The Corner

by David Simon/Ed Burns

  Of course, a week or two from now DeAndre’s dog will be stolen off the fence, just as Skip will be back down at Westside Shopping Center wearing his am-homeless-please-help cardboard sign, just as Blue will put his brushes and pencils away and go back to hardcore doping. The Vine Street garages will soon be a littered dumping ground again, just as Rose Davis will take back half the discards in her usual charitable fashion, just as Ella will stare at the rec center floor and wonder when she last scrubbed up the scuff marks and finger paint. And up at Gene’s, the police will, eventually, kick down the door at the behest of the neighborhood association, raid one shooting gallery among dozens, and—by some perverse cosmic anomaly—come up absolutely empty. Not a spike. Not a bag. Not a vial. The police will shrug it off and move to new business, though Fayette Street fiends, in their awe and wonder, will rechristen the proprietor as Clean Gene, the man with the only shotless shooting gallery in West Baltimore.

  But all of that is in the future. Now, with April ripe, the seasonal themes of rebirth and repair are marked on Fayette Street by one small epiphany after another, each more absurd and useless than the next. And layered atop all of it is the police department’s own spring cleaning of the corners from Monroe to Mount, an effort that has no more lasting effect than any of the others. But for now, at least, the Fayette Street crews are chased and herded daily by every roller, knocker, and jump-out squad that the department can spare.

  This, too, is at the behest of Myrtle Summers and Joyce Smith, who for the last month or two have made a habit of visiting the Western District and registering their displeasure. As president of the neighborhood group, Joyce made one appointment with the Western’s major, and when he failed to post and sent only his community relations sergeant, she made another. And another. Finally, faced with a persistence that any government minion can recognize, the Western commander fully acknowledged the ladies from Fayette Street as the squeaking wheels they were. Lubrication came in the form of the ubiquitious Bob Brown, other uniformed officers, the Western’s drug enforcement unit, and even some manpower from the Violent Crimes Task Force downtown.

  As June Bey clears the garage, and Ella mops down her rec-center floor, the Baltimore Police Department does similar duty at Fayette and Mount, pushing the drug traffic down to Gilmor or up to Monroe for a time, making it possible for Myrtle, at least, to go from the front door of Echo House to St. Martin’s without being proferred a vial or two. After so many police sweeps, it’s understood by all concerned that the crews will open shop a block or two away, just as it’s understood that the police sweeps must come to an end with the dealers returning to the usual terrain.

  Still, it’s spring and the Western commanders observe the seasonal rite by putting two additional foot patrolmen at Fayette and Monroe during the day shift, pushing the drugs off Vine and around the block onto Fulton. Bob Brown, Jenerette, and a handful of others take up the slack at the other end of the strip, sweeping the Mount Street corners for easy arrests. The crews migrate down the street and around the block to Baltimore and Gilmor, and the change in territory pushes competing products into proximity with each other, changing the distribution patterns. For years now, territory has been a dead concept in Baltimore’s drug markets; anyone with a good product can set up shop, hire local fiends for touts, and share the same real estate as half a dozen other crews. But pressed by the police, the sprawl of the neighborhood drug bazaar is quickly compressed, so that more and more players—touts, slingers, stickup boys, burn artists—are hustling in a smaller space. There is a crossing of the corners’ electrical currents: Dealers are more volatile than usual, the fiends, more desperate and nervous.

  Violence picks up.

  A tout for the Spider Bag crew is shot in the ass on Fulton in an argument over product. A few days later, a stickup boy wounds an older dealer on Baltimore Street. At Fayette and Mount, Eddie Bland, a steady presence on that corner, gets in an argument with a competing slinger and is cut in the head. A New York Boy messes up a package and is bludgeoned with baseball bats in the middle of Monroe Street. Over at Lexington and Fulton, Hungry tries to run his usual game with a ground stash but gets caught halfway down the block by Dred and his boys. They beat the man so badly an ambulance is required for the three-block trip to Bon Secours.

  Gary McCullough sees him the following afternoon outside the grocery on Monroe Street, his face torn and scratched, his head wrapped in gauze.

  “How you feelin?” Gary asks him.

  “Makin’ it,” Hungry assures him.

  Down on Mount, the Western troops do a warrant at the Schofield house, locking up Buster and half a dozen juveniles on drug conspiracy charges. At the other end, on Monroe Street, some plainclothesmen with the Violent Crimes Task Force downtown hit the corner house at Fairmount with another paper, grabbing six or seven more. A week later, some of the uniforms jump out on the Dew Drop Inn, rushing the first floor and coming up empty, missing Little Roy’s stash downstairs in the basement.

  The police are hard at it for a good two weeks, creating all kinds of disarray and paranoia. Fat Curt is up on the second floor of Blue’s one afternoon when he hears a banging on the front door and a shout of panic from the floor below. He knows what’s up right away. Knockers. A raid.

  “They comin’ in?” yells a voice from the back of the house. To Curt, it sounds more like a statement than a question. He hears another loud noise and a shout in the back alley. Blue and Hungry and Rita and everyone else are heading out the rear, probably. Fat Curt is all alone to face the police and take the charge. Got-damn.

  He picks himself up out of a broken-backed chair. Maybe it’s the coke rushing around in his head, or maybe it’s the old thrill of the chase, but either way, Curt feels the adrenaline as if it were just another blast. He forgets that his limbs are bloated and scarred, that he’s forty-six and looks to have twenty more years than that. He forgets that it’s all pavement out there, that the drop from the second floor window is a good twelve feet. He forgets that the risk isn’t at all worth it, that it’s only a shooting gallery and the charge wouldn’t go beyond possession or paraphernalia or maybe public nuisance. For one irredeemable moment, Fat Curt forgets everything and is transported back twenty years, back to a time when his game was complete, when he could do whatever had to be done. He goes rabbit.

  He reaches the window and throws his cane out. Then he climbs up on the sill and jumps, landing sideways on his right ankle. He hears an ugly little pop.

  “Ah shit. Got-damn.”

  It hurts like hell; the pain down there is pounding past the dope, kicking the shit out of the coke. Whatever else he’s done, Curt has ruined his high.

  “Curt, man, you hurt?”

  Hungry and Scalio have come around to the rear yard to assess the damage and commiserate.

  “Oh, man,” Curt moans, “mah foot. Damn.”

  The ambo takes him to Bon Secours, where the X-rays tell the tale. Broken ankle.

  “What did you do?” an intern asks him.

  “Jumped out a window.”

  “Why?”

  Damned if I know, thinks Curt. All that commotion and the police weren’t even coming in the door; just one police up on the corner, jacking someone up against the liquor store. It was that good coke that had them all paranoid.

  “Why’d you go out a window?” asks the intern.

  Curt manages a small smile. “I got rabbit in my blood.”

  They kill the pain, reset the bone, and bind him up in a plaster cast. The hospital springs for a pair of wooden crutches, knowing full well that this is all money that Bon Secours will never see. Curt has been living beyond the safety net for years now. No welfare check. No Medicaid. No SSI. No state disability grant.

  “How long am I wearing this?” Curt asks, looking over the plaster. “I’m sayin’ when do I need to come back.”

  Two months, at least, he’s told. The intern warns him to keep the ankle elevated, to stay off his feet as much as possible duri
ng the day. “You got to give it a chance to heal.”

  Curt grunts a vague affirmation, gathers up the crutches, and limps slowly out of the emergency doors, heading back down Fayette toward Monroe Street. Stay off his feet? Two months? Who keeps the calendar in the life of Curtis Davis? What tout ever made money by staying off his feet?

  The next night, he’s back out there on his corner, hooking up customers left and right, guiding them in like some sleepless air-traffic controller.

  “Yo Curt.”

  “Hey.”

  “How’s the leg?”

  “Ankle busted.”

  “Aw man.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll deal with it.”

  Now Curt’s more of a physical wreck than ever. He can barely move, his game down to small, exhausting struggles to get from the pay phone to the curb. A walk across Monroe Street to a white boy’s car window becomes a forced march; a trip around the corner to visit a Vine Street ground stash is a Russian novel.

  The corner gives no quarter to Curt, and none, of course, is ever asked. The shooting gallery regulars sympathize to a point: Fat Curt is a fixture in their lives, a flesh-and-blood touchstone loved in the same peculiar way that Bread was. But there isn’t much they can do besides help him up the steps into the needle palace, or spare him a few extra steps toward a stash of vials. Wounded or not, the rule of thumb is the same for cornermen and commandos: You keep up with the mission or you get left behind. And Fat Curt is a soldier.

  Still, it’s painful to watch, this slow, steady collapse of a street icon. To anyone who has lived off the Fayette Street corners, Curt is one of the few constants, a pole star by which a thousand other fiends can compass their position in life. He was supposed to last forever out here—hell, by corner standards, he has already managed that. But first he was leaning on that cane. And now it’s the crutches. To see him out in front of the liquor store—his shoulders hunched down, his yellow eyes bobbing to and fro, his mouth twisted in a grimace of permanent physical struggle—to see him broken down like this is to invite embarrassment, even sadness.

  At Fayette and Monroe, there is now that awkward acknowledgment that comes when any aging athlete, his skills gone, his body wrecked, tries against all odds to make it to the end of one last, humiliating season.

  “Curt.”

  “Hey, girlfriend.”

  “You look tired.”

  “I am, dear.”

  “How’s the leg.”

  “Hurts.”

  Two weeks after his disastrous leap, Curt is out on Monroe Street one night, watching the aftermath of a street shooting. Nothing special, just a bit of gunplay between some Jamaicans and a boy who had run off with some of their product. The boy is down at University, bloodied but stable; the Jakes are gone, melting into the city’s warm darkness. That leaves only a few shell casings and some bloodstains near the phone booth between Vine and Lexington. Still, the usual crowd is spread around the perimeter, signifying from behind the yellow police tape, their faces rendered strangely mechanical by the blue strobe lights of the idling radio cars. Two downtown detectives work the scene, then settle back to light smokes, waiting for the crime lab technician to finish taking the photos.

  “Jesus Christ,” says a Western uniform.

  “What?”

  “Look at that motherfucker’s hands.”

  “Where?”

  “The guy on crutches. Look at them hands.”

  The uniformed officers begin laughing. The detectives saunter across the street for a better look.

  “Hey, pal … yeah, you … c’mere.”

  Fat Curt tenses.

  “Hey, get this pretty motherfucker’s picture,” says the uniform, gesturing to the lab tech. “I swear this guy looks like Popeye.”

  Curt turns slowly, his face contorted in hurt and rage.

  “No shit,” says a detective. “It’s Popeye the Sailor Man.”

  The cops are all laughing now, talking about Curt’s hands and feet. They’ve never seen anything like it. One of them actually asks the medical miracle to shine a smile for the camera.

  “Hey, Mr. Popeye, you must be one spinach-eating sonofabitch,” laughs a sergeant. “Goddam if those ain’t the fattest mitts I ever seen.”

  The lab tech slides around to the other side of a radio car and takes aim with the camera.

  “Say cheese,” she says.

  The flash catches Fat Curt as he tries to limp offstage, his mouth muttering obscenities, his eyes low and glazed.

  DeAndre spots her at the counter of the Baltimore carryout, and she is looking so special and so fine on a late-April afternoon that he’s compelled to step away from the rest of his crew and offer up his very best line, the one that always seems to work.

  “Can I buy that for you?”

  The girl looks over at DeAndre and catches the mischief in his dark brown eyes, partly obscured by the dreds tumbling down his forehead. He gives up a quick smile, half embarrassed and half bold.

  “Say what?”

  He gestures at her sandwich, wrapped and waiting on the carryout counter. “Can I pay for that?”

  She laughs. DeAndre pulls out his roll.

  “Go ’head,” she says.

  The other boys in the carryout are holding back their laughter, waiting for this girl to take DeAndre’s money and then put him in his place. He peels a five off and slides it into the Plexiglas turnstile. She gathers up her lunch and he gathers in the change; they leave together and the smirking stops.

  Her name is Tracey and she’s nineteen, so much older than DeAndre that as he leaves the carryout, he suffers a sudden lapse in confidence. He has the sneaking suspicion that a girl who looks this good, who fills out her clothes with full-grown curves and carries herself so well around boys has no reason to be playing with his almost-sixteen-year-old self. He’s out of his league on this one.

  Still, it’s spring. You can’t lose what you never had, he tells himself; you cannot win if you do not play.

  Within days, it’s not just sex. It’s melodrama.

  “I’m sayin’ it ain’t like with Reeka,” DeAndre tells his mother. “Reeka just a girl. She too young an’ triflin’. Tracey is all woman.”

  Fran rolls her eyes.

  “I’m serious,” says DeAndre. “She’s a grown woman.”

  “And you a man,” adds Fran, deadpan.

  “Man enough.”

  “Please.”

  DeAndre is following this older girl around like a puppy, going to her apartment on Pratt Street, messing with her when she lets him, trying to figure out what else to do with her when she won’t. He spends his money on her—and little enough it is since he’s been on probation and off the corners.

  Cash-and-carry has always been the rule of thumb for the boys along Fayette Street; the girls, in turn, measure sincerity and commitment by the dollar. Yo, yo, got hotel money—that was the battle cry of last summer’s radio dance mix in West Baltimore. Now, DeAndre wears the T-shirt of the moment, declaiming that “I can’t stand a beggin’ ass bitch,” to which the feminine fashion retort is, “I can’t stand a broke-ass man.” On Fayette Street, the children chase each other with leering cynicism, and even for the youngest boys, the pursuit of sex is but another attempt at material acquisition.

  With Tracey, however, it’s different. Not since their initial encounter has DeAndre’s new girlfriend displayed a trace of a mercenary streak. She doesn’t seem to rate him on how much he spends on clothes, or clubs, or weed, or movies. She’s finishing high school and on her way to Coppin State college, so Tracey is a long step removed from the corner game and unimpressed with DeAndre’s gangsta pose. There is nothing available in his world that she covets, no monetary standard by which she makes affection available: On the weekend after they meet, she actually goes out and buys him flowers.

  All of which leaves DeAndre dazed and confused. Tracey is an alien presence in his universe; after little more than a week, in fact, he doesn’t know what to do with
her. Since losing his virginity to an older cousin at the age of eleven, DeAndre has come to regard sex as, at best, an exercise in amiable barter and, at worst, an act of raw prostitution.

  With Tracey, though, the sex comes too willingly, without any of the struggle that a boy from Fayette Street understands. For DeAndre, the chase is as much a part of the adventure as the sex itself and, in this case, the girl is setting the pace. But even more confusing are the silences before and after, the fact that he doesn’t have anything to say to this older girl who knows so much more than he does. She’s getting ready for Coppin, working and making the rent on her own apartment; he ‘s learning fractions and percentages by vialing up cocaine and living in the back bedroom of a shooting gallery. In the end, Tracey unnerves DeAndre by giving him a quick glimpse of the world apart from the corner, a world with which he simply cannot connect. After a few go-rounds at her place, he doesn’t call and neither does she. When they come upon each other on Baltimore Street a week or so after the calls stop, they pass without so much as a nod.

  And when his mother brings up the new romance a day after that encounter, DeAndre plays it off with a grunt.

  “I thought you was in love,” says Fran.

  “Man, that thing dead,” he explains. “Once you get with a girl, it just ain’t the same.”

  Fran looks at him sideways.

  “I’m sayin’ it just wasn’t the way I thought it would be,” he continues. “You know there wasn’t anything we could talk about. She goin’ to college and all.”

  “So?”

  “So, I ain’t about that,” says DeAndre. “Besides, I got my eye on some other things. R.C.’ s girlfriend cousin been trying to holler at me and, Ma, I swear, she phat as I don’t know what.”

  “What about Reeka?” asks Fran.

  “What about her?”

  “’Dre, that girl is in love.”

  “Ma, I can’t talk to Reeka. She too young.”

  Fran shakes her head, vaguely disgusted. Day after day, Tyreeka is on her son like white on rice. She’s seen them together down on McHenry Street, hanging with the C.M.B. crew; Tyreeka with her arms around DeAndre’s neck, or sitting in his lap, both of them cutting classes and running the streets together—an act of minor consequence for DeAndre, but a major transgression for Tyreeka. Not to mention all the hours that the young lovers have spent in Fran’s cramped bedroom at the Dew Drop, with her son locking the door from the inside and turning the television loud. And now, DeAndre is sitting here, blandly declaring that Tyreeka ain’t it, that summer is coming and he has to look elsewhere.