The Corner (75 page)

“The mentality out there is just …”

Gary drops his head, squeezes his mother’s hand, and weeps.

Marvin Parker has to go.

Fran Boyd knows it now, in fact, she’s known it for weeks, but had for a time resisted the idea of life alone. Coming out of detox, she had abandoned one world without the guarantee of another. Save for her children, everyone she cares about or with whom she shares a history is a drug addict; every one of them—friends, family, acquaintances—stands now as a threat to the fragile idea of recovery.

By virtue of his own attempt to detox, Marvin had given her the promise of a new stage on which to act out her life. Marvin had been part of a plan, a kindred soul who could share her fears and hopes, and support her best efforts. He was a casualty just as she was; they would heal each other.

Now, with Marvin running up to Baltimore Street for vials every day, the idea seems ridiculous. Now, she can’t help feeling betrayed.

She had sheltered him, taking him into her new house, yet he had gone back to the corner. She had given him love—physical love, at least—but it had hardly slowed him down. She had offered emotional support, yet got back nothing in kind. Instead, Marvin was up at Baltimore and Franklintown four and five times a day, slinging to use, even bringing it home and getting high in her bedroom. Fran had insisted time and again that he at least keep the mechanics of his problem out in the street, but he couldn’t even grant her that.

But this past weekend, the first in November, Marvin hadn’t come home at all, except to stick his head in the door on Saturday night and try to beg a few dollars more. By Monday morning, Fran was resolved:

Marvin has to go.

She spends the early afternoon gathering his things from around the house, filling his duffel bag with clothes and linens and bathroom items. Fran packs carefully; she’s leaving nothing behind, no pretext for him to return and try to talk his way back inside.

She lugs the bag to the front door, then lies down on the living room rug, listening to music on the old stereo’s one working speaker, justifying her actions in her own mind. She stews for a couple hours, her anger rising to a slow boil before Marvin finally comes into the house, street-worn and spent.

“You got to go,” she tells him.

Marvin looks at her as if this statement is coming out of the blue.

“I’m sorry, but you got to go,” she says again, getting up quickly and grabbing his bag. Marvin looks down to see Fran forcing all his worldy possessions on him. He makes no move for the duffel bag, trying instead to anchor himself on the living room wall. Fran walks past him, opens the door, and tosses the bag onto the front steps.

“Marvin, you got to go,” she says, conveying absolute conviction.

“Fran …” he says.

“No, don’t even start.”

Marvin tries to settle in, to take those five or six steps to the kitchen table, but Fran moves back into the room and looks him hard in the face.

“You don’t leave, I’m callin’ the police.”

“Fran … why?” he asks. “I got no place to go.”

She walks over, touching his shoulder to steer him lightly toward the door. He looks at her, and finally, seeing nothing he can work with, he goes.

With him goes Fran’s belief in her own recovery. When she left the detox center, it was with a feeling of power. In the eight weeks since then, it has come to seem little more than an illusion. Fran has lost more than a man or a relationship; giving up on Marvin is giving up on her plan. And like all plans along Fayette Street, this one is a wisp of thing. Two months ago, she had sketched a thin line between two points; she knows no other routes.

Later that afternoon, Fran tries to look at her algebra book for the first time in a week, but she’s missed as many classes as she’s attended, and the first problem, with all its obscurity, only infuriates her. She watches Oprah, then listens to the radio for an hour, and then, before DeRodd gets home from school, she goes to Baltimore and Franklintown to snatch a vial. For her, it’s a new corner with new faces, offering anonymity, so word won’t get back to Scoogie or Bunchie, Gary or Karen—anyone from around Fayette Street who might make her feel the deed.

The backsliding begins—not all at once, but gradually, and with all the seductive ease that comes with good heroin. She acknowledges the shame, greets it openly, and keeps right on with what she’s doing. Marvin comes back, too: The morning after she kicks him out, he shows up again, pleading poverty, crying about being on the street with nowhere to go. Fran doesn’t have strength enough to argue, and Marvin moves his things back into the house, all the while promising to get back into
detox again. His latest ploy is to tell her that he’s been calling the recovery center, trying to get to the top of the waiting list. She no longer believes him, but then again, she no longer believes herself. Through October and into November, they are together but separate in the house on Boyd Street, biding time, each of them slipping backward, overtaken by the inevitable.

DeRodd barely senses the change; he’s nine now, old enough only to notice that the refrigerator, which two months ago was a source of wonder, is now as empty as it was at the Dew Drop. There’s nothing but mayonnaise and relish and the end of a bread loaf with mold growing green on the crust.

DeAndre, however, sees it all. Fran knows he watches her out of one eye, judging, assessing, looking for an excuse to abandon his own pretensions. Why should he beg the Wendy’s manager for a second chance or look for work elsewhere if his mother is giving up on finding a job? If Fran isn’t going to her classes, why should he ask Rose Davis for more work-study or look into getting reinstated for spring semester? And why, if his mother is creeping up to Baltimore Street, should he feel anything but justified in slipping down to McHenry Street to smoke Phillie blunts and drink St. Ides?

A month back, when DeAndre finally gave up on the notion that the Wendy’s manager was ever going to call him for another shift, he talked vaguely about going back on the job hunt. But now, inertia prevails on Boyd Street. Fran isn’t going to classes, and for his part, DeAndre is getting up later and later, sometimes sleeping until early afternoon, then leaving Boyd Street after dark, heading east toward his old haunts.

Fran senses the change in DeAndre, but she no longer has standing enough to challenge him. Eventually, there is a November day when Fran comes quietly downstairs and sees her son at the table, counting and manicuring a fat roll of tens and fives. DeAndre tries to pocket the money as casually as he can, but she’s not blind.

“You out there again,” she states plainly.

“Who?”

“You is. I know.”

She tells him this as they sit at the kitchen table: Fran, burning a Newport down to the filter; DeAndre, still in his underwear at two in the afternoon, eyes red and marbled from the night before.

“Please,” says DeAndre dismissively.

“Andre, ain’t no other reason for you to have all that.”

She watches as he rages at her for the accusation: “Jus’ cause I get some money together, you think I’m sellin’ drugs. Why’s it always got to be that I’m sellin’ drugs?”

“You ain’t got no job.”

“You ain’t either,” he shouts.

“I’m sayin’ how you got the money if you ain’t got no job? You out there sellin’ that shit again.”

“Ma, I’m not slingin’. I just got Dorian and Dinky to pay me back some of what they owed me. You think I’m gonna take a chance of gettin’ locked up before my son is born? Please.”

It’s a weak lie and she’s heard it before, but whatever authority was granted her in August is now lost.

“You still on probation,” she warns him. “You get another charge you likely go to jail.”

“I can jail,” he says, diffident.

“You hardheaded. No one can teach you shit.”

“You sure as hell can’t.”

“Get out then,” she yells, deeply wounded. “If you livin’ here, then you still my son. Otherwise, you get your ass out the damn door.”

DeAndre storms upstairs, dresses, and slams the front door on his way out. Fran doesn’t see or hear from him for two days, until Tyreeka calls to say that DeAndre has been staying on Riggs Avenue with her.

A few days later, soon after DeAndre returns to Boyd Street, he gives his mother all the evidence she’ll ever need. After spending a morning vialing up several hundred dollars worth of coke in the front room, her son goes down to McHenry Street and leaves his mirror, glossed with residue, on the kitchen table. Half thinking, DeAndre took the vials and hid the razor, but left the mirror where Fran couldn’t help finding it.

Fran senses the insult, the casual indifference that allows her son to use their home for cutting up product. On the street, he’s beyond control; she knows that. But these rooms are still her home and despite all that has happened, she feels she should be able to claim that much. A month ago, the sight of the mirror might have thrown her into paroxysms of territorial rage; now, though, the anger she manages is vague and empty.

She goes upstairs, leaving the mirror on the table, where DeAndre will see it when he comes home. She takes off her coat, rubs her eyes until they are bloodshot, then crawls into bed.

Marvin is out somewhere, which is just as well. He’s about the last person she wants to see at this moment. When DeRodd comes bounding
home from school, letting the door slam loudly behind him, she tries to wrap a pillow around her ears. But DeRodd’s roughhousing carries past that barrier, and she raises her head just enough to shout her displeasure.

DeRodd quiets. Fran sleeps.

When she gets up hours later, it’s dark. DeRodd is moping in the kitchen. There’s not a damn thing worth eating in the icebox, and less in the pantry. Even dry cereal is but a memory.

“I’m hungry,” DeRodd tells her.

“I know you hungry. I’m hungry, too.”

It’s not yet Thanksgiving and the month’s money is gone. Fran sends DeRodd back up to Scoogie’s for a macaroni-and-cheese dinner. Then, with the house empty, she makes a systematic search for DeAndre’s stash, reasoning that it’s her home, that anything he brings through that rowhouse door is her property. She checks DeRodd’s room, the bathroom, the unfinished basement—a thorough tossing of the house that yields nothing, save for a few empty glassine bags in his bedroom—dope, not coke—enough of a hint to make her wonder if DeAndre himself is snorting. He must be keeping the stash elsewhere, out of her reach, bringing home only enough to vial up a day or two worth of product. She has to admit it: The boy is learning.

When Marvin finally shows his face, she does everything possible to make the man cough out a few dollars, telling her autumn love that it’s coming on winter and she’s sick of his leeching ways, that he’s going to have to put a few dollars in the kitty if he’s even thinking about staying past New Year’s. But Marvin shrugs her off and disappears, heading back up Boyd Street to the Franklintown corners. Through the window, she watches him hike the incline, flinging a few choice barbs as he goes, but she gets nothing for her effort.

No doubt the birthday celebration last month had brought out the worst in Marvin. Thinking on it now, Fran realizes that letting him share that blast with her made all things permissible. At the time, she had rationalized it, telling herself that it was a special event, a celebration. But by the next morning, it was clear to her that with Marvin as with DeAndre, she had conceded whatever high ground she still held. From that point forward, the man knew no limit.

In the days that followed the birthday mess, Fran had tried to change course and make Marvin do the same. She talked with him for hours, trying to make him see what he was losing. At times, he had agreed,
promising to do better and appealing to Fran for pity. And Fran couldn’t do anything but give him more time; she needed so badly to believe. But that was then.

“Fuck him,” she says, as she lies down on the living room rug, turning briefly on her side to give the stereo a little twist. She gets it going on the R&B gold station, then stretches out fully and stares at the blue stucco walls. Teddy Pendergrass croons above the static.

“Fuck him,” she says again.

She’d come out of the gate so strong back in August. She’d moved off Fayette Street, and done all the right things—or most of the right things, anyway. She’d made plans, registered for classes, looked for jobs. And in her greatest leap of faith, she’d gotten herself a man, hoping against hope for someone with whom the burdens might be shared. Instead, she got Marvin.

Marvin, Michael, Gary—all of her old loves were wandering these same streets, windblown, drifting from corner to corner, blast to blast. With Gary and Michael, it was different. With them, she had been in the game; their fall coincided nicely with her own, so that she had been nothing but deadweight dragging them down. But Marvin had turned the tables; this time it was Fran who was burdened. When she missed one step, then another, Marvin Parker was right there, waiting to take advantage as she stumbled.

Marvin had been a bad choice, but good choices along Fayette Street were hard to come by. The only men Fran knew were either on the corner, or a half-step away from it. Coming out of detox, the most she had any right to hope for was an addict in recovery like herself, a wounded soul chasing the same meetings and twelve-step programs. In short, someone just as fragile and vulnerable.

Even Mike Ellerbee, the one person who had confounded her view of life’s possibilities by simply walking off the corner and into the merchant marine—even Little Mike had pulled her up short. Ten days ago, she’d seen him down on Mount Street, wired up and bleary-eyed, talking too fast about how he had sent money back to his girl Ducey for his stepson and daughter, how he had written to her from aboard his ship, telling her to spend the money on rent and utilities and school clothes and toys.

“She just smoked it up,” Mike said, complaining bitterly. “I come home, I find out she hasn’t done anything but party.”

Fran looked at Mike Ellerbee, standing there on Mount Street with
a forty-ounce in his hand, and assumed that his run was over, that he’d be slinging again by spring and shooting people in the summer. The man was done.