The Corner. David Simon

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      This used to be their bedroom, though it’s hard to see that now. The only bed remaining is a solitary mattress on the floor, covered by dirty linens. Milk crates stand in for furniture. A battered pine bureau sits in the corner with every drawer broken. A dozen pornographic pictures are taped to the four walls—every breast and crotch highlighted by crude circles and triangles drawn in thick black marker.

      The art gallery was DeAndre’s contribution, still on display from the summer before, when Gary’s son turned fifteen and began slinging heroin on Gilmor Street. When his mother found out, Fran got so angry she put him out of the house. DeAndre stayed here for a while, and Gary did, too, using this place as a hideaway during his heroin binges. That summer, father and son would sometimes pass each other in these empty halls, both of them unable to manage any real connection. DeAndre was furious at his father’s descent, yet refused to part with any emotion. And Gary, though filled with real pride to see his firstborn becoming a manchild, could never risk words. Too much shame lurking there. Too much history.

      Gary walks across the bedroom toward the front windows, trying to wrap his mind around some better thought. Two plastic milk crates filled with old record albums are stacked hard by one window—flotsam from that happier time. Gary leans forward, hands on both knees, scanning the remains of his collection. Marvin Gaye. Barry White. The Temptations. And, of course, Curtis Mayfield, who used to mean everything to Gary. Curtis, always speaking for sanity, warning that if there’s hell below, we’re all going to go. Gary pulls out an album, looks at it, then returns it carefully to the crate.

      Ancient history here, too; vinyl sound-of-soul relics gathering dust in the age of hip-hop rhythm kings and gangsta posers. Gary has no ear for what the younguns call music nowadays.

      He sings.

      “If you had a choice of colors …”

      A beautiful voice. A strong tenor for any church choir.

      “… which one would you choose, my brothers.”

      The sound echoes through the house. Gary hears Tony stirring a floor above him. Gary starts another couplet, but the moment is broken by a tumult below the front windows. The lyric is lost amid angry cursing.

      “On the ground! On the ground, motherfucker!”

      Gary creeps to the right window, peering around the edge of the dirty sheet that passes for a curtain.

      “Get your hand out of your pocket. You hear me? Get your hand out of your pocket.”

      Plainclothesmen. Knockers. Six police jump out of two unmarked Chevrolets and shove two men to the sidewalk right below Gary’s window.

      “What?” asks Tony from the doorway.

      “Shsshhhh,” Gary hisses. “Poh-leece.”

      “Who is it?”

      Gary shakes his head.

      “Bob Brown?”

      Bob Brown is the predominant constabulary scourge of every doper in the Franklin Square neighborhood—fiends in this part of town invoke the name as something distinct from the rest of the Baltimore Police Department. Whenever he makes an entrance, lookouts actually shout “Bob Brown,” rather than the generic “Five-Oh” or “Time Out.”

      Gary shakes his head. Not Mr. Brown, not this time. “Knockers,” he whispers. “I don’t know none of ’em.”

      Tony steps softly toward the edge of the other window and looks down at the encounter. These police aren’t regulars in the neighborhood, and the two on the ground aren’t familiar faces either. Both are on their backs; one on the sidewalk, the other in the dirt where the pavement breaks at the base of a small tree. Both are pleading innocence. Three of the plain-clothesmen stand over them, shouting; a fourth stands in the street, eyefucking the crews on the Mount Street corners. The other two are waiting next to the unmarked Chevrolets, both cars idling in the fast lane of Fayette Street, the front and rear doors splayed open.

      “Don’t fucking lie to me!”

      “No, we just …”

      “Motherfucker, get your pants down.”

      Gary and Tony stand silently at the windows, watching the scene play out. A white police is doing the shouting; two black companions poke through jacket pockets. The young man in the dirt is still trying to argue the case, but his partner has already gone cold, his hardest game face now showing only hate. Slowly, still on their backs, the two lower their pants to their knees, their exposed legs shaking in the winter air. A police picks at the waistbands of their boxers, looking south. Dickie checks in ten-degree weather, but there’s no dope down there in those Jockeys or anywhere else for that matter. On the sidewalk is the brown sandwich bag one man was carrying. A knocker picks it up, looks inside and then, satisfied, drops it back on the pavement.

      The white police checks the sidewalk farther down Fayette Street, looking for loose paper or vials.

      “I didn’t see anything get thrown,” a black police says. A subtle suggestion, perhaps; one cop trying to tell another that, hey, maybe he got this one wrong.

      “Man, I swear we clean,” says the man in the dirt.

      “Shut up,” says the white police.

      But the sidewalk search yields nothing. After a moment or two more, with the wind whipping trash and dead leaves down Fayette Street, the young man in the dirt looks up at the black police and risks another plea.

      “Man, can we put our pants on?”

      The cop gives a quick, cursory nod and both men hoist themselves up on their elbows, undulating like crabs on the sidewalk as they work to dress themselves.

      The white plainclothesman tires of the game. He walks back toward one of the idling Chevrolets, turning to shout a final line at the two men on the ground. Dope or no dope, there’s always a moral to the story.

      “Don’t let me see your ass out here again.”

      Then they’re gone, the Chevrolets roaring up Fayette Street toward some new encounter. With every tout and dealer watching from the Mount Street corners, the two young men slowly gather up their humiliation and step off.

      Gary and Tony are still right above them in the window, bearing witness with no small amazement. Across the street, the Death Row and Diamond in the Raw crews immediately reopen the Mount Street shop.

      “Man, I can’t believe that,” Gary says, shaking his head in disgust. “They were just coming out of the carryout. The one boy had a sandwich is all.”

      Tony snorts in agreement.

      “I can’t believe it,” Gary says again. Twenty people standing out there at Mount and Fayette Streets—all of them selling or buying drugs, half of them dirty with the shit—and the knockers are jumping out and messing with two dopeless niggers and a meatball sub. Undressing them in the street, telling them they can’t be out here, then driving off to do the same to someone else.

      “Like they did to me last year,” says Gary. “Knocked out my teeth over a corn chip. And then afterward telling me I can’t stand on the street where I live.”

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