There is precious little privacy on Fayette Street, which is a problem for a young corner boy looking to hide inventory. Try to be invisible around here, try to tiptoe into a vacant house, and someone is always watching, clocking your moves, hoping you slip. Leave a ground stash unattended and Little Kenny or Hungry or Charlene will be quick to carry it off. Trust a tout like Country or Tyrone and your package will be nothing but memory. Rent an apartment from one of the regular stash-house girls and you better pay someone to sit in there or the bitch will blow profit up her nose and lie about it later. For DeAndre, the possibilities are limited to a single option: his mother’s room. It’s not much, but Fran Boyd is lucky to have that: one rear bedroom at what the Fayette Street fiends like to call the Dew Drop Inn, the closest thing to a shooting gallery east of Blue’s.
The three-story rowhouse in the 1600 block of West Fayette is the last stop for all the Boyds, save Fran’s older brother, Scoogie, who got their grandmother’s house up on Saratoga. For the two upper floors of 1625, Fran’s sister, Bunchie, pays thirty-two dollars a month under a federal Section 8 housing reimbursement. She, in turn, pushes that weight off onto three siblings—Fran, Stevie, and Sherry—charging each fifty a month for a bedroom. For Fran and her two sons, home is the second-floor rear room, all eight-by-ten feet of it.
They share a cluttered cubicle coated with the acrid tang of Newports and crammed with a single bed, a battered dresser, two chairs that are oozing their stuffing and, of course, the sleepless television. The bed usually goes to DeRodd and DeAndre, with Fran making do on the old sofa in the front room. Some nights, though, the bed mattress is taken by Fran and DeRodd, with DeAndre in a bedroll on the floor. Other times, it’s Fran on the bedroll, giving her sons the better chance at a night’s sleep. On the worst of nights—weekends or check days, perhaps, when pipers and gunners are ranging ceaselessly through the second-floor apartment—it’s all three of them together, fighting for a thin sliver of the single mattress as myriad forms of human dysfunction take place just outside the bedroom door.
Beyond the bare necessities, the back room features little else: an overstuffed closet; a makeshift nightstand on a milk crate, where Fran can chase her lines if the basement is otherwise occupied; a couple of Polaroid shots pinned to the walls, hinting at some better time; a funeral home pamphlet from the service for Fran’s mother last year. This is the space that DeAndre can pretend to control, and it’s therefore where his stash has to go.
Not that it had always been so. Early last fall, DeAndre thought he had it made when Fran, angry at his drug slinging, put him out of the Dew Drop. Summarily evicted from 1625, DeAndre went immediately up the block to 1717 Fayette, where his father was haunting what was left of the old house. Gary gave up the master bedroom and DeAndre suddenly found himself in a teenager’s dream, a paradise of unencumbered real estate that he was quick to turn into his clubhouse, decorating the walls with raw centerfolds, smoking blunts and downing forties with the other C.M.B. boys, and generally doing as he damn well pleased at the ripened age of fifteen. Yeah boy.
There was a downside. The plumbing didn’t exist and the electric was shut off, which made for some chilly nights. Not much in the way of furnishings either. And then there were the house guests, if you could call them that. For some months, Gary McCullough had been shuttling between 1717 Fayette and his mother’s house on Vine, staying the cold nights in his mother’s basement, but running the remnant of his former home as a kind of low-bottom rooming house. Trouble was, Gary, being a fiend, couldn’t afford to offer any of the usual amenities, and his boarders, being fiends, couldn’t afford to pay rent. Nor was anyone inclined to leave.
There was some young white girl from the county on the run for bad checks; with her was her dark-skinned boyfriend, who fed off her and occasionally touted for Diamond in the Raw. They shared the third floor with an older woman who haunted the Baltimore Street strip, trading her body for shot money. On the second floor was Arthur, a stone psycho whose room was closest to the front. Having supped heavily on the gore of Harbor Park slasher movies, DeAndre had no illusions about Crazy Arthur, not after he accidentally on purpose stuck his head into Arthur’s room one morning to find a stained mattress, a green garbage bag leaking moldy clothes, and a forest of glass bottles in all shapes and sizes, hundreds of them, some capped and some open but all of them filled to the brim with piss. Before that day’s night, DeAndre had rigged the connecting walkway with an assortment of boards, bits of fencing, strips of metal, and a tangle of rope—all of it woven into a kind of homemade tripwire to discourage Arthur from any midnight stroll toward the front bedroom.
Instead, the real peril at 1717 Fayette turned out to be his father. No matter how carefully DeAndre hid his stash, Gary found a way to the vials. His father didn’t skim a whole lot at first, but it was enough eventually to cut through DeAndre’s margins and enough finally to drive him back down the street to Fran and that godforsaken second-floor room.
Since moving back with his mother before Thanksgiving, DeAndre had been working Fairmount from package to package, more part-time than in the summer, but still enough to keep the roll fat. For a fifteen-year-old, the corner was not yet a job, and DeAndre, for all his pretense, could play at gangster for only as long as it took to get spending money. When he wanted to work, he and Corey would go to Bugsy or some other connect for a G-pack or a New York Quarter. Then they’d sell off. Then they’d play.
Short of the occasional juvenile charge or stickup, DeAndre had life pretty much the way he wanted it, provided there was a place on this earth where he could keep a stash. At the old house, it was his father helping himself to a few vials here, a few there. At the Dew Drop, it was cat-and-mouse with his mother. In December, when no one was around to watch, DeAndre did the only thing he could think to do: he hid the coke, the cash, and the .38 that Bugsy had given him for muscle in the closet, inside the sleeve of a leather jacket, which he then stuffed deep in a mass of balled-up laundry.
There wasn’t any better choice. Uncle Stevie’s room next door was more a shooting gallery than a bedroom, with Stevie, a certified welder, now torching nothing larger than a bottle cap. Same with upstairs, where Aunt Bunchie and Alfred and Aunt Sherry and her man, Kenny, were keeping house. Sherry might not be a worry; she was a drinker more than anything, but the other three were hardened players who wouldn’t hesitate to move on him. As for the second-floor living room, that was also out of the question. Too much foot traffic and besides, little Ray Ray was now sleeping there, hitched to a cardiac monitor because Aunt Sherry’s last baby was a crib death. You never knew when someone might come stumbling past to check on Ray Ray.
So it was the closet and hope for the best. But Fran was bolder than Gary, and it wasn’t a week before DeAndre walked into the rear bedroom and sensed disaster the minute he caught sight of the leather jacket lying cold and lonely on the bed.
Damn. He raced out of the room, down the stairs and into the basement, where he found Fran and Bunchie. Two cats who had swallowed the canary.
“Where my stuff?”
Just seeing them sitting there together in the basement was answer enough.
“DeAndre, you got to be joking, leaving that shit in there. Suppose DeRodd found it.” Fran played it easy, holding in her fangs.
“Where my stuff?” he persisted.
“Where you think?”
“I ain’t joking. That’s not my shit.”
“I don’t care. It’s gone.”
“Then you’re gonna pay.”
“You threatening me?” Her anger began to show.
DeAndre turned away. “That’s all right. It ain’t on me. It’s Bugsy’s shit.”
He was determined not to let it drop. He knew his mother, and if he had any hope of using that room in the future he had to let her know how far he was willing to go.
“So what you saying? You gonna