The Corner

by David Simon/Ed Burns

  “I don’t know,” says Gary, looking genuinely hurt.

  “But you’re saying she made all this up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  Gary’s mouth gapes open, then shuts. He wants to say it. He has to fight himself not to say it: Why do you think, fool? She wanted my blast. She wanted my blast and I said no and so she called the police. If Gary told them that, if he let it fall from his lips in the Western District court, everything would make sense. And neither the judge nor the prosecutor would bother to bring any charge from the admission of drug use, not in Baltimore, anyway. But Gary can’t see that; he keeps his secret.

  Ronnie, too. Just before Gary took the witness stand in his own defense, Ronnie gave her own grudging testimony. Questioned by the prosecutor, she made no mention of the blast, choosing instead to pretend that the argument was about Gary giving his attentions to some other girl. In sharp contrast to Gary’s later panic, his girl managed to thread the needle masterfully. Droll from the witness stand, her eyes bouncing between Gary at the defense table and his mother three rows back, she destroyed the case without directly contradicting her original complaint. No, she did not throw a brick. No, there was no knife. Yes, Gary did shove her, and later, on the sidewalk, he slapped her. But yeah, well, she did push him, too. In fact, she might have pushed him first, now that she thinks on it.

  “Mutual combat,” said Judge Bass, looking at the state’s attorney in bland resignation. Once Ronnie left the witness stand, it only remained for Gary to make some kind of denial and now, testifying in his own defense, he manages that much.

  “Your honor. I didn’t hit her. I swear.”

  Not guilty. The Western District prosecutor nods agreeably, then tosses the file into the discard pile. The domestic violence specialist from downtown looks crestfallen.

  Out in the courthouse hallway, the victory celebration is brief and ugly. Gary walks out with his mother on his arm; Ronnie, right behind him, with her own mother, who apparently didn’t want to miss her daughter’s big day in court.

  “Well,” ventures Roberta McCullough, “at least that’s over.”

  “Over and done with,” agrees Miss Sarah.

  “But I don’t think our childrens should be together,” Miss Roberta says, eyeing Ronnie fretfully. “They’re just not good for each other. They don’t do each other any good.”

  Ronnie’s mother bristles. “What the hell you mean by that?”

  Hands braced against her hips, she stares down at the smaller woman with contempt. Gary is behind his mother, looking at Ronnie in horror. Ronnie is smiling.

  “I just mean …”

  “They’se grown-up children,” shouts Miss Sarah, performing for the entire building. “You can’t tell them what to do, you ol’ bitch cow.”

  Roberta McCullough’s small frame seems to warp from the verbal assault, her eyes falling to the floor. Shaking, she holds one hand to her heart; Gary takes the other and tries to lead her to the stairs.

  “Who the hell you think you is?” shouts Ronnie’s mother. “Tell my daughter what she can and can’t do. You can go an’ fuck yo’self, you ol’ cow.”

  From the top of the stairs, Gary helps his stricken mother to the rail, then looks back over his shoulder to see Ronnie and her mother following. Miss Sarah keeps bellowing insults; Ronnie is behind her, smiling so wickedly that Gary realizes that this is part of the price, that Ronnie—having known that his mother would be there for him—had contrived to bring her own mother to the show.

  “You think you so high and mighty,” yells Miss Sarah. “Your son ain’t no better than my daughter.”

  The words echo down the stairs. Without turning, Miss Roberta falls back on the grace that she knows: “I’ll pray for you,” she tells her adversary. “That’s all I can do.”

  “Don’t need your got-damn prayers, bitch.”

  They leave the courthouse separately: Gary, consoling his mother, promising to have nothing more to do with Ronnie or her family; Ronnie, heading to Lafayette Market with the matriarch of the Boice clan, the two of them reliving the hallway battle in all its detail.

  The episode is enough to keep Gary from Ronnie all that night and the next day. He runs the streets telling himself that nothing—no caper, no blast, no game—will be enough to subject his mother to anything like that again. And it is true that Gary loathes nothing so much as the idea that his life is bringing grief to his mother.

  Besides, Gary has his own caper nowadays, and it’s one that puts Ronnie completely on the outside. The new game is all Gary. He had seen it first—envisioning it in all its promise—and he had marshaled the necessary manpower and resources to put the plan into effect. The less Ronnie knew about it, the better, since this new deal could keep the vials coming for as long as there were autmobiles on the streets of Baltimore.

  Amazing that he hadn’t thought of before, really, but then again, the copper piping and aluminum gutters had been so plentiful for so long. Only after an army of fiends had stripped the neighborhood rowhouses bare was there incentive enough for Gary to sit down and think with the same patience and clarity that he used to reserve for picking stocks and mutual funds. At last it came to him, the physical equation slapping him cold in the face as he sat on a Fayette Street stoop and watched the traffic roll past. Anyone watching might have actually seen the lightbulb above his head.

  Cars = Metal.

  Metal = Money.

  Cars = Money.

  Elsewhere, great minds might be bent to the task of explaining the habits of quarks and quasars, or reconciling quantum physics with a unified field theory, but in West Baltimore, the mind of Gary McCullough had discovered movable metal, and in doing so had punched a hole in the known limits of the dope-fiend universe.

  He started by hooking up with Will and Will’s rusting blue pickup. Will was a fiend from the McHenry Street strip who had nothing to compare with Gary’s vision and ambition, but was nonetheless in possession of the essential tools—notably his truck and a tow bar. Then, with Will on board, Gary put some feelers out in the neighborhood, offering a select service for a fee.

  “For a couple hundred dollars,” he would promise, “I can make your car disappear.”

  True, any fourteen-year-old could strip the ignition and drive the car away, but what then? Invariably, the damn thing turns up with no gas and a wrecked transmission on the other end of town, then gets towed by police down to the Pulaski Highway lot. You’re notified and the insurance company won’t total your loss, leaving you to cover the deductible and the towing and storage fees. Where was the victory in that?

  No, Gary was offering the total package. He would not steal your car and dump it where it could be found. He would not leave you in fear of a comeuppence at the city impound lot. For a couple hundred bucks—more, if you bargained badly—Gary would make anything with wheels disappear for good and for certain. And while many people in the neighborhood were happily wedded to their vehicles, at least a handful of others were not.

  From Catherine Street down to Gilmor and from Pratt to the expressway, cars and trucks and vans—most of them broke-down cripples—began to vanish, disappearing like socks in a laundromat dryer. Police reports were taken, vehicle numbers checked and added to the hot sheet, but all in vain. Because down on Wilkens Avenue, down at the scales, two characters in a blue Ford pickup were rolling into the United Iron and Metal driveway, towing yet another vehicle behind them. In addition to whatever fee they could collect from the individual owner, there was the cash to be paid by the scrap yard: forty to fifty for most cars; seventy or so for a van. And all that United Iron and Metal ever asked for in the way of proof of ownership was a signed note saying, yes, my name is Gary McCullough and for the fourth time in two weeks, I would very much like to have one of my autos—say, my ’85 Cutlass—driven into the compactor and crushed into a metal briquette.

  Simple, profitable, and relatively risk-free—this caper had an element
al beauty and, on occasion, when money was short, Will could persuade Gary that it was permissible to disappear an automobile chosen at random and for which their services had not been contracted. Later on, these excesses would make Gary feel genuine remorse at the thought of schoolteachers and factory workers going out in the morning to stare at empty asphalt. But presumably everyone was happily insured with low deductibles; in Gary’s needle-fevered mind, everything worked out in the end. And surely, it seemed, the supply of movable metal was endless. Until such time as humanity learned to liberate itself from the chains of internal combustion, Gary would have the snake on the run.

  For a week or two after the domestic assault trial, as Gary and Will and some of Will’s other running buddies chew their way through the west side automotive stock, the dollars roll in. Time and again, the blue pickup crawls up the driveway on Wilkens, trailing some derelict or not-so-derelict ride behind. The crew unhitches the captive, bargains with the scrap workers, and splits the proceeds—even shares all around. Then the pickup bounces back down the driveway and rattles through the West Baltimore Streets in search of a victory blast. More often than not, the pickup rolls to Fayette and Mount with Will and his buddies in the cab negotiating with the touts. And Gary—the idea man, the mastermind—is usually watching from the back bed, leaning over the cab roof like a submarine captain atop the conning tower, his proud countenance surrounded by all of Will’s tools and shovels and brooms lodged upside-down in the truck’s rear side braces. Those, too, are an unintended approximation of naval panache; the brooms ride high in the braces the way they do when a sub comes into port from a successful tour. Broom up means a clean sweep—all torpedoes fired, all targets destroyed. In West Baltimore this spring, it means pretty much the same thing.

  For Gary, however, the glory road reaches its end on a warm May afternoon, when he sees Will and the rest of the crew towing an old Chevy van across Baltimore Street. Gary waves. Will seems to see him from the cab, but the blue pickup keeps on going.

  The following day, when Gary goes down to Will’s girlfriend’s house to see what’s what, his fears are confirmed. The idea man has deep thoughts, but Will has the truck.

  “They cut me out. They stole my caper out from under me,” Gary moans to anyone who will listen. “There isn’t any morality to people.”

  For the rest of that week, he fights an urge to call the police and give them the story and the tag numbers on the blue pickup, but if Will’s loyalty can’t be relied upon on the street, it probably isn’t worth much in handcuffs either. Will might speak up; everyone, himself included, might take a charge.

  Dispossesed of his best caper to date, Gary slowly drifts back to the usual, hooking up with Tony and Ronnie to run some cheap metal, then hanging along the fringe while Ronnie takes up touting a package for the New York crew on Monroe Street, though in truth she’s palming as much as she’s selling. Once again, Gary is a supplicant.

  A few days after his girl finally gets fired by the New Yorkers, Gary manages to locate a pair of old water heaters in a rowhouse basement, pry them up and out, and drag them down to Wilkens. The take is twenty-three dollars and Ronnie is able to kick in another three. That’s enough for a one-and-one each. Within minutes, the two of them are hooked up with speedballs and headed down to Pops’, where Gary has been firing for the last two months.

  Even to Gary, the needle party at Pops’ is an end-of-the-line affair, with the lowest kind of addicts stumbling up to the third-floor apartment on South Fulton, then wallowing there amid the broken furniture and rotting mattresses. The shooting galleries closer to Fayette are all a bit more professional in outlook; Pops never cleans house or hurries anyone out, nor is he all that particular about what goes on in the two small rooms of his establishment.

  Bounding up the stairs behind Ronnie, Gary finds the apartment door ajar. He knocks once for the sake of politeness, then steps across the threshold. The old man is on the sofa, a breakaway syringe stuck behind his ear like a pencil.

  “Hey, Pops.”

  “Hey now,” Pops mumbles, toothless. “What you bring with you.”

  Gary smiles warmly, pulling out one cap of dope and a vial of coke. On the other side of the room is a skinny, dark-skinned girl that Gary can’t name, though he’s seen her before. A red-headed white girl, Vera, has the stool by the bathroom. Another white girl is asleep on a mattress in the corner, her arms wrapped around some young black kid’s bare torso. The mattresses are for the freaks, a handful of whom arrive at Pops in the morning, then whore themselves through the day, giving up their bodies for twenty or thirty on the hype, grinding it out in the center room in plain view of everyone else. Dope doesn’t do that to girls; coke is required to create two-dollar prostitutes. The result is that most of West Baltimore’s professional streetwalkers have been driven out of business. Who’s going to pay twenty dollars when every coke-addled freak between McHenry and Fayette will give it up for half a cap?

  Gary moves to a Formica table, borrowing a bottle cap from the dark-skinned black girl. Ronnie leans against the wall and watches as Gary heats up the cap and vial, mixing it with someone else’s water and dipping his own syringe first. Ronnie gets hers next, and then comes Pops, who pulls the spike from behind his ear and hands it over. Gary gives the old man a light touch of what’s left in the bottle cap.

  Gary pauses for a moment, and then, with the cap in his hand, digs down in his pocket, coming back out with a second bottle cap and some fresh matches. Ronnie gives a half smile at the switch, watching as Gary puts the cap back on the table.

  The dark-skinned girl passes her syringe and gets only water for her trouble. Pops got a little something for playing host, but there’s no free ride for the rest of them. Vera gets watered. So does Jerome, another stray who comes in from the hallway at the last minute, nodding and scratching, already blasted from something good.

  Pops and the black girl hit themselves, but Vera begins bleating in adenoidal fury that someone has to help her find a line. She pokes herself in the forearm a few times, but listlessly, without real hope of finding a vein.

  “Can you hit me?” she asks Jerome. “You gotta hit me.”

  But Jerome is nodding, falling asleep against the wall for minutes at a time, then lurching upright and waving his water-filled spike around in the air as if conducting some hellish symphony.

  “Wasn’t much,” says the black girl, disappointed.

  “Hey, Gary,” says Vera. “Can you lend me five dollars? I got this guy who’s supposed to bring me twenty worth of coke in about an hour, but if you can lend me five now …”

  “Dope fiends!” shouts Jerome, coming to.

  “… then when he comes back, I’ll give you half the coke. You got five?”

  Gary hits himself with the real thing. Ronnie, too. The whore on the mattress grunts, coughs, then goes back to sleep. Vera finally gets some blood in her needle, but pulls up too quickly, slipping off the line. Pops puts the syringe back above his ear.

  “Dope fiends!” shouts Jerome again, waving his spike.

  Ronnie pulls out her speedball and repeats the share-and-share alike process. But this time, even Pops gets watered.

  “Wasn’t much,” says Jerome.

  “Enough to get you out the gate,” says Gary.

  Jerome blinks at him, still floating on his morning blast.

  “You already out the gate,” adds Gary, reassessing.

  “East side dope,” explains Jerome, proudly. “East side dope is the best dope. I’m an east side boy.”

  Gary pockets the coke cap, empty now save for some residual essence that he’ll save for later. Still trying to hit herself, Vera again begs someone, anyone, to give up five now for twenty dollars of cocaine that is never going to arrive.

  “He said he was comin’ back.”

  Gary zips up his army jacket, turns to Ronnie, and gives a small nod of affirmation, as if to say, I can play, I can water with the best of them. Ronnie turns toward the door with
a vague smirk and Gary follows her down to South Fulton.

  Out on the street, large, fat drops of rain begin slapping hard at them, slowly at first, then gradually accelerating until Gary surrenders and ducks into a vestibule. Ronnie follows and the two of them ride their high, waiting for the downpour to slow.

  “Something I’m …”

  “Huh?”

  “I got something that I can’t remember,” says Gary.

  “You just high.”

  “No, it was …”

  Gary stares up Fulton, his pupils wide, trying with all his might to bring something to mind. The rain slows, they walk on, and by the time he reaches Vine Street, it comes.

  “Oh man. What day is it?”

  Ronnie shrugs.

  “Tuesday,” says Gary, answering himself. He counts forward on both hands, coming first to ten, then counting again and coming to eleven.

  “Eleven days. I’m still okay.”

  “For what?”

  “My county case. I got a notice that I have to go ten days in advance of court to talk with the public defender.”

  “Where do you got to go?”

  “Towson.”

  Ronnie shakes her head, then pronounces Gary doomed. Baltimore County is another planet when it comes to court cases and jail time, especially for black folk from the city. Without a lawyer for his shoplifting case, Gary will be at the mercy of the beast.

  “You best get up there today.”

  They get a hack and ride all the way up York Road to the county seat. Ronnie waits in the car while Gary goes inside, and after much confusion and a few wrong turns, he finds the office of the public defender. The white secretary in the outer lobby is surly and officious. Gary can sense the contempt that greets him as he shows her the court summons.

  “You’re too late.”

  “Ten days,” he says, pointing to the summons.

  “Ten working days.”

  “Huh?”

  “Weekends don’t count.”

  Gary is stunned. “What can I do?”