Bringing It All Back Home

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.