, with one drug charge still pending. He is looking for work, looking to get back with the girl who had him doing right for nearly a year.

  “I had it going on,” he says now. “I was doing everything right and I just messed it up. It was like I couldn’t stand to be doing good like that.”

  Nowadays, he doesn’t play much ball.

  Fran Boyd used to tell herself that she had rules about chasing the blast, that there were standards of behavior that she would always maintain. But the corner has its own rules, and number two—never say never—is always in full effect.

  In 1994, when Fran lucked into a subsidized rowhouse and moved from Boyd Street to Lorraine Avenue in East Baltimore, she finally got rid of Marvin Parker—who would himself be dead of an overdose within a year. As someone still nominally identified as a recovering addict, Fran, along with her sons, was placed in the fully rehabbed home through a nonprofit housing cooperative geared to support such people. There were two problems, however. First, Fran was no longer recovering. And second, a prolonged police crackdown on lower Greenmount Avenue had pushed the corner traffic several blocks to the north and east, turning the 400 block of Lorraine Avenue into one of the most active drug strips in the area.

  Fran had always told herself that she would never encourage DeAndre in his drug slinging, that she would never take profit from it or allow him to use her home as his stash house. On Lorraine Avenue, she did all these things. More than that, she robbed him blind, creeping into his room so many times that once, in frustration, DeAndre threw a punch through the bedroom drywall.

  “You got me again!”

  “What the hell you talking about?”

  “My money! You just a thieving dope fiend!”

  “Boy, I don’t know what you talking about.”

  Once, she waited for four hours by DeAndre’s bedroom door, listening to his breathing, waiting patiently for the moment when he would fall asleep and she could go through his jacket pockets for money or product or both. But DeAndre, burned five nights in row, forced himself to stay awake, hoping to catch her doing the deed. The standoff continued until dawn, when DeAndre finally got up to use the bathroom. Fran retreated to her room, waited for the sound of prolonged urination, and then ransacked her son’s room in under twenty seconds. She got forty dollars and felt no shame whatsoever. Her game was her game; what her son brought home had to get past that simple fact.

  Similarly, Fran had told herself for years that she was more about heroin, that she wasn’t going on the coke pipe every five minutes like the rest of these crazed fiends. On Lorraine, though, she went through her check money like water; within months, her face was a death mask, her weight down below ninety pounds. Worst of all, Fran had always told herself that no matter what, she wouldn’t trick. But on Lorraine Avenue, Fran let some of the old men think she was with them; she played them for blast money by using herself in ways that finally brought a quiet, caring reproach from her son.

  “Ma, you better than that.”

  Badly shaken, Fran called the detox center. She waited the wait—four months this time—then left her house key with DeAndre. Twenty-eight days later, she returned to Lorraine and began looking for a new home, a place in any neighborhood where the corners were simply intersections. Instead of drugs, she chased meetings. And when that failed to occupy all her time, she volunteered down at BRC, spending as much time as she could around the detox center.

  After a month or so, she found a subsidized apartment in Baltimore County, up off Loch Raven Boulevard. A few months later, BRC rewarded her volunteerism by hiring her—first to assist in the center’s medical department, and later to monitor residents as a drug counselor. And Fran, like any ex-fiend, was no fool when it came to working with addicts: Having played all the games so well and for so long, she was not about to let the BRC clients run anything past her. Or, for that matter, themselves.

  Just before last Christmas, a few months after Fran had celebrated a full year of being clean, she was laid off—the result of a federal audit of the detox center. It seemed that the grant money funding BRC required all counselors to be fully trained and qualified; to preserve its budget, the center was forced to let go some of its best and most reliable staffers, men and women who had survived the corner and were now using that experience to great effect. Fran, Antoinette, and about a dozen others were corner veterans on a hero’s journey, trying to salvage something of themselves, trying to give a little back. The government, being the government, could not see it.

  Fran was stunned. For a couple months, she holed up in her apartment, chain-smoking and biting her nails down to nothing, waiting, presumably, for her unemployment benefits and tax refund to run out. In the past, such a setback would have been more than enough to send her sprawling. To her credit, Fran sensed as much and fought back.

  At first she went to more meetings than usual. Then she enrolled in courses at a county community college, determined to get some of the training that might have enabled her to keep the job at BRC. Two months after that, she found part-time work at a residential facility for troubled teenagers. At this writing, Fran is beating the streets, looking for something better.

  She also is coming up on two years clean, a span of time that can no longer be mistaken for a victory lap. Her one-year celebration was at a BRC meeting and lasted nearly two hours. This year she’s ambivalent about whether to have a party.

  “I don’t think I want to do anything big,” she says. “I just want it to be a regular day.”

  William and Roberta McCullough remain on Vine Street. Now just short of seventy, W.M. continues to drive every day for Royal Cab, while Miss Roberta volunteers at St. James.

  Most of their many children give them great joy, and grandchildren are arriving regularly to add to that pleasure. But more and more of the corner world has found its way into their home.

  June Bey is still a prisoner of his addiction. And Kwame, always so angry at the world, saw his domestic assault charge dismissed when Regina, his girlfriend, refused to testify, but soon enough landed in more trouble. Kwame received probation for a drug distribution charge in 1995. That same year, he was wounded in a robbery on South Gilmor Street. Recently, he was arrested and charged by homicide with two separate drug-related shooting deaths. He is currently being held, without bail, on Eager Street pending trial.

  For two more years, Gary McCullough worked the warm months at Seapride and spent the winters making his way on capers, from one day to the next, while on occasion relying on Ronnie Boice and his mother’s generosity to get him over. He continued to live in his parents’ basement, to wrestle the snake, to chart his orbit around vials and glassine bags.

  In late 1995 he bought a cap of cocaine at Fa
yette and Mount, went home, fired it up, and got nothing for his trouble. Another burn bag for Gary.

  Two days later a fifteen-year-old street dealer offered to sell him more of the same.

  “Naw,” Gary replied. “It was doo-doo.”

  “Say what?”

  “There wasn’t nothing to it.”

  Two other young slingers suddenly appeared, and without another word, the trio knocked Gary to the ground, beating and kicking him into unconsciousness. For weeks afterward, Gary suffered from a ringing in his ears and a bright glare that made his left eye useless. Oddly, though, Gary seemed to draw strength from the experience, to see himself and his condition in a new light.

  “They was children,” he said, shaking his head. “Children beating on a grown man for nothing.”

  For three days straight, he walked downtown to Mercy Hospital, hoping to get a state-funded bed in the four-day detox unit. When nothing opened up, Gary begged. A friend volunteered to loan Gary five hundred dollars toward the cost of the bed—an offer that pushed Gary to the front of the hospital’s waiting list.

  After two delirious days in Mercy’s detox unit, Gary walked away, returning to West Baltimore and scoring a shot of cocaine. Then, without any regard to the contradiction, he headed down to the South Baltimore Homeless Shelter, saying he wanted to clean up, as Blue and Eggy had done.

  At that point, Gary had been shooting speedballs every day for more than five years. And when the last rush from the last shot of coke left him, he found himself struggling with an incredible depression. At times he became delusional.

  The shelter referred him to the Walter P. Carter Center, a state psychiatric facility downtown. Staff at the center prescribed an antidepressant, and eventually Gary went to stay with his brother Chris in Northeast Baltimore. During the days, he would baby-sit his brother’s children; at night, he would share their company. In return, they would not give Gary money, and they would not drive him back to Vine Street.