Читать книгу The Corner - David Simon - Страница 10

TWO

We can’t stop it.

Not with all the lawyers, guns, and money in this world. Not with guilt or morality or righteous indignation. Not with crime summits, or task forces, or committees. Not with policy decisions made in places that can’t be seen from the lost corner of Fayette and Monroe. No lasting victory in the war on drugs can be bought by doubling the number of beat cops or tripling the number of prison beds. No peace can come from kingpin statutes and civil forfeiture laws and warrantless searches and whatever the hell else is about to be tossed into next year’s omnibus crime bill.

Down on Fayette Street, they know.

Today as on every other day, the shop will be open by midmorning and the touts will be on the corners, chirping out product names as if the stuff is street legal. The runners will bring a little more of the package down and the fiends will queue up to be served—a line of gaunt, passive supplicants stretching down the alley and around the block.

The corner is rooted in human desire—crude and certain and immediate. And the hard truth is that all the law enforcement in the world can’t mess with desire. Down at Fayette and Monroe and every corner like it in Baltimore, the dealers and fiends have won because they are legion. They’ve won because the state of Maryland and the federal government have imprisoned thousands and arrested tens of thousands and put maybe a hundred thousand on the parole and probation rolls—and still it isn’t close to enough. By raw demographics, the men and women of the corners can claim victory. In Baltimore alone—a city of fewer than seven hundred thousand souls, with some of the highest recorded rates of intravenous drug use in the nation—they are fifty, perhaps even sixty thousand strong—three of them for every available prison bed in the entire state of Maryland. The slingers are manning more than a hundred open-air corners, serving up product as fast as they can get it off a southbound Metroliner. And the fiends are chasing down that blast twenty-four, seven.

In neighborhoods where no other wealth exists, they have constructed an economic engine so powerful that they’ll readily sacrifice everything to it. And make no mistake: that engine is humming. No slacking profit margins, no recessions, no bad quarterly reports, no layoffs, no naturalized unemployment rate. In the empty heart of our cities, the culture of drugs has created a wealth-generating structure so elemental and enduring that it can legitimately be called a social compact.

From the outside looking in, it’s tempting to see this nightmare as a model of supply and demand run amok, as a lawlessness bred from an unenforceable prohibition. But the reckoning at Fayette and Monroe and other places like it has grown into something greater than the medical mechanics of addiction, greater even than the dollars and sense of economic theory.

Get it straight: they’re not just out here to sling and shoot drugs. That’s where it all began, to be sure, but thirty years has transformed the corner into something far more lethal and lasting than a simple marketplace. The men and women who live the corner life are redefining themselves at incredible cost, cultivating meaning in a world that has declared them irrelevant. At Monroe and Fayette, and in drug markets in cities across the nation, lives without any obvious justification are given definition through a simple, self-sustaining capitalism. The corner has a place for them, every last soul. Touts, runners, lookouts, mules, stickup boys, stash stealers, enforcers, fiends, burn artists, police snitches—all are necessary in the world of the corner. Each is to be used, abused, and ultimately devoured with unfailing precision. In this place only, they belong. In this place only, they know what they are, why they are, and what it is that they are supposed to do. Here, they almost matter.

On Fayette Street today, the corner world is what’s left to serve up truth and power, money and meaning. It gives life and takes life. It measures all men as it mocks them. It feeds and devours the multitudes in the same instant. Amid nothing, the corner is everything.

We want it to be about nothing more complicated than cash money and human greed, when at bottom, it’s about a reason to believe. We want to think that it’s chemical, that it’s all about the addictive mind, when instead it has become about validation, about lost souls assuring themselves that a daily relevance can be found at the fine point of a disposable syringe.

It’s about the fiends, thousands of them, who want that good dope, need it the way other souls need to breathe air. Working men on their lunch hour come here, rubbing up against corner dwellers who haven’t seen a job in ten years. White boys from county high schools, quietly praying they won’t get burned for their allowance, stand next to welfare mothers who petition the same god on behalf of their check-day money. Up on Monroe Street, there’s a ninety-one-year-old retiree in the line handing his cash to fourteen-year-old slingers. And down the hill on Mount, there’s that prim little matron who shows up in her Sunday best—print dress, heels, white pillbox hat and veil—a churchgoing woman shuttling between choir and corner. And every other day on Mount or Gilmor Streets, the regulars get a glimpse of that tired little white girl from downtown, the one with the bloated hands who everyone says is some kind of lawyer. Black niggers, white niggers—you get down here at ground zero and, finally, the racial obsessions don’t mean anything. With twenty on the hype hanging in the balance, there’s only the perfect equality of need and desire. Here on Fayette Street, the fiends wait the wait, praying for the same righteous connect, taking a chance and carrying a little piece of the package away. Then they fire up and feel that wave roll and crest.

And it’s about the slingers, the young crews working the packages, all of them willing to trade a morality that they’ve never seen or felt for a fleeting moment of material success. And, true, the money is its own argument—not punch-the-clock, sweep-the-floor, and wait-for-next-Friday money, but cash money, paid out instantly to the vacant-eyed kids serving the stuff. Still, they are working the package with the hidden knowledge that they will fall, that with rare exception, the money won’t last and the ride will be over in six months, or four, or three. They all do it not so much for the cash—which they piss away anyhow—but for a brief sense of self. All of them are cloaked in the same gangster dream, all of them cursed by the lie that says they finally have a stake in something. By such standards, the corner proves itself every day. That it destroys whatever it touches hardly matters; for an instant in time, at least, those who serve the corners have standing and purpose.

This is an existential crisis rooted not only in race—which the corner has slowly transcended—but in the unresolved disaster of the American rust-belt, in the slow, seismic shift that is shutting down the assembly lines, devaluing physical labor, and undercutting the union pay scale. Down on the corner, some of the walking wounded used to make steel, but Sparrows Point isn’t hiring the way it once did. And some used to load the container ships at Seagirt and Locust Point, but the port isn’t what she used to be either. Others worked at Koppers, American Standard, or Armco, but those plants are gone now. All of which means precious little to anyone thriving in the postindustrial age. For those of us riding the wave, the world spins on an axis of technological prowess in an orbit of ever-expanding information. In that world, the men and women of the corner are almost incomprehensibly useless and have been so for more than a decade now.

How do we bridge the chasm? How do we begin to reconnect with those now lost to the corner world? As a beginning, at least, we need to shed our fixed perceptions and see it fresh, from the inside. We’ve got to begin to think as Gary McCullough thinks when he’s flat broke and sick with desire, crawling through some vacant rowhouse in search of scrap metal. Or live, for a moment at least, as Fat Curt lives when he’s staggering back and forth between corner and shooting gallery. Or feel as Hungry feels when he’s out there on a Monroe Street stoop, watching and waiting and gathering himself up for the moment when he’ll creep down the alley and, for the third time that week, grab up some New York Boy’s ground stash, consigning himself to yet another bloody beating because stash-snatching is a caper he knows, and blood or no blood, Hungry will have his daily blast.

We need to start over, to admit that somehow the forces of history and race, economic theory and human weakness have conspired to create a new and peculiar universe in our largest cities. Our rules and imperatives don’t work down here. We’ve got to leave behind the useless baggage of a society and culture that still maintains the luxury of reasonable judgments. Against all the sanction we can muster, this new world is surviving, expanding, consuming everything in its path. To insist that it should be otherwise on the merits of some external morality is to provoke a futile debate. In West Baltimore or East New York, in North Philly or South Chicago, they’re not listening anymore, so how can our best arguments matter?

Consider the corner, for a moment, as something apart from a social disaster, as something that has instead become organic and central within our cities. In the natural world, much is often made of the watering hole, the oasis in a small stand of acacia trees to which creatures great and small come for sustenance. The life-giving elixir brings them all—predators and prey, the vast herds and the solitary wanderers, the long of tooth and those new to this vale. Brick and mortar, asphalt and angles—the corner is no less elemental to the inner cities of America. Day and night they come, lured by coke and dope, ignoring the risks and dangers as any animal in need of a life force must. Wildebeests and zebras, no; the predominant herds on this veld are the hollow-eyed gunners and pipers, driven to the water’s edge by a thirst that cries out from every last cell, each doper or coke fiend reassured against risk by the anonymity of the crowd, by the comfort that greater numbers allow. There are the big cats, the dealers, who rule the turf on reputation and occasional savagery, and the jackals who follow them: burn artists and stash stealers roaming the fringe, feeding on the weak and inattentive. The hyenas, the stickup boys, are nocturnal outcasts whose only allegiance is to opportunity itself. Lumbering elephants? The police, perhaps, who are heard from a distance and arrive with bombast. They rule only where they stand.

Once, it was altogether different. Generations back, it was a hipster’s game, a fringe hustle played out in basements and after-hours clubs. The dope peddlers were few—and anathema; the users cool and carried by bebop rhythms, their addiction more or less a function of social rebellion or alienation. And the numbers? If there were two thousand addicts in the Baltimore of 1958, then the city police department’s three-officer narcotics squad had its hands full. But came the 1960s, and that early innocence was followed hard by the heroin wave that crested in every East Coast city.

In Baltimore, there were $1 capsules for sale in all the Pennsylvania Avenue nightspots, and a single dollar of that ancient shit would drop a dope fiend for the entire day. Demand moved beyond the musicians and beats, out into the back alleys, inching its way toward a handful of corners in the worst housing projects. East side, west side—the dealers, once defiantly anonymous, became success stories for an increasingly alienated ghetto world, bona fide gangster caricatures with territories and soldiers and reputations. Little Melvin, Big Lucille, Gangster Webster, Kid Henderson, Liddie Jones, Snyder Blanchard—these West Baltimore names still ring in the ears of the older players and fiends, names that produced organizations and inspired the next generation of street dealers.

Overnight, the money got serious. The users, an army unto themselves, were serviced daily in back alleys and housing project stairwells by men who were, on some level, careerists, committed to distribution networks that paid them, protected them, paid their bails, and took care of their people when they went away to Hagerstown or Jessup. These men were professional in outlook, lethal but not reckless, and by and large, they lived with an acknowledged code, to wit:

They didn’t use what they sold. They didn’t serve children or use children to serve, just as they wouldn’t sell to wide-eyed virgins looking to skin-pop for the first time. They carried the threat of violence like a cloak, but in the end, they didn’t shoot someone unless someone needed to get shot. When a bullet was necessary, there were always pros available—Dennis Wise or Vernon Collins by name—men willing, in the Pennsylvania Avenue gangster parlance, to get in close, take aim, and hit the right nigger. What was bad for business was hunted with a vengeance: stickup boys, if they survived, carried a bounty on their heads; burn artists were driven deep into the shadows.

This earlier generation stayed serious, cautious. On a business level at least, they understood responsibility and were therefore responsible with the package. More often than not, the count was exactly right and all the cash got turned over on time. They took precautions; they wouldn’t sell to just anyone who came past. They knew what a dope fiend looked like. If they didn’t know your name or face, they’d check your shoe leather, your clothes, your build, the veins on your arms—all of it was scrutinized because, in the end, it was pure humiliation for them to serve a police. They were a fixture in the neighborhood, but they were discreet. They took your money, but ten minutes might pass and they’d be half a block away before some other drone handed you the glassine bag. They could jail if they had to, but they tried their damnedest to stay out of the cuffs. To them, a charge was something to be avoided at all costs, and, by and large, when a charge came, they didn’t snitch; they worked the lawyers to limit the time.

By the mid-1970s, a succession of federal task forces had knocked down most of the name dealers: Melvin was in Lewisburg; Liddie, in Marion; Gangster Webster would soon fall to a fifty-year bit; Kid Henderson was dead and Big Lucille Wescott, dying. But the seeds they planted surpassed them and grew to maturity. Their children numbered in the tens of thousands and were now down on the neighborhood corners, no longer a mere irritant on the periphery, but out in the open and in full opposition to the community. The organized drug rings shifted, merged, diverged, then shifted again. Still, on some basic level, the code was maintained—at least until the coke came.

Cocaine changed the world.

The heroin trade was limited to the hardcore, but the arrival of cheap, plentiful cocaine in the early and mid-1980s broke down all the barriers and let everyone play. Both are white powder, but each has a distinct, pharmacological flavor: Dope is the downer, the heavy; a couple of trips to the corner, a $20 investment and a fiend has enough in him to suffer the day. Coke is the rush to the wire, all of it gone in a flash and never enough to slake that thirst. With heroin, even the hungriest fiend can look to a limit; coke demands that every bill that can be begged or borrowed or stolen goes up to the corner. And unless a fiend is set on firing speedballs, coke can go in clean—no need for any squeamishness about the syringe. A pipe and a nugget of ready rock does fine; even a quick snort is enough for the rush. In the beginning, they said it wasn’t even addictive—not like dope anyway; they called it “girl” or “Jane” or “Missy” in feminine contrast to “boy” or “John” or “Mister” for king heroin.

But coke has a power all its own. When coke hit Baltimore in the mid-1980s, it went beyond the existing addict population, gathering a new market share, for the first time bringing the women to the corner in startling numbers. More white boys came for it, too, some of them from the hillbilly neighborhoods just down the hill, others from the farthest reaches of suburbia. And many of them kept coming back—four or five times an hour—feeding their frenzy until the money ran out. And where once the coke fiends began their tour with a snort, by the late eighties most of the trade was on the pipe, smoking up that boiled-down rock. Crack, they called it in New York. Ready rock, cried the Fayette Street touts. Got that ready.

By the turn of the decade, the survivors graduated to speedballs, mainlining the coke and dope together for the ultimate rush. The heroin was the base; it leveled you out and got you well. The coke went on top, for that extra boost that morphine always lacked. Baltimore stumbled and staggered through the decade-long cocaine epidemic, emerging in the mid-1990s as the city with the highest rate of intravenous drug use in the country, according to government estimates. And of the tens of thousands of hardcore users, the vast majority were using coke and dope simultaneously. Even those fearful of the needle could find snorting-heroin that was 60 percent pure, then top that off with a pipeful of ready.

Old-time dopers were disgusted. To them, heroin alone seemed a reasoned lifestyle choice when compared to the havoc that followed. Watching the pipers and speedballers get bum-rushed on the corners, they would shake their heads and mutter. Even to them, it was lowbottom addiction. Even to them, it was pathetic.

With heroin alone, the sources of supply seemed finite and organizational; access was limited to those with a genuine connection to the New York suppliers, who had, in turn, cultivated a connection to a small number of importers. The cocaine epidemic changed that as well, creating a freelance market with twenty-year-old wholesalers supplying seventeen- year-old dealers. Anyone could ride the Amtrak or the Greyhound to New York and come back with a package. By the late eighties, the professionals were effectively marginalized in Baltimore; cocaine and the open market made the concept of territory irrelevant to the city drug trade.

It didn’t stop there either. Cocaine kicked the dealer’s code in the ass, because as the organizations gave way, so did standards. On every corner, street dealers began using minors, first as lookouts and runners, then as street-level slingers. In the beginning, these were the toughest kids, the criminal prodigies born and bred in the most distressed families, welcomed by dealers who were contending with stiffened penalties for sale. It made sense to hire juveniles for the street work: Why risk a five-year bit when any fifteen-year-old with heart could sling vials, take a charge, then carry whatever weight a juvenile court master might put on him?

It was a reasonable strategy at first, but ten years down the road the internal logic was no longer valid—amid chronic prison overcrowding, few adults were getting time for street-level drug distribution in Baltimore; probation and pretrial time served was the order of the day. Yet the children stayed on the corners, not so much as camouflage, but because good help was hard to find.

The code had failed: the touts, the runners, even the street-level dealers were violating the cardinal rule and using their own product. And not just dope—which might have permitted some stability—but coke, or coke and dope together; the pipeheads graduated to heroin, the dope fiends speedballed. And somewhere in this wild cocktail party, the packages started coming up short, the money began disappearing, and the touts and lookouts were suddenly wandering off post. Down on Fayette Street, reliability was out the window and not even the threat of violence could stop Country from putting a quarter of Scar’s package up his nose, or Eggy Daddy from claiming that he had to give sixty dollars of Gee Money’s profit to some imaginary stickup boy. What was a slinger to do?

The children weren’t exactly captains of industry either; they’d mess up in their own way, if you let them. But most weren’t using anything harder than weed, and most were ready and willing to work conscientiously for a bit of pocket money. In contrast to the hardcore fiends, dealers came to see that you could extract some loyalty from adolescents, or intimidate them if necessary. The teenagers would, in turn, bring in younger kids to sling and run for them, until, at last, the day of the ten-year-old drug dealer was at hand.

The trend only accelerated as more young mothers went to the corner chasing coke, and single-parent families already under pressure began to implode. More than heroin ever did, cocaine battered at what had for generations been the rock-hard foundation for the urban black family. Heroin had been claiming its share of West Baltimore men for thirty years, but the cheap cocaine of the 1980s had turned the women out, bringing them to the corner in numbers previously unthinkable. Where once, on Fayette Street, there had been a network of single mothers who managed to get the essentials done, there was now raw anarchy in many homes. And where a discussion of single-parent households once seemed relevant to places like Fayette Street, now there loomed the new specter of children who were, in reality, parentless.

Unattended and undisciplined, these children were raising themselves in the street, free to begin their inexorable drift, drawn not only by quick money, but by the game of it. Thirteen-year-olds who had cut classes and played hoops and run the back alleys together now banded together as a crew, playing gangster, slinging vials, and ducking the police. In West Baltimore, the corner became the funhouse, offering camaraderie and standing and adventure. What, after all, could compete with the thrill of suddenly being The Man, of having your own bomb of a package on a corner, standing there under the sodium-vapor lights as grown men and women seek you out and commence to begging? This one wants a job as a tout; this one is short four bills and asking to slide; that one offers her body for three vials. And in the end, it wasn’t just the valedictorians of Hickey School and Boys Village and every other state juvenile facility out there on the corner, it was all save the stoop kids—the well-parented few who weren’t allowed beyond their front steps. All across the inner city—from Lafayette Courts to Sandtown to Cherry Hill—slinging drugs was the rite of passage.

When children became the labor force, the work itself became childlike, and the organizational structure that came with heroin’s first wave was a historical footnote. In the 1990s, the drug corner is modeled on nothing more complicated than a fast-food emporium, an environment in which dealing drugs requires about as much talent and finesse as serving burgers. No discretion, no precautions; the modern corner has no need for the applied knowledge of previous generations.

Where once a competent street dealer would never be caught touching the dope, the more brainless of his descendants now routinely carries the shit in one pocket, money in the other. Wiser souls might work a ground stash—a small inventory of coke or dope hidden in the weeds or rubbish a few feet away—but ten minutes after selling out, they’ll be out under a streetlight, counting their grip, manicuring the $10 and $5 bills into a clean roll and fairly begging for the attentions of a knocker or stickup artist. Close scrutiny of customers has become anachronism, too. The new school serves anyone—known fiends and strangers, ragged or well-heeled, white or black, young or old, in battered pickups or fresh-off-the-lot BMWs—with an indifference as careless as it is democratic.

The precision and subtlety of the game have been replaced by raw retailing—open-air bazaars with half a dozen crews out on post, barking the names of their product like Lexington Market grocers. Corners are crowded with competing crews, each pushing the claim that their own product is true and righteous. With heroin, labels are stamped right on the glassine packet: Killer Bee, Lethal Weapon, The Terminator, Diamond in the Raw, Tec Nine. Free testers are tossed out every morning as word-of-mouth advertising for the coming package, and the touts are constantly trumpeting blue-light specials: two for the price of one, or a free vial of coke with every dime of dope, or family-size packets offering much more blast for just a little more cash. Where only $10 vials of coke are being sold, a fresh crew can carve a niche with a $5 offering. And if one crew’s product is too good to match straight up, a competing group might lace its package with a little strychnine—a bomb that might or might not drop a fiend dead, but definitely gets his attention either way.

Dealers and fiends alike go about this business with a herdlike trust in their own overwhelming numbers to protect them from the random drug arrest. Violence, too, is no longer the prerogative of the professional but a function of impulse and emotion. The contract killers and the well-planned assassinations of earlier eras are mere myth on these corners. Now, the moment of truth generally comes down to some manchild with hurt feelings waving a .380 around and spraying bullets up and down the block. The accidental shooting of bystanders—a rare event in the organizational era—is now commonplace. As for snitching, that part of the code is also dead and buried. No organizational ethic makes sense when everyone is shorting and getting shorted by everyone else, when loyalty is absent even within a crew that grew up together. In the new order, anyone can and will say anything for even the smallest advantage.

When the arrests come, they are regarded as routine misadventures, small setbacks that in most cases mean little more than a few nights on a city jail tier, followed by an appointment with a state probation officer that is, more often than not, ignored. Worse still, the absence of a real deterrent has bred a stupidity in the new school that is, for lack of a better word, profound. Few seem to learn from the experience of getting caught; they take the same charge time and again, jacked up by the same police who use the same tricks to gather the same evidence from the same corners. At times, the younger ones senselessly provoke the charge through pride and bluster as no old-timer would; eyefuck for eyefuck, curse for curse, insult for insult, until Collins or Pitbull or Peanuthead is out of the cruiser and swinging the nightstick hard, enraged at being called a bitch by some seventeen-year-old hopper.

Once charged, there is no strategy or defense, nothing for the lawyers to work with, no attempt to limit time because, in most cases, there is no time. When someone does finally go away for a year or two on a fourth or fifth offense, well, it’s all in the game. Prison itself is regarded with vague indifference: The operant corner logic is that the hardcore gangster stance is what matters, that if it’s time to jail, then you jail. You carry it like it means nothing, telling yourself the old prison-tier lie that says you really only do two days—the day you go in and the day you come out.

Cocaine and the expanding marketplace have changed the landscape of the corner, forging a boomtown industry that has room not only for the professional criminals and the committed addicts who have lingered on the fringe of the neighborhood for so long, but for everyone and anyone. Men and women, parents and children, the fools and the clever ones, even the derelicts and outcasts who had no viable role when drug distribution was a structured enterprise—all are assimiliated into the corner world of the 1990s. At Fayette and Monroe and so many other corners in so many other cities, it’s nothing more or less than the amateur hour.

And why not? Consider the food chain of the average drug corner, the ready fodder for all the ambo runs and police calls:

At the top are, of course, the dealers, ranging from disciplined New York Boys to fifteen-year-old locals who manage to parlay Nike and Nautica money into a package of their own. The stereotypes no longer apply; every now and then a showpiece with gold chains and an Armani shirt pops out of a Land Rover with custom rims, but for the most part, there’s little flash to the drug slingers making real money.

There is no singular connection, no citywide cartel to enforce discipline and carve up territory. Looking up the skirt of the wholesale market from Fayette and Monroe, the drug sources are random and diffuse. A supplier could be a twenty-five-year-old Nigerian fresh from airport customs or a New Yorker in his thirties with a line back to his uncle in the Bronx, a seventeen-year-old junior at Southwestern who sat down next to the right kid in homeroom, or even a fifty-year-old veteran of the old westside heroin organizations, coming home from Lewisburg or Marion after doing ten of a twenty-five-year stint and hooking up with some younger heads for one last fling.

The product itself is, by and large, ready to sell. Gone are the days of uncut dope on the table and four or five gangsters battling the scale, trying to get the purity down and maximize profit. Gone are the cut-buddies, who could wield the playing cards and mannitol with skill to ensure a proper package. Much of what sells on a Baltimore corner is purchased as a prepackaged item with little assembly required. A G-pack of a hundred coke vials, sold on consignment, can make you one thousand dollars, with six hundred kicked back to the supplier. Do that a couple times, then ride the bus or the rails to New York, catch the IRT up to Morningside Heights or the Grand Concourse and lay down the grip; what comes back is precut product, with the equivalent number of vials all neatly wrapped. No math, no chemistry—a sixth-grader with patience and a dull blade can fill the vials and be on a corner inside of an hour. Do that two or three times, ride the rails with one thousand dollars or so and you can come back home with two full ounces. Turn that over and—even allowing for short counts and spillage and fuckups—you’ve got five or six thousand. Same game, different numbers with dope, but either way, you’re a businessman. On most corners, if you can last two weeks without messing up, you’re the reincarnation of Meyer Lansky. The bottom line is this: Anyone who can work the numbers, dodge the stickup boys, and muster enough patience to stand on a corner for six hours a day can call himself a drug dealer.

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.

How could it be otherwise? Day after goddamn day, the corner proves itself and, by extension, every idiot on the corner is proven as well. Touts, runners, fiends—they’re always where you expect them to be, stand-around-and-serve prophets of the new logic; they speak and you believe.

So when you go up to Fayette and Monroe and hear that your rap buddy just fell dead after slamming some Red Tops, you barely miss a beat. Fuck it, the prophet tells you, he didn’t know how to shoot coke, not the way you do. Never mind that you were gunning with the dead man for a decade, never mind that you shared a hype with him a hundred times, never mind that he’s pounded on your chest to bring you back more than once, he ain’t shit now. Just another no-doping, skin-popping, scramble-shooting punk, says the corner. Nigger wasn’t serious like you; couldn’t handle the good shit. And you believe it; you want the Red Tops.

The corner prophet knows.

You go to court and the downtown judge gives you five years suspended, tells you you’re on supervised probation. Fuck that, says the prophet. If you report and then mess up, they can find you; if you don’t report, they ain’t got no record of you. And you, of course, do like the prophet says, thinking you’re getting over when you ain’t. A month or two later, you take a charge and they drag your ass from city jail to the downtown courthouse. The same prune-faced judge looks down at you, talking about how you’re in violation of probation, talking about how you’re gonna eat the whole five years. And you do the bit, come back from Hagerstown, go back up to the same corner and find that motherfucker. Yo, what up?

And the prophet just looks at you like you’re some kind of fool, talking about how you can get locked up for that shit, saying you should have reported.

And you don’t miss a beat. You nod your head in agreement because, the man’s a got-damn prophet; his shit has to be true. And when the next problem comes around, there you are again on the same corner, looking for more of the same.

“I’m saying, I can’t get rid of this hole, man,” you tell him, rolling up your sleeve to show a dime-sized crater. The prophet just shakes his head and a neophyte jumps into the lull, offering advice.

“Ain’t no hole, man,” says the newcomer. “That an abscess. You gotta get some ointment. Go to the emergency room, they got to give it to you. Clean it right up.”

“Fuck that,” you tell him. “I’m saying, you go there, you got to wait all day. Man, they don’t got no time for no niggers. See, what I’m saying, I can’t be doing that, man. I’m saying, this nigger got things to do.”

And, of course, the prophet finally steps up.

“Shit, you want to clean it up or what?” he asks.

“Yeah, what I’m saying …”

“Get yourself some eggs, two should do it,” the prophet says. “Boil ’em up in a pot ’til they hard. Then you gotta peel ’em real careful like. You want to get that thin skin, be under the shell? You know what I’m talking about, be under the shell?”

“Yeah, uh-huh.”

“You got to peel that off and stick it over the holes. Wrap it up in some gauze. Word up: two weeks. It be like these.”

The prophet shows you the back of his left hand. “Them the kind of scar you get.”

You’re not sure.

“Fuck it, I don’t give a shit if your motherfucking arm falls off,” says the prophet. “That’s on you.”

“No, I’m saying I ain’t heard about doing that. That’s all. I’m saying, it might work. You probably right.”

Two weeks and a dozen eggs later you’re pulling the gauze off your arm and, of course, the hole is now the size of a quarter. And when you go back to the corner prophet, he tells you he don’t know shit about eggs. Potatoes, he tells you. Boiled potatoes are the cure. For a moment or two, you shake your head and curse the prophet, but two hours later you’re pricing spuds at the Super Fresh, though in the end, you’ll say to hell with it. No time for boiling shit up or waiting around emergency rooms. The corner knows; you’re not about fixing the hole in your arm, you’re about that blast.

So you learn: The prophet never lies; he can’t be wrong. As it is for every other wandering animal, the watering hole is the only truth you can afford. It owns you, uses you, kicks your ass, robs your mind, and grinds your body down. But day after lonesome day, it gives you life.

For twenty on the hype, you believe.

Fat Curt lies still on a dirt-slicked mattress as the wind pushes through the cracks of the boarded-up windows, barely breaking stride before it rushes through the darkened rooms. All around him, the moans and coughs and curses of comrades scattered on makeshift bedrolls blend with groans from the boards and joists of Blue’s old house.

Hard soldiering in a hard winter. Curt sheds the tatter of blankets and clothing that have covered him through a February night, throwaways and giveaways layered one atop another for enough warmth to keep the old heart pumping. Curt gropes for his cane, finding it at the edge of the mattress. He plants the rubber tip into the weathered floorboard and slowly shifts his weight forward. He grabs the middle of the cane with his left hand and, with a long grunt, pries himself up and out. Swollen hands grip the walking stick as he fights off a wave of vertigo; swollen feet pad between a sprawl of bodies in the front room.

“Hey Curt.”

“Hey.”

Pimp props himself against a bare wall.

“What time is it?”

Pimp asking the time, like he’s got somewhere to be. Curt shakes his head: “Time to get on out there.”

Curt stumbles down the narrow corridor and through a sea of trash in the stripped-bare kitchen, heading for the back door. He leans down on his cane to make an exit through the broken-out bottom panels, doing a sideways limbo to get to the morning sunlight in the back alley. Hungry is out there already, his head bandaged from his latest misadventure with a New York dealer.

“He up here yet?”

Hungry shakes his head, a loose flap of white gauze fluttering in the wind. Not yet. Curt’s up and out, but you can’t punch the clock without a package.

He makes his way up the alley and out onto Monroe, but the early morning sun is lost in the shadow of the rowhouses on the east side of the street. So he canes his way down to Fayette Street, crossing over to the grocery and finding some pavement warmed by the day. The Korean is sweeping around the store entrance and Curt mumbles a greeting. The Korean nods, then waits, broom in hand, too polite to ask Curt to move. Curt senses this and returns the favor, stepping to the other side of the corner but still staying with the sun.

There he stands for the next hour or so, rooted on the corner that he has known his whole life, waiting for the rising tide of the day to pick him up and carry him along. Brothers-in-arms slide out of the alley, squinting in the sunlight, hunting up the morning’s first Newport and telling the early-bird customers to hang in there, to go around the block once or twice more until things pick up.

Curt watches Eggy Daddy and Pimp drift up to the corner: Eggy, looking no worse for the wear, pretty good considering; Pimp, now stick-thin from the Bug. Bryan follows them out of the alley carrying the piss bucket, dumping a night’s fill into the gutter, then returning the metal pail to Blue’s back door.

From the other direction, Bread saunters up smiling, looking a bit warmer than the rest. Bread still has a key to his mother’s back door down the hill on Fayette, a warrior living all for the corner but keeping that one last connection to the world left behind, sleeping in his mother’s basement when the winter chill is on. Still, Curt gives Bread some due as a soldier, because the man’s been out here forever, as long as Curt even. He’s forty-six and a legendary fixture, running and gunning dope at Monroe and Fayette since the corner lampposts were twigs.

“You look like a frog,” he tells Curt.

“Yeah,” Curt agrees. “Layin’ down, the fluid come up and swell my face.”

“Yeah, you swole all right.”

“Makes my eyes pop out and shit,” Curt grunts. “Like a got-damn bullfrog.”

“Maybe I get Charlene to come past an’ kiss you,” says Bread, nodding at the tired form of Charlene Mack across the street. “You be a prince then.”

“Sheeeet,” says Curt, laughing aloud, a joyous rumble welling up in his dry throat and bursting out. Bread laughs, too, delighted to have put pleasure on his old friend’s face. Making people smile is Bread’s best game, really. He doesn’t tout or sell much; nor is Bread one to go off the corner to boost or burglarize. Instead, he gets most of his dope because people like him, because he genuinely makes them want to share their blast.

“So what’s up?”

“Either they late or I’m early.”

There are enough of them now—prospective touts and lookouts—to open shop, as well as a handful of hungry fiends waiting listlessly at the entrance to Vine Street. Curt’s brother, Dennis, is across the street by the liquor store, bumming a smoke from Scalio. And just down the block is Smitty, collecting aluminum cans in a plastic bag, singing in his pitch-perfect tenor.

One after the other, the dealers drift in—Gee, Shamrock, Dred, Nitty, Tiny—and assess the labor pool. They find their hires, set their wages, and ante up the day’s first installment—the up-front blast to get the corner crew alive and working. Curt goes with Dred today; he’ll do some touting, maybe even work from his own ground stash on Vine Street.

But later for that. Right now, it’s back into Blue’s, all of them moving down the alley like cattle, heading back into the vacant rowhouse where Rita is already up, candle burning bright, adding to the daylight that streams from the gaps in the plywood boards. Strips of cloth are laid out on a battered wooden table; bottle caps, matches, and fresh water surrounded by dozens of dead-bent cigarette butts—a surgical amphitheater for the doctoring to come. And, of course, almost everyone but Rita is impatient, some jostling for a better position in the queue. Curt brings Bread along with him, and the two wait their turn quietly. Skinny Pimp, too, doesn’t bicker; he’s in the corner on a dirty bedroll, feeling a little too weak to stand around forever holding his place in line.

“Who next?”

“Naw … me.”

But Rita imposes her calm on the group. She’s the medicine woman, the tribal herbalist, the mother hen that all of them come to see. In every way that matters, she’s a professional—with a few weeks of nursing classes somewhere in her history—and she expects her clientele to act accordingly.

“Hold your horses,” she tells them.

Those willing and able to hit themselves go off to do just that. The rest wait their turn at Rita’s table in the front room: some because they’re not handy with a needle; others because their veins have retreated to portions of their bodies that can be reached only by a second party; others still because Rita is simply that good. From one end of the room to the other, they gear up, prepping the flesh for the doctor’s grand rounds. This one rubs his neck to get the juices going; that one drops his pants for a shot in the ass; the next soul ties up his arm and slaps at cratered skin, searching for a passage home.

“What’s working for you?” Rita asks, consulting with the patients as every good doctor does, asking them how they’re getting off lately and where the blood still flows. She probes amid old graveyards of tracks and scabs, feeling her way through the terrain like a dowser hunting water. And then, at last, she’s in and they’re on, the pinkish cloud rising into the syringe as bottom-line proof.

Rita Hale rarely blows a shot, rarely leaves the dope and coke in a knotted, puffing lump under the skin, veinless and trapped—the wasted-time-and-money mark of an amateur. Nor does she cheat—a fact that truly marks her as special—because the search for an honest shooting gallery doctor can be as exhausting as the quest for an honest auto mechanic. Her line of work is crowded with those who can’t resist taking advantage of the helpless, but Rita will never pluck a patient. She’s not about watering them down, or switching bottle caps, or blowing B-and-Q in their veins. There are shooting galleries in which the desperate and the naive are used and abused by the house staff. In such places, a newcomer asking for help getting on will get plenty of attention from a veteran. The old-timer will take the chump’s tool and tell him to turn his head, the better to see that ripe vein bulging in his neck. And then, with a practiced motion too quick for the eye to follow, he’s dropped the rube’s hard-won dope in his pocket and come out with an empty breakaway. So the new-comer gets blasted with nothing more than the sting of cold air or maybe water. Rubbing a swollen bubble of skin, he’ll start to bitch. But the old-timer will stand pat, shaking his head. Feel that bubble, he tells him. You feel that? That’s your shit. Told you don’t move, but you turned your head and see there, you blew your shot.

There’s no such sleight-of-hand with Rita. She’s not only good with a spike, she’s willing to earn her keep. And why cheat? For plying her trade honestly, Rita gets more dope than God. Almost everyone who comes to Blue’s ends up giving her a share of the hype, so that more than anyone in the neighborhood, Rita Hale lives the dope fiend’s purest fantasy—thirty, sometimes forty shots a day—so many that she’s reached that point where she no longer knows how it feels to want or need a blast. It’s a symbiotic relationship: The patients bring whatever the doctor wants and the doctor is always in.

Medicinal work may have saved Rita from the daily travail of the corner world, but her ability to find a vein is a double-edged sword. She’s become an essential service at Blue’s, the only working appliance in the gutted rowhouse, and so, she’s cursed with far too much coke and dope.

A few years back, Rita was among the most beautiful girls in the neighborhood; every man along Fayette Street remembers the curve of her figure, the symmetry of her face, the charm and humor that she brought to any conversation. Rita was something then, but for her the needle wasn’t a part-time adventure. She didn’t cast the straight world aside lightly; she hurled it down. Rita loved dope, and when she learned to doctor, there was nothing that could stop her. Within months, her hands and feet were as cruelly bloated as Fat Curt’s, her skin, cratered and scabbed. But still she kept on until her left upper arm was little more than raw, rotting flesh, the stench strong enough to fill every room of the shooting gallery. A few of the fiends—Curt and Eggy, to name two—tried to warn her, to convince her to go to Bon Secours and give it a rest before she got gangrene. But the others, driven by self-interest, said nothing. Twenty-four, seven, they lined up at her table, though some offered pirated antibiotics and back-street remedies along with her share of the dope and coke.

Eventually, Rita couldn’t leave the shooting gallery. With her body a caricature and her will destroyed, she became a prisoner. She was no fool: all the dope in the world couldn’t kill Rita’s wit and intelligence, and there was never a waking moment when she didn’t face up to how far she had fallen. She was, in a word, ashamed—ashamed of the arm, of the smell, of the extremity of her condition. She wouldn’t bear the looks of emergency room nurses or interns, or the counter help at the corner store, or the children playing on Vine Street. Even the most jaded police couldn’t help but view her with amazement and revulsion; on the rare occasion when they raided the shooting gallery, they’d never include Rita in the lockups. They’d poke her into a back room with their nightsticks, cursing her for the stench, leaving her behind with the cookers and syringes.

Only Blue went beyond talk and acted to save her. It was his house, after all, and he felt some responsibility for the regulars. Time and again, he told Rita to get to the hospital and when every other approach failed, he actually put her out on the street, telling her not to come back until she got treatment. That was two weeks ago. Now, Blue is gone—he took a charge and was sent courtside to the jail on Eager Street—and Rita is back, no better than before.

One after another, they get the blast—the bystanders waiting patiently, focusing on Rita, watching the plunger fall, trying to gauge the rush. Whose dope is better? Who got shit? There’s little time or inclination in the shooting gallery for small talk or theoretical debates, little energy wasted on human relations, on current events or communication for its own sake. When you speak, you speak about dope, or coke, or that motherfucker Bob Brown, or what’s happening on what corner. Nothing else gets heard in this place, except from some rare bird like Gary McCullough, who gets his blast and then breaks etiquette by rambling on about Zen Buddhism. And fuck that shit, everyone else thinks: Shut up and shoot dope.

“What you get there?” Rita asks, ministering to Bread.

“Black-and-White,” says Curt.

“That’ll work, but Spider Bags better.”

Curt grunts disdain. “S’all bullshit out there nowadays,” he tells her. “Nothing but got-damn chemicals. Ain’t been no real dope out here for ten years.”

Curt has the same complaint every morning. Rita smiles and finishes with Bread, then it’s Curt’s turn. Just as she’s finishing up, all hell breaks loose on the second floor—someone up there raising some kind of racket.

Curt goes to the bottom of the stairs and listens. No voices, just scraping and banging sounds from the back bedroom. The tout hesitates, torn between a residual loyalty to Blue and the need to get out on the corner and make a living. Another loud metallic clang seals his decision.

“Damn,” he says, caning slowly up the battered stairs, stopping at the landing to catch his breath. “Got-damn.”

The noise grows louder as he struggles up the last steps, reaching the second floor to see some fiend he half-recalls from somewhere down around Hollins and Payson, a dusty-looking motherfucker who’s been coming to Blue’s for the last few weeks. Curt tries for a name, but comes up empty.

“Ah … hey.”

The fiend looks over, indifferent, then turns back to the business at hand. He rips another piece of aluminum guard from a rear window, stripping what’s left of Blue’s house for a few dollars at the United Iron scales.

“My man, I’m sayin’, you know, it ain’t like we ain’t living here,” Curt offers.

“This your house?”

“Naw, but, y’know …”

“Fuck you then,” says the fiend.

“Man, leave it rest.”

“What you gonna do?”

“I’m just sayin’ give it a rest. You know the man ain’t even home.”

The fiend pauses at that, looking first at the haul of twisted metal on the floor, then back at what’s left on the windows. Curt takes that as a truce of sorts, turns and canes his way back downstairs. It’s time, after all, to punch that clock.

Curt goes back up to the corner to find Dred. He picks up his package, canes down through the alley, down past the litter-strewn lot where the alley tees into Vine Street. He crosses Vine and goes behind a vacant house, and—satisfied that no crudballs are watching—he hides the stash against the crumbling wall of a brick garage. Good enough, he thinks.

He heads back up Vine to Monroe, where all around him the regulars at Blue’s are about the business, each one a small cog in a vast, indifferent machine. The fiends come in ones and twos, most on foot, a few pulling to the curb in cars and trucks; one white girl rides up to cop on a mountain bike. By a little after noon, Curt is halfway through his second bundle. He’s lucky; he’s selling Yellow Bag/Gold Star and it was good yesterday. Now fiends are coming out of the woodwork looking for more of the same, though if the product is anything like what Curt fired that morning, it’s now merely adequate. That’s the way it often is: A product gets a reputation at the beginning of its run, but by the end, the cut takes over and the quality drops precipitously. Still, today’s business on the Yellow Bag circuit is brisk.

A wraith of a woman wearing a torn army jacket, her hair shoveled under a do-rag, makes the turn from Lexington and heads at Curt. She’s yellow-eyed and listing hard to starboard, her feet swamped in heavy brown workboots at least a half-dozen sizes too large.

“What you got?”

“Yellows.”

She cocks an eyebrow.

“It’ll work,” Curt tells her. He won’t oversell. Curt tries to let a little truth into the game, especially with the fiends who are looking sick.

“Hmmm,” she says, picking up on the equivocation. “Who got them Black-and-Whites?”

Curt sends her down toward Fayette, watching as she steers herself past the knots of touts and slingers clustered along the strip. She gets as far as the mouth of the alley in the rear of Fayette. Bryan is there, leaning against the bricks, holding up the back corner of the store, looking for all the world like he’s gainfully employed. She stops and asks. Bryan starts nodding.

Aw shit, thinks Curt, a wrong turn for the little lady. Bryan has nothing at all to do with Black-and-Whites, and this poor girl thinks she’s on the path. Bryan is selling his Arm & Hammer, or baby powder, or whatever else looks pretty and white inside a glassine bag. Boy ought to know better as many times as he’s been shot up behind that lameass shit.

For the next couple of hours, Curt touts and slings and watches the intrigue play out around him. Variations on the same theme that always end the same way, with someone getting over and someone else getting mad. Curt is old enough and wise enough to manage a little distance, to keep his thing separate and distinct. No sense being a pawn in any game other than your own.

Curt sees the McCullough boy come around the corner from Fayette Street to join Kwame—his uncle, Gary’s youngest brother—and Shamrock, Kwame’s running buddy. DeAndre’s been slinging a package with Sham and Kwame for a week now, working Fairmount early in the day and coming up the hill in the afternoons. Curt watches the boy make a few quick sales on Vine, the product coming right out of his pocket. Young people got no sense, thinks Curt, shaking his head at the sight.

The day grinds on. Curt sells, then gets his midday jolt at Blue’s, then heads back out to the corner for more of the same. About three or so, the police roll through—not Bob Brown, but some of the downtown folk—riding up Lexington, then down Monroe, then screeching to a halt at the mouth of Vine Street. Curt turns politely toward Fayette Street and begins caning away at half-speed, giving the knockers their due though they’re actually rousting some younger crew on Vine. Ten yards ahead of him, Curt sees DeAndre McCullough step quickly toward the liquor store. Just before turning the corner, he digs into his pocket and passes a plastic baggie to Tyrone, Ronnie Boice’s brother. Tyrone stuffs the baggie down his dip and strolls across the street, DeAndre seeks the protection of the store, and Curt can’t help but laugh.

The knockers, of course, don’t come anywhere near DeAndre or Tyrone, choosing instead one of the young dealers they caught raising up on them as they turned into the block. They stay up at Vine, standing by their idling Cavalier, waiting for the wagon as the rest of the corner world drifts off, allowing them a respectful distance. Minutes later, DeAndre comes out of the liquor store, looks up and down the street, then around the corner on Fayette.

“Where Tyrone at?” he asks the wind.

Curt, within earshot, half-shrugs. Boy must be joking. Can’t no one say where exactly Tyrone Boice might be, Curt muses, but wherever he is, your coke is right there with him and they getting along together just fine. DeAndre, wounded and bitter, waits a few minutes more, then stalks away.

Boy, you too young, Curt wants to tell him, too easy a mark. There was a time not long back when Curt or some other old-timer might’ve stepped up and said something, a time when a little wisdom might’ve mattered. Even on the corner, there was a day when people weren’t afraid to talk to each other. Or to listen. Curt can remember how they once would’ve chased the McCullough boy’s young ass home, told him not to be messing with things that weren’t for him. And a burn artist like Bryan, too, would’ve heard a little something about right and wrong.

And back in the day, they might’ve actually listened, or if they didn’t listen, at least they’d know the advice was from the heart. Like that day a few years back when Joe Laney, the lowest of the low-bottom, slash-stealing, game-running Fayette Street dope fiends shocked everyone and started chasing N.A. meetings. But even clean, Laney was coming up to Monroe and Fayette every day because, well, he had no other place to go. And Curt knew what had to be said.

He walked up and told him—one soldier to another—well now, seeing as you don’t want anything up here, you shouldn’t be hanging. And Joe heard this and knew it to be true, finding in Curt’s words an absolution, a good-luck wish for a new life.

Nowadays, though, the right word to the wrong person would get your ass shot up. So Bryan burns the customers and DeAndre wanders up and down Monroe Street, and Curt, as he often does, sees the future before it happens but says nothing.

In the end, Fat Curt has become more of a spectator than a player at Monroe and Fayette—not only because the corner has changed, but because Curt has changed as well. He would never complain about it—“I like to shoot dope,” he assures people—but somehow, Curt has outlived his time. All that running, all that gunning, and now, his body is giving out.

It’s a cruel but routine fate for a man who has given his entire adult life to the streets of West Baltimore. He had chased heroin with complete abandon, asking for very little in return beyond a good day’s blast, a few creature comforts, and—at least within the world of the corner itself—a degree of camaraderie and, yes, even dignity. At least in principle, the good day’s blast is still out here, but Curt has been stripped bare of every last comfort until even walking is an exercise in agony. Worse still, there is no longer any joy for him in the everyday life on the corner: The friendships, connectedness, and shared humor that the old code had made possible have been supplanted by bickering and violence and desperation. Curt, who had lived by that code, couldn’t settle comfortably into the new anarchy or find the human element that makes a hard life livable. To the older heads on the corner, he is still an oracle, but to the younger hoppers, Curt is merely one tout among many. If you were to tell them the whole story—the tale as every old head with a memory knows it—they’d have laughed at the idea. Curt? Fat Curt? The nigger on Monroe Street with them Popeye-looking hands?

But it’s true. Curt had a run.

Go back twenty-five years when there was still a viable neighborhood around Monroe and Fayette and there was Fat Curt, out on the edge of it, playing the gangster. He was a man of means, with money in his pocket and a real future in the west side heroin trade. In his early twenties, he fell into a comfortable niche under serious players like Teensy and Ditty and a few of the other homegrown entrepreneurs who had brought a wholesale heroin market to West Baltimore. Curt learned the rules and kept enough of them so that, eventually, he was trusted to make the trips to 116th Street and 8th Avenue—“Little Baltimore,” they called it, because that part of New York was home to many an exile from the black neighborhoods of the harbor city.

Curt made the runs, sometimes by train, sometimes by bus, and once in the city he’d go look up Sadie Briscoe, a Baltimore transplant who made the rent by hooking up the out-of-town crowd with the New York wholesalers. Curt would pass the money and pick up the package and see it safely to a Baltimore stash house. He made many a trip, skirting the newly forming interdiction squads, the stickup crews, and the burn artists, getting that good New York City dope and getting high on the excess. Back then, Curt had so much dope coming his way that for a long time he had no sense that he had an addiction.

On what was then the neighborhood corner, Lexington and Fulton, he was the show: He had a big de Ville, a car that kids like Gary McCullough would wash and polish for a hefty tip; a heavy roll of twenties, neatly manicured and passed freely for services rendered; and, of course, the endless supply of shit that granted him admission to every party. As time ticked on, others got greedy or sloppy or too notorious for their own good. They fell to state or federal charges, but Curt held fast to the middle rungs of the West Baltimore trade, never trying to play the game for more than the good blast and a few dollars besides. In part, his long run was a function of luck. But in part, Curt lasted because he never lost touch with one of the great joys of the thing, the cat-and-mouse adventure with the police, the running and dodging. Yet because he stayed out of jail, he never got a serious break in the action—a vacation from the needle that might have given his body a chance to dry the cells and slow the swelling in every limb. That’s the irony of a drug arrest at the street-corner level: Locking up a hardcore fiend won’t close the shop or stop the product. It won’t keep anyone from the game, or pave the way toward rehabilitation unless a fiend genuinely wants to quit fiending. The real tangible benefit from day-to-day police work in the drug war is medicinal: A run-and-gun player gets hit with a charge and, like it or not, he gets a brief convalescence. He gets some food, some sleep, maybe even some antibiotics. He gives those tired old veins a respite. Then, when the whistle blows, he’s charging out of the penalty box for more of the same.

And so, from the addiction itself he fell. Slowly at first, but relentlessly, he shed all of the big-score vestiges on the way down to Blue’s. The Cadillac was ancient neighborhood lore; the trademark roll of twenties, just a gleam in the eye; and the dope was no longer the raw and wild New York quarter, but whatever stepped-on nonsense was out here on the corners. Rose, the girl of his youth, was out on Fayette Street, but making her own way; Curt Junior, now a teenager, was selling from the same corners as well. For a while, home for Fat Curt was nothing better than a third-floor walk-up, with the electricity pirated by extension cord from a back-alley utility pole. Finally, when rent on that shithole came due, home was Blue’s.

Over time, it had reached the point where Curt couldn’t take a charge if he tried. All day, every day he’s selling or touting dope and coke and yet, somehow, his ubiquity at the crossroads of Monroe and Fayette has rendered him invisible. The police see him, of course; Curt is an epic sight. But as with Rita, the physical damage has kept him out of the police wagon for no better reason than that the street police are repulsed and frightened. They’d roll up on the corner, give the bloated tout a quick once-over, and then grab someone else. In the beginning, when Curt was thriving, there was no break because he was good or lucky or both. In the end, when Curt is slowly dying, there’s no break because his body has been wrecked.

Like now. A couple of the knockers get bored waiting for the wagon and come down Monroe to clear the corner. Two plainclothesmen and a uniform move down the block in tandem, quickly overtaking Curt, but moving past him to tell Shamrock, Kwame, and a few more of the younger ones to get the fuck off the street. Curt stands unmolested in the same spot, unable to rate even a casual eyefuck.

For twenty minutes, the shop stays closed as cops and corner boys alike wait for the Western District wagon. When it arrives to cart the day’s sacrifice to the district lockup, the rest of the herd watches placidly, insulated by their very numbers from worrying the thing too much.

The wagon finally rolls off down Monroe, turning the corner on Fayette, and Curt tries to pick up where he left off. But after roping in a quick sale, he’s overcome with a strange uncertainty.

“Aw shit.”

He hobbles up to Vine Street and looks down the alley at the row of vacant, battered brick. Third one down? Fourth one? Fifth? Who the hell can remember with all the shit going on?

“Oh Lord,” says Curt, petitioning for divine intervention as he pokes his way down the lane. “Where mah dope? Lord, please help me find mah dope.”

It’s another hour before he manages to relocate his bundle where he left it, sell it off, and get back to Blue’s for the midafternoon jumper. Curt’s down in the front room, waiting for Rita to get herself off, when he hears the same damn racket above him. Up he goes to the second floor, his legs aching, his patience thinned. Sure enough, the same asshole is still at it.

“Well, got-damn …”

The fiend looks blankly at him.

“Just leave the shit be now.”

“Fuck you, motherfucker.”

Curt wonders why he cares, thinking to himself that there ain’t much left to Blue’s old house anyway, and what’s left is going to get carted away by someone soon enough. Ever since Blue got locked up, Curt had been making a modest effort to hold the fort. But there was no telling when Blue might get home.

Two weeks ago—about an hour or so after Blue had told Rita to clean up and had put her out of the house—the police suddenly kicked in the front door and charged through the shooting gallery. This quite naturally scared the living shit out of all present, sending Blue himself out the second-floor rear window in a mad leap. It wasn’t much of a raid, in fact. There was no warrant and the police who went charging through rooms with guns drawn weren’t much interested in the handful of vials, syringes, and cookers scattered about. Instead, they were looking for an injured officer; someone, it seemed, had dialed 911 to report that a police was taking a beating inside the shooting gallery. The caller did not identify herself to the police dispatcher, but the gallery regulars figured Rita Hale, her feelings hurt by the eviction, to be the even-money bet.

As the police searched Blue’s house that day, the hardcore soldiers—Curt and Eggy, Pimp and Dennis—sat silent, their hard-won highs ruined. Blue went rabbit because he thought he was supposed to go rabbit, because he was running a shooting gallery and the police were kicking through the door. The fall from the upstairs window didn’t hurt a bit; getting grabbed and tossed around the back alley by a plainclothes detective who was responding to the officer-needs-assistance call—that was the problem. Convinced that there was no injured officer in the house, the raiding party managed to overlook the vials and syringes and leave everybody be—save for Blue and two or three others who had tried to run and had to be punished on principle. For Blue, the charge was burglary—to wit, breaking and entering into his own house.

So the lord of the manor is gone and Rita is back and now Curt is left to stare down a one-man demolition squad. There’s a part of him almost ready to let it go, but something else keeps the confrontation going. For Curt, it goes back to the old code, back to the time when people talked to each other. Fuck it, he figures, it is Blue’s house and Blue is a friend, and messing with the man’s house when he’s over at pretrial ain’t right. He watches the fiend pull at the window-stripping and decides to give it one more try.

“I’m sayin’ …”

But the fiend isn’t listening anymore. Instead, he’s crossing the room, picking up a long piece of jagged aluminum, and swinging hard.

The first blow tears Curt on the side of the face; he can feel the warm blood squirt from his cheek and neck. The second, he fends off, catching a deep cut in his left palm. The fiend brandishes the weapon again and Curt backs up into the front bedroom, assessing the damage.

The tout hears the enemy stalk down the stairs. Pausing for a moment to think it through, he drops his cane, grabs Blue’s wooden chair, drags it over to the closet, and uses it to boost himself up through the trapdoor. In a Herculean effort, he struggles up into the attic’s crawl space, managing somehow to push himself along to the trapdoor to the roof without getting wedged between the beams. He rests for a moment to steady a laboring pulse, then pops the roof cap and lifts himself onto the frozen black tar. A man on a mission, he ignores the wind’s chilly breath on his sweating body, crawling to the edge of the roof. He peeps down on the Fayette Street sidewalk.

No fiend.

Curt takes a look across the roof and spots a loose brick near the chimney stack. He stretches for it and returns to position directly above the doorway. A couple minutes more and, blessed Jesus, the fiend not only steps onto the stoop but stands there. Curt leans over the edge, squares the target in the crosshairs, and it’s bombs away.

The brick lands with a crack on the steps. A near miss.

Damn.

But the fiend continues to stand there, scoping the street. Somehow, the air raid didn’t register. In fact, after a moment or two more, the man actually steps back inside Blue’s.

Curt is flummoxed—how in hell did he miss?—but the initial failure does nothing to stay his anger. It’s back down from the roof and into Blue’s room, where Curt goes under the worn mattress for the old ax that Blue keeps.

Leaving his cane once again, steadied by his purpose, Curt hobbles out of the room, down the stairs, with a pause only at the bottom step, where the asshole obliges Curt yet again by walking past him down the narrow corridor. Curt rears back and comes down with a mighty chop. But no. The ax head flies toward the ceiling and nothing more lethal than the wooden handle glances off the fiend’s shoulder.

“Huh,” says the fiend, startled.

Curt stands there, looking at the wooden handle. The fiend is thinking, too, staring down at the loose blade on the floor. Suddenly, it clicks: “Man, shit.”

Curt says nothing.

“I mean, I’m sayin’ you all actin’ crazy and shit.”

Enough is enough, apparently. The fiend mumbles his way toward the door, talking about how all Curt had to do was say something, talking about it like Curt doesn’t know how to act, pretending like there are still rules left in this game. He leaves Curt there at the bottom of the stairs, still holding the worthless toothpick of a handle, exhausted, bloodied, wondering how so many no-thinking people get to be so got-damned lucky.

To see it in retrospect, to look backward across thirty years on the Fayette Streets of this country is to contemplate disaster as a seamless chronology, as the inevitable consequence of forces stronger and more profound than the cities themselves.

Cursed as we are with a permanent urban underclass, an unremitting and increasingly futile drug war, and Third World conditions in the hearts of our cities, the American experiment seems, at the millennium, to have found a limit.

The poor will always be with us, declared the biblical sages, and this divided nation seems to go out of its way to prove the point. As America lurched away from the rubble of great societies and new deals, no less a populist than Ronald Reagan wryly declared that we fought a war against poverty and poverty won. Many of us heard him and smiled knowingly at what seemed to be unvarnished truth. For decades now, the ghettos have appeared to us as certain and fixed, their problems beyond the reach of programs or policies or good intentions.

Perhaps it was inevitable. Or perhaps there were a few moments early on, a lost opportunity or two in the generations before the inner city acquired its permanence. Perhaps there was another potential for the brown-stones of the South Bronx and the brick rowhouses of North Philadelphia, an alternative path for the broken streets of East St. Louis and West Baltimore. Concede for a moment that we might be jaded by decades of failure, that our vision is skewed by knowledge of the outcome. It might serve to just once see the thing as William McCullough—Gary’s father and DeAndre’s grandfather—saw it, walking Fayette Street with a full stride and twenty-eight years of life, standing on the painted stone steps of his Vine Street home and thinking it good.

His castle was a two-story Formstone rowhouse like twenty others in the 1800 block. But this one in particular—the worldly possession of W.M. and his bride—was the sum of all their struggles. Wedged between Lexington and Fayette, the alley street was barely wide enough for automobiles, but it was clean back then, the rowhouses tucked into small lots on the south side of the alley, the facing rear yards of the Lexington Street houses lush with summer gardens.

Vine Street was in its glory, a quiet haven in a neighborhood still racially mixed, still predominantly white, in fact. Working-class and middle-class white families lived mostly along the main streets; their black, working-class neighbors lived mostly behind them on alley streets named Vine and Fairmount and Lemmon. That was a time when the corner markets were mostly Jewish, free of bulletproof Plexiglas and willing to sell to local families on credit, a time when St. Martin’s parish, once the largest in Baltimore, was still a thriving bastion of Roman Catholicism in the center of the neighborhood. That was before the Harbor Tunnel and 1-95 replaced the long journey up Monroe Street and across North Avenue on old U.S. 1, a route from which a generation of interstate travelers might look out their car windows at the fresh Formstone, painted brick, and clean-scrubbed marble steps of Franklin Square and see the very essence of Baltimore’s working-class rightness. That was the time of unlocked doors and open windows and sleeping in Druid Hill Park on hot summer nights, a time when heroin was little more than a whisper and violence rarely went beyond the occasional domestic assault. By the calendar, that was 1955.

William McCullough had come to Baltimore fourteen years earlier, a stowaway on the bus from Salisbury, North Carolina. As a small boy, W.M. had picked cotton for pennies on the plantation of his birth, the Cathcart farm just east of Winnsboro, South Carolina. He was the great-grandson of slaves owned by the McCullough family, a West Irish clan who had settled the land along the riverbank to the northeast of Winnsboro; he was the grandson and son of sharecroppers who could never quite make the land pay. The cotton fields were hard, tenant farming harder. W.M. could remember the hardest Depression years in Winnsboro, with his father struggling to squeeze money out of bad crop settles and his mother and younger brother stalking through the woods, looking for roots and nuts and anything else that might stave off hunger. When Fred McCullough managed to land a job with the Southern Railroad, it seemed to his older son that the very worst days were gone.

The family moved north to the rail hub at Salisbury, where at twelve, W.M. began shining shoes and working in the kitchen of the Trailways depot on Main Street. Week after week, he brought his pay back to the wood-frame bungalow at the north end of town, where it was pooled with what his father and brother managed to earn. When he was fourteen, he had the temerity to use a couple dollars from one week’s pay to purchase new overalls and a leather jacket. His father took a strap to him and, no doubt about it, Fred McCullough could hit hard when he was mad. It wasn’t the first beating and unlikely to be the last, so W.M. decided right then and there that he was gone. He said good-bye to his brother, crawled out a side window, and jumped down into the weeds. That night he slept inside a bathroom at the bus depot, and the next morning, he convinced a northbound driver to take him to Baltimore. He had an uncle up there making money. He would make money, too.

He had a strong back, enormous self-discipline, and an utter absence of formal education. But he was unashamed of his limitations and unafraid of hard work. He could read numbers, handle money, and work harder than most anyone he knew. He believed these things were enough.

He landed at the bus station in downtown Baltimore with $1.40 in his pocket, and the driver, doubtful of W.M.’ s chances, told him that if things didn’t work out he should come back to the terminal the following night, when the driver would be back through and could return him south. But by then W.M. had a job working a grinding wheel at an iron foundry on South Charles Street. The plant produced wheels for railroad cars—the sheer weight of the things drove grown men to quit after less than a week—but W.M. lied himself up to eighteen years old to get hired. The company men had learned to trust in fresh black immigrants from the Carolinas and Virginia. Greenhorns just up from the cotton patch always work hard, the bosses believed, harder than the coloreds who had grown accustomed to city life. For his part, W.M. proved the rule; he was their John Henry, grinding and lifting and hauling deadweight for twelve years.

It was 1942 and William McCullough, at the age of fourteen, was a small but committed part of the largest ethnic migration in American history. It was larger than the flight of the starving Irish a century before, larger still than the succeeding waves of Eastern European and Italian immigrants who later crowded the halls of Ellis Island and Castle Garden. The black exodus from the rural South in this century would utterly transform the American cities of the East and Midwest. In the Mississippi Valley, the northward migration brought thousands of southern blacks to Memphis, Kansas City, St. Louis, and ultimately, to the terminus cities of Chicago and Detroit. In the East, the same phenomenon brought waves of migrants to Baltimore and Washington, Philadelphia and New York.

There was nothing surprising about this. Mechanization was changing the agrarian economy of the South, with the sharecropping and tenant farming that characterized so much of black rural life increasingly marginalized. By the early 1940s, even the farming of cotton—the most labor-intensive of Southern crops—was being transformed as mechanical cotton pickers were perfected and marketed. Once the South had staked both its society and economy on black labor; by World War II, the same labor force was expendable.

To the north, the smoking cities of the American industrial belt offered an alternative. Even in the Depression years, the pages of the black community newspaper in the McCullough hometown of Winnsboro were littered with notices of a generation drifting inexorably northward:

“We regret to report another departure for Baltimore …”

“Mr. Hill, a Winnsboro native and lifelong resident of the county, will leave to join relatives in Philadelphia.”

“On Sunday last, a good-bye picnic was held for the Singletary family …”

“… the young gentleman will be departing our community next month with friends to pursue prospects in Washington …”

Baltimore siphoned from the rural black population of both Carolinas and the Virginia tidewater. Southern whites—those with any sense of the future anyway—began to see the migration as beneficial, a pressure valve on their demographic time bomb. Though increasingly superfluous in the wake of mechanized agriculture, the black population had become a majority in many rural counties, a growing threat to the world of Jim Crow that might one day require a reckoning. Now, through migration, much of that reckoning would come in the North.

The Baltimore to which W.M. fled was America’s most northern southern city, and it was here, as an adult, that he truly learned the ways of white folk. Every day, when he walked into a little luncheonette across from the foundry, the owner’s trained parrot would stretch its wings and squawk, “Nigger in the house, nigger in the house.” Of course, he couldn’t sit at the counter, but he could carry his lunch out, so he didn’t let it bother him. He couldn’t go into the downtown hotels, or restaurants, or into most shops save for the basements of the Howard Street department stores, and he couldn’t even think of using one of the changing rooms to try on clothes. But then again, he didn’t have the money for downtown, so he didn’t pay it any mind.

In the schools, theaters, ball yards, and swimming pools of Maryland’s largest city, strict segregation had long been the rule. City politics, the police and fire departments, the patronage of civil service—all of it was lily white, just as strict housing patterns had limited the black belt to a handful of dense, crowded neighborhoods on the eastern and western edges of downtown. On the east side, Gay Street became the central boulevard for black Baltimoreans, and to the west, there was Pennsylvania Avenue—the Avenue as it came to be known, black Baltimore’s Broadway, home to dozens of juke joints and the legendary Royal Theater. Beyond those core areas, in rowhouse neighborhoods like Franklin Square, black families were consigned to back alleys in a fashion that left them only half visible to neighboring whites. Little was heard from the colored folk in places like Vine Street and Lemmon Street alley, save for the occasional house-rent party or fish fry, or the righteous shout that went up from the backstreets whenever a radio announcer declared that Joe Louis had put another white man on his ass.

Until the great migration north, the Germans, Irish, and Lithuanians who made Franklin Square their home saw little possibility that anything would change. Until World War II, in fact, change on the city’s west side came only gradually. Originally, the gentle slope to the immediate west of downtown had been farmland, the possession of a gentleman farmer who forfeited all when he went off to fight in a Confederate uniform. After the bloodletting at nearby Antietam in 1862 and Gettysburg the following year, the Union Army used the confiscated land for an encampment and field hospital. The ramshackle medical facility drew nuns and clergy and soon spawned a small Catholic parish that would, in time, grow into the gothic behemoth of St. Martin’s, its stone bell tower ringed by gargoyles that, the locals now liked to say, were too damn scared to come down and take their chances on the street.

As the city stretched westward after the Civil War, the redbrick Federal-style rowhouses were filled by a proletarian class of Germans, with some Irish and Scots mixed in—an immigrant class that predated the war and found some contentment in looking down on later arrivals. The settlers were shopkeepers and small businessmen, factory workers and longshoremen, clerical workers and political ward heelers. Many of the westsiders worked at Baltimore & Ohio’s huge roundhouse and rail yard off West Pratt Street, many others on the piers that lined the Upper Patapsco a mile or so to the east. H. L. Mencken, the sage writer of the city, had been born in the rowhouse at 1704 West Fayette, then proceeded to spend his writing years in a Hollins Street home on Union Square, just a few blocks to the southeast.

During the early years of the migration, the working-class and middleclass whites of Franklin Square had no great love for the blacks who began to crowd the west side alleys or the core of the black belt along Pennsylvania Avenue, but neither was there a great deal of overt racial conflict. Baltimore had settled into a practiced and—from the white viewpoint, at least—functional segregation. If more rural blacks chose to shake the Carolina clay from their boots and find Lemmon Alley, or Vine Street, or the battered rowhouse slum of the lower Avenue, it hardly required accommodation or even a serious reckoning from Baltimore’s governing elite. The Mason-Dixon line was a good forty miles to the north; racial separation was the civic firmament.

It took World War II and the epic of industrial rearmament to destroy the illusion of equilibrium, if not Jim Crow itself. In Baltimore, as in every industrial city, the influx of migrant labor accelerated at astonishing rates as factories, steel mills, and shipyards began running two and then three shifts. Nor, by wartime, was the rural migration a singularly black phenomenon. From west of the Shenandoah came the Appalachian whites, weary of scrub farms and darkened coal mines in West and western Virginia, desperate in their pursuit of a factory wage in the nearest metropolis of the Eastern industrial belt. They settled into rental properties carved from the poorer housing stock in alleys and on side streets.

As much as or more than the Southern black migrants, the Appalachians battered communal sensibilities in Franklin Square and throughout the southwestern part of the city. Older German and Irish residents quickly came to regard the new arrivals as Huns and Visigoths; for some of the mountain folk, indoor plumbing was beyond aspiration, and trash removal consisted of tossing dinner scraps from the back kitchen window. Whereas white working-class discomfort with neighboring blacks was muted by the distance between boulevard and back alley, poor whites were unconstrained by racial geography. When a family of hard-living, hard-drinking ex-coal miners moved into a third-floor walk-up and began raising hell, the whole block knew it.

As the wartime boom continued, some of the poorer west side neighborhoods began to destabilize. Pigtown, a neighborhood surrounding the B & O roundhouse and terminus, was so named because of nearby slaughterhouses, but in time the name would be imbued with a cold sarcasm among older residents who watched the neighborhood sag under the weight of so many poor Appalachians. To the north and east, the colored enclave around Pennsylvania Avenue also began to sprawl, as the growing black population could no longer be easily contained in a handful of city blocks. By the end of the war, the lower end of the Avenue—” the Bottom” as it came to be known—was regarded as the worst and most crowded black slum on the west side.

It was to the Bottom that W.M. moved a few months after arriving in Baltimore. He had found his uncle that first day off the bus and he had stayed with him for a time, but the man was a drinker. For weeks, the older man pressed his nephew for liquor money, but rather than give up some pay, W.M. moved out, getting a room of his own in the 700 block of Saratoga Street. He was fifteen.

He worked and he saved. When his father finally learned his whereabouts and came north to bring him home, W.M. stood firm. He wouldn’t go back; he was his own man now, surviving in a new world. The foundry was backbreaking work and there was precious little to come home to in the room on Saratoga Street, but in Baltimore, more things seemed possible than people ever dreamed about down in the country.

When he was sixteen and still grinding at the foundry, he met a thirteen-year-old girl, a quiet churchgoing thing named Roberta. The first and only woman in his life was a Baltimore native, living just off the Avenue with her family, who had come up from tidewater Virginia. Being underage, W.M. needed a guardian’s signature to approve a marriage, so his uncle did the honors. When some of the neighborhood people went so far as to get in touch with his father, asking him to stop such a youthful union, they got a sharp response.

“He’s a man,” Fred McCullough told them. “If he’s supporting himself, I can’t stand here and tell him what to do.”

They lived for some years with Miss Roberta’s family, with W.M. sharing his pay and all the time looking for something better. Beyond his wife and in-laws, he had few friends as a matter of choice. He didn’t drink and wouldn’t carouse and managed to stay aloof from the high life along Pennsylvania Avenue. He simply didn’t trust a good time, and more to the point, he didn’t trust anyone who did. He’d seen too many country boys waste themselves and their pay in the jukes and bars, or down at the legendary Selene’s, which would survive for more than a decade as the great temple of Avenue whoring and gambling. His young wife had religion, and W. M., though never enamored of preachers and collection plates, was more than willing to do his share as a family man.

After twelve years at the foundry he found a better-paying job at American Standard, where he would lift cast-iron bathtubs and toilets and carry them around the plant as if they were stage props. He was a legend at American Standard: He never shirked, never tried to look for an easy way. Not once did he call in sick; why lie around in bed when you could just as well work an illness out of you? He still couldn’t read, but after a few years at American Standard, he could see ways to modify and improve the manufacturing process. Plant managers had him walk around with a herd of efficiency experts and engineers who were redesigning the assembly line. Production quickly doubled, though W.M. never got a dime for his ideas.

He was at American Standard about a year when, in 1955, they moved into the Vine Street house. Franklin Square was still majority white working-class; even on Vine Street, the McCulloughs were neighbors to a half-dozen white families. Black and white got along well enough—W.M. felt a camaraderie with all of his neighbors that seemed to him genuine. They worked hard; so did he. And when one family was in trouble, everyone else on the block was quick to pitch in. Newly integrated by the Supreme Court decisions, the schools around Franklin Square were still strong, still stable. The streets were clean, the corners clear. More often than not, when someone’s kid was misbehaving, the child stood a good chance of taking one slap on the behind from a concerned neighbor, then a second when he got home.

For W.M. and Miss Roberta, this was the best time of their lives. The family was growing as McCullough families always had—Fred McCullough had stopped at thirteen children; W.M. would beat that mark by two. Kathy had come first in 1948, then Jay four years later, then William Junior a year after that. Joanne and Judy followed them and then in 1957 came Gary, the sixth child and third son.

Not surprisingly, the McCullough children reflected the values of the neighborhood and home that raised them. All were willing to work as hard as was necessary, to take care of business, to live for more than just today. Kathy would travel the globe as a field engineer with Westinghouse; Jay would hold a planning position with the city government; Joanne would make her mark as a program analyst with Bethlehem Steel, Judy as a computer programmer. The son born just behind Gary, Daniel, would join the U.S. Army, rising to staff sergeant and serving overseas.

Until the early 1960s, life was very much as it was supposed to be on Vine Street. The children were growing, reaching for a better life than their mother and father had ever envisioned; the neighborhood seemed safe and stable. For the McCulloughs, it seemed the immigrant experience was playing out as it had for all those who came before them, for the Irish and the Germans, the Jews and the Lithuanians. They were not a wealthy family, nor would they ever be, but all things being equal, they had what they needed and their children and their children’s children would reap the just rewards of so much struggle.

But of course, things were not equal. For the cities, the black migration would prove to be the single greatest social and economic phenomenon of the century, yet it was an event that would never be addressed in any systematic way. In Baltimore as elsewhere in the mid-to late 1950s, the urban migration led to the construction of federally funded lowincome housing, sited and then utilized along distinct racial lines. With the majority of the high-rise and low-rise developments built in the core of the black belt, that area grew more crowded, more oppressive.

Realtors seized the day, busting block after block. In the neighborhoods just north of Franklin Square, frightened whites fled at the first sign of a black home owner; in the late fifties, stable communities such as Edmondson Village could go from white to black within a year.

Along Fayette Street, too, the whites ran—many heading west toward suburban Irvington and Catonsville, others south across Baltimore Street, which would remain a hard-and-fast racial boundary for another two decades. By the early 1960s, W. M. could count only a handful of white strays, older residents mostly. The Jewish families were still working the corner stores, but none lived above the shops anymore. They drove down from Park Heights in the morning, worked the counter, then drove back with the day’s receipts.

Almost overnight, the sense of shared community that W.M. had discovered and prized in Franklin Square was dead and buried forever beneath a blizzard of real estate signs. He had been among the neighborhood’s first black home buyers, the crest of the immigrant wave. What broke behind him was not only a deluge of black working-class families trying to buy their own homes, but the working poor, the sad fodder for carved-up rental units, many of which were rowhouses already battered by the earlier Appalachian migrants.

On the west side of Monroe Street, some of the white homeowners held for a time, selling off to individual black buyers at prices that accorded their tree-lined blocks the pride and stability that home ownership always brings. But from Monroe Street down the hill to Franklin Square itself, there was very little that the landlords and speculators didn’t eventually claim. It only got worse when city planners rammed I-170 through West Baltimore, knocking down blocks of rowhomes just north of Franklin Square, forcing ever more poor refugees into the worst of the rental properties.

By the mid-1960s, the poor had come to Fayette Street and the problems of the poor became the problems of the neighborhood. Worst of all, the industrial and manufacturing economy that had originally propelled the migration began to disappear. Among the later migrants, particularly, unemployment was chronic as factories closed and the demand for unskilled labor collapsed. Nor were the schools what they had been; white refugees took the tax dollars with them, though until the end of the decade, an adequate public education could still be had at high schools like Frederick Douglass, Carver, and Mergenthaler.

In the McCullough family, the older children seemed for the most part immune. The neighborhood was changing, but they had all grown up on the values of their parents, on streets that were still generally benign. The corners weren’t corners yet; the drug trade had not yet grown bold and vast. But the scent of the game was in the air and a few were learning where to go and who to find.

By 1966, Ricardo had been born, and Rodney, too. Kathy, now the oldest of nine, was already out of the house, attending college. Gary almost nine, was already showing the kind of utter earnestness that his father could recognize as a McCullough trait. That year, Gary got his first job as a stock boy at Nathan and Abe Lemler’s pharmacy, grocery, and liquor store on Lexington Street, and the Lemlers imparted everything they knew about work and business to the child. Gary worked hard, stayed honest, and was, in turn, trusted by the family. He made twenty dollars a week.

To Gary, the Lemlers seemed to be good people—they extended credit and would fill prescriptions without charge if someone was sick and unable to pay—yet they were regarded as outsiders by the locals, who saw them as purely mercantile. Gary felt his loyalty stretched to the limit when some of the older heads would roll through the store—snatching liquor bottles and carrying them off—and the Lemlers would ask Gary to chase after them. Once, he had followed Fat Curt’s brother, Dennis, who had lifted a bottle of rye whisky.

“Nigger,” Dennis asked, when Gary caught up to him, “who the fuck you think you is?”

It was a question he never had to answer; the riots after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. decided the matter. From Fremont Avenue to Edmondson Village on the west side, the Lemlers and nearly every other Jewish shop owner were burned out, eventually to be replaced by Korean merchants who would neither extend credit nor hire children from the neighborhood.

The riots accelerated the decline along Fayette Street. At night, a quiet but persistent heroin trade opened up at Fulton and Lexington, the corner where the Lemler store used to be.

At 1827 Vine Street, William Junior—known to all as June Bey—was first to stumble, losing himself by the early 1970s in a heroin addiction that would consume the rest of his adult life. His mother and father tried to wait him out, tried to revive their hopes each of the two dozen times June Bey took himself off the street for drug treatment. He’d been to Kentucky for the detox program there; he’d been down to Carolina to stay with family. But nothing took, and when the appliances around the house began to disappear, W.M. finally put him out.

It was the first heartbreak. Miss Roberta took solace in religion and her other children, praying all the while that June Bey might still see himself in a new light. W.M. did what he had always done; he swallowed hard and went back to work.

In the mid-1970s, American Standard closed their Baltimore plant, and the company provided W.M. with a twenty-year pension that amounted to exactly thirty-seven dollars a month—an absurd sum that he often thought of questioning, though his inability to read discouraged him from seeking a detailed explanation. For a time, W.M. drove a truck interstate for Sky King, then worked for a limo service, and then, in 1980, he got a license from the public service commission and began driving for Royal Cab. Most weeks, he worked six days of double shift, rising early to catch the morning rush, then coming in for lunch and a nap, then back out until ten or eleven at night. He drove everywhere, worked every neighborhood, relying on his instincts to keep him alive in a line of work as lethal as any in Baltimore. After being robbed a half-dozen times, he started carrying a pistol under the driver’s seat.

W.M. was never much on conversation; it was always Miss Roberta who provided the day-to-day childrearing, who would take hold of the minor problems and major disasters in their lives. But W.M. served as the moral example, as a standard for will and endurance against which his children took their measurement. Gary, more than most, stood in absolute awe, and his own double-and triple-shift life was a tribute to his father. He’d learned a lot about business from the Lemlers, and what he didn’t know he set about learning in half a dozen jobs that took him through high school. He cooked crabs down at Seapride on Monroe Street, clerked at some of the shops on Baltimore Street, sold a bit of weed now and then, and still found time to run all kinds of errands for his mother and father.

He graduated with honors from Mergenthaler Vocational—“Mervo, where they teach you how to earn a living, but not how to live,” Gary liked to say—then spent the half year at Ohio State before getting that telegram from a pregnant Fran Boyd. He came home—not only because it was the right thing to do, but because he was tired of school. College was all talk and theory; Gary wanted to be out there, working and earning and scheming.

His sister Joanne told him about an affirmative action program at Bethlehem Steel. For years, the company had steadfastly refused to hire blacks for skilled positions and was now playing catch-up. Gary took the test and scored well, getting an apprentice job and becoming one of the first black craftsmen at Sparrows Point, eventually rising to supervisor. He took a night job as a guard out at the Social Security building in suburban Woodlawn. Then he started buying cheap, vacant rowhouse properties in the neighborhood, rehabbing some as rental units and setting up Lightlaw, which he registered at City Hall as a minority contractor. He worked every day of the year—Christmas, Easter, New Year’s, his own birthday—sometimes for sixteen hours a day. When the money began rolling in, when there was more under the mattress than he could spend, he began soaking up the financial publications, trying, on his own, to decode the Babel of stock and fund listings. He got a brokerage account with Charles Schwab, began trading, feeling his way through some ventures. At one point, his income from investments alone reached more than two thousand dollars a month.

Gary McCullough was a whirlwind, a man of dreams and plans. Before long, he was the talk of the neighborhood. For W.M., his son seemed proof positive that whatever problems there were on Fayette Street, they weren’t going to hold his family down. June Bey had fallen, but he could still be counted as the exception. Nothing out there made you take drugs, or hang on the corner, or laze around the house all day waiting on a welfare check. W.M. and Miss Roberta had proved the other way of living, the right way; now their children were proving it, too.

The oldest children—Kathy, Jay, and Joanne—were not so sanguine. Repeatedly, they urged their parents to move off Vine Street, to buy a house or take an apartment in the county. Since the 1970s, suburban flight had ceased to be a white prerogative in Baltimore; the black middleclass had been pushing westward since the late 1960s, a step or two ahead of the working poor that would follow them down Frederick Road to Irvington and Yale Heights, or out Edmondson and Liberty Heights Avenues to Edmondson Village and Forest Park. Now, western Baltimore County—Woodmoor, Woodlawn, parts of Randallstown and Arbutus—was home to the black taxpayer. Left behind were too many of the broken families, too many who had grown up without hope; too many migrants and sons of migrants who had come too late to the city, who had never caught hold of the union-scale wages that allowed one generation to climb out of poverty and carry the next on its back to the suburbs.

The irony was ripe: Segregation had leavened the ghettos by keeping black professionals and middle-class families active in the life of city neighborhoods; now they, too, were missing at the community meetings, at PTA conferences, at recreation centers, at block parties. By the late 1970s, many of black Baltimore’s institutional treasures—Provident Hospital, Douglass High School, even the grand boulevard of Pennsylvania Avenue—were, to one degree or another, failing.

W.M. and Miss Roberta sensed this, of course, just as everyone else in the city sensed it. They had seen their older children move to suburban homes; now those same children were pleading for them to follow. But the mortgage was paid on Vine Street and they wouldn’t get much if they sold out. There weren’t any savings to talk about, though the children offered to help pay for the move. Still, that wouldn’t do; neither W.M. nor his wife could stand for that kind of charity. Besides, it felt like home. Miss Roberta had fed a family out of that small kitchen; W.M. had stepped down the same stone steps for every working morning going back twenty-five years. There were all of the usual ties to the neighborhood; Roberta McCullough never missed a church function at St. James on Monroe Street. And there were still others like them, too—good people who would stick it out with them if they stayed. Ella Thompson. And Bertha Montgomery, across the alley. And Paul Booth around the corner on Lexington.

They stayed, just as Gary stayed on Fayette Street when Fran convinced him not to buy that house out in Catonsville. But there was an inertia to their decision, an inability to see just how bad Franklin Square had become, or how much worse it would get. Slowly, in ways that were perceptible only over years, the Fayette Street corners grew more and more treacherous. The New York Boys came. Then the cocaine vials, and, finally, the pipers and the ready rock.

Among the younger McCullough children, Darren, Sean, and Chris were all as hardworking and serious as their predecessors. But the corner caught up with Judy’s husband about 1984, driving him out of a happy marriage and up onto the Monroe Street corners. It caught up to Ricardo, too, when his friends lured him out of the house to run with the pack, trying their hands as sneak thieves and stickup boys. It caught up to Kwame, the youngest son, so angry at everyone and everything that W.M. actually tried to talk to him, going out of character to make his boy see that a man had to make peace with himself and the world. But Kwame couldn’t see it, couldn’t feel it the way W.M. had. For a time, Darren got him a job at the shoe store on Baltimore Street, where Darren had made manager, but Kwame spent the rest of his time in the streets, working packages or sticking up younger dealers with Shamrock. The corner also caught up to Kenyetta, the youngest, who got involved with a boy who gave her a child and then took to shooting people before a state charge finally stuck and he rode the prison bus to Hagerstown. The baby, Shakima, toddled around Miss Roberta’s kitchen every day while Kenyetta tried to finish school at Southwestern.

But the shocker was Gary. The third son, who had taken life by storm; the wide-eyed dreamer who had learned his father’s lessons and taken them to a new level. When Gary began the fall into drugs in 1986, his parents were shaken to the core. Gary had made it in a way that W.M. understood; others among his children were equally successful, but their way had been paved by educational opportunities and career plans. All of them made W.M. proud, but Gary’s victories resonated with his father because he had won them as W.M. had—by getting up early to chase a few dollars more.

There was no sense in it, nothing to W.M.’ s eye to explain how his son could fall so far. Gary split with Fran for good in 1985 and four years after that, all of it—the craftsman’s job at Beth Steel, the second job, the properties, the Mercedes-Benz, the bank accounts, the brokerage account—was gone. Gary had been hurt; W.M. knew that. He’d been hurt by Fran, by the women who followed Fran. Quite a few people in the neighborhood had taken advantage, too, stealing from Gary; his son was always a little too trusting that way. But nothing to W.M.’ s way of thinking could take hold of someone with Gary’s dreams and Gary’s mind and transform that person into a drug addict.

In the end, it was Gary who let them know just how much worse it could get, who taught them to fear their neighborhood the way it ought to be feared, so that standing at the front door on a summer day, watching the dealers work a ground stash, Miss Roberta could turn to her husband and say, very gently, that maybe the children were right. Maybe they should have left.

There was no more to it than that. No anger, no recrimination, no polemics against the police or the government or the white man. That wasn’t the McCullough way. If W.M. blamed anyone, he blamed the men and women in the street, the sons and the daughters who had lost their way, who didn’t understand life the way he did. If it were up to me, he’d sometimes tell people, you wouldn’t need prisons and you wouldn’t need jails either. If he had possession over Judgment Day, that gas chamber down on Eager Street wouldn’t shut down until the corners were clear. He could say things like that and mean them, feeling the vengeance warming in his veins. And then he’d walk out to the cab for his afternoon tour and see Gary coming from the alley tester line, or June Bey nodding at the pay phone, or DeAndre, his grandson—and a bright boy, too—huddled at the mouth of Vine Street with the other touts and lookouts. At such moments, W.M.’ s heart would break and all the anger would rush out.

He had lived the way a man was supposed to live. He had played by the rules, working all his life, working still to make ends meet, though he was now of an age when most men retire. He had never gone on welfare, or sought a handout, or complained about what did or didn’t come his way. He had taken a good woman and kept his vows. He had brought fifteen children into the world, loved them, given them food and clothes and a home, and sent them to schools to learn things that he never had a chance to know. He had not been as clever as other men, perhaps, or as wise with his money and property. And he had never really understood the forces arrayed against him. But then, none of that can be claimed as part of our national premise, our enduring myth that says America is the land of opportunity, the last best hope for all races and religions, and that any man who stays true to himself and works hard here can and will succeed.

For the last half-century in the city of Baltimore, William McCullough has stayed true to himself and worked as hard as any man conceivably can. At age sixty-five, he has the woman with whom he shared a lifetime, Miss Roberta. He has many children and grandchildren, some of whom make him proud, some of whom don’t. He collects a $37-a-month pension. Six days a week—some weeks, seven—he drives a cab.

And every night, he comes home to Vine Street.

The snake has found Gary McCullough curled on the bed, the soiled sheets twisted around his legs. He’s half-awake and half listening as the clock radio sputters Sunday morning sermons in a dull, metallic whisper.

The snake speaks his name, and Gary, with a supreme effort, rolls over and sits up at the edge of the sagging mattress, his feet touching a linoleum floor wet from the Friday night rain that sent a flood rolling down the back cellar steps of his parents’ house on Vine. Hunching over as a wave of nausea hits, he cups his pounding head. He longs to go back to sleep, even that half-assed, no-resting heroin sleep that greets him every night, but the snake has his attention.

He reaches up, stretching as he gropes for the bare lightbulb in the ceiling socket. He finds it, gives a twist, then falls back to the mattress, spent. The weak light pushes back a bit of the darkness behind the mounds of molding clothes that frame the thin room.

It’s a grim, tight space at the bottom of the Vine Street rowhouse, sprinkled with flotsam and jetsam from Gary’s wanderings, bits and pieces that could have had a purpose, that once sparked a righteous McCullough plan, but now lay discarded, gathering dust: a busted black-and-white TV, a car’s rearview mirror, a set of keys, church fliers, a broken clock, a chipped porcelain statue of embracing lovers.

Within arm’s length of the bed stands a broken dresser for life’s few absolute necessities: bottle caps, matches, a jar of water, syringes. Behind the paraphernalia rests a box fan that makes do as a coat rack now, but come summer, it’s all there is to push the stale air and help Gary breathe through his asthma attacks. At the head of the mattress is a homemade wooden stool that serves as Gary’s library shelf. A well-thumbed Bible shares the perch with a high school physics book, a grade school civics text, Thoreau’s Walden, and Elie Wiesel’s Night—books rescued from trash piles or church basements, then read and reread by Gary with keen interest. The Bible is creased and marked at Psalm 38, a verse of shame and repentance that resonates in Gary’s mind night after night.

For your arrows have pierced me and your hand has come down upon me

Because of your wrath, there is no health in my body

My bones have no soundness because of my sin,

My guilt has overwhelmed me like a burden too heavy to bear

My wounds fester and are loathsome because of my sinful folly

I am bowed down and brought very low

True penitence from within the haze. Gary knows the words by rote, reading them over and over in the dim basement light. And in the margin of the psalm, he has inked a rough graffito plea: “God help me, please.”

But not now. Not this morning.

The snake won’t be placated with psalms or supplications. Gary scratches his cheek and looks above him to the narrow wall shelf that holds the the other religious artifact in his basement world, the Box of True Blasts. Shaped like a cigar box, but smaller, the balsa-wood container serves as repository and museum for the touchstones of Gary’s life on the corner—a treasure chest of happy memories to be perused in the spirit of nostalgia. He takes down the box and dumps its contents on the bed: the glassine bags, marked and stamped with an array of designs, logos, and slogans; the plastic vials, in a variety of sizes, each with a different colored top. Each a memento, a remembrance of bombs past, each a keepsake from a successful crusade, from a moment when a fiend got within snatching distance of the holy grail.

The green vial on the top of the pile? He got that one last year at Mount and Fayette, from the New York Boy, Scar, back when Scar had something to sell. Drop a little of that coke in some dope and yes Lawd, you had a speedball that would sing. And the Family Affair bag from this fall. Dag, that was right. But the recollection makes him grimace. The box offers nothing for the here and now—only touchstones from days gone.

Gary leans forward, fumbling with the dresser’s top drawer, pulling it toward him and rifling the contents for a Newport butt he left there last night. It’s a new habit that Ronnie gave him back in November, so now, in the daily pursuit of dollars for dope, he has to husband a little bit more pocket change for smokes. More often than not, he’s unable to afford a pack, so he buys singles from the Koreans for a quarter each. He lights up and pulls hard for the nicotine, getting off a good couple of puffs, then stubs the filter into the damp linoleum. He waits, checking himself, taking stock.

No good. No good at all.

He goes back to the dresser, this time for an empty glassine bag. He holds it to the light and gives a little tap, then another, staring hard. Against all visible evidence, he grabs a burnt-bottom bottle cap and taps lightly at the bag, coaxing out a few grains of residue. He takes a syringe and adds a few drops of water, then pulls it up without even bothering to wave a match under the bottle cap, hunts a vein and slams the shot. For a few seconds, he’s hope defined: the junkie alchemist, trying desperately to turn lead into gold. But nothing, no rush.

Gary searches for his clothes. One pair of pants is balled up on the bed; a second pair lies on the floor along with his shoes, a flannel shirt, and a sweater. For a moment, he makes no move to retrieve them. Instead, he folds his hands and bows his shaved head, a monk sending a silent prayer to a silent god. Let this pass.

But the snake is on the move.

It’s Gary’s worst fear. That snake down there, sliding through his intestines, growing, gathering strength, pushing its way through the soft organs of his underbelly, into his stomach, the slow climb up his esophagus, and then into his throat, cutting off his air, strangling him on one end, breaking his bowels on the other. For many of the fiends, it isn’t like that. For them, withdrawal is a few days of low-grade flu, a sickness to be dealt with like any other. You take some aspirin, you crawl into bed, and you stay there and get what sleep you can until you come out the other side. For them, it’s mind over matter, withdrawal being more about soul than body.

But for Gary, there’s no play in it; the thing is all physical. For him, the very idea of withdrawal is epic because the snake owns every cell, every vein, every organ. Like last month, when he let his mother send him down to North Carolina to stay with his younger brother, Dan. Willing and determined, Gary fortified himself with one last blast, then crawled into the back of his brother’s van. And he tried. Lord, they don’t know how he tried. But the nausea never seemed to stop, nor did the craving slacken. He wrestled the snake for a few days, then stole off to find a corner near his brother’s house. And that was the thing, too: You can’t run from it. The corner is everywhere.

Now, galvanized by fear, he dresses at flank speed, pulling on one pair of pants, then a second to brace him against the February cold. No socks in the basement, though, so the shoes get laced over bare feet, the leather edges digging into his ankles. He pauses for a moment, looking down, and almost manages a smile at the pointy-toed, two-tone dress shoes, burgundy and tan, bought on a lark for four bills in a secondhand shop because they reminded him of better days. He starts up the stairs, then stops, rubbing his head. Where’s the hat? Can’t go nowheres without the hat.

Dag.

He tears the bedding apart, finding it wedged between the mattress and the warped wall panel. A lucky California Angels cap that’s seen him through it before. He wears it with the brim behind him, smoothing the band against his forehead. The backward angel, up and moving, ready to wade into the mix.

He navigates the narrow passage through the basement, then makes his way up the steep staircase, climbing over and around an avalanche of bundled clothing tossed down the steps. He emerges in the center of the rowhome’s first floor, stepping into a dining room where the table has been pushed to the wall, then covered with clothing, papers, and a dozen other workaday things. In the McCullough home, the kitchen long ago gave the dining room a beating, forcing its furniture and formality against the far wall, giving the back of the first floor to Miss Roberta’s cooking and the chipped Formica table from which her family feeds.

Gary pauses for a moment at the basement door, caught by the sunlight from the back kitchen window. He wipes at his eyes, trying to adjust to the sight of his mother, working the stove, fixing W.M.’s lunch.

“Uh, Ma, I … ah, I need …”

His voice is soft, fading beneath the talk-show chatter of daytime television. She shakes her head. She doesn’t have it, she tells him, and Gary knows it’s true. If she had twenty dollars, she would reluctantly give ten to him, despite herself, so as not to watch her child suffer. He nods, accepting, and she offers instead to cook him some breakfast. An egg-and-bacon sandwich.

Gary shakes his head. The nausea drives him out of the kitchen and through the front door. He’s on Vine Street, the winter wind cutting through his sweater and savaging his bare ankles. Up on Monroe, there is a feeding frenzy as fiends flow from a tester line—freebies thrown to fiends as advertising for the day’s package. Spider Bags, too—this was a double blow, as the bags with the black widow on them are a definite bomb.

Gary knows he’s missed his chance, but he jogs up to the corner anyway, pushing into the wind, arriving in time to watch Tiny give out the last one and glide off. Gary stands there in the flow of just-served fiends, his hand out, his hunger on display. He tries a plea.

“Hey Janice.”

He gives Janice his stepped-on puppy look, but she ignores him. She has her own need; they all do. Gary, though, takes the refusal to heart. When I had it, he tells himself, I shared it. I shared it with crudballs who won’t give me the time of day now.

He’s alone at the top of the alley, standing amid the wind-whipped trash. He feels the snake move, then makes up his mind and heads off to find Ronnie. She’ll make him suffer, but she’ll also get him out of the gate.

There is a part of Gary that hates himself for leaning into Ronnie’s punches, for putting up with her games for the sake of a blast. She calls herself his girlfriend, tells him she loves him, but the truth is, there’s no sexual charge in the relationship, nothing that anyone could mistake for affection. They had messed around a few times, for appearances’ sake more than anything else, but Ronnie holds no real attraction for Gary, save for her ability to make it happen from nothing. Every day, Gary pisses and moans over her crudball moves, over the abuse he takes. Every day, he tells himself that it’s all one way, that he has tried to end the relationship only to have her follow him around and pull him back. Every day, he tells himself that this is the last time, that after Ronnie gets him the blast he’ll cut her loose for good.

But there is no getting around Veronica Boice. She is the neighborhood sorceress, a rare mixture of will and wisdom and evil. She’s different from Gary, who can’t wrestle with the snake without the fear rushing up and overwhelming him. Not Ronnie. She channels the pain into a demonic fury that seems likely to crush anyone standing between her and her shot. Gary saw it happen a few weeks back, when Ronnie took her ninety-pound frame up Fayette Street and stared down the New Yorkers.

“Gimme a blast,” she told Gee. “Last one wadn’t shit.”

There she was in the middle of Fayette and Monroe, not a nickel to her name, a whippet of steel wire standing up to big, bad, bat-waving Gee, threatening: “Gimme a blast or I’ll call the motherfucking poh-leece. You know I will.”

The crowd took it in, amazed. Gee laughed, made a joke, tried to play it off in front of all the touts and customers. But he could see it; he could see the dusty bitch dropping dime over a single vial and he could see that the choice for him was between minor charity and felony murder.

Gee gave in, slipping her one just to see her gone. And Gary, watching all of this from the sidelines, was once again staggered by the kamikaze logic that Ronnie always brought to the game. Ronnie punking Gee in the middle of Monroe Street. Dag.

He warms now at the memory, at the thought of finding the girl. He cuts from Vine Street across the vacant lot and through the back alley behind his parents’ house, then out onto Fayette Street through a second gap in the rowhouses, arriving at Ronnie’s sister’s house, where Ronnie’s been spending the colder nights. Pulling one hand from inside the sweater cuff, he bangs twice on the door, then twice again.

One of the twins, sleepy, stumbles out of the front room, cracks the door, and stares mournfully out of the vestibule.

“She not here,” he says, closing the door before Gary has a chance to react. His world is shrinking; the snake twists maliciously down in his bowels. He turns back toward Monroe, but Eggy Daddy and Fat Curt and the rest of the regulars are already on station, hustling the morning crowd. No work up there.

He heads down the hill. Fran might take care of him, for old time’s sake. Or DeAndre. Yeah, Andre, who’s got it going on down Fairmount. But at the Dew Drop Inn, only Bunchie is out on the stoop, looking none too good herself.

“Fran in bed,” she says. “Andre gone to school.”

School? DeAndre? Lord, please, what are the chances of that? Gary stumbles on, heading down Gilmor without any real plan, the snake now coiling and uncoiling in his throat. He goes around the block and turns toward Fayette, defeated, moving through the crowd at Mount Street, looking into the eyes of a half-dozen regulars who have already made their shot. By now, he’s unable to gather his wits, to endure the snake long enough to manufacture a hustle.

“Hey, hey,” a voice calls.

Gary looks up to see a face, vaguely familiar, smiling at him from the other side of Mount Street.

“What’s up with you?”

Gary squints, trying to focus. Now he’s got it. The guy from Stevie’s room. The fiend who’s been shuffling in and out of Dew Drop Inn for about a month now, firing with half a dozen others in Stevie Boyd’s rogues’ gallery. Doug, remembers Gary. Name is Douglas for sure.

Gary crosses the street.

“Nothin’ yet,” he tells Doug.

“Man,” says Doug, taking stock, “you looking flat-out rough.”

Gary nods agreement. “I feel bad. Can’t get started.”

“No, hey, I can hook you up with something,” says Doug. “I got somethin’ goin’ on.”

Gary takes this in. Doug is going to get him over. Doug, who hasn’t done anything but use the same shooting gallery. Gary nods agreement, hopeful, but waiting for the shoe to drop.

“Found this spot,” says Doug. “They practically asking you to take their shit. I’m serious. This one store out on Forty West been keeping me well all week.”

Gary nods. He can do it. He can do anything if the snake goes back down into its hole. And Doug understands. He’ll get Gary the jumper: twenty on the hype, free of charge, so long as they share the caper. To Gary’s ears, it’s burning bush time, with Yahweh himself shouting out to him from the unconsuming flames.

I’m up for it, Gary thinks. I’m up for anything.

An hour and a half later, he’s stepping off the Route 40 bus out near Westview, walking around the county like a damn puppy at Doug’s heels. He’s out of his game now, stumbling through the shopping mall doors, still trying to fight the snake because Doug’s twenty wasn’t much.

“We go in separate-like,” Doug tells him outside the J.C. Penney. “You follow me up the escalator where they got this shelf of irons. You the lookout, I scoop. Nothing to it, my man.”

Gary just nods. Yeah. Lookout. Look out for what?

In they go and Gary looks around, trying to spot security guards from among the customers but not at all sure of what he’s seeing. Doug’s out in front, hellbent for the steam irons. Gary watches his partner sidle up to the display, watches as Doug comes out with a worn Penney’s shopping bag. One, then two, three, four, five, six. Gary’s on the other side of the aisle, fidgeting, looking around frantically for the handcuffs sure to come. But no, everyone on the floor is oblivious.

He follows Doug out the side entrance and into the parking lot, thinking, that they’re both invisible. A couple of raggedy-ass, dope-eyed black men stumbling through a county shopping center, lifting appliances, and we’re flat-out invisible. We just walk in and take what we want.

“See?” says Doug. “Nothin’ to it.”

A fine caper, and Gary is proud, the high of their success pushing the reptile deeper in his belly. At the bus stop, Doug intrudes on his reverie, wondering where they can off the merchandise. “Been dumpin’ a lot of irons on Fayette,” he says apologetically.

For that, Gary’s got a plan of his own, a contribution to the cause greater than that of a mere lookout. With real delight, he tells Doug where the irons are going and who will be paying for them.

“Say what?”

Gary nods, smiling wickedly.

“The police gonna buy our irons,” says Doug, doubtful.

“Yes indeed.”

Which is pretty much what happens when the two of them get back to the city and find the right corner bar at Baltimore and Smallwood Streets, a place that Gary knows is a hangout for off-duty police. For good retail items, Gary has used the bar before, learning that the rollers, like everyone else, love a discount. Just like that, three of the irons are gone; ten dollars each and everyone’s happy, no questions asked. Doug is impressed, even more so after they walk back up the hill and Gary goes salesman on the workers building the new wing at Bon Secours, unloading two more irons on the hard hats.

Cash money. They head back for Mount and Fayette and Gary’s mind is spinning with the glory of the caper, oblivious to the cold, indifferent even to the snake itself. It’s all the better because he made it happen without Ronnie. Now he’s thinking that Ronnie isn’t much, that he can cut her loose. At Mount Street, they jump into the action like new shooters at a crap table.

“Who got those Black-and-Whites?” Gary asks. Tallyho.

The next day, they’re together again, county-bound, riding the MTA out to the same stop, giddy at the possibilities. Doug talks like a broken record, offering up the same plan. Gary shows no concern, because what the hell, they’re invisible. Same spot, same shelf—Doug hits the irons while Gary stands around like some kind of referee. One, two, three, four—then Doug stops, probably figuring there isn’t much of a steam iron display left. This time Gary is out the door first, crossing the promenade, then turning to wait for his partner.

But no Doug.

Gary waits, then walks back to the entrance, close enough to catch a glimpse of Doug being led off by two security guards. He feels his stomach roll, his mind racing. Got to think. Got to think on this. The guards walk Doug away, back to the security office, but no one comes for Gary. He wanders down the promenade, retrieves a newspaper from a trash can, then takes a seat on a bench, hiding behind the sports section with no real plan. Panic steals his high.

Ten minutes later, Gary is still there when three security guards suddenly appear, blocking him against the bench.

“Come with us.”

“I wouldn’t do … I wasn’t with …”

Gary’s protest is weak and he knows it; his ability to carry a lie is the poorest part of his game. In the security office, he’s reunited with Doug, who gives him a guilty look. They’re left to sit there in silence while papers are shuffled and bodies move around them. Watching it all from within the fog, Gary is dazzled by a voice, businesslike and droning, then a hand extending papers. Gary, clueless, takes the pen and signs away, then waits some more until the county police arrive and he’s in the back of a police wagon for the short run to the Wilkens lockup. There, he sits in a common holding area, wondering when he might see a court commissioner, and bargaining with the snake, trying to figure some way to make peace with the animal inside.

He’s the very picture of abject poverty, at least until some tattooed white boy walks over, lifts his shirt, and tugs at an Ace bandage wrapped around his ribs. Three bags of dope fall to the ground and the white boy laughs at the expression on Gary’s face.

He picks up one of the glassine bags and looks over in gratitude; the white boy seems Christlike, feeding the multitudes. No spike, so Gary breathes it deep into one nostril, then leans back to hear the white boy’s laughter and feel the snake backing away.

A few minutes later, they give him his call. Gary handles the receiver gingerly, dreading the answer at the other end. He’s causing pain they don’t deserve, but he has to get out.

“Ma … yeah, Ma,” he says. “I’m locked up … Out in the county, Ma. They got me locked up.”

He winces visibly at his mother’s voice, seeing her sagging down at the kitchen table, imagining the prayers running around her head. He tells the tale haltingly, painting himself a victim. Miss Roberta listens to a story that Gary hears as feeble even as he tells it. Finally, she cuts him off:

“Gary, what were you doing out there in the first place?”

He doesn’t have an answer.

“Oh Gary.”

She promises to call his brother Ricardo, who is now off the corner and doing all right for himself, making money down at the crabhouse and on a second job out at Social Security. Cardy might help, but beyond that she can’t promise, telling Gary that money is tight, that she’ll talk to his father when he gets home. Gary hears that and swallows hard.

“Ma, please,” says Gary. He’s begging finally, promising to change, get off the drugs, maybe get back his old job at the Point and do all the things he used to do. “Ma, I’m gonna make it up to you, I promise.”

His mother reaches Ricardo, scrapes up the money and finds a bondsman, but Gary gets the bad news when he’s pulled out of the bullpen in the afternoon: He can’t be released by the county; he has a detainer from Baltimore city.

An old assault warrant, the turnkey explains. Gary tries to remember. Assault? Who? He didn’t assault anyone. It doesn’t register until he meets the city fugitive detective, thumbing his way through the paperwork.

“Says here, you hit, ah, Veronica Boice.”

Ronnie’s revenge. Her trumped-up humble of an assault charge from when Gary cut her out of a blast. Dag.

The next ride takes him downtown. It’s Gary’s first trip to the city jail, that tiered nightmare at the city detention center and state penitentiary complex on Eager Street. He’s out of his depth and he knows it.

In the intake area, he unwinds slowly, his eyes trying to adjust. He’s in a barred confine littered with maybe a dozen men—some white strays, but mostly black—being processed in and out of the facility. From behind a screen, a lieutenant pulls his paperwork, takes his thumbprint, and points him in the general direction of the bullpen. It’s eighty bodies deep, a murmuring, stinking mob squeezed around a single metal toilet.

Gary struggles for space, eventually squeezing into a spot along one wall. He slumps down, tuning out the noise, eyes capturing a verse or two lifted from Isaiah, another fragment of raging prophesy about sin and redemption. He’s barely digested that much when the guards send them out on the tier, into J-section, where a coterie of broke-down oldtime hustlers share space with some of the younger souls. Gary draws an old white gunner from South Baltimore as a cellmate, a veteran who has been jailing for years, who knows to keep a low profile.

Soon enough, Gary knows it, too. He quickly gets a sense of the sharks, the kind you want to keep from, especially the crazed one in the cell directly across from him. Banging the bars, eyefucking anything that moves, the neighbor across the way spends the time talking to no one in particular, telling the world just how bad he is. Beyond him, though, J-section seems pretty tame.

Next morning, they let them out on the tier a half hour before breakfast for a chance to move around, maybe get to a telephone. Today, though, the sharks are making all the calls, so Gary heads off to the mess hall and a chance to look into that blue chain-linked sky along the way. Breakfast is two thick slices of bread, two packets of jelly, and a cold boiled egg. Gary throws it all together as a sandwich and forces it down. Then it’s back down the funnel and back into that cell. Twice more like that and he can call it a day.

He’s a novice here, jailing without a game face, genuinely incapable of the requisite brutality. No shank, no moves, no allies, no money, but he’s making it, discovering that the words of Islam he learned in an earlier life can be a key. In the afternoon of that first day, he joins the little prayer group that nestles in one cell, hearing the words, talking the talk, giving it some meaning. The regulars are receptive; Gary is carving out a little niche, getting some breathing space and a chance at the phone. His mother promises that they’ll have a paid bail on the city charge soon. And, most important, an old-timer in the section comes through with pills that manage to hold the snake at bay.

A day more and Gary’s thinking he can be hard, like Gee or Drac or any of the corner gangsters. Hard like Ronnie, who can do a month in women’s detention standing on her head. Gary is showing them all up in his mind, showing them he can do what he has to, thinking these thoughts until the white boy shows up, a kid, really, but shaded a little too far toward suburban, with wispy blond hair. Anyone with a soul has to wince when they drop the kid in with the madman across the way.

The kid sits at one edge of the metal bunk and looks across the aisle at Gary, who tries to give back a reassuring smile. Night comes on with the lights dimmed, the noise muted. Gary closes his eyes, but night never brings real silence to Eager Street. Screams, sobs, cursing, laughter punctuate the hours; in jail, you cry at night—at least you do if you’re still capable of crying. After a time, Gary gives up trying to sleep and slides back against the wall, staring into the dimness. Passing time.

He catches a movement in the cell across the way. Gary thinks he sees the glint from a gold ring slicing through the air, smashing down into a sleeping form. He hears a whimper, then the ripping of fabric and flashes of white skin. And then, a shattering of sound, with the caged animal cursing over a piercing endless scream that banks off the bars and echoes down the tier. Something is tossed from the cell; Gary squints in the darkness until his eyes make out what looks like the bloody stub of a broken fluorescent tube.

The guards finally come and take the kid away. Gary closes his eyes, praying into that void, petitioning every power in the universe to take him home. No more dope, no more capers.

For all that night and the next, he’s singing the redemption song, making plans for the better life to come, promising to wash the sin from his hands. He’s still talking like that on the day after, when the bail money is right and he’s gliding out from under the razor wire on Eager Street.

He’s back on Vine the next day, breathing deeply, feeling good about himself, ignoring the chants of the touts, ennobled by the effort to make good on his oaths. I can do this, he tells himself. I can get it all back.

His father’s cab comes in off Monroe, rolls down the slope and rides up over the curb to park in front of the neighbor’s house. W. M. gets out, pausing a second from the effort.

Then he sees his son and lifts a huge hand to chest level for a small wave. Gary blinks, his eyes filling, and father and son search each other for a moment, but neither takes the moment any further. W.M. breaks the stare, then walks by in silence, wearily climbing the steps to the house. Gary watches him, loving him even from the depths of the abyss.

The front door slams and Gary is alone on the street, wondering whether the jailhouse pills got him through, whether the snake is dead or just waiting. He watches two women get served in front of a vacant garage and feels the vicarious pleasure of the transaction. He’s still unwilling to go up to the corner, but equally unwilling to leave his front steps.

He sees her first up on Monroe Street, drifting back and forth at the mouth of the alley. Indifferent to her surroundings, the weather, her own physical being—a haunted creature, pinning him down with her eyes alone, drawing him wordlessly toward her. For a moment, he thinks to turn and run, to get into his mother’s kitchen and ask for an egg sandwich. Instead, he walks up that hill pretending he’ll do battle with her, scream at her, tell her how he suffered. But his voice isn’t harsh enough for the task; the words come in sad appeal, not anger.

“Ronnie, why you do me like that?”

She snorts derisively, looking away.

“You had me locked up for nothin’.”

She ignores him, watching a tout approach a customer near the pay phone.

“You put me in jail behind nothin’ at all.”

“Gary, you know there won’t be no case when it comes to court.”

He says nothing.

“You miss me, love? I got a welcome home gift.”

Her hand comes out of a sweatshirt pocket, her fist balled.

Gary looks at the hand, then up into Ronnie’s eyes. And it’s over without a struggle.

“Careful,” he says, “I don’t want my mother to see.”

Late the next morning, he’s down in the basement, same as he ever was, waking slowly at the sound of his name. Ronnie lies on the edge of the mattress beside him.

“Gary … Gary … Gaaaarrry.”

His mother is at the top of the landing yelling into the darkness, exasperated. “Gary!”

He finally stirs. “What time is it?”

“Gary, I need you to go to the store.”

Ronnie giggles, and he shushes her down. He gets up and starts to dress, telling Ronnie to get out through the cellar door. She laughs again, then begins pulling herself together.

“Come over after,” she tells him at the door. “I found some stuff in a garage we can take to the scales.”

It’s Gary who laughs this time. Ronnie doesn’t know a damn thing about what sells and what doesn’t at United Iron and Metal. It isn’t her game and if that’s all the plan she’s got, then he’s got to start worrying. The last speedball is already wearing thin.

Gary makes it upstairs to the dining room, into the light, looking worn and lost. His mother gives him one glance and knows, but says nothing because there’s nothing left to say. She goes to the small breakfront, rifling through a stack of chipped plates and saucers until she finds the $10 bill hidden there. She hands it to him, telling him to bring back five pounds of potatoes and two boxes of Hamburger Helper.

He stands there for a moment, staring at the bill, watching it burn his palm. The price of admission. Gary wonders whether his mother has lost her mind. She can see that he’s ailing. She can’t expect, and yet … He hesitates, his mind taking in the runoff from some rare reservoir of better nature. Something is going on here, something that suddenly seems more important than all the promises he gave no real thought to keeping.

He pockets the money, sensing that this, at least, is tangible, a real chance to go beyond the silence that stands between them, to justify both the loving mother and the dutiful son. This is a mission, a hero’s journey.

“Be right back.”

He’s out the back door and into the alley, but it doesn’t matter which way he goes. It’s nearly noon and the shop is bustling from Monroe to Gilmor; he’s surrounded. He’s going to have to face it, wade through it, and emerge on the other side.

He heads up the alley toward Monroe Street, the shortest distance to the store. But walking past Blue’s house, he sees Pimp ducking under the busted rear door, looking like he’s flush. Gary wets his lips, pulls the Angel hat up, wipes at his brow. The snake hisses, cursing.

He makes it to Monroe, stepping out of the alley and into the beehive. Up the street, at Vine, it’s all Spider Bags, and down on Fayette Street, Death Row and the Pink Top vials are honey for another swarm of fiends. Gary watches with practiced eyes as those with short money look for hook-ups, as Fat Curt steers a couple of hungry souls down Vine Street, as Eggy Daddy sings the merits of the Pink Tops.

Gary rivets his eyes to the ground and pushes one foot, then the other down the pavement toward Pratt Street and the grocery. He’s soon past the liquor store, across Fayette, and heading down the hill. So far so good.

“Gah-ray.”

It’s Junie talking. Gary makes the mistake of lifting his head. Dope and coke are flying everywhere: touts taking orders, dealers handing off, other bodies on urgent missions flashing past. It’s in the air. He can smell it, taste it. And Junie’s got that Mike Tyson. The shit’s a bomb.

Gary’s hand, the one with the death grip around Hamilton’s throat, is coming alive, pulling itself out of his pocket, moving with a will all its own. I could tell her I got robbed. Or just not come home. Hang with Ronnie somewhere. Stay down on Fayette Street, give it a couple of days and she’d forget.

He looks at Junie’s face. A mask, the eyes dead.

No. He jams the offending hand deep into his pocket.

“Ain’t up,” he says, then pushes past, crossing Baltimore Street, gaining speed, past Blue’s son, Dontanyn, the last retailer in the line, before rolling downhill to the market.

Inside, he gathers the stuff, but dag, the prices are way high. He thinks about cutting the order. Maybe shave off a nickel. Tell her he got mixed up, or just drop the bag in the kitchen while she’s upstairs sleeping. It would be nothing to keep five and find a hookup with some other short money. Get ten, maybe twenty on the hype. That’ll work.

He’s trapped in the aisle, holding one box of Hamburger Helper, then two, then one again. He looks at the label. The stuff ain’t even good for you, too many chemicals. He stands there for a minute more, until the scales tip and he grabs both boxes and the taters, goes to the register and gives up a bill as crumpled as his spirit.

The way home is not the hero’s journey. He climbs Monroe Street, package in hand. He drags his lonesome ass past the touts, feeling weak. The snake spits out its contempt.

“What took you so long?” asks his mother.

He mumbles half an answer.

“Want to eat?” she asks him, her voice now soft.

Gary looks at her, sees that she knows. Maybe she knew the whole time. He wants to say something, to bring it home, but the snake seizes the moment instead.

“No, Ma,” he says, “I got to go out.”

DeAndre McCullough leans against the oversized concrete flowerpots outside the rec center doors, his demeanor on chill, his face tucked down inside the hood of his sweatshirt. R.C. is perched next to him on the steps, lacing and relacing his new Jordans, listening with growing impatience as DeAndre tells the tale. Boo is against the other flowerpot, half listening, half waiting with a broken fragment of the playground’s crumbling asphalt in his hand, watching for a rat to stick its head out of the discarded easy chair at the end of the alley.

“You was getting out the hack?”

“Right on Baltimore Street,” says DeAndre.

“Sheeeeet,” R.C. says. “We should call a meeting.”

DeAndre nods agreement.

“We should send a message,” adds R.C. “Go down there deep.”

“You see who it was?” asks Boo.

DeAndre shrugs.

“But, yo, Black, you was comin’ from the projects,” insists R.C. “You was down the hill where they always be. That’s why they took them shots at you.”

DeAndre nods agreement. He likes it when anyone calls him Black. He fashioned the street name himself, figuring that any real gangster ought to be able to fashion his own corner legend, rather than leaving such important matters to random chance. His family used to call him Onion, because when he was little his head had that particular shape. DeAndre hated Onion.

“I’m saying we should go strong,” adds R.C., warming to the idea. “Fuck them project niggers. They ain’t all that.”

It probably was the Lexington Terrace boys who took a shot at DeAndre on Baltimore Street, and by rights C.M.B. should mount up and march back down there in force. But DeAndre has other things crowding his mind; they all do since they started going off to sling drugs in ones and twos. Hard to raise a posse when the crew is scattered over a half-dozen corners.

“Must be them,” says Boo, chiming in late. “Or maybe those niggers from Stricker and Ramsay.”

“Boo, you stupid,” says R.C. “They ain’t gon’ be up on Baltimore Street. And, yo, half of them is white anyway.”

“So?” asks Boo, wounded. “Least I ain’t stupid like you, R.C. Least I go to school.”

“I go to school,” R.C. says, then catches himself before the other two dissolve in laughter. “Well, I will go to school soon as my mother gets me into Francis M. Woods.”

That’s the current theory on Richard Carter’s academic career. If he could only get out of Southwestern and into Francis Woods, then he’d turn it around, maybe get to the tenth grade before reaching the age of majority. It’s a fine theory, and there are appreciable differences between the chaos of the Terrordome, as the local kids call Southwestern, and the controlled anarchy of Francis Woods. But the contrast is relevant only if a student were to attend more than, say, two or three days a semester. R.C. always hits a shopping mall for the back-to-school fashion sales, then shows up looking right for the first day of class. After that, it’s back to the streets.

As for DeAndre, lately he’s been living in both camps. Since Rose Davis put him back on the rolls last month, he’s been making it down to Francis Woods for little more than half of his classes. He’s also been slinging enough of his Blue Tops on Fairmount to keep money in his pocket. Not as much as he’d like, of course—Tyrone Boice plucked him good when he tried to bring his vials up to Monroe Street—but enough to get by.

“What you say?” DeAndre asks, changing the subject.

“Huh,” says Boo.

“About the thing.”

“Yeah,” says Boo, throwing the asphalt chunk. Hitting the chair, missing the rat.

DeAndre waits for more of an answer. When none is forthcoming, he suppresses an almost overwhelming desire to smack Boo upside his head. He’s been trying to give Boo a little piece of his package on consignment, bring on a subcontractor and make a little more than he could make on his own.

“I’m sayin’ you’d get twenty-five,” DeAndre tells him.

“Twenty-five dollar?”

R.C. laughs loudly from the steps. “Boo, goddamn!”

“No,” says DeAndre. “That’s the split.”

“Oh yeah,” says Boo, nodding until silence descends on them.

DeAndre looks over at Boo and waits. Boo is a loyal member of C.M.B., but sometimes talking to him is like banging your head on a wall. DeAndre’s latest partner in the Blue Top venture on Fairmount was Corey, his cousin Nicky’s boyfriend. And while Corey didn’t mess up like so many others, he also wasn’t spending as much time on the corner as DeAndre. So hiring Boo seemed to make sense, assuming simple math was at all within his grasp.

“How much I get?” Boo asks finally.

“DAMN, BOY,” shouts R.C. “YOU IGNORANT AS SHIT.”

“At least I ain’t messin’ up all the time like you do,” says Boo, bitterly. “You always a fuck up.”

Now DeAndre laughs. It was true enough: R.C. was always messing up the money; he couldn’t sling drugs for two days without getting into some kind of hole.

“Fuck you, bitch,” mutters R.C.

DeAndre breaks it down to Boo slowly: I give you forty, you sell out and one-fifty comes back to me and fifty you keep. You sell twice that, you make a hundred dollars. And the Blue Tops, DeAndre assures him, they are the bomb; he’s selling out at five dollars a vial on Fairmount. If Boo wants to try them down at Ramsay and Stricker, they could go for dimes.

“Okay,” says Boo.

They sit for a time on the two thin steps below the rec doors, glad for a February day with a little warmth. Distracted by a conversation that amounts to half war council, half marketing meeting, they hardly notice as bodies begin to drift in from Fayette Street, lining up meekly. In scarcely a minute, eighteen men and women are standing hard by the fence, on the edge of the playground, across the vacant lot from Mount Street. All in a row, all waiting patiently.

From here, too, they can see Collins come north up Vincent from Baltimore Street and park his radio car at the intersection with Fayette.

“Bitch always hanging ’round Malik’s house,” DeAndre says.

“Yo, that’s cause Malik be snitching,” says R.C. “Many times as he gets locked up and never goes to jail, I’m telling you that boy be snitching.”

They watch a tall, lanky fiend walk up the middle of Fayette Street in front of Collins, pulling a new refrigerator balanced on a homemade wagon.

“Collins ain’t shit,” DeAndre declares. “Last summer, he pulled me up on Gilmor, sayin’ he was gonna kick my ass. If my mother wasn’t there, I’da fucked him up.”

“Collins always be pickin’ at us,” R.C. complains. “Like we’re the only ones doing shit.”

“He ain’t as bad as Bob Brown,” says Boo.

“That’s what I’m saying,” says R.C. “They always be after us like we the gangsters.”

“Bob Brown come ’round an tell me I can’t even sit on my own steps,” says DeAndre. “That shit ain’t right.”

Three teenagers—two males and a younger girl—come out of the side alley on Mount and head toward the line of waiting adults. The line seems to straighten in anticipation as one of the young men stands near the end of the line, his right hand tucked inside his jacket. The other escorts the girl to the front of the line, where she begins to hand each fiend a bag.

Testers.

From washing machines to widgets, every product needs marketing and promotion, and street drugs are no exception. In every open-air market in the city, samples are offered up early in the day to spread the word that so-and-so’s shit is truly a bomb. And because a weak tester would be self-defeating, the free samples rarely disappoint. Word that a crew is putting out testers can come minutes or hours—and sometimes even a day or more—in advance of the actual event, and the possibility of free bag or vial can produce a lemming run through a back alley or vacant lot.

“Family Affair back slingin’ like I don’t know what,” says R.C., watching the line dissolve.

Just around the corner from the tester hand-off, Collins still sits in his radio car, his view obstructed by the rowhouses on the north side of street. As the fiends skirt out of the alley in twos and threes, the patrolman seems to catch on. He pulls his cruiser into Fayette Street in a hurry, wheeling around the corner at Mount. Too late; the last of them is in full flight.

“Collins ain’t shit,” DeAndre says again, getting up to leave. R.C. stands up, too, stretching and yawning.

“Black,” says R.C. “You gonna go to the dance?”

“When?”

“Valentine’s. Miss Ella havin’ a sock hop.”

“What’s that?”

“Like a dance.”

“You going?”

“Oh yeah,” says R.C., proud. “Me and Treecee. You gonna bring Reeka?”

Tyreeka Freamon has been DeAndre’s girl since the summer. She hasn’t been on Fayette Street long; until last year, she’d been living with her father in East Baltimore—her mother, too busy chasing vials to keep track of her, caught a drug charge that took her to women’s prison in Jessup. Then, when Tyreeka couldn’t get along with her father’s new girlfriend, she landed at her grandmother’s house on Stricker Street. DeAndre likes the newness of Tyreeka, the fact that there isn’t a neighborhood history behind her; and he likes her show of independence, the way she doesn’t always hang with the other girls on the fringe of C.M.B. That’s partly because she’s still going to school on the east side, partly because she likes to hang with the boys, which is good and bad for DeAndre—good because it made it easy to holler at her, bad because there are always others waiting to do the same.

She’s young—thirteen last September—but she’s not young. Every boy in the neighborhood has noticed the curves and the way Tyreeka moves. DeAndre knew Linwood had his eyes on her; so did Chris and Sean. In that crowd, DeAndre was hardly the best-looking suitor. Tyreeka, he knew, saw him as too dark-skinned at first, too ordinary looking back then, before he let his dreds grow out and found his look. But DeAndre got close to her first by playing that he was interested in her younger cousin, Tish, who had been nursing a child’s crush on DeAndre.

“You know my cousin like you,” Tyreeka told him.

“Yeah,” he told her, “but I like you.”

From then on, he was all over Stricker Street, spending near every dime he could scrape together by slinging at Hollins and Payson, or on Fulton, or on Fairmount. First, he bought her new Nikes; then it was trips to the movies at Harbor Park. By the time summer ended they’d seen every last thing that had come to the downtown theater complex—the good ones twice or three times. Whatever was left over went for shopping trips down at Mt. Clare or Westside, with DeAndre spending as much on his own clothes as he gave to Tyreeka. Then there was that video game down at Bill’s, the one called Street Fighter; DeAndre had her learn enough to play him on it, and not a night went by that they didn’t pour fifteen or twenty dollars in quarters into the slot. He was leaking money in those days, two hundred a week just to stay next to Tyreeka. Still, Linwood and Sean were losing their minds. Why, they asked Tyreeka, did you pick that ugly, blackass nigger?

She knew where the money came from, of course. In the beginning, he actually brought her down to the corners to pass the time. She’d sit on the stoop; he’d serve a customer and then stop back to play around. But as things got more serious, he could see that it wasn’t right. There is no respect in having your girl out on the corner with you.

The sex only started coming in the late fall, with DeAndre getting to her first in the back bedroom at the Dew Drop and later using his parent’s old house up the block, where the pinup girls stared down on them as they went at it. Out in the street, he talked trash like everyone else did, telling himself and everyone else he was gonna bust the bitch. But he genuinely liked Tyreeka and so he tried to be good to her, it being her first time and all.

Now they’re together, but DeAndre is still worrying. Tyreeka likes to fool with his friends, and when it comes to girls, he doesn’t trust any of them. Linwood is still hungry for it. And Dewayne. And Tae is a creeper; he’s been flirting with Tyreeka since the day she moved into the neighborhood. No, DeAndre definitely has to take her to Ella’s dance, or she’ll be there without him and that won’t do.

“Ella say Kiti gonna be mixin’,” says R.C.

“Yeah, I be there,” DeAndre says, before turning his attention back to Boo. “You comin’?”

“Huh?”

“You comin’ down?”

“Yeah.”

And off he goes, a fifteen-year-old entrepreneur on his daily commute to the office. With Boo trailing, DeAndre walks past Stubby, who’s back out slinging Pink Tops at Fayette and Vincent since Collins rolled out; on past Scar, who’s selling green vials in front of the vacant house on the other side of the street; on past Drac, who’s working out with Killer Bee along Gilmor; arriving at last at the Fairmount corners, the market niche that he has made his own. Fairmount and Gilmor, home of the Big Blue Top.

There, on his corner, DeAndre proceeds to have a day like no other, a sell-out-the-store bonanza that keeps him running into the late hours of night. He’s got a bomb and his name is ringing. Customers are coming at him from Monroe Street, from Hollins and Payson, from down below Baltimore Street. He’s out there when Boo sells off his allotment and settles up. He’s out there still when Boo has gone home for the night. He’s tired, working hard, and ultimately, getting a little bit lazy in the wee hours—all the more so after two Phillies blunts packed with that good Edmondson Avenue weed. By eleven or so, he’s no longer ducking back into the labyrinth of alleys that run off the 1500 block of Fairmount. He’s out in the open for most of the sales, carrying it with him, serving people right along Gilmor.

He’s too busy to notice the unmarked Cavalier at the other end of Gilmor, too tired to bother sending the girl with the $10 bill back into the alley for her two vials, too ready to believe that he can go on like this forever, slinging on autopilot, making more money than even Tyreeka knows how to spend.

“FIVE-OH.”

Aw shit. Coming up Gilmor. Two of ’em on a jump-out from a gray Chevy. And right when DeAndre was about to pass two vials to the girl. He drops them in the gutter and races into one of the side alleys. Behind him, he can hear the car doors slam and heavy footsteps. But fuck that, he knows Fairmount’s alleys and he knows where he’s going. He’s also a fifteen-year-old running on adrenaline and $120 high-tops; not many rollers are going to stay with that, burdened as they are with utility belts, Kevlar vests, and hard-soled shoes.

The footsteps behind him fade, but as a precaution, DeAndre cuts through to Baltimore Street, then doubles back and waits a few more minutes before slipping back out onto Baltimore again. Then, finally, he saunters casually up to the corner, standing there for a moment, peering up Gilmor to Fairmount and the scene of the crime, so to speak. No cops, no crowds—just the regulars drifting back toward the corner.

Then from behind him, he hears the screech of radials. DeAndre turns and they’re out of the car and on him—Huffham and some other roller that DeAndre doesn’t recognize. This time he doesn’t bother to run. He even manages a little smile, figuring he’s gotten over.

“What’s up?” he asks Huffham.

The cop is shaking his head, one meaty hand gripping DeAndre by the upper arm, lurching him into the liquor store window grate. It hurts like hell—especially when they yank his arms back and apply the cuffs.

“Why’d you run?” the other police asks.

“What?” says DeAndre.

Huffham shakes his head again, but DeAndre could care less. He beat them straight up, ran them into the dust in those back alleys. He could have stayed hid forever if he wanted; he only popped out on Baltimore Street because he knew they didn’t have the coke. And now they’re late; they’re dragging his ass back up to Fairmount and the corner is cluttered with fiends and dealers. No way. They didn’t have it and DeAndre knew they never would.

All the way up the block, he’s holding down the smile, trying to manage a hard-as-nails gangster look for the sake of appearances. He sees Linwood in the crowd. Dink-Dink, too.

Huff ham is still gripping his arm, moving him toward the curb in starts and jolts. The other cop is a few steps ahead, bending down. Aw shit.

“You want these back?”

Got-damn. Couldn’t someone—anyone—out here have picked the shit up? Lord, please, I’m on a corner with every fiend in the neighborhood and not one of them sees fit to pick up two vials of coke lying in the gutter? He’d have gone on home if he thought the people at Fairmount and Gilmor were just going to leave Blue Tops lying all over the place.

He waits for the wagon. The corner—his corner—watches the dethronement with indifference. DeAndre shouts toward the closest recognizable face.

“Tell my mother I’m up the Western.”

There’s no comprehensive ass-kicking this time, though he did run from the police—a sin that often provokes a Western uniform to deliver some parting shots on principle. Perhaps it’s because he’s fifteen, perhaps because he didn’t bolt a second time when they pulled up on Baltimore Street, and perhaps because Huffham and his partner are about police work by the rules. For whatever reason, DeAndre arrives at the station house unhurt.

Huffham is good about trying to reach Fran as well, but that’s no surprise: the juvenile system is such a pain-in-the-ass complication for a working police that it’s better by far to get a parent or guardian to come up to the station and sign for the kid. In fact, some police will actually lock a kid up, process him, and then drive the arrestee back home rather than suffer through the wait for a juvenile hearing officer. Worse, if the kid is committed to JSA custody, there’s also that drive to Hickey or Waxter. So for the rest of the four-to-twelve shift, they’re calling for Fran to come and get her son, trying to reach her by calling a neighbor who lets people from the Dew Drop use her phone. When that doesn’t work, DeAndre gives Huffham the number at his grandmother’s house on Vine Street.

He’s waiting and watching, listening to the cop try to explain the situation, probably talking to Miss Roberta, who’s probably confused. No, she doesn’t know where Fran is. Fran doesn’t live here. Aw shit.

Nothing is working. Fran is out on her own adventure and the connections aren’t getting made. At midnight, the shift changes and there’s no alternative but to call for juvenile intake. DeAndre’s still hoping that someone on Fairmount got the word to his mother, that Fran is on her way up to the Western now. But barring that, he’s bound for Hickey.

It’s nearly two in the morning by the time the intake officer has DeAndre McCullough properly processed as a delinquent child. She commits him to the Hickey School in Baltimore County, citing not only the lack of an available parent to take custody and the current offense of possession of cocaine with intent to distribute, but two other pending juvenile cases: another cocaine charge from September and a stolen car charge from August.

He’s still waiting for the early-morning ride out to Hickey when word comes back that the training school is over capacity. New juvenile arrests are being sent fifty miles south of the city, to Boys Village in the lower reaches of Prince George’s County. That’s trouble. DeAndre was ready for Hickey; he’d heard about the place from half a dozen C.M.B. boys already. But Boys Village is way worse than Hickey, filled with D.C. niggers who like to beef with the Baltimore boys.

His sense of foreboding increases as he rides south, the amber glow of the city receding as he’s hauled down Route 3 through miles of suburbs that give way to farms and woods and Lord knows what else. Highway signs point to places that DeAndre can only wonder about: Crofton, Bowie, Upper Marlboro. Watching the outline of an open-slat tobacco barn roll by under the moonlight, DeAndre wonders where in hell they’re taking him. Klan country, probably.

On Fayette Street, the standing assumption is that any place in America without bricks and pavement and black people is, by definition, a playground for sheet-wearing, pickup-truck-wrecking, get-a-rope rednecks. It’s a powerful and enduring myth to the young men and women of West Baltimore, a self-imposed construct of the corner mind: They don’t want us out there. They don’t need us. Stray from the streets you know, you fall off the edge of the world.

Staring out the van window, DeAndre sees stars in the winter sky. Boys Village. Damn.

Might as well be the dark side of the moon.