The Corner (79 page)

For company, he soon has Pimp, who succumbs a week after Curt and is brought not only to the same hospital, but to the same ward, occupying a single-bed room directly across the hall. The Bug has now ravaged Pimp’s body, but his mind is still lucid and he settles into Bon Secours as Jeff to Curt’s Mutt, the two of them lounging as best they can at the end of the hallway, flirting with nurses and squeezing cigarettes and sodas from passersby.

Then Shardene is unable to rise after a cold night inside the vacant house. When she does finally get up around midday, she’s talking nonsense, her thoughts rambling out in broken sentences. She’s admitted to a bed in the hospital’s other wing, and Fayette Street’s lost platoon is down to three warriors: Eggy Daddy, Rita, and Curt’s brother, Dennis.

“They gonna have to carry me off this corner,” declares Dennis proudly. “You can take all them other motherfuckers to Bon Secours and I’ll still be right here.”

“You hardcore,” Eggy assures him.

“I’ll be the last man on the corner.”

“I be there with you,” Rita assures him.

But Rita begins to have second thoughts. Like Curt, she has for years carried her pain and her damage with stoic disregard, yet there are now enough empty spaces in the front room of the shooting gallery to make her mindful. First Bread leaves them. Then Hungry. Then Blue up and walks away as if he actually has a plan. Then Curt and Pimp, falling out one after the next. And now Shardene, giving in to the damp and cold. For more than a year now, Rita has been mending her own raw arms, self-medicating the wounds with bootleg antibiotics and whatever fresh rags and bandages she could find. Now she begins to wonder whether a few days in a hospital bed with IV drugs and fresh bandages wouldn’t make her feel a little better.

Just before Christmas, she too walks through the doors of the Bon Secours emergency room. With the infections in both arms reaching a near-absolute state of drug resistance, Rita is quickly admitted and lodged at the other end of the hallway from Shardene.

“We one big happy family again,” says Fat Curt, dryly.

It’s damn close to true. With Rita gone from Blue’s house, a dozen different fiends from Fayette and Monroe are now obliged to visit her at her hospital bedside, bringing their vials and bags and syringes with them. When the nurses and attendants turn their backs, Rita finds a vein for each of her visitors, then applies the balance to her own needs, finding
it easier than ever because her intravenous shunt is as useful for heroin as for antibiotics. Direct deposit, she calls it.

She works her way down the length of the hallway, making sure Shardene is properly medicated, then making friends with a couple of lost souls in the next room over. They’re looking rough, laid up with the Bug, unable to keep to their game as the virus overruns their bodies. No matter; Rita shares what comes her way, helping both with their blast. Fat Curt, as patriarch to this bizarre reunion, tries to talk to Rita, to tell her to slow down and be cool and give herself at least a couple weeks’ rest.

“You gonna get thrown out of here before the medicine have a chance to work,” he tells her.

“I won’t,” Rita insists. “I’m gonna be better about it.”

But after five days in a hospital bed, a blood screen on Shardene shows a higher heroin content than when she first walked into the emergency room. She’s put back onto the street.

Then Rita herself is seen creeping into the room across the hall, armed with a breakaway syringe. When the night nurse surprises her, she’s holding the tool in one hand and a grateful patient’s forearm in the other. And so Rita Hale, the best doctor on Fayette Street, is herself ejected from a place of healing, accused of ministering to patients without house privileges.

That leaves Fat Curt and Pimp, and for them the year comes to its end amidst antiseptic smell and walls of bland white. But it offers a last flourish, too: As decidedly stationary objects, both patients are finally located by the mysterious Robert Carr, the man who had gone to the corners looking for Curt several months back, and whom Curt had dismissed as a hospital bill collector. Instead, Carr is the hospital’s own expediter, a contractor who identifies high-cost indigent patients, then shepherds their medical assistance and SSI claims through the bureaucracy so that the hospital will ultimately get paid, if not through patient billing then by government allowance. By now, with as much as thirty thousand dollars expended during his last three hospitalizations, Curt has gained some notice among the caregivers at Bon Secours. Robert Carr has him sign this and initial that, and within a week or two, Curtis Davis has a state medical assistance card—an outcome that has resisted all previous efforts. More than that, both Curt and Pimp now have a promise of long-term care, either at a nursing home or a chronic-care facility. A soldier to the core, Fat Curt refuses to die and refuses to get
well; it therefore occurs to those overseeing his medical adventure that it might be better to deposit him somewhere else in the city than to have him show up in the same emergency room yet again.

Pimp, at life’s end, is grateful for any semblance of a plan. But Curt hears nursing home and begins plotting his escape. He’s got forty-five years and they’re treating him like an ancient. He knows he’s sick; he knows, too, that any more life on the corner is likely to make him sicker still. Even so, the man is not yet ready to believe his run is over.

His ankle, he tells the doctors. If he can just get the ankle to set right, he’ll be fine. And this business about the swelling in his legs and arms being permanent: He’s heard about some kind of machine that can squeeze out the juice, make things go back to normal. And the liver—well, Curt can’t exactly see the liver. He knows he needs such an organ and he understands that his isn’t particularly happy, but he really can’t assess his own health by thinking about something so intangible.

“Get so as where I can walk again and I’ll be all right,” he tells his doctor. “It’s my legs that give me the problem.”

But Curt will not be all right ever again, and when the doctors try to explain this gently, Curt doesn’t seem to get all of the message.

“I don’t need a nursing home,” he tells one social worker. “What I need is to get things together to where I got a place of my own and maybe a little money each month. If I can get that foot not to swole up like it has and if I can get me a monthly check, I be good.”

Fat Curt has given a lifetime to the corner game; now he’s asking for some small dignity in return. The social worker tells him Robert Carr is working on the SSI case, that a check might be there for him eventually. But as for his health, it’s about much more than swollen feet.

“My blood pressure then,” Curt agrees. “I need to take medicines for that.”

“And your liver. You’re very sick, Curtis.”

“My liver,” he repeats, as if reminded of a minor detail. “Got to go easy on that too.”

“You need to be monitored,” she explains. “You’re going to need to be in a place where they can see just how you’re doing every day.”

Gradually, he’s shoehorned into their plan, though even at the end, he’s talking about the chronic-care facility as a temporary solution, a way station on the road to some happier place.

Come January, he’ll be at Seton Manor over on Franklin Street, a
converted downtown hotel that used to be known as the James Brown Motor Inn because the hardest working man in show business bought the place in the 1970s and put his name on it. In its current incarnation, though, Seton Manor is the last institutional resort for so many of the souls who have played and lost on the city’s corners. From Fayette Street to Greenmount Avenue, from Flag House to Lexington Terrace, those without the sense to die quick and clean are instead brought to Seton Manor and carted upstairs in a slow-motion lurch of an elevator ride, then deposited in one of the painted cinder-block rooms on the third and fourth wards, where they are fed hospital food and AZT, first by mouth, then through an intravenous line, then not at all because in those last days, sustenance is to little purpose. They are black and brown bodies mostly, stick figures, consigned to metal-brace beds or stumbling and staggering past each other in the corridors, looking into each other’s death masks and knowing beyond any doubt whatsoever.

At Seton Manor, Curt will settle on a fourth-floor ward largely comprised of AIDS patients, though he will insist, to the general indifference of the nurses, that he has tested clean. He’ll be there five days before his first roommate dies in his sleep, and two weeks before the second stops breathing. By the time bedmate number three goes gentle into that good night, not even Curt can mistake the meaning and purpose of his new home.

“They think I’m dyin’,” he tells Pimp, who arrives the same week to take a bed down the hall. “Them nurses tryin’ to give me the same pills that they givin’ everyone else around here.”

Pimp is sympathetic enough, though he, of course, has been admitted to Seton Manor on the assumption that he requires nothing more than a terminus.

“You tell them you ain’t got it?” he asks Curt.

“Told my nurse and I told the damn social worker. They still tryin’ to put them pills into me.”

Curt spends his days watching television in the small lounge or telling tales in Pimp’s room. Meanwhile, everyone around him withers to nothing.

“Fast as you learn their name, they die on you,” Curt says at one point. “Ain’t no point gettin’ to know people here.”

He can’t believe it ends this way. He can’t believe that the damage done can’t be repaired, that there isn’t some medical plea-bargain that can be struck to modify the sentence. He did the deeds; he always knew
the cost. Soldiers as hardy and willing as Curt are now long gone; measured by the dead, Curt’s cup ran over years ago. Still, death seems to him wrong and premature and entirely unbelievable. Fuck the liver thing and fuck the blood pressure, because Fat Curt still feels the same inside. He’s not thinning down, he’s not fighting the virus. He can still laugh and hope and remember. He can still tell a joke or wish people well or want more for himself.

“Not my time yet,” he tells a visitor one day. “But I need to get out of this place before I’m like to kill myself from seein’ everyone else go.”

A couple of weeks into the new year, Curt begs his friends from Fayette Street to come downtown and take him somewhere—anywhere—so that he can scrape against ordinary life, see how people are when they’re still dealing more with this world than the next. He is taken back to Fayette and Monroe, where he’s greeted with genuine affection by the old guard: Rita, telling him how fine he looks standing there with clean clothes and clear eyes; Stink, joking with him to stay away from the big white bags, which are weak today; his brother Dennis, sizing Curt up and granting some soldierly respect in a low, quick growl:

“They ain’t kilt you yet, huh?”

“You neither.”

“Me neither,” agrees Dennis, laughing until he coughs.

For a time, Curt watches the back-and-forth between the touts and runners and feels the desire growling inside. But today, for pride if for no other reason, he fights with himself, leaving Fayette Street after an hour or so, asking a friend to ride him by the harbor before dropping him back at Seton Manor.

There, atop Federal Hill, he sits on a bench, his fat hands deep in his coat pockets, his shoulders braced against the cold, his cane resting beside him. To the east, in the outer harbor, a tug is slowly pushing an empty freighter from its mooring at the Domino Sugar plant, turning the big ship slowly until the bow is facing Lazaretto Light and the channel to the bay.

Curt says nothing for a long time, watching as the tug slowly detaches and the ship begins to move.

“Headin’ out to sea,” he says finally.

A young, dark-skinned woman wheels past him with a baby stroller. Curt looks up and smiles, but the woman is preoccupied with her toddler, who is trying to take off his mittens. She reaches down to lightly slap the boy’s hand.

Curt laughs softly, then looks to the harbor again. The ship has started to show a wake.

“I’ve had a good life,” he says. “These last couple years have been rough and all, but I’m not going to go on complaining about things. I did what I wanted to do and I can’t say that if it came around again, I’d do too much different.”

He stays on the bench for a while longer, waiting until the ship has cleared the point and turned into the lower channel. By then the sun is low and the January cold cuts deeper.

Curt rises, then pauses for a last look at the water. Leaning hard on the cane, he starts slowly for the car.

“Time to go,” he says.

This war goes on.

Thirty years down this sad stretch of road and the same people are still peddling the same brand of snake oil, still hawking that elusive light at the tunnel’s end.

There’s nothing wrong with the war on drugs that can’t be perfected, they’ll tell you. Nothing that can’t succeed with just a little fine-tuning and a little more money. More cops and more prisons and some new laws and we’ll really start to get at the sources of supply, or attack the demand, or maybe do both at once. Democrats, Republicans, it doesn’t matter who’s running for office—they’ll all promise to get hard with it, to get things back under control, to spend the money on a bigger, better campaign. They talk that shit as if the national prison population hasn’t tripled in ten years. They talk it because they don’t know what else to say, because they know that at the very least, these are the words that most of us want to hear.

Thirty years. And now, all that’s left is national failure on a grand scale, a tainted political inheritance that is backhanded from one administration to the next. Thirty years and the politicians and professionals are still offering up the kind of piss-into-the-wind optimism that compels any rational mind to recall another, comparable disaster. Listen to a big-city narcotics detective boasting about his arrest statistics, savoring them as tangible evidence of progress, and you might think of some starched Saigon briefing officer in an air-conditioned Quonset hut tallying up the daily body count. Or the hear the voice of a DEA or Customs spokesman talking up the street value of some huge cocaine seizure along the Mexican border, and you might conjure the ghost of a long-dead Pentagon guru promising to carpet-bomb infiltration to a standstill along the Ho Chi Minh trail. An urban police commander extolling the virtues of community-oriented policing as a means of
regaining the trust of inner-city neighborhoods? He’s the direct descendant of every CIA spook and Agency for International Development official who ever spoke earnestly about pacification or the model villages program. You want more? Then watch any prosecutor in any American city call the obligatory press briefing to announce the indictment of one major trafficker in a million-dollar drug probe, even as new dealers arrive to take possession of the same open-air drug markets. That’s a corps commander grinding up men, money, and machines for possession of some godforsaken Vietnamese hill, then declaring victory as he copters his people out and returns the same real estate to his enemy.

And as with the debacle in Indochina, the American crusade against drugs is collapsing without the loss of a single significant battle. Quite to the contrary, the reckoning already at hand in the West Baltimores of this country comes replete with a string of seeming victories: tens of thousands warehoused in prisons; millions in contraband and dollars confiscated; generations of police commanders and lawyers compiling impressive stats to assure themselves promotion.

But these successes aren’t nearly enough, and when the rules of engagement get in the way of lasting victory, we simply change the rules, creating whole new tracts of federal statute, establishing strict mandatory punishments and unforgiving guidelines for sentencing, granting so much raw punitive power to U. S. prosecutors that federal judges around the country are left to grumble in legal journals about draconian and immoral sentencing laws. It used to be said that only in a police state could police work be made easy; yet for the sake of this war, we’ve gutted the Fourth Amendment, allowing race-based profiling and stop-and-frisk police tactics based on the most minimal probable cause. We’ve created civil forfeiture statutes that make it a game for government to take what it wants—houses, boats, planes, cars, cash—from anyone it targets without the necessity of criminal conviction. We’ve made mandatory drug testing a prerogative not only of parole and probation agents, but of any private employer in the nation. Most dramatic of all, perhaps, we have continued to escalate this war of occupation in our inner cities until more than half of the adult black male population in places like Baltimore are now, in some way, under the supervision of the criminal justice system.

This war, like the last one, will not be won. The truth in this is nakedly visible—if not to those crafting the tactics and strategy, then to those
standing on the bottom, looking up at all the sound and fury. To the men and women of Fayette Street, it isn’t about tightening the screws, or raising the stakes, or embracing a few more constitutional twists and turns. It isn’t about three-time loser statutes or drug courts or kicking in the right door of the right stash house. It isn’t that all these efforts don’t work quite well enough, or that more of them will work better. It’s that none of it works at all. The tactics are flawless, but the strategy is nonexistent.

At rock bottom, down here where Fayette crosses Mount Street and runs up the hill to intersect with Monroe, no one is fooled—just as no grunt up to his ass in rice paddy could ever be fooled. Here on Fayette, every fiend and tout and runner understands; they know with a certainty to rival the faith of any religion that no one will miss his daily blast.

Against that, there will be no victory. Not if you come up Fayette Street with bulldozers and knock over every rowhouse between downtown and Bon Secours. Shit on that; the slingers and fiends would be out here in the rubble, slinging pink-top vials. Not if you call out the National Guard or put police officers on every corner; do that and they’ll move five blocks, or ten blocks, or twenty, until there’s an open-air market savaging some new neighborhood and you’ve run out of cops and guardsmen.

But you still want it to work. Of course you do.

Try napalm.

Seriously. One of those Rolling Thunder air strikes might do it. Because that Marine commander with the sage wit had it right: Only if you’re willing to destroy the village can you be absolutely assured of saving it. Don’t bother with surgical strikes for the Fayette Streets of this nation; if you want victory, you’ve got to send these people right back to the proverbial Stone Age, because anyone left standing will be back on their corners the next day. Or better still, some New York Boy will figure out how to boil down the jellied gas you’ve been dropping, and the fiends will be lining up to buy that new, wild ride in $10 vials.

A cleansing of that kind might actually work. But of course, we can’t do something even modestly genocidal and expect to stay the same ourselves, to maintain the myth of a national ideal. A war waged openly on the underclass would necessitate some self-inflicted scars, some damage to the collective soul of whatever kind of nation we think we
are. And if we can’t stomach that kind of horror show, perhaps the only real alternative is to keep pretending, to keep telling ourselves that it’s only a matter of a stronger law or a better mousetrap or this year’s model of shit-spinning politician swearing that he’s the one to really get tough on crime.

So we ignore these dying neighborhoods, or run from them if they creep too close. In the end we know we can always cash in our chips, climb to the embassy roof and ride that last Huey to suburbia or some well-policed yuppie enclave in the best quadrants of our cities. We’ve got a right to walk away because it’s our world; hell, we’ve got the tax returns to prove it.

But how far can we run from New York and Detroit, from Atlanta and Newark, from West Baltimore and East St. Louis? How many county lines must we cross before the damned of these cities will no longer follow? How many private security guards can we hire? How many motion sensors do we need? This is different, this war, and instinctively we know that retreat from it can never be total. These people that we’re ready to abandon, they are not an alien foe—their tribe is our own. And these battlefields are not half a world away in places easily forgotten. This is us, America, at war with ourselves. In some weird way, this is our own manifest destiny coming back to bite us in the ass, the pure-pedigreed descendant of all those God-fearing forefathers plunging into the wilderness, stripping the land, looking to feed off their new world, killing and being killed, opening up the east and marching west. Now, it’s a twisted replay of that devouring, except that this time, we’re the fodder.

We know this deep down; we read the newspapers, we watch the television. We have and they have not, and therefore, they need us. They need us so badly that they’ll cross the lines and dodge the rent-a-cops and climb any wall we build. And in the end, there is no real surprise when you hear that your neighbor’s car is gone. Or that the counter guy at the local 7-Eleven got aced in a robbery last night. Or that someone you work with pulled up to the pumps at the Route 32 Exxon and got carjacked. There should be no surprise when you come to that hideous moment for which you’ve spent a lifetime preparing, when you or someone you love walks down the wrong block, or into the wrong parking garage. In an instant, the illusions are obliterated and the reckoning—their reckoning—is yours as well.

Thirty years gone and now the drug corner is the center of its own
culture. On Fayette Street, the drugs are no longer what they sell or use, but who they are. We may have begun by fighting a war on drugs, but now we’re beating down those who use them. And along Fayette Street, the enemy is everywhere, so that what began as a wrongheaded tactical mission has been transformed into slow-motion civil war. If we never seriously contemplate alternatives, if we forever see the order of battle in terms of arrests and prisons and lawyers, then perhaps we deserve three more decades of failure.

In the end, we’ll blame them. We always do.

And why the hell not? They’ve ignored our warnings and sanctions, they’ve taken our check-day bribe and done precious little with it, they’ve turned our city streets into drug bazaars. Why shouldn’t they take the blame?

If it was us, if it was our lonesome ass shuffling past the corner of Monroe and Fayette every day, we’d get out, wouldn’t we? We’d endure. Succeed. Thrive. No matter what, no matter how, we’d find the fucking exit.

If it was our fathers firing dope and our mothers smoking coke, we’d pull ourselves past it. We’d raise ourselves, discipline ourselves, teach ourselves the essentials of self-denial and delayed gratification that no one in our universe ever demonstrated. And if home was the rear room of some rancid, three-story shooting gallery, we’d rise above that, too. We’d shuffle up the stairs past nodding fiends and sullen dealers, shut the bedroom door, turn off the television, and do our schoolwork. Algebra amid the stench of burning rock; American history between police raids. And if there was no food on the table, we’re certain we could deal with that. We’d lie about our age to cut taters and spill grease and sling fries at the sub shop for five-and-change-an-hour, walking every day past the corner where friends are making our daily wage in ten minutes.

No matter. We’d persevere, wouldn’t we? We’d work that job by night and go to class by day, by some miracle squeezing a quality education from the disaster that is the Baltimore school system. We’d do all the work, we’d pay whatever the price. And when all the other children are out in the street, learning the corner world, priming themselves for the only life they’ve ever known, we’d be holed up in some shithole of a rowhouse with our textbooks and yellow highlighter, cramming for finals. Come payday, we wouldn’t blow that minimum-wage check on Nikes, or Fila sweat suits, or Friday night movies at Harbor Park with the
neighborhood girls. No fucking way, brother, because we pulled self-esteem out of a dark hole somewhere and damned if our every desire isn’t absolutely in check. We don’t need to buy any status; no, we can save every last dollar, or invest it, maybe. And in the end, we know, we’ll head off to our college years shining like a new dime, swearing never to set foot on West Fayette Street again.

That’s the myth of it, the required lie that allows us to render our judgments. Parasites, criminals, dope fiends, dope peddlers, whores—when we can ride past them at Fayette and Monroe, car doors locked, our field of vision cautiously restricted to the road ahead, then the long journey into darkness is underway. Pale-skinned hillbillies and hard-faced yos, toothless white trash and gold-front gangsters—when we can glide on and feel only fear, we’re well on the way. And if, after a time, we can glimpse the spectacle of the corner and manage nothing beyond loathing and contempt, then we’ve arrived at last at that naked place where a man finally sees the sense in stretching razor wire and building barracks and directing cattle cars into the compound.

It’s a reckoning of another kind, perhaps, and one that becomes a possibility only through the arrogance and certainty that so easily panies a well-planned and well-tended life. We know ourselves, we believe in ourselves; from what we value most, we grant ourselves the illusion that it’s not chance and circumstance, that opportunity itself isn’t the defining issue. We want the high ground; we want our own worth to be acknowledged. Morality, intelligence, values—we want those things measured and counted. We want it to be about Us.

Yes, if we were down there, if we were the damned of the American cities, we would not fail. We would rise above the corner. And when we tell ourselves such things, we unthinkly assume that we would be consigned to places like Fayette Street fully equipped, with all the graces and disciplines, talents and training that we now possess. Our parents would still be our parents, our teachers still our teachers, our broker still our broker. Amid the stench of so much defeat and despair, we would kick fate in the teeth and claim our deserved victory. We would escape to live the life we were supposed to live, the life we are living now. We would be saved, and as it always is in matters of salvation, we know this as a matter of perfect, pristine faith.

Why? The truth is plain:

We were not born to be niggers.

“It’s fucked up,” R.C. says.

The rest of the crew is equally angry. They discovered this corner, worked and nurtured it. As much as they own anything in this world, they own Gilmor and McHenry. Now, suddenly, the C.M.B. crew finds that its real estate has drawn the attentions of a rival.