The Corner

by David Simon/Ed Burns

  Inside the shooting gallery that day, no one says much; when Hungry is the subject, what’s left to say? The most that anyone can manage is a few harsh words for the young hopper with the knife. What was the nigger thinking, anyway? You give a package to Hungry, you might as well toss it in a storm drain. And then to settle up with the man at the point of a blade—that was out of all the understood proportions. Hungry steals your shit, or comes up short you beat him down: fair is fair. But it wasn’t personal. Hungry took everyone’s shit; Hungry was always short. To cut him down on a crowded corner for $100 or $150 in lost product made about as much sense as sucker-punching that A-rabber’s horse for pissing.

  Fat Curt was just down the street and missed the murder. Pimp saw it though. So did Scalio. And Blue. And Robin Neverdon, a coke fiend from the other side of Fayette. And although it takes the detectives a good while to shake the tree—a cornerful of eyeball witnesses does not, in this neck of the woods, necessarily equate with a solved case—eventually there comes a knock on the front door of the shooting gallery, the one that says the world is suddenly paying attention to the people inside Blue’s rowhouse.

  “Poh-leece. Homicide.”

  Fat Curt’s brother, Dennis, cracks the door, gets a look at two white men in suits and backs into the hallway.

  “Where’s Blue?” asks a detective.

  Dennis mumbles something, the air wheezing through the hole in his neck. The trache is still there more than a year after the last emergency room visit.

  “Where’s Blue at?”

  The suits press the issue, moving down the hallway, deeper into the catacomb. In the front room, Fat Curt is propped on a wooden chair, one swollen hand wrapped around a bent screwdriver that he’s using to claw at his cast. He’s gnawing at it like an animal caught in a trap.

  “Cast got wet,” he tells them.

  Wrapped in deadweight, his leg has been hurting for weeks now. Worse, the summer heat has made the constricting plaster unbearable. Curt figures he’ll doctor himself.

  “You Blue?”

  Curt shrugs. “Don’t know the man.”

  The detectives move back into the kitchen and a shorter fiend slips down the stairs, turns into the hallway and makes for the door.

  “Hey,” says one suit, “you right there. Are you Blue?”

  “Naw,” Blue replies before leaving. “He gone.”

  For a veteran detective, the usual process would be to gather the nearest and dearest together and plead on the dead man’s behalf—a standardized speech angled at family and friendship, loyalty and common decency. But after wandering the first floor of Blue’s for a few minutes, it’s clear to the police that none of that counts for much here. They go the other route.

  “If we don’t find Blue, everyone’s getting locked up.”

  That cuts it. Dennis goes down the hall to the front door and yells for Blue to come home. When George Epps finally makes his way back, he’s greeted by two very impatient police investigators.

  “Why’d you say you weren’t Blue?” the red-haired one asks.

  Blue flashes a mock-innocent smile. “Man,” he tells them, “you know how that is.”

  They know. They put him in the back of a Chevy Cavalier and ride him downtown, where they get confirmation on the story of Hungry and Smiley and the lost package. They grab Robin from across the street and Robin gives up much the same tale. A third witness cinches it and the radio cars roll up on Vine Street a few days later, slowing in front of the rowhouse where Smiley lays his head.

  The murder and subsequent arrest is barely noted on the corner, spoken of only at odd points and in the most abstract terms. In the shooting gallery, Hungry is not mourned as a lost soul so much as he is missed for continuity’s sake. At the least, death interferes with the illusion; it always ruins the high. When Bread fell out and died, the rest of them had to acknowledge their own certain terminus. Dennis, who has the Bug, can imagine himself collapsing on the couch at Annie’s and being hauled off by the ambo. And Pimp, rail-thin with the same virus, can imagine his own people paying to have him laid out at Brown’s, then buried without a headstone down at Mt. Zion. And Bryan, who survived the bullets this winter but now has to get his AZT at the University clinic and deal with the night sweats and nausea—he gets a glimpse of just how short his run might be. Hungry is gone. No one musters much grief for that fact alone; it’s the absence of Hungry that bothers them. Here again is proof that not a motherfucker among them is getting out alive.

  The summer slowly claims its casualties. Soon Bryan disappears, on the run again after sticking up Eggy Daddy for some of Gee Money’s vials and cash. A desperate act, true, but Bryan can’t think of what else to do when Gee doesn’t pay him promptly at the end of a shift. Then Pimp goes down, coughing and rasping, with double pneumonia. And then, finally, it’s Fat Curt’s turn.

  He soldiers until he can soldier no more, until the hot July day when he falls to the pavement at the crossroads that claimed him years before. He’s had the wet cast off his leg for a couple weeks—long enough to prove that the doctors were right, that the ankle wasn’t going to set right if he didn’t stay off his feet. Without the cast, Curt is soon hobbling around with his foot twisted to one side, his metal cane getting him where he needs to be, his face etched with constant pain.

  “Got to get it looked at,” he tells anyone who asks. “Got to get some doctorin’ on it.”

  But he never does. Despite weeks of agony, it isn’t the ankle that brings him back to Bon Secours. It’s Fat Curt lying on the corner of Monroe and Fayette, talking out of his head, delirious, his eyes buried beneath a yellow glaze.

  “Curt … Curt.”

  “He ain’t makin’ sense.”

  “Somebody got to call nine-one-one.”

  On the last day of July, Curt is rushed into the E. R. at Bon Secours, stabilized, then sent up to the second floor and a semiprivate room. When he wakes up, he’s on an intravenous feed, sick as a dog, his warped frame wrapped in a hospital robe. Before long, the young interns are crowded around his bed, pausing in their routine to take in the enormity of the damage.

  “Treat me like a freak,” he says after they leave.

  The nurses are warmer to him, but even they test his patience with continual questions about his medical history—as if Bon Secours didn’t already know everything there was to know about him from springtime, when he broke the ankle.

  “I ain’t sayin’,” Curt tells one nurse who queries him.

  “Why not? This is to help the doctors.”

  “’Cause I can’t remember what I told you the last time and I don’t want to get caught lyin’,” Curt explains. “Keep askin’ me the same damn questions an’ I can’t recall my answers.”

  Even the nurse laughs.

  He’s there for two weeks, and after the first two days or so, he’s clean. For Curt, the snake has never been the problem. He likes shooting dope; it’s his life. But if the dope isn’t there, he’ll get a little bit sick, deal with that, and then come up smiling. For two days, he looks like hell itself and then, slowly, some other being emerges from within, someone never seen at the corner of Monroe and Fayette.

  “What’s for lunch today, darlin’.”

  The nurses are all darlings. The other patients are good peoples. The sound of summer rain at his hospital window reminds him of better times. Even the hospital food is tolerable.

  “Rather have some of that pork from Bittman’s,” he tells visitors. “Pork sandwich, fries, greens, and a Coke.”

  The dope goes away, but the dope fiend’s sweet tooth doesn’t. Stink shows up one day to catch Curt up on the corner news; Curt leans on him for a couple sodas from across the street. Rose and Curt Junior come by with drugstore candy and, for an afternoon, Curt’s broken family is gathered together once again at his bedside, eating sweets and watching daytime television. Most of all, Curt dreams about getting uptown to that snowball stand at Laurens and Monroe, getting some coin together, and ma
king summer official.

  “Get me some pineapple flavor,” he says. “Ain’t nothin’ better than the pineapple.”

  After long years of chemical torpor, the sudden liberation of body and mind is exhilarating to Curt and everyone who comes near him. His memory is clear and firm; long-lost stories pour from him, stories to pass the hospital hours. He’s talking about the drug runs to New York and the adventures in that city, telling tales out of school about Little Melvin and Liddie and Junior Bunk and two dozen other long-gone players from his youth.

  “Dead and gone. All my friends is dead and gone,” he says, reflectively. “Outlived most of ’em. Just lost Bread to this foolishness not long ago. He was a good friend.”

  Curt is sad, of course; too much has been wasted to get beyond sadness. But now there is something more than sadness to him, something given full flower in the stable confines of a hospital bed. Now, with the corner at bay, all the normal needs and desires of life come rushing up at him. He wants the kid in the next bed over, the one recovering from a gunshot wound, to be comfortable and comforted. He wants the charge nurse to like him a little bit. He wants another soda. He wants something tastier than that nasty green Jell-O for dessert. Within a week, his wants grow into long-term aspirations. He wants to get an apartment. He wants to do something for Rose and for his teenaged son, who have been on their own for so long. He wants someone to take a picture of his legs and put it on a T-shirt, give it away at all the schools and let the children see what the needle does. He wants a little government money on check day—enough to pay the rent and buy groceries. And on several early mornings that other part of him is very much alive and then he wants the big-legged nurse on the night shift, the fine-looking one who’s been kind enough to flirt.

  Fat Curt is off the corner. And he is alive.

  Physically, of course, he’s falling apart: hepatitis, jaundice, his liver holding on by a thread, the enzyme counts hovering at levels that can be attained only through years of pharmaceutical riot. The lymphedema in all four limbs is now likely past the point of return; if Curt stops firing dope tomorrow, the hands and legs will still stay fat. The ankle is irrevocably disfigured. Fusing it might have some beneficial effect, but nothing can ever make it right. The healed abscesses are permanent scars; the open ones promise only sepsis.

  “You keep shooting drugs,” the social worker tells him, “and you’ll be dead within months. Your liver has about given up.”

  Curt can only smile at the thought. “My liver got every right to give up. I know it. You ain’t got to tell me that.”

  “I’m serious, Curtis. You’ll die.”

  “I hear you. I know it.”

  Her name is Kathy. She leaves her name and number on Curt’s chart, telling him that she’ll help, that if he wants to do something different, she’ll work with him on some kind of plan. “But,” she adds, “I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve had a lot of experience. I know that if you don’t want to change yourself, then you’re only wasting my time. And I’m not going to let you waste my time, you understand?”

  Curt nods.

  “Around here,” says Kathy, “I’m known as the bitch.”

  “You the bitch, huh?” says Curt, now laughing. “I best watch out for myself then.”

  “You better watch out if you’re wasting my time,” she says. “You say you want to change, but I can’t do this for you.”

  “I know,” says Curt. “It’s all about me.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I got to want to change.”

  “Right.”

  The room goes silent. The social worker waits for the next logical assertion, but it never comes. “Curtis,” she says, finally. “Do you want to change?”

  “I need a break,” he says grudgingly.

  It’s as close as he dares come. Still, Kathy offers to get him started. If he promises to attend the group sessions at Tuerk House every day, she can get him on the waiting list for the twenty-eight-day program there. She’ll also help him fill out the applications for state social services, medical assistance, and federal disability through Social Security.

  “What I need is a place of my own,” says Curt.

  “Well, that’s something we can work on. But you’ve got to show me that you’re serious. Are you going to go to these meetings and get yourself into Tuerk House?”

  “Yeah. I’m tired. I’m tired of bein’ tired.”

  He’s discharged a week later, sent back out into the street with what’s left of his liver and the same wreck of an ankle as before. For now, he’ll stay with a sister up on Ellamont Avenue, using her rowhouse for his address on all the applications to be filled out at Rosemont and the Social Security branch office on Frederick Avenue. The caseworkers are not hopeful. Maryland is cutting back public assistance for adult males, and, as for federal disability benefits, it’s a dead certainty that any applicant will be turned down for SSI benefits on the first attempt unless he’s stone blind or quadriplegic.

  So Curt stays on Ellamont, waiting for a check that may never come, rising late each morning to fight his sweatpants over the top of his bloated legs, then struggling to get his foot inside a pair of running shoes three sizes too large. Most days, Curt makes the noon meetings at Tuerk House, the detox facility across the street from the Rosemont social services office, where he sits in a room with two dozen other wounded souls, most of them names and faces he knows from a life on the corner. They charge two bills for the Tuerk House meetings; two dollars to tell your true story and hear other people do the same. The reasoning is that after all these years of scratching out blast money, only a no-hustling dope fiend can’t come up with two bills. Either that, or a dope fiend who isn’t serious about changing, and therefore has no need for meetings. But if you pay your money and catch enough sessions, the social worker makes a call and you’re off the waiting list. Then comes four weeks inside—enough time for some people to call themselves clean.

  With every meeting, Fat Curt learns more of the cadence of a new language. And after three weeks in the back of the Tuerk House meeting room, he finds it in himself to stand and be heard.

  “Name’s Curt,” he tells them. “I’m a drug addict.”

  “What’s all the damn commotion?”

  Fran Boyd is on the steps, joining the rest of the neighborhood, peering up Fayette Street at a cluster of police cars, their blue strobes flashing.

  “Turtle, what happened?”

  Little Stevie looks up at his aunt in absolute earnest, delivering what he knows in the most ordinary tone an eight-year-old can manage.

  “Mr. Eddie shot somebody.”

  Fran glances back up the street then turns to her nephew, who looks back at her with complete dispassion. Stevie might as well have told her it was going to rain.

  “Get in the house,” she yells at him.

  “Yes’m,” says Stevie, stung by her harshness.

  As another day begins on Fayette Street, Fran Boyd is still here in body, if not spirit. She’s still scoping the terrain, still taking the shit as it comes. In her heart, though, Fran has taken the first few small steps on that long road to somewhere else. As the usual summer mayhem swirls around her doorstep, she finds it harder to manage the mind-set that sees everything as the stuff of low comedy or high drama. Increasingly, what she manages amounts to disgust, a lingering emotion she can’t shake even in her sessions in the basement—sessions over which she’s made an honest effort to gain some control.

  She’s still in the mix, of course—until the people from BRC call, Fran has got to negotiate her world—but lately, Fran has been talking about the corner more as a thing despised than as a thing mastered. She was good at the game, better than most, but the hot months bring a crazed senselessness. It makes even the best and most devoted players uneasy; it makes anyone thinking about change think a little harder. Today’s distraction is a shooting. The day before, it was a police sweep. Tomorrow there will be something else. Now, since
seriously beginning to contemplate her own escape, Fran sees less sense to this life than ever before. Day after day, she sits on her steps and watches the big-tent circus, still alert for her angles, but now she does so with a heightened awareness of the horror.

  A week ago she saw a Mount Street regular named Clyde, home from the charge he took over the winter, arriving at his corner just in time to get snagged with some vials, tossed in the Western District wagon, and returned to the detention center.

  “He came to visit for just a little while,” Fran deadpanned. “Now he gone back home.”

  After that she witnessed R.C.’ s sister Darlene go after another girl on Mount Street with a baseball bat and felt only broken nostalgia: “You know I used to baby-sit for her and Ricky and Bug. She was sweet back then. She crazy now.”

  More recently Fran was out on the steps when Stashfinder, one of the Western District’s finest, came charging up Fayette to grab some pink-top vials off the vacant lot and give them to her brother, Stevie.

  “What you doin’, officer? They ain’t mine,” Stevie Boyd implored as they cuffed him up. “I swear to you, they ain’t mine.”

  And they weren’t. In point of fact, Stevie was touting heroin, not coke on this particular day. He was on the way out of the house wearing a green brim and black sweatshirt when the police snatched him. Alfred, Bunchie’s better half, who was selling the Pink Tops, was also wearing a green cap and black hoody, but he had stepped back inside the Dew Drop to take a leak. It was a rare miss for Stashfinder—Sgt. Timothy Devine, by name—a veteran who had worked the bottom end of the Western District for years.

  Devine had earned his nickname from the locals by doing police work the old-fashioned way. Stashfinder wouldn’t simply throw probable cause to the wind, rolling up on a corner and diving into everyone’s pockets. He’d get out of his car and creep. He’d watch a corner for hours from inside a vacant rowhouse, or from a rooftop, using a blanket that he kept in his cruiser trunk. He’d wait awhile, letting all the pieces come together. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, when he did come down on the corner, he’d walk straight to the ground stash, pick it up, and bring it back to the right slinger. If he’d seen the money go from the tout to dealer, he’d follow that too, so that a supplier took his rightful charge.