A Note on Addiction and Forgiveness in “The Wire”

Some television shows do so many different things so damn well that you could write entire essays about just one or two aspects of any given scene. The Wire is for sure one of those shows, with its brilliance being both timeless as well as all-encompassing. Still, a lot of those aspects are a combination of way over my head, not really my area of expertise to begin with, or already have been talked about by much smarter people than me. However, when I last rewatched the show, almost a year ago actually, I thoroughly loved it, even more than the previous time I watched it, but I only made one note – Walon, episode one-ten, addiction and forgiveness. Now, in many ways I could have written something similar about plenty of other scenes, probably all of Walon's scenes in fact, but it was this particular one that simply made the most sense to me, what with him and Bubbles sitting on a park bench during a warm Baltimore morning, talking about life and people and forgiveness, with the church standing there all quiet in the background.

As far as context goes, Walon is a benevolent biker with a troubled past. He's a former addict who contracted the bug somewhere along the way, gave it to his wife but was at least mercifully spared transmitting it to his daughter through conception. He's been drunk and high most days of his life, he lied and cheated whenever he could to get money to fuel his addiction, and when life was at its worst, his addiction often made him see nothing but the impossibly nice side of things... It was only when he saw rock-bottom rushing in to kiss him that he decided to change. In doing so he never quite left the game per se. He stuck around Baltimore, especially the projects, but always trying to drag fellow addicts away from their ghosts. Along the way he met Bubbles, arguably the heart of the entire show, and a character about whom I already wrote something down. The scene I wrote about, however, was quite late into the show, nearly the final the episode, whereas for this one I likewise thought of a great moment between Walon and Bubbles, but one that happens early on, when the two men talk forgiveness and Walon imparts some wisdom by saying,

Look, forgiveness from other folks is good, but it ain't nothing but words coming at you from outside. You wanna kick this sh*t you gotta forgive your own self... Love yourself some, brother, and then drag your sorry ass to some meetings... What the f*ck you wanna hear? That you're strong enough to do this by yourself? Getting clean is the easy part. Now comes life.

I suppose some people might call this a tired old cliché, but it does ring true, or at least it is held to be true by Walon, that an addict cannot truly let go of his addiction unless he learns to forgive and to love himself. Otherwise all the nasty business that comes with addiction will be seen by the addict as due punishment for his past, and present, crimes. Whenever he feels good he might think, hey, it's not so bad, I can enjoy it a little bit, I'm doing just fine! But whenever he feels bad he might think, gee, I guess there's no point, I know I'll feel bad on the comedown, but I'm such a bad person that I deserve to feel bad, so I might as well... In that sense, though being forgiven by his loved ones is important, the addict has to forgive himself in order to truly let go of the past, and he has to truly love himself so that he can realize he's far too valuable to destroy. Because at the end of the day no one learns to avoid bad things if they don't have the belief that they are far too good for any of that nonsense. I suppose in that way, for lack of a better word, the body is a temple, and we ought to treat it accordingly, with the same kindness and deference. If you disagree and if you treat your body unkindly, then it would seem that somewheres deep down you are punishing yourself, that you think you deserve whatever headaches and nausea, and loneliness and misery, you will inevitably get from your addiction.

But do you really deserve it? It's hard to say... The thing with judging and guilt is that oftentimes the people who should feel guilty don't feel guilty at all, whereas some of the people who should forgive themselves seldom do. Likewise the people who should face judgment for their crimes often forgive themselves right quick so that you don't even notice it, whereas people who have already been forgiven by others never find it in their hearts to forgive themselves... Bubbles is definitely one of those latter kinds of people. In many ways his struggle with addiction hinges on his own belief that he deserves it all. Being a bad husband, a bad father, a bad brother, a bad uncle, a bad friend, a bad everything, it all made him at some point become so distant that he felt like the needle was his wife, and daughter, and sister, and niece, and friend, and everything. Because that's another thing with forgiveness – if you don't forgive someone who hurt you, you might just be leaving them no choice but to carry on further into the path of sin.

Here I might as well drop the crime talk and bring in the sin, because it's hard to deny some christian undertones to Walon's words. I myself don't quite know where I stand on most things, christianity included, but I don't think it's inconceivable to understand this situation through the lens of scripture. This particular bit of wisdom from the show hinges on this particular addict being a sinner, no doubt, but one who should still love and forgive himself. Only then can he carry on with the rest of his life. Because that's another thing about forgiveness that people don't often understand, namely that a sinner forgiving himself isn't, or it shouldn't be, the end of the story... It's actually the very beginning. Walon says so as much. Leaving the needle isn't the hard part for Bubbles, anyone can do that, at least for however long it lasts, I suppose. The difficult part is to spend the rest of your life fighting off the urge. And how can you fight it off when you have a voice deep in your head telling you you're not worth it, telling you in great detail all the bad things you've done, and that the only place you can always return to is the needle itself?

It's possible you can't, which brings us to the famous parable of the prodigal son. That's what Bubbles is, or maybe the prodigal brother or uncle, but it makes little difference. The parable is universal in that should you deny a sinner's true and honest search for forgiveness you'd only be condemning him to more sin, the wages of which are death. In fact, the feeling that people would never love or forgive us is tremendously heightened by the Devil himself, who of course, I'd say, can be very easily turned into a metaphor in the form of the omnipresent needle. Because Bubbles' sister might hate him, distrust him, she might even turn him down with extreme prejudice, and at that point Bubs might as well return to the needle, who has never let him down, no, not once... or at least that's how it would seem on that day... Then again you might say Bubbles and the prodigal son do deserve rejection. They've made their decisions, so now they should reap the due compensation, clean and simple. And I guess that would be true, there's a very strong sense in which justice is deserved. But then again there ought to be a place for mercy too, no? And the point of the parable, I think, is that the sinner would be truly repentant, which in turn, more than just a feeling, is a state of grace that is so hard to achieve that we might could indeed doubt it sometimes.

Luckily for Bubbles his sister did eventually forgive him, and so he forgave himself. Would that then be fair? That he is forgiven for sins or crimes or just plain old evil deeds that most people don't even attempt? That he gets to come back from a dark place most people don't even venture out into? That he gets to be a bad man only for us to magically forget all about it and that's it? I myself can see something real behind them words, I can see it only too well, but then again forgiveness, if it is to be given, it has to be given over grave sins. If you only forgive your brother because he ate the last cookie then, well, that's nice of you, I suppose. But if you forgive someone for more serious things you might as well be saving a life. And religion or not, I don't imagine forgiveness is this magical whiteout that solves everything like in those badly written stories with rushed endings. Forgiving isn't so much as erasing but still I'm not so sure... I'd say forgiveness would be more like burying the past, and still remembering it, maybe forever, but no longer crying at the grave.

Now I ain't ever been in Bubbles' or Walon's situation per se, but I have met a few people like them, or at least I stopped a while to talk to them in the street or on a park bench, and I think there's something universal about the idea of addiction, and something even more universal about the idea of forgiveness. In that sense the two go hand-in-hand because your addiction, whatever it might be, is likely to send you down a spiral things that will cause you to one day search forgiveness. And that day ought to be, not the end of any sinner's story, as it is so easy to cynically believe, but in fact the very beginning. For Bubs, a fictional and yet very real character, things turned out okay, and he carried on towards what anyone could hope is a great life. And for Walon, the character who made me think about all this stuff, I figure I might as well let him have the final word, when in his introduction scene he imparted, not only wisdom but immediate forgiveness too, by saying,

Now I know I got one more high left in me, but I doubt very seriously if I have one more recovery. So if there's anybody out there that sees that bottom comin' up at them, I'm here to talk sense... I don't care who you are, what you done, or who you done it to. If you're here, so am I.

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