The Corner

by David Simon/Ed Burns

  But the old truck is loaded and wheezing, barely managing the grade up to Bentalou. Will downshifts, and for a second the truck almost seems to be going backward until finally, there’s just enough engine to get them up and over. They pause at the crest and check for traffic, turning ever so slowly as a shiny black four-by-four with tinted glass and Halogens races around them and then squeals to a halt, blocking Bentalou. Out steps a white man. A big white man with a beet-red face. A big white man with a big brown baseball bat.

  “Oh,” says Gary.

  “I’ll kill all of you right here, right now,” yells the man with the bat. “Get the fuck out!”

  They tumble from Will’s truck, begging, pleading, trying like hell to explain the unexplainable.

  “What’s up, boss?” says Will, arms raised in surrender.

  “On your knees,” growls the white man. “Now.”

  Three of them are down on the asphalt, making their peace with God. Gary comes out of the passenger door and starts walking sideways, hoping to make the sidewalk and slip down Bentalou as if he’s some kind of bystander.

  “Get the fuck over here!”

  “I … I just got a lift from them. I’m …”

  The white man cocks the bat and takes a step toward Gary, who goes down on his knees with the rest of his crew, everyone begging and praying as the traffic rolls around them. They’re on a West Baltimore street, a moment or two from violent death and no one—but no one—is going to come to their defense. Never mind that it’s three black men and a white girl held hostage in the street by a red-faced ’billy. Never mind that this is the heart of black Baltimore, that they’re on their knees in the very shadow of the George Washington Carver Vocational High School. Never mind that Mr. Carver served a grateful nation by finding ten thousand things to do with a peanut. Never mind that it’s four against one or that two dozen black citizens are examining this Deep South diorama through rowhouse doorways and automobile windows. All of that doesn’t seem to mean much to the white man with the bat; he’s right at home here in the southbound lane of Bentalou Street, yelling and screaming and strenuously asserting his right to take batting practice on behalf of his stolen property.

  “Please,” says Will, palms up in supplication.

  The girl is crying.

  “We’ll put it back,” says Gary.

  “Goddam right you will.”

  “Yessir.”

  “I should kill you right now.”

  “Yessir. Please.”

  The short ride to the front gate of the scrap yard is a journey of a thousand miles. Gary and the others lug all the metal back inside the fence, trying in absolute earnestness to remember the original resting place of each item. At the end, the hillbilly puts them on their knees one last time, swearing to them that if they ever so much as dream about his metal again, they should wake up and apologize.

  “Yessir. You right, sir.”

  On the way home, Will’s brother is back at shotgun, with Gary riding alone in the empty pickup bed, the hot summer wind rushing past him as they rumble down Bentalou. Gary’s heart is still racing, his stomach churning. He could have died back there—he could have actually died like a dog in the street, and no one would have said or done anything to stop it. Catching his breath, Gary feels some gratitude for the mercies shown, for the terrifying white colossus who, by God’s sweet grace, decided to spare them all.

  Near Winchester Street he glimpses the ruby glory of that rose-covered trellis again. But this time it brings no joy.

  Dag, he tells himself. I need a job.

  On Fayette Street, movement itself tells a story.

  Fat Curt, for one, can tell from a man’s walk whether he’s flush, or illing, or carrying a semiauto down in the dip of his sweats. Having lived a life in the corner game, Curtis Davis sees all of it with precision, so that no one moves from here to there without the old tout divining the actual purpose.

  When Curt sees Scalio do his slow, listing two-step across Monroe Street, he knows that there is no destination, that he’s on his corner until the end of the business day. A police giving him a quick glance might actually be fooled by the illusion of forward progress, but come back in an hour and Scalio will be where you left him.

  Or consider Eggy Daddy, a man on a mission, his thinned-out frame motivating away from the corner traffic in a brisk pimp roll; the sight tells Curt that Eggy’s taking a little personal time for his medication. Or Chauncey, coming down Vine Street for the morning testers, giving it a half-strut, half-trot—Curt sees that and knows Chauncey got the word late, that the boy’s giving it just enough to get his tired carcass to end of the line.

  There’s the sudden bolt of Stink from one side of the street to the other, followed by the slow creep into a gap between rowhouses. See something like that and you don’t think police—only amateurs run from a police when they’re dirty and Stink is no amateur. Fat Curt’s better guess is that Odell or some other stickup boy will be coming around the corner next.

  There’s also the running glide, the silk-smoooth movement of Hungry, darting out from the Vine Street garages, then hugging the front of the rowhouses all the way down to Fulton. It’s speed enough to guarantee escape, but not so much as to attract the attention of everyone on the street. Curt gets sight of the sideways glide and knows that Hungry has possession of someone else’s vials.

  Finally, there is the forty-meter dash, the out-and-out, headlong, I-don’t-care-who-sees-me rush for glory or safety or revenge. Get a glimpse of a man running with that kind of heat and you know that he’s going to vault any fence or crash any door to get there first.

  So when Curt spots one of the Mount Street hangers-on, Wayne by name, cutting the corner onto Fulton, his neck craning around in terror, he understands and looks toward Mount. Sure enough, a New York dealer clears the corner, sprinting on the balls of his feet, slicing across Fayette. The dealer is closing the distance, gripping an aluminum bat in his hand as if it were a relay baton. The race soon has the attention of the entire strip, with touts and slingers from Mount to Monroe momentarily distracted. Time out for a street beating.

  “They done talkin’,” says Fat Curt dryly.

  On Fulton, Wayne stumbles briefly as he goes from the sidewalk to the street, then rights himself before taking the front steps of his rowhouse in a single leap. He grabs the door handle and flings himself inside, slamming it shut just as the New Yorker clears the corner and races across Fulton.

  “Motherfucker!”

  The New Yorker slams the bat against the wood once or twice for emphasis, demanding that Wayne open the door and take a rightful whipping.

  “Get the fuck out here, bitch!”

  Wayne is unconvinced and stays put.

  The dealer slams the bat against the door one last time, then turns away from the house just as Officer Robert Brown of the Western District rolls up in a radio car. Mr. Brown was down on Baltimore Street where, from a block’s distance, he caught a glimpse of the New Yorker shifting to overdrive. He, too, can mark the movement of this world. And though the running dealer was all he could glimpse from Baltimore Street, he knew, instinctively, that around the corner somewhere, ahead of the New Yorker, was another man, sprinting for his life.

  Having chased Wayne into his hole, the dealer heads back across Fulton, the bat cradled on his shoulder like an Englishman’s umbrella. Bob Brown pulls to the curb, steps from the car, and with the indifference of a grade-school playground monitor, takes hold of the weapon. In a wordless exchange, the New York dealer gives it up without breaking stride.

  “Mr. Brown got hisself a new bat,” says Fat Curt, hauling his cast-heavy leg up Blue’s steps.

  “What happened?” asks Blue.

  Curt snorts. “Some foolishness.”

  Blue is preoccupied, working with reds and blues and blacks on a lunch special sign for a Belair Road carryout, the only straight work for his talents in the last couple months. He’d come home from the city jail in April with
all kinds of promises and plans, even spent a few days trying to fashion some of them into a better day. But down on Baltimore Street, there wasn’t much work left for him. Where once he used to take orders for signage from all the local groceries and shops, now most of the window boards are mass-produced and cheap. And with so many of the corner stores run by Koreans, he can’t even begin to make personal connections.

  What’s left for him is running the needle palace, or what was left of it after he came home from courtside. Curt’s efforts notwithstanding, the fiends had carried anything worth selling out of the house. Now, when Blue charges two dollars a head to sit and fire a shot, what he delivers is four walls, a jar of water, and Rita Hale.

  Meanwhile, Blue is back to hardcore drugging. He had slowed himself on New Year’s as a resolution to himself, but by the time they locked him up in February, he was steady firing again. He’d come home from jail clean, having dried himself out in the infirmary. But that, too, didn’t last and now Blue is the same as ever, though perhaps a little more convinced that he’ll never find strength enough to deal with his hunger.

  Worse, Ella keeps pressing for him to teach the art classes. Blue doesn’t have the heart to tell her no, to explain that he’s now too desperate to play at doing right, that he has to deal with himself first before he can worry about anything else. Ella believes in him, and he’s grateful for that. But Ella and her art class will have to wait.

  Instead, Blue’s most creative act since coming home has been adding another page or two of verse to the composition book he carried in his satchel. Blue’s poetry is heavy and remorseless, a running argument between himself and his addiction, and a week ago, during a late-night lull at the shooting gallery, he had turned inward long enough to put some more of the pain into words:

  Insanity is alive and well, taking on all new comers

  Fragile minds are overcome and subdued,

  And placed in a prison where

  the bars are invisible …

  He meant every word. And the next morning, he thought about his life long enough to take another walk around the city, looking to see if anyone needed anything they owned drawn or painted. The best he can do is this bit of signage from the carryout at Belair and North.

  “Lookin’ good,” says Curt, watching the paint go on.

  “Yeah, well,” says Blue, “it’s my thing.”

  Pimp comes down from the corner, shaking his head, his lips curled into the strangest of smiles. Among the shooting gallery regulars, Pimp still carries some of his old legend. He used to be among the best of the old-style boosters, so quick with his hands that he could go into a downtown jewelry store and come out with a whole tray of rings. He could play the part, too: Put Pimp in a tailored suit, arm him with a Michigan roll faced with a $100 note, and he was good enough to go on the road, taking off jewelers up and down the coast. Now, though, there is nothing of the old game left. Pimp is ragged, thinned to nothing, his repertoire down to the usual corner tricks.

  “This stuff is too crazy, too crazy,” he says, by way of beginning. “You hear about what happened down on Mount Street?”

  “Huh,” says Curt.

  “One of them Ay-rabbers from up on Bruce Street went down there to cop. Put his rig right there at the curb, you know, got the bag on the horse’s face …”

  Curt is interested. He used to A-rab on a produce cart.

  “… so he’s down there dealin’ with things and the horse takes a piss all over a ground stash.”

  Curt and Blue both laugh.

  “Red Tops had a stash right at the curb. Horse pissed on it so they beat the poor man’s ass right off the corner, like he had something to do with it. And when they get done beatin’ on him, damned if they don’t have at the horse.”

  Fat Curt gives him a disbelieving look.

  “Why beat the horse?” says Pimp. “Horse don’t know.”

  Blue shakes his head.

  “Summer,” says Curt. “People doin’ all kind of stupid shit.”

  That they are. Summer brings the corner stew to a boil and the city medic units earn their keep. In mid-July, after the tenth consecutive ninety-degree day, bad counts and missing dollars bring a high-caliber argument; stolen stashes and burn bags are repaid at the bent edge of a kitchen knife. Summer is what makes a corner a corner—the drug-market regulars bemoan the coming violence in one breath, then lapse into prideful boasting the next.

  “Mount and Fayette,” says Eggy, watching the ambos roll up on a double shooting. “Only serious niggers need apply.”

  Last year in June, the Fayette Street strip tallied four murders and a half-dozen shootings. Half of the fatalities were on the home team, the other half New Yorkers—casualties brought on as the immigrants from the Grand Concourse and Flatbush struggled to establish themselves in this section of the city. Fayette was living up to its reputation; from Monroe down to Gilmor, the days and nights rang with gunfire, until the New York Boys had their share and everyone else had grown accustomed to their product.

  This year, it’s mostly East Baltimore that’s burning. Every summer night, it seems, another body or two falls somewhere on the other side of the city. Over there, the Eastern uniforms are running from one call to the next, chalking this one and rolling that one. Their commanders are beside themselves, their careers suddenly at risk from the worst bloodletting ever seen on Gay Street, or East Madison, or Ashland Avenue. The municipal government of Baltimore is still pretending to some kind of control, but the truth is that the city fathers have lost possession over whole sectors of the east side.

  Why there? Why not. The violence roams and fluctuates with its own rhythms, so that the scene of last year’s holocaust—though still a twenty-four-hour drug market—is now marked by nothing worse than an occasional assault. Under the weight of sporadic police pressure, or competition among crews, or some other nomadic impulse, the corners themselves shift location, then shift back again. Overnight, the fiends and slingers sense a difference; they wander down Fayette, or over to Baltimore, or up to Lexington for a time. Equilibrium is restored—or not. Sometimes the smallest change in the weather can make the pavement run red. Sometimes a loose bullet catches flesh, sometimes the lock-blade gets an artery. But there’s no real science to it: Put a tame corner under a microscope and you find dope and coke, fiends and dealers, stickup boys and burn artists, lookouts and touts. Put a hot corner under the scope and you find pretty much the same thing.

  So far this year, the beatings, cuttings, and shootings on Fayette Street haven’t amounted to more than the usual. It’s enough to keep the ambos and trauma units in business, but nothing so lethal as to impress the regulars. But now, in the fetid days of midsummer, with the heat rising in waves from the black asphalt, the Fayette strip steps up to its reputation.

  A stickup boy is shot down in daylight at the mouth of the Vine Street alley. An argument over a short package leaves a Mount Street dealer cut in the side of the head and a tout on the run. A white boy is robbed and shot crossing Baltimore Street. On Saratoga, the police are called to a rowhouse and find the bodies of two women shot to death. The house has been ransacked; word on the corners is that a package of raw coke was taken.

  And then, just before it ebbs, the bloodletting reaches out and touches Hungry. Not that anyone is surprised when one of the neighborhood’s most committed short-count artists and stash stealers suddenly has his number come up. Hungry’s time had been borrowed for a good while, and maybe that’s what makes his last go-round seem so tragic and absurd. A young slinger, Smiley by name, had been off Fayette and Monroe for a while now, plying the bottom end, competing with Dewayne and Boo and the other young boys, working vials along the lower McHenry Street strip. But come the heat of July, he finds himself back up top, paired with one of the New York Boys and a particularly weak package of heroin. He stands by the carryout, scouring the morning regulars on a day when good help is hard to find.

  And Hungry gets his package.

&nbs
p; To sell, of course—not to keep. But the distinction is lost on Hungry, who must be astounded that anyone on Fayette Street is still naive enough to give him a starter kit. No slinking, no ground-stash stealing, no palming a few vials and hoping against hope that the short-count doesn’t get noticed—just a few nods of agreement and he’s got the whole world in his hands.

  Smiley heads off while Hungry takes the consignment into Blue’s house. There, with Rita’s help, it begins to go the way of all contraband—at least until Hungry notices that for all of this free dope, he’s not getting off. The package isn’t much.

  Disappointed, he reasons that he might as well actually sell some off and take what profit he can. But up on Monroe Street, Smiley’s garbage isn’t moving. Word is already out that what Hungry has been given just ain’t what it claims to be. And when Smiley comes back, with the New Yorker behind him, he isn’t trying to hear any of it. The two come at Hungry hard—not once, not twice, but enough times that Hungry gets the whole you-gonna-die-if-I-ain’t-paid-tommorrow lecture. When he hears any part of it, Hungry winces, because Hungry is always short, always beholden, always waiting for the inevitable. He knows the beating; he lives with the beating. It’s the established rate of exchange. In Hungry’s mind, it completes the transaction and settles all debts.

  So when Smiley throws out his threats and walks away, Hungry doesn’t quite take it in. He’s still standing there the following afternoon, up against the metal grate of the carryout, when the dealer returns to make his final pass with a lock-blade.

  Once in and once out. Hungry greets the knife with open arms and a vague expression of surprise. Then he walks a step and a half, his legs heading in the general direction of the Bon Secours E.R., where the day crew keeps his usual gurney ready. Then he drops.

  Everyone on the corner sees it, watching as Smiley stalks away and Hungry tries to pick himself up off the curb. He grabs hold of a small tree, trying for purchase, then slips down and lies still. The crowd melts off. The ambulance arrives. The yellow crime scene tape goes up.