Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories

by Carlo Rotella

  “I learned to write on the job,” says Pelecanos. “I really got out of the first person on The Big Blowdown,” his fifth novel (1996), a period piece set in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. “That’s where I got to the generational view, getting into the heads of all kinds of characters, and that’s when I started to say, Okay, now I’m a writer. From then on, you see more variety, more different kinds of characters. I started writing more social novels.” From private eye stories, featuring his troubled alter ego Nick Stefanos and then Derek Strange, a black ex-cop with a deep sense of social responsibility, he ventured out across the crime subgenres—criminal noirs, pulps, procedurals, historical dramas, tales of average Joes pushed too far. He doesn’t outline before he writes, but he does his homework. Relying more over time on research has obliged him to cultivate sources. “I do police ride-alongs, interviews; I go to trials just to listen to the language; and I’ve made a lot of contacts on the other side, too, people who’ve done bad things in their lives and are eager to talk.”

  He has also tried to change some bad habits. He pines for the novice energy of his first novels, he says, but he can’t read them now because “I had been timid in those books about being honest about race, and I wanted to change that. I hadn’t let the characters speak as they would speak. I was walling them around too much, idealizing the black characters too much. You have to not be afraid to be misinterpreted.”

  More fully inhabiting his black characters and letting them speak as they would speak has drawn some critics’ ire. The author and activist Ishmael Reed has fulminated against Pelecanos, whose black characters, Reed has said, “speak like the cartoon crows in those old racist cartoons.” Writing in the Washington Post, the novelist Guy Johnson accused Pelecanos of purveying broad ghetto stereotypes that create “doubt about whether he knows his subjects well enough to capture them.”

  “For me, it’s not so much about black and white as it is about knowing Washington,” said Pelecanos. “I get letters from black readers saying, ‘Thank you, you got something right.’ Like, after Hard Revolution, I heard from a few different people about the riots. Stokely Carmichael has always been blamed for inciting them, but he didn’t, and I had to get that right. But, more often, they’ll write to say I caught something about how people talk, or they’ll say, ‘How did you know about that bar?’” You read Pelecanos for the way his characters experience a workplace moment, the rush of being out among people drinking where there’s music, the rhythm of an unremarkable weekday evening in a lower-middle-class household—not for poetic language, intricate plotting, or gloriously inventive action tableaus. Going into people’s heads is what he does. “If I shouldn’t be allowed to go into a black character’s head, then I shouldn’t write women, or The Pacific, since those people aren’t like me, either.”

  Pelecanos has pursued his character studies into a variety of fictional people: white and black, male and female, contemporary and historical. Putting them in motion through the plots of crime stories produces surprising results. Nick Stefanos, his first hero, progressively drinks his way out of a starring role and becomes a supporting character in later novels. Every instinct bred by crime stories and action movies encourages a reader to expect that Lorenzo Brown, the ex-con trying to keep his nose clean in Drama City (2005), is headed for a spectacular showdown with gangsters—but he steers around it. You never see the serial murderer in The Night Gardener, and the frustrated cops don’t, either.

  Pelecanos was a writer, story editor, and producer for The Wire. He wrote crucial scenes as different as the ex-junkie Bubbles’ breakthrough at a twelve-step meeting and the western-style standoff in an alley between Omar Little, the street legend who robs drug dealers, and Brother Mouzone, the prim shootist from New York. Pelecanos also created Cutty, a character who turns away from the street life and opens a boxing gym, and gave The Wire its Greek gangsters, even providing the background voices shouting in Greek when the cops raided a warehouse. In story meetings, he refereed arguments between Simon and Ed Burns, the show’s other cocreator.

  “Ed and I are often butting heads in a way that somebody who doesn’t know us might think is toxic,” Simon told me. “George’s essential role was to be the gravitas, to make the decision. We’d present our best arguments, and he’d sit and listen until he couldn’t stand it any longer. He was the one with the storytelling chops to decide. He has a really strong ear for theme and idea. He writes books and scripts that are about something. When George says you won an argument, you feel good because it means the idea was good.”

  Expanding on his description of Pelecanos as a moralist, Simon said, “We didn’t know we needed Cutty until George invented him. It’s not about plotting, it’s about defining some aspect of human endeavor that wasn’t covered by other characters. Institutionally, not much is redeemed in The Wire, yet all of us believe in the individual’s ability to act. George said, ‘We need a moral center.’”

  Burns told me a story about scripting the death of Wallace, a likable corner boy gunned down by his pals. “It could have been just Bodie, who was pretty much a monster back then, who would just walk up and kill him. But that would have left nothing for Poot, and it would have sealed Bodie as a character. The way George wrote it, Bodie can’t finish it, and Poot, who’s a good friend of Wallace, has to step up and do it. That transcends genre; that’s squeezing all the juice out of a scene.” Bodie opens up as a character from that point, grappling with a dawning understanding that the large forces bearing down on him make it almost impossible for him to act honorably and survive. “That’s why you hire writers like George,” said Burns, “because they find what’s inside a scene, what’s inside the character.”

  The Wire, in return, left its mark on Pelecanos. It “changed the way I look at a lot of things,” he said. “In the past, I would go down to a drug corner and go, ‘Why doesn’t the government do anything about this?’ Now I see better that they’re not gonna do something about it, and just throwing money at it won’t work. The people who live there have to take things into their hands.”

  Driving up Georgia Avenue toward Maryland, following the historical route of the Pelecanos family and others who moved up into the suburban middle class, we passed through a redevelopment district. Banners hanging from streetlights announced that “Good Things Are Happening” on Georgia Avenue. Crossing into Silver Spring, we entered a classic post–World War II suburban landscape of detached houses, each set off by a lawn.

  “This is where I grew up,” said Pelecanos. “Whittington Terrace. It was Jewish, Italian, Greek—ethnic people buying their first house.” We parked at Forest Knolls Elementary School and got out. From the schoolyard, we could see into the back yard of the house he grew up in. “I climbed the fence and went home every day for lunch,” he said. “Same thing in high school. That’s how I got in trouble.”

  He was referring to an accident with a gun when he was seventeen in which he nearly killed his pal Frank Carchedi. The boys, who had been tight since first grade, were fooling around with Pelecanos’s father’s unregistered .38, and it went off. “I blew the side of his face off,” said Pelecanos. “He just looked at me and said, ‘You shot me.’”

  I asked if the moment resurfaces when he writes violent scenes. “Honestly, yes,” he answered. “To shoot somebody at close range like that, you don’t forget.” He has written elements of the episode into more than one novel, including Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go (1995): “The right side of his jaw was exposed, skinless, with pink rapidly seeping into the pearl of the bone. You’re okay, LaDuke, I thought. You turned your head at the last moment and Coley blew off the side of your face. You’re going to be badly scarred and a little ugly, but you’re going to be okay.”

  Pelecanos told me that his father had his arms full of groceries when he came home after Carchedi had been rushed to the hospital. “He was carrying these big bags, and he came in, and there was blood all over the walls. The wound had geysered. He just dropped
the bags, they slid right out of his hands, and he turned white.”

  “The truth of it was, it wasn’t a real sinister thing,” Carchedi, now a successful area businessman, told me on the phone. “It was a couple of teenage kids being knuckleheads, playing around. But it was an important experience, in a way. It made us both stronger, and if anything it made us closer. It was a pretty lonely place out there when it happened.” No criminal charges were filed; the men remain close. Pelecanos is Carchedi’s daughter’s godfather, and he named the mayor in The Wire after his friend.

  Carchedi said, “It was more or less a flesh wound, which sounds funny to say, like Monty Python or something, considering how bad it looked and the surgery I had to have. But it was a bloody mess, and it changed us.” One affereffect of the episode he detects in his old friend’s writing is a deep respect for the transformative power of violence, part of a larger skepticism about the fantasy figure of the action hero with a gun. “Reading his books, on the surface you think that the way to be is the characters who are the tough guys, fast and loose on the edge, alpha-male types. You feel like kind of a loser because these guys are out there drinking and playing, but they usually end up being losers. We’re attracted to the fantasy of these guys, but as the book wraps up, it’s the guy who gets up and goes to work in the morning who ends up really cool.”

  The shooting drew in the starkest terms the line between youthful hijinks and the kind of catastrophe that can end a life or warp it beyond redemption. Carchedi said, “It was a turbulent time. Things were different in the ’60s and ’70s, and every kid wasn’t tethered by a cell phone, but that was as far out there as we ever got. We were basically good kids. We did well in school; we listened to our parents. We’d get out on the edge. We took risks, and we’d do crazy things that parents now, who are so on their kids, would be horrified by, but one of our bonds was that we knew we weren’t gonna go over that edge. A lot of that was the strength of our families—blue-collar, ethnic. That was behind us, and kept us accountable.” The shooting was the two boys’ big mistake, and they still wonder at the sheer dumb luck that allowed them to recover from it.

  Carchedi feels that dwelling on the incident can lead to a romantic misreading of Pelecanos that confuses a dutiful, responsible family man with one of his own characters. “If you look at the stories written about George, they focus on the macho side, the tough side—and he does have that side. He was on the streets; he was that kind of kid and young adult. But he’s mellowed, and he’s quicker to talk about family than about this other stuff. George is really focused on family, in his books and in his life. He’s taken a path that a lot of guys in his position would not have taken. I know for a fact that he’s turned stuff down because he wanted to stay here with his family. He’s flown high, but he could have flown even higher.”

  “My worldview changed because we had children,” Pelecanos said. We were sitting in the den in his house, not far from the house in which he grew up. Books with his name on their spines lined two shelves. His wife, Emily, 50, and their kids—Nick, seventeen; Peter, fifteen; and Rose, eleven—came and went, attending to weekday evening business.

  Pelecanos was talking about crime writers with kids and those without, and how you can tell the difference—for instance, in their appreciation of the life-altering consequences of violence. He takes a shot in passing at Quentin Tarantino in The Turnaround: a therapist who works with wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital talks bitterly about audiences laughing and clapping through the episode in Grindhouse in which a woman mows down enemies with a machine gun grafted onto the stump of a severed leg.

  Pelecanos described a turning point in his life, his experience in Brazil in 1993, when he and Emily went there to adopt Peter. (Nick and Peter are adopted from Brazil; Rose from Guatemala.) They had document problems and ended up spending the whole fall there. They were struck by the nakedness of the poverty and despair they saw. “You couldn’t walk around at night; there were fences with nails in them around the houses, kids with murder in their eyes. Here it’s more hidden. It radicalized me a little bit, and it made me want to reach a bit higher, like Steinbeck.”

  Thinking about the changes in his writing encouraged by fatherhood, he said, “The answer to ‘What makes a good man?’ has changed. Some of the men stop themselves. They’re more in control of their impulses. And if they cross the line, they know they’ll have to give up what they are.”

  * * *

  Original publication: “Crime Story,” Washington Post Magazine, July 20, 2008.

  Fights

  Boxing Stories

  IF YOU READ THE sports section, James Fallows once observed, then nothing in the newspaper seems fresher to you when it’s hot off the presses, and nothing goes stale as quickly. He’s right. A day-old sports section is much staler than a day-old front page, and infinitely staler than a day-old comics page, which remains entirely fresh even if you read the next day’s comics before you get to it. Who won or lost, who’s two games out of first place in the division, who averaged 3.6 yards a carry . . . it all seems urgent the morning after it happens, and then suddenly and completely irrelevant a day or two after that.

  If you read the sports section, you know this. But chances are that you’re not familiar with the one exception to the rule. Boxing stories don’t get stale. I’ll explain why in a minute, but first we have to confront a hard truth: you don’t know about this exception because you skip the boxing stories. Admit it. You skip them. Admit that you’d rather read about a sort-of-ebullient cleanup hitter’s contract negotiations (short version: he’s going to be making a lot of money for a long time) or the micro-minutiae of a basketball star’s stunningly dull existence (ball, video games, money, call mom; repeat).

  Not that there are so many boxing stories to skip. Boxing wedges its way into the margins of daily papers’ sports sections only occasionally, usually for one of three reasons: 1) a big fight catches the attention of the general sports press, in recent years often because it featured either Mike Tyson, who managed to mock-convince one winking sportswriter after another that this time he could be serious, this time he might really have changed, or Oscar De La Hoya, who was cute and famous, no matter how overrated he may have been as a fighter; 2) a local fighter on the rise is about to challenge for a title; or 3) something very bad happens to a fighter, in or out of the ring.

  Most general-assignment sportswriters don’t know much about boxing, but they do seem to enjoy writing about it, perhaps because the fight world’s built-in quality of anachronism (it’s always 1926 at the fights) inspires them to indulge fantasies of being wisecracking, typewriter-pounding guys in snap-brim fedoras who crank up a two-piece phone and shout, “Honey, get me Rewrite!” For that reason, and because stylish delivery of the story often has to make up for both writer’s and reader’s disinterest in boxing for its own sake, writing about boxing in the daily paper tends to be extra-purple. Play a drinking game with your friends in which everybody has to drain a beer every time the word “gritty” or “grimy” appears in a #3-type story, the kind about something very bad happening to a fighter. Also, everybody has to drink when there’s a punchy short sentence—put the over-under at, say, five words. Also, keep an eye out for purple paragraphing.

  Know what I mean?

  Purple.

  And punchy.

  Everybody has to drink when that happens, too. You’ll all be retching in no time.

  Now, let me explain why boxing stories, in violent contrast to other sports-section stories, don’t go stale.

  It will help to have an example in front of us. I have one on my desk now, in the sports section of yesterday’s New York Times. Most of that section’s contents have already acquired the desolately superseded feel of abandoned homesteads overgrown by prairie grass. The Patriots came from behind to beat the Dolphins. The Redskins came from ahead to lose to the Buccaneers. Somebody returned a missed field goal 108 yards for a touchdown, the longest play in NFL history. The L
os Angeles Kings blew out the Columbus Blue Jackets, and the Los Angeles Galaxy (part of the trend toward ambiguously singular-plural team names, like the San Jose Liquidity or the Boston Crabbiness) won the MLS Cup. It all may have seemed exciting at the time, and it retained some interest on Monday morning when I read it as fresh news around a bowl of cereal, but by Tuesday it was a sere wasteland.

  Then there’s the boxing story, a good example of the #3-type, by Geoffrey Gray. James Butler, a once-promising super-middleweight (which means he has to weigh no more than 168 pounds for a fight, which means that he could lay out any 350-pound football blimp or slap-happy basketball bad boy in about eleven seconds), has been charged with the murder of Sam Kellerman, who wrote and acted a little and dabbled in boxing and was the younger brother of Max Kellerman, a fairly well-known television commentator on boxing.

  Gray deftly juxtaposes their stories. Butler came up the hard way, in the projects. His father wasn’t around; his mother alternately went off partying and harshly disciplined her sons. Butler had talent, and he could hit, but he never mastered his power or himself. He made it as far as a title shot, but lost. He’s known as a headcase, most famous for an incident in which he coldcocked a victorious opponent in the ring after the decision had been rendered and the gloves were off. Butler spent four months in jail for that assault, not his first visit to the joint. He was also diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but the medication made him sluggish and heavy, and therefore unable to fight, so he didn’t take it.

  Sam Kellerman, the son of a prominent psychoanalyst and an artist, attended Stuyvesant High School and Columbia University, and tried his hand at theater, television, and music. He also indulged a romance with boxing that brought him to the Kingsway Gym in Manhattan. Alexander Newbold, who trained both Butler and Kellerman there, made a policy of encouraging his fighters to get to know each other, and the two young men from different backgrounds became friends. Butler was staying with Kellerman in his apartment in Los Angeles when Kellerman was killed—bludgeoned to death from behind while sitting at his computer.