Charley Scalies could have been one of my father’s cousins, back when Highlandtown was largely Italian and Polish and every rowhouse had at least one person who worked at Bethlehem Steel. If not Esskay or the Crown, Cork & Seal bottle cap factory.
He wasn’t, having grown up above his father’s pool room in South Philadelphia. But he was family nonetheless, a cherished friend—”good people,” as my mom would say. He ate pizza with me and my dad at Matthew’s and—on strict orders from his family to watch his weight—suffered through a salad one afternoon at Michael’s Steak and Lobster near Dundalk.
“It was like we grew up together,” said Willie Matricciani, a high school friend who was raised next to the St. Leo’s rectory in Little Italy and dined with us at Michael’s. “We hit it off right away.”
As did I. Charley—who played the stevedore Horseface Pakusa on Season Two of “The Wire”—died of Alzheimer’s on May 1 at a nursing home in the Philadelphia suburbs. He was 84.
We were paisans from the day I sat next to him at lunch on the first day of filming in 2002.
Soon I was writing lines for Charley and Chris Bauer, who played Frank Sobotka, his passionately delusional waterfront union boss; the name Sobotka found on a tombstone in a cemetery off of German Hill Road. Most of Horseface’s scenes were with Sobotka.
“Charley is in my top three favorite screen partners ever,” said Bauer, whose career extends from the current Marvel feature “Thunderbolts” back to Woody Allen’s “Sweet and Lowdown” in 1999 and before.
“He had me in every category: life experience, wisdom, kindness, humor. His generosity as an actor and man legitimized my status as a character. Who plays a character called Horseface and laughs harder about it than anyone?”
Charley did. When I last wrote about him in 2019—nearly two decades after “The Wire” debuted—he said, “Horseface lives inside of me. I invite him out to play as needed.”
By then our friendship had so transcended Hollywood (we were both outsiders) that he and his wife of 62 years—”Miss Ang,” the former Angeline Cardamone— spent a day showing my son around Philadelphia when he moved there after college.
That’s a mensch, an honorific Charley bestowed upon Matricciani that Willie had never heard despite growing up side-by-side with the old Lombard Street shtetl in the 1960s.
Just before Christmas 2013, Willie and about a dozen other friends appeared in a script Charley wrote called “It Takes Balls,” a rendering of his pool hall childhood and the characters that passed through.
Some of these mugs were not good people and Charley—who graduated from St. Joseph’s University and worked as an industrial management consultant—chose a higher road. A few of his relatives did not and it pained him.
Charley’s story was more of a dramatic reading than a production and took place at the Zappa Branch of the Pratt Library at Eastern and Conkling. Local writer/photographer Tony Hayes played a part and interviewed him a few days before the performance.
“I decided to write this story around my father’s pool room,” said Scalies, “and all of these strange, funny people. I was gonna write the character of my father as the hero, but I realized my mother [Tressa in the play] was my hero.
“She’s the one who did everything for us but never said a word about it,” he said. “She just did it.”
She pretty much had to as Charlie’s namesake father—”Chappie”—drove trucks, moved furniture, worked at a grocery and a luncheonette and owned a seafood joint. He also hosted high stakes card games in the basement of the pool room which, from time-to-time, landed him in the local calaboose.
Chappie’s favorite line? “When I graduated from the second grade I was so nervous I couldn’t shave.”
Charley’s quote about his mother (born Theresa Iacono) being the backbone of the family reminded me of some of the tough guys in old East Baltimore. You still see a few today, unshaven, middle-aged men of Mediterranean descent gambling on backgammon in Eastern Avenue coffee houses or playing bocce on Stiles Street. Little generals out in the world, an enlisted man at home.
Not Charley, “a humble, confident man who needed nothing he didn’t already get from God and his family,” said Bauer. “I learned much from him as an actor, but even more as a father and husband.”
Scalies appeared in all 12 episodes of the second season of The Wire. He told barroom tales about shoveling grain with wooden shovels in days gone by (sparks from metal against the hull of a ship filled with grain goes ka-boom), egged on goofy Ziggy Sobotka to fight a man three times his size and told a mortally injured coworker not to worry because “you’re still on the clock.”
But Horse’s best turn may have been his theft of a police surveillance van off the station house lot, slick enough to make a working man proud.
The pride of police Major Stan Valchek (Al Brown, 1939-2023), the van was packed into a shipping container and sent around the world to piss Valchek off. Longshoremen as far away as Australia would take photos of the van and mail them to Valchek to further antagonize the arrogant cop.
“That’s my favorite scene,” said Wire fan Stanley Bridges of Detroit, another tough town that could stand in for Baltimore. “Hollywood could never create a character as extraordinary as Horseface. Once you’ve seen him, you know that’s some real life shit.”
Doug Olear played FBI agent Terry Fitzhugh. Though he didn’t have any direct scenes with Scalies he paid close attention to his work.
“He was one of those guys that actors love to study because he was so real, someone I thought could never tell a lie,” said Olear. “He exuded something genuine.”
The best remembered Wire characters, said Olear, tend to be Wendell Pierce (Bunk), Dominic West (McNulty) and Idris Elba, who played Stringer Bell. But “it was guys like Charley who made it Dickensian.”
As such, he could easily have played Joe Gargery, the kindhearted and loyal blacksmith in Great Expectations, a man at peace with his physical strength as well as tenderness.
The last time I was with Charley was at a diner outside of Philly a little more than a year ago. A journalist from England had come to the States to write about The Wire and I arranged a lunch for us. Even though he was still driving, Charley was not the same, not at all.
It recalled a note I’d gotten from him a few years earlier about the passing of a guy he’d known since nursery school.
“Three weeks ago we buried my oldest and dearest friend,” wrote Charley. “He was a victim of the thief that takes your memories, your mind and then everything else that makes you you.”
Rafael Alvarez wrote for the first three seasons of The Wire. He is currently a correspondent aboard the Maersk Kinloss cargo ship approaching Busan, South Korea. Alvarez can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com
