LITMIR.BIZ

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Fran was overwhelmed.

      “Thought you might be havin’ some trouble,” her son said.

      “I was.”

      And that time, DeAndre didn’t play it for pride or advantage. He didn’t shame her. If anything, he was a little embarrassed by it all. She reached across the bed, tugging on his shirt sleeve, pulling his head next to hers. No words, but a quick embrace. A connection.

      Damned if that wasn’t DeAndre, too. Hardheaded, arrogant, sullen —but at moments he could step outside of himself, drop the game face, and be capable of anything. Fran smiles at the memory; her boy is a trip.

      She watches him turn the corner at Gilmor, pulling his denims back up over his ass and hunkering himself into his lock-legged strut. If I could get past this, she thinks, if I could get myself clean, there would still be time and I could make it right with him.

      She’s so wrapped in her thoughts that she’s holding the cigarette pack in the open, tapping one out with half the corner watching. Damn.

      “Can I get one?”

      “Huh?” she says, slow to recover.

      “A smoke?”

      “Hmmm,” she grunts, giving it up.

      “Hey Fran …”

      And another.

      “Borrow one?”

      And another still. This corner soaks up Newports like a dry sponge; she had to be a damn fool to be sitting out here with a whole pack in her hands.

      “Yo, Fran …”

      “Got-damn, Stevie, I done gave away half the pack.”

      Her brother shrugs, wounded.

      “Here,” says Fran, pulling out a last giveaway and putting the rest in her pocket. Stevie lights up off her own.

      “Ronnie’s back,” he says.

      That he is. Fran watches Ronnie Hughes and Michael Hearns roll up Fayette and park the Buick just across the street. Car doors swing open and the two men get out slowly, smiling, stretching like athletes on the sidewalk before walking back to the car trunk. Must be good, thinks Fran.

      Ronnie opens up and the two men lift out the items on the very top of the pile—women’s dresses and men’s sportswear, the store tags flapping up in the winter wind. They’re standing there in the middle of Fayette Street, holding the shit up in the air by the curl of the hangers, displaying it with pride for the crowd at Mount and Fayette. The day’s catch.

      “Ain’t this a bitch,” says Fran, smiling.

      Michael walks toward her, his arm extended, his hand gripping an evening dress as if it’s a five-pound bass. Fran notices the Macy’s label. Not bad at all, she has to admit.

      “Look at you,” she says.

      Michael grins. A breadwinner.

      “We can sell this shit,” she assures him.

      Already, her mind is a step ahead. Where to sell it. What to ask. What to settle for and what to take for her cut. Out here on Fayette Street, the party never ends.

      TWO

      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.

      Down on Fayette Street, they know.

      Today as on every other day, the shop will be open by midmorning and the touts will be on the corners, chirping out product names as if the stuff is street legal. The runners will bring a little more of the package down and the fiends will queue up to be served—a line of gaunt, passive supplicants stretching down the alley and around the block.

      The corner is rooted in human desire—crude and certain and immediate. And the hard truth is that all the law enforcement in the world can’t mess with desire. Down at Fayette and Monroe and every corner like it in Baltimore, the dealers and fiends have won because they are legion. They’ve won because the state of Maryland and the federal government have imprisoned thousands and arrested tens of thousands and put maybe a hundred thousand on the parole and probation rolls—and still it isn’t close to enough. By raw demographics, the men and women of the corners can claim victory. In Baltimore alone—a city of fewer than seven hundred thousand souls, with some of the highest recorded rates of intravenous drug use in the nation—they are fifty, perhaps even sixty thousand strong—three of them for every available prison bed in the entire state of Maryland. 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.

      From the outside looking in, it’s tempting to see this nightmare as a model of supply and demand run amok, as a lawlessness bred from an unenforceable prohibition. But the reckoning at Fayette and Monroe and other places like it has grown into something greater than the medical mechanics of addiction, greater even than the dollars and sense of economic theory.

      Get it straight: they’re not just out here to sling and shoot drugs. That’s where it all began, to be sure, but thirty years has transformed the corner into something far more lethal and lasting than a simple marketplace. 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.

      On Fayette Street today, the corner world is what’s left to serve up truth and power, money and meaning. It gives life and takes life. It measures all men as it mocks them. It feeds and devours the multitudes in the same instant. Amid nothing, the corner is everything.

      We want it to be about nothing more complicated than cash money and human greed, when at bottom, it’s about a reason to believe. We want to think that it’s chemical, that it’s all about the addictive mind, when instead it has become about validation, about lost souls assuring themselves that a daily relevance can be found at the fine point of a disposable syringe.

      It’s about the fiends, thousands of them, who want that good dope, need it the way other souls need to breathe air. Working men on their lunch hour come here, rubbing up against corner dwellers who haven’t seen a job in ten years. White boys from county high schools, quietly praying they won’t get burned for their allowance, stand next to welfare mothers who petition the same god on behalf of their check-day money. Up on Monroe Street, there’s a ninety-one-year-old retiree in the line handing his cash to fourteen-year-old slingers. And down the hill on Mount, there’s that prim little matron who shows up in her Sunday best—print dress, heels, white pillbox hat and veil—a churchgoing woman shuttling between choir and

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