The Corner Read online

  By the turn of the decade, the survivors graduated to speedballs, mainlining the coke and dope together for the ultimate rush. The heroin was the base; it leveled you out and got you well. The coke went on top, for that extra boost that morphine always lacked. Baltimore stumbled and staggered through the decade-long cocaine epidemic, emerging in the mid-1990s as the city with the highest rate of intravenous drug use in the country, according to government estimates. And of the tens of thousands of hardcore users, the vast majority were using coke and dope simultaneously. Even those fearful of the needle could find snorting-heroin that was 60 percent pure, then top that off with a pipeful of ready.

  Old-time dopers were disgusted. To them, heroin alone seemed a reasoned lifestyle choice when compared to the havoc that followed. Watching the pipers and speedballers get bum-rushed on the corners, they would shake their heads and mutter. Even to them, it was lowbottom addiction. Even to them, it was pathetic.

  With heroin alone, the sources of supply seemed finite and organizational; access was limited to those with a genuine connection to the New York suppliers, who had, in turn, cultivated a connection to a small number of importers. The cocaine epidemic changed that as well, creating a freelance market with twenty-year-old wholesalers supplying seventeen- year-old dealers. Anyone could ride the Amtrak or the Greyhound to New York and come back with a package. By the late eighties, the professionals were effectively marginalized in Baltimore; cocaine and the open market made the concept of territory irrelevant to the city drug trade.

  It didn’t stop there either. Cocaine kicked the dealer’s code in the ass, because as the organizations gave way, so did standards. On every corner, street dealers began using minors, first as lookouts and runners, then as street-level slingers. In the beginning, these were the toughest kids, the criminal prodigies born and bred in the most distressed families, welcomed by dealers who were contending with stiffened penalties for sale. It made sense to hire juveniles for the street work: Why risk a five-year bit when any fifteen-year-old with heart could sling vials, take a charge, then carry whatever weight a juvenile court master might put on him?

  It was a reasonable strategy at first, but ten years down the road the internal logic was no longer valid—amid chronic prison overcrowding, few adults were getting time for street-level drug distribution in Baltimore; probation and pretrial time served was the order of the day. Yet the children stayed on the corners, not so much as camouflage, but because good help was hard to find.

  The code had failed: the touts, the runners, even the street-level dealers were violating the cardinal rule and using their own product. And not just dope—which might have permitted some stability—but coke, or coke and dope together; the pipeheads graduated to heroin, the dope fiends speedballed. And somewhere in this wild cocktail party, the packages started coming up short, the money began disappearing, and the touts and lookouts were suddenly wandering off post. Down on Fayette Street, reliability was out the window and not even the threat of violence could stop Country from putting a quarter of Scar’s package up his nose, or Eggy Daddy from claiming that he had to give sixty dollars of Gee Money’s profit to some imaginary stickup boy. What was a slinger to do?

  The children weren’t exactly captains of industry either; they’d mess up in their own way, if you let them. But most weren’t using anything harder than weed, and most were ready and willing to work conscientiously for a bit of pocket money. In contrast to the hardcore fiends, dealers came to see that you could extract some loyalty from adolescents, or intimidate them if necessary. The teenagers would, in turn, bring in younger kids to sling and run for them, until, at last, the day of the ten-year-old drug dealer was at hand.

  The trend only accelerated as more young mothers went to the corner chasing coke, and single-parent families already under pressure began to implode. More than heroin ever did, cocaine battered at what had for generations been the rock-hard foundation for the urban black family. Heroin had been claiming its share of West Baltimore men for thirty years, but the cheap cocaine of the 1980s had turned the women out, bringing them to the corner in numbers previously unthinkable. Where once, on Fayette Street, there had been a network of single mothers who managed to get the essentials done, there was now raw anarchy in many homes. And where a discussion of single-parent households once seemed relevant to places like Fayette Street, now there loomed the new specter of children who were, in reality, parentless.

  Unattended and undisciplined, these children were raising themselves in the street, free to begin their inexorable drift, drawn not only by quick money, but by the game of it. Thirteen-year-olds who had cut classes and played hoops and run the back alleys together now banded together as a crew, playing gangster, slinging vials, and ducking the police. In West Baltimore, the corner became the funhouse, offering camaraderie and standing and adventure. What, after all, could compete with the thrill of suddenly being The Man, of having your own bomb of a package on a corner, standing there under the sodium-vapor lights as grown men and women seek you out and commence to begging? This one wants a job as a tout; this one is short four bills and asking to slide; that one offers her body for three vials. And in the end, it wasn’t just the valedictorians of Hickey School and Boys Village and every other state juvenile facility out there on the corner, it was all save the stoop kids—the well-parented few who weren’t allowed beyond their front steps. All across the inner city—from Lafayette Courts to Sandtown to Cherry Hill—slinging drugs was the rite of passage.

  When children became the labor force, the work itself became childlike, and the organizational structure that came with heroin’s first wave was a historical footnote. In the 1990s, the drug corner is modeled on nothing more complicated than a fast-food emporium, an environment in which dealing drugs requires about as much talent and finesse as serving burgers. No discretion, no precautions; the modern corner has no need for the applied knowledge of previous generations.

  Where once a competent street dealer would never be caught touching the dope, the more brainless of his descendants now routinely carries the shit in one pocket, money in the other. Wiser souls might work a ground stash—a small inventory of coke or dope hidden in the weeds or rubbish a few feet away—but ten minutes after selling out, they’ll be out under a streetlight, counting their grip, manicuring the $10 and $5 bills into a clean roll and fairly begging for the attentions of a knocker or stickup artist. Close scrutiny of customers has become anachronism, too. The new school serves anyone—known fiends and strangers, ragged or well-heeled, white or black, young or old, in battered pickups or fresh-off-the-lot BMWs—with an indifference as careless as it is democratic.

  The precision and subtlety of the game have been replaced by raw retailing—open-air bazaars with half a dozen crews out on post, barking the names of their product like Lexington Market grocers. Corners are crowded with competing crews, each pushing the claim that their own product is true and righteous. With heroin, labels are stamped right on the glassine packet: Killer Bee, Lethal Weapon, The Terminator, Diamond in the Raw, Tec Nine. Free testers are tossed out every morning as word-of-mouth advertising for the coming package, and the touts are constantly trumpeting blue-light specials: two for the price of one, or a free vial of coke with every dime of dope, or family-size packets offering much more blast for just a little more cash. Where only $10 vials of coke are being sold, a fresh crew can carve a niche with a $5 offering. And if one crew’s product is too good to match straight up, a competing group might lace its package with a little strychnine—a bomb that might or might not drop a fiend dead, but definitely gets his attention either way.

  Dealers and fiends alike go about this business with a herdlike trust in their own overwhelming numbers to protect them from the random drug arrest. Violence, too, is no longer the prerogative of the professional but a function of impulse and emotion. The contract killers and the well-planned assassinations of earlier eras are mere myth on these corners. Now, the moment of truth general
ly comes down to some manchild with hurt feelings waving a .380 around and spraying bullets up and down the block. The accidental shooting of bystanders—a rare event in the organizational era—is now commonplace. As for snitching, that part of the code is also dead and buried. No organizational ethic makes sense when everyone is shorting and getting shorted by everyone else, when loyalty is absent even within a crew that grew up together. In the new order, anyone can and will say anything for even the smallest advantage.

  When the arrests come, they are regarded as routine misadventures, small setbacks that in most cases mean little more than a few nights on a city jail tier, followed by an appointment with a state probation officer that is, more often than not, ignored. Worse still, the absence of a real deterrent has bred a stupidity in the new school that is, for lack of a better word, profound. Few seem to learn from the experience of getting caught; they take the same charge time and again, jacked up by the same police who use the same tricks to gather the same evidence from the same corners. At times, the younger ones senselessly provoke the charge through pride and bluster as no old-timer would; eyefuck for eyefuck, curse for curse, insult for insult, until Collins or Pitbull or Peanuthead is out of the cruiser and swinging the nightstick hard, enraged at being called a bitch by some seventeen-year-old hopper.

  Once charged, there is no strategy or defense, nothing for the lawyers to work with, no attempt to limit time because, in most cases, there is no time. When someone does finally go away for a year or two on a fourth or fifth offense, well, it’s all in the game. Prison itself is regarded with vague indifference: The operant corner logic is that the hardcore gangster stance is what matters, that if it’s time to jail, then you jail. You carry it like it means nothing, telling yourself the old prison-tier lie that says you really only do two days—the day you go in and the day you come out.

  Cocaine and the expanding marketplace have changed the landscape of the corner, forging a boomtown industry that has room not only for the professional criminals and the committed addicts who have lingered on the fringe of the neighborhood for so long, but for everyone and anyone. Men and women, parents and children, the fools and the clever ones, even the derelicts and outcasts who had no viable role when drug distribution was a structured enterprise—all are assimiliated into the corner world of the 1990s. At Fayette and Monroe and so many other corners in so many other cities, it’s nothing more or less than the amateur hour.

  And why not? Consider the food chain of the average drug corner, the ready fodder for all the ambo runs and police calls:

  At the top are, of course, the dealers, ranging from disciplined New York Boys to fifteen-year-old locals who manage to parlay Nike and Nautica money into a package of their own. The stereotypes no longer apply; every now and then a showpiece with gold chains and an Armani shirt pops out of a Land Rover with custom rims, but for the most part, there’s little flash to the drug slingers making real money.

  There is no singular connection, no citywide cartel to enforce discipline and carve up territory. Looking up the skirt of the wholesale market from Fayette and Monroe, the drug sources are random and diffuse. A supplier could be a twenty-five-year-old Nigerian fresh from airport customs or a New Yorker in his thirties with a line back to his uncle in the Bronx, a seventeen-year-old junior at Southwestern who sat down next to the right kid in homeroom, or even a fifty-year-old veteran of the old westside heroin organizations, coming home from Lewisburg or Marion after doing ten of a twenty-five-year stint and hooking up with some younger heads for one last fling.

  The product itself is, by and large, ready to sell. Gone are the days of uncut dope on the table and four or five gangsters battling the scale, trying to get the purity down and maximize profit. Gone are the cut-buddies, who could wield the playing cards and mannitol with skill to ensure a proper package. Much of what sells on a Baltimore corner is purchased as a prepackaged item with little assembly required. A G-pack of a hundred coke vials, sold on consignment, can make you one thousand dollars, with six hundred kicked back to the supplier. Do that a couple times, then ride the bus or the rails to New York, catch the IRT up to Morningside Heights or the Grand Concourse and lay down the grip; what comes back is precut product, with the equivalent number of vials all neatly wrapped. No math, no chemistry—a sixth-grader with patience and a dull blade can fill the vials and be on a corner inside of an hour. Do that two or three times, ride the rails with one thousand dollars or so and you can come back home with two full ounces. Turn that over and—even allowing for short counts and spillage and fuckups—you’ve got five or six thousand. Same game, different numbers with dope, but either way, you’re a businessman. On most corners, if you can last two weeks without messing up, you’re the reincarnation of Meyer Lansky. The bottom line is this: Anyone who can work the numbers, dodge the stickup boys, and muster enough patience to stand on a corner for six hours a day can call himself a drug dealer.

  Serving the larger street dealers are a host of employees, a few working for profit, most for product, but all within a fragile hierarchy, a structure predicated on such short-supply qualities as trust and reliability. You get to be a runner because a dealer trusts you to handle the dope and coke directly, to bring it in small quantities from the stash to the corner all day long without succumbing to the obvious temptations. A runner who proves himself time and again, who won’t cheat his boss by lightening the product, can step up. He might handle some of the money or, in the dealer’s absence, supervise the street sales. He might just make lieutenant. On the other hand, a runner who fucks up is on his way to becoming a tout.

  Touts, less trusted, are there to promote the product and bring in business. All are fiends: Some are tenor twenty-year veterans of the corner, and consequently, only a rare few—Fat Curt for one—can be relied upon to handle product. Touting is day work, a meat-market selection, with the dealers hiring their help each morning and paying them for the most part in dope and coke. Touts serve as living billboards—walking, talking advertisements for the chemicals coursing through their bodies. A tout who staggers to his post and simply stands there—vacant-eyed, at a thirty-degree junkie lean, telling passersby that the Spider Bags are a bomb—is earning his keep. Rain or snow or gloom of night, he’s out there on a double shift for three or four blasts a day and, if he’s lucky, ten or twenty or thirty dollars in cash. No health benefits. No supplemental life. No pension. As much as any working man, the drug-corner tout is a soul in desperate need of a union.

  Below the touts are the lookouts—the last hired and first fired of the corner world. Standing guard at the frontiers of the empire are the very young and the very damaged. For the children, it’s a lark: trying their hands at the game for the first time, scooting around on bikes or riding the top of a mailbox. It beats the hell out of sixth-grade social studies and for a few hours’ effort, you’re up twenty or thirty dollars with very little risk. For the walking wounded, the low-bottom dope fiends who aren’t allowed within a block of a stash, standing lookout is the last chance to get a free shot. They also serve who stand and wait, eternally on the spy for knockers, rollers, and, of course, the stickup crews. They spend hours chained to their post, watching the endless flow of traffic for the blue bubbles of the marked cars, or the small trunk antennas that are the tell-tale badge of an unmarked Cavalier. And God help the lookout who forgets to look both directions on one-way streets like Fulton or Fayette; most of the rollers will play the sneak and drive their cruisers the wrong way. Stray off post or take a nod and a lookout stands a good chance of seeing the business end of an employer’s aluminum bat. And so all day, every day, they’re raising up, sounding the alarm with a loud bark, or a whistle, or the standard shouts of “Five-Oh” or “Time Out” ringing from the four points of the compass, giving warning that Huff ham or Pitbull is looking for an easy lock-up, or that a stickup artist like Odell is on safari with his four-four.

  On the demand side of the market are, of course, the fiends, grazing around the
oasis day and night, wandering from one crew to the next in search of the perfect blast. And they, too, must be serviced by a coterie of specialists.

  The shooting galleries—vacant or near-vacant rowhouses, battered by the constant traffic, emptied of all valuables—are manned by a service industry all their own. The keepers of the inn guard the door, charging a buck or two for entry, maybe less if a fiend is willing to share some of the hype. For the price of admission, you get a patch of solid floor, a choice of bottle caps, a pint or so of communal water, and if you’re lucky, a book of dry matches or a shared candle. You bring your own spike, but if you don’t have one, there will likely be someone else at or near the gallery selling works for a couple bucks. Either that or you can walk the block or two to the established needle house—the home of some profit-minded diabetic—and get fixed for a dollar. At last, when you’re equipped and ready but can’t seem to find a vein, help is as near as the house doctor, the happy troglodyte wearing shoes decorated with candle-drippings, the healer who spends all night and day hunting wayward arteries for fiends lacking the skill or the patience or both.

  But it doesn’t end there. At the urban watering hole, the employment opportunities of sellers and users compete with those of the vanguard of raw capitalism, the true hucksters trying to sell steakless sizzle. Anyone can market dope and coke on the corner, but it takes a special breed to serve up nothing and call it something. Baking soda or bonita-and-quinine—B-and-Q—as dope, oregano as weed, battery acid as ready rock: Once chased from the corners by the organized drug trade, the burn artists have returned to a golden era. They stand where they want, sell what they want, and risk only the rage of their victims, or in a rare instance, the ire of a street dealer whose business or reputation suffers by proximity.