LITMIR.BIZ

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Street instead, and the neighborhood began to wear at them the way it wears at everyone. Soon, the weed and beer and pills were the sum of all days. She was twenty-four and living with Gary on the day she truly found her future—the day they buried her sister, Darlene. That, too, would have been ’80 or ’81 if she remembered right, and Fran was out-of-her-mind grieving at the wake when a family friend brought dope to her for the first time.

      “Do a line of this,” he told her.

      Three years older than Fran, Darlene had died in a house fire at 1625 Fayette, burned over eighty percent of her body in the same back bedroom where Fran was now laying her head. On the day of the wake, she put her head down on that mirror, snorted all she could of that powder and came up forgetting that her sister was dead. The same friend came looking for Fran the next day, found her, and gave her the same. The day after that, he didn’t come. The day after that, Fran went looking for the friend.

      After a time, she got so she’d keep the shit right by her bed, do some of it the first thing every morning before getting dressed in her downtown clothes. She didn’t even know she had a habit until the dose wasn’t there one morning and she realized she was too hungry to go to work without it. Sick in the mornings and missing work, or happily indifferent and cursing her supervisors, Fran kept messing up until the phone company fired her; the union did precious little to prevent it.

      When he couldn’t find a future in Fran, Gary, too, began to lose himself on Fayette Street. At first he fought with her over the drugging. And when he laid hands on her, she moved out, telling herself that she wouldn’t be beaten as her mother had been beaten. Gary wandered off in search of other women and new religions and a half-dozen other schemes—all of it delaying the inevitable crash. And when nothing else worked, Gary chose, consciously and deliberately, to lose himself in dope and coke. The jobs and the cars and the houses were stripped away and, in the end, he and Fran were both scraping bottom—separate, yet together—moving to the same tired rhythms.

      The neighborhood blamed her for what had happened to Gary. Bullshit, she told herself. As if the two of them didn’t make their own choices; as if she had some kind of power over Gary that he didn’t have over himself; as if she didn’t have enough problems of her own.

      What she couldn’t stand about Gary was the pity parties he would throw for himself, the crying and complaining about how he once had it all and how he had been betrayed. Like today, when he wanders off bitching and moaning at the injustice of it all, at having been watered down, as if anyone out here had any guarantee of fair treatment. Outwardly, at least, Fran would never let anyone see her show hurt that way. With no regrets, she ran her own games on people when she could, and she couldn’t really blame anyone who managed to run a game on her. It pissed her off when Gary came to her with his wounds. She couldn’t make it better for herself; how was she going to help Gary?

      For another hour, she watches the ebb and flow on Mount and Fayette, watches as the touts sell out, then re-up, then sell out again, watches as the knockers roll up to the carryout, jack the corner boys against the wall and come up empty. Every day, the street parade passes in front of these steps and every day, rain or shine or snow, Fran is outside to watch it pass.

      She misses precious little. Too many years on Fayette Street have provided her with an extra sense, a hunter’s instinct that allows her to see things on the street that would be lost on an outsider. Without a scorecard, she knows at any given moment who is selling for whom, who is stealing from whom, who is about to get hurt, and who will do the hurting. Fran can spot confrontations and connections a block away; it’s her stock-in-trade, an acquired gift that allows her an edge. Like now, when she glances two full blocks down Fayette Street and picks up the outline of a teenage boy—one in a group of four—crossing the asphalt with a stiff-legged gait.

      DeAndre. With R.C. and Dorian and Boo, probably.

      If he tries to tell her he was in school today, he’s got a surprise coming, she thinks. Expecting him to go straight to Fairmount, she’s surprised when he peels off from the group and heads her way.

      “Why you not in school?”

      “Half-day.”

      “Half-day? It’s not even eleven.”

      “Half half-day,” he assures her.

      “Andre, you is a trip,” she says, shaking her head. “All that work to get back into Francis Woods, and here you at, running the streets.”

      “My teachers let me out,” he insists.

      “Please,” says Fran.

      He shrugs. Not every lie need be believed; some are spoken simply as a formality.

      “You got cigarettes?” she asks.

      “Not for you.”

      “Lemme have one,” she insists.

      DeAndre ignores her and walks to the carryout. She smolders as she watches him go. Goddamn if he doesn’t think he’s the little king of everything. He goes out on the corner for a week or two, gets some money in his pocket and thinks he’s some kind of man. And it’s worse, she thinks, since he put Bugsy on me. DeAndre thought he’d backed her down because of that shit. Fuck no, that wasn’t the way it played at all. Of course, he don’t know that, the little shit.

      Three weeks back, Bugsy had showed up at the front steps, asking for Fran, asking for the sixty-five vials and two hundred in cash that she had found in the closet. Like the other New Yorkers, Bugsy generally kept his business to himself. But when there was a problem, he came right at you.

      “Black says you took my stuff,” said Bugsy, using DeAndre’s favorite street name. The dealer was softspoken and very calm, strangely so for someone no older than twenty. Fran still couldn’t believe her son—who had put her in, and worse, she was unnerved by Bugsy’s seeming reasonableness. If he had come on strong, Fran would have known how to deal with that. But the quiet certainty in Bugsy’s play was scary—not only for Fran, but for her child. As pissed as she was at DeAndre, she had to think about both ends. Bugsy could come back on him.

      “He shouldn’t’ve brought it in my house.”

      “That’s between him and you. I want what’s mine.”

      “Look,” she said, quickly reasonable herself. “I can get you the gun back, but I ain’t got the money or the stuff. If you’re going to hurt him, I can pay you back, but I’m going to need some time.”

      Bugsy mulled it over for a moment. “Get me the gun. He’ll pay me back the money. He only owes me sixty from the last one.”

      “Okay. I’ll get the gun and give it to him.”

      “That’ll work,” he agreed, still very relaxed.

      Things had evened out since then. Fran knew DeAndre believed she had learned her limit; Fran, however, was merely biding time. If her son brought more of his misadventure into her home, she would pluck him good. And while Fran knew she had provoked the crisis by stealing the stash, she told herself that she had, in the end, proved herself a mother by protecting DeAndre from the wrath of his supplier.

      Not that he knew any of that, strutting around here like Big Daddy Kane. DeAndre wasn’t humble by nature, and he was at his worst with a little money in his pocket. Yet even from inside the heroin fog, Fran knew she had pushed her son into open rebellion, that his time on the corner was as much about her drugging as it was it was about status or money.

      The boy had lived in the equivalent of a shooting gallery for the last three years. He was old enough now to judge her and to act on that judgment. By degrees, he had rendered his verdict and established himself apart from her. And his new universe, Fairmount and Gilmor, offered a ready-made haven for a child in full rebellion. For a time, she had railed against it, trying at every turn to retain her authority, to demand that DeAndre do as she told him, not as she herself did. Last year, when he was slinging, she put him out of the house only to watch him set up his little clubroom up at 1717. Last month she tried to lay down some law and ended up breaking a broom handle over his head. DeAndre simply

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