The Wire

by Rafael Alvarez

  The tavern never made it as a permanent set, but the display is captured on film for good. It includes mock campaign literature for Rep. Nancy Pelosi – the California Democrat who is Big Tommy’s daughter and Young Tommy’s sister, and now speaker of the US House of Representatives – and a poster based on a real flyer from nearly 60 years ago.

  The poster is designed around a piece of campaign literature from the 1955 Democratic primary that I found among my late father’s political memorabilia, a pamphlet promoting at the top of the ticket the elder D’Alesandro for mayor and Leon Abramson for City Council president.

  Also being pushed are four candidates for City Council from Northeast Baltimore’s Third District, including the father of the former Maryland Attorney General, J. Joseph Curran, Jr., who also happens to be the father-in-law of Martin O’Malley, once Baltimore’s mayor and currently Maryland’s governor.

  Viewers always seem to invoke O’Malley’s name when talking about Carcetti, though they are different animals.

  True, Carcetti’s rise to mayor from city councilman has elements of O’Malley’s own ascension. O’Malley’s election as mayor is a fascinating study on many levels, but particularly because it happened in a city that’s 65-plus percent black.

  So surprising was O’Malley’s 1999 win that the Washington Post recorded the event with this politically incorrect headline on its front page: “White Man Gets Mayoral Nomination In Baltimore.” It was big news that this white man won. And how it happened was a good story.

  I had always seen the political storyline on The Wire as an opportunity to examine politics and race, a subject that seems almost dated, but not quite, now that we’ve elected an African-American president of the United States.

  We never explored it completely, but we touched on it, and Carcetti’s mayoral bid was one of the ways.

  O’Malley made no secret of his disdain for The Wire and publicly attacked it on more than one occasion. Nevertheless, we asked him to appear in a cameo, as we had other politicians. The question was barely raised before it was shot down.

  One former mayor who had no qualms about appearing was Kurt L. Schmoke, now dean of Howard University School of Law. Schmoke turns up in Season Three as the city’s health commissioner, advising fictional Mayor Clarence V. Royce when Hamsterdam and its de facto legalization of drugs come to light.

  The irony is that early in his own mayoral tenure, Schmoke, also once the city’s top prosecutor, had recommended a national debate about “decriminalizing” drugs, suggesting that perhaps it should be treated as a public health issue, rather than a criminal one. Needless to say, his suggestion hit the fan and some believe derailed an otherwise bright political future.

  Reacting to his comments in a rather hyperbolic diatribe, US Rep. Charles B. Rangel, the New York Democrat, went so far as to call Schmoke “the most dangerous man in America.”

  So, it is with a barely concealed grin that Royce’s health commissioner, played by Schmoke, warns the mayor, “Better watch out, Clarence, or they’ll be calling you the most dangerous man in America.”

  There were more than a few inside jokes like that.

  In Season Four, then-Governor Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr., a Republican, portrays a Maryland state trooper who intercepts Mayor Carcetti and aidede-camp Norman Wilson at the door of the State House after the two tire of waiting to see the fictional governor about school funding.

  This was not unlike what really happened once when Mayor O’Malley was forced to go see Ehrlich, hat in hand, about a city schools budget shortfall.

  Ehrlich had asked to appear in the show, and a brief exchange with Carcetti was his commercial cable debut.

  In Season Five, there’s Carcetti’s mention of having dinner with “the

  P.G. County boys” specifically referring to “Steny, Miller and Maloney.”

  The reference is to three very real Democrats from Prince George’s County – US House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, Maryland Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller, and Timothy F. Maloney, a one-time power in the Maryland House of Delegates who still carries some political sway in the Washington suburbs.

  And lest we forget, in the final season, Clay Davis appears on a radio talk show program with one Larry Young.

  Who is Larry Young?

  He’s an actual radio talk show host in Baltimore. But he’s also a Democratic former state senator from West Baltimore who was ousted from the Maryland Senate in 1998 for ethical breaches and later tried, and acquitted, on political corruption charges.

  Why the hell not? Politics is, after all, an insider’s game.

  Sheee-it.

  William F. Zorzi

  VICTORY UNDECLARED

  “After Season Three, I said to Simon: ‘let’s declare victory,’ and he said, ‘No, there’s more to tell …’”

  – CHRIS ALBRECHT, THE MAN WHO PUT THE WIRE ON THE AIR

  You didn’t have to follow The Wire extraordinarily closely to sense a disconnect between the end of Season Three just before Christmas 2004 and the debut of Season Four nearly two years later.

  “The show was never going to be a hit and it wasn’t a failure,” said David Simon in New Orleans in February 2009 at the start of filming Treme, his new HBO pilot. “So we wrote for closure in case we weren’t renewed.”

  Closure as the curtain falls on Hamsterdam, the failed, off-the-grid social experiment in legalizing drugs along a small corridor of town.

  Blood brother gangsters Stringer Bell and Avon Barksdale – “us” their vow since adolescence – betray one another over the best way to run an illegal drug business.

  On a tip from Avon, Omar and Brother Mouzone track down Stringer – “… seem like I can’t say nothin’ to change ya’ll minds” – and execute him.

  Avon returns to prison, along with the bulk of his crew, after police raid his weapons warehouse on info from Stringer.

  With Barksdale’s life’s work in pieces, young buck Marlo Stansfield takes over the corners – meet the new boss, twice the sociopath as the old boss – and the West Baltimore drug trade percolates as before.

  And Jimmy McNulty is back in uniform, walking a beat in West Baltimore where he got his start as a Bawlmer po-lice; smiling for the good people on the stoops, as content as a malcontent can be.

  “I think that when McNulty is back on the street at the end of Season Three it showed how heroically unambitious he really is,” said Dominic West.

  “Part of what makes him likeable and heroic was his indifference to self-advancement, which he believed was all that his superiors were interested in,” said West. “He was happy to be back on the beat that gave substance to real police work.”

  All wrapped up neatly enough for a reluctant swan song.

  “A lot less explanations needed at the end of Season Three of The Wire than David Chase had to make for [the finale] of the Sopranos,” said Albrecht, HBO chief from 2002 to 2007, a year before the show’s final season.

  “There was a giant pivot between [Season] Three and Four,” he said. “It was a big maneuver for the show, even though it lived in the same world.”

  The pivot was greased by an idea that executive producer Ed Burns – former cop, former middle school teacher – had for a novel; the story of a kid who witnessed a murder and wanted to trade that chip to get out of some other trouble he’d waded into.

  “Ed desperately wanted to do [a season] on education,” said Simon, “so I asked him, ‘Are you going to write that novel, because I think I can sell it as Season Four?’”

  And he did, along with the fifth and final season about the media and its complicity in all American ills portrayed in the previous seasons.

  By this time, the show was about to enter its second life; a word-of-mouth, “you’ve got to see this show” phenomenon via DVD and the Internet – a run that still continues and has become bigger than the original broadcasts on HBO.

  “Chris ordered Season Five on the Tuesday after the premiere of Season Four, a day
after [mediocre] ratings came out,” said Simon. “He reached back for what HBO was famous for.”

  “If we didn’t put it on, who would?” concluded Albrecht. “I said, ‘Fuck it. Let’s do it.’”

  SEASON FOUR

  SEASON FOUR OVERVIEW

  UP IN THE MORNING AND OFF TO SCHOOL

  “In America, before we notice things, things have to become bad …”

  – ED BURNS, TO THE NEW YORK TIMES

  It is known as the season “about the kids.”

  And the kids – four boys navigating their way to manhood while making obligatory appearances in school – were every bit as compelling as gangsters selling dope, cops chasing gangsters, and a waterfront full of hard-drinking stevedores.

  “I got real caught up in the story of those boys,” said Susan “Tootsie” Duvall who played assistant principal Marcia Donnelly at Edward J. Tilghman Middle School.

  The boys were played by Tristan Wilds (Michael), Jermaine Crawford (Dukie), Julito McCullum as Namond, and, portraying Randy Wagstaff, Maestro Harrell.

  The quartet was coached by Robert Chew, the Baltimore-born veteran of local theater who played Prop Joe.

  Key casting input came from Ed Burns, who taught middle school geography in Baltimore after retiring from the police department and was keen on finding actors who, he told the Baltimore Sun, “still had the stamp of childhood on their faces.”

  As Marcia Donnelly, it was Duvall who made sure those childhoods were served, against all odds, with a minimum of what public education in America promises.

  It is Donnelly, if anyone, whom the kids obey. She who manages to get enough of them to show up – viz. the scene of paying Cutty Wise and others as freelance truant officers rounding up enough kids for a single day of class to protect state funding – and Donnelly who sends clothes home to Dukie.

  Known for her textbook (white) Baltimore accent, the 1971 graduate of Catonsville High School taught the trick of exaggerating O’s while swallowing gerunds to Tracey Ullman for John Waters’s 2004 film A Dirty Shame.

  “Marcia Donnelly struck a nerve with a lot of teachers,” said Duvall. “So many of them told me how glad they were to see the real bureaucracy of education exposed for what it is… some people who approached me didn’t realize that we were actors.”

  A stage protégé of Jean “Edith Bunker” Stapleton, Duvall began working with David Simon during the filming of The Corner, the 2000 HBO miniseries based on the book by Simon and Burns.

  Researching The Corner, Simon has said, led him to oppose the war on drugs as a war against the poor. On the show, Duvall played Mary, owner of the Sea Pride crab house where the fictional De’Andre McCullough (based on the young man who played “Lamar” on The Wire) worked with his addict father.

  Seeing herself on screen as “Miss Mary” was not pleasant, nor, she said, “very pretty” – “I was 200 pounds in a hair net and lost a lot of weight after watching.”

  Watching herself on The Wire was just as difficult, and, though less personal, more heart-wrenching.

  “The kids you really rooted for fell to the street,” she said. “Somehow Namond doesn’t.”

  Of Duvall’s role, David Simon said: “We knew the assistant principal would be the institutional representative of whatever order and discipline existed at the middle school.

  “We didn’t want to make her a bitch or a bleeding heart [and] we knew whatever we gave Toots, she would handle deftly.”

  Duvall, 60, beat breast cancer after Season Four of The Wire wrapped. That, combined with a dearth of films shooting in Maryland since the entrenchment of the recession, persuaded her to step away from acting for an office job in a suburban high school.

  At Reservoir High School in Howard County, Duvall is in charge of attendance and truancy records for some 1,500 kids, a job not unlike the duties Marcia Donnelly tackled with less support but no less moxie.

  The high school lies about halfway between Baltimore and Washington, some 20 miles from the desperate stretch of asphalt where Michael, Namond, Dukie, and Randy hung out, scrawling “Fayette Mafia Crew 4-evah” to mark their turf.

  Daily walks through Reservoir High – where the economic spectrum runs from wealthy to very poor – afford more than a few glimpses of what the world saw of Baltimore on The Wire, said Duvall.

  [Including mothers pulling each other’s hair in the school office and otherwise personable kids forced to act tough when Mom is around because Mom expects it.]

  “The suburbs don’t seem to influence the city,” said Duvall. “The city influences the suburbs.

  “We have kids who know that if they’re absent 15 consecutive days we can un-enroll them so they miss ten days, show up for one, miss ten, show up for one.”

  Reservoir High is graced with a real-life Bunny Colvin in the person of Gorham L. Black III, a retired army colonel (and the son of a Tuskegee airman) who fills in as a substitute teacher and conducts a once-a-week “advisory” class for 25 African-American freshmen.

  “I try to tell them it’s okay to be smart, to be respectful of yourself and others, to pull up your pants. I tell them that in prison, if your pants are around your knees it means your ass belongs to somebody else,” said Black, who is 66.

  On the American news program Nightline, Ed Burns explained the lure of the drug dealer for kids in neighborhoods beyond mere poverty.

  “He’s the man in the neighborhood that has what nobody else in the neighborhood has, which is standing, which is money, which is power,” said Burns. “Kids naturally want to go in that direction.”

  Gorham Black hopes the boys he works with – one of whom needed to talk because his mother had been arrested – will see something worth emulating in the example, set by himself, of what a black man can and should be.

  “When they come into class they have to shake my hand and say, ‘Good afternoon, Mr. Black.’ I watch their grades, talk to their teachers. A lot of them don’t have parents to do it.”

  Black said an especially poignant scene for him during Season Four came when Bunny took the winning engineering team from his “project” class to a downtown steakhouse. The outing soon implodes along the fault lines of culture and etiquette separating the kids’ world from the one beyond the ’hood.

  In a second “advisory”class, this one for all male students in their junior and senior year called “What It Is To Be A Man,” Black works to prepare the boys for whatever even remotely formal events may await them.

  The boys learn how to tie a necktie, write thank-you notes, and shake hands and look someone in the eye, among other courtesies, in a sort of finishing school for kids off to a rocky start.

  At the end of the school year, Black hosts a reception out of his own pocket, hiring a caterer to serve finger sandwiches with cake and punch.

  “They have to wear a pair of khakis with a white dress shirt, something useful they can wear for anything from church to dinner,” said Black.

  “I have other teachers drop in on the reception as guests and teach the boys that if someone comes up to you and you have a piece of cake in one hand and a glass of punch in the other, you put one of them down, shake hands and say hello.”

  The victories are small, some would say symbolic, but Black has seen grades improve among half of his kids, along with self-esteem.

  The old soldier is reminded that one of the searing points of Season Four, one voiced through Bunny Colvin, is that most of these kids are smart enough to know that traditional learning isn’t worth much in a society that has already decided it has no use for them.

  To accept this, said Black, would be the same as giving up.

  “I’m convinced that what we do here will transform itself when they leave,” said Black. “Be polite, be respectful at home and outside. Be kind. I have to believe those things will make a difference or I’m dead.”

  •

  One of the most memorable acts of kindness in any season of The Wire came early in Season Four after a girl nam
ed Chiquan in Mr. Prezbo’s class refuses to sit next to Dukie because of his body odor.

  Like an ornery wasp going from pistil to pistil, Chiquan agitates other students – using jewelry to reflect the sun in another girl’s eyes – until one of them slashes her across the face with a razor.

  Prez, who just a year ago accidentally killed a man while working as a cop, is momentarily paralyzed. Blood gushes from Chiquan’s face, pandemonium reigns and an ambulance is called.

  In the chaos, the slasher slumps to the floor, alone except for the attention of Dukie, who uses a cheap, battery-powered mini-fan he found and repaired to blow air across the face of a dazed girl who just inflicted a wound that will need 200 stitches to close.

  All season long, said Duvall, Jermaine Crawford played scenes like that “with an intuition you can’t teach … he made you care.”

  High praise from someone who spent close to 40 years in the theater and for a decade taught the craft at Towson State University, alma mater of Corner director Roc Dutton.

  As long as there have been neighborhoods, said Duvall, there have been neighborhood tough guys, becoming more violent with each era until 14-year-olds like Michael Lee are calculated, cold-blooded killers.

  “Every generation has their rebels without a cause,” she said. “But Dukie embodied the sad side of it that rarely gets shown.”

  When that sad, gentle soul embraces his all but assured end at the tip of a hypodermic needle, Duvall took it hard.

  “My last scene is with Dukie, he comes to school to borrow money again from Prez and I won’t let him in,” said Duvall. “And then he goes down the alley to shoot heroin. I was home, watching by myself and I wept.”

  OMAR’S WHISTLE

  Jen Ralston and the Sound of The Wire

  When Michael Kenneth Williams appeared on the set as a World War II soldier named Tucker in Spike Lee’s 2008 movie Miracle at St. Anna, the director called out: “Here come Omar, here come Omar!”