The Corner Read online

  Curt made the runs, sometimes by train, sometimes by bus, and once in the city he’d go look up Sadie Briscoe, a Baltimore transplant who made the rent by hooking up the out-of-town crowd with the New York wholesalers. Curt would pass the money and pick up the package and see it safely to a Baltimore stash house. He made many a trip, skirting the newly forming interdiction squads, the stickup crews, and the burn artists, getting that good New York City dope and getting high on the excess. Back then, Curt had so much dope coming his way that for a long time he had no sense that he had an addiction.

  On what was then the neighborhood corner, Lexington and Fulton, he was the show: He had a big de Ville, a car that kids like Gary McCullough would wash and polish for a hefty tip; a heavy roll of twenties, neatly manicured and passed freely for services rendered; and, of course, the endless supply of shit that granted him admission to every party. As time ticked on, others got greedy or sloppy or too notorious for their own good. They fell to state or federal charges, but Curt held fast to the middle rungs of the West Baltimore trade, never trying to play the game for more than the good blast and a few dollars besides. In part, his long run was a function of luck. But in part, Curt lasted because he never lost touch with one of the great joys of the thing, the cat-and-mouse adventure with the police, the running and dodging. Yet because he stayed out of jail, he never got a serious break in the action—a vacation from the needle that might have given his body a chance to dry the cells and slow the swelling in every limb. That’s the irony of a drug arrest at the street-corner level: Locking up a hardcore fiend won’t close the shop or stop the product. It won’t keep anyone from the game, or pave the way toward rehabilitation unless a fiend genuinely wants to quit fiending. The real tangible benefit from day-to-day police work in the drug war is medicinal: A run-and-gun player gets hit with a charge and, like it or not, he gets a brief convalescence. He gets some food, some sleep, maybe even some antibiotics. He gives those tired old veins a respite. Then, when the whistle blows, he’s charging out of the penalty box for more of the same.

  And so, from the addiction itself he fell. Slowly at first, but relentlessly, he shed all of the big-score vestiges on the way down to Blue’s. The Cadillac was ancient neighborhood lore; the trademark roll of twenties, just a gleam in the eye; and the dope was no longer the raw and wild New York quarter, but whatever stepped-on nonsense was out here on the corners. Rose, the girl of his youth, was out on Fayette Street, but making her own way; Curt Junior, now a teenager, was selling from the same corners as well. For a while, home for Fat Curt was nothing better than a third-floor walk-up, with the electricity pirated by extension cord from a back-alley utility pole. Finally, when rent on that shithole came due, home was Blue’s.

  Over time, it had reached the point where Curt couldn’t take a charge if he tried. All day, every day he’s selling or touting dope and coke and yet, somehow, his ubiquity at the crossroads of Monroe and Fayette has rendered him invisible. The police see him, of course; Curt is an epic sight. But as with Rita, the physical damage has kept him out of the police wagon for no better reason than that the street police are repulsed and frightened. They’d roll up on the corner, give the bloated tout a quick once-over, and then grab someone else. In the beginning, when Curt was thriving, there was no break because he was good or lucky or both. In the end, when Curt is slowly dying, there’s no break because his body has been wrecked.

  Like now. A couple of the knockers get bored waiting for the wagon and come down Monroe to clear the corner. Two plainclothesmen and a uniform move down the block in tandem, quickly overtaking Curt, but moving past him to tell Shamrock, Kwame, and a few more of the younger ones to get the fuck off the street. Curt stands unmolested in the same spot, unable to rate even a casual eyefuck.

  For twenty minutes, the shop stays closed as cops and corner boys alike wait for the Western District wagon. When it arrives to cart the day’s sacrifice to the district lockup, the rest of the herd watches placidly, insulated by their very numbers from worrying the thing too much.

  The wagon finally rolls off down Monroe, turning the corner on Fayette, and Curt tries to pick up where he left off. But after roping in a quick sale, he’s overcome with a strange uncertainty.

  “Aw shit.”

  He hobbles up to Vine Street and looks down the alley at the row of vacant, battered brick. Third one down? Fourth one? Fifth? Who the hell can remember with all the shit going on?

  “Oh Lord,” says Curt, petitioning for divine intervention as he pokes his way down the lane. “Where mah dope? Lord, please help me find mah dope.”

  It’s another hour before he manages to relocate his bundle where he left it, sell it off, and get back to Blue’s for the midafternoon jumper. Curt’s down in the front room, waiting for Rita to get herself off, when he hears the same damn racket above him. Up he goes to the second floor, his legs aching, his patience thinned. Sure enough, the same asshole is still at it.

  “Well, got-damn …”

  The fiend looks blankly at him.

  “Just leave the shit be now.”

  “Fuck you, motherfucker.”

  Curt wonders why he cares, thinking to himself that there ain’t much left to Blue’s old house anyway, and what’s left is going to get carted away by someone soon enough. Ever since Blue got locked up, Curt had been making a modest effort to hold the fort. But there was no telling when Blue might get home.

  Two weeks ago—about an hour or so after Blue had told Rita to clean up and had put her out of the house—the police suddenly kicked in the front door and charged through the shooting gallery. This quite naturally scared the living shit out of all present, sending Blue himself out the second-floor rear window in a mad leap. It wasn’t much of a raid, in fact. There was no warrant and the police who went charging through rooms with guns drawn weren’t much interested in the handful of vials, syringes, and cookers scattered about. Instead, they were looking for an injured officer; someone, it seemed, had dialed 911 to report that a police was taking a beating inside the shooting gallery. The caller did not identify herself to the police dispatcher, but the gallery regulars figured Rita Hale, her feelings hurt by the eviction, to be the even-money bet.

  As the police searched Blue’s house that day, the hardcore soldiers—Curt and Eggy, Pimp and Dennis—sat silent, their hard-won highs ruined. Blue went rabbit because he thought he was supposed to go rabbit, because he was running a shooting gallery and the police were kicking through the door. The fall from the upstairs window didn’t hurt a bit; getting grabbed and tossed around the back alley by a plainclothes detective who was responding to the officer-needs-assistance call—that was the problem. Convinced that there was no injured officer in the house, the raiding party managed to overlook the vials and syringes and leave everybody be—save for Blue and two or three others who had tried to run and had to be punished on principle. For Blue, the charge was burglary—to wit, breaking and entering into his own house.

  So the lord of the manor is gone and Rita is back and now Curt is left to stare down a one-man demolition squad. There’s a part of him almost ready to let it go, but something else keeps the confrontation going. For Curt, it goes back to the old code, back to the time when people talked to each other. Fuck it, he figures, it is Blue’s house and Blue is a friend, and messing with the man’s house when he’s over at pretrial ain’t right. He watches the fiend pull at the window-stripping and decides to give it one more try.

  “I’m sayin’ …”

  But the fiend isn’t listening anymore. Instead, he’s crossing the room, picking up a long piece of jagged aluminum, and swinging hard.

  The first blow tears Curt on the side of the face; he can feel the warm blood squirt from his cheek and neck. The second, he fends off, catching a deep cut in his left palm. The fiend brandishes the weapon again and Curt backs up into the front bedroom, assessing the damage.

  The tout hears the enemy stalk down the stairs. Pausing for a moment to think it thro
ugh, he drops his cane, grabs Blue’s wooden chair, drags it over to the closet, and uses it to boost himself up through the trapdoor. In a Herculean effort, he struggles up into the attic’s crawl space, managing somehow to push himself along to the trapdoor to the roof without getting wedged between the beams. He rests for a moment to steady a laboring pulse, then pops the roof cap and lifts himself onto the frozen black tar. A man on a mission, he ignores the wind’s chilly breath on his sweating body, crawling to the edge of the roof. He peeps down on the Fayette Street sidewalk.

  No fiend.

  Curt takes a look across the roof and spots a loose brick near the chimney stack. He stretches for it and returns to position directly above the doorway. A couple minutes more and, blessed Jesus, the fiend not only steps onto the stoop but stands there. Curt leans over the edge, squares the target in the crosshairs, and it’s bombs away.

  The brick lands with a crack on the steps. A near miss.

  Damn.

  But the fiend continues to stand there, scoping the street. Somehow, the air raid didn’t register. In fact, after a moment or two more, the man actually steps back inside Blue’s.

  Curt is flummoxed—how in hell did he miss?—but the initial failure does nothing to stay his anger. It’s back down from the roof and into Blue’s room, where Curt goes under the worn mattress for the old ax that Blue keeps.

  Leaving his cane once again, steadied by his purpose, Curt hobbles out of the room, down the stairs, with a pause only at the bottom step, where the asshole obliges Curt yet again by walking past him down the narrow corridor. Curt rears back and comes down with a mighty chop. But no. The ax head flies toward the ceiling and nothing more lethal than the wooden handle glances off the fiend’s shoulder.

  “Huh,” says the fiend, startled.

  Curt stands there, looking at the wooden handle. The fiend is thinking, too, staring down at the loose blade on the floor. Suddenly, it clicks: “Man, shit.”

  Curt says nothing.

  “I mean, I’m sayin’ you all actin’ crazy and shit.”

  Enough is enough, apparently. The fiend mumbles his way toward the door, talking about how all Curt had to do was say something, talking about it like Curt doesn’t know how to act, pretending like there are still rules left in this game. He leaves Curt there at the bottom of the stairs, still holding the worthless toothpick of a handle, exhausted, bloodied, wondering how so many no-thinking people get to be so got-damned lucky.

  To see it in retrospect, to look backward across thirty years on the Fayette Streets of this country is to contemplate disaster as a seamless chronology, as the inevitable consequence of forces stronger and more profound than the cities themselves.

  Cursed as we are with a permanent urban underclass, an unremitting and increasingly futile drug war, and Third World conditions in the hearts of our cities, the American experiment seems, at the millennium, to have found a limit.

  The poor will always be with us, declared the biblical sages, and this divided nation seems to go out of its way to prove the point. As America lurched away from the rubble of great societies and new deals, no less a populist than Ronald Reagan wryly declared that we fought a war against poverty and poverty won. Many of us heard him and smiled knowingly at what seemed to be unvarnished truth. For decades now, the ghettos have appeared to us as certain and fixed, their problems beyond the reach of programs or policies or good intentions.

  Perhaps it was inevitable. Or perhaps there were a few moments early on, a lost opportunity or two in the generations before the inner city acquired its permanence. Perhaps there was another potential for the brown-stones of the South Bronx and the brick rowhouses of North Philadelphia, an alternative path for the broken streets of East St. Louis and West Baltimore. Concede for a moment that we might be jaded by decades of failure, that our vision is skewed by knowledge of the outcome. It might serve to just once see the thing as William McCullough—Gary’s father and DeAndre’s grandfather—saw it, walking Fayette Street with a full stride and twenty-eight years of life, standing on the painted stone steps of his Vine Street home and thinking it good.

  His castle was a two-story Formstone rowhouse like twenty others in the 1800 block. But this one in particular—the worldly possession of W.M. and his bride—was the sum of all their struggles. Wedged between Lexington and Fayette, the alley street was barely wide enough for automobiles, but it was clean back then, the rowhouses tucked into small lots on the south side of the alley, the facing rear yards of the Lexington Street houses lush with summer gardens.

  Vine Street was in its glory, a quiet haven in a neighborhood still racially mixed, still predominantly white, in fact. Working-class and middle-class white families lived mostly along the main streets; their black, working-class neighbors lived mostly behind them on alley streets named Vine and Fairmount and Lemmon. That was a time when the corner markets were mostly Jewish, free of bulletproof Plexiglas and willing to sell to local families on credit, a time when St. Martin’s parish, once the largest in Baltimore, was still a thriving bastion of Roman Catholicism in the center of the neighborhood. That was before the Harbor Tunnel and 1-95 replaced the long journey up Monroe Street and across North Avenue on old U.S. 1, a route from which a generation of interstate travelers might look out their car windows at the fresh Formstone, painted brick, and clean-scrubbed marble steps of Franklin Square and see the very essence of Baltimore’s working-class rightness. That was the time of unlocked doors and open windows and sleeping in Druid Hill Park on hot summer nights, a time when heroin was little more than a whisper and violence rarely went beyond the occasional domestic assault. By the calendar, that was 1955.

  William McCullough had come to Baltimore fourteen years earlier, a stowaway on the bus from Salisbury, North Carolina. As a small boy, W.M. had picked cotton for pennies on the plantation of his birth, the Cathcart farm just east of Winnsboro, South Carolina. He was the great-grandson of slaves owned by the McCullough family, a West Irish clan who had settled the land along the riverbank to the northeast of Winnsboro; he was the grandson and son of sharecroppers who could never quite make the land pay. The cotton fields were hard, tenant farming harder. W.M. could remember the hardest Depression years in Winnsboro, with his father struggling to squeeze money out of bad crop settles and his mother and younger brother stalking through the woods, looking for roots and nuts and anything else that might stave off hunger. When Fred McCullough managed to land a job with the Southern Railroad, it seemed to his older son that the very worst days were gone.

  The family moved north to the rail hub at Salisbury, where at twelve, W.M. began shining shoes and working in the kitchen of the Trailways depot on Main Street. Week after week, he brought his pay back to the wood-frame bungalow at the north end of town, where it was pooled with what his father and brother managed to earn. When he was fourteen, he had the temerity to use a couple dollars from one week’s pay to purchase new overalls and a leather jacket. His father took a strap to him and, no doubt about it, Fred McCullough could hit hard when he was mad. It wasn’t the first beating and unlikely to be the last, so W.M. decided right then and there that he was gone. He said good-bye to his brother, crawled out a side window, and jumped down into the weeds. That night he slept inside a bathroom at the bus depot, and the next morning, he convinced a northbound driver to take him to Baltimore. He had an uncle up there making money. He would make money, too.

  He had a strong back, enormous self-discipline, and an utter absence of formal education. But he was unashamed of his limitations and unafraid of hard work. He could read numbers, handle money, and work harder than most anyone he knew. He believed these things were enough.

  He landed at the bus station in downtown Baltimore with $1.40 in his pocket, and the driver, doubtful of W.M.’ s chances, told him that if things didn’t work out he should come back to the terminal the following night, when the driver would be back through and could return him south. But by then W.M. had a job working a grinding wheel at an
iron foundry on South Charles Street. The plant produced wheels for railroad cars—the sheer weight of the things drove grown men to quit after less than a week—but W.M. lied himself up to eighteen years old to get hired. The company men had learned to trust in fresh black immigrants from the Carolinas and Virginia. Greenhorns just up from the cotton patch always work hard, the bosses believed, harder than the coloreds who had grown accustomed to city life. For his part, W.M. proved the rule; he was their John Henry, grinding and lifting and hauling deadweight for twelve years.

  It was 1942 and William McCullough, at the age of fourteen, was a small but committed part of the largest ethnic migration in American history. It was larger than the flight of the starving Irish a century before, larger still than the succeeding waves of Eastern European and Italian immigrants who later crowded the halls of Ellis Island and Castle Garden. The black exodus from the rural South in this century would utterly transform the American cities of the East and Midwest. In the Mississippi Valley, the northward migration brought thousands of southern blacks to Memphis, Kansas City, St. Louis, and ultimately, to the terminus cities of Chicago and Detroit. In the East, the same phenomenon brought waves of migrants to Baltimore and Washington, Philadelphia and New York.

  There was nothing surprising about this. Mechanization was changing the agrarian economy of the South, with the sharecropping and tenant farming that characterized so much of black rural life increasingly marginalized. By the early 1940s, even the farming of cotton—the most labor-intensive of Southern crops—was being transformed as mechanical cotton pickers were perfected and marketed. Once the South had staked both its society and economy on black labor; by World War II, the same labor force was expendable.