The Corner. David Simon

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ