The Corner Read online

  “So what’s up?”

  “Either they late or I’m early.”

  There are enough of them now—prospective touts and lookouts—to open shop, as well as a handful of hungry fiends waiting listlessly at the entrance to Vine Street. Curt’s brother, Dennis, is across the street by the liquor store, bumming a smoke from Scalio. And just down the block is Smitty, collecting aluminum cans in a plastic bag, singing in his pitch-perfect tenor.

  One after the other, the dealers drift in—Gee, Shamrock, Dred, Nitty, Tiny—and assess the labor pool. They find their hires, set their wages, and ante up the day’s first installment—the up-front blast to get the corner crew alive and working. Curt goes with Dred today; he’ll do some touting, maybe even work from his own ground stash on Vine Street.

  But later for that. Right now, it’s back into Blue’s, all of them moving down the alley like cattle, heading back into the vacant rowhouse where Rita is already up, candle burning bright, adding to the daylight that streams from the gaps in the plywood boards. Strips of cloth are laid out on a battered wooden table; bottle caps, matches, and fresh water surrounded by dozens of dead-bent cigarette butts—a surgical amphitheater for the doctoring to come. And, of course, almost everyone but Rita is impatient, some jostling for a better position in the queue. Curt brings Bread along with him, and the two wait their turn quietly. Skinny Pimp, too, doesn’t bicker; he’s in the corner on a dirty bedroll, feeling a little too weak to stand around forever holding his place in line.

  “Who next?”

  “Naw … me.”

  But Rita imposes her calm on the group. She’s the medicine woman, the tribal herbalist, the mother hen that all of them come to see. In every way that matters, she’s a professional—with a few weeks of nursing classes somewhere in her history—and she expects her clientele to act accordingly.

  “Hold your horses,” she tells them.

  Those willing and able to hit themselves go off to do just that. The rest wait their turn at Rita’s table in the front room: some because they’re not handy with a needle; others because their veins have retreated to portions of their bodies that can be reached only by a second party; others still because Rita is simply that good. From one end of the room to the other, they gear up, prepping the flesh for the doctor’s grand rounds. This one rubs his neck to get the juices going; that one drops his pants for a shot in the ass; the next soul ties up his arm and slaps at cratered skin, searching for a passage home.

  “What’s working for you?” Rita asks, consulting with the patients as every good doctor does, asking them how they’re getting off lately and where the blood still flows. She probes amid old graveyards of tracks and scabs, feeling her way through the terrain like a dowser hunting water. And then, at last, she’s in and they’re on, the pinkish cloud rising into the syringe as bottom-line proof.

  Rita Hale rarely blows a shot, rarely leaves the dope and coke in a knotted, puffing lump under the skin, veinless and trapped—the wasted-time-and-money mark of an amateur. Nor does she cheat—a fact that truly marks her as special—because the search for an honest shooting gallery doctor can be as exhausting as the quest for an honest auto mechanic. Her line of work is crowded with those who can’t resist taking advantage of the helpless, but Rita will never pluck a patient. She’s not about watering them down, or switching bottle caps, or blowing B-and-Q in their veins. There are shooting galleries in which the desperate and the naive are used and abused by the house staff. In such places, a newcomer asking for help getting on will get plenty of attention from a veteran. The old-timer will take the chump’s tool and tell him to turn his head, the better to see that ripe vein bulging in his neck. And then, with a practiced motion too quick for the eye to follow, he’s dropped the rube’s hard-won dope in his pocket and come out with an empty breakaway. So the new-comer gets blasted with nothing more than the sting of cold air or maybe water. Rubbing a swollen bubble of skin, he’ll start to bitch. But the old-timer will stand pat, shaking his head. Feel that bubble, he tells him. You feel that? That’s your shit. Told you don’t move, but you turned your head and see there, you blew your shot.

  There’s no such sleight-of-hand with Rita. She’s not only good with a spike, she’s willing to earn her keep. And why cheat? For plying her trade honestly, Rita gets more dope than God. Almost everyone who comes to Blue’s ends up giving her a share of the hype, so that more than anyone in the neighborhood, Rita Hale lives the dope fiend’s purest fantasy—thirty, sometimes forty shots a day—so many that she’s reached that point where she no longer knows how it feels to want or need a blast. It’s a symbiotic relationship: The patients bring whatever the doctor wants and the doctor is always in.

  Medicinal work may have saved Rita from the daily travail of the corner world, but her ability to find a vein is a double-edged sword. She’s become an essential service at Blue’s, the only working appliance in the gutted rowhouse, and so, she’s cursed with far too much coke and dope.

  A few years back, Rita was among the most beautiful girls in the neighborhood; every man along Fayette Street remembers the curve of her figure, the symmetry of her face, the charm and humor that she brought to any conversation. Rita was something then, but for her the needle wasn’t a part-time adventure. She didn’t cast the straight world aside lightly; she hurled it down. Rita loved dope, and when she learned to doctor, there was nothing that could stop her. Within months, her hands and feet were as cruelly bloated as Fat Curt’s, her skin, cratered and scabbed. But still she kept on until her left upper arm was little more than raw, rotting flesh, the stench strong enough to fill every room of the shooting gallery. A few of the fiends—Curt and Eggy, to name two—tried to warn her, to convince her to go to Bon Secours and give it a rest before she got gangrene. But the others, driven by self-interest, said nothing. Twenty-four, seven, they lined up at her table, though some offered pirated antibiotics and back-street remedies along with her share of the dope and coke.

  Eventually, Rita couldn’t leave the shooting gallery. With her body a caricature and her will destroyed, she became a prisoner. She was no fool: all the dope in the world couldn’t kill Rita’s wit and intelligence, and there was never a waking moment when she didn’t face up to how far she had fallen. She was, in a word, ashamed—ashamed of the arm, of the smell, of the extremity of her condition. She wouldn’t bear the looks of emergency room nurses or interns, or the counter help at the corner store, or the children playing on Vine Street. Even the most jaded police couldn’t help but view her with amazement and revulsion; on the rare occasion when they raided the shooting gallery, they’d never include Rita in the lockups. They’d poke her into a back room with their nightsticks, cursing her for the stench, leaving her behind with the cookers and syringes.

  Only Blue went beyond talk and acted to save her. It was his house, after all, and he felt some responsibility for the regulars. Time and again, he told Rita to get to the hospital and when every other approach failed, he actually put her out on the street, telling her not to come back until she got treatment. That was two weeks ago. Now, Blue is gone—he took a charge and was sent courtside to the jail on Eager Street—and Rita is back, no better than before.

  One after another, they get the blast—the bystanders waiting patiently, focusing on Rita, watching the plunger fall, trying to gauge the rush. Whose dope is better? Who got shit? There’s little time or inclination in the shooting gallery for small talk or theoretical debates, little energy wasted on human relations, on current events or communication for its own sake. When you speak, you speak about dope, or coke, or that motherfucker Bob Brown, or what’s happening on what corner. Nothing else gets heard in this place, except from some rare bird like Gary McCullough, who gets his blast and then breaks etiquette by rambling on about Zen Buddhism. And fuck that shit, everyone else thinks: Shut up and shoot dope.

  “What you get there?” Rita asks, ministering to Bread.

  “Black-and-White,” says Curt.

  �
��That’ll work, but Spider Bags better.”

  Curt grunts disdain. “S’all bullshit out there nowadays,” he tells her. “Nothing but got-damn chemicals. Ain’t been no real dope out here for ten years.”

  Curt has the same complaint every morning. Rita smiles and finishes with Bread, then it’s Curt’s turn. Just as she’s finishing up, all hell breaks loose on the second floor—someone up there raising some kind of racket.

  Curt goes to the bottom of the stairs and listens. No voices, just scraping and banging sounds from the back bedroom. The tout hesitates, torn between a residual loyalty to Blue and the need to get out on the corner and make a living. Another loud metallic clang seals his decision.

  “Damn,” he says, caning slowly up the battered stairs, stopping at the landing to catch his breath. “Got-damn.”

  The noise grows louder as he struggles up the last steps, reaching the second floor to see some fiend he half-recalls from somewhere down around Hollins and Payson, a dusty-looking motherfucker who’s been coming to Blue’s for the last few weeks. Curt tries for a name, but comes up empty.

  “Ah … hey.”

  The fiend looks over, indifferent, then turns back to the business at hand. He rips another piece of aluminum guard from a rear window, stripping what’s left of Blue’s house for a few dollars at the United Iron scales.

  “My man, I’m sayin’, you know, it ain’t like we ain’t living here,” Curt offers.

  “This your house?”

  “Naw, but, y’know …”

  “Fuck you then,” says the fiend.

  “Man, leave it rest.”

  “What you gonna do?”

  “I’m just sayin’ give it a rest. You know the man ain’t even home.”

  The fiend pauses at that, looking first at the haul of twisted metal on the floor, then back at what’s left on the windows. Curt takes that as a truce of sorts, turns and canes his way back downstairs. It’s time, after all, to punch that clock.

  Curt goes back up to the corner to find Dred. He picks up his package, canes down through the alley, down past the litter-strewn lot where the alley tees into Vine Street. He crosses Vine and goes behind a vacant house, and—satisfied that no crudballs are watching—he hides the stash against the crumbling wall of a brick garage. Good enough, he thinks.

  He heads back up Vine to Monroe, where all around him the regulars at Blue’s are about the business, each one a small cog in a vast, indifferent machine. The fiends come in ones and twos, most on foot, a few pulling to the curb in cars and trucks; one white girl rides up to cop on a mountain bike. By a little after noon, Curt is halfway through his second bundle. He’s lucky; he’s selling Yellow Bag/Gold Star and it was good yesterday. Now fiends are coming out of the woodwork looking for more of the same, though if the product is anything like what Curt fired that morning, it’s now merely adequate. That’s the way it often is: A product gets a reputation at the beginning of its run, but by the end, the cut takes over and the quality drops precipitously. Still, today’s business on the Yellow Bag circuit is brisk.

  A wraith of a woman wearing a torn army jacket, her hair shoveled under a do-rag, makes the turn from Lexington and heads at Curt. She’s yellow-eyed and listing hard to starboard, her feet swamped in heavy brown workboots at least a half-dozen sizes too large.

  “What you got?”

  “Yellows.”

  She cocks an eyebrow.

  “It’ll work,” Curt tells her. He won’t oversell. Curt tries to let a little truth into the game, especially with the fiends who are looking sick.

  “Hmmm,” she says, picking up on the equivocation. “Who got them Black-and-Whites?”

  Curt sends her down toward Fayette, watching as she steers herself past the knots of touts and slingers clustered along the strip. She gets as far as the mouth of the alley in the rear of Fayette. Bryan is there, leaning against the bricks, holding up the back corner of the store, looking for all the world like he’s gainfully employed. She stops and asks. Bryan starts nodding.

  Aw shit, thinks Curt, a wrong turn for the little lady. Bryan has nothing at all to do with Black-and-Whites, and this poor girl thinks she’s on the path. Bryan is selling his Arm & Hammer, or baby powder, or whatever else looks pretty and white inside a glassine bag. Boy ought to know better as many times as he’s been shot up behind that lameass shit.

  For the next couple of hours, Curt touts and slings and watches the intrigue play out around him. Variations on the same theme that always end the same way, with someone getting over and someone else getting mad. Curt is old enough and wise enough to manage a little distance, to keep his thing separate and distinct. No sense being a pawn in any game other than your own.

  Curt sees the McCullough boy come around the corner from Fayette Street to join Kwame—his uncle, Gary’s youngest brother—and Shamrock, Kwame’s running buddy. DeAndre’s been slinging a package with Sham and Kwame for a week now, working Fairmount early in the day and coming up the hill in the afternoons. Curt watches the boy make a few quick sales on Vine, the product coming right out of his pocket. Young people got no sense, thinks Curt, shaking his head at the sight.

  The day grinds on. Curt sells, then gets his midday jolt at Blue’s, then heads back out to the corner for more of the same. About three or so, the police roll through—not Bob Brown, but some of the downtown folk—riding up Lexington, then down Monroe, then screeching to a halt at the mouth of Vine Street. Curt turns politely toward Fayette Street and begins caning away at half-speed, giving the knockers their due though they’re actually rousting some younger crew on Vine. Ten yards ahead of him, Curt sees DeAndre McCullough step quickly toward the liquor store. Just before turning the corner, he digs into his pocket and passes a plastic baggie to Tyrone, Ronnie Boice’s brother. Tyrone stuffs the baggie down his dip and strolls across the street, DeAndre seeks the protection of the store, and Curt can’t help but laugh.

  The knockers, of course, don’t come anywhere near DeAndre or Tyrone, choosing instead one of the young dealers they caught raising up on them as they turned into the block. They stay up at Vine, standing by their idling Cavalier, waiting for the wagon as the rest of the corner world drifts off, allowing them a respectful distance. Minutes later, DeAndre comes out of the liquor store, looks up and down the street, then around the corner on Fayette.

  “Where Tyrone at?” he asks the wind.

  Curt, within earshot, half-shrugs. Boy must be joking. Can’t no one say where exactly Tyrone Boice might be, Curt muses, but wherever he is, your coke is right there with him and they getting along together just fine. DeAndre, wounded and bitter, waits a few minutes more, then stalks away.

  Boy, you too young, Curt wants to tell him, too easy a mark. There was a time not long back when Curt or some other old-timer might’ve stepped up and said something, a time when a little wisdom might’ve mat tered. Even on the corner, there was a day when people weren’t afraid to talk to each other. Or to listen. Curt can remember how they once would’ve chased the McCullough boy’s young ass home, told him not to be messing with things that weren’t for him. And a burn artist like Bryan, too, would’ve heard a little something about right and wrong.

  And back in the day, they might’ve actually listened, or if they didn’t listen, at least they’d know the advice was from the heart. Like that day a few years back when Joe Laney, the lowest of the low-bottom, slash-stealing, game-running Fayette Street dope fiends shocked everyone and started chasing N.A. meetings. But even clean, Laney was coming up to Monroe and Fayette every day because, well, he had no other place to go. And Curt knew what had to be said.

  He walked up and told him—one soldier to another—well now, seeing as you don’t want anything up here, you shouldn’t be hanging. And Joe heard this and knew it to be true, finding in Curt’s words an absolution, a good-luck wish for a new life.

  Nowadays, though, the right word to the wrong person would get your ass shot up. So Bryan burns the customers and DeAndre wande
rs up and down Monroe Street, and Curt, as he often does, sees the future before it happens but says nothing.

  In the end, Fat Curt has become more of a spectator than a player at Monroe and Fayette—not only because the corner has changed, but because Curt has changed as well. He would never complain about it—“I like to shoot dope,” he assures people—but somehow, Curt has outlived his time. All that running, all that gunning, and now, his body is giving out.

  It’s a cruel but routine fate for a man who has given his entire adult life to the streets of West Baltimore. He had chased heroin with complete abandon, asking for very little in return beyond a good day’s blast, a few creature comforts, and—at least within the world of the corner itself—a degree of camaraderie and, yes, even dignity. At least in principle, the good day’s blast is still out here, but Curt has been stripped bare of every last comfort until even walking is an exercise in agony. Worse still, there is no longer any joy for him in the everyday life on the corner: The friendships, connectedness, and shared humor that the old code had made possible have been supplanted by bickering and violence and desperation. Curt, who had lived by that code, couldn’t settle comfortably into the new anarchy or find the human element that makes a hard life livable. To the older heads on the corner, he is still an oracle, but to the younger hoppers, Curt is merely one tout among many. If you were to tell them the whole story—the tale as every old head with a memory knows it—they’d have laughed at the idea. Curt? Fat Curt? The nigger on Monroe Street with them Popeye-looking hands?

  But it’s true. Curt had a run.

  Go back twenty-five years when there was still a viable neighborhood around Monroe and Fayette and there was Fat Curt, out on the edge of it, playing the gangster. He was a man of means, with money in his pocket and a real future in the west side heroin trade. In his early twenties, he fell into a comfortable niche under serious players like Teensy and Ditty and a few of the other homegrown entrepreneurs who had brought a wholesale heroin market to West Baltimore. Curt learned the rules and kept enough of them so that, eventually, he was trusted to make the trips to 116th Street and 8th Avenue—“Little Baltimore,” they called it, because that part of New York was home to many an exile from the black neighborhoods of the harbor city.