Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad (13 page)

Simon assumed that Driesell would be fired. “We had him dead to rights,” he said. Instead, the university investigated for a year, slapped the coach on the wrist, and gave him a new contract, with a raise. “That was the last time I ever believed journalism fixes anything,” Simon said.

• • •

T
he
Baltimore Sun
,
when Simon finally joined as a full-time reporter, was still a newspaper fetishist’s dream—a haven of hardworking, colorful reprobates, lechers, drunks, and misfits. And Baltimore provided more than enough opportunity for a reporter looking to follow Mencken’s favorite dictate to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

Simon joined a group of young writers and editors that included Rafael Alvarez and William Zorzi, both of whom would eventually write for
The Wire
.
Zorzi, who would also play a version of himself in the show’s fifth season, was a political reporter with a lugubrious, bone-dry wit. Alvarez was a twitchy, voluble hipster with a high-pitched shout of a laugh and a penchant for radical shifts of identity, such as what he mysteriously called “my Elvis phase.” They were pranksters in the office: if Zorzi was on the phone with, say, the governor of Maryland, there was a fair chance Simon could be found with a foot up on the desk, thrusting his crotch into the other man’s face. Well after Simon had left the paper, Zorzi would come back to his desk and find notes from his old colleague, informing him of the various bodily crevices in which he’d wiped Zorzi’s phone receiver.

Simon worked hard and stayed out late. “We were young, devil-may-care, work-around-the-clock, party-till-you-drop, rock ’n’ roll reporters,” Alvarez said. In the newsroom, Simon was not shy about expressing his opinions, often in what would become for him a kind of secondary art form: the devastatingly eloquent, polemical memo. His editor, Rebecca Corbett, eventually had to demand that any further officewide missives be vetted by her first.

“I felt like, I’m a newspaper reporter. I could be making a lot more money doing something else, but the one thing I do get that most people don’t, is that I get to come into my office, put my feet up on the desk, and say what I think,” Simon said. When it came to edits, his opinions could be expressed with somewhat less civility: Alvarez recalled at least one instance of Simon kicking a trash can across the office, and Zorzi described seeing him in an editor’s office, “literally on the floor, kicking his feet.”

Simon was assigned to the police beat, filing daily stories on murders, drug busts, and departmental politics. With the encouragement of Corbett and another editor, Steve Luxenberg, he was also experimenting with longer-form features, though he hadn’t become what Zorzi neologized as a “writeur”—a reporter with more flair in his prose than chops in his reporting.

Simon was mindful of George Orwell’s diagnosis of why writers write. As he put it, “Because you want to show them you’re right and they’re wrong. That, ‘I’ve learned something about the world, I’m going to share it with you, and fuck you if you don’t agree.’

“Anytime I hear a reporter say, ‘I want to make the world right,’ or, ‘I’m writing for the little guy; I’m about the truth,’ I think, ‘Okay, you’re full of shit,’” he said. “I want to hear from the guy who acknowledges the vanity of the byline. Any reporter I knew who was good, he wanted to come back to the newsroom the day after he filed and have everybody be reading his shit, saying, ‘Man, this is a fucking good story. I wish I’d thought of it.’”

Yet Simon had a gift for putting his ego and his sense of justice to the same purpose. “One of David’s best skills is that he gets pissed off as a citizen and a journalist sort of simultaneously,” said Alvarez. “He’s righteous about the truth, and he’s good at leveraging people, through his journalistic skills, into getting the best version of the truth available. That makes you a great reporter.”

Was he cocky about those skills?

Alvarez lifted an eyebrow. “Look, a tiger knows he’s a tiger, right?”

Simon found an immediate affinity for the world of working cops, which mirrored the newsroom in its rough jocularity, its camaraderie, and its sense of purpose, however cynical it might sometimes become. He also, like many journalists, not to mention children of middle-class privilege, was susceptible to a romantic notion of working-class men. Irishmen, always kind of Dionysian twins for Apollonian Jewish boys, fascinated him. He made a point to drink Jameson. Later, as a showrunner, he went out of his way to dress in a style best described as “Polish dockworker.” And while the romance of “common folk” would occasionally come to seem like his only blind spot and threaten to undermine his finest work, it also gave him enormous powers of empathy when it came to reporting on both the police and the people they pursued.

On Christmas Eve 1986, Simon spent the overnight shift with a squad of murder detectives in the hopes that an enlightening, or at least amusing, story would come out of the juxtaposition of holiday and homicide. Toward the end of the shift, while toasting from a bottle of whiskey Simon had snuck into the office, one of the detectives said, “The shit that goes on up here. If someone just wrote down what happens in this place for one year, they’d have a goddamn book.”

Two years later, on New Year’s Day 1988, Simon officially began a leave of absence from the
Sun
and reported for work as a “police intern.” In hand he had a book contract from Houghton Mifflin and an agreement from Police Commissioner Edward Tilghman to allow him complete access to one of the city’s two homicide squads. (Several cops later speculated that the fact that Tilghman was dying of a brain tumor at the time contributed to his decision—either because it had driven him mad or he figured he wouldn’t be around to see the fallout, which indeed he wasn’t.)

For the next calendar year, Simon spent nearly every day with the initially wary detectives of Lieutenant Gary D’Addario’s homicide squad. It was a deep embed. His marriage—the first of three—dissolving, Simon worked six or seven days a week, often pulling double shifts alongside the detectives and generally coming as close as was possible to joining their ranks. “Sometimes, coming off midnight, we drank at dawn and I would stagger home to sleep until night. I learned to my amazement that if you forced yourself to drink the morning after a bad drunk, it somehow felt better,” he wrote in an afterword to a fifteen-year anniversary edition of the book that grew out of his reporting:
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets
. At night he would return to his new bachelor apartment, with its mattress on the floor, and pore over the stacks of notebooks he’d fill. In time, he came to have a more global view of the division’s goings-on than many of the detectives themselves and could answer such questions as who was working which case on a given day.

The day before the Marty Ward memorial, Jay Landsman and Terry McLarney, both in their fifties, sat at a Caribbean-themed restaurant near the border of Baltimore, the city, and suburban Baltimore County. On the table was a platter of Old Bay–doused wings and the remnants of more than several beers, though neither man made any move toward the bathroom: cop bladders.

These were the last men still on the job from the squad Simon immortalized in
Homicide.
McLarney had since climbed the BPD ranks to become major and head of the Homicide Unit. Landsman had moved out to the county, where he now worked burglaries, but his youngest son, Joe—one of four Landsman children in law enforcement—was a newly minted murder investigator under McLarney. To the degree that there is a David Simon “voice” evident throughout his work, it was in some ways an amalgam of these two men’s style of speech—baroque, vulgar, deadpan, in love with language for its highfalutin ballbusting potential.

Landsman, like most of the cops, had disliked the idea of the book at first. “I didn’t want anybody looking over my shoulder all the time. You’re working murders in the ghetto. What, are you going to come out looking like a saint?” he said. Simon became the victim first of the cold shoulder and then of weeks of hazing—mostly the overuse of his American Express card at the bar after shifts and a series of ever more imaginative ways to question his sexuality.

“But David is a likable guy,” McLarney said. “He was young, he was getting a divorce . . . It was like the Stockholm syndrome. We started to identify with him somehow. It became normal for a call to come in and for David to just jump in the car.”

Would Simon have made a good cop?

“If they started admitting pinko liberals, I guess,” said Landsman.

“Nah,” said McLarney. “He’d never pass the drug test and polygraph.”

At the end of the year, Simon sat down with his massive pile of notes, files, and recordings and churned out a manuscript. His editor, John Sterling, returned from lunch to find the stack of typed pages sitting on his desk; Simon had been so anxious to deliver the book that he’d driven from Baltimore to Manhattan, dropped it off, and headed home.

• • •

I
f David Simon had never gone into television, he would still have a claim to greatness as a long-form literary journalist based strictly on
Homicide
,
as entertaining, compelling, and journalistically convincing an account of men at work as has been written. To have achieved all that while observing the highest standards of journalistic integrity made it all the more impressive. It’s little wonder Simon would later be so hard on journalists he accused of being fabulists; never mind issues of ethics and integrity, he must have thought, why would anybody
need
to make things up?

For an aficionado of
The Wire—
or its predecessor, the TV series
Homicide: Life on the Street
—the book is a treasure trove of familiar details. There are scenes like a tender moment between a deeply inebriated McLarney and another detective in which the future head of homicide thanks the other, because “when it was time for you to fuck me, you were very gentle.”

There’s lingo like “red ball” (a high-publicity, and thus high-priority, case), “dunker” (an easy-to-solve murder), and “stone whodunit” (the dunker’s polar opposite). Simon is never better than when diving into such deep linguistic pools—the secret inside languages of the working world. It’s an impulse that reached its natural extremity in
Generation Kill
,
Simon and Ed Burns’s HBO miniseries about the invasion of Iraq, the point of which seemed in part to be the ways in which the Orwellian jargon of the war machine’s bureaucracy both drove and obscured the war itself.

And of course there’s “the board,” a kind of grimly ironic echo of the writers’ room whiteboard, which tells the story of which cases are solved (written in black) and which remain stubbornly in red.

But the most important lesson of
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets
for Simon was a narrative one. At the dramatic and emotional core of the book is the murder of eleven-year-old Latonya Kim Wallace and one detective’s increasingly obsessive and futile search for her killer. “At the time I remember calling my editor and saying, ‘My God, what happens if they don’t solve this? My story may not have an ending.’ And John, being a better editor at that point than I was a reporter, said, ‘Then that’s your ending. Maybe that’s perfect.’ Which: Yeah, of course.”

Or as Sterling put it, articulating what might have been a credo for the Third Golden Age’s narrative philosophy: “Life is like that: endings are rarely provided. There’s an awful lot that’s messy and unresolved.”

Above all, the book is a work of immense confidence. Simon grew to know his subjects so intimately that he could claim, without hesitation, the right to say what they were thinking and feeling at any moment. This is all the more remarkable since he allowed each detective to read, and request changes to, his portions of the manuscript before publication. Nothing of substance was altered.

Indeed, the men ended up impressed, even touched, by the way Simon had portrayed them. “That motherfucker . . . he was good,” said Landsman. “He was inside my mind. He really knew us.”

McLarney had an even more astonishing takeaway for the subject of a nonfiction book whose author could walk away comfortable that he had told the uncompromised truth. He said, “David Simon taught me that people can be trusted.”

Had they experienced any blowback?

“Nah, he never blew any of us,” said Landsman, sipping his beer and slipping easily into what was obviously an old routine.

“Well, there was that one incident. On the couch . . . ,” said McLarney.

“Oh, yeah. But we’d never blow him back.”

• • •

O
ne homicide detective who was not around the office in 1988—he was detailed to a federal investigation—was Ed Burns. Burns was the perfect Simonian character: tough, intellectual, antiauthoritarian, Irish. He grew up just outside Baltimore, the son of a once aspiring newsman who had settled for the job of type-composer at the
News-American
. Punished for chronic misbehavior by the nuns at his Catholic school with confinement in the basement, Ed discovered a walk-in freezer filled with ice cream: an early lesson in the pleasures of bucking the system.

Coming out of college in the early 1960s, Burns went to work as a copy boy at the
News-American
. There, he had the newsroom experience of David Simon’s dreams. One of his jobs would be to roust reporters from whatever brothel or bar they’d crawled off to for the afternoon. The paper’s stairwells were so filled with discarded airplane bottles of booze, one had to be careful not to sprain an ankle.

As the war in Vietnam escalated, Burns, eminently draftable, made a calculation that he’d be better off running toward trouble than waiting for it to come to him. He enrolled in Officer Candidate School. Not for the last time, he found himself less than impressed by the men in charge. “The dumbest fucking people I could have imagined,” he said. “And they were not only sending me to die, but to lead
other
people to die.”

Again, he calculated that the best path to survival was a counterintuitive one. He quit the officer track and signed on to language school, which meant he’d be assigned as a companion and translator to a Kit Carson scout—one of the North Vietnamese defectors the army had begun using for their knowledge of local terrain. Though more dangerous, the duty also meant an earlier exit from the service and a measure of control.