The Corner (12 page)

Serving the larger street dealers are a host of employees, a few working for profit, most for product, but all within a fragile hierarchy, a structure predicated on such short-supply qualities as trust and reliability. You get to be a runner because a dealer trusts you to handle the dope and coke directly, to bring it in small quantities from the stash to the corner all day long without succumbing to the obvious temptations. A runner who proves himself time and again, who won’t cheat his boss by lightening the product, can step up. He might handle some of the money or, in the dealer’s absence, supervise the street sales. He might just make lieutenant. On the other hand, a runner who fucks up is on his way to becoming a tout.

Touts, less trusted, are there to promote the product and bring in business. All are fiends: Some are tenor twenty-year veterans of the corner, and consequently, only a rare few—Fat Curt for one—can be relied upon to handle product. Touting is day work, a meat-market selection, with the dealers hiring their help each morning and paying them for the most part in dope and coke. Touts serve as living billboards—walking, talking advertisements for the chemicals coursing through their bodies. A tout who staggers to his post and simply stands there—vacant-eyed, at a thirty-degree junkie lean, telling passersby that the Spider Bags are a bomb—is earning his keep. Rain or snow or gloom of night, he’s out there on a double shift for three or four blasts a day and, if he’s lucky, ten or twenty or thirty dollars in cash. No health benefits. No supplemental life. No pension. As much as any working man, the drug-corner tout is a soul in desperate need of a union.

Below the touts are the lookouts—the last hired and first fired of the corner world. Standing guard at the frontiers of the empire are the very young and the very damaged. For the children, it’s a lark: trying their hands at the game for the first time, scooting around on bikes or riding the top of a mailbox. It beats the hell out of sixth-grade social studies and for a few hours’ effort, you’re up twenty or thirty dollars with very little risk. For the walking wounded, the low-bottom dope fiends who aren’t allowed within a block of a stash, standing lookout is the last chance to get a free shot. They also serve who stand and wait, eternally on the spy for knockers, rollers, and, of course, the stickup crews. They
spend hours chained to their post, watching the endless flow of traffic for the blue bubbles of the marked cars, or the small trunk antennas that are the tell-tale badge of an unmarked Cavalier. And God help the lookout who forgets to look both directions on one-way streets like Fulton or Fayette; most of the rollers will play the sneak and drive their cruisers the wrong way. Stray off post or take a nod and a lookout stands a good chance of seeing the business end of an employer’s aluminum bat. And so all day, every day, they’re raising up, sounding the alarm with a loud bark, or a whistle, or the standard shouts of “Five-Oh” or “Time Out” ringing from the four points of the compass, giving warning that Huff ham or Pitbull is looking for an easy lock-up, or that a stickup artist like Odell is on safari with his four-four.

On the demand side of the market are, of course, the fiends, grazing around the oasis day and night, wandering from one crew to the next in search of the perfect blast. And they, too, must be serviced by a coterie of specialists.

The shooting galleries—vacant or near-vacant rowhouses, battered by the constant traffic, emptied of all valuables—are manned by a service industry all their own. The keepers of the inn guard the door, charging a buck or two for entry, maybe less if a fiend is willing to share some of the hype. For the price of admission, you get a patch of solid floor, a choice of bottle caps, a pint or so of communal water, and if you’re lucky, a book of dry matches or a shared candle. You bring your own spike, but if you don’t have one, there will likely be someone else at or near the gallery selling works for a couple bucks. Either that or you can walk the block or two to the established needle house—the home of some profit-minded diabetic—and get fixed for a dollar. At last, when you’re equipped and ready but can’t seem to find a vein, help is as near as the house doctor, the happy troglodyte wearing shoes decorated with candle-drippings, the healer who spends all night and day hunting wayward arteries for fiends lacking the skill or the patience or both.

But it doesn’t end there. At the urban watering hole, the employment opportunities of sellers and users compete with those of the vanguard of raw capitalism, the true hucksters trying to sell steakless sizzle. Anyone can market dope and coke on the corner, but it takes a special breed to serve up nothing and call it something. Baking soda or bonita-and-quinine—B-and-Q—as dope, oregano as weed, battery acid as ready rock: Once chased from the corners by the organized drug trade, the burn artists have returned to a golden era. They stand where they
want, sell what they want, and risk only the rage of their victims, or in a rare instance, the ire of a street dealer whose business or reputation suffers by proximity.

There are the other outcasts, too, those with no temperament for sales or service, just a willingness to risk all for a chance at the mother lode. The stash stealers, who will spend time watching the runners and touts, tracking them to the ground stash and then waiting for the ideal moment. Or the stickup boys, the crazed loners who gather information about this corner and that, tracing a product back until they’re coming through the door of the stash house in an adrenaline rush, staking everything on the premise that no dealer will come back on them, that their ferocity will not be matched. A few of West Baltimore’s stickup men have survived a decade or more, but most carry the doomed, thousand-yard-stare of shorttimers. Once, a stickup boy could go into battle relying at least on the organizational structure; they knew who they were going up against and the consequence of those actions. But today, when even fifteen-year-old hoppers have a loaded.380 hidden in the alley, the job is little better than a death wish.

Crowd them together—each pursuing his or her immediate ends—and what governs the corner no longer resembles either a corporate model or the orderly economics of the marketplace. It is, instead, the raw anarchy of the natural world. At the watering hole, the strong survive, the weak perish, and self-preservation and self-gratification dictate that any conceivable act of brutality or betrayal can and will occur. Social norms, morality, the values of the civilization that created the American cities—precious little of it remains at the oasis itself, where everyone must come to drink, regardless of the risk. Though it began as a criminal subterfuge and grew to become a neighborhood bazaar, the urban drug corner is now the social framework through which almost every soul in these battered communities must pass. Some, perhaps, will destroy themselves immediately, others will lose themselves in the mix, and a few stoics, astonishingly, will pass through the corner unscathed and uncorrupted. But pass through they must, because in places like Fayette Street, the corner is the neighborhood.

Yet there are still rules to this place—even anarchy creates its own axioms. The old code of the dealers is useless now; the new rules are different and have to be. Because, by necessity, any new logic must allow for a mother to stand on Monroe Street and tout Red Tops with her two-year-old in tow. It must allow for a fiend’s theft of the television set
from the recreation center, of chalices from the corner churches, of the rent money from his mother’s bedroom. And the rules of the corner cannot stand if they prohibit a thirteen-year-old from holding up a single vial of coke and telling a playmate with brutal honesty that for one of these, your mother will step up and suck my dick.

Make no mistake: No one likes to play under the rules, no one on Fayette Street respects them or regards them as fair or worthy or in any way justified. Even the lowest needle freak knows guilt at the instant he’s doing dirt, but knowing it changes nothing. The rules are not to be trifled with; they are not arbitrary, nor are they simply an afterthought or rationalization. The new postulates and proofs of the corner embrace the chaos, written as they are in an environment perfectly indifferent to anything beyond dope and coke. To exist in that environment—to seek or sell dope and coke—and at the same time to carry the burden of an outside morality is to invite abuse and failure. To ignore the rules, to try to live above them, is to walk blindly into the maw of the thing, risking destruction for something as ethereal and vague as human decency.

The rules of the game are a two-step program to nonrecovery, as valid a living credo as anything on those pamphlets that get tossed around at Narcotics Anonymous meetings. First among them is a basic declaration of intent as all-encompassing as the first commandmant to roll down the slopes of Sinai.

I. Get the blast.

Get it and live. For whomsoever believeth in good dope shall live forever, or if not forever, at least for that sugar-sweet moment when he chases down a vein, slams it home, and discovers that what they’re saying about them Green Tops is true: The shit is right. And if the shit ain’t right, if he cooks it up and guns it home and it’s B-and-Q, or just enough to get him out of the gate, then the first rule still applies. Go back to the corner and get the blast. And then do it again. Because the next one, or the next one after, will be the true dose, the one to justify all faith. Ten or twenty or thirty years of addiction—it doesn’t matter. Every fiend in the street is trying to re-create that first perfect shot of dope or coke, the one that told him this was what he wanted in life. The fiends are at it morning, noon, and night—none of them ever quite getting there, getting just close enough to feed the hunger. And if by some miracle one nails it, if he catches that perfect wave and experiences the chemical epiphany in the back bedroom of some rotting two-story pile, swaying
and nodding and scratching to some angelic melody in the kingdom-to-come, if he can stumble back against the flaking plaster and paint, smile stupidly and, with utter reverence, proclaim the shit a bomb, then what? What price glory, save for another caper for another ten dollars and another trip back to the corner, hoping against hope that the vials are still packed, that whoever put that good dope on the street hasn’t watered down the back end of the package.

If faith and spirituality and mysticism are the hallmarks of any great church, then addiction is close to qualifying as a religion for the American underclass. If it was anything less, if at Fayette and Monroe there was a single shard of unifying thought that could compete with the blast itself, then the first rule would be null and void. But no, the blast is all, and its omnipotence not only affirms the first rule, but requires the second:

II. Never say never.

On the corner, the survivors do what they’ve got to do and they live with it. When mere vice is sufficient to get the blast, it ends there. But eventually, it’s sin that is required, and when sin falls short, absolute evil becomes the standard. Those who play the game and deny the progression, who insist that there are some moral limits that they will not violate, are forever surprising themselves. Never say never, cry the sages, because a true believer pays absolute homage to addiction, he turns to face it like a Muslim turns toward Mecca. The transformation is gradual but certain, and wrapped in a new vernacular of moral denial.

In the thought and speech of the corner, misdemeanors become not crimes, but capers. Those selling drugs are no longer peddling dope, but serving people; those buying the drugs are not addicts or junkies—perjorative terms of an earlier era—but dope fiends, a term that captures the hunger and devotion of the corner chase, rather than simple dependency. A player who undertakes an armed robbery, a street shooting, or a carjacking is no longer committing a felony, but simply doing a deed. A burn bag sold to a friend, a stash stolen from a first cousin’s bedroom, is no longer a betrayal, but merely getting over. When you do these things, of course, you’re simply playing the game; when these things are done to you, it’s the work of a crudball, a cold motherfucker with no feelings or conscience. The term is never self-applied; corner logic doesn’t work that way. One’s own crudball adventures are not, of course, regarded as such; the most successful of them are recounted by the perpetrators in a bemused tone that suggests professional pride. The rest of the herd,
too, can often manage a grudging respect for a player who breaks new ground in doing unto others, so that a crudball act that consistently yields a profit can easily rise in stature. It becomes, in corner parlance, a dope-fiend move.

It’s almost better to be born into the world of the dope-fiend move, and stay there, than to arrive there as a matter of necessity, burdened by ethical baggage that serves no useful purpose. That can only make a player vulnerable. So it is with Gary McCullough, who can’t easily justify anything worse than the penny-ante caper. And so it is with Fran Boyd, who has acquired an arsenal of fiendish moves only to be constrained by a lingering sense of obligation to her sons.

In the end, the corner best serves the hardcore, the junkyard dogs with neither the time nor inclination for pity. It’s for Ronnie Boice, Gary’s girl, who never misses her shot, though her children are running the streets; or Jon-Jon, training twelve-year-olds to sling his bags on Gilmor; or Bunchie, who can make the rent money disappear month after month, knowing that in the end, her brother Scoogie will shell out what’s needed to prevent the eviction; or Dink-Dink, selling burn bags to fiends three times his age and almost hoping that they come back on him, figuring he’ll go to his nine and catch himself a body.

By nature or by nurture, the mindset of the dope-fiend move, once acquired, becomes a lifelong companion. Once in the game, it’s hard for a player to forget the lessons learned and operate in the legitimate world. The dope-fiend move becomes the immediate answer to all problems, the short-term response to life’s long-term struggles. Off the corner and loosed upon the legitimate world, it’s the lie on the housing application, the copied essay on the community college midterm, the petty theft from the register, and ultimately, the justification for returning to the world of the corner. It’s a new way of thinking that can’t be challenged with jobs or educational opportunities or drug treatment, because once you see the world as a dope fiend does, you can’t see it any other way. A few years in the mix and the only voice in your head becomes the collective wail of the corner itself.