The Corner

by David Simon/Ed Burns

  He’d come to this conclusion after his near-death experience on Baker Street, which is what compelled his return to the labor pool for the first time in years. A day or two after the disaster at the junkyard, Gary had tried to hook up with the contracting crew rehabbing the row homes on Lexington Street. He went down to the job site, found the foreman, and started to explain that he’d once had his own home renovation firm, that he had drafting experience, that he knew something about their game. But the man gave him the once-over and walked away. When Gary persisted, he was shown a clipboard with a crude sign-up sheet.

  “Put your name down and if something comes up …”

  Something never would. Perversely, the only neighborhood resident ever to get any kind of job with the renewal project was Gary’s comrade-in-arms, Tony Boice, who happened to be wandering up Lexington Street at the exact moment the contractor needed an extra body for some grunt work. Tony worked a day or two, then got himself locked up behind a nighttime burglary, thereby ending his construction career. Gary heard the story and felt some bitterness; that was a gig he had truly wanted, a job for which he had real experience. But in the end, Cardy and the crabhouse had provided shelter from the storm, and for that Gary was grateful.

  Finishing the cigarette, he watches the line at the register grow as afternoon commuters stop for a dozen crabs here, a half-bushel there. He stretches again, looks down Monroe, then walks over to the pay phone, where someone has left a few sections of the afternoon paper. He rifles through them, looking for anything worthwhile, keeping the sports and business sections. The Orioles lost, but they were making a habit of losing and Gary has stopped following the season. On the financial pages, he reads the local news briefs, his eyes darting around the print, his mind soaking up facts and figures. Paul’s voice brings him back.

  “Gary.”

  “Comin’, Mo.”

  This time the call is not only for the females, but for fourteens, sixteens, and twenty-fours—the larger sizes, sorted by cost-per-dozen. Gary folds and tucks the business section into his back pocket and goes back to work. He’s breaking down bushels, shoveling ice, turning the crawling Chesapeake blues to bright, hot orange. A half hour later, he’s caught up with demand; Paul comes into the back room to tell him as much.

  “Hey, Chief,” Gary says, pulling the newsprint from his pocket. “You remember what I was tellin’ you about that company?”

  “When?”

  “The other day. That company that I was sayin …” Gary points to a back-page brief. Paul takes hold of the edge of the paper and begins to read, nodding vaguely at whatever it is Gary thinks he’s proving.

  “You see that. A fifty-two-week high.”

  “Huh,” says Paul.

  “I told you. P.H.H. They like a leasing company out in Hunt Valley. They gonna go over forty; they might have a stock split even. You’ll see.”

  “Gary, I don’t have the kind of money to invest in stock.”

  “Not to worry, Mo,” says Gary. “I know the name of a penny stock out of Hong Kong. It’s gonna go all the way up. For a little money, we can get in at the bottom, ride it all the way.”

  Paul shakes his head, laughing. Gary shrugs and repockets the newspaper, urging him to reconsider, assuring him that with a little venture capital, Gary could make both of them real money.

  Paul isn’t quite ready to let the kitchen help manage his portfolio; still, Gary is happy to just talk about such things. It’s another plus of being a working man—perhaps the biggest plus. Stepping away from the corner, Gary now has moments when his thoughts are free to roam beyond the confines of the game. With life stabilized by a daily routine, the better part of Gary’s nature is once again delving into the world of ideas. Financial trends, social issues, religion, history, and science begin to interest him again, slowly reclaiming that portion of his mind in which such things once thrived. When he walks back up the hill toward home at the end of every shift, his back is a little straighter and his pace a bit lighter.

  This summer, Gary is a working man and he means to hold on to his status the only way he knows how. He’ll show Miss Mary, Ron, and Paul what hard work looks like. When Labor Day arrives in two weeks, he’ll have built a monument to crab-slinging that will leave them wondering how they were able to run the business before Gary Castro McCullough arrived at the sorting-room door.

  Even more pleasing to him is the fact that there’s nothing raucous or lethal waiting for him when he gets home from work. Gary is off the streets now, stopping on Mount or Monroe Street only to spend most of the day’s pay, to get his vials and carry them down to his parents’ basement. He’s not about hanging, or bullshitting, or finding adventures in the shooting galleries along the strip. He never wanted or needed any of that nonsense in the first place; the chemical fog was all he really required.

  Down in the basement, with the box fan doing its best to move fetid air, Gary takes his time, hits a vein, and then, with the wave cresting over him, finds absolute contentment in his own company. He has the old clock radio on the AM so he can soak up the talk-show chatter, catching fragments of the national mood as it floats past. He’s a consumer of concepts and arguments, lying on that same tired mattress, listening to the ideologues rant. Later, in the small hours of the morning, he comes down slowly, his head clear enough to enjoy his library, spending an hour or two with Thoreau, or St. Luke, or Mohammed. From somewhere downtown, Gary had gotten hold of a hardback copy of Karen Armstrong’s History of God and had been so taken with the title that he resolved to tackle the tome in all its complexity. So it is that in the early morning hours of most any summer’s night, at least one Baltimore dope fiend can be found abed, exploring the roots of monotheistic theology by the light of a bare lamp bulb.

  After the reading, there is another cap and another nod, another hour or so with the AM static lulling him to sleep. And this is Gary McCullough’s life—helpless, harmless, compact and, more or less, functional.

  It is functional in the sense that he is a drug addict with a job, a man willing to do the best work he can for a few dollars and a chance at nightly oblivion in a basement hovel. He scrubs pots and hauls bushels and cooks crabs six days a week, taking the seventh as the Lord intended it. Some Sundays he goes with his mother to St. James across the street, but mostly he has to work weekends. His sabbath is likely a Monday or Tuesday, when Gary gets his blast out of the way early and then wanders, extending himself a little beyond Fayette Street.

  He went to the harbor once, just to walk the pavilion and watch the tourists. On another late July afternoon, he rediscovered Mount Vernon, taking in the shops along Charles Street, which he had almost forgotten in the years of daze. Near the monument was a health food store that was even better than he remembered. He bought carob and ginger for the ride home, delighted to spend his pocket money on something out of the ordinary.

  Another time, he walked into a matinee and caught that Schindler’s List movie that everyone was talking about. The movie shocked him, tore a hole through his heart; he left the theater unable to speak, feeling connected to the nightmare. But for weeks afterward, he talked incessantly about Schindler and Nazis and death camps. What they did to those people, he told those willing to listen. What they did to them Jews when the Jews weren’t messing with anyone.

  “No matter where you go,” he offered at one point, “a nigger’s always a nigger.”

  With new eyes, Gary looked around at the waste and carnage and stupidity of his own neighborhood and soon began thinking in parallel terms. In another time and place, the damned were shot and gassed and burned by the millions with frightening efficiency. In West Baltimore, in a nation of civil liberties, there was instead the slow-motion destruction of thousands. It was different, Gary had to admit; but it was the same, too.

  On Fayette Street, life had become a slow process of taking black boys and girls, black men and women, and breaking them down, turning them into less. It happened without camps and barbed wire, withou
t cattle cars or crematoriums or dictatorial intent. But it happened nonetheless, quietly, hour by wasted hour.

  Gary not only saw it all as genocidal, but convinced himself that this time, there would be people ready and able to justify it. They’re going to get tired, he would say. They’re going to get tired of the violence, of the drugs, of us.

  He read Wiesel’s Night again, and he listened to the voices on his clock radio—Rush Limbaugh or G. Gordon Liddy or some of the local yahoos. He woke in the morning with a sense of impending, unalterable doom. Out in the street, Gary would comment on the human destruction on Fayette Street and relate it in some vague way to the Holocaust. The other fiends had no idea what he was talking about. Shut up and shoot dope, they told him.

  But Gary thought he’d discovered something. “Niggers ain’t born,” he said one summer morning, after firing in his basement room. “They made.”

  And he knew the other half of the equation, too: They hate us.

  “They surely do hate us.”

  He said it without bitterness, with a self-knowledge that can come only from the inside, looking out. He remembered a day this winter when he’d been walking—just walking—near Union Square, and a yuppie homesteader had chased him down the block, threatening to call the police. Gary got mad and stayed mad for all of three minutes, until he paused long enough to look himself over and decide the man was right. If I had anything worth stealing, I’d chase my ragged self down the block, too.

  He knew that he appeared to people as little more than a cartoon, a ghetto stereotype as dehumanized and expendable as any skeletal camp prisoner in black and white stripes. To that homeowner, to others like him, to the angry radio voices at night, all that had happened in his life before this moment didn’t matter. To them, he had no history, no beginning, nothing beyond the here-and-now. To them, he was a dope fiend, nothing more.

  He knew how this sounded, too, how little white folk wanted to hear the complaint. To the radio guys late at night, he was just one more whining special-interest supplicant, a welfare-fed remnant of a New Deal gone old, ready and willing to blame all the injustice in the world rather than himself.

  “Like they think we don’t know what we did to ourselves,” Gary would say sadly, “like they think we can’t see it.”

  He could admit personal guilt; he knew what he’d done. Yet if that was all there was to it, why did the world treat him exactly the same when he was doing right, when he had all those jobs and all those stocks and mutual funds? Back then, all his money and standing didn’t matter to the sales clerks and security guards, who would follow him around stores. The world was no different when he drove his Mercedes—bought and paid for with Beth Steel paychecks and tech-stock dividends—and suffered through dozens of police stops and registration checks. Nor did money count when he would get dressed up and bring a date down to the harbor restaurants. His worst, most humiliating memory, was of a cool summer night when he took a girl to City Lights in Harborplace and asked if it might be possible to sit outside on the balcony. No, sorry, he was told; then they were seated at a table by the kitchen while the balcony tables stayed empty for the next two hours. A small insult, of course—nothing that could level a person in a single blow, unless that person came from Fayette Street, where every moment tells you who you are and what you were meant to be.

  On Fayette Street, they surely needed niggers, because anything better could not and would not serve the corners. Once, Gary had been strong enough and monied enough to leave this place, yet he hesitated. An Israelite, he had listened to Pharoah and stayed; now, he was once again a slave, as were they all. To be more than that on Fayette Street would be an accusation, a living affront to all of those chipping away at their own souls.

  All that summer at the crabhouse, Gary had watched the crabs that had been wedged in the bushels for too long; he had seen how when you pulled off the top, most of them would just lie there, waiting for the steamer. Worse, those few that tried to escape would be pulled back by the claws of those left behind.

  “Crabs in a barrel,” Gary would say, echoing the famous DuBois metaphor, but coming to it on his own: “When one starts to climb out, the others drag him back down.”

  To Gary, everyone, black and white, seemed gratified by his long fall. It was there in every face; he even saw it in people who had watched him grow up, in children he had raised, in women he had loved. Even Miss Mary down at Seapride—she knew what kind of work he was doing, yet there again, when she looked his way, he could tell that she saw the mark of the needle before she saw a human being.

  Alone in his basement at night, Gary would try righteously to argue the point, weaving his own fall from grace with all kinds of genocidal imagery in a dope-crazed swirl of pity and paranoia.

  “They gonna come for us,” he whispered once in a heroin nod, listing onto his worn mattress. “They gonna come and you won’t even be able to blame them for coming.”

  Yet by light of day, it still seemed to Gary that after a summer’s worth of honest work, the world had no right to judge him like this. After all, he was doing no harm to anyone but himself. He stole nothing, manipulated nothing, ran no dope-fiend moves—save for the usual bitch-and-barter with the touts. Whatever Gary did to himself, he did in the damp and quiet of that basement. In the face of the American drug war, he stood as both drug addict and citizen.

  And if his employers at Seapride hadn’t believed that he was more than just another fiending crudball at the beginning of the summer, then Gary had made them believe it on the Fourth of July—a day like no other in the crabhouses of Baltimore. On the Fourth, when every right-thinking Marylander has steamed crabs in celebration, Gary had come in at seven that morning to begin scrubbing down the pots. Soon after that, customers were lined around the block for the blues, some of them coming back two and three times for another half-bushel.

  He didn’t leave until midnight. After slinging crabs for seventeen hours straight, Gary walked up the hill exhausted, his eyes bloodshot from the spice, his arms and legs scratched and cut by the claws of the larger blues. Five hundred bushels—sixty thousand hard shells—had been sorted and stunned in the ice tanks, then steamed and sold at Seapride that day. It was a nonstop, dawn-to-dark crab frenzy on South Monroe Street. And that Fourth of July night, his pocket fat with cash, Gary was too tired for anything but a go-to-nod blast. He didn’t need the radio or his library; he sat back on his bed and fell immediately into the deepest sleep, with crab dreams so real that he would wake now and again to find his hands still racing through the bushels, sorting live crabs from dead, males from females.

  After the Fourth, even the white boys working the kitchen had to give him his due: Gary was the John Henry of bushels. Save for that one break in the afternoon when he had to make his way up the hill and get himself right, no one was around to get those crabs off the trucks, into the pots, and over the counter as quickly or as cheerfully. Gary had his problem, the white boys would acknowledge, but come the dinner rush, he was one hard-laboring sonofabitch.

  They call for him all summer long.

  “Twos, Gary.”

  “On my way, Mo.”

  “You got any soft-shells?”

  “Got what you need, Chief.”

  Day after day, bushel after bushel, he does the job and gets his blast. And no one at the crabhouse, black or white, ever feels cheated by any part of the bargain.

  When Labor Day arrives to mark summer’s end, Gary is once again at the top of his game. At Seapride, this is the last battle of the seasonal war, with the seafood trucks pulling up on Monroe Street from Delaware, the Eastern Shore, and the Carolina coast. For Gary, it’s the last chance to show the bosses that when the crab season slows and the working hours are cut back, he’s the one they need to keep.

  “Hundert fifty bushels,” shouts Ron, coming into the sorting room from the loading dock. “Let’s get ’em in.”

  And there’s Gary, first to the back of the truck, carrying two at a t
ime, with the angry females reaching through the basket slats, looking to punish him for the trouble.

  “Ah,” he shouts as one finds some unguarded skin above his belt. “I been got.”

  Another war wound. His brother Cardy laughs gently.

  “Got me right through the shirt,” says Gary.

  “Bitches be that way,” says Cardy, gesturing to the bushel of females. “You got to watch ’em all the time.”

  Gary laughs, too, despite the allergic wheeze in his throat, despite the stinging pain at his waist. He goes back to the truck—fifteen, twenty times—until his arms can take no more. Then he goes back again.

  “What’s the count?” asks Ron when the bushels are inside and stacked.

  Bobby Short runs down the rows.

  “Forty-seven, forty-eight … one forty-nine.” Bobby looks up and frowns. “We got shorted one.”

  “No, Chief,” says Gary, from the edge of the stun tank. “I got your last one here.”

  He’s already a third of the way through the basket, tossing live ones into the ice water that ends their fight, dropping the dead into a discard basket on the floor. And after these ten or twelve dozen, another bushel, then another.

  “… oh happy day.” Gary is singing gospel as the crabs are numbed. “… oh happy, happy day.”

  Outside, the line backs up out the door and onto the sidewalk. The kitchen boys race to keep up with the crowd at the counter.

  “We on the beam now, ain’t we?” shouts Gary.

  He pulls off his California Angels cap, wipes his forehead, and then returns it to his head. He yanks the raise-chain on the tank and three bushels of ice-covered number twos surface from the water. He uses one hand to hold the wheeled, stainless steel cube of a crab pot adjacent to the tank; with the other, he sweeps the crab pile into the pot.