The Corner (78 page)

The week he goes back to the corner, DeAndre visits Riggs Avenue only three times, sometimes bringing Pampers and once, at Tyreeka’s urging, showing up with winter shoes—miniature Timberlands—for the baby. But emotionally he’s elsewhere; in his heart, he’s down at McHenry and Gilmor with his blunts and his forties and all those corner girls looking good to him. And when he pulls out his roll and peels off a five or a ten, Tyreeka can’t help resenting the fact that DeAndre is keeping most of the money for himself. Most of all, she resents him for giving up so quickly.

Despite the baby, she is once again losing him. Bitterly, she begins calling Fran’s house or throwing pages out to DeAndre on his new beeper.

“Your son needs diapers.”

“Your son needs a snowsuit.”

“Your son needs cab fare to the clinic.”

The needs are genuine enough, and now that DeAndre is steady slinging, Tyreeka makes no more speeches about the evils of the corner. She knows that a decision has been made, that DeAndre will be on McHenry Street no matter what she says, that she can either waste her time arguing or she can keep a hand out and take what money is offered as a practical, get-it-while-I-can matter. But her constant calls and pages are about more than material need. They are Tyreeka’s last-ditch effort to hold onto the fragments of a family life that she herself has never known but has tried, against all odds, to create.

With DeAndre back on the corner, it becomes Tyreeka’s task to get the baby to his clinic appointments. Or to go to the market and haul back all those cans of formula. Or to lug DeAnte and all his accessories around the west side, bringing him by bus or hack to see Fran, or to stay with DeAndre’s cousin Nicky and her baby, DeQuan, or with her girlfriends along Fayette Street. She’s alone, save for the company of so many others like her, all of them stumbling down the same road, trying hard to remember to forget whatever it was they once believed.

Just after Christmas, Tyreeka has the baby with her at the WIC clinic in Edmondson Village, waiting for her appointment with a program intake worker, hoping to get on the voucher system for free formula. In the waiting room with her are a half-dozen girls—three older than Tyreeka, two the same age, one a year younger—all with babies in tow, their eyes heavy-lidded from waiting-room torpor, their bodies round and fleshy from recent pregnancy.

“How old yours?” one asks Tyreeka.

“A month.”

“Mine three months in a week.”

“She pretty,” says Tyreeka. “That’s a pretty child.”

“You got them marks?” the girl asks.

Tyreeka shrugs, confused. The girl lifts her shirt and unhooks the top button of her denims, pulling the waist down to reveal her stretch marks.

“Oh them,” says Tyreeka. “Yeah. I got them.”

“When they gonna go ’way?” the other girl asks.

Tyreeka doesn’t know. But seeing these girls offers some comfort; she senses that she’s doing no worse than anyone else. For Christmas, she bought toys and clothes enough on layaway, though it means she’ll be paying off stores right through spring. Come this afternoon, she’ll be up at the market on Poplar Grove, loading up her cart with formula,
her WIC voucher in hand. And next week, she’ll have DeAnte back at the clinic for his well-baby checkup. She’ll do it all and still find power and conviction within herself to love and nurture a child. Born at the wrong time to the wrong people and for the wrong reason, DeAnte McCullough is, perhaps, fortunate enough to be wanted and cared for by a child who, if not entirely schooled or realistic, is nonetheless proving capable.

“McCullough,” says the WIC program worker, carrying a manila file folder into the waiting room. “DeAnte McCullough.”

“Here,” says Tyreeka, rising.

“You’re the mother?”

“Yeah,” says Tyreeka, “I am.”

Blue enters his mother’s house from the back, ducking his head beneath the cracked plywood, looking around at the broken shell of the kitchen, seeing it with new eyes.

“Ho, who’s in there?”

“Who dat?” comes a rough voice.

“Blue.”

Fat Curt pops his head out of the front room, looking down the hallway at the onetime proprietor of this West Baltimore rowhouse. Blue tries to smile, as if to keep the encounter benign. But Curt is embarrassed; now that Blue has crossed over, there’s no other way to feel.

“Man, I’m gone. I’m doin’ what I shouldn’t be and I’m gone,” says Curt, shuffling past Blue, making for the alley.

“Curt, man …”

“Naw, I’m gone,” his breath freezing in the early December cold. “This is all messed up.”

Curt leaves, but Rita is going nowhere. She’s still on station in the front room, poking the raw meat of her upper arm, trying to lure blood into the bottom of the syringe. She sees Blue and stops, refraining politely in his presence.

“Hey, Blue. How you been?”

“Makin’ it, you know, with the help of the Lord.”

“Well, the Lord must know somethin’,” muses Rita, “’cause you lookin’ good.”

“Thanks.”

“I know I ain’t lookin’ so good.”

Blue smiles, trying for a response.

“I’m lookin’ rough,” Rita says. “Feelin’ rough, too.”

Pimp sits in a three-legged chair in the corner, the chair wedged against the wall for balance, a torn and stained blanket around his shoulders for warmth. Shardene is next to him. Eggy Daddy joins the group, coming down the stairs at the sound of Blue’s voice.

“Eggy.”

“Hey, Blue.”

“Hey.”

For George Epps, redemption has been a journey of a thousand small steps, each undertaken in its. proper time. Back in August, the necessary action—perhaps the only action for which he had strength enough—was simply walking away, leaving what remained of his childhood home and transplanting what remained of his life to a cot at the South Baltimore Homeless Shelter. Then came the counseling. Then the meetings. Then a sponsor. And eventually, when he felt stable enough, he began the search for something else to do with his days and a way to see himself as something more than a recovering addict.

He found his way back to the rec center, keeping a promise made long ago to Ella Thompson and taking hold of the arts and crafts sessions with the younger children. Blue found some joy there, some stirring of hope in the faces of the little ones, perfectly oblivious in the laughter of the moment, their hands wet with finger paint or sticky with Elmer’s glue. At the rec center, too, he found a friendship with Marzell Myers, Ella’s assistant, who went out of her way to encourage him and became one of the first people to make him feel at ease in a world from which he had long been absent.

Meanwhile, down at the shelter, the counselors talked about job training, about maybe taking that next step and hooking into the working life. Blue told them he didn’t yet feel strong enough for that, though he had become less resistant to the idea over the last few weeks. Perhaps they’re right, he began telling himself. Perhaps it was time for another risk. After all, he had learned to trust the people at the shelter, to balance his own desires with a new awareness of his own limitations and the raw power of addiction. Come what may, Blue promised himself, this time he would not bullshit himself back to Fayette and Monroe.

For weeks now, he had been firm enough in his purpose to walk the old neighborhood, traveling from corner to corner along Fayette Street with eyes shaded by wide-frame sunglasses, an African kufi perched on his head, the earphones of a Walkman tape player serving to tune out
the chanting and chirping of the touts. The tape player said it all: Anyone sporting such on these corners could not be getting high; a true fiend would trade a $40 Walkman for one-and-one in a heartbeat.

To those he passed on his daily tour, Blue’s abrupt restoration seemed unlikely enough. This was the same man who took two bills a customer at the door of the needle palace all those years; it was the same man who cannibalized the home of his departed mother. That he could find a way to walk among the living anywhere deserved a certain amount of attention. That he could stroll along Fayette Street, where all the old temptations awaited him, seemed bold and remarkable.

Yet nothing about Blue’s recovery could be credited to boldness. He had, in these past few months, abandoned the idea that he could assert himself or that his addiction could be manipulated. Instead, Blue had fought through every trick of his own mind, every rationalization and denial, to reach the most essential conclusion: With regard to vials and glassine bags, he was powerless. He could not, after so many lost years, believe that he knew what he was doing. He could not trust in his own judgment and, like it or not, he would have to trust in the judgment of others.

Armed with that much understanding, he had ventured from the homeless shelter in ever-lengthening sorties, first skirting the old haunts, then glancing past them, then—as he found the strength—gliding right through them, carrying himself through corners fat with coke and dope.

But on this December day, the small step forward involves the shooting gallery that he is obliged to call his own.

“What’s up?” he asks the crowd that gathers in the front room of the derelict house.

“Same ol’ thing,” says Eggy. “You know that.”

“Yeah,” says Blue, “well that’s the thing. That’s definitely the thing I want to get at.”

There is so much that ought to be said now, so many arguments that Blue could make. Moments earlier, before walking back through the alley and into this house, he told himself that this act was more than symbolic. I started this nonsense, he reasoned. I damn sure ought to finish it.

What had once stood as brick-and-mortar testament to his mother’s life work had long since become a blighted monument to his own life’s waste and pain. That Blue had moved on, that he’d given up paying the back taxes on 1846 Fayette and that the city probably owned the broken
shell—all this was somehow beside the point. Blue knew what this house had been and he knew what he had done. For his own sake, for the sake of what remained of the neighborhood and for the sake of the lost souls in the shooting gallery, he had to shut this thing down.

“I jus’ wanted to say …”

Speech coming. The old crew looks at him as if from the end of some long, deep tunnel. Blue senses the distance involved and feels the necessary words drying in his throat.

“I’m sayin’ that, you know, this has got to stop.”

Pimp shifts uneasily in his broken chair.

“I mean you want to get help, I’m here to help, you know. An’ if you want to go on like you been, that’s okay, too, but I’m sayin’ I don’t want it to be here.”

The others look around at each other. Rita shifts her eyes away, staring into the sunlit crack in the front plywood. Eggy Daddy steps past Blue, mumbling an excuse me, looking for some other moment than the one now being shared.

“I mean,” Blue continues, “I know I started this. But it’s got to stop somewhere.”

“Well,” says Rita, always polite, “you right to say so, I guess …”

But no one moves. Blue tries to talk to Rita, to convince her to take a walk with him up to Bon Secours. Get some help for the raw flesh on that upper arm.

“You need some attention on that.”

“I know it.”

“So let’s go.”

“Now?” asks Rita.

“Yeah now. No time like the present.”

Rita shrugs, looking around the shooting gallery for help. When none is forthcoming, she tells Blue that tomorrow would be better.

“Tomorrow,” says Blue, sad at the word.

“I be ready tomorrow.”

He tried. And for trying, he feels a little better. He wishes them well, telling them to stay warm, assuring them that they can pull him up any time if they’re looking for help. Then he walks back through the kitchen and into the alley. His war is over—he prays that it’s over anyway—and they are still here, soldiering into another winter. And Blue, for all his new strength, can’t help but love them, respect them even, for their resilience, for their unwavering devotion. From the outside, Blue can see
it perfectly: There’s no one like a dope fiend. There’s no one alive who can go to sleep in a vacant house at night in the dead of winter, night after night, knowing that he’s doing what he has to, that everything else might be lost, but the blast will justify him in the end.

No speech by George Epps can move these people. As he leaves his mother’s house, he has to concede that in some sense their claim to the property is more legitimate than his own. A week passes before he rouses himself to call the Western District, talking to a police captain about giving the needle palace a toss, maybe reboarding all the doors and windows with fresh plywood.

“There’s people in there that need medical attention,” Blue tells the captain. “They need to get some attention for their own good. That’s really why I’m calling on it.”

The Western troops do make an appearance, evacuating the shooting gallery long enough for an Urban Services crew to nail up fresh plywood. That pushes Curt and Rita and the rest down the block for a few days, or for at least as long as it takes someone to pry loose the barrier and creep back inside.

Blue comes back through, sees that it’s no use, and lets go. He’s on a different road now; what happens in his old house is beyond his most essential task, which involves saving himself. But what Blue can’t lure from the shooting gallery eventually washes up at the doors of the Bon Secours emergency room anyway, broken and ill.

Among equals, it’s Fat Curt who drops first, collapsing on his corner in an incoherent and jaundiced heap, his liver doing all the things the doctors warned him it would do. He’s admitted, stabilized with fluids and enzyme therapy, and detoxed once again as a matter of happenstance. This time, unlike last August, he’s in no shape to be discharged. With his liver problems and his extremities bloated and his blood pressure off the charts, no one can manufacture a viable excuse for dumping him back on the street after a week or two.

Instead, he settles into a third-floor bed in a semiprivate room, a change that Curt himself soon regards as a reasonable cold-weather respite. The food is bad, of course; everyday Curt stares down at the Jell-O on his tray table and begs visitors to bring him barbecue. And there’s not much drama to the daily routine: Changes of dressings on his abscessed limbs, whirlpool, and physical therapy provide what passes for excitement during Curt’s medical interlude. But he’s warm and dry and watching television on clean sheets.