The Corner. David Simon

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ