The Corner

by David Simon/Ed Burns

  “This street where all the houses are done up nice.”

  Ronnie glares at him from a universe away. What possible purpose could there be in touring a well-kept block of rowhouses? Where’s the caper in that?

  “I would have liked to live down here,” says Gary.

  Ronnie snorts derisively, but Gary ignores her, crossing the boulevard, forcing Ronnie to detour with him. He gets within sight of the green expanse and the repointed brick and the Williamsburg pastels on painted shutters and he’s transported to a life beyond the one he’s living. Gary is on St. Mary’s Street, soaking up the essences of a world he very nearly captured.

  “This,” he tells her, “is how to live.”

  Walking slowly down the street, he’s lost in the possibilities, so much so that he’s caught off balance when two hard-look soldiers, their hooded sweatshirts pulled up tight, come at them from the edge of the park.

  Gary thinks to run, but doesn’t. Ronnie only smirks.

  “Uh,” says Gary.

  The smaller one goes into the dip of his sweats, starts to pull out the cannon. Gary is crushed: All that work on Pennsylvania and Bloom and now he’s going to lose whatever blast money he had squirreled away for tomorrow morning.

  But Ronnie is in motion, walking toward the stickup boys.

  “Hey,” she says, holding her hand out.

  “Wassup?” says the bigger one, looking from Ronnie to Gary and then back again.

  “Gimme a quarter,” says Ronnie.

  The stickup boys share a look. The smaller one takes his hand from the waist of his sweats. No gun.

  “C’mon, let me have a quarter,” whines Ronnie.

  The stickup crew moves on. Gary stands by the park entrance, his face glowing. Ronnie, the queen. His queen.

  “You is an apple-scrapple!” Gary declares, hugging her.

  “Come on,” says Ronnie, smiling. “Let’s get home.”

  All the way up Fayette Street, he’s thinking about it, marveling at his girl’s skills, congratulating himself for having held on to her. He’s telling himself that the burn bags make sense. That he can do this tomorrow and the day after and for as long as need be.

  “We gonna hook up tomorrow, right?”

  “If you want,” says Ronnie agreeably.

  “In the morning,” Gary says. “You come by and bang on the basement door for me.”

  By the time they clear Stricker Street and creep into their own neighborhood, Gary’s world seems settled and secure. At least until he remembers his father.

  “Oh man,” he says.

  Ronnie looks at him.

  “I can’t hook up in the morning.”

  “Why not?”

  Gary searches for words. Ronnie cocks her head to the side, staring at him, her antennae up to whatever small act of deceit Gary is hoping to conceal. If he can’t hook up with her first thing tomorrow, he most have another caper planned. And from all capers, she will have her rightful share.

  “Where you gon’ be at?”

  “I got to run somewhere in the morning,” Gary tells her.

  “I go with you.”

  Gary shakes his head. “It’s family,” he tells her.

  All the way back up Fayette Street, Ronnie fumes. Gary knows exactly what she’s thinking—that he’s ungrateful, high on good dope right now because of her caper and yet unwilling to share a caper of his own. But he’s willing to let himself be misunderstood, because the alternative would require him to arm Ronnie with information on a McCullough family drama—something that Gary has been loath to do ever since that ugly moment last summer at the courthouse when Ronnie’s mother tore into Roberta McCullough for no good reason. Instead, Gary lets the silence stand as he walks with his girl up Fayette. Ronnie can think what she wants; he’ll deal with that problem down the road.

  What Gary can’t tell Ronnie is that in the morning, he will get up early to drive with his mother and his brother Cardy across town to Union Memorial Hospital. There they will visit William McCullough, who is in a semiprivate room, waiting to see what the doctors have to say about his prostate.

  At sixty-five, W.M. is showing few signs of worry, though he’s been at Union Memorial for nearly a week, ever since he collapsed in pain on the bathroom floor while trying to catheterize himself to pass water—dealing with the problem on his own as he had for years. The doctors are hinting at cancer or worse—talking to Roberta and the children in hushed tones—but it doesn’t seem to faze the family patriarch, who does more talking about the hospital food than about his own medical condition.

  Still, for Gary, who has already paid one visit to the ailing W.M., the sight of his father laid out in a hospital bed—with tubes and IVs and all the other paraphernalia of medical science—is terrifying. To Gary, W.M. has always been larger than life, a man capable of epic toil and endless stoicism. In Gary’s mind, his father will endure forever, and if not forever, then surely for as long as it will take Gary to leave his drugging behind and resume the kind of life that would restore him in his father’s sight. From within the heroin haze, Gary can sometimes convince himself that the last several years have been little worse than a brief interlude, a modest lapse in which time and family have been standing still. But last week, W.M. was lying on a metal bed beneath white sheets, and the doctors were looking at the charts, and Roberta McCullough was by her husband’s bedside every day, looking alone and scared.

  That first visit to see his father had done nothing but exacerbate Gary’s twin feelings of guilt and terror. Sitting up in bed, W.M. had acknowledged Gary with little more than a nod, then proceeded to direct his conversation to his wife and Cardy for the entire visit. Sensitive to a fault, Gary couldn’t help feeling the distance that separated him from his father. Nothing he could do or say in that hospital room could bridge the distance.

  “Man right here in this bed, he died during the night,” W.M. told Roberta, with a nod toward the empty litter on the other side of the partition. “I could hear him wheezin’ and coughin’ and tryin’ to breathe and I was ringing for the nurse, but no one came. I listened to him die.”

  Leaning against the far wall, Gary heard the story and felt sick to his stomach. His father lay before him, waiting for good news and just as likely to hear bad, and meanwhile, Gary could provide no decent account of his life. For five whole years he had been running the streets, wasting time, losing sight of what truly mattered.

  “Don’t want to die the way he did,” W.M. mused. “A hospital ain’t no place to get sick and die.”

  Gary wanted to cry out, to plead, to throw himself across the chasm and grab hold of the edges of his long-ago life. Instead, he left when Cardy and his mother left, having said nothing and done nothing, acknowledging his father with nothing beyond another quiet nod.

  He was silent on the drive back to Vine Street. That night, when the snake coiled up and hissed at him, he went down to the corner with the money in his pocket and did what he needed to do. But the next morning, he found strength enough to make his way up to Poplar Grove Street and the St. Edward’s clinic, where he had heard you could get Clonidine patches on a daily basis.

  He would kick free of the heroin, he promised himself, and he would do it with just the Clonidine. He would stay down in the basement and sleep and listen to the radio talk shows and, come the weekend, he would be sick. But by Monday, or Tuesday at the latest, he would no longer be a drug addict. Then he would return to Union Memorial, where his father lay beneath white sheets, and he would present himself as the prodigal son come back to the doorstep. He could say nothing to his father now; but with the help of the Lord and a daily ration of prescription drugs, Gary would still have the chance to say all he needed to say.

  That was the plan last week anyway, and it continued to be the plan for a few days after the hospital visit. At St. Edward’s clinic, Gary had submitted to a medical examination, professed the true extent of his problem, then left with three patches—enough to get him through the week
end.

  He stayed in the basement and slept for twelve hours, felt the sickness rising, then stayed in the basement for another ten or twelve hours, trying to measure time by top-of-the-hour radio broadcasts or by pages turned in the dog-eared Bible by his bed. The next day, with sweat pouring down the small of his back, he got dressed and crept out for a vial of coke. When the coke alone failed to settle him, he went down the street for a nickel of dope.

  On Monday he went back up to Poplar Grove for another patch. “I’m still trying to kick,” he told the doctor at St. Edward’s. “I’m down to one bag a day.”

  Except that the next day, it was a bag and a half. And the day after, two. And the day after that—well, he hooked up with Ronnie Boice, who managed to sell his Clonidine dose for five dollars. When that money was gone, she dreamed up the burn-bag caper and now, heading back up Fayette, Gary realizes that he will be going to see his father tomorrow as the same fallen man he was six days before.

  Tomorrow morning, for all Gary knows, his father might be told that time was short, that all the years of toil and hope and struggle were coming to an end. And Gary would be there, in the hospital room, without being there. He would hover at the edge of the family drama as half-son, half-wraith—spent, useless, empty of all purpose save the one that sent him to the corner three times a day.

  Crossing back over Gilmor Street with Ronnie, Gary feels the ship of his drug euphoria capsize, taking water and breaking apart as it crashes against the rock of his own conscience.

  “Family,” says Ronnie, contemptuous.

  “I’m not lying. I promised to do something.”

  “Promised your mother, you mean.”

  Ronnie shows her animus for Roberta, punishing Gary for his pretense of being a good son.

  “She think you so good and pure,” Ronnie says. “She don’t know you like I know you.”

  Gary shakes his head. He can’t hold the secret any longer. “It’s not my mother,” he says.

  “It’s always your mother.”

  “My father’s in the hospital. He might have cancer.”

  Ronnie is unimpressed. “So,” she asks Gary, “what is it that you got to do tomorrow?”

  “I’m going to see him.”

  Ronnie shakes her head. To her, William McCullough is irrelevant to Gary’s current incarnation and the daily struggle for drugs. If W.M. was sick, then they’d need a blast. If he got better, they’d need another. And if he died, they’d still have to go out and get high.

  “Your father want to see you?” Ronnie asks.

  “I want to see him.”

  “Huh,” says Ronnie.

  They walk the last few blocks in silence, with Ronnie delivering the coup de grace as they pull even with the liquor store at Monroe Street.

  “You always pretending with them,” she tells Gary.

  Gary wants to strike her, to shove her away and shout and give free rein to all his loathing. But Ronnie is essential now. She proved that today as she will prove it tomorrow, so Gary swallows his pride and looks only for a way to placate one world long enough to visit briefly in the other.

  “I come right back from the hospital,” he says. “Cardy driving us.”

  Ronnie shrugs.

  “I swear I’m not gonna do anything without you.”

  “Better not,” she says, raising an eyebrow.

  It’s marital fidelity as measured on the hype. Having given his oath, Gary leaves feeling relief and genuine gratitude. She will wait for him tomorrow. She will cut him in for another trip to Pennsylvania and Bloom, or for any better caper that she can dream up between this night and the next. The snake can say nothing to him now: For another day at least, Gary has some tenuous connection to a plan.

  He arrives home in time to get a hot chicken plate from his mother’s stove. His mother serves him, and he joins Kwame and June Bey and his young niece Shakima at the table. Afterward, Miss Roberta cleans up with sad, tired eyes fixed on the sink. Nothing is said about the man missing from the kitchen table until Kwame breaks the silence.

  “How he look today, Ma?”

  “He looks better,” she tells him.

  “So he comin’ home tomorrow, right?”

  “With the help of the Lord.”

  June Bey drifts out first. Then Kwame. Then Shakima finishes eating and begins giving chicken pieces to the cat. Gary clears the table, carries laundry upstairs, then slips quietly out into the street, the last thirteen dollars from the Bloom Street caper burning in his back pocket. He gets one-and-one, then adjourns to the basement for what proves to be the best speedball in weeks. Black Tops. A bomb from Gee Money’s crew.

  For the rest of the night, Gary is down in the basement with his clock radio and his library, frantic from potent coke, his eyes darting around the clutter as he tries to find some comfort in the soiled sheets and blankets. When that fails, he gets dressed again and goes out into Vine Street for the early morning hours, wandering up to the corner without money or purpose, trying to steady his fevered mind in the cold predawn air.

  The cocaine finally surrenders just before sunup, and Gary can’t be awakened when Cardy picks up his mother after breakfast. He comes to consciousness that afternoon, alone in an empty house with another portion of guilt. His mother and brother are at the hospital. His father is talking with the doctors. And Gary McCullough sits in his long underwear at the kitchen table, with a glass of orange juice and two strips of bacon.

  He thinks for a while about getting a ride across town, surprising everyone by showing up at Union Memorial on his own. But something inside him shouts down the thought of such an arduous journey in the December cold. Instead, he finishes his breakfast, dresses slowly, and wanders down to Fayette long enough to learn that Ronnie isn’t out of bed yet either. He goes back to Vine Street, takes a piece of American cheese from the refrigerator, wraps a slice of white bread around it, and has lunch.

  Gary locks up the house and begins walking north up Monroe Street, heading toward Poplar Grove and the clinic at St. Edward’s, telling himself that he will still do this thing, that he’s sick and tired of being sick and tired. More Clonidine and he’ll be ready. A patch for today and two more for the weekend, and he’ll be there for his father on Monday.

  “My name’s Gary McCullough,” he tells the nurse. “I’m in your detox program, but I haven’t been here the last few days.”

  The nurse shakes her head. The doctor is on rounds for his patients at Bon Secours. He won’t be in the clinic until tomorrow.

  “I’m just tryin’ to get the patch.”

  “You have to see the doctor.”

  Gary nods politely, walks out of the clinic and feels the chill of late afternoon. From across Poplar Grove Street, the sunlight is fading down into the barren trees by the cemetery. The day seems utterly lost to him.

  Ronnie. She’ll be back on Fayette Street, or coming around Vine, looking for him. Gary steadies his nerves, bundles up against the cold and begins walking up the Grove, toward Riggs Avenue and away from his neighorhood. He warms to a new idea. He will do this today. He will salvage some honorable purpose before his mother and brother return from the hospital.

  On Riggs he turns east and finds the house without any problem. His son’s girlfriend is out of school for the holidays, and she greets him with surprise at the door.

  “Mister Gary,” says Tyreeka.

  “Hey,” he says. He can’t recall her name.

  “Andre not here,” she tells him, confused and awkward.

  “I just came to see the baby, if that’s okay.”

  Tyreeka smiles, delighted. DeAnte is upstairs with his great-grandmother taking the last of a bottle, she tells Gary. “I got to change him, but I’ll bring him down after that.”

  Gary sits quietly on the front room sofa, nodding politely to Tyreeka’s cousins as they race around him, shouting and laughing. The girl is gone for ten minutes, but when she comes down the stairs, DeAnte is on her shoulder, tiny and new and wi
de-eyed.

  “Goodness,” says Gary.

  “You want to hold your grandson?” she asks.

  “That be all right?”

  “’Course.”

  Gary leans back on the couch and holds out his hands. Tyreeka carefully ladles the infant into his arms. DeAnte looks up into Gary’s face, blandly curious.

  “He got the McCullough eyes,” she says.

  Gary strokes the baby’s cheek and says nothing for a long while. Tyreeka sits on a chair opposite and watches.

  “You a grandfather now,” she says.

  Gary looks up, intent and serious. Then he smiles.

  “He’s beautiful,” he says finally. “He remind me of Andre.”

  “Lawd, I hope not,” laughs Tyreeka. “If that child is anything like DeAndre, I’m gonna have my hands full. I’m hoping he takes more after my family in some things.”

  Gary ponders this, then nods agreement. “Andre was rough,” he says, reflective. “He was always into something, always doing some kinda deviltry.”

  “Yes, indeed,” says Tyreeka.

  The baby coughs, then cries. Gary puts the child to his shoulder and pats lightly, and when that doesn’t work, he looks to Tyreeka, who stands up and takes the baby. The crying stops.

  “He know his mother,” Gary says.

  “I be right back,” Tyreeka says, taking the infant upstairs. Gary looks out a cracked window onto the front porch and the rowhouses on the other side of Riggs Avenue. The sun is all but down now.

  “When you’re young,” he says, watching Tyreeka’s cousins, “you think about what it is that you want to be …”

  Gary seems to give up on the thought. He leans back and rests his head on the sofa, looking up at long shadows on the front room ceiling.

  “… you think of all the things there is. And you wonder what it is you should wish for.”

  He is crying now. Tears trail down both cheeks.

  “I’m a drug addict,” he says.

  Gary looks down at his own hands.

  “That’s what I am,” he says firmly. “Who would wish for that? Who would choose that for their life?”

  Gary gets up slowly and zips his jacket. He hears the young girl upstairs, cooing and laughing at her child. He stands awkwardly in the darkness of the front hallway, listening to the happy noise above him, waiting for a chance to say his thank-you and good-bye.