The Corner Read online

  There are the other outcasts, too, those with no temperament for sales or service, just a willingness to risk all for a chance at the mother lode. The stash stealers, who will spend time watching the runners and touts, tracking them to the ground stash and then waiting for the ideal moment. Or the stickup boys, the crazed loners who gather information about this corner and that, tracing a product back until they’re coming through the door of the stash house in an adrenaline rush, staking everything on the premise that no dealer will come back on them, that their ferocity will not be matched. A few of West Baltimore’s stickup men have survived a decade or more, but most carry the doomed, thousand-yard-stare of shorttimers. Once, a stickup boy could go into battle relying at least on the organizational structure; they knew who they were going up against and the consequence of those actions. But today, when even fifteen-year-old hoppers have a loaded.380 hidden in the alley, the job is little better than a death wish.

  Crowd them together—each pursuing his or her immediate ends—and what governs the corner no longer resembles either a corporate model or the orderly economics of the marketplace. It is, instead, the raw anarchy of the natural world. At the watering hole, the strong survive, the weak perish, and self-preservation and self-gratification dictate that any conceivable act of brutality or betrayal can and will occur. Social norms, morality, the values of the civilization that created the American cities—precious little of it remains at the oasis itself, where everyone must come to drink, regardless of the risk. Though it began as a criminal subterfuge and grew to become a neighborhood bazaar, the urban drug corner is now the social framework through which almost every soul in these battered communities must pass. Some, perhaps, will destroy themselves immediately, others will lose themselves in the mix, and a few stoics, astonishingly, will pass through the corner unscathed and uncorrupted. But pass through they must, because in places like Fayette Street, the corner is the neighborhood.

  Yet there are still rules to this place—even anarchy creates its own axioms. The old code of the dealers is useless now; the new rules are different and have to be. Because, by necessity, any new logic must allow for a mother to stand on Monroe Street and tout Red Tops with her two-year-old in tow. It must allow for a fiend’s theft of the television set from the recreation center, of chalices from the corner churches, of the rent money from his mother’s bedroom. And the rules of the corner cannot stand if they prohibit a thirteen-year-old from holding up a single vial of coke and telling a playmate with brutal honesty that for one of these, your mother will step up and suck my dick.

  Make no mistake: No one likes to play under the rules, no one on Fayette Street respects them or regards them as fair or worthy or in any way justified. Even the lowest needle freak knows guilt at the instant he’s doing dirt, but knowing it changes nothing. The rules are not to be trifled with; they are not arbitrary, nor are they simply an afterthought or rationalization. The new postulates and proofs of the corner embrace the chaos, written as they are in an environment perfectly indifferent to anything beyond dope and coke. To exist in that environment—to seek or sell dope and coke—and at the same time to carry the burden of an outside morality is to invite abuse and failure. To ignore the rules, to try to live above them, is to walk blindly into the maw of the thing, risking destruction for something as ethereal and vague as human decency.

  The rules of the game are a two-step program to nonrecovery, as valid a living credo as anything on those pamphlets that get tossed around at Narcotics Anonymous meetings. First among them is a basic declaration of intent as all-encompassing as the first commandmant to roll down the slopes of Sinai.

  I. Get the blast.

  Get it and live. For whomsoever believeth in good dope shall live forever, or if not forever, at least for that sugar-sweet moment when he chases down a vein, slams it home, and discovers that what they’re saying about them Green Tops is true: The shit is right. And if the shit ain’t right, if he cooks it up and guns it home and it’s B-and-Q, or just enough to get him out of the gate, then the first rule still applies. Go back to the corner and get the blast. And then do it again. Because the next one, or the next one after, will be the true dose, the one to justify all faith. Ten or twenty or thirty years of addiction—it doesn’t matter. Every fiend in the street is trying to re-create that first perfect shot of dope or coke, the one that told him this was what he wanted in life. The fiends are at it morning, noon, and night—none of them ever quite getting there, getting just close enough to feed the hunger. And if by some miracle one nails it, if he catches that perfect wave and experiences the chemical epiphany in the back bedroom of some rotting two-story pile, swaying and nodding and scratching to some angelic melody in the kingdom-to-come, if he can stumble back against the flaking plaster and paint, smile stupidly and, with utter reverence, proclaim the shit a bomb, then what? What price glory, save for another caper for another ten dollars and another trip back to the corner, hoping against hope that the vials are still packed, that whoever put that good dope on the street hasn’t watered down the back end of the package.

  If faith and spirituality and mysticism are the hallmarks of any great church, then addiction is close to qualifying as a religion for the American underclass. If it was anything less, if at Fayette and Monroe there was a single shard of unifying thought that could compete with the blast itself, then the first rule would be null and void. But no, the blast is all, and its omnipotence not only affirms the first rule, but requires the second:

  II. Never say never.

  On the corner, the survivors do what they’ve got to do and they live with it. When mere vice is sufficient to get the blast, it ends there. But eventually, it’s sin that is required, and when sin falls short, absolute evil becomes the standard. Those who play the game and deny the progression, who insist that there are some moral limits that they will not violate, are forever surprising themselves. Never say never, cry the sages, because a true believer pays absolute homage to addiction, he turns to face it like a Muslim turns toward Mecca. The transformation is gradual but certain, and wrapped in a new vernacular of moral denial.

  In the thought and speech of the corner, misdemeanors become not crimes, but capers. Those selling drugs are no longer peddling dope, but serving people; those buying the drugs are not addicts or junkies—perjorative terms of an earlier era—but dope fiends, a term that captures the hunger and devotion of the corner chase, rather than simple dependency. A player who undertakes an armed robbery, a street shooting, or a carjacking is no longer committing a felony, but simply doing a deed. A burn bag sold to a friend, a stash stolen from a first cousin’s bedroom, is no longer a betrayal, but merely getting over. When you do these things, of course, you’re simply playing the game; when these things are done to you, it’s the work of a crudball, a cold motherfucker with no feelings or conscience. The term is never self-applied; corner logic doesn’t work that way. One’s own crudball adventures are not, of course, regarded as such; the most successful of them are recounted by the perpetrators in a bemused tone that suggests professional pride. The rest of the herd, too, can often manage a grudging respect for a player who breaks new ground in doing unto others, so that a crudball act that consistently yields a profit can easily rise in stature. It becomes, in corner parlance, a dope-fiend move.

  It’s almost better to be born into the world of the dope-fiend move, and stay there, than to arrive there as a matter of necessity, burdened by ethical baggage that serves no useful purpose. That can only make a player vulnerable. So it is with Gary McCullough, who can’t easily justify anything worse than the penny-ante caper. And so it is with Fran Boyd, who has acquired an arsenal of fiendish moves only to be constrained by a lingering sense of obligation to her sons.

  In the end, the corner best serves the hardcore, the junkyard dogs with neither the time nor inclination for pity. It’s for Ronnie Boice, Gary’s girl, who never misses her shot, though her children are running the streets; or Jon-Jon, training twelve-yea
r-olds to sling his bags on Gilmor; or Bunchie, who can make the rent money disappear month after month, knowing that in the end, her brother Scoogie will shell out what’s needed to prevent the eviction; or Dink-Dink, selling burn bags to fiends three times his age and almost hoping that they come back on him, figuring he’ll go to his nine and catch himself a body.

  By nature or by nurture, the mindset of the dope-fiend move, once acquired, becomes a lifelong companion. Once in the game, it’s hard for a player to forget the lessons learned and operate in the legitimate world. The dope-fiend move becomes the immediate answer to all problems, the short-term response to life’s long-term struggles. Off the corner and loosed upon the legitimate world, it’s the lie on the housing application, the copied essay on the community college midterm, the petty theft from the register, and ultimately, the justification for returning to the world of the corner. It’s a new way of thinking that can’t be challenged with jobs or educational opportunities or drug treatment, because once you see the world as a dope fiend does, you can’t see it any other way. A few years in the mix and the only voice in your head becomes the collective wail of the corner itself.

  How could it be otherwise? Day after goddamn day, the corner proves itself and, by extension, every idiot on the corner is proven as well. Touts, runners, fiends—they’re always where you expect them to be, stand-around-and-serve prophets of the new logic; they speak and you believe.

  So when you go up to Fayette and Monroe and hear that your rap buddy just fell dead after slamming some Red Tops, you barely miss a beat. Fuck it, the prophet tells you, he didn’t know how to shoot coke, not the way you do. Never mind that you were gunning with the dead man for a decade, never mind that you shared a hype with him a hundred times, never mind that he’s pounded on your chest to bring you back more than once, he ain’t shit now. Just another no-doping, skin-popping, scramble-shooting punk, says the corner. Nigger wasn’t serious like you; couldn’t handle the good shit. And you believe it; you want the Red Tops.

  The corner prophet knows.

  You go to court and the downtown judge gives you five years suspended, tells you you’re on supervised probation. Fuck that, says the prophet. If you report and then mess up, they can find you; if you don’t report, they ain’t got no record of you. And you, of course, do like the prophet says, thinking you’re getting over when you ain’t. A month or two later, you take a charge and they drag your ass from city jail to the downtown courthouse. The same prune-faced judge looks down at you, talking about how you’re in violation of probation, talking about how you’re gonna eat the whole five years. And you do the bit, come back from Hagerstown, go back up to the same corner and find that motherfucker. Yo, what up?

  And the prophet just looks at you like you’re some kind of fool, talking about how you can get locked up for that shit, saying you should have reported.

  And you don’t miss a beat. You nod your head in agreement because, the man’s a got-damn prophet; his shit has to be true. And when the next problem comes around, there you are again on the same corner, looking for more of the same.

  “I’m saying, I can’t get rid of this hole, man,” you tell him, rolling up your sleeve to show a dime-sized crater. The prophet just shakes his head and a neophyte jumps into the lull, offering advice.

  “Ain’t no hole, man,” says the newcomer. “That an abscess. You gotta get some ointment. Go to the emergency room, they got to give it to you. Clean it right up.”

  “Fuck that,” you tell him. “I’m saying, you go there, you got to wait all day. Man, they don’t got no time for no niggers. See, what I’m saying, I can’t be doing that, man. I’m saying, this nigger got things to do.”

  And, of course, the prophet finally steps up.

  “Shit, you want to clean it up or what?” he asks.

  “Yeah, what I’m saying …”

  “Get yourself some eggs, two should do it,” the prophet says. “Boil ’em up in a pot ’til they hard. Then you gotta peel ’em real careful like. You want to get that thin skin, be under the shell? You know what I’m talking about, be under the shell?”

  “Yeah, uh-huh.”

  “You got to peel that off and stick it over the holes. Wrap it up in some gauze. Word up: two weeks. It be like these.”

  The prophet shows you the back of his left hand. “Them the kind of scar you get.”

  You’re not sure.

  “Fuck it, I don’t give a shit if your motherfucking arm falls off,” says the prophet. “That’s on you.”

  “No, I’m saying I ain’t heard about doing that. That’s all. I’m saying, it might work. You probably right.”

  Two weeks and a dozen eggs later you’re pulling the gauze off your arm and, of course, the hole is now the size of a quarter. And when you go back to the corner prophet, he tells you he don’t know shit about eggs. Potatoes, he tells you. Boiled potatoes are the cure. For a moment or two, you shake your head and curse the prophet, but two hours later you’re pricing spuds at the Super Fresh, though in the end, you’ll say to hell with it. No time for boiling shit up or waiting around emergency rooms. The corner knows; you’re not about fixing the hole in your arm, you’re about that blast.

  So you learn: The prophet never lies; he can’t be wrong. As it is for every other wandering animal, the watering hole is the only truth you can afford. It owns you, uses you, kicks your ass, robs your mind, and grinds your body down. But day after lonesome day, it gives you life.

  For twenty on the hype, you believe.

  Fat Curt lies still on a dirt-slicked mattress as the wind pushes through the cracks of the boarded-up windows, barely breaking stride before it rushes through the darkened rooms. All around him, the moans and coughs and curses of comrades scattered on makeshift bedrolls blend with groans from the boards and joists of Blue’s old house.

  Hard soldiering in a hard winter. Curt sheds the tatter of blankets and clothing that have covered him through a February night, throwaways and giveaways layered one atop another for enough warmth to keep the old heart pumping. Curt gropes for his cane, finding it at the edge of the mattress. He plants the rubber tip into the weathered floorboard and slowly shifts his weight forward. He grabs the middle of the cane with his left hand and, with a long grunt, pries himself up and out. Swollen hands grip the walking stick as he fights off a wave of vertigo; swollen feet pad between a sprawl of bodies in the front room.

  “Hey Curt.”

  “Hey.”

  Pimp props himself against a bare wall.

  “What time is it?”

  Pimp asking the time, like he’s got somewhere to be. Curt shakes his head: “Time to get on out there.”

  Curt stumbles down the narrow corridor and through a sea of trash in the stripped-bare kitchen, heading for the back door. He leans down on his cane to make an exit through the broken-out bottom panels, doing a sideways limbo to get to the morning sunlight in the back alley. Hungry is out there already, his head bandaged from his latest misadventure with a New York dealer.

  “He up here yet?”

  Hungry shakes his head, a loose flap of white gauze fluttering in the wind. Not yet. Curt’s up and out, but you can’t punch the clock without a package.

  He makes his way up the alley and out onto Monroe, but the early morning sun is lost in the shadow of the rowhouses on the east side of the street. So he canes his way down to Fayette Street, crossing over to the grocery and finding some pavement warmed by the day. The Korean is sweeping around the store entrance and Curt mumbles a greeting. The Korean nods, then waits, broom in hand, too polite to ask Curt to move. Curt senses this and returns the favor, stepping to the other side of the corner but still staying with the sun.

  There he stands for the next hour or so, rooted on the corner that he has known his whole life, waiting for the rising tide of the day to pick him up and carry him along. Brothers-in-arms slide out of the alley, squinting in the sunlight, hunting up the morning’s first Newport and telling the early-bird cust
omers to hang in there, to go around the block once or twice more until things pick up.

  Curt watches Eggy Daddy and Pimp drift up to the corner: Eggy, looking no worse for the wear, pretty good considering; Pimp, now stick-thin from the Bug. Bryan follows them out of the alley carrying the piss bucket, dumping a night’s fill into the gutter, then returning the metal pail to Blue’s back door.

  From the other direction, Bread saunters up smiling, looking a bit warmer than the rest. Bread still has a key to his mother’s back door down the hill on Fayette, a warrior living all for the corner but keeping that one last connection to the world left behind, sleeping in his mother’s basement when the winter chill is on. Still, Curt gives Bread some due as a soldier, because the man’s been out here forever, as long as Curt even. He’s forty-six and a legendary fixture, running and gunning dope at Monroe and Fayette since the corner lampposts were twigs.

  “You look like a frog,” he tells Curt.

  “Yeah,” Curt agrees. “Layin’ down, the fluid come up and swell my face.”

  “Yeah, you swole all right.”

  “Makes my eyes pop out and shit,” Curt grunts. “Like a got-damn bullfrog.”

  “Maybe I get Charlene to come past an’ kiss you,” says Bread, nodding at the tired form of Charlene Mack across the street. “You be a prince then.”

  “Sheeeet,” says Curt, laughing aloud, a joyous rumble welling up in his dry throat and bursting out. Bread laughs, too, delighted to have put pleasure on his old friend’s face. Making people smile is Bread’s best game, really. He doesn’t tout or sell much; nor is Bread one to go off the corner to boost or burglarize. Instead, he gets most of his dope because people like him, because he genuinely makes them want to share their blast.