Life is a lollipop you cannot lick. (Omar is dead. Long live Omar.)
Omar's been dead for nearly decades now. And now Michael K Williams has followed him.
Don't know why it took so long for me to find out he’s dead, but it did (take me so long to find out, that is) and he is (dead, that is).
Michael K. Williams, famous for his portrayal of Omar Little in The Wire, as well as some small supporting roles in The Sopranos, Inherent Vice, and more recently Motherless Brooklyn, would have been an interesting character even if he weren't one of TV's first portrayals of a gay Black man whose gayness and Blackness aren't pointedly referenced in every single scene so that the all white writers room can be all self-congratulatory.
“See? A gay black man on our HBO show! Look at how liberal we are!”
Omar was most likely meant to be killed be the end of season one. Just like Jesse in Breaking Bad.
Both actors ended up, thru sheer force of charisma, major characters on their respectives shows.
Omar was interesting because in The Wire, any character who tries to act outside the rules and regulations of their given organization is, by definition, more fun to watch. This remains true whether it's the Baltimore Police Department, with its highly regimented structure and specific assignments, or Marlo Stanfield's gang, which sells heroin and coke and engages in illegal activity, but seems to have even more rules, more self-censure, and less individual freedom for its members than the fuckin cops. You never see the gang members actually having fun. At any point. Even Omar's suicidal impulses lean more towards intense than “fun.”
Indeed, one of the things The Wire did so well, even better than The Sopranos or Breaking Bad, was to show that the day-to-day operations of an illegal operation are just as dull and mind-numbingly boring as a legal outfit (particularly any gig involving surveillance, which by definition is challenging for any director to make watchable. The Wire figured it out, with Herc's idiotic quips or Omar's sheer vengeance seeking, but other shows/films have to find reasons for surveillance gigs to stop being surveillance gigs. Breaking Bad is most guilty of this. Any time Jesse was assigned a watch gig, he'd get bored and either fuck it up or almost fuck it up.)
But Omar usually got what he wanted in the end. He was the show's cowboy. He robbed drug dealers. He had no allegiance to any crew. He worked alone. He favoured carrying two shotguns - which looks badass but is not practical. He was openly homosexual in a world rife with homophobia and nobody dared call him derogatory names due to his reputation.
I don't mean that gay people should have to act like Omar in order to be respected. People of all/any orientations deserve respect. But both Jimmy McNulty and Omar were defiant loners in a show full of gangs (police included) and his appearance was always a breath of fresh air after watching the seemingly endless scheming and conspiratorial whispering that characterized The Wire.
So why did authorities recently find the actor who portrayed him, Michael K. Williams dead from a coke and fent overdose?
Because nobody would fucking hire the guy and let him try a new character out. Even his brief appearances in Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice (2014) and Edward Norton's Motherless Brooklyn (2020) felt more like Where's Omar? moments than Williams inhabiting/embodying a full-time, three-dimensional character.
I think that Omar's prominence and sheer iconoclastic power limited the actor in a way that Idris Elba has not been limited but Wood Harris (who played Avon Barksdale) and Hassan Johnson (who was Wee-Bey, the only character in The Wire to ever get the better of Omar in a gunfight, if you're into trivia like that).
Some actors survive their greatest creations. Others don't. When Bryan Cranston called Walter White “the role of a lifetime” on Letterman (or maybe it was Conan, or Seth Meyers, one of the many interchangeable Old White Dude Behind Desk Interviews Hot Actors shows), I'm not sure he understood the full weight of what he was saying. When the show ended, he now has the rest of his life to…?
Try and live Walter White down. Breaking Bad ended in 2013. What has Cranston been in since that anyone has seen? I recall a small cameo in The Disaster Artist (2017) that went over okay, but Trumbo (2015) certainly wasn’t embraced. Indeed, the reception to Trumbo already suggested the top billing thing might not be a good idea, especially considering how well received his small part in Drive (2011) was. But maybe that’s because Breaking Bad was still on when Drive came out.
It's highly doubtful he will find a character that iconic or well known again. The odds of him getting Walter White alone were insanely small because most people remembered him as Jerry Seinfeld's sadistic dentist who Jerry suspects converted to Judaism strictly for the jokes. (When Jerry confronts a Catholic priest about this: “And this offends you as a Jewish person?” Jerry: “No! It offends me as a comedian!”)
If not that, then the rest of us remembered Bryan Cranston as the goofy father from Malcolm in the Middle. Vince Gilligan, for his part, knew Cranston from an X-Files episode he wrote in the mid-90s that Cranston starred in.
My point is this: Cranston had the role of a lifetime. He doesn't have it any more. What will he do with the rest of his life? Will he seek out character roles? Or will he demand top billing, star in a series of flops, and disappear forever?
But Omar was never the main character. And he was so emphatically Omar that it was probably difficult for casting directors to put him in new projects. I've seen many movies where Michael K. Williams shows up and every time (and I’m talking more than four times) someone, either in the theatre or in the room, piped up “Hey! That's Omar!”
So Williams was doomed to be Omar for the rest of his life. And I really don’t think he wanted that. He’d already struggled with a coke addiction. In The Wire it is hinted that Omar uses heroin (which is why he is content to rob either cash or stash…it didn't seem to make a difference to him). So I guess he fell into it in real life. And it killed him.
R.I.P. Michael K Williams. Rest in power.
So! In life news: I'm back at work after a long and intense period of depression.
Just got 60 days notice on my current place. This is my THIRD eviction during the COVID-19 pandemic. I seriously cannot take much more of this.
Reading a lot lately. Just finished The Getaway by Jim Thompson, a basic crime novel until the last 10%, when it turns into a surreal, Malcolm Lowry-esque meditation on hell. I have to say though, I've read much stronger meditations on the nature of evil & criminality in Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, anything by Steve Erickson or Tana French, and another crime book set in Hollywood in the 1930s called The Pictures by Guy Bolton, a first novel I just finished that my former mother-in-law gave me for Xmas 2019. Also recently finished an ominous novella by Ian McEwan called The Comfort of Strangers, reread I Am Legend by Richard Matheson and am considering a third read of Douglas Kennedy's The Big Picture, a book I fucking love. It's seriously a contender for Great American Novel of the 90s, as good as The Corrections. Also read a non-fic thing called Hidden Valley Road. So it seems like I haven't done a fucking thing this year but I guess I have.
3. Here's a dumb poem-thing I scrawled in my palm-sized diary these past few days:
What is the searcher after? Certainly not the dusty road of destination, where bored-looking men hock loogies & play cards w each other outside laundromats in Coke machine glow1 cuz we're all in the same boat…sinking. The same sinking drifting aimless spot the size of a backyard sprinkler compared to the Lone Star State a blip like the thin lips of rock star zero Bill Corgan in the sometimes deep sometimes thrashing sometimes dashing blue-grey waters of the Pacific.
The problem is inevitable, the solution reachable. Alas always a way.
Urgency can’t help a situation like this. Knowledge is treated like currency around here.
Knowledge has always been currency. Hence the profusion of confusion. Smart ones trade it. Carpenters. Unionized truck drivers.
Oftentimes people have negative knowledge…as in we know what not to do, or what should not be done, to a building, to a person, the frames of the burning flames of failed venture. It's the carpenter who makes money either way, not the starry eyed would-be restaurateur.
Ah but we need dreamers. We can't just have people who can make things. We need people who think things. Think new things.
Knowledge is currency.
I was once told in Grade 6, 7 or 8 (middle school was the worst time for bullies…I remember one time an entire class….like forty kids chased this kid named Jeremy up a tree. And I was in that mob. I don't know why. I did not know Jeremy, I just know everybody hated him. I wasn't screaming at him and I wouldn't have hit him had he come down from that branch…that branch was his salvation he stayed up there the whole lunch hour where the fuck were the adults? My point is in that moment there was no I. I was of the crowd, the mob, and it was of me.
I would have been a Nazi. A proficient Nazi.
You know how that feels to admit?
I would have gone along with the crowd.
I would have been swept away by the momentum.
Anyway Jeremy got down okay. But other days I watched as he got pummeled. Another time someone literally kicked his ass and he screamed. In pain. And I watched. And didn't do anything. Or say anything.
I think he switched schools eventually. I could never understand why people hated & him. He was a good-looking kid.
Speaking of good-looking, I'm talking about French Stewart here, because in one of those grades, (6, 7, or 8) somebody told me an erroneous fact about him. French Stewart is/was that annoying squinting alien from the TV show Third Rock From the Sun.2
You're hearing the theme song now aren't you? You can see the dancing planets can't you? That stupid hillbilly riff, you can hear it, right?
Anyway someone told me that he was media mogul Martha Stewart's son.
I believed this. I had no reason not to believe it. I believed it for years.
Knowledge is currency.
Anyway I found out in 2012 or so that they weren't related. Weren't related at all. And it astounded me.
Recently stumbled across this photograph from my wedding and it struck me as a metaphor for life. My tongue is out trying to lick ______ like she's a lollipop and she's sorta dancing away from me, teasingly. Or maybe not teasingly. Maybe she knew somewhere deep down we’d end up like we did. Life is a lollipop you can never lick. What you want is always just ahead. There’s always the next thing.
Dear God I don’t think any woman has ever looked as good as ____ did in that wedding dress. It suited her as well as her skin did. It was fucking perfect. I hope that, at least on that day, or for a time, I was able to make her happy. That we weren’t just playing house. We were together. I can accept that I fucked it all up but I wouldn’t be able to accept hearing that it never was what I thought it was. You can tell usually. You just know. And I know, once upon a time, for a good year and a half, almost two years, we were happy.
I never should have tried to get of Methadone so fast. I guess I was trying to show her that I was serious about us, that I wanted to be able to travel longer than a few days. We went to Salem a few years ago for 3 days and it was fun!
But, as ever, I wanted more. But me getting off Methadone put an undue burden on her. It was the snowball that started the avalanche. By the end of that year I was in rehab. And halfway through July of the next year we were kaputt. Completely finished. We talked still, on Instagram, until a few months ago when she put a (justifiable) stop to that. So I went to see Moon one last time. Then she walked with me back to our old place because a package had been left there for her. En route she spoke about a conversation she had with her mother, about what her end-of-life plans were. She said her Mom said “I haven’t thought about it. I’m going to live forever.” to which _____ replied “well, can you come up with a plan? Because if something happens I don’t want to be stuck visiting you every day, resenting you more and more…” and I realized that maybe the difference between me and ____ is more fundamental than the fact that I did drugs and she did not. If my Mom gets sick, or my Dad for that matter, and I can help take care of either, to make sure they die at home, and not in some awful antiseptic hospital, then that’s what I’m going to do. My parents cleaned my diaper for years. My Mom carried me in her uterus for ten months. The least I can do is the same for them.
Once we got to the place there was no time for introspection. ____ started a conversation with the kids who live there now. They gave her some mail and her package. Then she kept talking to them, despite the fact that she knew she and I would never speak again. Maybe it was deliberate, maybe it wasn’t. Either way, it was an anti-climactic and kinda rude way to end our relationship. Pretending I’m not there and chatting with a bunch of teenagers. I said goodbye and went on my way. And that was that. I can’t think of a shittier ending than that. Perhaps she was punishing me. Or perhaps she was so over me that saying goodbye did not occur to her. Whatever. It sucked. With a heavy heart, I went home and sat alone in the dark for the rest of the night. I know that pretty soon I’ll have to take those two Quality Street boxes full of photos and mementos and burn them. Not today. But maybe tomorrow.
R.I.P. Gord Downie