The Wire Read online

  Ransone says he drew on that conflict – neither this and not quite that, yet wanting to be accepted anyway – to find the soul of the waterfront jester Ziggy Sobotka.

  “Ziggy wasn’t as stupid as people wanted to make him out to be. He didn’t just want to be in a gang. There was a lot more to it than that,” he said.

  “To me it was about how hard it is to live in Baltimore. It’s a town of incredibly talented and eccentric people who wind up doing nothing.”

  Born James Finley Ransone III, the grandson of a man who owned a string of liquor stores, “P.J.” grew up along Dulaney Valley Road, far enough away from downtown that he felt like a tourist on grade-school trips to the National Aquarium at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor downtown.

  In elementary school, he took part in plays and won roles in theater projects at Towson State University. During this time he auditioned a part in Barry Levinon’s 1990 Baltimore immigrant story Avalon, a role given to a young Elijah Wood.

  While at Cockeysville Middle School, his mother, Joyce Ransone, heard that the county was opening a magnet school for the arts and took him for an audition.

  “I knew he didn’t fit in with the jocks and the preps,” said Mrs. Ransone.

  On his own or with friends, the teenaged P.J. would head down Interstate-83 into Baltimore City and notice the stuff that wasn’t in Phoenix or on exhibit at the Inner Harbor.

  Baltimore is “a bizarre, conflicted place – a racist Southern town stuck in the Northeast,” said Ransone. “Just look at the incredible shit they put on the benches. The whole time I was growing up, it was ‘The City That Reads,’ and now it says ‘The Greatest City in America.’

  “Are they kidding? It ought to say ‘The Most Insane City in the Universe.’”

  How insane?

  “Once,” he said, “my friend saw two humongous black lesbians dressed up in baseball uniforms beat the fuck out of a homeless guy with their bats.”

  Combined with that white trash business is an acknowledgement that his father was the model for some of Ziggy’s less appealing social attitudes.

  “P.J.’s father grew up in a working-class family and had quite a reputation for being wild,” said Mrs. Ransone, an assistant to the president of a financial company. “And his dad has more of the Baltimore accent.”

  Ah, the Bawlmer accent, the song of sirens who pronounce all of their o’s as though they’d just seen a dog run down in the street.

  “Oh, no!”

  A singular mixture of Tidewater drawl, Appalachian twang, immigrant pidgin, and leftover Cockney, the tone and cadence of the Baltimore accent is typically a white, ethnic parlance that long ago followed many of its practitioners to the suburbs.

  It has only one sibling that resembles it: South Philadelphia.

  And while the degree of a resident’s Bawlmerese varies according to education and social status, there are surprising anomalies. Funniest of all, says Ransone, are those people – unaware that their own tongues are lathered with it – who ridicule others for “talkin’ ’at way.”

  Al Brown, who played Major Stan Valchek, a careerist who angles his way to acting police commissioner by series end, is a Philly native and comes by the accent honestly, especially when barking things like “If you don’t want my finger in your eye …” or calling a roomful of cops and prosecutors “ratfuckers.”

  But the accent hangs badly on New Yorkers who think they can find the way in through Brooklyn or Jersey. Folks from the South or the Midwest have to be gifted mimics to nail it, although Brits seem to do fine.

  But it was programmed into P.J. at birth. All he had to do when the director called “Action” was let go.

  “It really comes out,” he said, “when I get angry.”

  Throughout the second season of The Wire – when people were tossing Ziggy atop shipping containers, setting his car on fire, or laughing themselves sick when his diamond-studded pet duck drank itself to death – there was much for the Prince of Goofs to be angry about.

  •

  After graduating from Carver in 1997, Ransone landed in New York, where he enrolled in film school. He dropped out, explained his mother – as only a mother can – because “he didn’t apply himself.”

  Drag queens gave him a tour of Manhattan; he managed to land an agent, got a few commercials, and then a handful of television and independent film roles. He has been known to play bass in metal bands.

  In his role as Ziggy, a doomed son of a son of a stevedore, raised for a world that is slowly dying out, Ransone says he was pushed to some of his best work as an actor by Chris Bauer – who played his father, the union boss Frank Sobotka.

  “To me the most brilliant moment [of Season Two] was when Frank goes to see Ziggy in prison and sees his son through the glass,” said Bauer.

  “Zig is in a tank of sharks and all he is is food. Frank Sobotka’s legacy is not dredging the harbor for more work, it’s sitting right there in prison.”

  The scene was the hardest for Joyce Ransone to watch or forget.

  “The night Ziggy shot the Greek guy and the young boy, I had one of those nights where I couldn’t sleep,” she said.

  Did Ziggy survive lock-up?

  “Probably,” said P.J.

  Less difficult, said Mrs. Ransone, was one of the first scenes of the season when Ziggy jumps atop a saloon table and exposes himself. For this, she said, P.J. had gone to some effort to prepare her.

  “He said, ‘Mom, you’re not going to believe this, but HBO has designed a prosthetic penis for me and I have to whip this thing out,’” Mrs. Ransone recalled.

  “I give these young actors a lot of credit. It takes a lot of bravery to play a part like that.”

  Bravery, perhaps, is not the right word.

  “The Wire tested every ability I have as an actor,” said Ransone. “You couldn’t be on that show and be one-dimensional.

  “I went in with the Johnny Depp approach: just show up and lie your ass off. With Chris, I was able to bleed into a universe where you cut away everyone around you except the person in the scene you’re talking to.”

  •

  As the second season of The Wire was wrapping up, Ransone got a part in A Dirty Shame, the 2004 film by fellow Baltimorean John Waters. He played a dirt worshiper named Dingy Dave.

  “He’s really into dirt,” says Ransone, who became friends with the director during the shoot and now considers him a confidant.

  From there, he went on to play US Marine Corporal Josh Ray Person in David Simon’s HBO miniseries Generation Kill, a young warrior with the wit of Ziggy Sobotka and the balls of Omar Little.

  Intimates have suggested to Ransone that the divide between Ziggy and Person was negligible, but he doesn’t buy it, noting that while he embraced the “lovable fuck-up” in his youth, the P.J. who played Ray Person had moved on from there.

  Asked how a place as burdened as Baltimore could remain charming, Ransone once quipped, “Look at me. I’m broke and I’m still charming.”

  And then allowed how, given all he believes to be true about a place romanticized in 1960s beer commercials as “The Land of Pleasant Living,” he expects to come home for good one day.

  “I still dream of buying a house there, in a really nice neighborhood near Loch Raven,” he said. “I’ll probably die in Baltimore, but I can’t tell you why. Maybe because, as dysfunctional as everybody is down there, it’s still a family town.”

  episode nineteen

  ALL PROLOGUE

  “It don’t matter that some fool say he different …” - D’ANGELO

  Directed by Steve Shill

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

  Omar the Terror is ready to take the stage in a Baltimore City courtroom to testify against Marquis “Bird” Hilton for last season’s murder of the maintenance man Gant. He tells the court that his occupation for the last eight years or so has been robbing drug dealers.

  And thus he is comfortable with the world of pe
ople like Bird, whom Omar knows from both prison and the streets. From the stand, he identifies Bird as the triggerman as well as putting the murder weapon on him.

  At the detail, early reports on Frank Sobotka peg him as a workingman with a modest house outside the city, a paid-off truck, and a little bit of savings. Nothing dramatic. The union – with fewer than a hundred dues-paying members – is somewhat threadbare, according to available records.

  All of which makes the hiring of high-roller lobbyist Bruce DiBiago, and the payment of some $70,000 to various political organizations in past months, more than a little suspicious.

  Russell, Freamon, and Bunk show Daniels a computer graphic of how ships are worked by the longshoremen, specifically the Atlantic Light on the day the can with the women was off-loaded.

  The container with the dead girls was not immediately entered into the computer, only to be logged some four hours later. All cans they are able to identify as being logged in this fashion come from the same shipping line – Talco – and one checker is always on the job: Thomas “Horseface” Pakusa.

  At Little Johnny’s, Vondas introduces Nick to an Israeli named Eton to discuss delivery of the chemicals. Nick can get as much as they want. There’s just one thing holding up the delivery: Ziggy’s in trouble with an Eastside dope dealer named Cheese.

  Vondas agrees to intercede on Ziggy’s behalf. The intercession is successful, notably because Cheese works for Eastside drug kingpin Proposition Joe, whose product is supplied by The Greek’s organization.

  Later, when Vondas offers to pay Nick for the stolen chemicals in heroin instead of money, Ziggy urges him to take the dope to turn a better profit. Nick takes half in cash, half in heroin, telling his cousin that this time, he’ll handle the dope.

  McNulty has given up trying to identify his Jane Doe floater and gives Doc Frazier the okay to ship her body to the anatomy board for use by medical students. He tells Bunk that he is done waging war with the department and turns his attention to what remains of his marriage.

  He cajoles Elena into accepting a date and at dinner claims to be effectively retired from the ways of the old Jimmy. The leopard, he declares, has changed his spots. When McNulty asks his wife for another chance, Elena dryly offers him, instead, a “fuck for the road.”

  Cut to: great sex.

  Cut to: the morning after, when McNulty, ready to move back home, is reminded that it was just sex. And please leave before the boys come home today.

  Stringer reaches out to a Washington connection for an important job, something he can’t do with Baltimore labor. About which the DC boy surmises, “If Stringer Bell reachin’ all the way past Baltimore with this kind of work, then we got a real mystery going on.”

  Greggs visits the stripper Shardene, now retired from the pole, living happily with Lester Freamon and going to nursing school. The detective wants info on immigrant girls, mostly Eastern Europeans, working the club circuit.

  Shardene tells her to try a joint off of Holabird Avenue near the docks and ask for a friend of hers. Greggs and Prez pursue that angle and attempt to follow the trail of sex workers that snakes through Baltimore strip clubs and bordellos.

  At a union meeting, Sobotka gives his men an update on the effort to lobby the General Assembly for a new grain pier and dredging of the main shipping channel, if not the canal.

  A stevedore asks where the money is coming from to do it all. Help from the national office, says Sobotka, and some friends coming through in a pinch.

  After the meeting, fellow labor official Nat Coxson calls Sobotka on his lies about the money and cautions, “Watch your ass, Frank.”

  At the Clement Street Bar, Ziggy gets $2,400 from Nick for the burned Camaro, and buys the bar a round while lighting a cigarette with a $100 bill.

  Frank Sobotka waits outside the bar for Ziggy to leave and drags the wayward kid down memory lane along the rotting grain pier. When Frank begins to suggest that he made mistakes as a father, Ziggy gently tells him not to go there and then brings up all the good things he remembers about growing up in a waterfront family.

  “What else do you remember?” asks Sobotka.

  “Everything,” says Ziggy.

  In prison, D’Angelo dumps the rest of his dope down the toilet, tells his mother to tell Avon, Stringer, and Donette to leave him alone and participates in a discussion of The Great Gatsby in a book group.

  From his take on Fitzgerald, it is clear that D’Angelo sees his own tragedy clearly.

  “It don’t matter that some fool say he different ’cause the only thing that make you different is what you really do or what you really go through. … [Gatsby] got all them books and he ain’t read near one of ’em. … He was who he was and he did what he did … [and] that shit caught up to him.”

  At episode’s end, D’Angelo is jumped by a fellow inmate and hanged with a belt hooked around a library doorknob.

  INEVITABLE FATES: D’ANGELO, WALLACE, AND DUKIE

  “The Wire was an epiphany to me … I was so unaware of the real-life Dukies …”

  – JERMAINE CRAWFORD, ACTOR

  Wallace got it in Season One: shot dead by his homeboys Bodie and Poot, as disbelieving of the betrayal as he was afraid. His plea is simple, as though a shared childhood counted for something. “This is me, yo …”

  D’Angelo went down in Season Two, choked to death by a fellow inmate in a murder secretly contracted by his uncle’s most trusted lieutenant, Stringer Bell.

  And Dukie?

  Man, I just seen that dusty bitch the other day, headed down the alley with the dope fiends.

  “Broke my heart,” said Sean Lindsay, an elementary school teacher in Long Beach, California, who has used The Wire in his graduate studies in education.

  Broke Jermaine Crawford’s heart too.

  “If you’re not ‘muscle’ or ‘street’ you get the short end of the stick,” said Crawford, who played the impoverished middle school student Duquan “Dukie” Weems. “There’s nowhere to go.”

  Unlike Wallace, no final plea was afforded D’Angelo, who is killed as he begins to assert his dignity separate from the “corporation” of his uncle’s drug empire.

  Stringer Bell makes sure that doesn’t happen. Just keeping the boy “close” wasn’t close enough anymore.

  While Bell and Barksdale house counsel Maurice Levy try to keep D’Angelo in bounds after his drug arrest on the New Jersey Turnpike, D doesn’t play ball. All he wants to know is what happened to the naïve younger boy he tried to protect as best he could.

  “Where Wallace?”

  No answer.

  This time with contempt: “Where Wallace?”

  D’Angelo is assaulted in the prison library, a belt tightened around his neck and made to look as though he’d hanged himself from a doorknob.

  His last words came in a soliloquy delivered a few moments earlier while discussing The Great Gatsby in a prison literature class taught by Richard Price, the novelist and screenwriter making a cameo.

  Fitzgerald, said D’Angelo, “is saying that the past is always with us. Where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it, all of this shit matters.

  “… you can say you somebody new, you can give yourself a whole new story, but what came first is who you really are. It don’t matter that some fool say he different ’cause the only thing that make you different is what you really do …”

  Solid insight, enough for a B or better at any high school in the country. In D’Angelo’s universe, it earned an F for foreboding.

  •

  The core audience of The Wire – a cult within a cult – is made up of gangsters and cops, both real and wannabes; egghead intellectuals, and – in the wake of all five seasons being released on DVD – virtually every hipster in the United Kingdom where Wire-mania picked up speed in 2008 and was in full swing in 2009 with midnight broadcasts on the BBC.

  “The most operatic TV I’ve ever seen … so much of it was heart-wrenching. The death of Wallace
was tragic, but beautifully wrought,” said Anna Hall, a 40-year-old writer from Yorkshire, UK, living in New York City.

  Like the copy of Gravity’s Rainbow or Ulysses kept by the bed in hopes that one day the portal to their riches will reveal itself, The Wire did not easily open for Hall.

  “I tried three times to watch the first episode and couldn’t get into it,” said Hall. “But so many people I trust told me it was great that I persevered. Once my husband and I were hooked, we were watching three episodes a night.”

  While making references in online posts to Hamlet and Dickens, fans chatting online have fun with their favorite characters while holding their breath that their darlings won’t be gunned down each time a shadow emerges from a dark street.

  They are the “Wireheads”, who have carried on since the show left the air and been joined by those who found the show online, in reruns and through DVDS.

  Though a “Wirehead” Internet search also leads to instructions on converting your petrol burner to an electric car, female fans of Idris Elba (and more than a few men) are known as “Stringabellas”.

  The followers of Omar were known as “Cheeseheads” before Method Man took the role of Prop Joe’s nephew “Cheese” – and there’s one guy who signs all his posts, “In the Bunk We Trust.”

  David Simon has said that the undercurrent of humor in The Wire – the ironic observations of Sergeant Jay Landsman, Herc and Carver’s shenanigans, the slapstick of Ziggy Sobotka and the perfect timing of a Bunk comeback – made “the horror bearable.”

  But not easier to stomach the slaughter of Wallace and D’Angelo.

  “I was absolutely shocked when they killed D’Angelo, did not see it coming,” said Hall. “I thought he’d become the new [drug] kingpin.”

  Larry Gilliard Jr., the Baltimore-born actor who played D’Angelo can sympathize, saying he “felt bad” for the audience when his storyline met an abrupt end.

  Gilliard grew up in public housing, graduating from the Baltimore School for the Arts in 1985.