You can pick up a lot of new language from watching The Wire, the five-season HBO drama looking at different aspfects of drugs and crime in the American city of Baltimore.
In my current re-watching, one favourite has been the verb ‘to un-ass’, meaning to free up or make-available: normally related to money.
Un-assing also appears in The Corner, a brick of a book that The Wire creators David Simon (a former police reporter) and Ed Burns (a detective-turned-inner city schoolteacher) co-authored in 1997, prior to The Wire’s first season in 2002.
A year-long documentary look at a drug-infested neighbourhood in West Baltimore, The Corner approaches these streets from the perspective of those living on them rather the homicide detectives who took centre stage in Simon’s previous 600-page brick, Homicide. Like Homicide, it was made into a TV series – and in it I think you can properly start to grasp where the richness and depth of The Wire as a work of fiction comes from. Also, you might start to grasp how the drug trade works, from the ground up: how it consumes whole neighbourhoods, hoovering up the people within and spitting them out only when there is nothing left to take.
The authorities – police, schools, social services and the rest – are virtually helpless to do anything about it and more or less give up, settling for nothing much more than keeping themselves upright, playing their own games and making sure they get paid. In this they mirror life on ‘the corner’, referring to the intersections of city streets in America where drug dealers and touts typically hang out, like ‘Mount and Fayette’ in the West Baltimore neighbourhood covered here.
On the police’s approach to the ‘war on drugs’, Simon and Burns write,
“greater ideals are soon enough lost to the troops on the ground. For them, there is only the absolute futility of trying to police a culture with an economy founded on lawbreaking, of pretending to protect neighbourhoods that can barely be distinguished from the corners that are overwhelming them. By the standards of a national drug prohibition, half of Fayette Street’s residents are doomed outlaws.”
There is an important insight to be gleaned from this I think, countering the conventional idea that places like West Baltimore have lost all sense of community. It is that the nature of community is radically different in these places. After all, if there was no community, it would be easy to leave. But the corner has a way of keeping its denizens – its addicts, hustlers, touts and gangsters – in the neighbourhood where it can minister to them.
A racial aspect
As well as the engine of the drug trade, there is a racial aspect to this. You can pick it up from some of the lovely vignettes you find in The Wire, the small amusing events which often appear also in The Corner or Homicide. Think of the first season and mid-level gangster DiAngelo and his girlfriend Donette going to a posh downtown restaurant and feeling out of place, even though, as she points out, there are black people in there. Or how the young ‘hopper’ Wallace is sent to stay with a grandparent in the country and his colleagues back at home call it ‘Klan country’.
This relates to an idea of ‘true blackness’ which associates black identity with ‘the game’ of the drug trade, treating black people who live and prosper in the outside world as traitors who are betraying their own identity.
“On Fayette Street, the standing assumption is that any place in America without bricks and pavement and black people is, by definition, a playground for sheet-wearing, pickup-truck-wrecking, get-a-rope rednecks. It’s a powerful and enduring myth to the young men and women of West Baltimore; a self-imposed construct of the corner mind: They don’t want us out there. They don’t need us. Stray from the streets you know, you fall off the edge of the world.”
Reading about this, it occurred to me that this attitude has now been widely rationalized and made intellectual, taken as correct just because it’s a common attitude from black people who must be deferred to under ‘system of diversity’ rules (it also now reproduces itself in current attitudes to the countryside in Britain from many urban progressives and race activists). However it appears in the book as just another way of protecting the group: protecting them from feeling bad about themselves, retaining some pride, status and a kind of community amid the mayhem of their neighbourhood.
From micro to macro
In this example – and indeed in the whole book – I think we can glimpse the special quality of The Wire: that it has arisen from from the ground up. The narrative of The Corner goes from micro to macro. Rather than starting from the theories of experts sitting in offices and pulling in lots of money for sounding clever, it starts from the reality on the ground, then explores what this entails in relation to policy.
One example of this is how they show that the amount of attention devoted by police to clearing corners of the drug trade (often brutally and indiscriminately) means that other crimes – against the person and against property – are widely neglected.
In one passage, the warm-hearted addict and father Gary McCullough (who evokes the character Bubbles in The Wire) is shown pushing a fridge down the street to the metal dealer with a fellow fiend in broad daylight, yet being ignored. “All the hunting and gathering of metal – most of it stolen outright – and then, down at the scales, it’s not fenced, but sold off as a legal transaction. There were times when Gary had to admit that the capers were something less than capers, that crime in West Baltimore had somehow ceased to be crime.”
It’s all very thought-provoking. But it works best as storyline and reflection rather than conclusion and prescription. Simon and Burns are clearly angry by what has happened to their city and their country – as the former has made clear many times. However the only attempt at policy recommendation they make is what appears in the ‘Hamsterdam’ episode in Season 3 of The Wire, where a local police commander effectively legalizes the drug trade in certain small areas in order to displace it from elsewhere: allowing normal life of sorts to resume on ‘the corners’.
As they write here,
“War or no war, 20,000 heroin addicts and another 30,000 pipers are going to go down to the corner in Baltimore tomorrow. . . . Against that fact, the drug war stands as a useless and unnecessary brutalization, an unyielding policy that requires our government to occupy ghettos in much the same way that others have occupied Belfast, or Soweto, or Gaza.”
This may be so, but legalization or decriminalization does not seem to me like a solution given the serious damage heroin and cocaine do to people, which is made perfectly clear in the book. Indeed a large proportion of those who appeared at the start of their year on the streets were dead by the time their book was published: mostly of health complications associated with drug use, but some from gang violence.
Maybe taking ‘the heart out of’ the drug trade, as the Deacon in The Wire puts it, would improve the situation. I don’t know, but it seems like utopian thinking to me, passing over the realities of politics. Here perhaps, the weakness of the bottom-up approach, otherwise so strong, appears.
This approach is continually enlightening however, although sometimes gruelling given the length of this book. Simon and Burns write of how there is little concept of time on the drug corners: “life in this place cannot and will not be lived in the future tense.” And pretty much all children raised there are tragically drawn into it. “From the moment that the children down here have any awareness at all, they are shaped by a process that demands that they shed all hope, that they cast off all but street-level ambition, learning to think and feel and breathe in ways that allow only for day-to-day survival.”
I think all of us city-dwellers can recognize this from encounters with our own versions of ‘corner boys’ and girls: young people, mostly black too it must be admitted, who seem to be living in a different world with different, ultra-violent rules; right alongside us but completely separate.
Such reflections from Simon and Burns reflect a deep immersion in their subject matter, without which I think the greatness of The Wire is inconceivable. Indeed, for me The Wire emerges from The Corner and Homicide not so much as a work of genius as one grounded in hard work, commitment and the willingness to observe and record rather than impose pre-conceived theories on to reality, or even dealing in theory at all.
In this way I think we might see how great fiction perhaps arises from non-fiction: not so much from imagination and invention, but from close observation of the world surrounding the writer(s). Simon and Burns and their publisher deserve great credit in this case for making this world the world of ‘the corner’, where most of us would never go, let alone spend a year then make a five-season series out of.
I note the expression, ‘un-ass’ meaning to free up. I am aware of a Glasgow expression, firstly in demotic ‘ye widnae want to rip the arse oot o’ it’ - in standard English - ‘you would not want to rip the arse out of it’ - meaning in a situation of advantage you would not wish to take too much advantage/ liberty that brought notice to the authorities and thus end the benefit. Glasgow- Irish- US Eastern seaboard - one wonders if there is a historic connection?
Good piece - thought provoking, this subculture thrives in a our cities