The Corner

by David Simon/Ed Burns

  “Dust! Dust!” he shouts. Jimmy, one of the younger hires, throws a round of spice onto the bottom layer of crawlers.

  Gary sweeps his arm again, rustling another three or four dozen to their doom. “Dust.”

  This is the quick way of doing it—the way it has to be done when the customers are lined up to the street corner. Other times, you can snatch the crabs one at a time and layer them carefully in the pot, making sure each gets the same handful of spice. But now, on the holiday, it’s got to be catch as catch can.

  “We microwavin’ them,” Gary declares. “We givin’ it the microwave process.”

  He sweeps his arm again and a shell point catches him in the hand, the point going right through the thick rubber glove.

  “Ow! Dag!”

  He pulls out the point and yanks the glove off to examine the wound. He holds the offending crab in his other hand, looking at it as if expecting some kind of argument. Times like these, a crab-slinger will hurl the assailant against a wall. Crab fission, Mo, and leave the debris there on the ground as a warning to others. But not Gary.

  “Hey, hey,” he says, dropping the crab gently into the pot. “Crab got his job to do. I got mine.”

  With another few sweeps of his arm, he empties the tank.

  “Dust! Dust!”

  From the steam room, Paul calls in a double-time order for thirty-twos—the biggest of the Chesapeake blues; monster crabs creeping and snapping at each other in the sorting bins to Cardy’s extreme left. For those willing to pay, the crab-eating doesn’t get better than thirty-twos.

  “Gimme the big boys, Chief,” says Gary, stepping across Cardy to grab the bin. “Someone out front is serious.”

  The monsters go into the stun tank, the chain is yanked down, the frozen crawlers reemerge. Jimmy starts to sweep his side of the tank, rushing the thirty-twos into the pot.

  “No, ho, no,” cries Gary, stopping him.

  He begins placing the crabs in uniform rows, preparing them for the most perfect culinary journey possible.

  “Gary, we ain’t got time.”

  “Yes we do. We make time for thirty-twos,” Gary tells him, ordering and spicing the crabs in precise layers. “These ain’t just crabs, Mo. These are crustaceans. You got to respect ’em.”

  Jimmy can’t even argue. Them bad boys look beautiful down there in the bottom of the pot, and Gary is hard to the task, making time, getting it done.

  “… oh happy day.”

  Fat Curt leans back in the plastic chair, waiting for the part where they give you the check. He’s a wreck. Anyone can look at his arms and legs and see that. What the hell else can any legitimate government do other than hand him a check?

  “And Mr. Davis,” asks the Social Security Administration caseworker, “what is the nature of your condition?”

  “Say what?”

  “What’s wrong with you that you can’t work.”

  “I’m swole up.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “My legs and arms is swollen. Can’t barely walk.”

  “But what’s the medical condition?”

  This makes Curtis Davis think for a moment. He leans forward and looks around the SSA branch office on Frederick Avenue, his mind struggling, his mouth trying to get hold of some of the long words he’s heard from the hospital whitecoats.

  “Elephantitis.”

  The bureaucrat looks up from his computer keyboard. “Elephantitis?”

  Time to play the ace. Curt reaches both hands beneath his right knee, pulls his leg straight, and then raises it slowly. He sites the ankle over the corner of the desk and lets it fall. From knee to foot, the extremity is so bloated that Curt’s baggy denims are stretched to the tearing point. The running shoe is three sizes beyond what he would ordinarily wear, and even then it can’t be laced.

  “Uh …”

  The man is speechless. But Curt isn’t done yet. It’s September, and soon enough he’ll be soldiering once again in a vacant house in the freezing cold of another Baltimore winter. For Curt, the future is now and he figures that this must be his moment; if he can pull up these pants, if he can show just a few inches of cratered, gatorlike flesh, then this paper-shuffler will surely understand. It’s just a matter of finding the right bureaucrat, the right desk. You take your number and you wait and you sign the right form, giving them all that they ask for. You do these things and then the leg is the trump card. You put it up there and you get paid.

  For Curt, this constitutes a lock-solid plan.

  “Uh, sir …”

  But Curt is busy with the guided tour: “My ankle messed up too. From fallin’ out a window … Lookit this …”

  “Mr. Davis, that won’t be necessary.”

  Curt is still struggling with the pants cuff, trying to show more, when the man lightly touches his shoe and insists that he bring the leg back down to the floor.

  “I don’t need to examine the disability,” the man explains. “A doctor will evaluate you in the event you appeal.”

  “Uh huh.”

  The keyboard clicks and snaps as Curt answers a few more questions. Work history? Laborer. What years? Long time gone. Current income? None. Current assets? None. And where have you received treatment for your disability?

  “Hospitals,” says Curt.

  “Which ones?”

  “All of ’em.”

  After five minutes, the forms are complete and the file is prepared and Curt is handed his copies. Curtis Izell Davis, aged forty-five, has formally asked the U.S. government to recognize him as disabled and unemployable.

  “You’re denied,” says the male caseworker, smiling politely. Curt shakes his head. He wants to show the leg again.

  “Mr. Davis, with the exception of those legally blind or quadriplegic, everyone is denied on the initial application. Now then, would you like to appeal this decision?”

  Curt nods his head.

  “Okay,” says the man, moving the cursor across the screen. “I am now noting your request for an appeal. You’ll be notified by mail within ninety days.”

  Wrong desk, Curt thinks. He gets up slowly, the residual paperwork folded into one of his thick hands. If it was the right desk, he tells himself, he’d have that check. Or at least a promise that the check would soon be on its way. Instead, he’s got himself another application to go with two or three others made in the last couple of weeks. These papers in his hand—indicating that he has applied to Social Security for SSI benefits—will allow him to proceed with a pending application for medical assistance from the state, which could possibly be acted on in three months, if he’s lucky. He also recently filled out the forms for food stamps, though that application is in limbo now—the Rosemont workers said it couldn’t go through while he was still in Bon Secours; his dietary needs, they explained, were being met by the hospital. But he’s been out of the hospital more than a month now and no one from Rosemont has bothered to inform him that the paperwork must be resubmitted.

  Then there’s DALP—the state’s disability loan program—through which Curt is allowed to “borrow” $157 a month to meet his living expenses, including rent. That application is also floating around the Rosemont offices, waiting for someone to step up and declare Curt disabled. The DALP program came into being the year before as Maryland began dropping adult males from the medical assistance program; the legislature was willing to create the new program only with the stipulation that all funds allocated would be loans to be repaid within three years. No one at Rosemont or anywhere else believes repayment is likely, but calling it a loan rather than a benefit has let state lawmakers feel good about themselves amid so much talk about welfare reform.

  In any event, Curt is out of the hospital, on his own, and up to his ass in social service applications. With no check forthcoming, he’s waiting like everybody waits, taking a number and sitting on the plastic chairs in the Rosemont waiting area or down at the social security branch office on Frederick Road. He’s supplicating before the ca
seworkers, answering their questions, signing their forms, waiting for that special someone to show him the right desk so that the right government worker can marvel at the condition of his legs and then pay up.

  Until then, he’s got nothing—not even the two dollars required for the Tuerk House meetings. He’d been going, not every day, but often enough to remain on their waiting list for the residential program. Mostly he’s uptown on Ellamont in his sister’s living room, watching game shows and soap operas and waiting on the postal carrier. Every day brings bills that will never be paid—eight thousand dollars alone from the last hospital stay—but nothing in that computer-embossed typeface that is the telltale of every social services missive.

  His sister, Angie, has her own problems, but she’s willing to keep him for a while. Still, unless Curt has a check day fairly soon, he’ll be back on the street. He’s been up to Monroe and Fayette once or twice already—mostly to round up a little cash for laundry or a burger or a pineapple Sno-Kone. Stink and Pimp, Eggy Daddy and Blue have all praised him for being clean, and that felt good. But his health is no better than before—worse even. His ankle gives him excruciating pain with every step.

  A few days after Bon Secours dumped him back on the street, he went over to the Johns Hopkins E. R. to see about getting the ankle fixed, but the triage nurse treated him coldly and he emerged after a six-hour wait with nothing save for a clinic appointment three weeks distant.

  Three days after that, he went down to University Hospital, hoping for something better. The whitecoats in the E.R. took an X-ray or two, then forwarded him to the orthopedic clinic.

  Now, a day after he displayed the leg at the social security office, a doctor at the orthopedic clinic looks at the same carnage and confirms what Curt already knows—that the ankle has set at an awkward angle, that, short of fusing the bone, there isn’t much that can be done.

  “And we’re probably not going to be able to operate with the leg in that swollen condition,” the resident explains. “The vascular damage won’t allow it.”

  So they send him to the vascular clinic, where more University of Maryland personnel gather around, incredulous at the sight.

  “How long have you been using drugs?” asks one.

  “Long enough.”

  “You’ve done a lot of damage.”

  “I know it,” snaps Curt. “Don’t need no doctor to tell me that, but you go on ahead with it, if you like.”

  “I’m just … I’ve never seen lymphedema that bad.”

  “Elephantitis,” Curt assures him.

  “Not elephantiasis,” the vascular resident says. “It’s lymphedema, the swelling of veins and arteries, and to a certain extent irreversible.”

  Then again, the resident explains, there’s a vascular compression machine that might reduce the bloating if applied consistently. Curt would have to remain seated for a couple of hours a day, with his legs elevated as a compression pad tightened its grip around each extremity. The resident writes a prescription.

  So Curt limps downtown to visit a medical supply company, where the woman working the counter wants to know if he intends to compress both legs simultaneously.

  “Say what?”

  “Do you want to use the pads on both legs at once? It takes less time that way.”

  “But that’ll cost more,” Curt guesses.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “One leg.”

  “A monthly rental fee of eighty dollars or you can buy the machine for five hundred,” the clerk tells him.

  “Five hundert,” drawls Curt. “I ain’t like to see five hundert dollars together at the same time again.”

  “Do you have medical assistance?”

  “I’m gettin’ to it now.”

  “If you get a medical assistance card, we might be able to work something out.”

  If and when. Days stack up one after the other, and still nothing arrives in the mail at the Ellamont address save more requests for more documents to justify the application for medical assistance. Miss Bunch, the caseworker assigned to Curt, wants a rental form signed by Curt’s sister, as well as more medical files from Bon Secours and University Hospitals. No word on the food stamps. No word on DALP.

  The wait grinds against Curt, wearing at his resolve, dragging him by perceptible degrees back toward the corner. He’d gotten clean in the hospital, stayed that way for a couple weeks after. He’d gone to the meetings, talked the twelve-step talk, told his story to people and heard them tell the same story back. For as long as he dared, he’d done what the bitch social worker asked in the vague belief that with a little government money, he could get a room of his own, some food and a few other sundries, and try to scratch out a bit more dignity than he could expect at Monroe and Fayette. But the government money wasn’t coming soon, and his sister wanted him to kick in some rent, and in the absence of any other plan, there was only one thing Curt knew well enough.

  “What up?”

  “Big whites. Big white bags today.”

  “They a bomb?”

  “They sure enough get you there.”

  He tries for a while to tout without using, to take his pay in cash rather than on the hype, to put the money in his pocket. He isn’t really handling the dope much anymore: He’s too slow to work his own stash, and he’s clean enough now so that he doesn’t carry a vial or two of his own in his pockets. He was already arrest-proof by virtue of his physical condition; now he’s even more secure as a salesperson working a step or two apart from the transactions. “I be all right,” he explains, “as long as the niggers don’t miss and the police don’t make a mistake.”

  For a while he works part-time at Monroe and Fayette, straddling the fence between his old life and the new one dependent on government money. But the corner isn’t looking for part-time help, and before long Curt is up on the strip almost every day. He misses more of the Tuerk House meetings; finally, by late September, he’s dropped from the residential waiting list. A week or two more and he’s not coming home every night to Ellamont. In the end, he’s broken completely, the jaundice returning to his eyes, the days and nights reduced to running between Blue’s and Annie’s with the rest of the hardcore crowd, waiting by candlelight for Rita’s ministrations.

  Hungry is nearly two months gone. Pimp is even weaker now, skinnier. Dennis, Curt’s brother, is the same, staggering along, refusing to give in to the Bug. And Rita—her arms are rotting beyond the point where antibiotics make a difference, and the stench is almost enough to clear the shooting gallery at Blue’s.

  As for the proprietor of the needle palace, he has tumbled once again, disappearing into the back of a police wagon at the height of summer, taking a fresh charge in a manner that confirms the corner belief that honesty is never, ever the best policy.

  “What’s your name?” a Western footpatrol had asked him.

  An incredible question, by corner standards: As if merely by asking, you can walk up to someone in the vicinity of Monroe and Fayette and elicit the correct given and surnames. But the cop walking foot on Monroe Street happened to be an older desk man, rotated in one of those periodic departmental crackdowns that throws all the house cats back on to the beat. That the footman bothered to ask the question at all was absurd; that Blue—who had earlier lied to a pair of homicide detectives with the same query—would actually answer was beyond comprehension.

  “My name?”

  “Yeah.”

  “George Epps.”

  So the footman got on his radio and called in George Epps. It’s hard to say which one of the two was more surprised when the warrant check came back. George Epps was, indeed, a wanted man. Violation of probation from the earlier charge of burglarizing his own house—it seemed that the Division of Parole and Probation wanted to know what ever happened to its home-monitoring bracelet—not to mention the client wearing same.

  “Aw, man. You got to be jokin’.”

  The cop seemed almost sad. “Why’d you give me your righ
t name?”

  “Thought I could,” Blue shrugged. “Hadn’t really done much of anything lately.”

  The wagon was called and Blue went away for the second time this year, leaving what remained of his childhood home to the fiends. There was nothing in the place to steal or sell—only used syringes, bottle caps, candle wax, and the soiled bedrolls of the remaining inhabitants. And nothing was what Blue found when he returned from the city lockup at summer’s end.

  He came home from Eager Street clean once again—just as clean as he had been upon returning from his earlier arrest. And once again, he returned to a place that guaranteed nothing but the same kind of failure and pain. He felt truly tired, and in that weariness, he saw with different eyes just how little was left of his mother’s rowhouse and how little that address had to do with him anymore.

  At that moment, Blue concluded that he could no longer live this way. A friend had told him about a homeless shelter down in a refurbished fire station in South Baltimore, a residential program that allowed men to stay for up to six months. That was long enough to find work, save some money, and fashion a plan—provided you didn’t backslide and fail one of the random piss tests. You had to be clean to get into South Baltimore Station, and Blue knew that if he stayed at Monroe and Fayette a second longer than required, he’d lose all purchase on sobriety. So, within days of coming home from detention, he packed up his paints and brushes and poetry journals and caught a ride down Baltimore Street and then south under the railroad overpass on Carey Street—his disappearance as sudden as his return from jail. There were no one-for-the-road needle parties, no last-minute hustles; he said little about it to anyone and offered nothing beyond a casual see-you-down-the-road to the regulars who watched him get into the hack. It seemed more a surrender than an actual exit. But he didn’t come back that night. Or the next night. Or the night after.

  After a week or two, Blue was only a wisp of memory in the fogged minds of those who remained at Monroe and Fayette. Inside the remnant of his home, what was left of the lost platoon was dealing with the here and now. Flubber and Bread and Hungry and Blue and all the other casualties were up on the shelf. For those huddled in the broken rowhouse, there was no time for reflecting on the faces no longer there. Whistling in through the gaps in the plywood, the first gentle winds of September left them preoccupied with the threat of a change in the weather. It was cool at night now, sometimes almost cold—good sleeping weather for as long as it lasted. But with fall comes winter right behind, hard soldiering weather for the likes of Curt and Eggy Daddy, Rita and Pimp.