episode forty-one
REFUGEES
“No one wins. One side just loses more slowly.”
– PREZ
Directed by Jim McKay Story by Ed Burns & Dennis Lehane; teleplay by Dennis Lehane
Leaving an all-night poker game, where he plays cool, close to the vest and now and again is taken by the older and the wiser, Marlo steps out into the early morning sunlight.
At a corner grocery, he buys a bottle of water while brazenly stealing a couple of lollipops in front of a chumped and angry rent-a-cop.
You “act like you don’t even know I’m there,” the guard says.
“I don’t,” answers Marlo.
It was a move, said Malcolm Azania, a Canadian novelist who publishes under the pseudonym Minister Faust, “simply to prove his untouchability … his urban catacombs containing scores of victims who disappeared as completely as if they were in Pinochet’s Chile.”
At Cutty’s gym, all the talk among the boys is about the cutting in Prez’s class. Randy gives them a credible bio of the girl with the blade who lives in a group home: enough to make anyone want to attack someone.
On her first day in homicide, Greggs bumps into fellow refugee Lester Freamon, and new boss Sergeant Jay Landsman assures Kima she’ll learn the ropes in no time. And then she is initiated into the family of “murder police” in a series of pranks involving “methane probes,” a corpse holding a note identifying his assailant – “Tater killed me” – and a call from the zoo from a “Mr. Lyon.”
The funny stuff comes to an end when Rawls and Burrell decide to give the investigation of the dead state witness that Carcetti is making such a stink about to Greggs – “the rookie” – as a way of keeping it out of public view.
At the rim shop, Old Face Andre does the alibi shuffle trying to explain to Marlo how he lost the package to Omar. The boss man doesn’t want to
hear it, takes an expensive ring from Andre and tells him to make good on what he lost.
“Omar ain’t no terrorist,” says Marlo, “… just another nigger with a gun.”
When Andre leaves, Marlo tells Partlow he needs $150,000 cash for the next card game, determined to beat the “old heads” at the poker table.
Prez tries to engage his class in a discussion of the assault, but they are more interested in the rumor that he used to be a cop and whether he ever shot anyone. When he tells them that he was a cop but being a police officer “was about working with the community”, they laugh in his face.
At the Univeristy of Maryland sociology department, Bunny Colvin helps a professor named Parenti put together a pitch to the school system about studying just the kind of kids that Prez is trying to reach and teach.
One of the school superintendents cautiously allows the program to proceed with one, ill-defined prohibition: They can do “nothing that gets anyone upset … there’s an election going on and we don’t want to put our schools in the middle of that mess.”
Sydnor and Officer Massey shut down the wire room and head back to the street with Marimow pleased as punch. Already on the street, Bunk visits Lex’s mother, finding a small shrine and a frightened woman: “I don’t know where my son is,” she says.
Prop Joe pitches Marlo on the New Day Co-op: good dope at quality prices and if you’ve got a phone, you’ve got a lawyer and a bail bondsman.
Perhaps best of all, “No one fucks with you,” says Joe.
“No one fucks with me now,” replies Marlo.
A room full of black ministers, however, give Carcetti the eye-fuck when he comes calling for their support.
“Wherever I go, people want the same things … but they’re just not getting them. I’m going to change that,” he says. “My door is open to you, regardless of who you endorse.”
The ministers thank him, somewhat coldly, and Carcetti reasons that if nothing else, they’ll respect him for meeting them on the up-and-up.
Drinking with Bunk when the shift is over, Freamon tries to figure out where the corpses are that the Stanfield group is dropping and muses about the possibility of a dumping ground.
Snoop and Chris work to recruit Michael, scoping out the derelict rowhouse he lives in with his little brother, watching the pair walk to school together and surmising that Michael only attends class to get out of the hell that is home.
Says Snoop: “Make a good run at that boy, he’ll be on a corner, no problem.”
At a parley with Omar at Blind Butchie’s gin mill, Prop Joe insists he had nothing to do with the Stringer Bell/Brother Mouzone attempt on his life. To clear the air, he gives Omar a tip on a high-stakes card game on the Westside, lots of cash on the table.
After making sure that Bug has a snack and is doing his homework, Michael makes his way to Cutty’s gym about the same time that the badge of the security guard who confronted Marlo over the lollipops is tossed inside Snoop and Partlow’s boarded-up boneyard.
In an attempt to school Sherrod in basic math – both to keep the younger man in his T-shirt business and maybe help him in general – Bubbles has managed to enroll his friend in school.
Watching Sherrod study one night in the shithole they are squatting in, Bubbles notices that the student is using a dictionary to reference algebra homework.
“It ain’t no thing,” says Sherrod, weakly playing the lie.
“I see that,” says Bubbles.
What viewers saw on Andre Royo’s face in that scene, the actor said, is the look of being fed a plate of bullshit, something he remembers on his parents’ faces when, as a kid in the Bronx, he’d try to dance around the fact that his room wasn’t clean, he was late getting home and why his grades were not what they should have been.
“Everybody,” said Royo, “knows that look.”
When Omar and Renaldo stickup the card game, Marlo says: “That’s my money.”
To which Omar replies, in an echo of Jason Compson IV, an unlikely predecessor from The Sound and the Fury: “Money ain’t got no owners, only spenders.”
Omar takes the ring that Marlo took from Andre and the stone-faced Stanfield tells him to “Wear it in health.”
DENNIS LEHANE & THE STOLEN LOLLIPOPS
On the October, 2006 night that his Season Four teleplay of “Refugees” debuted on HBO, the Boston-born crime novelist Dennis Lehane was quoted in the St. Petersburg Times of Florida about The Wire and television in general.
“The Wire is the most anti-TV show out there,” said Lehane. “The vision is almost completely uncompromising, makes almost no concessions to the audience.
“There’s zero wish fulfillment in it … a very scabrous, uncompromising vision.”
Scabrous: rough to the touch; having scales, small raised dots or points. A word you don’t hear everyday.
Lehane helped The Wire realize its prickly vision over the last three seasons with the scripts “Dead Soldiers” (2004); “Refugees” (2006); and in 2008, the final year, “Clarifications.”
Season Four, he said – the one about public education – was particularly special.
“The story of those four kids trying to navigate middle school while the street is sucking at their heels, that hit a nerve like no other,” said Lehane, who in Season Three had a cameo as a police officer named Sullivan in charge of special equipment.
Ed Burns, who worked as a Baltimore police detective and middle school teacher before working on The Wire, has said the lure of the drug dealer is the most potent force in poor neighborhoods where few others have much to show for their lives.
Though Lehane has given life to many a bad man in novels that include Gone, Baby, Gone, Mystic River, and most recently, The Given Day (in which the Baltimore-born Babe Ruth is a recurring character) few villains have struck him as stone cold as Marlo Stanfield.
“Marlo is very de-human,” said Lehane. “That’s different than subhuman which suggests an evolutionary disconnect or an insult in regard to intelligence.
“Marlo is exceptionally intelligent and in an
evolutionary sense he’s Machiavelli’s ideal … he’s been dehumanized to the point where he’s incapable of understanding why he should care about anyone or anything that doesn’t enrich his bottom line.
“Where other characters on the show had a lot of flash – I’m talking about everyone from Omar to Bunk to McNulty, even Bodie – Marlo is practically Stalinist in his lack of it. That makes him all the more terrifying.
“It’s hard to expect mercy from someone you can’t imagine telling a joke or having a mother.”
And mercy is certainly not what the rankled security guard at the grocery store received when he had the temerity to approach Marlo – “he talked back,” was the offense, according to Chris Partlow – when Marlo stole a few early morning lollipops after an all-night poker game.
“The death of the security guard was where we started,” said Lehane. “How to get there became the issue … the lollipops came to us at some point. It just seemed like something Marlo would do and something [to] exemplify how cheap life can be out there.
“One place where David [Simon] and I have always been particularly simpatico is in making people die over stupid shit. We both get really geeked up over that,” said Lehane, who also wrote the scene of Omar’s death at the hands of a 12-year-old while buying a pack of cigarettes.
“There’s zero nobility in it,” he said. “That’s the street.”
episode forty-two
ALLIANCES
“If you with us, you with us …”
– CHRIS PARTLOW
Directed by David Platt
Story by David Simon & Ed Burns; teleplay by Ed Burns
The youngsters at the heart of the story – Namond, Randy, Michael, and Dukie, joined by a young boy named Donut who is obsessed with cars and stealing them for fun – sit near an abandoned factory late at night telling ghost stories.
Real-life ghost stories from around the way – dead people in rowhouses – stories to scare the shit out of a kid the way Boy Scouts might put a spin on Mary Shelley while sitting around a campfire.
Says Namond: “They zombies. [Partlow] got the power. He say come and they got to come – like the devil do with the damned.”
“There’s dead, then there’s special dead,” says Donut, adding that Marlo is so powerful the undead work for him as spies.
Dukie – the kid always getting punked, the one supposedly dumber than the rest – doesn’t believe any of it and later tells Randy that he saw Chris Partlow walk a boy into a vacant rowhouse.
Valchek lets Carcetti know that the department brass have given the case of Braddock – the dead witness – to a rookie detective and Norm Wilson feeds the info to Tony Gray, accomplishing their mission while staying away from the fallout.
Says Wilson with a grin: “I’m a devious motherfucker once I get going.”
Gray doesn’t fall for it and Wilson draws the picture for him: You’re going to lose but if you use the leak about the Braddock case to boost your poll number, you’ll have some credibility in a year or so for the state legislature, maybe Congress.
Gray doesn’t like it, but he sees it and accepts it, and is soon sharing the Braddock info at a televised press conference. Concluding that Burrell can only hurt him – whether the mistakes are honest or not, he’s not sure – Mayor Royce turns to Rawls and says: “I need you to make this go away … I won’t forget.”
Marimow’s marching orders for the major crimes unit remain unchanged: catch Marlo and as many of his players with dope on the table. He’s not interested in anything else.
Raids on Stanfield corners and other addresses are ordered by Marimow based on the low-level info gleaned from the now-defunct wire.
The cops have very low hopes for the endeavor, meager expectations that are soon fulfilled. Pearlman is both disillusioned and worn out enough by the never-ending drug war to tell Daniels she’s ready for a career change.
As Pearlman has had it trying to make a real difference in the face of political and bureaucratic idiocy, so state Delegate Odell Watkins (played by Frederick Strother), whose support is all but necessary for a successful campaign, has had it with the callous arrogance of Mayor Royce.
When Prez tries to help the ever-mistrustful Michael in class, the boy just stares at a blank notebook page and is given detention. Namond is a bit harder to control, much less teach, screaming: “Get your police stick out the desk and beat me. You know you fuckin’ want to.”
Leaving the class, Namond bumps into Grace Sampson, Colvin, and Professor Parenti, there to begin selecting students for their project, which will study “good” kids versus “corner” kids.
Colvin says that Namond is the kind of kid they are seeking for the corner study.
Prez soon begins to empathize with his errant students, realizing that if he teaches them anything it most likely will not be math. He gives Dukie a fresh set of clothes and Donut swiftly pops the teacher’s car open when Prez locks his keys inside.
Later, when Prez confidentially asks a student why Dukie doesn’t wear any of the clothes he bought him, he’s told that the boy’s family sells his clothes for drugs.
Marlo puts a price on Omar’s head but Partlow suggests they find a better way to skin the cat, noting that “[Avon] Barksdale turned this town upside down huntin’ him and all he ended up lookin’ was weak.”
Hanging out again at the abandoned factory, the quartet of middle-schoolers are surprised and a bit frightened to see Partlow and Snoop show up. Telling everyone but Michael to beat it, the Stanfield assassins tell him they’ve heard good things about him and there’s work if he wants it.
Michael begs off, claiming family responsibilities, and is told: “We be around if you need something.”
Marlo gets word that Prop Joe was behind the card game stickup. Old Face Andre is summoned and told they’re going to fake a robbery at his store and blame it on Omar. Andre doesn’t like it, but there’s not much a beleaguered employee can do.
Indeed, Andre is pistol-whipped by Partlow – who also kills a delivery woman – in the staged robbery as Snoop stands by. A bloodied Old Face will soon name Omar as the killer in the homicide interrogation room.
[Later, a very skeptical McNulty will say to a fellow officer: “You ever know Omar to do a citizen?”]
Visiting his father in prison, Namond is told by Wee-Bey that Bodie did the right thing in working Marlo’s package. The game, he tells his son, has changed.
As Carcetti knocks on doors for votes along a rough stretch of East Baltimore, Rawls surprises them with the news that Odell Watkins has broken with Mayor Royce and that he, for one, would be happy to wake up to a new morning at City Hall.
The moment he leaves, Carcetti and his right-hand, Norm Wilson, make a beeline for Watkins.
In the event, reasons Carcetti to Watkins, that he becomes “a white mayor in a majority black city … you will have a voice within my administration simply because I’m gonna need it.”
When Watkins says Royce is ahead by seven points in the polls, Carcetti responds that it’s only four.
In his meeting with Marlo in a Christian Science Reading Room, Prop Joe says he knew about the robbery of the card game but not that there was a police camera scoping Marlo’s lair, the motivation it takes for Stanfield to join the narcotics co-op.
The episode ends with Dukie taking Michael and Randy to the vacant house to which he saw Chris Partlow walk someone who never walked out. The boys pry the plywood off the door and, creeping toward the back, find the decaying bodies left there by Snoop and Chris.
His point proven, Dukie declares: “There ain’t no special dead … there’s just dead.”
episode forty-three
MARGIN OF ERROR
“Don’t try this shit at home.”
– NORMAN WILSON
Directed by Dan Attias
Story by Ed Burns & Eric Overmyer; teleplay by Eric Overmyer
It’s the day before the election, a Sunday, and the candidates attend worship se
rvices with their respective families and supporters.
Ever the opportunist, Carcetti attends the church where a politically influential black minister controls the pulpit: the Rev. Reid Franklin preaching the divine word about “men of truth who fear God and hate covetousness.”
Afterward, Carcetti seeks Franklin’s support – has not Watkins already broken with the incumbent? – and the reverend promises to keep an open mind.
Herc, working surveillance on Marlo’s lair via the hidden (but not undetected) camera, sees nothing of note while Marlo plays up to the spying cops.
Taking a call, Marlo asks what time he should pick up “the skinny girl from New York,” saying it’s a job he has to do himself. Reading Marlo’s lips with the help of an interpreter, Herc and Sydnor surmise that “skinny girl” is cocaine.
The stunt will later make Herc look very foolish – to Marlo’s delight – with the Amtrak police.
Brianna Barksdale tells Namond’s mother – De’Londa – that the gravy train of cash, sort of a pension based on Wee-Bey’s loyalty to the organization, has stopped running. When De’Londa says that if Wee-Bey talks, Avon will be facing more time in prison, the mother of the murdered D’Angelo replies “I don’t give a shit what happens to Avon.”
Namond, who wouldn’t be much better off than his neighborhood friends without the drug money, is later told by his mama that it’s time for him to step up and get in the family business for real.
[In interviews, the actor McCullum said that Namond (rhymes with Raymond) “had to do what he had to do.”]
And Prez does what he doesn’t have to do, presenting Dukie with a safe home away from an unbearable one: clean clothes, soap, and a laundry bag in the gym, where he can shower if he gets to school early enough. The teacher says he will take care of making sure the clothes are laundered and returned.
The Wire Page 27
