The Corner (59 page)

“How you fixed now, Chief,” he asks Paul.

Paul, a son-in-law to Seapride’s owner, checks the front bins and pronounces himself satisfied. “We’re okay for now. We might need more females in a bit.”

“You got it, Boss. You got it.”

Gary retreats into the back room, where he grabs a bushel of females and sorts them into the ice water. He’s ahead of the game now—at least until the late-afternoon rush. He looks around for his Newports and finds them on the back wall, atop a spice box.

“Gonna have me a smoke,” he tells his brother.

Cardy nods without looking up from the bins. Gary meanders back through the steam and around the front counter, pulling up at the pay phone in front of the crabhouse. He opens the foil and taps one out.

He’s a working man now, a full-pack man. No more sliding the Korean twenty-five cents through the Plexiglas and getting back a single stick. No sir, Gary has a new game now—one that pays cash money at the end of every day, six solid days a week.

He lights up, stretches, and watches the hillbilly parade go by on Monroe Street. The smoke actually seems to help his asthma, though he knows that doesn’t make sense. Still, he works it down to the filter. A job, a full pack of smokes—might even give the kitchen girls a couple bills and get some fries for lunch. Gary is living large.

It’s been like this since Cardy hooked him up at Seapride, with a promise to Paul and Ron and Miss Mary that his older brother was a hard worker. And it was no lie; Gary was proving that to everyone. Apart from Cardy and maybe Bobby Short, the other veteran sorter, he was the best they had. No complaints, no arguments—he could see what needed to get done and then did it. He’d come in early to clean the pots or stay late to handle the overload on a busy night, and as long as the bosses were willing to forgive an occasional twenty-minute absence—when Gary had to attend to his medical affairs—they couldn’t help but be pleased.

And Gary was just as happy. With a job, he was on a different road entirely. He didn’t have to worry about where the next blast was coming from; he didn’t have to run capers anymore. Like anything else, of course, the crabhouse had its downside. Even through heavy rubber gloves, a crab jockey could take a nasty cut from a half-inch shell point, or risk a serious burn when a steam hose got loose, or take a mean pinch from a number thirty-two male willing to fight to stay out of that ice bath. But for Gary, such hazards paled in comparison to the pain that comes from a caper gone awry, or the humiliation of asking a dealer to take short money for a vial, or worst of all, the fear that comes on those nights when luck doesn’t hold and the Western District rollers catch you where you’re not supposed to be.

Seapride was keeping all of that at arm’s length. The job meant money enough for the blast, for smokes, for a little something every month to kick back to his mother to help with groceries, gas and electric. It meant waking up every morning with a vial or two left over, so that the snake could have no say. It meant that Tony, Will, and Lump didn’t matter so much, and better yet, that the Gaunt One didn’t matter at all.

Gary proved that the day Ronnie bailed out of women’s detention, coming home from the drug charge that the Western knockers gave her last month. She’d done pretty much what the corner expected her to do, playing the police the way she played everyone else, promising that she’d give them Gee Money and Dred and every other dealer they mentioned, so long as they’d lose sight of her charge. Of course, she planned to do nothing of the kind, figuring that any deal with the police was a deal worth breaking. Instead, she asked for Gary and was told about the crabhouse.

And what a moment it was when Ronnie walked up to the counter looking to drag him out on some messed-up caper, taking him for the same clown. Gary let her wait there, walking back into the sorting room and going about his business, letting her know that he had the ultimate hustle now: He was on the clock. Ronnie lost it, ranting and shouting, then crying the blues about how she’d always loved him, how she’d sacrificed for him and been there for him when he was down. She made such a scene that Gary had to drag her outside the crabhouse and send her away, telling her face-to-face that things were different, that he’d be making an honest dollar now.

Naturally, working life wasn’t altogether perfect at first. In the beginning, Seapride paid him on Thursdays—once a week, like working men everywhere get paid. That didn’t cut it; Gary had needs. The paycheck had to be an everyday thing, not only because the snake was waiting, but because having a couple hundred dollars in his hand at any one moment could kill him. At first, Gary had his mother come down to the crabhouse on Thursdays before he got off work, so she could hold most of that money for him. After a few weeks, though, Paul got a sense of the situation. Without ever having to speak the words, Gary was able to make his need plain to Paul, who, in turn, brought Ron and Mary and the rest of the family to an understanding of sorts. Gary would work hard—all day, every day—and come the end of the shift, he’d be rewarded right from the cash drawer. He got six an hour, which was pretty grim compared to the money he used to make—sixteen an hour at Beth Steel and almost ten as a security guard—but life was a lot simpler now. Everything had been boiled down to basics; some things were possible and some were not.

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, without 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.