Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/071392/0713520.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 13KB | 255 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 74

Bringing It All Back Home


Author and screenwriter Richard Price returned to his roots
to write Clockers, an unblinking tale of black teenage cocaine
dealers and the white cops who pursue them

By JOHN GREENWALD


    It was near midnight, and Richard Price was stranded,
notebook in hand, in the lobby of a bleak housing project with
a surly crowd massing outside. Price had followed a cop who was
chasing a drug dealer into the building, only to have them
vanish up one of three stairways before he could see where they
went. When an elderly woman appeared, Price desperately bluffed
being a cop and demanded, "Where'd my partner go?" She could
only stammer and stare. Finally the real officer returned,
winded and empty-handed, and escorted the shaken writer safely
through the crowd.

    That was just one of the scrapes Price survived while
gathering material for his shattering novel Clockers, a 599-page
panorama of crime-and-drug-infested streets that appeared in May
to rave reviews and is now a best seller. To write it, Price
spent three years hanging out in Jersey City with cops, cocaine
dealers and seemingly everyone else in the meanest parts of
town. At a time when the Los Angeles riots have shocked the
country into a pained awareness of its troubled neighborhoods,
Clockers illuminates the underside of one city with laser-like
clarity.

    The novel focuses on Strike, the black 19-year-old boss of
a crew of teenage cocaine dealers, who suffers from a stammer
and an ulcer; and Rocco Klein, the jaded white cop who
investigates a murder to which Strike's brother Victor has
confessed. "I'm not a social-policy maker, nor a journalist or
sociologist," says Price, 42, an edgy, high-energy presence. "I
want you to read about Strike and Victor and say, `There but for
the grace of God go I. And if I were born in the projects in
1970, where would I be today?' "

    Price himself grew up in a lower-middle-class Jewish
family in the projects in the era of black leather jackets and
greaser hair. Today the kid from the Bronx is on a roll.
Houghton Mifflin paid $500,000 for Clockers, and Universal
Pictures is putting up $1.9 million for the film rights and a
screenplay Price will write. Two more Price-scripted movies, Mad
Dog and Glory and Night and the City, both starring Robert De
Niro, are set for release this year. Earlier Price credits for
The Color of Money and Sea of Love helped put him on Hollywood's
A list. "He writes character first and then builds the story
around the character," says Al Pacino, who starred in Sea of
Love. "That's very good for an actor, because he supplies the
character with so many levels."

    Mean streets have fascinated Price since his days in the
Bronx. He based his first novel, The Wanderers, a violence-laced
cult classic about teen gangs that he wrote while a graduate
student at Columbia, on the working-class kids he knew in the
projects. Price drew on similar material for Bloodbrothers,
another stunning tale of working-class Bronx brawlers. But he
was never really part of the violence. "I was a member of the
Goldberg gang -- we walked down the street doing algebra," he
says in an interview in the lower-Manhattan loft he shares with
his wife, the painter Judy Hudson, and daughters Annie, 7, and
Gen, 5. "I just basically grew up on the periphery of things,
and so by instinct I was an observer and a reviser of the
world."

    Price saw himself as more Milquetoast than macho. "I
probably wished I was tougher," he says. "Everybody wishes they
were different." He likes to quip that his family's crest was
"crossed thermometers on a field of aspirin." Far from being a
street tough, Price was small and skinny and had a partially
disabled right arm -- the result of lack of oxygen during a
breech birth.

    His tickets to teen self-esteem were his imagination and
the sense of a writer's vocation. "I always felt like I was a
complete screw-up except for the fact that I had this talent for
writing, and I held on to it for dear life." He still harbors
a bottomless yearning for praise and admiration. "It never
leaves me," Price says. "I want people to think of me as a great
writer, or at least a good writer, and that's often in
competition with true concentration." He can dazzle in person,
coming across as a witty, street-smart and high-strung talker
who tosses off one perfectly turned phrase after another in a
still thick Bronx accent.

    Price freely admits to overcompensating for his docile
self-image by taking big risks. He threw himself into the
research for Clockers with scant regard for his safety, running
with the police one night and cocaine dealers the next. Armed
only with his notebook, Price charged through a crack-house door
with cops on a drug bust, the only one not wearing a
bulletproof vest. "There were situations in which I thought I
was going to have my head handed to me," he recalls. "Your first
reaction is anger, not at the people who are about to do it to
you, but at yourself. You think, `Boy, you really set yourself
up for this, you moron, you dope. You got a wife and two kids
at home, and now you gotta be the hot-s--- guy who's going to
come in and bring back the news.' "

    Price's career seemed to have reached a dead end a decade
ago, when he became strung out on cocaine. The habit took hold
when he ran out of ideas after Ladies' Man, a novel of sexual
exploration and loneliness in Manhattan, and was struggling with
The Breaks, a coming-of-age story set in a school like his alma
mater, Cornell. Feeling written out, Price started snorting the
drug to help him finish the book. "You start using cocaine to
help you to write, then you need the writing as an excuse to do
coke." Eventually "every aspect of my life -- moral, physical,
spiritual, intellectual -- was bankrupt. It takes a very long
time for a middle-class white guy to believe that he's anything
but golden, protected, saved." But after some three years of
addiction, "it finally got through to me that I was in terrible
trouble and I was a drug addict. And I stopped."

    That journey through hell helped inspire Clockers. (The
title refers to teen dealers who sell coke around the clock.)
Once he cleaned himself up, Price taught creative writing to
recovering addicts in the Bronx and was stunned by the bleakness
of their young lives. "I couldn't survive at 32 with four books,
a reputation and money, and I almost fell down the toilet," he
says. "Here are these kids; at 15 they're disenfranchised and
falling apart. There's sex abuse, drug abuse, alcohol abuse,
every kind of nightmare at home. And these kids are doing crack
and coke. It was just too much for me to grasp."

    Those thoughts seized Price at the same time that he was
hanging out with cops in Jersey City, doing research for Sea of
Love. "The combination of getting face-to-face with these kids
and seeing the world through cops' eyes started me thinking
about race and class and survival. I just felt like I wanted to
plunge in and drink the ocean."

    Price tried to grasp all facets of this jagged and
unfamiliar world. "With subject matter like this, with regard
to race and class, I really wanted to know my stuff very
intimately. I wanted to make things up in an extremely
responsible way." He was also sensitive to the emotionally
charged issue of whether a white writer could truly portray
black ghetto dwellers. "I had a lot of anxiety about it," Price
concedes. "On the other hand, what's a novelist's job? Whaddya
mean, I can't write about somebody who's not me? Basically,
there's nothing in Strike's world that I can't identify with in
some metaphorical way."

    To make the book as realistic as possible, Price
repeatedly quizzed residents of Jersey City (the model for
Dempsy in the novel) on how they would act in situations he
planned to write about. He paid sources $100 for interviews,
gave books to people who preferred them, and helped others find
jobs. "With this way of writing I had half of Jersey City
looking over my shoulder and pointing things out, saying things
like, `Oh, man, that's stupid; don't ever do that.' Everybody
was in on the act: cops, drug dealers, families. It was an
equal-opportunity book." Among other things, he found that
detectives tuck in their ties before examining a body, and
shrewd dealers hold two-for-one happy hours to keep their
inventories lean.

    Price became deeply involved in the lives of the people he
wrote about. He invited an 11-year-old boy from the projects,
who served as the model for one character and is now in junior
high school, to spend a month with his family in their East
Hampton, N.Y., summer home. "I didn't do it to save him, because
he didn't need to be saved." Still, "with even the best kids you
don't know what's going to happen to them, because you don't
know who's going to get hold of them at that impressionable
age." On another occasion Price put up $1,000 to sponsor a "Race
for Pride" day in the projects that featured a barbecue and
track-and-field contests.

    Price got so entangled in his subject that John Sterling,
editor in chief of Houghton Mifflin, had to calm him down and
get him to start writing. "After three years of piling up
notebooks like a madman," Price says, he felt he still needed
to know more about everything, from the welfare system to Jersey
City's schools. "My editor had to call me in from the ledge. He
took me to lunch and talked very slow and kind of loud" to ask
" `What's the first sentence of the book?' I'd say, `No, no,
you don't understand, I'm not ready.' But I did have a contract
and all."

    Clockers taught Price stark lessons about the polarity
between white middle-class cops -- who "are more of a daily
presence than the mailman" in the projects -- and black
inner-city residents. He saw all the hostility between the two
groups reflected in a single unconscious glance that a tired and
sweaty cop, who had just come from a drug raid, gave a pregnant
black woman. "The cop looks at her, notes her pregnancy and just
makes a twist with his mouth like, `Oh, great, here comes
another one.' " The woman caught the glance and "looked like
someone had just punched her in the stomach. I knew exactly what
was going through her head: `Here you're arresting my kid before
he's born.' "

    Yet the cop was unaware of what had happened. If asked,
Price says, the officer would say, " `What did I do? What are
these people complaining about? I just closed this goddam crack
house in the projects.' You have that missing of understanding
all the time, and I saw it over and over again."

    Price also learned the difference between the lost boys
who dealt drugs and their peers who took honest jobs. "The kid
at McDonald's has got somebody waiting at home for him. If he
goes out and sells dope, they're either going to break his
head, or he's going to break somebody's heart." He can also see
past fast food to the Army or college or a better job. But the
dealer "probably has no one at home who gives a damn about him,
probably thinks of time as being minute to minute," and senses
that once he starts flipping burgers, "that's as good as it's
ever going to get for him."

    The harsh world of Clockers marks Price's first new novel
in nearly 10 years. He felt dried up after The Breaks and began
writing screenplays for Hollywood, which had already filmed The
Wanderers and Bloodbrothers as adapted by others. "I just said,
`I can't think of anything. Give me an idea, and I'll write it
for you.' It was like going from being a clothes designer to a
tailor."

    But Hollywood had its drawbacks. "Screenwriting's not an
art; it's a craft. You learn how to service stars and actors
and studios. It's the craft of pandering. And no matter what
you write, it always gets changed around to look like
everything else that everybody else has ever seen." At times
Price let his anger and frustration show. "I don't suffer fools
gladly," he says. "When I feel that I know what I'm doing, I
don't feel like being subjected to a lot of panicky pandering
to make the maximum number of people happy. It's upsetting."

    While Price wrestled with such misgivings, the idea for
Clockers turned him back into a novelist. "I finally found
something that after eight years I didn't want to compromise."
Like Rocco Klein, who rediscovered himself by delving into the
mystery at the heart of Clockers, Price reclaimed his calling
by writing the book. "I wanted to say, `Look, this is happening
in front of your nose, and you didn't see it. You pass these
people every day, and you don't know anything about their
lives.' " Price took the trouble to find out and returned from
his voyage of discovery with an overpowering portrait of a grim
and neglected world.