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