The Corner

by David Simon/Ed Burns

  Fat Curt, for one, won’t make another winter out here; he knows it. He’d love to come inside, to gather up a few nuts and berries and hibernate in some warmer place. But still, no check arrives at the Ellamont address. When Curt struggles uptown to collect his mail, all he finds are more requests for more documentation—proof beyond proof of a disability that Curt can readily display for anyone willing to let him roll up his pants. The worker at Rosemont now wants hospital records going back two years; Curt comes up from the corner game long enough to run down to Rosemont in a hack, where he asks about money and is told that his DALP application is still being processed.

  “Have you applied for SSI?” the woman at Rosemont wonders. “Because to receive DALP, you have to apply for SSI.”

  “I been there.”

  “You’ve been to social security?”

  Curt nods. “They sayin’ I got an appeal.”

  “Well you should receive something from us shortly then.”

  Shortly. Curt takes that for what it’s worth, which is to say he goes back to Monroe and Fayette and does what he can to prepare for the coming weather. He begs a second pair of extra-large sweats from a friend; he’ll need two layers if he’s going to be out of doors. He trades up for a new pair of running shoes. And then, when the police are jumping out on Monroe and Vine, clearing the corners as a last, useless rite of the fading season, Curt gets a new jacket.

  It comes to him indirectly, not as an act of charity but through an unlikely string of events. It begins with a young slinger in a yellow and brown leather coat racing up Vine Street, followed by a Western District radio car that comes the wrong way down Fulton and then shoots up the alley. Sprinting, the kid ducks between two parked cars and lurches to a quick stop at 1823 Vine, where he takes the front steps in a single bound and grabs at the door handle. Locked. He starts banging, but the patrolman sees him and guns the motor of the cruiser. Nothing to do now but jump from the stoop and try to make the mouth of the back alley. But no, the radio car will be there before him.

  The kid cuts back hard, leaping up another set of steps and pulling open the storm door at 1827. He’s quickly in the front room, pulling the leather coat from his shoulders in the hope that a change of wardrobe will throw the hounds. He creeps past the stairwell landing to the kitchen, where he runs into Roberta McCullough, ironing her husband’s work shirt.

  “Is … is James here?”

  “Who?”

  “James.”

  The kid drops the coat across the top of the cluttered dining room table. Roberta McCullough looks at him hard, trying to make any connection whatsoever.

  “Who are you, young man? Why are you in my house?”

  The kid moves toward the back door and is gone, flying out of the kitchen and into the back alley. The Western troops hit the front door a moment later, charging through the house in pursuit. Miss Roberta is one shock away from a heart attack.

  “Where’s he at?” demands the first cop through the door.

  She barely manages to point to the back door. The Western uniform doesn’t believe her.

  “We find him in here and you’ll be locked up too.”

  Roberta McCullough is speechless. Another patrolman races up the stairs; she can hear the search proceed into her front bedroom.

  “Where’s he at?”

  “He left out the back.”

  “Who is he?”

  “I never saw him before in my life.”

  “Then why did he run in here?”

  She shakes her head, confused. They don’t believe her.

  The police root around a bit longer, with two of them giving a quick search of Gary’s basement. They leave showing unequivocal disgust, offering no explanation or apology. Moments later, when Cardy parks his pickup on Vine Street and tries to walk into his mother’s house, the police jack him up against the Formstone for good measure.

  “He a workin’ man,” shouts Pimp from the top of the alley.

  But the details are no longer important. Cardy is made to drop his pants in the street, and two Western officers give him a dickie check for no other reason than their own frustration.

  “This ain’t right,” Cardy tells them.

  “Shut up.”

  “I just tryin’ to check on my mother.”

  “Shut up or get locked up.”

  William McCullough pulls up in his cab to see one of his hardest-working children down on the pavement, his pants at his ankles. “Now what you doin’ with him?” asks W. M. “He got a job. He got two jobs. He don’t got nothin’ to do with this mess.”

  But the Western troops have their day, letting go of Cardy only after it’s clear to everyone on the street that there’s no justification—legal or moral—for having him down on the pavement in the first place.

  “This is a drug-free zone,” a Western uniform tells Cardy on leaving. “You can get locked up for loitering.”

  “I live here.”

  As quickly as they descended on Vine Street, the police are gone. The radio cars and wagon speed to opposite ends of the alley and disappear on some other mission.

  W.M. talks for a while about making a complaint, but Cardy dissuades him, telling his father that it would do no good. When his wife recovers from her shock, she notices the yellow and brown jacket—an alien presence—on her table. The coat scares her.

  As the police cruise the area, searching in vain for their prey, Roberta McCullough walks the leather coat out her front door and offers it to the first living soul she can find.

  “Do you … would you take this jacket?”

  Fat Curt stands on Vine Street, looking a gift horse in the mouth. “Say what?”

  “That young man left it here and I don’t want it in my house. Do you need a coat?”

  “Yes’m.”

  So Fat Curt’s fall ensemble is complete. He puts his cane against the Formstone front of the McCullough house and tries on the jacket; it’s a reasonably good fit. He thanks her, picks up his cane and makes his way down Vine toward Fulton.

  He gets as far as Lexington and Bruce before a Western unit rolls past him, going the other way, and then screeches to a halt. Curt doesn’t immediately turn around, though he can feel the eyes of the patrolman glaring at his back. Slowly, the cop backs his car down Lexington, far enough to get a look at Curt from the front.

  “What?” asks Curt. “I look like a rabbit to you?”

  A great line, but the cop doesn’t laugh.

  “Where’d you get the jacket?”

  “From a friend,” says Curt.

  The Western man goes away mad, and Fat Curt goes about his business. He’s a soldier again, and now, despite any pretensions to the contrary, he’s convinced that he’ll always be a soldier. A week or two more and he stops calling down to his sister ‘s house or worrying about the constant requests for more documentation. He doesn’t believe in government money anymore, or those plastic chairs up at Rosemont, or finding the right desk. He doesn’t believe that his ankle will stop hurting, or that the swelling in his legs will cease. He believes that his liver will have to do the best it can under the circumstances. Yes, Fat Curt is back on post and no one at Blue’s wants him anywhere else. No one there will remind him that for a few weeks, at least, he’d looked better than he had in a long while. Fat Curt returns to their lives and they are grateful for the reassurance that comes from an ordered universe. His return affirms that the old corner axiom still holds: No one gets out alive.

  Only once does Curt falter, revealing, for a brief moment at least, the feeling of loss that results from even three or four weeks clean. Sitting on the steps of a Monroe Street rowhouse one sunless afternoon, Curt actually begins crying, the tears gathering up in the corners of his eyes and then racing down his cheeks.

  Gary McCullough is there with him, making for a strange combin ation. Curt and Gary didn’t really mix, not since the days when Gary was a stock boy at Lemler’s Pharmacy and the owners sent him to chase after Curt and Dennis
and all the others who walked out with unpaid-for merchandise. But on this day, Curt has chosen to grieve for himself, and he has picked Gary to mourn with him. And Gary, of course, will listen to things that the platoon in the shooting gallery does not ever want to hear.

  “Look at me. Look at my legs, my hands …”

  “Uh huh.”

  “I look like a damn freak and I can’t do a got-damn thing about it …”

  “You ought to go up the emergency room …”

  “Ain’t you think I been to every hospital in town? Got-damn doctors can’t do shit for me.”

  “But …”

  “But nuthin.’ I need love. Every mother’s son got to have love. Who in the hell gonna love me lookin’ like this. Ain’t nobody love me and ain’t nobody gonna love me.”

  That leaves Gary with little to say. He puts a hand on Curt’s shoulder and waits for the moment to pass. It does.

  “I gotta go make some money,” Curt says.

  “Me, too,” says Gary.

  “You still down with them crabs?”

  “Yeah.”

  From then on, Curtis Davis showed only his game face. No more talk about fixing his ankle, or his legs, or his hands; no more clinic appointments or emergency room visits. Only two medical issues still worry Curt, one of which seems to be seeking him out. Twice now, some man by the name of Robert Carr has sidled up to the boys at Fayette and Monroe, asking where Curtis Davis might be hanging.

  “You a police?”

  “No. I’m from Bon Secours.”

  No one believed that, of course. A man goes to the hospital; the hospital doesn’t go to the man.

  “Where’s Curt at? I just need him to sign some forms.”

  “He gone.”

  “Well tell him to stop by the hospital then.”

  But Curt has no intention of chatting with Robert Carr, whoever he is. If the man isn’t a police with a warrant, then he’s a collection agent. Curt has seen the kind of bills that are washing up at his sister’s house; even if the hospital sends people up to the corner every day for the next year, Curt tells himself, those bills are about money that Bon Secours won’t never see. No, Curt will have to avoid Mr. Carr, which could be a problem in that his last bit of medical business requires a trip back to Bon Secours.

  A week after his confessional with Gary, Curt and a friend take a discreet walk up to Bon Secours in the hope of answering a question. Curt knows he’s been tested; the doctors there couldn’t have had him that whole time and not tested him. Weeks ago he’d asked people at the hospital for his medical chart as verification for his SSI appeal, but with the corner once again taking hold of him, he’d never followed up. Curt reasons that the chart is probably down in medical records somewhere, in a manila envelope, waiting for him.

  “You all made me a copy of my records?” he asks a nursing supervisor. “Where can I get a look at my records?”

  He’s directed down a couple of corridors to a small counter in the Fayette Street wing of the building. He gives his name and a pretty blond girl hands him his charts. No counseling sessions, no explanations, no privacy issues—just a thick stack of medical casework and lab reports dropped into a dope fiend’s swollen hand. Curt can’t read, but he brought the friend.

  “What’s the word?” Curt asks.

  The friend rifles through the chart. The Bug has got Dennis and Pimp and Bryan. It got Flubber, too, and God knows how many others at Monroe and Fayette who fell out and died without ever even knowing. And Curt’s no fool; he knows how many needles he’s shared, how many days and nights and years of drugging he’s endured.

  “Tell it true,” says Curt, firm.

  “You’re negative.”

  “Uh huh.” Curt, showing no surprise.

  “Curt, you’re negative.”

  A long-shot winner if ever there was one. By the odds, Curtis Davis has managed the medical equivalent of a Maryland state lottery win.

  “Curt, this means you don’t got it.”

  “Goddammit, I know what negative mean.”

  “Well, you’re relieved, right?”

  “I’m a soldier,” Fat Curt says. “If’n I’d caught it, I’d’ve dealt with that, too.”

  They start showing up at the Rosemont field office at seven, seven-thirty, leaning against the black metal rails in the early morning light, or slumping against the front steps of a no-frills, hard-edged box of red and brown brick. They keep to themselves, waiting the wait, sometimes asking one of the security guards whether they’ll make the cut. Do they take twenty? Or twenty-five? And what time do they start letting people inside?

  At eight or so, one of the guards comes out with the paper slips, numbered one through twenty-five, to be handed out as if this were a delicatessen counter. Sometimes there’s an argument or two to help pass the time. Number fourteen tells number thirteen that she got here first. Number thirteen says the hell you did; I saw you get out of that hack and walk up. But mostly, it stays quiet for the next half hour, until the workers come down for their morning smoke.

  From that moment onward, every opening and closing of the door is marked by those waiting. Are they open yet? When they gonna open? The latecomers drift up to ask about their chances or count how many are already waiting with the paper slips. Those willing to chance it stick around; the rest trail off, vowing to come earlier next time.

  At nine, the doors don’t open and there’s a bit of muttering from one or two near the end of the line, but no one leaves or presses any real argument on the guards. Ten minutes later the office is declared open and numbers one through twenty-five are ushered in. They move past the guards to the old elevator—the one adorned with graffiti declaring “everyone working here can fuck themself”—which lurches them to the third floor in clumps of five and six.

  At the end of the hall, another security guard waves a handheld metal detector over torsos and privates—just enough of an effort to suggest an actual search and add to the growing sense of insult. From the security checkpoint, it’s a short walk to the waiting area, where the group is offered a choice of mismatched, multicolored plastic, shaped-like-no-one’s-ass chairs that exist only to decorate the lowest rungs of American government.

  They sit. And for the next four, or five, or six hours, they hear without hearing and see without seeing. Their faces are frozen masks, fixed on the wall or the ceiling or the television set that force-feeds them video lessons on AIDS prevention, prenatal care, and drug addiction. They sit there amid people they once went to school with, or lived near, or knew as the friend of another friend, but now none of that is acknowledged with anything more than rudiments.

  “How you been?”

  “Same ol’.”

  They watch numbers one and two, three and four go up to the receptionist and make whatever plea brought them down here in the first place. They watch as those people are finally paired with caseworkers and sent back into other rooms with pages and pages of forms. They wait for numbers five and six, seven and eight. When number nine is called, they sit stoically as he gets in a protracted debate with the woman at the desk—some bullshit about how he already filled out an application and just wants to see his caseworker and no, goddammit, he doesn’t have an appointment. It takes twenty-five minutes to get to number ten.

  Lunchtime comes. For forty-five minutes or so, not a single number is called. Then the minutes and the numbers begin creeping by again and at last it’s midafternoon—already a long day for those tired and hungry, a longer one for those wrestling with the snake.

  “Number eighteen.”

  Number eighteen left out.

  “Number nineteen.”

  Yes, Lord. It’s finally Mr. Nineteen’s turn. He has endured. And by enduring he has earned the privilege of taking an application form and following a caseworker down the hall and into a side office cluttered with empty file cabinets and ancient office furniture. If he’s lucky, he landed a good one—a public functionary pleasant enough and quick with the pa
perwork. The veterans know the roster: Get that woman with the dyed hair and she’ll never, ever take your phone calls. Get the Nigerian and when it gets complicated, you won’t understand a thing he says. But at this stage, none of that matters; on this first day, hope is still intact and the back-and-forth between Mr. Nineteen and his caseworker has all the gentility of a first dance. The forms are filled out, the rules explained. A request for additional documents is put in writing and the process seems for the most part rational and certain. He leaves feeling that he has stated the necessary case, that it’s only a matter of getting the Independence Card and waiting for the money to show up in the bank machine computer.

  But long before any check day arrives—and even when some dollars begin to flow—those who go down to Rosemont will acquire and nurture a fulminating hatred, a bitterness that will extend not only to a system that is indifferent and insufficient to their desperation, but to its minions, who, even at their best, are unable to erase the immense gap between themselves and their clientele. On one level, the Rosemont regulars understand that the caseworkers have far too many clients and too much redundant paperwork, and that they are limited in what they can do by regulations that demand endless documentation. But that reality doesn’t matter when it comes down to survival, because this is real money here: food dollars and rent dollars, Nike dollars and Tommy Hilfiger dollars and blast dollars. And when they’ve done everything they’ve been asked and the money still doesn’t flow as fast or as freely as expected, then to hell with understanding.

  As for the caseworkers themselves, they have equal standing in the argument. They’re working at the broken edges of the nation—the frontier where those without means come to scream and beg and supplicate, to run any game or hustle or dope-fiend move for the possibility of a few dollars more. The social service department caseworkers are there every working day to greet the corner world, to negotiate the last tatters of a social compact between that world and the nominal government. They’ve been cussed and threatened, lied to and cried to by people for whom this process is not a means to a better end, but the end itself.