When You Walk Through The Garden…

Five years after its finale, “The Wire” is as much an American narrative as it is a Baltimorean one.

“Is it anything like ‘The Wire’?” Anyone living in Baltimore for a substantial amount of time who’s traveled outside the limits of this crazy place is likely to have had this question, or a permutation of it, fired their way by a curious outsider. Often, the interrogator leans forward, holding off on blinking for fear of missing that inevitable “yes,” an affirmation they feel you owe them in the wake of the masterful high drama that played out over five seasons of the series.

It’s as though these curious souls imagine you having to outrun Chris and Snoop every day on your walk to work, or that you paid last month’s rent by flipping a package you stole off of Barksdale’s boys that night you got a little too loose and decided it was a good idea to run with Omar and them.

There is no denying that David Simon’s “greatest show in the history of television, ever!” was a finely crafted display of what is possible in the medium. Whereas the network’s hit “The Sopranos” treaded the familiar terrain of the travails of the Italian-American crime family, “The Wire,” more so than approaching wholly new subject matter, was an unprecedentedly thorough examination of life in the contemporary, post-industrial American city. Stripped bare of the rose tint, it bounded past the lofty marks set in years past by Simon’s “The Corner” and “Homicide: Life On The Streets.”

To be sure, denizens of other U.S. cities have certain stigma attached to their home turf, derived from works of fiction that adhere to the spine of truth (to varying degrees): North Jersey has the tropes of “The Sopranos” and many a mob movie, and Boston has stock imagery of “The Departed,” or “The Town.”

So perhaps the short answer to the “Is it anything like ‘The Wire’?” question is yes. But, much like people outside the Beltway only seem to know the Ravens as the Super Bowl team from last year led by some guy who got away with murder, we have boots on the ground, and must know that not only is there more to our town than dope and death, but that ours is not a solely Baltimorean condition.

In the DVD commentary for the pilot episode, David Simon stated that the show is “really about the American city, and about how we live together. It’s about how institutions have an effect on individuals. Whether one is a cop, a longshoreman, a drug dealer, a politician, a judge or a lawyer, all are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution to which they are committed.”

Surely Baltimore is not the only place one can find any of these types of human being, be they white as the driven snow or “crookeder than a barrel of snakes.” The show’s depiction, however, of a world at war with itself painted a new portrait of the post-American magma that has been bubbling white hot under the disintegrating crust of the so-called American Dream for longer than some would like to admit. Of course, a number of characters have real life analogues, and much of the goings-on from season to season ring true for those with the dubious distinction of being old and/or astute enough to recall similar scandals, tragedies and day-to-day affairs around town.

The political wrangling (read: treachery, deceit and immobilism in the name of staying in office) that plays out later on in the series is reminiscent of former Mayor O’Malley’s protracted pissing contest with former Governor Ehrlich (and on a more dubious note, the hijinks of Sheila Dixon leading up to her indictment for the misappropriation of gift cards meant for poor families at Christmas time).

So yes, the powers that be, fucked up as they sometimes are, have done unconscionable things that more often than not hurt and defrauded the constituents they were meant to protect and provide for. This political culture, however, is not wholly unique to Baltimore. Detroit’s Kwame Kilpatrick just had the book thrown at him, the former mayor that probably surprised no one more than him. And to be fair, we’ve never seen a mayor as dastardly and crooked as Providence’s Buddy Cianci. So yes, art imitates life and city life can be stranger than fiction at times, but the ills plaguing the family, the school and City Hall are blights upon many houses in this country, not just ours.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the show for those not hailing from Charm City is the portrayal of the respective existences of the human cogs in the machinery of the drug economy. The visceral scenes that play out in gripping detail touch upon the human element of the failed War On Drugs in a way that can hit close to home for many.

In harsher times, I’ve copped on a couple of the corners featured in the last two seasons. But I’ve also wasted away in North Philly and Brooklyn with guys with names like OG John in flophouses that felt a lot like home. The fact remains that there are a growing number of places in this country, both rural and urban, that are square pegs in the round holes of the American Promise (insert Norman Rockwell painting-dad telling us that if we work hard and do right, we will be rewarded).

One need only look to the media’s hard-on for reporting on the violence in Chicago or the bankruptcy of Detroit, as if those cities exist in a vacuum and are not harbingers for things to come elsewhere if changes are not made, to see that change is afoot in these waning years of the empire.

And regarding the show’s focus on the public school system’s bureaucracy-induced failings, a long time friend’s anecdotes of his days teaching in Newark seem all too similar to the fourth and fifth season’s schools-centric story lines. The fatherless boys and girls, throwaway children turned into prison fodder because society never told them they were worth anything more, are coming up all across the country.

Maybe that’s where the “Is it anything like ‘The Wire’?” crowd loses the plot. Perhaps it’s easier to empathize with a character, or at the most base level, to simply be entertained by him, if one refuses to acknowledge the plight of a real life counterpart. “The Wire” was significant for many reasons, but its development of characters that were fleshed out to a biographical degree has served as both a blessing and a curse. For some, the show was just “too real.” For others, it was “too black.” And hell, the closest thing we’ve seen to Hamsterdam on TV since has been “The Walking Dead.”

The series did more than just offer up scenes of ruin porn; It constantly reminded us of the inescapable fact that no matter how fucked up a city may be, there are still people who, for one reason or another, have to call it home and thus eke out an existence one way or another. Disregard for the flesh-and-bone factor makes it all too easy to dissociate the intricate plots and character arcs of a serial drama from the even more complex human and institutional threads that are woven together to create the existential fabric of a major city.

Those with negligible willingness to understand what life might look like in Baltimore for the average citizen may associate certain things, usually negative, with the city by default. But how many know that actress Sonja Sohn, who deftly played Detective Kima Griggs on the show, helms the ReWired For Change program, working to help youths avoid falling through the cracks like so many characters in the show? Therein lies our problem all too often as a city: Getting out from under that image.

Maybe we Baltimoreans should thank our lucky stars that the series was the hit it was and not some schlock used to move cars, dish detergent and pharmaceuticals on a lesser network. In the wake of the show’s curtain call in ‘08, those of us living in the city that served as its setting, a character in and of itself, can be left feeling like the humiliated youngest child, endlessly defending our alcoholic dad who most recently got a little too tight at Ashley Johnson’s birthday jamboree and grabbed Ms. Pennington’s ass just before projectile vomiting all over the piñata.

If only the world could see him, the Lord Baltimore himself, as we see him. If only we could tell them about that time he drove us
“downy ocean” out of nowhere and bought us all ice cream. Then maybe they’d see why we love him. As “The Wire” laid out many of the city’s realities in grim and honest detail, it’s often hard for us to prove that our town’s a “really good guy once you get to know him.”

And it would seem that that’s all we’re trying to do, on both the individual and collective levels. We all just wanna show the world that while there is plenty of truth regarding the ugliness of institutional corruption, the drug game and its accordant violence contained within “The Wire’s” narrative, there is also plenty of good here.

So to those near and far who thought that the “It!” in our now defunct (and pricey) slogan “Get In On It!” meant murder, racketeering, embezzlement and wholesale drug operations, please be advised that there are actually people here, just like in your town or city, who want what a lot of people all over the world want: a comfortable life for themselves and their loved ones.

I do not have the luxury of being so naive that I don’t realize that for many residents of Baltimore, daily life here resembles the worst bits of “The Wire.” There are those who must live with a genuine fear of death in their own neighborhoods. There is (self-)destruction and violence and despair and the heartbreak of loved ones lost needlessly to the meat grinder that is life in the badlands of that American Dreamscape.

Unfortunately, neutral evil shadeballs like Clay Davis have real life counterparts. We do indeed have a PD with a revolving door of commissioners whose struggles to contain gun violence lead to an out of control murder rate yearly. And our school system officials have spent stimulus money meant to improve education on cruises, makeovers and dinners. But on or off-screen, our ills are emblematic of the current trajectory of American society.

This city, like many cities, is an organism desperate for survival, and whether we like it or not, we are all part of an American ecosystem succumbing to the natural course of entropy.

The paradox of “The Wire” lies in the fact that although Mr. Simon sought to tell an American story with the series, he and the cast and crew did such a phenomonal job of crafting a world of predators and prey competing for the comfort of limited resources that it’s easy to write the narrative off as solely “a Baltimore thing.” The show, especially in its latter seasons, made quite clear that not everyone was invited to play in the Sandbox Of Prosperity, and that Langston’s “Dream” was to be deferred indefinitely for all too many.

As a society, we’ve been trying “to keep the Devil way down in the hole” for some time, deluding ourselves into thinking that the despair of poverty, addiction, illiteracy and violence doesn’t touch the more fortunate among us, doesn’t live where we live. The “things like that don’t happen in my neighborhood” fallacy drives the wedge even further between those who live the harsh realities like the ones depicted in the series and those who don’t realize just how close all of it comes to them.

Perhaps those curious to know whether Baltimore is anything like the “The Wire” should visit us some time. Or better yet, perhaps they’d be keen to take a stroll down the road less traveled in their own towns to see how much of “Bodymore” exists in their neck of the woods.