“I’m sayin’ that, you know, this has got to stop.”
Pimp shifts uneasily in his broken chair.
“I mean you want to get help, I’m here to help, you know. An’ if you want to go on like you been, that’s okay, too, but I’m sayin’ I don’t want it to be here.”
The others look around at each other. Rita shifts her eyes away, staring into the sunlit crack in the front plywood. Eggy Daddy steps past Blue, mumbling an excuse me, looking for some other moment than the one now being shared.
“I mean,” Blue continues, “I know I started this. But it’s got to stop somewhere.”
“Well,” says Rita, always polite, “you right to say so, I guess …”
But no one moves. Blue tries to talk to Rita, to convince her to take a walk with him up to Bon Secours. Get some help for the raw flesh on that upper arm.
“You need some attention on that.”
“I know it.”
“So let’s go.”
“Now?” asks Rita.
“Yeah now. No time like the present.”
Rita shrugs, looking around the shooting gallery for help. When none is forthcoming, she tells Blue that tomorrow would be better.
“Tomorrow,” says Blue, sad at the word.
“I be ready tomorrow.”
He tried. And for trying, he feels a little better. He wishes them well, telling them to stay warm, assuring them that they can pull him up any time if they’re looking for help. Then he walks back through the kitchen and into the alley. His war is over—he prays that it’s over anyway—and they are still here, soldiering into another winter. And Blue, for all his new strength, can’t help but love them, respect them even, for their resilience, for their unwavering devotion. From the outside, Blue can see it perfectly: There’s no one like a dope fiend. There’s no one alive who can go to sleep in a vacant house at night in the dead of winter, night after night, knowing that he’s doing what he has to, that everything else might be lost, but the blast will justify him in the end.
No speech by George Epps can move these people. As he leaves his mother’s house, he has to concede that in some sense their claim to the property is more legitimate than his own. A week passes before he rouses himself to call the Western District, talking to a police captain about giving the needle palace a toss, maybe reboarding all the doors and windows with fresh plywood.
“There’s people in there that need medical attention,” Blue tells the captain. “They need to get some attention for their own good. That’s really why I’m calling on it.”
The Western troops do make an appearance, evacuating the shooting gallery long enough for an Urban Services crew to nail up fresh plywood. That pushes Curt and Rita and the rest down the block for a few days, or for at least as long as it takes someone to pry loose the barrier and creep back inside.
Blue comes back through, sees that it’s no use, and lets go. He’s on a different road now; what happens in his old house is beyond his most essential task, which involves saving himself. But what Blue can’t lure from the shooting gallery eventually washes up at the doors of the Bon Secours emergency room anyway, broken and ill.
Among equals, it’s Fat Curt who drops first, collapsing on his corner in an incoherent and jaundiced heap, his liver doing all the things the doctors warned him it would do. He’s admitted, stabilized with fluids and enzyme therapy, and detoxed once again as a matter of happenstance. This time, unlike last August, he’s in no shape to be discharged. With his liver problems and his extremities bloated and his blood pressure off the charts, no one can manufacture a viable excuse for dumping him back on the street after a week or two.
Instead, he settles into a third-floor bed in a semiprivate room, a change that Curt himself soon regards as a reasonable cold-weather respite. The food is bad, of course; everyday Curt stares down at the Jell-O on his tray table and begs visitors to bring him barbecue. And there’s not much drama to the daily routine: Changes of dressings on his abscessed limbs, whirlpool, and physical therapy provide what passes for excitement during Curt’s medical interlude. But he’s warm and dry and watching television on clean sheets.
For company, he soon has Pimp, who succumbs a week after Curt and is brought not only to the same hospital, but to the same ward, occupying a single-bed room directly across the hall. The Bug has now ravaged Pimp’s body, but his mind is still lucid and he settles into Bon Secours as Jeff to Curt’s Mutt, the two of them lounging as best they can at the end of the hallway, flirting with nurses and squeezing cigarettes and sodas from passersby.
Then Shardene is unable to rise after a cold night inside the vacant house. When she does finally get up around midday, she’s talking nonsense, her thoughts rambling out in broken sentences. She’s admitted to a bed in the hospital’s other wing, and Fayette Street’s lost platoon is down to three warriors: Eggy Daddy, Rita, and Curt’s brother, Dennis.
“They gonna have to carry me off this corner,” declares Dennis proudly. “You can take all them other motherfuckers to Bon Secours and I’ll still be right here.”
“You hardcore,” Eggy assures him.
“I’ll be the last man on the corner.”
“I be there with you,” Rita assures him.
But Rita begins to have second thoughts. Like Curt, she has for years carried her pain and her damage with stoic disregard, yet there are now enough empty spaces in the front room of the shooting gallery to make her mindful. First Bread leaves them. Then Hungry. Then Blue up and walks away as if he actually has a plan. Then Curt and Pimp, falling out one after the next. And now Shardene, giving in to the damp and cold. For more than a year now, Rita has been mending her own raw arms, self-medicating the wounds with bootleg antibiotics and whatever fresh rags and bandages she could find. Now she begins to wonder whether a few days in a hospital bed with IV drugs and fresh bandages wouldn’t make her feel a little better.
Just before Christmas, she too walks through the doors of the Bon Secours emergency room. With the infections in both arms reaching a near-absolute state of drug resistance, Rita is quickly admitted and lodged at the other end of the hallway from Shardene.
“We one big happy family again,” says Fat Curt, dryly.
It’s damn close to true. With Rita gone from Blue’s house, a dozen different fiends from Fayette and Monroe are now obliged to visit her at her hospital bedside, bringing their vials and bags and syringes with them. When the nurses and attendants turn their backs, Rita finds a vein for each of her visitors, then applies the balance to her own needs, finding it easier than ever because her intravenous shunt is as useful for heroin as for antibiotics. Direct deposit, she calls it.
She works her way down the length of the hallway, making sure Shardene is properly medicated, then making friends with a couple of lost souls in the next room over. They’re looking rough, laid up with the Bug, unable to keep to their game as the virus overruns their bodies. No matter; Rita shares what comes her way, helping both with their blast. Fat Curt, as patriarch to this bizarre reunion, tries to talk to Rita, to tell her to slow down and be cool and give herself at least a couple weeks’ rest.
“You gonna get thrown out of here before the medicine have a chance to work,” he tells her.
“I won’t,” Rita insists. “I’m gonna be better about it.”
But after five days in a hospital bed, a blood screen on Shardene shows a higher heroin content than when she first walked into the emergency room. She’s put back onto the street.
Then Rita herself is seen creeping into the room across the hall, armed with a breakaway syringe. When the night nurse surprises her, she’s holding the tool in one hand and a grateful patient’s forearm in the other. And so Rita Hale, the best doctor on Fayette Street, is herself ejected from a place of healing, accused of ministering to patients without house privileges.
That leaves Fat Curt and Pimp, and for them the year comes to its end amidst antiseptic smell and walls of bland white. But it offers a last flouri
sh, too: As decidedly stationary objects, both patients are finally located by the mysterious Robert Carr, the man who had gone to the corners looking for Curt several months back, and whom Curt had dismissed as a hospital bill collector. Instead, Carr is the hospital’s own expediter, a contractor who identifies high-cost indigent patients, then shepherds their medical assistance and SSI claims through the bureaucracy so that the hospital will ultimately get paid, if not through patient billing then by government allowance. By now, with as much as thirty thousand dollars expended during his last three hospitalizations, Curt has gained some notice among the caregivers at Bon Secours. Robert Carr has him sign this and initial that, and within a week or two, Curtis Davis has a state medical assistance card—an outcome that has resisted all previous efforts. More than that, both Curt and Pimp now have a promise of long-term care, either at a nursing home or a chronic-care facility. A soldier to the core, Fat Curt refuses to die and refuses to get well; it therefore occurs to those overseeing his medical adventure that it might be better to deposit him somewhere else in the city than to have him show up in the same emergency room yet again.
Pimp, at life’s end, is grateful for any semblance of a plan. But Curt hears nursing home and begins plotting his escape. He’s got forty-five years and they’re treating him like an ancient. He knows he’s sick; he knows, too, that any more life on the corner is likely to make him sicker still. Even so, the man is not yet ready to believe his run is over.
His ankle, he tells the doctors. If he can just get the ankle to set right, he’ll be fine. And this business about the swelling in his legs and arms being permanent: He’s heard about some kind of machine that can squeeze out the juice, make things go back to normal. And the liver—well, Curt can’t exactly see the liver. He knows he needs such an organ and he understands that his isn’t particularly happy, but he really can’t assess his own health by thinking about something so intangible.
“Get so as where I can walk again and I’ll be all right,” he tells his doctor. “It’s my legs that give me the problem.”
But Curt will not be all right ever again, and when the doctors try to explain this gently, Curt doesn’t seem to get all of the message.
“I don’t need a nursing home,” he tells one social worker. “What I need is to get things together to where I got a place of my own and maybe a little money each month. If I can get that foot not to swole up like it has and if I can get me a monthly check, I be good.”
Fat Curt has given a lifetime to the corner game; now he’s asking for some small dignity in return. The social worker tells him Robert Carr is working on the SSI case, that a check might be there for him eventually. But as for his health, it’s about much more than swollen feet.
“My blood pressure then,” Curt agrees. “I need to take medicines for that.”
“And your liver. You’re very sick, Curtis.”
“My liver,” he repeats, as if reminded of a minor detail. “Got to go easy on that too.”
“You need to be monitored,” she explains. “You’re going to need to be in a place where they can see just how you’re doing every day.”
Gradually, he’s shoehorned into their plan, though even at the end, he’s talking about the chronic-care facility as a temporary solution, a way station on the road to some happier place.
Come January, he’ll be at Seton Manor over on Franklin Street, a converted downtown hotel that used to be known as the James Brown Motor Inn because the hardest working man in show business bought the place in the 1970s and put his name on it. In its current incarnation, though, Seton Manor is the last institutional resort for so many of the souls who have played and lost on the city’s corners. From Fayette Street to Greenmount Avenue, from Flag House to Lexington Terrace, those without the sense to die quick and clean are instead brought to Seton Manor and carted upstairs in a slow-motion lurch of an elevator ride, then deposited in one of the painted cinder-block rooms on the third and fourth wards, where they are fed hospital food and AZT, first by mouth, then through an intravenous line, then not at all because in those last days, sustenance is to little purpose. They are black and brown bodies mostly, stick figures, consigned to metal-brace beds or stumbling and staggering past each other in the corridors, looking into each other’s death masks and knowing beyond any doubt whatsoever.
At Seton Manor, Curt will settle on a fourth-floor ward largely comprised of AIDS patients, though he will insist, to the general indifference of the nurses, that he has tested clean. He’ll be there five days before his first roommate dies in his sleep, and two weeks before the second stops breathing. By the time bedmate number three goes gentle into that good night, not even Curt can mistake the meaning and purpose of his new home.
“They think I’m dyin’,” he tells Pimp, who arrives the same week to take a bed down the hall. “Them nurses tryin’ to give me the same pills that they givin’ everyone else around here.”
Pimp is sympathetic enough, though he, of course, has been admitted to Seton Manor on the assumption that he requires nothing more than a terminus.
“You tell them you ain’t got it?” he asks Curt.
“Told my nurse and I told the damn social worker. They still tryin’ to put them pills into me.”
Curt spends his days watching television in the small lounge or telling tales in Pimp’s room. Meanwhile, everyone around him withers to nothing.
“Fast as you learn their name, they die on you,” Curt says at one point. “Ain’t no point gettin’ to know people here.”
He can’t believe it ends this way. He can’t believe that the damage done can’t be repaired, that there isn’t some medical plea-bargain that can be struck to modify the sentence. He did the deeds; he always knew the cost. Soldiers as hardy and willing as Curt are now long gone; measured by the dead, Curt’s cup ran over years ago. Still, death seems to him wrong and premature and entirely unbelievable. Fuck the liver thing and fuck the blood pressure, because Fat Curt still feels the same inside. He’s not thinning down, he’s not fighting the virus. He can still laugh and hope and remember. He can still tell a joke or wish people well or want more for himself.
“Not my time yet,” he tells a visitor one day. “But I need to get out of this place before I’m like to kill myself from seein’ everyone else go.”
A couple of weeks into the new year, Curt begs his friends from Fayette Street to come downtown and take him somewhere—anywhere—so that he can scrape against ordinary life, see how people are when they’re still dealing more with this world than the next. He is taken back to Fayette and Monroe, where he’s greeted with genuine affection by the old guard: Rita, telling him how fine he looks standing there with clean clothes and clear eyes; Stink, joking with him to stay away from the big white bags, which are weak today; his brother Dennis, sizing Curt up and granting some soldierly respect in a low, quick growl:
“They ain’t kilt you yet, huh?”
“You neither.”
“Me neither,” agrees Dennis, laughing until he coughs.
For a time, Curt watches the back-and-forth between the touts and runners and feels the desire growling inside. But today, for pride if for no other reason, he fights with himself, leaving Fayette Street after an hour or so, asking a friend to ride him by the harbor before dropping him back at Seton Manor.
There, atop Federal Hill, he sits on a bench, his fat hands deep in his coat pockets, his shoulders braced against the cold, his cane resting beside him. To the east, in the outer harbor, a tug is slowly pushing an empty freighter from its mooring at the Domino Sugar plant, turning the big ship slowly until the bow is facing Lazaretto Light and the channel to the bay.
Curt says nothing for a long time, watching as the tug slowly detaches and the ship begins to move.
“Headin’ out to sea,” he says finally.
A young, dark-skinned woman wheels past him with a baby stroller. Curt looks up and smiles, but the woman is preoccupied with her toddler, who is trying to take off h
is mittens. She reaches down to lightly slap the boy’s hand.
Curt laughs softly, then looks to the harbor again. The ship has started to show a wake.
“I’ve had a good life,” he says. “These last couple years have been rough and all, but I’m not going to go on complaining about things. I did what I wanted to do and I can’t say that if it came around again, I’d do too much different.”
He stays on the bench for a while longer, waiting until the ship has cleared the point and turned into the lower channel. By then the sun is low and the January cold cuts deeper.
Curt rises, then pauses for a last look at the water. Leaning hard on the cane, he starts slowly for the car.
“Time to go,” he says.
TEN
This war goes on.
Thirty years down this sad stretch of road and the same people are still peddling the same brand of snake oil, still hawking that elusive light at the tunnel’s end.
There’s nothing wrong with the war on drugs that can’t be perfected, they’ll tell you. Nothing that can’t succeed with just a little fine-tuning and a little more money. More cops and more prisons and some new laws and we’ll really start to get at the sources of supply, or attack the demand, or maybe do both at once. Democrats, Republicans, it doesn’t matter who’s running for office—they’ll all promise to get hard with it, to get things back under control, to spend the money on a bigger, better campaign. They talk that shit as if the national prison population hasn’t tripled in ten years. They talk it because they don’t know what else to say, because they know that at the very least, these are the words that most of us want to hear.
Thirty years. And now, all that’s left is national failure on a grand scale, a tainted political inheritance that is backhanded from one administration to the next. Thirty years and the politicians and professionals are still offering up the kind of piss-into-the-wind optimism that compels any rational mind to recall another, comparable disaster. Listen to a big-city narcotics detective boasting about his arrest statistics, savoring them as tangible evidence of progress, and you might think of some starched Saigon briefing officer in an air-conditioned Quonset hut tallying up the daily body count. Or the hear the voice of a DEA or Customs spokesman talking up the street value of some huge cocaine seizure along the Mexican border, and you might conjure the ghost of a long-dead Pentagon guru promising to carpet-bomb infiltration to a standstill along the Ho Chi Minh trail. An urban police commander extolling the virtues of community-oriented policing as a means of regaining the trust of inner-city neighborhoods? He’s the direct descendant of every CIA spook and Agency for International Development official who ever spoke earnestly about pacification or the model villages program. You want more? Then watch any prosecutor in any American city call the obligatory press briefing to announce the indictment of one major trafficker in a million-dollar drug probe, even as new dealers arrive to take possession of the same open-air drug markets. That’s a corps commander grinding up men, money, and machines for possession of some godforsaken Vietnamese hill, then declaring victory as he copters his people out and returns the same real estate to his enemy.
The Corner Page 67