The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood

by David Simon

“You can hold back from the suffering of the world. You have free permission to do so and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.” —Kafka

Bubbles' sponsor Waylon reads this quote to Bubs in the Wire series finale.

By one in the morning, this night is like any other, and Curtis Davis knows that it can never end, that money and desire will not be denied. He can tell this story going back a quarter century, back to when he stood on these same corners and the game was just beginning. He had some money in those days, and God knows he had the desire. He has stayed out here nearly every night since, until only his desire remains. He was out here yesterday and he’s out here tonight, and come tomorrow, he’ll be at Monroe and Fayette, watching the same scenes play. No point in talking about changing, or stopping, or even slowing down. In his soldier’s heart, Curt knows that everyone talks that shit and no one believes it a minute after they say it. Like Blue—running and gunning tonight, but telling himself he’s going to quit come tomorrow. A resolution, says Blue. Naw, Curt tells himself, the shit is forever.

Vices make us want them above all else.

In Gary’s mind, it isn’t only the severity of the act that qualifies a crime, but the likelihood that any human being other than yourself might get hurt. In the life of Gary McCullough, this point is essential.

Wired and twitching, the stick man gets served and slips offstage quickly, bolting around the corner and southward. He’s a charged particle loosed beyond the human condition, frenzied, spinning through the streets from one vial to the next. Those on the pipe are so coke-crazed, so hungry for that ready rock that even hardcore dope fiends are apt to show disgust. A man can carry an addiction to heroin, or at least he can pretend to carry it; cocaine always carries the man.

that's some good ass prose

An artist by trade, Blue still keeps his paints, markers, and a book of poems in that satchel, carrying it with him everywhere for fear of losing it in the needle palace.

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.

YUP

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.

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.

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 use...

the old prison-tier lie that says you really only do two days—the day you go in and the day you come out.

The paper bag does not exist for drugs. For want of that shining example of constabulary pragmatism, the disaster is compounded.

For the police working these ghetto posts, the public consumption law posed a dilemma: You could try to enforce it, in which case you’d never have time for any other kind of police work; or you could look the other way, in which case you’d be opening yourself to all kinds of disrespect from people who figure that if a cop is ignoring one illegal act, he’ll probably care little about a half-dozen others. But when the first wino dropped the first bottle of elderberry into the first paper bag—and a moment of quiet genius it was—the point was moot. The paper bag allowed the smokehounds to keep their smoke, just as it allowed the beat cop a modicum of respect. In time, the bag was institutionalized as a symbol; to drink without it was to insult the patrolman and risk arrest, just as it was a violation of the tacit agreement for a cop to ignore the bag and humble anyone employing it. In a sense, the paper bag allowed for some connection between the police and the corner herd; for the price of an occasional bottle, in fact, the smokehounds could often be relied upon to provide information about more serious matters.

Roots of Bunny Colvin's paper bag speech here

center team is precious to him. The contradiction here makes R.C.’s effort in the Francis Woods gym seem transcendent: As the rest of his life settles inexorably onto the corner, a place where only the most self-centered and temporary passions are gratified, R.C. nonetheless takes the time three days a week to dedicate himself to the communal requirements of team basketball. He rebounds without reward; passes the ball without hope that it will come back; takes only those shots that offer a high percentage. The Hilltop boys notice, of course, but for the others—DeAndre, Tae, and the rest—their time on the court is mere play. To R.C., the rest of the crew are profaning his god. Beneath the generalized fantasy that every city kid carries in his head, R.C. knows his athletic career will end with playground ball. He will never play for a school varsity squad because he can never find a school. But still, he can’t give up on the idea of himself as a ballplayer. Nor can he indulge himself on the court as he does at every other point in life. Such is the power and mystique of this sport that for a few hours a day, it can socialize the likes of Richard Carter. Not that he can carry lessons about teamwork, selflessness, discipline, and hard work back into the street; they exist only within the baselines. R.C. will never follow through with an academic effort, or training regimen, or diet. For him, only the act of stepping onto the hardwood matters, and on those frequent occasions wh...

so goddamned sad.

But Ella Thompson has not been disrespected. By right or by conscience, her children are taken into account; even in its desperation, the corner manages that much.

if they ever so much as dream about his metal again, they should wake up and apologize.

Cracker ass stole that from Reservoir Dogs.

Fat Curt, for one, can tell from a man’s walk whether he’s flush, or illing, or carrying a semiauto down in the dip of his sweats. Having lived a life in the corner game, Curtis Davis sees all of it with precision, so that no one moves from here to there without the old tout divining the actual purpose.

These bits, the stories of the corner as a living thing, are what works. The individual two or three hander scenes often grow repetitive by contrast.

Instead, Blue’s most creative act since coming home has been adding another page or two of verse to the composition book he carried in his satchel. Blue’s poetry is heavy and remorseless, a running argument between himself and his addiction, and a week ago, during a late-night lull at the shooting gallery, he had turned inward long enough to put some more of the pain into words: Insanity is alive and well, taking on all new comers Fragile minds are overcome and subdued, And placed in a prison where the bars are invisible …

See, this guy and Fat Curt are way more interesting than the McCullough family. There still is no clear through line between Gary as a success and Gary as a fiend.

Inside the shooting gallery that day, no one says much; when Hungry is the subject, what’s left to say? The most that anyone can manage is a few harsh words for the young hopper with the knife. What was the nigger thinking, anyway? You give a package to Hungry, you might as well toss it in a storm drain. And then to settle up with the man at the point of a blade—that was out of all the understood proportions. Hungry steals your shit, or comes up short you beat him down: fair is fair. But it wasn’t personal. Hungry took everyone’s shit; Hungry was always short. To cut him down on a crowded corner for $100 or $150 in lost product made about as much sense as sucker-punching that A-rabber’s horse for pissing.

This America, man

Another time, he walked into a matinee and caught that Schindler’s List movie that everyone was talking about. The movie shocked him, tore a hole through his heart; he left the theater unable to speak, feeling connected to the nightmare. But for weeks afterward, he talked incessantly about Schindler and Nazis and death camps. What they did to those people, he told those willing to listen. What they did to them Jews when the Jews weren’t messing with anyone. “No matter where you go,” he offered at one point, “a nigger’s always a nigger.” With new eyes, Gary looked around at the waste and carnage and stupidity of his own neighborhood and soon began thinking in parallel terms. In another time and place, the damned were shot and gassed and burned by the millions with frightening efficiency. In West Baltimore, in a nation of civil liberties, there was instead the slow-motion destruction of thousands. It was different, Gary had to admit; but it was the same, too. On Fayette Street, life had become a slow process of taking black boys and girls, black men and women, and breaking them down, turning them into less. It happened without camps and barbed wire, without cattle cars or crematoriums or dictatorial intent. But it happened nonetheless, quietly, hour by wasted hour. Gary not only saw it all as genocidal, but convinced himself that this time, there would be people ready and able to justify it. They’re going to get tired, he would say. They’re going to get tired of the violence...

Unless and until we have a change of heart, we should stop complaining. And come the first of the month, we should pay the bribe. To do less is to compound the tragedy; to do more—well, that road is the one never taken because we are moral pretenders to a war on poverty. We have been pretenders for three decades now, ever since the Vietnam War swallowed whole the ideals of the Great Society. To do more than tender the bribe would require empathy, charity, and connectedness, and in thirty years we have summoned up nothing close. Empathy demands that we recognize ourselves in the faces at Mount and Fayette, that we ackowledge the addictive impulse as something more than simple lawlessness, that we begin to see the corner as the last refuge of the truly disowned. Charity asks that we no longer begrudge the treasure already lost. And connectedness admits that between their world and ours, the distance, in human terms at least, is never as great as we make it seem.

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

Recovery and the trappings thereof can become just as much of a crutch as any bottle, line or dope high, and few people seem to tell addicts and drunks that. it kinda bothers me but who am i to judge

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

Definitely an Ed Burns passage.

This is different, this war, and instinctively we know that retreat from it can never be total. These people that we’re ready to abandon, they are not an alien foe—their tribe is our own. And these battlefields are not half a world away in places easily forgotten. This is us, America, at war with ourselves. In some weird way, this is our own manifest destiny coming back to bite us in the ass, the pure-pedigreed descendant of all those God-fearing forefathers plunging into the wilderness, stripping the land, looking to feed off their new world, killing and being killed, opening up the east and marching west. Now, it’s a twisted replay of that devouring, except that this time, we’re the fodder.