LITMIR.BIZ

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boyfriend. And while Corey didn’t mess up like so many others, he also wasn’t spending as much time on the corner as DeAndre. So hiring Boo seemed to make sense, assuming simple math was at all within his grasp.

      “How much I get?” Boo asks finally.

      “DAMN, BOY,” shouts R.C. “YOU IGNORANT AS SHIT.”

      “At least I ain’t messin’ up all the time like you do,” says Boo, bitterly. “You always a fuck up.”

      Now DeAndre laughs. It was true enough: R.C. was always messing up the money; he couldn’t sling drugs for two days without getting into some kind of hole.

      “Fuck you, bitch,” mutters R.C.

      DeAndre breaks it down to Boo slowly: I give you forty, you sell out and one-fifty comes back to me and fifty you keep. You sell twice that, you make a hundred dollars. And the Blue Tops, DeAndre assures him, they are the bomb; he’s selling out at five dollars a vial on Fairmount. If Boo wants to try them down at Ramsay and Stricker, they could go for dimes.

      “Okay,” says Boo.

      They sit for a time on the two thin steps below the rec doors, glad for a February day with a little warmth. Distracted by a conversation that amounts to half war council, half marketing meeting, they hardly notice as bodies begin to drift in from Fayette Street, lining up meekly. In scarcely a minute, eighteen men and women are standing hard by the fence, on the edge of the playground, across the vacant lot from Mount Street. All in a row, all waiting patiently.

      From here, too, they can see Collins come north up Vincent from Baltimore Street and park his radio car at the intersection with Fayette.

      “Bitch always hanging ’round Malik’s house,” DeAndre says.

      “Yo, that’s cause Malik be snitching,” says R.C. “Many times as he gets locked up and never goes to jail, I’m telling you that boy be snitching.”

      They watch a tall, lanky fiend walk up the middle of Fayette Street in front of Collins, pulling a new refrigerator balanced on a homemade wagon.

      “Collins ain’t shit,” DeAndre declares. “Last summer, he pulled me up on Gilmor, sayin’ he was gonna kick my ass. If my mother wasn’t there, I’da fucked him up.”

      “Collins always be pickin’ at us,” R.C. complains. “Like we’re the only ones doing shit.”

      “He ain’t as bad as Bob Brown,” says Boo.

      “That’s what I’m saying,” says R.C. “They always be after us like we the gangsters.”

      “Bob Brown come ’round an tell me I can’t even sit on my own steps,” says DeAndre. “That shit ain’t right.”

      Three teenagers—two males and a younger girl—come out of the side alley on Mount and head toward the line of waiting adults. The line seems to straighten in anticipation as one of the young men stands near the end of the line, his right hand tucked inside his jacket. The other escorts the girl to the front of the line, where she begins to hand each fiend a bag.

      Testers.

      From washing machines to widgets, every product needs marketing and promotion, and street drugs are no exception. In every open-air market in the city, samples are offered up early in the day to spread the word that so-and-so’s shit is truly a bomb. And because a weak tester would be self-defeating, the free samples rarely disappoint. Word that a crew is putting out testers can come minutes or hours—and sometimes even a day or more—in advance of the actual event, and the possibility of free bag or vial can produce a lemming run through a back alley or vacant lot.

      “Family Affair back slingin’ like I don’t know what,” says R.C., watching the line dissolve.

      Just around the corner from the tester hand-off, Collins still sits in his radio car, his view obstructed by the rowhouses on the north side of street. As the fiends skirt out of the alley in twos and threes, the patrolman seems to catch on. He pulls his cruiser into Fayette Street in a hurry, wheeling around the corner at Mount. Too late; the last of them is in full flight.

      “Collins ain’t shit,” DeAndre says again, getting up to leave. R.C. stands up, too, stretching and yawning.

      “Black,” says R.C. “You gonna go to the dance?”

      “When?”

      “Valentine’s. Miss Ella havin’ a sock hop.”

      “What’s that?”

      “Like a dance.”

      “You going?”

      “Oh yeah,” says R.C., proud. “Me and Treecee. You gonna bring Reeka?”

      Tyreeka Freamon has been DeAndre’s girl since the summer. She hasn’t been on Fayette Street long; until last year, she’d been living with her father in East Baltimore—her mother, too busy chasing vials to keep track of her, caught a drug charge that took her to women’s prison in Jessup. Then, when Tyreeka couldn’t get along with her father’s new girlfriend, she landed at her grandmother’s house on Stricker Street. DeAndre likes the newness of Tyreeka, the fact that there isn’t a neighborhood history behind her; and he likes her show of independence, the way she doesn’t always hang with the other girls on the fringe of C.M.B. That’s partly because she’s still going to school on the east side, partly because she likes to hang with the boys, which is good and bad for DeAndre—good because it made it easy to holler at her, bad because there are always others waiting to do the same.

      She’s young—thirteen last September—but she’s not young. Every boy in the neighborhood has noticed the curves and the way Tyreeka moves. DeAndre knew Linwood had his eyes on her; so did Chris and Sean. In that crowd, DeAndre was hardly the best-looking suitor. Tyreeka, he knew, saw him as too dark-skinned at first, too ordinary looking back then, before he let his dreds grow out and found his look. But DeAndre got close to her first by playing that he was interested in her younger cousin, Tish, who had been nursing a child’s crush on DeAndre.

      “You know my cousin like you,” Tyreeka told him.

      “Yeah,” he told her, “but I like you.”

      From then on, he was all over Stricker Street, spending near every dime he could scrape together by slinging at Hollins and Payson, or on Fulton, or on Fairmount. First, he bought her new Nikes; then it was trips to the movies at Harbor Park. By the time summer ended they’d seen every last thing that had come to the downtown theater complex—the good ones twice or three times. Whatever was left over went for shopping trips down at Mt. Clare or Westside, with DeAndre spending as much on his own clothes as he gave to Tyreeka. Then there was that video game down at Bill’s, the one called Street Fighter; DeAndre had her learn enough to play him on it, and not a night went by that they didn’t pour fifteen or twenty dollars in quarters into the slot. He was leaking money in those days, two hundred a week just to stay next to Tyreeka. Still, Linwood and Sean were losing their minds. Why, they asked Tyreeka, did you pick that ugly, blackass nigger?

      She knew where the money came from, of course. In the beginning, he actually brought her down to the corners to pass the time. She’d sit on the stoop; he’d serve a customer and then stop back to play around. But as things got more serious, he could see that it wasn’t right. There is no respect in having your girl out on the corner with you.

      The sex only started coming in the late fall, with DeAndre getting to her first in the back bedroom at the Dew Drop and later using his parent’s old house up the block, where the pinup girls stared down on them as they went at it. Out in the street, he talked trash like everyone else did, telling himself and everyone else he was gonna bust the bitch. But he genuinely liked Tyreeka and so he tried to be good to her, it being her first time and all.

      Now they’re together, but DeAndre is still worrying. Tyreeka likes to fool with his friends, and when it comes to girls, he doesn’t trust any of them. Linwood is still hungry for it. And Dewayne. And Tae is a creeper; he’s been flirting with Tyreeka since the day she moved

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