Even while Michael K. Williams was being celebrated for his breakout role as Omar Little in “The Wire,” the actor was still getting “high on crack and cocaine” — to the point that it cost him his home.
“Scenes from My Life,” the posthumous memoir from the star — who died of an overdose of fentanyl, cocaine and heroin on Sept. 6, 2021 — delves into the addiction which ultimately took his life at the age of 54.
During the second season of “The Wire,” which aired on HBO from 2002 to 2008, Williams was abusing drugs on days he wasn’t shooting the show in Baltimore.
Williams’ memoir, “Scenes from My Life, is out Aug. 23.“I rolled like that pretty much all year, until I was completely broke,” he wrote. “When Season 2 wrapped, I felt the thud of coming back down to Earth. I could no longer afford the rent on that beautiful Baltimore apartment. Putting all my things in storage, I moved back to New York, to my empty [Flatbush Gardens, Brooklyn] apartment, which had nothing but a mattress on the floor and a milk crate to eat on. When the rent came due again, I had nothing left so I got evicted. I had nowhere to live and my mother was trying to get me to go to rehab, but I was not having it.”
In the book, out Aug. 23, Williams also recalled his dysfunctional childhood, including an absent father and sexual molestation.
“By the time I entered high school, I already felt like damaged goods,” he wrote. “Injured by my father’s absence, roughed up by my mother’s hard love, and too meek to stand up for myself, I was a ripe target. After two men in positions of authority—one from school and one from church— molested me, I fell into an empty, dark state. It was like a hole I couldn’t dig myself out of.”
From there, he eventually turned to drugs to numb the pain.
Williams wrote that “once crack cocaine came into my life, it just moved the f–k in. Everything else took a backseat.
“At first it felt like this salvation like I had filled a hole in me that I didn’t think could be filled. None of that was true — I was really putting Band-Aids on gunshot wounds — but I bought into the lie because I needed to,” Williams wrote. “The lie was so much more comfortable. You feel like the drug is brightening or enhancing your life. But then it becomes your life.”
Williams wrote that he lost his Baltimore apartment because he spent so much on drugs.
The actor won fame for his role in “The Wire,” playing Omar Little. Five-time Emmy winner Williams — who wrote about being too high to talk to then Presidential hopeful Barak Obama during a 2008 campaign stop — also confessed that he was never a recreational drug user.
“I am an addict, and an addict is always teetering on that edge, one small step away from falling back in…. Every addict, every alcoholic has a self-loathing; we bathe ourselves in that. It’s the way for the addiction to keep us on the ropes, keep us connected to the darkness.”
