and, with a long grunt, pries himself up and out. Swollen hands grip the walking stick as he fights off a wave of vertigo; swollen feet pad between a sprawl of bodies in the front room.
“Hey Curt.”
“Hey.”
Pimp props himself against a bare wall.
“What time is it?”
Pimp asking the time, like he’s got somewhere to be. Curt shakes his head: “Time to get on out there.”
Curt stumbles down the narrow corridor and through a sea of trash in the stripped-bare kitchen, heading for the back door. He leans down on his cane to make an exit through the broken-out bottom panels, doing a sideways limbo to get to the morning sunlight in the back alley. Hungry is out there already, his head bandaged from his latest misadventure with a New York dealer.
“He up here yet?”
Hungry shakes his head, a loose flap of white gauze fluttering in the wind. Not yet. Curt’s up and out, but you can’t punch the clock without a package.
He makes his way up the alley and out onto Monroe, but the early morning sun is lost in the shadow of the rowhouses on the east side of the street. So he canes his way down to Fayette Street, crossing over to the grocery and finding some pavement warmed by the day. The Korean is sweeping around the store entrance and Curt mumbles a greeting. The Korean nods, then waits, broom in hand, too polite to ask Curt to move. Curt senses this and returns the favor, stepping to the other side of the corner but still staying with the sun.
There he stands for the next hour or so, rooted on the corner that he has known his whole life, waiting for the rising tide of the day to pick him up and carry him along. Brothers-in-arms slide out of the alley, squinting in the sunlight, hunting up the morning’s first Newport and telling the early-bird customers to hang in there, to go around the block once or twice more until things pick up.
Curt watches Eggy Daddy and Pimp drift up to the corner: Eggy, looking no worse for the wear, pretty good considering; Pimp, now stick-thin from the Bug. Bryan follows them out of the alley carrying the piss bucket, dumping a night’s fill into the gutter, then returning the metal pail to Blue’s back door.
From the other direction, Bread saunters up smiling, looking a bit warmer than the rest. Bread still has a key to his mother’s back door down the hill on Fayette, a warrior living all for the corner but keeping that one last connection to the world left behind, sleeping in his mother’s basement when the winter chill is on. Still, Curt gives Bread some due as a soldier, because the man’s been out here forever, as long as Curt even. He’s forty-six and a legendary fixture, running and gunning dope at Monroe and Fayette since the corner lampposts were twigs.
“You look like a frog,” he tells Curt.
“Yeah,” Curt agrees. “Layin’ down, the fluid come up and swell my face.”
“Yeah, you swole all right.”
“Makes my eyes pop out and shit,” Curt grunts. “Like a got-damn bullfrog.”
“Maybe I get Charlene to come past an’ kiss you,” says Bread, nodding at the tired form of Charlene Mack across the street. “You be a prince then.”
“Sheeeet,” says Curt, laughing aloud, a joyous rumble welling up in his dry throat and bursting out. Bread laughs, too, delighted to have put pleasure on his old friend’s face. Making people smile is Bread’s best game, really. He doesn’t tout or sell much; nor is Bread one to go off the corner to boost or burglarize. Instead, he gets most of his dope because people like him, because he genuinely makes them want to share their blast.
“So what’s up?”
“Either they late or I’m early.”
There are enough of them now—prospective touts and lookouts—to open shop, as well as a handful of hungry fiends waiting listlessly at the entrance to Vine Street. Curt’s brother, Dennis, is across the street by the liquor store, bumming a smoke from Scalio. And just down the block is Smitty, collecting aluminum cans in a plastic bag, singing in his pitch-perfect tenor.
One after the other, the dealers drift in—Gee, Shamrock, Dred, Nitty, Tiny—and assess the labor pool. They find their hires, set their wages, and ante up the day’s first installment—the up-front blast to get the corner crew alive and working. Curt goes with Dred today; he’ll do some touting, maybe even work from his own ground stash on Vine Street.
But later for that. Right now, it’s back into Blue’s, all of them moving down the alley like cattle, heading back into the vacant rowhouse where Rita is already up, candle burning bright, adding to the daylight that streams from the gaps in the plywood boards. Strips of cloth are laid out on a battered wooden table; bottle caps, matches, and fresh water surrounded by dozens of dead-bent cigarette butts—a surgical amphitheater for the doctoring to come. And, of course, almost everyone but Rita is impatient, some jostling for a better position in the queue. Curt brings Bread along with him, and the two wait their turn quietly. Skinny Pimp, too, doesn’t bicker; he’s in the corner on a dirty bedroll, feeling a little too weak to stand around forever holding his place in line.
“Who next?”
“Naw … me.”
But Rita imposes her calm on the group. She’s the medicine woman, the tribal herbalist, the mother hen that all of them come to see. In every way that matters, she’s a professional—with a few weeks of nursing classes somewhere in her history—and she expects her clientele to act accordingly.
“Hold your horses,” she tells them.
Those willing and able to hit themselves go off to do just that. The rest wait their turn at Rita’s table in the front room: some because they’re not handy with a needle; others because their veins have retreated to portions of their bodies that can be reached only by a second party; others still because Rita is simply that good. From one end of the room to the other, they gear up, prepping the flesh for the doctor’s grand rounds. This one rubs his neck to get the juices going; that one drops his pants for a shot in the ass; the next soul ties up his arm and slaps at cratered skin, searching for a passage home.
“What’s working for you?” Rita asks, consulting with the patients as every good doctor does, asking them how they’re getting off lately and where the blood still flows. She probes amid old graveyards of tracks and scabs, feeling her way through the terrain like a dowser hunting water. And then, at last, she’s in and they’re on, the pinkish cloud rising into the syringe as bottom-line proof.
Rita Hale rarely blows a shot, rarely leaves the dope and coke in a knotted, puffing lump under the skin, veinless and trapped—the wasted-time-and-money mark of an amateur. Nor does she cheat—a fact that truly marks her as special—because the search for an honest shooting gallery doctor can be as exhausting as the quest for an honest auto mechanic. Her line of work is crowded with those who can’t resist taking advantage of the helpless, but Rita will never pluck a patient. She’s not about watering them down, or switching bottle caps, or blowing B-and-Q in their veins. There are shooting galleries in which the desperate and the naive are used and abused by the house staff. In such places, a newcomer asking for help getting on will get plenty of attention from a veteran. The old-timer will take the chump’s tool and tell him to turn his head, the better to see that ripe vein bulging in his neck. And then, with a practiced motion too quick for the eye to follow, he’s dropped the rube’s hard-won dope in his pocket and come out with an empty breakaway. So the new-comer gets blasted with nothing more than the sting of cold air or maybe water. Rubbing a swollen bubble of skin, he’ll start to bitch. But the old-timer will stand pat, shaking his head. Feel that bubble, he tells him. You feel that? That’s your shit. Told you don’t move, but you turned your head and see there, you blew your shot.
There’s no such sleight-of-hand with Rita. She’s not only good with a spike, she’s willing to earn her keep. And why cheat? For plying her trade honestly, Rita gets more dope than God. Almost everyone who comes to Blue’s ends up giving her a share of the hype, so that more than anyone in the neighborhood, Rita Hale