The Corner (73 page)

“We made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends …”

Down here, at least, there is the camaraderie of shared endurance, the sense of being among other survivors of the same slow-motion slaughter. This much is ready and waiting for those who come off the corner.

“Our common welfare should come first. Personal recovery depends on NA unity …”

To the extent that anything in the drug treatment firmament actually works, this does. Though there are many at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting who need to have their court papers signed, who are required to prove to an outside authority that they attended so many meetings a week, the same rule applies: Those who are here as prisoners of the drug war haven’t a prayer, but those who are doing it for themselves might just make it. They’re the ones compelled by the horror of reaching bottom, they’re the ones who have learned to trust only in humility, in an almost instinctive sense of their own weakness.

If you are one of those, if after a week or three of meetings you are still up to it, still determined not to consign what remains of your life to the pavement, you might look around and take stock of your fellow travelers. It’s a mixed bag of souls: the weary in need of a temporary rest; the desperate, frightened by a near miss; the game runners, busy building a presentencing pretext. And there are also a few others like you, humbled and vanquished; men and women so seared by the corner’s power that this time, they might just make a year or two clean. Many are detox veterans, wearing the chevrons of past campaigns. Nine times, sixteen times, twenty-two times—some have lost count of how many times they’ve struck bottom, surrendered in their hearts, gone through sickness and therapy and meetings only to sail out into the ether and
get captured once again in the corner orbit. You look at them and calculate your own chances.

The young ones don’t come—or, those who do come, arrive sullen and disconnected, waiting only until the end of the meeting and a chance to have their court slips signed. For them, the full-blown nightmare has yet to be imagined, much less lived. A fiend can’t sense the bottom until he’s spent years in service of a corner, misusing all his friends, discarding his family. At twenty-one, or twenty-five, a dope fiend hasn’t been beaten down nearly enough to begin questioning the corner construct. He still has years of free falling, a decade, perhaps, of game-running and lie-telling before he feels anything solid beneath him.

If you’re ready, though, you’ll take what’s offered. You’ll recite the steps, the traditions. You’ll hear testimony and when the time comes, you’ll tell your own story, sparing nothing. You’ll pick a mentor and then mentor someone else. You’ll sit through the daily gatherings, chain-smoking with a hundred others, accepting Styrofoam cups of coffee and one-whatever key chains as if these things were the blood and body of Christ himself. For a long time, for longer than you thought possible, the meetings will be your life.

Or not.

The corner is still there; the rules are still the same. At any point in the long struggle, you can miss a meeting or two. Or ten. You can discover that what you thought was the bottom was not really bottom at all, that there are depths to which you will still need to descend before you can again think about change. You can fall in one thoughtless moment or after days of deliberate and conscious thought, telling yourself all sorts of happy lies in order to get yourself through the door of a shooting gallery and take the spike in your hand. You can kill yourself that way, too, going back out into the corner mix after months in the church catacombs, firing what used to be your usual dose and discovering in one world-shattering moment that all your heroin-tolerant cells are missing, that your cleaned-up self isn’t yet ready for thirty of a Spider Bag all at once.

Or you can slouch forward, plugging away from one meeting to the next until you finally reach that pivotal point where your strength comes as a surprise, where you can tell yourself that your desire to stay clean is the equal or better of your hunger. Only then, when you are at last ready to look past a life of meetings, do you come to the next chasm.

What, you finally ask yourself, do I do now?

Your entire recovery—all that passes for drug treatment in this country—has been about defining what you don’t want to be, what you fear and dread and need to avoid. You were a drug addict. You are now a recovering addict. Beyond that, you have no idea what to say about your life.

Because even if your bottom was real, and even if you’ve managed to heed its warning and stay clean, what remains for a thirty-five-or forty-year-old survivor for whom the corner world has been home? You’ve lived by manipulation, by ignoring your pain and the pain of others, by invoking the dope-fiend move as the solution to every problem. Now, all of that must be abandoned at the threshold of some other, barely imagined way of living. To survive at Fayette and Mount, you had to get over on someone else every damn day and you got to be good at it. But to apply the rules of the corner to any other world invites only frustration and failure. You’re supposed to trade your dope-fiend skills for what? Humility? Servitude? Minimum wage? Giving up the drugs was hard enough; giving up the hustle is harder still. And if you do manage it, all you’ve done is come to the end of the beginning.

What’s left is the closest thing to impossible.

Having put the drugs away and turned your back on the corner, you are left to face life. And this is the part of the journey no one mentions when they theorize about drug treatment or recovery or rehabilitation: You weren’t really running to the vials, at least not in the beginning. You were running away from the very same life that you are now challenged to discover and examine. After years in the fog, you are back where you started; older, perhaps wiser, but still tangled up in the remnants of what had been an unfulfilled existence. Your body is clean, your mind is clear. But none of that is much help when the pieces of a broken life are dumped on the table in front of you. Yes indeed, you had some problems. There they are, still awaiting your considered attention.

The people with the sticks and the carrots, the ones who used to talk arrest stats and now talk treatment—they don’t know quite what to say to you about any of that. They know what they don’t want you to do. They don’t want you to take drugs, or sling vials, or break into parked cars and rip out the radios. They don’t want you to rob people or shoot people or hijack their luxury sedans when they stop for gas. They don’t want dope fiends, and in an abstract way, they’ve shown their commitment by spending billions to stop you from being a dope fiend.

Beyond that, they have nothing much to say.

So welcome back to a culture that still hasn’t found a use for you or your kind. This is America, where the West Baltimores exist in social and political isolation, where a good 10 percent of the population is no longer required by the economic engine, where there will always be those for whom not only a modicum of material success, but relevance, is unlikely. You were born for Fayette and Mount, you went there, and, at this point, the only real surprise is that you survived long enough to want something more.

If you went back there now—a last visit, perhaps—if you walked twenty blocks due west from the city’s downtown to Mount Street and found the sage idiot manning his post, then you could state your case:

“I been a dope fiend,” you’d say.

“I’m tired,” you’d say.

“I’m trying to stop,” you’d say.

And the idiot on the corner would surely look at you and offer a cold question that points very close to the truth:

“Why?”

And damned if you could answer.

“Hey, Gary.”

Gary McCullough peers across the Seapride counter, his red eyes squinting through the steam.

“Here … right here, Gary.”

Finally, Gary sees him: a white boy, blond-haired, grinning passively. It’s John Boy Walton, or so Gary has been calling the kid lately. Gary beams a grin back, then slides out from behind the steamers and spice boxes, pulling off his gloves and with his right hand, offering a white man’s grip. Instead, the kid twists it into a street-corner greeting. Gary laughs aloud.

“You late,” Gary tells him.

“We missed the first bus,” John Boy explains. “This is my buddy Dan. The guy I told you ’bout.”

Dan nods curtly and Gary picks up the hinged section of counter and makes his way out the front doors of the crabhouse. Beyond Miss Mary’s earshot, they can talk freely.

“My main apple-scrapple,” laughs Gary, clapping John Boy on the back. “You was supposed to be here at twelve. I’m not supposed to leave now.”

“Not even for a few minutes?”

Gary pulls off his California Angels hat, wipes his head, and mumbles something about Miss Mary, about how it’s always bad to leave when she’s at the register. John Boy counters that he brought Dan all the way from Brooklyn Park.

“I’m tellin’ him how you my man,” says John Boy, managing an inflection somewhere between black and white.

Gary laughs.

“C’mon, Gary. We got enough for a bundle.”

Gary is tempted, but Miss Mary is going to need him at least until
five. Even now, in mid-October, with the crab season all but over, with his hours being cut to the bone, Seapride is still Gary’s main hustle. He shakes his head, telling them they’ll have to come back in an hour. “I just can’t take off ’til then. You was supposed to be here at twelve and now I can’t.”

John Boy looks at Dan and gets only a shrug back.

“’Bout an hour?”

“Maybe less. If I get all them pots filled up, maybe I can ease out ’fore then.”

Dan nods to John Boy, who thumps Gary on the shoulder.

“Okay, Mo,” says Gary, recovering his bounce as he turns back to the crabhouse. “You just sit tight and stay right and we gonna be good to go.”

“We chillin’,” says John Boy. “Go back and do your thing.”

Gary hears the white boy throw out little pieces of used cornerspeak and can’t help laughing to himself. As far as the corner game goes, John Boy is barely out of diapers, a neophyte in need of mentoring. To Gary, the white buyers all seem alike when they first appear on Fayette Street: They all try to walk sideways, with their hands in their pockets, a little too nervous and a little too polite. They all have one-syllable names, too—Bob and John and Dan—as if anything more complicated might give offense. The latest in a series is this smiling, fair-haired wonder from Brooklyn Park, a kid so comically genuine—so positively white—that Gary can’t help comparing him to John Boy on that old television show. And if John Boy Walton wants to come down off his mountain and start shooting vials, it only seems right that he have the assistance of someone equally earnest and humane.

The two had found each other at Fayette and Monroe near the end of summer. Gary had seen him wandering like a lost puppy trying to make the connect. The look of things told Gary that the boy didn’t have a clue, that some stepped-on cut would be the closest thing to coke he was likely to see. Charitable as ever, Gary sidled up and offered what advice he could:

“Man, stay away from those Purple Tops.”

“Huh?”

“I’m sayin’ them purple ones is doo-doo.”

When the white boy left Fayette Street that day, he left with good coke—courtesy of the smiling, full-service tour guide who charged him a mere vial or two as recompense. The boy went back down the hill
feeling as if he’d latched onto a kindred soul, a fellow who understood in the most fundamental way that all men are brothers.

Ever since, Gary has been taking John Boy’s money and returning with the best product he could find, and for this, the white boy from the southern reaches of the city pays him in vials. At first, John Boy would leave after the exchange, taking the vials home with him. But more and more often, he wants to hang with Gary, to pull out bottle caps and pump the coke with his new friend.

“Gary,” he told him once, “you’re a great guy.”

“Huh,” said Gary.

“No, I mean it. You’re like the nicest guy I know.”

Gary was embarrassed but flattered. He took his role as tour guide seriously, and on those occasions when he paid for weak vials with John Boy’s money, he would apologize profusely and offer to go back with his own cash—if he had his own cash, anyway—and find better. Eventually, John Boy decided that the two of them should consolidate, maybe get an apartment together somewhere down below Pratt Street. Gary listened to talk like that and begaas-shen worrying that the white boy had gone faggot on him, but in truth it was all just an extension of John Boy’s lust for Fayette Street coke. His vision of the perfect world had quickly become a walk-up where the nicest guy in the world came home every day with the best vials money could buy.

Gary had been telling John Boy he’d think about it; he didn’t want to kill this goose before getting every last golden egg. He had no intention of living happily ever after in twenty-on-the-hype racial harmony, but meanwhile, John Boy kept coming back, day after day, pressing cash into Gary’s hand and making life much easier than any fiend could expect it to be.

The timing could not have been better, because Gary’s crabhouse caper was beginning to wear thin. The season had slowed after the Labor Day rush and almost everyone—save for Cardy and Bobby Short, the experienced sorters—was seeing their hours cut. Gary had gone from six days a week down to five, to four, and then—as the cold weather thinned the crowds at the counter and left the crabhouses with nothing but Gulf crawlers shipped north at higher cost—he was down to Wednesdays and Saturdays. Miss Mary was even talking about dropping his Wednesday shift at the end of the month.

More to the point, Gary’s habit had grown fat on the crabhouse job. Although he had given some of the pay to his mother, the rest had found
its way into his veins and his tolerance for dope-and-coke speedballs was, by summer’s end, higher than it had ever been before. Six months ago, he had been able to maintain on twenty or thirty dollars worth of dope a day; now, he was using three times that amount, often augmenting the cash from the crabhouse with a handful of side hustles. And beyond the caps and vials, he’d also had money for cigarettes by the pack, fries or sandwiches from the kitchen girls at Seapride, and twice-or three-times-a-day forties from the liquor store, too.

Now it was ending. All his hard work this summer, all his steady-as-she-goes servitude meant little once the season ended. In his frustration, Gary was convinced that it had to do with race, that Miss Mary would rather give the off-season days to the South Baltimore white boys, some of whom had shown little in the way of work ethic. Ignoring the inconvenient fact that his older brother remained full-time at the crabhouse, Gary enjoyed telling himself that Miss Mary was out-andout prejudiced.

Of course, feeling that way about it made it easier for him to creep out of work for an hour or two today, to meet up with John Boy and Dan Boy and any other pilgrims with ready cash. After the lunch rush, he would slip past the counter and once again guide them to the promised land, hooking them into a right and true product.

As he comes back through the front counter, he gets the eye from Ron, Miss Mary’s son, who is perched at the register.

“Gary, where the hell’ve you been at? We need sixteens.”

“You got ’em.”

“I needed ’em ten minutes back.”

“You got ’em now, Chief. Comin’ right out to you.”

He gives the steamers and stun tanks another forty minutes of his time, working bushel after bushel until all of the front-room bins are full. Then he waits. Miss Mary and Ron are still up front, working the register and taking orders. For his absence to get less notice, he’ll have to hang until Paul or one of the girls takes over.

“More spice,” comes a yell from the back room.

“More dust!” shouts Gary. “I’m on it, Mo.”

He’s carrying two crates of crab spice back into the sorting room when he catches sight of Fran at the edge of the counter, flagging him down.

“What?” Gary says. “What’s up?”

“Finish what you doin’,” says Fran. “I be out front.”

Gary drops the crates in front of the stun tanks, pulls off his gloves, and walks out the loading-dock door. Fran is leaning up against the crab house walls, biting down her fingernails. She is still looking good, but Gary notices the yellow at the corners of her eyes.

“What’s goin’ on?”

“Your son is goin’ on. The boy is a trip, Gary.”

“Huh?”

“You ready?”

“What?”

“You ready for news?”

Gary blinks and shrugs.

“You a grandad. You gonna have a grandson.”

“Who?”

“You. Your son gonna have a son all his own.”

Gary’s mouth drops open. He’d heard that DeAndre’s girl was looking heavy, but he hasn’t seen much of Fran in the weeks since she came out of detox. Nor has he spoken with his son lately.

“You know it’s a boy?” asks Gary, awed.

Fran nods. Gary takes off the Angels cap, scratches his head, and breaks into a smile so beatific that Fran has to open her arms and embrace him.

“That same girl he been with?”

“Reeka.”

“Yeah,” says Gary, “how ’bout that. We gonna be grandfather and grandmother. Ain’t that somethin’?”

Fran hugs him again. For both of them, there is, at this moment, no sense of a tragedy compounded, of babies bringing babies into an unforgiving world. Tyreeka is now fourteen; DeAndre, two years older. Their union will soon produce a child three generations removed from the hope and honest belief that prompted William McCullough to steal a ride on a northbound bus and go to work in a Baltimore foundry. Yet in this first moment, Gary McCullough feels nothing but delight.

He asks about a due date and Fran tells him Christmas. Yet again, Gary tells Fran that he’s going to change, that he’s going to clean himself up in time to help.

“I’m going to get past this,” he says.

Fran talks a bit about going to meetings, about the waiting list at BRC. Gary nods, but for both of them, it is a routine conversation, half-heard and spoken quickly. Fran pulls him up in mid-promise.

“Andre needs help with things,” she says. “He tryin’ to pay for the bassinet and high chair and clothes and whatever else. And they already went and cut his hours at Wendy’s and he’s out looking for some other work …”

Gary stops smiling.

“He’s been tryin’ but you know how he is. If he don’t get some cash soon, he goin’ right back to the corner.”

Gary opens his mouth, utters a syllable, then turns away. Fran presses forward, wrapping her argument into a tight circle. Gary gets paid every day; surely he can let her hold forty or fifty. For DeAndre.

“Aw, man. No, this ain’t, um …”

“Lemme hold twenty then.”

Gary looks away, then back at Fran, then down at his rubber boots, wet and brown with crab spice. He’s trying to counter, trying to offer up a reason, but the words won’t come. He opens his mouth again, managing only to exhale before turning on his heel and marching into the crabhouse. Fran holds her ground and ten seconds later Gary is back.

“I ain’t got paid yet today,” Gary says.

“I’ll wait then.”

Gary pivots again, stalking back into the crabhouse to gather his thoughts. He returns after a minute, explaining that he can’t spare anything because his mother will be down to collect the money for groceries and such.

“Tell her it’s for Andre’s baby and she’ll let some of it go. If she knows what it’s for, she won’t mind.”

Again Gary flees indoors, leaving Fran on the pavement shaking her head, shouting that at the very least, he ought to let her hold ten.

“For real, Gary, c’mon.”

But he’s back behind the counter now, hiding out, peeking through the steam every few minutes to see if she’s gone, until, after a time, she is.

For Gary, the back-and-forth with Fran has always been an exhausting ordeal. Now it’s more difficult than ever: With more dope and coke coursing through him, Gary has slipped deeper into the fog. He had long prided himself on his ideas and opinions, but lately he can sense that his words are fewer and slower, his sentences less complex. More and more, he stumbles from one half-formed thought to another; conversations once rich in substance and reference points are now just rambles. He can speak well enough about ordinary things, but Gary has always
been about more than ordinary things. Now, after years of chemical riot, he’s missing a part of himself.

At times, in the quiet of his mother’s basement, Gary grasps the growing confusion in his mind. Such moments frighten him. Occasionally, he admits the fear aloud to friends, then looks at them expectantly, waiting for that redemptive moment when they shake their heads and tell him that it isn’t permanent, that it’s just the blast. And Gary, hearing this, nods and smiles, telling himself that it will all come back to him in time: His intellect, his humor, his lucidity—all of it will be where he left it. At other times, he doubts himself, worrying that he isn’t thinking the same, that he can’t remember things like he once did. The drugs, Gary would say, shaking his head. The drugs are killing my mind.

A few moments before, he couldn’t keep up with the beg-and-barter challenge of Fran Boyd. Now, unable to remember whether he had walked back into the sorting room for males or females, he goes back out and stares down into the bins. Everything is full save for the sixteens. He returns to the sorting room and pulls a plastic bin of sixteen-dollar-a-dozen males over to the tank. He’s got them up on the edge, ready to dump, when Cardy looks over at him, questioningly.

“You just did sixteens.”

“Say what?”

“You took sixteens and cooked ’em not ten minutes back.”

With one hand still holding the crab bin, Gary uses the other to pull his Angels cap off his head. He wipes his forehead with his sleeve and tries to think.