David Simon, the creator of The Wire and Treme, may now be the TV laureate of urban dysfunction, but he grew up in a comfortable Washington, D.C., suburb, where the most risqué thing he did as an adolescent was “trying to steal my dad’s Playboy magazine.”

The summer after high school, he went to work at an uncle’s electronics warehouse in New York. It was 1978, and “the city was gloriously out of control and sinister,” says Simon. “Always a little faster than I was.” He remembers going to the East Village, to Tompkins Square Park, to buy weed, “and you’d get oregano, but you’d say, ‘I’m still alive, so I’ll just smoke oregano.’ For somebody brought up in the suburb with