The Wire

by Rafael Alvarez

  “Fuck loyalty,” says McNulty. “And fuck you, Lester. I never thought I’d hear that chain-of-command horseshit outta your mouth.”

  As Colvin lunches with Johns Hopkins University officials to talk about his post-retirement career as the school’s No. 2 security man – a nice $80k a year gig – his troops begin spreading the word on the street that there will be a “free zone.”

  It is as if the cops have begun speaking Chinese.

  Says Carver: “This corner’s indicted. We’re coming back tomorrow and when we do, everybody wears bracelets – unless you people move your shit down to Vincent Street, down where the houses are all vacant. You do that and we don’t give a shit.”

  Explains another cop: “Vincent Street is like Switzerland. Or Amsterdam.”

  For Fruit, it don’t compute: “Look: we grind, and y’all try to stop it. That’s how we do. Why you got to go and fuck with the program?”

  At a local community college, McNulty follows a hunch, gets Stringer Bell’s cell phone number from the registrar and wanders the halls until he glimpses Bell in an economics class.

  Goddamn!

  He will later follow Stringer to a meeting with an architect, a real estate developer and State Senator Clayton Davis.

  Double goddamn.

  Later, Freamon will bring McNulty down a peg by telling him that he not only already had Bell’s cell number, but that Stringer only uses the line for legal business.

  “Stringer Bell’s worse than a drug dealer,” says Freamon.

  “He’s a developer,” says Prez.

  In a bar in Little Italy, the eastside neighborhood that launched the legendary and real-life Baltimore mayor Thomas J. D’Alesandro (1903–1987) – father of current United States Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi – Tommy Carcetti tells confidants he will run for mayor.

  In walks a classy, good-looking woman and Carcetti bets the table he can talk her into letting him buy her a drink. He does, but it’s because he already knows her: Theresa D’Agostino, a local girl made good down the parkway in DC, a fixer of campaigns.

  While pretending to sweet-talk her for his friends, Carcetti is asking D’Agostino to manage his campaign.

  Impatient with the lack of progress in getting the street dealers to buy into his brainstorm, Colvin has all the dealers rounded up and brought to a high school auditorium so they can hear the gospel of a new day loud and clear.

  At the meeting are Bodie and Poot, a few others from the Barksdale team, as well as Fruit, Jamal and Boo from Marlo’s crews. Colvin can’t do a thing to get them to listen until a small black woman – the vice principal who knows the boys and their families – walks in and tells them to shut up.

  The second she leaves, however: bedlam. Across town, Cutty goes to a Barksdale house party that a man in prison might dream about for years upon end: drugs, music, booze, and a plenitude of pulchritude.

  If Cutty doubted it before, he knows it now: he’s back.

  THE WRITER’S AMBITION

  A few years ago, a network newsmagazine show produced a piece on me as part of their ongoing series of profiles on crime novelists. The crew came to Washington, D.C. to film the segment. On the second night of the shoot we filmed at Thirteenth and Clifton in Shaw, alongside the once notorious Clifton Terrace apartments, subsidized housing known not only as a breeding ground for poverty and crime but also for its location on the edge of the Piedmont Plateau, offering one of the most glorious views in the city.

  As the cameraman shot me curbside, standing beside my car, wearing a black leather jacket with a turtleneck beneath it (a consciously cool but improbable pose, as I would ordinarily not stand outside in this part of the city at night), a group of local kids approached me and made their way into the shot.

  One of them, who said his name was Peanut Butter and Jelly (“’cause that’s what I like to eat, most time”), asked me why I was being filmed – his way of saying, I suppose, that I didn’t look particularly special.

  “I’m a book writer,” I said, not using the word “novelist,” or simply “writer,” knowing that this description would be the one he would most succinctly understand.

  “You gonna put me in one of your books?” he said in the bold way of the street kid with nothing to lose.

  “Okay,” I said, adding, “and that’s a promise, too.”

  I was thinking that he had probably already been on the bad end of many broken promises in his short life, and I did not intend to add my name to the list of those who had let him down.

  I did write a minor character, a kid named Peanut Butter and Jelly, into my next book. I am fairly certain that the real Peanut Butter and Jelly does not know this. The editor of the program left him in the piece as well, which was nationally broadcast on a Sunday morning several months later. I am equally certain that the boy has not seen it.

  So what was the point of our efforts?

  To honor the bargain would be the easy, noble answer. But the real answer, more about us than it is about him, is more complicated.

  The night I met Peanut Butter and Jelly, I drove uptown in my high-performance BMW to a nice neighborhood where my wife and children slept safely and comfortably in a house I’d built with the proceeds of my career as a novelist, screenwriter, and film and television producer.

  I cannot say with certainty what kind of environment Peanut Butter and Jelly returned to that evening, but it is safe to assume that it was nothing like the one I share with my family.

  If he is like most of the kids I meet in the inner city, he lives in a spare dwelling with a single parent, if he lives with a parent at all. He walks through drug-infested streets to get to a dilapidated school that will undereducate him and ultimately leave him unskilled and unprepared to face a world of productivity in which he does not belong.

  And what did I do for him that night? I learned his name, and I put it in a book. A small thing, really. Not nearly enough to bring anything of import to his life.

  I make my living writing about people who, because of an accident of birth and circumstance, are less fortunate than me. In interviews I often say that my mission is to illuminate and dignify their lives to a public that rarely reads about them or recognizes their humanity in film, television, and fiction.

  This is true, but it is only a partial truth. What goes unsaid is the gnawing feeling that I am also exploiting them for my personal gain. It is the same feeling I sometimes get while working on The Wire, which takes our shoot to some of the most impoverished sections of Baltimore.

  On set we often meet kids who greet us as if the circus has come to town. Many of us indulge them by bringing them into the video village, letting them watch the monitors, wear the headphones, and eat candy and junk food from the craft service tables. This makes them happy for a little while and, undeniably, allows us to feel good about ourselves.

  But at the end of the day we go back to our lives and they go back to theirs. For them, nothing has changed.

  In a recent interview with a national newspaper, I was repeatedly asked if I felt that I was doing some sort of public service by writing novels that expose social ills or by working on The Wire, a television series that attempts to present a complete, accurate world populated by fully fleshed-out characters, the types most folks routinely look away from on the street.

  I refused to answer in the affirmative because I do not for one moment harbor such illusions. My ambition is to do good, honest work. At best, a viewer might watch our show and be inspired to become the kind of extraordinary person – teacher, coach, foster-parent, mentor – that I can only conjure up as a fictional character in my head. The kind of person, that is to say, who is far better than me.

  As for Peanut Butter and Jelly, I think of him less frequently as time goes on. Occasionally I wonder what became of him, but then the moment passes. I have my own family to dream about and worry over, and they occupy most of my thoughts.

  Them, and the books I have yet to write.

  Ge
orge Pelecanos

  episode thirty

  STRAIGHT AND TRUE

  “I had such fuckin’ hopes for us.” – MCNULTY

  Directed by Dan Attias

  Story by David Simon & Ed Burns; teleplay by Ed Burns

  Johnny tries to get Bubbles to stop snitching, arguing that they are doing pretty well for themselves without it.

  “Oh yeah,” says Bubs. “We getting by. Out here every damn day, rippin’ and runnin’ and ain’t got shit to show for it.”

  When they do get something to show for it early in the episode – $10 given to Johnny for “rescuing” a man on a ladder from Bubbles – Johnny disappears with the cash.

  Awaking with a hatchet-in-the-head hangover after the party, Cutty is told by his grandmother that his ex-girlfriend called again to remind him of a commitment he made to visit her church.

  “She say there’s a job in it, if you still lookin’,” says the grandmother.

  McNulty, on a deathly dull surveillance of the photocopy shop Bell runs, decides to just go in and say hello.

  “Ain’t seen you round the way,” he tells Bell, who replies that he doesn’t go around the way anymore; that he is now into real estate.

  Even though McNulty is the only one who seems to care, Freamon believes Bell is now truly out of the reach of handcuffs.

  “He won’t go near the street,” Freamon tells Jimmy. “He is insulated from the day-today operations on the corners.

  “The money that comes back is laundered through enough straight business investments that there’s no way to trace it back. A player gets to that point, there’s no way for working police to tie a can to his tail.”

  Somehow, this gets through to McNulty, who decides to channel his efforts into catching the dealer Kintel Williamson, who is still close to the streets where the cops have a chance.

  Omar and his attrition-depleted crew prepare to take off another job, with the boss having to make an uneasy peace between Dante and Kimmy, who argue over the roles they will play.

  Says Omar: “This time we have to do it right.”

  With his own men as skeptical of his sling-with-impunity scheme as the dealers, Colvin drops in on Daniels to get the names of mid-level dealers, reckoning that he will need their help in getting the corner boys to play ball.

  When Carver and Herc try to bring in Marlo for a meet with Colvin, it appears a fight will erupt until Carver tells Herc to back off.

  They do, however, have better luck with others who – incredulous – are introduced to their new stomping grounds along Vincent Street. Now the problem strikes at the foundation of capitalism: no customers.

  Says Colvin to a still-reluctant Bodie: “I swear to God, I have over 200 sworn personnel and I will free them all up to brutalize every one of you they can.

  “If you’re on a corner in my district, it will not be just a humble or a loitering charge. It will be some Biblical shit that happens to you on the way into that jail wagon. You understand? We will not be playing by any rules that you recognize.”

  Emerging to glimpse this Baltimore Moses with new tablets of “thou shalts” from on high is an aged woman still living in one of the all-butfalling-down houses, a resident overlooked.

  “We musta missed her,” says Lieutenant Dennis Mello, played by the real-life retired Baltimore homicide sergeant Jay Landsman.

  “One more thing to do, then,” answers Colvin.

  Scanning the morning paper, Carcetti, seeing that another witness in an important drug case has been murdered, is livid.

  “You let a witness get killed in a high-profile case like this, it says the city’s broke and can’t be fixed,” he tells fellow councilman, Anthony Gray, played by Christopher Mann.

  “You want your cape and the little red underpants?” needles Gray. “Or do you stash that shit in the phone booth?”

  Carcetti tells Mayor Royce he will take the case to the media if he doesn’t make the witness homicide a priority. He most definitely has Royce’s attention.

  Taking time out from his new Barksdale duties, Cutty finds out that his old girlfriend, Grace, has no romantic interest in him and that the church to which she sent him has no job to offer.

  But he also finds that the job he does have, working for Avon, sickens him in a way it didn’t before he went to prison. “An elevation in [Cutty’s] growth,” said Chad Coleman, the actor who portrayed him, in an online interview with Marcus Vanderberg.

  Bunk does double-duty trying to find Dozerman’s gun while working Tosha’s murder and concludes, via an eyewitness, that Omar was present when she was killed. Before he can get the witness downtown, however, Landsman shows up and orders him back on the Glock-in-a-haystack search.

  Bell, not as far removed from the game as McNulty may believe, convenes a meeting of major, citywide players in the drug trade – Marlo being conspicuous by his absence – and preaches to them the benefits of working together.

  “All in favor of goin’ in together so as to pull the best discount on a New York package, raise up,” he says, a show of hands passing the motion.

  Observes Prop Joe: “For a cold-ass crew of gangsters, y’all carried it like Republicans an’ shit.”

  Afterward, Bell tries to enlighten Marlo on the wisdom of joining the co-op. Greggs, on info from Bubbles, follows Marlo to the meeting, flabbergasted when Bell shows up. Summoning McNulty, the pair almost wet their pants with glee: Stringer is still in the game.

  Like rats scrambling for cheese, van loads of junkies are set loose by Colvin’s troops in the drug free zone, which is almost immediately christened “Hamsterdam.”

  Stunned and spooked – their disease bigger than whatever their misgivings may be – dope fiends buy their medicine out in the open, as amazed as the dealers when the cops simply stand by.

  At a Catholic grade school parent/teacher meeting, McNulty – in the company of his ex – meets Carcetti’s kingmaker, Theresa D’Agostino, goes home with her and beds her.

  And Avon Barksdale comes home from prison. After lavish welcome-home celebrations, Stringer takes his old friend to a waterfront condo he’s bought, a new Lincoln Navigator parked below.

  “We makin’ so much straight money,” says Bell. “We can carry shit like this out in the open now, in our own names.”

  episode thirty-one

  HOMECOMING

  “just a gangster, I suppose.”

  – AVON BARKSDALE

  Directed by Leslie Libman

  Story by David Simon & Rafael Alvarez; teleplay by Rafael Alvarez

  When Sergeant Carver tells Bunny Colvin that some dealers remain resistant to the free zones, Colvin tells the cops to “bang them senseless.

  “Anything you need to do, you do. Up to a body that can’t walk itself out of an emergency room, I will back you and your men.”

  They do worse than bust heads: expensive sneakers are thrown into sewers, fine cars are towed to who-knows-where and many of the dealers themselves are driven far outside the city boundaries and left to fend for themselves.

  Stringer and Avon find out that the legit world has its own share of headaches; the price of steel has doubled and there is this thing that goes against a gangster’s nature: city permits, as in asking for and then paying for the permission to do as one pleases.

  Stringer tries to bribe a consultant to the contractor doing work for his own “B&B” development firm.

  “He goes downtown and does for us what we can’t do for ourselves,” the contractor explains. “Democracy in action, Mr. Bell.”

  Keen to do business and do it quickly, Bell pays a visit to the consultant: State Senator Clay Davis, who sets the price to speed up the permit process at $25,000.

  Says Davis: “Twenty gets you the permits. Five is to me for bribin’ these downtown motherfuckers. I mean, I’m the one got to risk walkin’ up to these thieving’ bitches with cash in hand, right?”

  McNulty and Greggs argue to Daniels that if they don’t get a green light to dog Bell
and Barksdale, they will soon be so insulated from the drug trade as to be untouchable.

  Daniels will not be moved. “Stringer Bell is quiet,” he says. “And if he’s quiet, I don’t give a fuck if we come back a year from now and find out he’s on the Greater Baltimore Committee. This unit is about the bodies.”

  Avon, unaware that Stringer has extended the olive branch to Marlo, is far more disturbed by the up-and-comers’ drug corner real estate than he is pleased with the legit property coming into his control through Stringer’s entrepreneurship.

  Bunk lets Tosha’s family know that she was not an innocent bystander in the incident that caused her death. In fact, he says, she was likely killed unintentionally by a member of Omar’s gang.

  Hoping the family will lead him to Omar, Bunk says: “Y’all need to get word to the right people.”

  They do and Omar sends word back to his fellow alumnus of Edmondson High School: “… tell ’em she caught one from the boys she tried to take off. Tell ’em there ain’t no need to involve no police in any of it.”

  Working to tie up every loose end that keeps him awake at night, McNulty – backed-up by Greggs – tries to get the state to change D’Angelo Barksdale’s cause of death from suicide to murder.

  The State’s Attorney prosecutor tells them: “I don’t know how you city guys do it. But down here in Annapolis, we try to duck a punch or two. Not lean into every last one.”

  Barksdale and Bell have a serious conversation about the future of their partnership. Barksdale, upset that Marlo has gone unchallenged on his prime street corners, is not consoled by Bell’s argument that they’re making so much money they don’t need any more turf wars.

  “How many corners do we need?” asks Bell.

  “More than a nigger can spend,” says Avon.