The Corner (60 page)

But Gary thought he’d discovered something. “Niggers ain’t born,” he said one summer morning, after firing in his basement room. “They made.”

And he knew the other half of the equation, too: They hate us.

“They surely do hate us.”

He said it without bitterness, with a self-knowledge that can come only from the inside, looking out. He remembered a day this winter when he’d been walking—just walking—near Union Square, and a yuppie homesteader had chased him down the block, threatening to call the police. Gary got mad and stayed mad for all of three minutes, until he paused long enough to look himself over and decide the man was right. If I had anything worth stealing, I’d chase my ragged self down the block, too.

He knew that he appeared to people as little more than a cartoon, a ghetto stereotype as dehumanized and expendable as any skeletal camp prisoner in black and white stripes. To that homeowner, to others like him, to the angry radio voices at night, all that had happened in his life before this moment didn’t matter. To them, he had no history, no beginning, nothing beyond the here-and-now. To them, he was a dope fiend, nothing more.

He knew how this sounded, too, how little white folk wanted to hear the complaint. To the radio guys late at night, he was just one more whining special-interest supplicant, a welfare-fed remnant of a New Deal gone old, ready and willing to blame all the injustice in the world rather than himself.

“Like they think we don’t know what we did to ourselves,” Gary would say sadly, “like they think we can’t see it.”

He could admit personal guilt; he knew what he’d done. Yet if that was all there was to it, why did the world treat him exactly the same when he was doing right, when he had all those jobs and all those stocks and mutual funds? Back then, all his money and standing didn’t matter to the sales clerks and security guards, who would follow him around stores. The world was no different when he drove his Mercedes—bought and paid for with Beth Steel paychecks and tech-stock dividends—and suffered through dozens of police stops and registration checks. Nor did money count when he would get dressed up and bring a date down to the harbor restaurants. His worst, most humiliating memory, was of a cool summer night when he took a girl to City Lights in Harborplace and asked if it might be possible to sit outside on the balcony. No, sorry, he was told; then they were seated at a table by the kitchen while the balcony tables stayed empty for the next two hours. A small insult, of course—nothing that could level a person in a single blow, unless that person came from Fayette Street, where every moment tells you who you are and what you were meant to be.

On Fayette Street, they surely needed niggers, because anything better could not and would not serve the corners. Once, Gary had been strong enough and monied enough to leave this place, yet he hesitated. An Israelite, he had listened to Pharoah and stayed; now, he was once again a slave, as were they all. To be more than that on Fayette Street would be an accusation, a living affront to all of those chipping away at their own souls.

All that summer at the crabhouse, Gary had watched the crabs that
had been wedged in the bushels for too long; he had seen how when you pulled off the top, most of them would just lie there, waiting for the steamer. Worse, those few that tried to escape would be pulled back by the claws of those left behind.

“Crabs in a barrel,” Gary would say, echoing the famous DuBois metaphor, but coming to it on his own: “When one starts to climb out, the others drag him back down.”

To Gary, everyone, black and white, seemed gratified by his long fall. It was there in every face; he even saw it in people who had watched him grow up, in children he had raised, in women he had loved. Even Miss Mary down at Seapride—she knew what kind of work he was doing, yet there again, when she looked his way, he could tell that she saw the mark of the needle before she saw a human being.

Alone in his basement at night, Gary would try righteously to argue the point, weaving his own fall from grace with all kinds of genocidal imagery in a dope-crazed swirl of pity and paranoia.

“They gonna come for us,” he whispered once in a heroin nod, listing onto his worn mattress. “They gonna come and you won’t even be able to blame them for coming.”

Yet by light of day, it still seemed to Gary that after a summer’s worth of honest work, the world had no right to judge him like this. After all, he was doing no harm to anyone but himself. He stole nothing, manipulated nothing, ran no dope-fiend moves—save for the usual bitch-and-barter with the touts. Whatever Gary did to himself, he did in the damp and quiet of that basement. In the face of the American drug war, he stood as both drug addict and citizen.

And if his employers at Seapride hadn’t believed that he was more than just another fiending crudball at the beginning of the summer, then Gary had made them believe it on the Fourth of July—a day like no other in the crabhouses of Baltimore. On the Fourth, when every right-thinking Marylander has steamed crabs in celebration, Gary had come in at seven that morning to begin scrubbing down the pots. Soon after that, customers were lined around the block for the blues, some of them coming back two and three times for another half-bushel.

He didn’t leave until midnight. After slinging crabs for seventeen hours straight, Gary walked up the hill exhausted, his eyes bloodshot from the spice, his arms and legs scratched and cut by the claws of the larger blues. Five hundred bushels—sixty thousand hard shells—had been sorted and stunned in the ice tanks, then steamed and sold at
Seapride that day. It was a nonstop, dawn-to-dark crab frenzy on South Monroe Street. And that Fourth of July night, his pocket fat with cash, Gary was too tired for anything but a go-to-nod blast. He didn’t need the radio or his library; he sat back on his bed and fell immediately into the deepest sleep, with crab dreams so real that he would wake now and again to find his hands still racing through the bushels, sorting live crabs from dead, males from females.

After the Fourth, even the white boys working the kitchen had to give him his due: Gary was the John Henry of bushels. Save for that one break in the afternoon when he had to make his way up the hill and get himself right, no one was around to get those crabs off the trucks, into the pots, and over the counter as quickly or as cheerfully. Gary had his problem, the white boys would acknowledge, but come the dinner rush, he was one hard-laboring sonofabitch.

They call for him all summer long.

“Twos, Gary.”

“On my way, Mo.”

“You got any soft-shells?”

“Got what you need, Chief.”

Day after day, bushel after bushel, he does the job and gets his blast. And no one at the crabhouse, black or white, ever feels cheated by any part of the bargain.

When Labor Day arrives to mark summer’s end, Gary is once again at the top of his game. At Seapride, this is the last battle of the seasonal war, with the seafood trucks pulling up on Monroe Street from Delaware, the Eastern Shore, and the Carolina coast. For Gary, it’s the last chance to show the bosses that when the crab season slows and the working hours are cut back, he’s the one they need to keep.

“Hundert fifty bushels,” shouts Ron, coming into the sorting room from the loading dock. “Let’s get ’em in.”

And there’s Gary, first to the back of the truck, carrying two at a time, with the angry females reaching through the basket slats, looking to punish him for the trouble.

“Ah,” he shouts as one finds some unguarded skin above his belt. “I been got.”

Another war wound. His brother Cardy laughs gently.

“Got me right through the shirt,” says Gary.

“Bitches be that way,” says Cardy, gesturing to the bushel of females. “You got to watch ’em all the time.”

Gary laughs, too, despite the allergic wheeze in his throat, despite the stinging pain at his waist. He goes back to the truck—fifteen, twenty times—until his arms can take no more. Then he goes back again.

“What’s the count?” asks Ron when the bushels are inside and stacked.

Bobby Short runs down the rows.

“Forty-seven, forty-eight … one forty-nine.” Bobby looks up and frowns. “We got shorted one.”

“No, Chief,” says Gary, from the edge of the stun tank. “I got your last one here.”

He’s already a third of the way through the basket, tossing live ones into the ice water that ends their fight, dropping the dead into a discard basket on the floor. And after these ten or twelve dozen, another bushel, then another.

“…
oh happy day
.” Gary is singing gospel as the crabs are numbed. “…
oh happy, happy day
.”

Outside, the line backs up out the door and onto the sidewalk. The kitchen boys race to keep up with the crowd at the counter.

“We on the beam now, ain’t we?” shouts Gary.

He pulls off his California Angels cap, wipes his forehead, and then returns it to his head. He yanks the raise-chain on the tank and three bushels of ice-covered number twos surface from the water. He uses one hand to hold the wheeled, stainless steel cube of a crab pot adjacent to the tank; with the other, he sweeps the crab pile into the pot.

“Dust! Dust!” he shouts. Jimmy, one of the younger hires, throws a round of spice onto the bottom layer of crawlers.

Gary sweeps his arm again, rustling another three or four dozen to their doom. “Dust.”

This is the quick way of doing it—the way it has to be done when the customers are lined up to the street corner. Other times, you can snatch the crabs one at a time and layer them carefully in the pot, making sure each gets the same handful of spice. But now, on the holiday, it’s got to be catch as catch can.

“We microwavin’ them,” Gary declares. “We givin’ it the microwave process.”

He sweeps his arm again and a shell point catches him in the hand, the point going right through the thick rubber glove.

“Ow! Dag!”

He pulls out the point and yanks the glove off to examine the wound. He holds the offending crab in his other hand, looking at it as if expecting
some kind of argument. Times like these, a crab-slinger will hurl the assailant against a wall. Crab fission, Mo, and leave the debris there on the ground as a warning to others. But not Gary.

“Hey, hey,” he says, dropping the crab gently into the pot. “Crab got his job to do. I got mine.”

With another few sweeps of his arm, he empties the tank.

“Dust! Dust!”

From the steam room, Paul calls in a double-time order for thirty-twos—the biggest of the Chesapeake blues; monster crabs creeping and snapping at each other in the sorting bins to Cardy’s extreme left. For those willing to pay, the crab-eating doesn’t get better than thirty-twos.

“Gimme the big boys, Chief,” says Gary, stepping across Cardy to grab the bin. “Someone out front is serious.”

The monsters go into the stun tank, the chain is yanked down, the frozen crawlers reemerge. Jimmy starts to sweep his side of the tank, rushing the thirty-twos into the pot.

“No, ho, no,” cries Gary, stopping him.

He begins placing the crabs in uniform rows, preparing them for the most perfect culinary journey possible.

“Gary, we ain’t got time.”

“Yes we do. We make time for thirty-twos,” Gary tells him, ordering and spicing the crabs in precise layers. “These ain’t just crabs, Mo. These are crustaceans. You got to respect ’em.”

Jimmy can’t even argue. Them bad boys look beautiful down there in the bottom of the pot, and Gary is hard to the task, making time, getting it done.

“…
oh happy day
.”

Fat Curt leans back in the plastic chair, waiting for the part where they give you the check. He’s a wreck. Anyone can look at his arms and legs and see that. What the hell else can any legitimate government do other than hand him a check?

“And Mr. Davis,” asks the Social Security Administration caseworker, “what is the nature of your condition?”

“Say what?”

“What’s wrong with you that you can’t work.”

“I’m swole up.”

“Excuse me?”

“My legs and arms is swollen. Can’t barely walk.”

“But what’s the medical condition?”

This makes Curtis Davis think for a moment. He leans forward and looks around the SSA branch office on Frederick Avenue, his mind struggling, his mouth trying to get hold of some of the long words he’s heard from the hospital whitecoats.

“Elephantitis.”

The bureaucrat looks up from his computer keyboard. “Elephantitis?”

Time to play the ace. Curt reaches both hands beneath his right knee, pulls his leg straight, and then raises it slowly. He sites the ankle over the corner of the desk and lets it fall. From knee to foot, the extremity is so bloated that Curt’s baggy denims are stretched to the tearing point. The running shoe is three sizes beyond what he would ordinarily wear, and even then it can’t be laced.

“Uh …”

The man is speechless. But Curt isn’t done yet. It’s September, and soon enough he’ll be soldiering once again in a vacant house in the freezing cold of another Baltimore winter. For Curt, the future is now and he figures that this must be his moment; if he can pull up these pants, if he can show just a few inches of cratered, gatorlike flesh, then this paper-shuffler will surely understand. It’s just a matter of finding the right bureaucrat, the right desk. You take your number and you wait and you sign the right form, giving them all that they ask for. You do these things and then the leg is the trump card. You put it up there and you get paid.

For Curt, this constitutes a lock-solid plan.

“Uh, sir …”

But Curt is busy with the guided tour: “My ankle messed up too. From fallin’ out a window … Lookit this …”

“Mr. Davis, that won’t be necessary.”

Curt is still struggling with the pants cuff, trying to show more, when the man lightly touches his shoe and insists that he bring the leg back down to the floor.

“I don’t need to examine the disability,” the man explains. “A doctor will evaluate you in the event you appeal.”

“Uh huh.”

The keyboard clicks and snaps as Curt answers a few more questions. Work history? Laborer. What years? Long time gone. Current income? None. Current assets? None. And where have you received treatment for your disability?