The Corner

by David Simon/Ed Burns

  Fran hugs him again. For both of them, there is, at this moment, no sense of a tragedy compounded, of babies bringing babies into an unforgiving world. Tyreeka is now fourteen; DeAndre, two years older. Their union will soon produce a child three generations removed from the hope and honest belief that prompted William McCullough to steal a ride on a northbound bus and go to work in a Baltimore foundry. Yet in this first moment, Gary McCullough feels nothing but delight.

  He asks about a due date and Fran tells him Christmas. Yet again, Gary tells Fran that he’s going to change, that he’s going to clean himself up in time to help.

  “I’m going to get past this,” he says.

  Fran talks a bit about going to meetings, about the waiting list at BRC. Gary nods, but for both of them, it is a routine conversation, half-heard and spoken quickly. Fran pulls him up in mid-promise.

  “Andre needs help with things,” she says. “He tryin’ to pay for the bassinet and high chair and clothes and whatever else. And they already went and cut his hours at Wendy’s and he’s out looking for some other work …”

  Gary stops smiling.

  “He’s been tryin’ but you know how he is. If he don’t get some cash soon, he goin’ right back to the corner.”

  Gary opens his mouth, utters a syllable, then turns away. Fran presses forward, wrapping her argument into a tight circle. Gary gets paid every day; surely he can let her hold forty or fifty. For DeAndre.

  “Aw, man. No, this ain’t, um …”

  “Lemme hold twenty then.”

  Gary looks away, then back at Fran, then down at his rubber boots, wet and brown with crab spice. He’s trying to counter, trying to offer up a reason, but the words won’t come. He opens his mouth again, managing only to exhale before turning on his heel and marching into the crabhouse. Fran holds her ground and ten seconds later Gary is back.

  “I ain’t got paid yet today,” Gary says.

  “I’ll wait then.”

  Gary pivots again, stalking back into the crabhouse to gather his thoughts. He returns after a minute, explaining that he can’t spare anything because his mother will be down to collect the money for groceries and such.

  “Tell her it’s for Andre’s baby and she’ll let some of it go. If she knows what it’s for, she won’t mind.”

  Again Gary flees indoors, leaving Fran on the pavement shaking her head, shouting that at the very least, he ought to let her hold ten.

  “For real, Gary, c’mon.”

  But he’s back behind the counter now, hiding out, peeking through the steam every few minutes to see if she’s gone, until, after a time, she is.

  For Gary, the back-and-forth with Fran has always been an exhausting ordeal. Now it’s more difficult than ever: With more dope and coke coursing through him, Gary has slipped deeper into the fog. He had long prided himself on his ideas and opinions, but lately he can sense that his words are fewer and slower, his sentences less complex. More and more, he stumbles from one half-formed thought to another; conversations once rich in substance and reference points are now just rambles. He can speak well enough about ordinary things, but Gary has always been about more than ordinary things. Now, after years of chemical riot, he’s missing a part of himself.

  At times, in the quiet of his mother’s basement, Gary grasps the growing confusion in his mind. Such moments frighten him. Occasionally, he admits the fear aloud to friends, then looks at them expectantly, waiting for that redemptive moment when they shake their heads and tell him that it isn’t permanent, that it’s just the blast. And Gary, hearing this, nods and smiles, telling himself that it will all come back to him in time: His intellect, his humor, his lucidity—all of it will be where he left it. At other times, he doubts himself, worrying that he isn’t thinking the same, that he can’t remember things like he once did. The drugs, Gary would say, shaking his head. The drugs are killing my mind.

  A few moments before, he couldn’t keep up with the beg-and-barter challenge of Fran Boyd. Now, unable to remember whether he had walked back into the sorting room for males or females, he goes back out and stares down into the bins. Everything is full save for the sixteens. He returns to the sorting room and pulls a plastic bin of sixteen-dollar-a-dozen males over to the tank. He’s got them up on the edge, ready to dump, when Cardy looks over at him, questioningly.

  “You just did sixteens.”

  “Say what?”

  “You took sixteens and cooked ’em not ten minutes back.”

  With one hand still holding the crab bin, Gary uses the other to pull his Angels cap off his head. He wipes his forehead with his sleeve and tries to think.

  “Check the pots,” his brother tells him.

  Gary puts the bin on the floor and walks back out into the swelter of the front room. He bends around the near wall to check the numbers on the control box. Sixteens cooking on No. 3.

  “Dag.”

  He walks back into the sorting room, picks up the plastic bin and dumps it back on the pile. Cardy smiles.

  “Dag,” says Gary again.

  “Where you at, Gary?” Cardy asks.

  “Cloud nine,” he answers, frowning.

  Cardy sings a lyric: “You can be what you want to be …”

  Gary hears the old Temps classic and loses himself in nostalgia. He finishes the verse, then segues into a bit of “Ball of Confusion,” followed by “Just My Imagination”—a medley of antique Motown, delivered in broken rhythm as he shovels fresh ice into the tanks. Satisfied that he’s ahead of the game, he tells his brother he’ll be back in a few, then creeps out the loading dock door to Monroe Street. The white boys are nowhere to be seen.

  “Aw, man …”

  He checks the carryout, then Martini’s across the street. When he comes back out, John Boy and Dan Boy are sauntering his way, holding soft ice cream cones. Vanilla and chocolate, swirled together.

  “Thinkin’ I’d lost you,” Gary says.

  “Naw. Let’s do it.”

  Gary walks point as the trio makes its way up the hill, crossing Baltimore Street at Monroe and heading straight for the maelstrom of the Fayette Street corners. Gary pulls up half a block short and squints toward the touts and runners, a trusty scout trying to read the terrain.

  “You want the whole bundle, right?”

  “If it’s good, yeah.”

  “We’ll go one-and-one and see,” says Gary, taking their cash. “If it’s good, we can come back on it.”

  Gary pockets the money and sends them back down the street, telling them to wait by the Baptist church. Watching his money walk away, Dan Boy gives a wistful, nervous look; John Boy settles in, patient. Gary, he knows, is true.

  Ten minutes later, the three men huddle in the basement of 1827 Vine Street, where they present a picture of three-part harmony, the corner’s version of a color-blind America.

  Gary finds a vein in his forearm and launches the speedball, plunging it halfway home and then waiting for the wave to safely crest. When it does, he fires the other half. The white boys just slam theirs, dropping the plunger all the way. John Boy leans back on the bed, nearly swooning.

  “Man,” says Gary, “you keep slammin’ like that an’ you gonna black out. I’m tellin’ you.”

  John Boy stays flat on the mattress; Dan Boy pulls his needle free, sits up, sniffs the air nervously, then retreats to the back wall of the basement, standing there with his neck back and fists clenched, braced against the warped paneling like a sentry on post. Gary shakes his head again, then resumes his lecture on the danger of slamming a speedball.

  “I’m sayin’ you got to be careful …”

  But no one’s listening. It was the same thing last week, when Gary brought John Boy into this same house by way of the back door, stumbling through the kitchen and past his mother. Minutes later, in the basement, Gary watched in amazement as his pale charge slammed three speedballs in rapid succession.

  “Dag,” Gary drawled, “slow down on that.”

  But John
Boy wasn’t hearing him. He was down on the floor, eyes rolling up in his head, foam at the corners of his mouth.

  “No, hey, John …”

  Gary earned his pay as a tour guide that day, keeping John Boy on his feet and breathing, throwing cold water on his face to revive him, then running upstairs to get more water and some kind of help. By the time the white boy showed any sign of coming back around, Gary had treated his mother to a vile and frantic performance.

  For days afterward, Gary cursed himself for giving his mother and father this new cause for grief. No more white boys, he swore to himself, no more ghetto tours—nothing, at least, that would bring this mess into their very house.

  Though both had fallen to dope and coke, Gary had always judged himself better than June Bey, blaming his brother for bringing all the chaos of addiction home to Vine Street. June Bey had stolen things from the house; he had people doing dirt with him in the upstairs bedrooms. Last month, when his parents went south for a family funeral in Carolina, June Bey brought so many people in off Monroe Street that the family home began to resemble a shooting gallery. Gary had scolded his brother for that, even threatened to tell their father if June Bey didn’t give it up. To bring home the corner—that had once been utterly beyond Gary. His father worked hard enough to have peace in his house; his mother loved them all too much to have the worst moments played out in front of her.

  Likewise, Gary had seethed for years about his youngest brother, Kwame, who would stash in his bedroom whatever vials he was selling, as well as guns and bullets and all sorts of other paraphernalia. It was enough evidence to place the whole family at risk should the Western knockers come through the front door with a maul. Back in the summer, in fact, the warrant squad had indeed come through the door looking for Kwame, scaring Miss Roberta half to death with their semiautomatics and their threats.

  “Kwame McCullough,” declared a city officer, coming down the steps from a search of the upstairs bedrooms. “Where’s he at? When was he here last?”

  Miss Roberta couldn’t lie. Neither could she give them her son, who had slipped out the kitchen door only minutes before.

  “He … I don’t … he’s not here.”

  “But he was here,” said the city cop.

  Roberta McCullough fell silent.

  “When did he leave?”

  “I … what is it he’s done?”

  “He’s charged in a warrant. Assault by pointing a handgun.”

  Regina, the mother of Kwame’s child, had sworn out a complaint, claiming that during a heated argument, Kwame pointed a gun at her. Now plainclothesmen were pushing and poking their way through the family home, demanding information and making accusations.

  “When was he here last?”

  Roberta said nothing.

  “You haven’t seen him in weeks, right?” said the city cop, his voice rising with contempt.

  “I … he …”

  “You’re a liar,” the plainclothesman told her, then turned toward his partner, a state trooper assigned to the warrant detail. “Look at her. She’s a damn liar.”

  The woman held one hand to her chest, staring out the open front door onto Vine Street. The trooper, sensing perhaps the true cost of the moment, would not play to his partner.

  “Ma’am,” he said quietly. “I’m just doing my job here. Your son needs to turn himself in and deal with this warrant.”

  When Gary came into the house minutes later, he found his mother at the edge of tears, broken by the confrontation and terrified for Kwame. Again, Gary had blamed his brother—not only for the assault on Regina, but for refusing to surrender on the warrant and bringing the jump-out squad through the front door.

  By Gary’s reckoning, June Bey and Kwame thought only of themselves when they brought the corner into these rooms, and by such a standard, Gary rated himself the better son. He was a drug addict to be sure, but at least he thought twice about doing anything that crossed the love he felt for his mother and father.

  Less than a week earlier, however, he had—for want of a blast—brought the hellish tableau of a drug overdose before his mother’s sight. He had cursed himself then and cursed himself since; but again today, he was down in the same basement with two white boys, playing at the same caper for the same fee.

  “Gary, man, this shit is right,” mumbles John Boy sitting up.

  Gary nods in agreement, then looks across the ciuttered basement to see Dan Boy, still sniffing the air and twitching, his head cocked to one side like a squirrel.

  “You okay?” asks Gary.

  John Boy turns slowly and takes stock of his friend. “Hey, Dan. What’s up?”

  But Dan Boy has left this world for some other dimension. He’s jerking spastically and giving a wide-eyed stare at his companions; it’s the look of deep paranoia often found at the heart of a good speedball.

  “Yo, Dan,” says Gary.

  The white boy skitters against the broken dresser, knocking an empty forty-ounce to the floor. It doesn’t shatter, but the noise brings Gary back to what remains of his senses. Upstairs, his mother is working in the kitchen.

  Gary turns to John Boy. “We got to go.”

  John Boy nods. The two of them ease past the wilting Dan to open the back basement door. Gary goes through first, then pushes up the double metal doors of the backyard grating. Sunlight streams into the basement lair.

  “C’mon, Dan. We’re rollin’ out.”

  But Dan is having no part of it, and soon a pantomime is playing out in the rear yard, with Gary and John Boy out by the laundry line, gesturing frantically, trying to lure Dan from the basement. They wave their arms and smile stupidly, alternating words of warm encouragement with impatient blurts of irritation—and all for nothing. The most Dan Boy can manage is to pop his head out of the walk-up, then jerk his neck around like a rodent, squinting in every direction.

  “Damn,” John Boy says. “He’s all fucked up.”

  Gary and John huddle up and make a plan. They go to the end of the yard and mouth threats about leaving whether Dan comes or not. They walk halfway down the alley, bringing a nervous Dan to the edge of the yard and allowing Gary to double back and close the walk-up grate. He does so with profound relief, then looks up to see his mother watching him in the kitchen window. He can’t bring himself to wonder how long she has been there.

  The white boys are crazy trouble. Gary again swears to keep them from his basement, to put some distance between his corner capers and the family home. But he’s really no longer in a position to make and keep those kinds of bargains. When he gets back to the crabhouse after his hour-and-a-half’s misadventure with the white boys, he’s told that he’ll be losing another day on the clock, leaving him with a paycheck for Saturdays only.

  Soon it will be winter and Gary McCullough, citizen drug addict—a man who needs only a modest paycheck, his basement library, and a good breakaway syringe to live a comfortable and serene existence—will be forced back into the corner mix. For him, the game is getting harder. The vacant houses are truly vacant now; the copper and aluminum is long gone. Stealing from junkyards can get you beaten to death and the legendary car caper with Will is ancient history. Ronnie Boice isn’t around, either; she’s off with her brother since Gary gave her the shoulder at the crabhouse. For now, at least, Gary is alone.

  A week after he has to coax Dan out of the basement, he’s out walking with two other white companions, coming south on Fulton from the liquor store. One of his pale friends has sprung for Gary’s favorite—a forty of Mickey’s malt liquor—and Gary is high and loose on a good one-and-one purchase. He’s giving free voice to his mind, letting a one-sided conversation wander from religion to space travel to investment strategies. He doesn’t notice the tall, dark-skinned kid change direction on the pavement behind him, or the other two coming from across the street.

  “You know what this is,” says the tall one, flashing what looks to be a small .25 pistol. “Get in the fucking alley.”

&
nbsp; The white boys know very well what it is. It’s after dark and they’re blocks north of where they should be.

  A second kid pulls a hunting knife.

  “Right now. Get in the alley, motherfucker.”

  Gary tries to walk sideways, to skirt the issue even as the white boys are led into the darkness.

  The tall one turns on him.

  “You too, nigger,” he says. “You in this shit, too.”

  Mickey’s, wallets, and house keys go to the ground. Excluding the alcohol, the entire haul comes to about $2.75 in cash money. In the close quarters of the alley, Gary risks a quick look at faces and fails to recognize the crew; they’re from some other neighborhood. The stickup boys show only disgust: If they’d caught up to this safari before the white boys copped, they should be getting at least twenty or thirty dollars. If they’d caught up to it afterward, they should be getting three or four vials. It doesn’t add up.

  “This ain’t shit,” says the tall one.

  “Man, please,” says Gary. “It’s all we got.”

  The tall boy points the.25 at Gary’s head and lets loose with a stream of motherfucker-this and motherfucker-that. Gary looks down at the pavement, waiting some long seconds to learn what a bullet actually feels like.

  “Turn your pockets out,” the one with the knife says.

  They do so, and the tall one shakes his head, glaring at Gary. It’s a look that seems to say: You want to walk with white boys, you best come up with some white-boy money when asked.

  “Man, please,” says Gary again.

  “Get the fuck out my sight,” shouts the tall one.

  The white boys back out of the alley. Gary tries to reach down for his forty, but tall boy kicks the bottle across the pavement. “I said get the fuck outta here.”

  They run. The white boys go south toward Baltimore Street; Gary goes around the block and back up Fayette to his mother’s house. He heads that way telling himself that he’ll come back, that he’ll get Kwame’s .38 and come back, but, of course, he does nothing of the kind. It’s not in his nature.

  Instead, Gary ends the night in his mother’s kitchen, his high wasted and the snake hissing from his stomach. He’s back at the bottom, without any sort of plan for tomorrow, yet carrying the habit of a man who, not two months ago, was making $200 to $250 a week. Gary needs capers—new capers, better capers. This one, this business with white boys, is more problem than anything else. He needs the world to give a little, to go easy on him for a while. He’s given five whole years to the corner, five years for which he has absolutely nothing to show, save for the darkened webbing that marks both arms. But in the quiet of his mother’s kitchen, Gary can still muster enough innocence to be incredulous.