for his afternoon tour and see Gary coming from the alley tester line, or June Bey nodding at the pay phone, or DeAndre, his grandson—and a bright boy, too—huddled at the mouth of Vine Street with the other touts and lookouts. At such moments, W.M.’ s heart would break and all the anger would rush out.
He had lived the way a man was supposed to live. He had played by the rules, working all his life, working still to make ends meet, though he was now of an age when most men retire. He had never gone on welfare, or sought a handout, or complained about what did or didn’t come his way. He had taken a good woman and kept his vows. He had brought fifteen children into the world, loved them, given them food and clothes and a home, and sent them to schools to learn things that he never had a chance to know. He had not been as clever as other men, perhaps, or as wise with his money and property. And he had never really understood the forces arrayed against him. But then, none of that can be claimed as part of our national premise, our enduring myth that says America is the land of opportunity, the last best hope for all races and religions, and that any man who stays true to himself and works hard here can and will succeed.
For the last half-century in the city of Baltimore, William McCullough has stayed true to himself and worked as hard as any man conceivably can. At age sixty-five, he has the woman with whom he shared a lifetime, Miss Roberta. He has many children and grandchildren, some of whom make him proud, some of whom don’t. He collects a $37-a-month pension. Six days a week—some weeks, seven—he drives a cab.
And every night, he comes home to Vine Street.
The snake has found Gary McCullough curled on the bed, the soiled sheets twisted around his legs. He’s half-awake and half listening as the clock radio sputters Sunday morning sermons in a dull, metallic whisper.
The snake speaks his name, and Gary, with a supreme effort, rolls over and sits up at the edge of the sagging mattress, his feet touching a linoleum floor wet from the Friday night rain that sent a flood rolling down the back cellar steps of his parents’ house on Vine. Hunching over as a wave of nausea hits, he cups his pounding head. He longs to go back to sleep, even that half-assed, no-resting heroin sleep that greets him every night, but the snake has his attention.
He reaches up, stretching as he gropes for the bare lightbulb in the ceiling socket. He finds it, gives a twist, then falls back to the mattress, spent. The weak light pushes back a bit of the darkness behind the mounds of molding clothes that frame the thin room.
It’s a grim, tight space at the bottom of the Vine Street rowhouse, sprinkled with flotsam and jetsam from Gary’s wanderings, bits and pieces that could have had a purpose, that once sparked a righteous McCullough plan, but now lay discarded, gathering dust: a busted black-and-white TV, a car’s rearview mirror, a set of keys, church fliers, a broken clock, a chipped porcelain statue of embracing lovers.
Within arm’s length of the bed stands a broken dresser for life’s few absolute necessities: bottle caps, matches, a jar of water, syringes. Behind the paraphernalia rests a box fan that makes do as a coat rack now, but come summer, it’s all there is to push the stale air and help Gary breathe through his asthma attacks. At the head of the mattress is a homemade wooden stool that serves as Gary’s library shelf. A well-thumbed Bible shares the perch with a high school physics book, a grade school civics text, Thoreau’s Walden, and Elie Wiesel’s Night—books rescued from trash piles or church basements, then read and reread by Gary with keen interest. The Bible is creased and marked at Psalm 38, a verse of shame and repentance that resonates in Gary’s mind night after night.
For your arrows have pierced me and your hand has come down upon me
Because of your wrath, there is no health in my body
My bones have no soundness because of my sin,
My guilt has overwhelmed me like a burden too heavy to bear
My wounds fester and are loathsome because of my sinful folly
I am bowed down and brought very low
True penitence from within the haze. Gary knows the words by rote, reading them over and over in the dim basement light. And in the margin of the psalm, he has inked a rough graffito plea: “God help me, please.”
But not now. Not this morning.
The snake won’t be placated with psalms or supplications. Gary scratches his cheek and looks above him to the narrow wall shelf that holds the the other religious artifact in his basement world, the Box of True Blasts. Shaped like a cigar box, but smaller, the balsa-wood container serves as repository and museum for the touchstones of Gary’s life on the corner—a treasure chest of happy memories to be perused in the spirit of nostalgia. He takes down the box and dumps its contents on the bed: the glassine bags, marked and stamped with an array of designs, logos, and slogans; the plastic vials, in a variety of sizes, each with a different colored top. Each a memento, a remembrance of bombs past, each a keepsake from a successful crusade, from a moment when a fiend got within snatching distance of the holy grail.
The green vial on the top of the pile? He got that one last year at Mount and Fayette, from the New York Boy, Scar, back when Scar had something to sell. Drop a little of that coke in some dope and yes Lawd, you had a speedball that would sing. And the Family Affair bag from this fall. Dag, that was right. But the recollection makes him grimace. The box offers nothing for the here and now—only touchstones from days gone.
Gary leans forward, fumbling with the dresser’s top drawer, pulling it toward him and rifling the contents for a Newport butt he left there last night. It’s a new habit that Ronnie gave him back in November, so now, in the daily pursuit of dollars for dope, he has to husband a little bit more pocket change for smokes. More often than not, he’s unable to afford a pack, so 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