The Corner (89 page)

Much was said by the pastor, some of it quite true. The choir sang. Gary’s white supervisor at Seapride, Paul, brought down the all-black congregation by talking about Gary’s boundless love and then offering a beautiful rendition of “His Eye Is On The Sparrow.”

“Damn,” mused Fran. “The white boy can sing.”

The obituary, written by the family, omitted the essential facts of the tragedy, but nonetheless came close to capturing just how much had been lost: “He always freely gave. Indeed, he often offered spiritual, emotional and financial support and the refuge of his own home to those in need. Deeply philosophical, Gary was always eager to impart the wisdom with which he was blessed via his intuition and spiritual insight, life experiences, discourses, lectures and readings … Still, no words can truly capture the beauty, sincerity and kindness of the person he was.”

Leaving the church, Fran stood on Monroe Street and wiped at her tears. DeAndre gave her a quick embrace.

“The game wasn’t for him,” she said, watching the touts at Fayette. “He wasn’t hard enough to be out here like he was.”

The son nodded. “I know this sounds wrong,” DeAndre said finally, “but I’m almost glad for it. I feel like he was never going to get out of it, you know, he was never going to be what he was, and I think he was sad from knowing that. I feel like he’s at peace now.”

When he stood over his father’s casket and swore his oath, DeAndre McCullough truly believed the words. He always does.

By the summer of 1994, DeAndre was everyday slinging with C.M.B. at McHenry and Gilmor. The arrest in the Gilmor Street stash house hadn’t slowed him much, particularly since the case, involving an event that occurred just after his seventeenth birthday, was yet again referred to juvenile court. As a condition of his probation, DeAndre was prohibited from setting foot anywhere near McHenry and Gilmor—a condition that he managed to obey for almost a month.

By the end of that summer, he was taking hacks to some of the Park Heights drug corners and spending most of what he made on the best snorting heroin in the city. He went clubbing. He bought women. He stayed high. He also took a few small charges, but nothing so dramatic that a juvenile master was willing to violate his probation.

By 1995 DeAndre was on the pipe, at one point going through an entire half ounce of coke in his room on Lorraine Avenue in a single evening. His mother knew; Fran could smell the butane and cooked rock all the way downstairs. By then, though, she was in free fall herself so there was little she could say to her son that would mean much.

Down on his corner, DeAndre began messing the packages, burning through suppliers, and running up debts. In an argument with a dealer named Man, DeAndre teamed with Shamrock and robbed Man’s stash house, taking product and money at the point of a four-four. The dispute might have escalated, save for the fact that Man himself was later wounded by the Terrace boys, and Shamrock went courtside after being charged with a murder stemming from another drug-related robbery. That case fell apart quickly, but Shamrock then caught a drug distribution conviction; he is currently on Eager Street, waiting to be sentenced for violating his probation on that charge.

At home, meanwhile, DeAndre played his dope-fiend moves on his own family. Once, he skipped with Fran’s Independence Card, using it to withdraw a full month’s check money in retaliation for all she had taken from him. He even stole a stash from his cousin Dinky, though he was clever enough to blame R.C. And when R.C. tried to tell Dinky, he got banged for his trouble, though later, Dinky admitted that he had been avoiding the truth, and he quietly offered R.C. an apology.

“DeAndre been getting high too much,” said Dinky mournfully.

And when Dinky was shot to death, DeAndre went over-the-top crazy. The night after the Terrace boys ambushed his cousin on Hollins Street, DeAndre joined up with three other B-and-G regulars, rolling up on the playground at Lexington Terrace and firing into a crowded knot of rivals. That night, the Baltimore and Gilmor crew came through Fran’s door on Lorraine Avenue high and drunk, talking about how they were sure they’d caught bodies. But there was nothing in the morning paper. One bystander had been slightly wounded, nothing more. No matter: DeAndre swore he would catch up with the boys who got Dinky. He’s swearing it still.

At Dinky’s funeral, DeAndre began using morphine. Soon after, he also
tried the needle, creating a small, tight line of tracks on one forearm. By then, his ability to make a run with a package was no longer what it needed to be. Two years earlier, at fifteen, he had made Fairmount and Gilmor jump; now at seventeen, his game produced only argument and debt.

On the odd, awkward occasion when he would roll past Riggs Avenue to see his son, DeAndre could see Tyreeka look at him with vague terror. Sometimes he would go into a nod. Other times he would talk out of his head. But always he was bitter and angry, ever more resentful as Tyreeka seemed ever more distant. She had managed to stay in school and was looking toward graduation and her first year of college at West Baltimore’s Coppin State. She was working part time. She was raising DeAnte alone. At some point she had grown past him and DeAndre was smart enough to know it. He tried to tell her nothing was different, that he was getting it together, that he wasn’t getting high.

“But,” Tyreeka told others, “I can tell he ain’t the same.”

When his mother returned to detox, the worst of DeAndre’s ride ended. Coming back clean, Fran gave her son an ultimatum, telling him that he could not continue getting high in her house, that he had to support her effort to stay clean. He argued at first, resenting what he saw as her holier-than-thou pretense.

“You had your fun,” he told her. “Now you telling me I can’t have mine.”

Eventually he softened. Soon after his mother returned to Lorraine and began looking for a county apartment, DeAndre checked himself into Oakview for detox, taking advantage of state guidelines that offer minors treatment on demand. But a week later, he checked himself out and visited Tyreeka, admitting to his addiction and blaming heroin and cocaine for all the problems between them.

Tyreeka was frightened, but after much trepidation, she took him back, offering him one last chance. Within two weeks, DeAndre was back down Gilmor and McHenry.

Fran threatened him, told him he would not be allowed to move out to the county with her. Yet the weight of their shared past made it impossible for her to believe in her own threat. For years she had cheated DeAndre; now, when he was cheating himself, she felt too much guilt to put him out in the street.

For the past year DeAndre has drifted between long corner runs and brief interludes in which he struggles mightily to right himself, swearing yet again that he won’t go back, that he won’t use, or sell, or lie to himself
about his own weakness. At these moments, he is earnest and genuine. He gets up early. He visits his son. He looks for work, and, if he finds it, he pulls in a paycheck or two before beginning the inevitable slide. Last October his uncle Dan took him out of Baltimore down to Harrisonburg, Virginia, a Shenandoah Valley town where Dan lives and works and where there are no corners. DeAndre worked nearly a month at a McDonald’s there. He liked Virginia, and the people seemed to like him.

On Thanksgiving he came back to Baltimore to see his son and attend DeAnte’s third birthday party. He spent most of his McDonald’s pay on a present, but he showed up high for the party at Tyreeka’s house. He did not return to Virginia.

Earlier this spring, DeAndre got himself in debt to a supplier by the name of Sweetpea, a hardcore player who was known to use a gun now and then. Most threats failed to resonate with DeAndre, but Sweetpea seemed serious about recouping his loss and, more to the point, he seemed to like shooting people. For the first time in his life, DeAndre was on the run—a situation that only resolved itself when Sweetpea was himself shot to death on Gilmor Street in an unrelated dispute. Similarly, this spring marked the first time that DeAndre was locked up on an adult charge with bail attached. It was nothing, really—just an argument at a sub shop. DeAndre claimed he was trying to break up a fight and had been wrongly arrested for assault. Nonetheless he caught a three thousand dollar bail.

He called Fran from Central Booking.

“I need three hundred to get out.”

“Then you best get comfortable.”

He was inside more than a week—the first time he’d been locked up since Boys Village. DeAndre seemed chastened by the experience. For a quiet week or so, he tried to stay inside at night, watch basketball on TV, and write raps and poetry.

These verses are his:

At this writing, DeAndre is just past his twentieth birthday. He professes some surprise at this. He had thought he would be dead by now, like Dinky or Boo or half a dozen other boys who came up with him. When he was younger, he had always imagined his death in stark, violent terms—a gangster’s end, quick and hard and ripe with all the indifference to which a young man likes to pretend.

Live the life, leave the life. Ain’t no big thing.

But the corner is relentless and certain. It can’t be underestimated. It can’t be appeased with pretense or melodrama or the easy fatalism of youth. It waits. It works. It finishes whatever it begins in its own time, in its own way.

Today, DeAndre McCullough, an addict and small-time drug dealer, is still with us.

This book is a work of journalism. The names that appear in these pages are, in fact, the real names of people who have lived and struggled along West Baltimore’s Fayette Street. The events recounted here—with the exception of those described in the epilogue—took place in 1993.

Our research began in September 1992, when we first ventured into the Franklin Square neighborhood to begin meeting people and making ourselves known. We chose that area almost at random. The established Fayette Street strip that runs from Gilmor up the hill to Monroe Street is one of a hundred, perhaps a hundred and twenty open-air drug markets operating in Maryland’s largest city. As such, it appeared to us typical; Franklin Square therefore seemed comparable to any number of inner-city neighborhoods overwhelmed by the drug trade. Beyond that, we selected West Fayette Street because of its proximity to racially mixed areas. We felt this was important for demonstrating a basic fact: While the vast majority of Baltimore’s major drug markets are located in black neighborhoods, many users serviced by these markets are white. At Fayette and Mount, as on so many other American corners, the demand for heroin and cocaine is decidely multicultural.

Being a bit pale ourselves, we stood out on Fayette Street, and we were initially regarded by many of the corner regulars as police or police informants. Worse, a few of the older heads remembered Ed from his tenure as a patrolman and detective with the Baltimore Police Department, lending credibility to the rumor that we were snitches or plain-clothesmen or worse. A singular memory is the sight of Eggy Daddy, waltzing up Vine Street singing, “I spy for the FBI,” at the top of his lungs, announcing our presence to everyone.

To counter such suspicion, we did a lot of talking, joking, and hanging around with no particular purpose. We played basketball with the rec kids. On warmer days, we took the touts to the corner store for iced tea.
We passed out dozens of copies of
Homicide
, David’s earlier work, to make it clear that we really were writers trying to put together a book. Most of all, we met people on their own terms and did a lot of listening.

To Western District patrol officers, many of whom were unfamiliar with us, we were also suspect. To their way of thinking, whites had little reason to be north of Baltimore Street except to buy heroin and cocaine. This assumption led to a string of police stops, queries, and on occasion, threats of arrest and orders to quit loitering and leave the area. Eventually word of the book project got back to the stationhouse and there were fewer such encounters.

Officers who did know us presented another problem. Early in the year, in the aftermath of a shooting at Monroe and Fayette, a veteran detective made a point of picking David out of a crime-scene crowd and chatting amiably—an interaction that required some explaining as far as the corner regulars were concerned. In time, most officers understood our dilemma and responded by ignoring us, or better still, taking a moment now and then to offer us some mild abuse.

By February, most of the regulars were convinced that whatever else we claimed to be, we weren’t police. No one could recall seeing us buy or sell anything, nor did we seem to do anything that resulted in anyone getting locked up. Basically, we kept telling the true story until folks began to believe it.

Our methodology was simple enough and is best described as stand-around-and-watch journalism. We went to the neighborhood each day with notepads and followed people around. One day, we might follow DeAndre McCullough down to Gilmor and Fairmount; another day, we might be at the rec center with Ella Thompson; the day after, we might head for a shooting gallery with Gary McCullough.

Often, because the presence of notebooks was intimidating to people in the corner mix, we would leave pad and paper in our pockets, our cars, at the rec center, or in the homes of a few people comfortable playing host to us. Events would occur and we would step away for a time to write down the details. While reporters know that this isn’t the best or easiest way to record what they witness, they are also aware that pulling a notepad amid illegal activity is certain to change or stifle events. For this book, the hard way was the only way.

Approximately 75–80 percent of the incidents described in the book were witnessed by one or both of us. On some occasions, important events occurred when we were busy with another individual or otherwise not
in the neighborhood. As a result, these scenes had to be reported through traditional, retroactive interviews with those involved. Fortunately, the corner world is so self-contained that in the wake of an incident, several accounts would invariably come back to us from different sources. At that point, it remained for us to sort wheat from chaff—a process essential to all reporting.

We did not begin writing until 1994, choosing to first follow our characters for a full year so that we could make better sense of their experiences. To keep the focus of the narrative on those who live along Fayette Street, we chose not to put ourselves into the story. At times, it may be clear to readers that the authors—described as “hacks” or “friends” or “companions”—are bit players in a particular scene. Anyone trying to guess at the presence of the authors in various scenes might be surprised, however. For example, we were not in English class when DeAndre raised his hand to volunteer for public oratory, or when he cornered Boo at the bus stop, knocking him down and demanding his money. Those incidents were recounted to us. On the other hand, we were in the room when DeAndre went before the juvenile master, when Tyreeka gave birth to her son, and—to our chagrin at the time—we were there when Gary McCullough got jacked by the stickup crew on Fulton Avenue. We have tried to be accurate about the fact of our occasional presence, but at the same time discreet.

The dialogue in the book was either witnessed by one or both of us, or, in a handful of instances, reconstructed from detailed interviews with those involved in the conversation. Similarly, when it is indicated that characters are thinking about something, we have not simply interpolated their thoughts and feelings from their actions. More often than not, we were present at the events upon which the person is reflecting, and their thoughts were verbally expressed to us at the time of the incident or immediately after the fact. In other cases, interior monologues were constructed from repeated interviews.

Furthermore, we eventually showed relevant portions of the book to each of the main characters, who could then suggest—but not insist on—changes. We encouraged our subjects to correct factual mistakes, explain contradictions, or add relevant details to their stories. Journalists often refuse to share unpublished material with sources, but in a project such as this, the usual prohibition seems senseless. To write narrative with an interior point-of-view, reporters need everything they can acquire from their subjects. To their credit, the people of Fayette
Street read what we wrote and then, for the most part, talked honestly about it. That interactive process made the book better, and in a very real sense, more accurate.

Still, readers may wonder whether some characters were inclined to recount events to their own advantage, exaggerating or fabricating details. The fact is that the authors were told a great many lies on a great many occasions; had we conducted our research in a limited window of time, based on limited interaction with people, this account would be seriously flawed. Instead, we continued to follow our subjects for more than four years—a long time for anyone to play false with their lives. Throughout 1993, for example, DeAndre McCullough refused to admit to the use of any drugs other than weed and liquor. By 1995, however, he was in detox, humbly displaying several track marks and admitting to having snorted heroin as early as Christmas two years earlier. Time, as they say, will tell.

One last note of disclosure: A year is a long time to watch people struggle and suffer, and many people were doing a lot of both on Fayette Street in 1993. We were reporters, yet we did not avoid the chance to encourage those who wanted to change, to give some measure of emotional support to people when they talked about getting straight or looking into detox and recovery.

In the beginning this caused us some concern. The usual policy of strict nonintervention argues that if someone asks for a lift to the methadone clinic, a reporter says no. The notion is that if the man is meant to get in a meth program, he’ll do it whether or not a reporter and his automobile happen to be at hand. Similarly, if that man is dollars light for a morning blast, then he should stay light whether or not the reporter has cash in his pocket.

That impartial stance sounds well and good until the day the reporter is confronted with another human being so sick and tired that he breaks down and cries openly for someone to drive him to a clinic. Or the day that same reporter takes a run-and-gun dope fiend out of the corner mix for a two-hour interview, only to see him become ill from withdrawal. If the fiend was on his game, he’d have blast money by now; instead, he spent the morning talking about his life to a writer. And Lord, the man needs to hold five dollars in a hurry.

As a rule, we did not intervene in the swirl of events. But there were a few instances when we ignored the rule. We came to this project as reporters, but over time we found ourselves caring more about our
subjects than we ever expected. If that helped or hurt, someone more than he or she otherwise would have been helped or hurt, then it could be argued that our source material is tainted. Yet the limited support we provided had decidedly little effect. DeAndre, Fran, Gary—all began the year in the corner mix, all of them ended there. And Blue—who escaped from his own shooting gallery—did so quietly and with little encouragement from anyone. Perhaps all our journalistic concerns about nonintervention are predicated on a touch of vanity. The corner culture and addiction are powerful forces—equal to or greater than all the legal barriers and social programming arrayed against them. On Fayette Street, the odds do not change because someone pops up with a notepad and the occasional kindness.

Our best guide in these matters proved to be none other than Elliot Liebow, who, in 1962 and 1963, conducted his classic study of Washington, D.C., street-corner men in similar fashion. In his notes on methodology for
Tally’s Corner
, Liebow wrote: “The people I was observing knew I was observing them. Some exploited me, not as an outsider, but rather as one who, as a rule, had more resources than they did. When one of them came up with resources—money or a car, for example—he too was exploited in the same way. I usually tried to limit money or other favors to what I thought each would have gotten from another friend had he the same resources as I. I tried to meet requests as best I could without becoming conspicuous.”

At the risk of neglecting to name many of those along Fayette Street who gave us their cooperation and support, we would specifically like to thank those who opened their world to us: Fran Boyd and the Boyd family; William and Roberta McCullough and their family; DeAndre McCullough, Tyreeka Freamon, and DeRodd Hearns; Richard Carter and his family; Ella Thompson, her family, and the children of the Martin Luther King Jr. Recreation Center; George Epps, Michael Ellerbee, Dennis Davis, Terry “Eggy Daddy” Hamlin, Bryan Sampson, Tony Boice, and Veronica Boice. We remember, too, Curtis Davis, Pimp, Rita, Scalio, Bread, Shardene, and all the other lost soldiers. Especially, we hold to the memory of Gary McCullough, a man of great heart and gentle spirit. His true friendship and his interest in this book helped sustain us.

Also assisting us in our journeys along Fayette Street were a host of other generous souls: Frank Long, Marzell Myers, Myrtle Summers, and Joyce Smith of the community group and rec center; Col. Ron Daniel
of the Baltimore Police Department, as well as those supervisors and officers of the Western and Southern Districts who understood the project and gave us room to work; Commissioner Lamont Flanagan of the Baltimore Detention Center; Judge H. Gary Bass of the District Court of Baltimore; John Seaman and the staff of the South Baltimore Homeless Shelter; Rose Davis at Francis M. Woods Senior High School; Kathy McGaha and Jeanne McNamara with the social work department at Bon Secours Hospital; Dr. Dan Howard of Bon Secours and the community health clinic at St. Edward’s; the Rev. Isaac T. Golder, a pastor of the Good News Bible Chapel, an affiliate of the Fulton Avenue Baptist Church; and Rebecca Corbett, a friend and mentor at the
Baltimore Sun
. We are also indebted to Joe Laney, Sonny Mays, and Larry “House” Canada—three sage veterans of Fayette and Monroe who shared some hard-bought wisdom with us.

And last, but certainly not least, there is the crew once known as the Crenshaw Mafia Brothers. We remember Dinky and Boo, and we offer this West Baltimore shout-out to Tae, Manny Man, Dion, Brooks, Brian, Dewayne, Dorian, Arnold, Ronald, and all the rest:

Go easy. Step light. Stay free.

In our own lives, Ed wishes to thank Anna Burns, and David owes just about everything to Kayle Tucker Simon. Without their constant love and support, the work would not be done.

At Broadway Books our thanks go to Bill Shinker for unstinting support of the project, as well as Victoria Andros, Luke Dempsey, Rebecca Holland, Maggie Richards, Trigg Robinson, Jennifer Swihart, and Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich. Thanks as well to our agent, Rafe Sagalyn, who stayed with this project even as deadlines tumbled one after the next. And we are humbled by the efforts of our line editor, Barbara Ravage; this book would have been quite close to incoherent without her careful eye.

At the center of it all is John Sterling. Not only did he craft this book with all the skill and grace of a great editor, he was there at the first spark of creation. It was John who initially suggested an account of life on a city corner, and it was John who kept us going through four years of research and writing. At the end, he finished by stepping up, taking hold of the pages, and saving yet another book from its authors.