The Corner (80 page)

“I mean, damn,” says Tae, “I know we ain’t doin’ right. But how can some other peoples tell us to get off the corner when they doin’ the same thing we doin’.”

“And they not even from around here,” adds Dinky.

“Man, I know it,” agrees Tae. “Where they comin’ from sayin’ that we can’t stand here when they ain’t even from here?”

“Ain’t like they New York Boys,” says Boo.

“That’s what I’m sayin’,” Tae insists. “They from D.C. How can they come up here and act like they got the right to be tellin’ us shit.”

“It’s fucked-up,” R.C. says again.

“They fucked-up,” says Dinky, making it specific.

At sixteen or seventeen years, most of the C.M.B. crew are still too young to see the corner rules as the end of all argument. The blast and the dollar are the only two standards by which life at Gilmor and McHenry can be governed, yet here they stand, perplexed and offended at the behavior of another group of young men selling drugs. They are still young, and in a perverse way, idealistic. Consequently, the idea that people can be arbitrary and irrational, unjustified and imperious is fuel for all kinds of indignation.

Off and on, they’ve been playing at the corner for three or four years now, time enough to learn a lot about selling drugs. Money, mechanics, players; ruses and risks, dodges and fears. But now, with the ante suddenly raised, they’re confronted with the elemental unfairness of the thing—the corner not as their playground, but as the rigged game it always proves to be.

Since summer, C.M.B. had been entrenched at Gilmor and McHenry. They had scouted the corner, opened their shop, brought good dope and coke to the down-bottom McHenry Street strip. And they were seeing some dollars because of it.

The Southern District troops were still running on old-school time—chasing calls and writing reports and generally rolling past the corners on their way to somewhere else. The stickup boys still weren’t showing much interest either. And the white boys down here were loyal and docile customers. Their money was always on time; their version of the
stashstealing, short-changing, dope-fiend move was a pale imitation of the games played on Fayette Street. Some other young crews had set up down here, but they were, for the most part, accommodating of C.M.B. and its enterprise. The history and connections between groups proved lubricant enough: Boo’s brothers had the shop at Ramsay and Stricker; Dewayne, Tank, and Tony were down on South Vincent; Herbie and his brothers were over to the west on Payson.

So on this early December night, idling at the lip of an alley a half a block from their corner, with a couple of forties going flat from lack of attention, the crew is angry as they struggle with the latest turn of events. This one started, as these things often do, without much fanfare. Two nights ago, they were out here on post—Tae and Dinky and Brooks—when a dark blue Acura rolled past, speakers blaring. The car came through McHenry Street a second time, finally rolling up to the north corner at Gilmor. Tae was there, leaning against the bricks of the corner house, trying to look hard and disinterested at the same time, wondering who they were and how it might play out.

Down came the passenger window.

“Yo, Shorty.”

“You talkin’ to me?” Tae as DeNiro, but without the backup.

His gun was home. Dinky, standing across the street, had his nine at the stash house, but that was half a block too far.

“This our corner.”

“Huh?”

“You got to be movin’ on. You standin’ on our corner.”

Tae fell speechless. Their corner?

“I’m sayin’ you don’t want to be standin’ out here tomorrow,” warned the boy in the car. Before Tae could react, the Acura slipped away from the curb, turning at Monroe. Then Dinky came across the street.

“Yo, what up with that?”

It would take Tae a couple of minutes to get some pieces of the story together. And it would take all of C.M.B., working hard on those few shards, most of the next day before they felt confident enough to peg the threat. Dinky had the Acura pinned to some older boys who had showed up a couple of days earlier and opened shop across the street from them on Gilmor and McHenry. This fitted with some other scraps: a tip from Brian that a crew from D.C. had tried to do something over on Fulton Avenue, and R.C.’ s report that some D.C. boy was a cousin to
Tank, and that D.C. boys had come up here on Tank’s invite. All of this blended with Tae’s sense that the boys weren’t local.

Still, as they grappled with all the ramifications tonight, it didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Dinky remembered when the boys had made their appearance, first at Gilmor, and then, when it was clear their vials couldn’t compete with C.M.B.’ s product, down the block at Stricker Street. After watching them for a couple of hours, it was obvious that the new crew wasn’t about a whole lot—just some latecomers with weak stuff, looking for a little room.

The C.M.B. contingent let them be. There was market enough for anyone on McHenry Street, particularly since the double-seal bags that R.C. and Brooks had out now were smokers. And for their hospitality, they’re rewarded with a threat.

Conferencing at the mouth of the alley, Dinky is, as usual, the most adamant. “Yo, we shoulda squashed ’em right from jump,” he says. “This shit here is ours.”

“What we gonna do?” asks R.C.

“Fuck ’em up,” says Boo. “Fuck ’em up bad.”

Simple solutions to simple problems, but Tae has to fret the details. In DeAndre’s absence, he stands alone as leader of the crew.

“Where we gonna find ’em?” he asks.

They’re game for an all-out offensive and they’ll settle for an evenhanded beef. But in this instance, the D.C. boys are playing with certain advantages. For one thing, they’re from somewhere else, so there’s little possibility of setting up on them, getting a drop at this address or that. For another, they’re apparently mobile, rolling around in that Acura.

“They do that drive-by shit in Washington,” says Manny Man.

“Then we wait,” says Dinky, showing heart.

“We wait?” asks Manny.

“If them niggers for real, they sure enough comin’ back,” says Dinky. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

All strategy ends on this unsettling note. Whatever else might stand to their credit, the Crenshaw Mafia Brothers are not accustomed to playing defense—a point readily proven on the basketball court over the last several months. Their best game is run-and-gun, and now, they’re compelled to stand at a South Baltimore crossroads and wait to see if their opponents will return to shoot bullets at them.

There’s no question that Dinky has been hungry for this kind of
thing, and he’ll take it as it comes. DeAndre’s cousin has been looking for reasons to step up, to explode, to magnify and exaggerate any insult until it becomes sufficient cause for violence. Among his own, Dinky is loyal, quiet, and polite. On the corner, he’s the first to throw a punch or let go of a bullet. He’s been ready to catch a body for a year now, so that some of the boys are actually starting to worry, thinking that Dinky has some kind of death wish.

Brooks is indifferent, showing no fear and less thought about the matter. Boo is altogether lost, unable to gauge probabilities. The fact that he’s been thinning down, too, makes his judgment even more suspect; Tae and R.C. are both convinced he’s smoking up his own profit.

For Tae, the choice is deliberate. He’s rational about the risks and rewards, but he sees himself as smarter and more aware than the rest, the soldier least likely to become an early casualty. He’ll take things as they come, reassessing on a day-by-day basis; for now, though, he’s not running. Manny Man is scared and shows it; he’s been playing at this corner game, following Tae, trying to belong to something a little bigger than himself. Now, the idea of confronting a lethal unknown unnerves him.

And then there is Richard Carter.

R.C. mostly keeps his own counsel; he listens more than he talks, leaving his usual bluster behind. He’s been a centerpiece of C.M.B. since Tae first came up with the idea for a Fayette Street crew, and in the past he’s not been slow to find misadventure. But now, the gangster ethos is becoming something more than a fantasy. Before, it was always show-and-tell for the neighborhood adolescents, a dabbling with guns and vials and glassine bags that fairly reeked of dare and double-dare. Now, they are on a corner—their corner—confronting something far less predictable than a rival neighborhood crew. Whatever else the D.C. boys are, they are not pretending to adulthood; they are eighteen and nineteen—some look to be in their early twenties. They’ve come up to McHenry Street with some kind of plan, and they’ve thrown down their gauntlet for some kind of reason.

For R.C., this threat is something of a litmus test, a turning point in his relationship to the corner. He’s had his share of short runs, selling gypsy packages until he gathered enough for girls or weed. He’s played at violence, chasing and beating rivals as a pack, posing with street-bought guns, or maybe punctuating some small gang dispute by letting
go of a round or two from a block’s distance. He’s had his fun playing cat-and-mouse with Bob Brown and the rest, knowing in his heart that a juvenile charge would not break him, that a month or two at Hickey School or Boys Village would be as rough as it gets. And when the risk becomes real, when fear or boredom begins to oppress, he knows he can simply walk away, heading up to his mother’s apartment to get blunted and watch cartoons, or back to the rec center for hoops or touch football or Connect Four.

Now he’s arrived at a real crossroads, a term both precise and symbolic. They all have, actually. As a crew, the only lasting collective accomplishment of the Crenshaw Mafia Brothers is that they have made McHenry and Gilmor. Since summer, not a week has passed that someone with C.M.B. credentials hasn’t been down here representing. Some made money, others went broke, and quite a few proved themselves absolute fuckups; but the corner itself flourished. It was there for them every day, ready and willing to give them another turn. Yet suddenly, interlopers have arrived to take it all away.

Not much is known about the D.C. contingent, but the mystery itself is intimidating. If they’re anything like the New York Boys who started showing up along Fayette Street four or five years back, then they’ll be in force. They’ll be out there twenty-four, seven, working the corners like it’s a job. To counter that, C.M.B. will have to step up; Tae and R.C. and Dinky—all of them. For C.M.B., the amateur hour is over.

R.C. senses this. So does Tae. The rest are only vaguely aware that something in their lives has changed.

“We got to get everyone down here,” says Tae.

R.C. agrees: “If we coming back tomorrow,” he says, speaking in subdued tones, “then we got to come deep.”

And they do. The B-and-G boys come off their corner to assist, as does the younger C.M.B. clique—Manny’s younger brother, Dion, Travis, and the rest. Brian comes down from Lemmon Street. Boo brings some people from Ramsay and Stricker. The only notable absences are Dewayne, who is working with Tank and Tony and is therefore linked in some awkward way to the D.C. crew, and DeAndre, who hears of the beef from Dinky, but stays with his baby up at Tyreeka’s house, where he’s still promising to get a job and go back to school and do right by his new family. He sends word back that he’ll be there if any of his boys get hurt.

The rest post early, showing up on Gilmor Street just after noon,
when trade on the lower strip is still slow. Each of them seeds a cracked doorway, or paper bag, or the tire of a parked car with a weapon or two, then takes a turn standing in front of the carryout at the southwest corner. By late afternoon, the adrenaline begins to jump and flash, sparking the false sightings that set them darting—movements that end just as quickly with a burst of nervous laughter and the inevitable pushing and shoving. Only Dinky stands aloof, immune to the antics, braced yet oddly calm. At sixteen, and already with a soldier’s temperament, he’s found his element in crisis. His presence begins to take hold and settle the others.

They work the shop, sell some vials. As time wears on them, they grow restless waiting and wondering.

“We got to keep spread out,” Tae insists, thinking tactically. “Not bunch up and shit. And we got to be watchin’ out.”

There’s general agreement on this much, though no one moves until Dinky steps up, declaring that the carryout corner will be his. Dinky, with his nine tucked into the back of his stonewashed denims, is the anchor in any defense.

They disperse. And wait. And watch for the Acura, though it’s soon late evening and the car is nowhere to be seen. When something does finally happen, it surprises everyone.

“Aw shit,” says R.C.

A string of regular pops, four or five, are heard down near Stricker. R.C. sees shadows cresting the hill from Carey Street, and then a muzzle flash. Next come shouts and scared laughter and Manny Man running back down the block, back past R.C. and a rigid, unmoving Dinky. Then Tae shouts out the lyric of last winter’s soundtrack: “Get ya guns out.”

At first they’re hearing gunfire behind them, and they’re running, ducking into alleys and behind parked cars and trying to figure out what the hell is happening. D.C. boys? Must be. But no one sees much. Someone yells a curse, then lets go of what seems like a whole clip. R.C. is rushing around the corner onto Gilmor, right behind Boo, trying to find purchase as he jumps the curb in front of a parked pickup. He slips and falls, cursing.

“Aw shit.”

They’re being routed. Or so it seems until most of them get up across Pratt Street, where they find heart in their own numbers.

“They was over on Stricker,” says Tae.

“Where’s Dinky?”

“Man, they was shooting right over my head.”

“I think Eric went down.”

“Where at?”

“He was behind me and I hear him go, ‘Shit!’ and he’s holding his leg and shit.”

“Where Dinky at?”

They talk it through, gathering up nerve in their still-solid numbers. They go back down Fulton, then come up McHenry from the west. Dinky is still standing there, waiting for them.

“Yo,” Dinky says. “They back down the hill.”