The Corner (72 page)

“Andre, it ain’t your place.”

“It is my place.”

“I said it ain’t your place,” she yells suddenly. “You don’t know shit about it so just mind your business!”

She wants to shout him down, to shut him up before he says everything she herself knows is true. But she’s too tired to nurse a good anger. She climbs to the top of the stairs and starts into her room.

“Ma,” DeAndre says quietly.

“What?”

“You come too far to fall like this. You been through too much and you done too much now to go back down.”

It’s DeAndre standing here. It’s her eldest son—the one who always manages to touch that most important part of her at the very moment when she least expects it. It’s DeAndre, showing her his whole heart.

“I’m sayin’, you know, Marvin ain’t doin’ nuthin’ but bringing the family down. He got to go.”

The family. DeAndre is still trying to believe, and she can’t help but love him for this. For a moment, she can almost believe with him. She returns to the top of the stars and they embrace.

“I ain’t goin’ back down Fayette Street,” he tells her.

It isn’t a threat. He isn’t even angry. He’s saying it plain, and she’s hearing it plain.

“I’m sayin’ I love you an’ all,” her son says, “and I want you to make it. But if you don’t, I ain’t goin’ back down there.”

“I ain’t either,” she says softly.

Once upon a time, you were in perfect harmony with the greater scheme of things, a happy prisoner of the corner rhythms, an average, everyday dope fiend devoted to the singular pursuit of the perfect blast. But no fairy tale ever lasts, and finally, without warning, you hit bottom.

Only bottom turns out not to be a place, or a particular point on any street-by-street, this-way-to-hell compass. It is, instead, the gradual yet inescapable feeling of horror that leads any drug addict to the most gut-wrenching, agonizing moment of revelation.

You are stunned. You have a right to be: Truth be told, you didn’t even know you were heading this way. You certainly didn’t see any signs, nothing that might have told you to ease up a bit. For years, you’ve been about the business of obliterating yourself; now, without any justification whatsoever, you’re suffering through a prolonged bout of self-awareness. When the initial shock passes, you try what has always worked best: denial.

But even as you drag your ass out to a corner for the day’s jump start, the back of your mind holds to a sickening fear that no chemical concoction can rid you of this feeling, this strange sense that you’ve reached an end. A half hour later, while those around you are deep in the throes of the latest Spider Bag offering, you sit there in the back of the shooting gallery like an old radial with a slow leak, helpless as your high seeps out.

The bottom is the fiend’s worst-case scenario—worse than any back-alley beating, worse than standing, shackled, in front of a surly district turnkey while some fresh-out-of-the-academy roller strings your five vials into some kind of kingpin charge. Worse even than sitting on one of those plastic chairs in the University Hospital emergency room, half-listening as a resident presses the phone number and address of the clinic into your hand, reassuring you all the while that with proper care, you can still get some good years from your body. As a soldier, you learned long ago to deal with the stuff of beatings and arrests. A ruined liver, endocarditis, the Bug—these were the givens, the acceptable hazards on the road to oblivion. In the end, you reckoned such setbacks—if you reckoned anything at all—as fresh and viable reasons to keep faith with Rule One and get the blast. Fuck it, you learned to tell yourself, no one’s perfect. No one lives forever.

But the bottom is a different dimension entirely, a state of mind with a texture unlike anything you’ve ever encountered. It’s beyond the horror of the snake, beyond even those strange junkie dreams, those recurring nightmares of physical need in which you land in your favorite needle palace, mix the powder and water, and no matter how many matches you fire, the shit just won’t cook up. It’s beyond the worst tricks and lies, beyond those times when some smarter or hungrier player runs a game, or switches a spike, and what you get for your effort is a sprinkle of water. Even in those fevered, bowel-breaking moments, you’ve managed to regroup, to somehow get yourself back out there and manufacture another twenty on the hype.

The process of revelation might take you a couple of days, maybe even a week, but eventually it sinks in that no combination of vials and bags, capers and games can carry you past this feeling. Denial won’t play anymore; everything is turning flat. You watch as all your defenses crumble, replaced by a host of raw and alien emotions. Shame, disgust, and an almost overwhelming weariness dominate your every waking moment. Finally you understand that the bottom is a forced move—not so much a choice as the end of all choice. Your path is set and all you can think to do is try to find some help. But the very idea of help is so far beyond the established corner universe that at first, you can’t even imagine where to look.

Maybe you try to do it on your own, holing up in some basement with an old blanket wrapped around you, fighting the sickness in solitude, waiting a couple days before you have strength enough to drag yourself down the street, past the touts, to a church basement or rec center, where you can try your hand at the twelve-step, I-am-powerless-over-my-addiction philosophy. If you can’t handle that—and not many can—then your last, best hope is to know someone, somewhere who knows someone, somewhere else who got into a program and came out the other side. Find the right someone and chances are you might end up with a phone number. Call that number and you might make it to a waiting list. Endure the wait and after a month, or two, or four, you might be rewarded with a bed of your own, a Clonidine patch, some Motrin or Tylenol and a physician’s assistant or nurse’s aide to watch over your misery.

You’re in treatment, and the bottom has brought you here. Without that down-in-the-hole grounding that takes the joy out of the strongest vial, you would not have gotten this far. But as days pass in the detox
center, you begin to see it as more than the bottom. Having given yourself over to something external from, and opposed to, the corner itself, you believe it’s fair to take some credit for having attempted this journey. For you, a weary soldier, treatment seems a choice. You chose; looking back, you want to believe this.

Those with their hands at the throttle—the politicians and commentators, the cops and lawyers and social theorists—pretty much believe the same thing. They, too, feel as though they’ve chosen, when in fact their crusade has simply grounded on a bottom all its own.

After declaring the prohibition, after mobilizing, after filling prisons and rewriting laws and spending billions, those responsible for waging war on the American culture of drugs have come to the same belated conclusion, albeit after a quarter century of denial, as any dope fiend who gives up the fight. Twenty-five years ago, the road taken was that of drug task forces and kingpin statutes and international interdiction. The dollars went to drug enforcement agents and prosecutors and prisons. When the dollars weren’t enough, the laws were changed to make the dollars do more. Mandatory minimums, civil forfeitures, the degradation of the Fourth Amendment—these became the new weapons. For a quarter century, the drug warriors have ratcheted up the conflict, always with the promise that a little more effort, a little more pressure can’t help but have the necessary impact. Their Old Testament approach has been singular, focused, specific. It’s a fine old American strategy: stick first, carrot later.

Now, with the endgame at hand, the numbers in cities like Baltimore are too hopeless, the open-air drug markets too numerous to justify the stick. Now, with the drug culture fully entrenched, the average Baltimore police commander has learned enough to argue that while all the arrests and sweeps and seizures can’t win the war, they nonetheless have a purpose. No longer does law enforcement pursue street-level drug sellers and users merely to punish them; now, the stat game has become a means to drive lawbreakers toward treatment. Still and always, it’s the stick first. But now, at least, the drug war has a carrot as well.

Talk nowadays with any police professional or prosecutor in a city with a significant drug-involved population and what comes back is likely to be an admission—twenty-five years too late—that our society cannot merely arrest its way out of the problem. Talk to those who have invested their careers in the drug war and they’ll respond with an argument not for change, but for something that amounts to a redefinition
of the status quo. By this new reckoning, the criminal pursuit of those along Fayette Street is now more essential than ever because the pursuit attacks demand and drives users toward drug treatment. In this new vision, treatment, education, and law enforcement are joined in a synergistic new entity.

Instead of trying to sell the numbers game of street-level arrests to an increasingly cynical public, drug policy makers and police commanders now argue about a nobler purpose. They’re not chasing down lost souls for whom jail space no longer exists; they are, instead, guiding those souls back toward a therapeutic solution. Better than the usual pretrial detentions and district court arraignments, the possibilities for the arrestee can now extend to a special drug court and a sympathetic judge ordering residential detox and rehabilitation. Thanks to this redefinition, the chase seems to make sense again. By a quick fix in the terminology, the war and the warriors are once more necessary.

Except for this: Take a walk through a crowded detox facility in Baltimore. To be sure, the dormitory beds and meeting hall are filled—and filled to a great extent with court-ordered patients. Similarly, it’s no surprise to see many of these patients parroting a drug-free ideology as if it means something to them. Yet when the surface is scratched, it becomes entirely apparent that there is no real connection between stick and carrot.

Those who are here because a judge ordered them here, those who have been given a choice of either five years with the Department of Corrections or full compliance with a program of drug counseling and rehabilitation, are merely taking up beds, biding time, and looking for any chance to slip free. No court order can override the corner rules if a person is about the corner. No judge can tell a man to change his most basic desire if the man himself sees no cause for change.

The drug counselors—the best of them, anyway—know this. They regard those clients sent by way of the city’s drug court, or a sentencing judge’s probation requirements, as long-shot cases. A few might actually respond to the new regime of counseling and group therapy and Narcotics Anonymous confessional. But in those instances, the court-referral cases change because they are ready to change, not because society wills it. As for the rest—they play at recovery until the probation requirements are fulfilled, or until the hunger is too much. Then, it’s out the front door and down to the nearest corner.

So the court-ordered pretenders soon fall away, leaving only those
who arrive at this opportunity and then cling to it by their own act of will. These people don’t seek change because drugs are unlawful or prohibited or subject to the condemnation of others. Redemption for them is essential because they have seen and felt and tasted bottom. For too many years, they have been dismantling their lives one blast at a time, shedding friends and relatives and, ultimately, themselves. Now, by their own volition, they are returning to ask for the alternative. And what, exactly, is that alternative?

On the high-end, perhaps, where Blue Cross/Blue Shield still pays all but the deductible, drug treatment might resemble a comprehensive, carefully structured program for reintegrating vulnerable, dependent personalities into the community. In places where real money is spent, a great deal of therapy is usually assured. But the public drug treatment effort, when it’s available at all, isn’t the full-tilt, Betty-Ford-is-my-salvation kind of detox. It’s mostly out-patient treatment, or, for the more fortunate, it’s three, or five, or maybe even twenty-eight days of in-house treatment, followed by some group therapy and the NA creed repeated three or four times a day until it becomes rote.

For those who emerge from the inner-city corners, nothing is there to help them after the first few moments of stability, and no one will suggest that a used-to-be dope fiend from West Baltimore is any more welcome in the other America than he was before he fired that first blast. Treatment may be capable of telling people that once they’ve finished twenty-eight days off the street, they are cured of their physical addictions and they are therefore in recovery. But it cannot tell them who they are or where they might go to find something better.

After four days in Mercy Hospital’s detox ward, or four weeks in BRC ‘s dormitory, what remains for the fiend who hit bottom and bounced is to step back into the streets and walk past the same drug markets, tracing that thin line that carries him from one NA meeting to the next. He goes from rec centers to church basements to elementary schools, chasing the same words and phrases and imagery, clinging to the stories of other fiends. He catches two or three or four meetings a day—however many are required to keep him from scratching at the empty place in his soul.

Narcotics Anonymous is the church of last resort in urban America. It provides a daily religious rite that brings the corner survivors into houses of worship, albeit through the basement doors. Above them, the sanctuaries stand mostly empty save for Sundays; but down below, amid
the folding chairs and linoleum tiles and Bible classrooms is a religion practiced damn near every day.

“… we humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings …”

Down in the catacombs, day and night, the steps are read and the traditions reaffirmed. Confessions are made.

“We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves …”

Key rings are distributed—one day clean, one week clean, six months clean—trinkets held precious by men and women who are on a hero’s journey, who will embrace at the night’s end and walk out onto the same streets that once devoured them.