The corner in question is where West Fayette meets Monroe Street in West Baltimore, the site of one of an estimated 100 open-air drug markets in that beleaguered US city. The year is 1993, a pivotal one in the escalation of Baltimore’s illegal round the clock drug trade.
“On every corner, street dealers began using minors, first as runners and look-outs, then as street-level slingers,” elaborate David Simon and Ed Burns. “When children became the labor force, the work itself became childlike, and the organizational structure that came with heroin’s first wave was a historical footnote.”
Anyone who has seen The Wire, Simon and Burns’s equally epic and labyrinthine police drama, will be familiar with the crucial role played by children — not just teenagers, but their even younger siblings — in the distribution of heroin and crack cocaine on Baltimore’s most notorious corners. Here, those children are made real. Likewise, the dealers, the cops, the hustlers and the politicians: all the venal, murderous, muddle-headed and heroic individuals whose fictionalized alter-egos have so mesmerized viewers on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Corner, which was originally published in the US in 1997, is the book that spawned The Wire. It tracks the lives of several players in Baltimore’s drug demi-monde and of some of the hard-working, hard-bitten cops who try in vain to police the corners. It reserves its not inconsiderable anger and scorn for the politicians who, in Wire parlance, “juke the stats” — manipulate the crime figures for personal gain.
Famously, the Democratic candidate for mayor of Baltimore, Martin O’Malley, campaigning on an anti-drug ticket, brandished a copy of the book while making a speech on the corner of the title in 1999. Paradoxically, given that the book is, among other things, a fierce polemic against drug prohibition, he won.
Reading The Corner, having watched all five series of The Wire, is an unnerving experience. For once, the drama does not exaggerate the reality. One could say, at the risk of antagonizing the show’s fanatical fans, that it tends slightly to romanticize it. Look, for instance, at Omar, the cold-hearted but effortlessly cool stick-up artist in The Wire who makes a living by identifying, then robbing at gunpoint, the stash houses of the neighborhood drug gangs. On-screen, he is a Hollywood archetype: the cold-blooded outlaw, the loner, the man in black. In real life, as the authors point out, the Omars of Baltimore are living, even by the standards of the gangster “game,” on borrowed time, their job “little better than a death wish.”
The street lives depicted in The Corner are tougher, sadder and more desperate than those dramatized in The Wire. The first person you meet in the book is Fat Curt, a veteran of the corner, with “needle-scarred hands,” arms like “swollen leather” and “bloated legs” who is “bent to this ancient business of survival.” He is now caught up in another daily grind, trying to hustle welfare aid for the drug-related lymphoedema that ravages his scarred body. Elsewhere, the young DeAndre is engaged in the struggle to stay straight, often working for a fraction of what he would earn on the corner, while his mother shoplifts to maintain her habit. Then there’s Tyreeka, pregnant at 13, feisty and almost proud. What The Corner shows us, often in the graphic detail of hardcore drug use, is that generations have fallen to America’s drug trade.
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