Books |
Lush Life
Richard Price
By
Published: Mar 04, 2009
Category:
Fiction
So, it’s 4 AM when Eric Cash gets held up at gunpoint. Pitch black. No headlights illuminating the street. Not shadows, even. A shot is fired. Eric’s two buddies drop to the sidewalk. He dashes into the nearest apartment building. The muggers run fast into the darkness. And, on the sidewalk, Eric’s friend lies there, never to get up.
What could anyone possibly remember from this seconds-long nightmare?
“The shooter. What kind of hair did he have? Straight, shaved, kinky?”
“How about facial hair? Close your eyes and see it again.”
“How about clothes?”
“Both had hoodies? What color?”
“All right, so you didn’t see much because it was dark. But you couldn’t shut down your hearing, right? So…when he spoke, what kind of accent did you hear, Nuyorican, black, foreign…”
These are the questions the cops ask Eric when they catch up with him. The plot of Lush Life turns on the answers. Not just his answers, but also those of the others who are drawn into this crime maelstrom as the Lower East Side police try to figure out who pulled the trigger.
They are all over this incident in minutes; canvassing the neighborhood; questioning wits, aka witnesses, who happened to be there, the Asian and Dominican tenants upstairs in the apartment building, and the Yemeni guy who works the 24-hour mini mart at street level. They all give compelling but different answers.
Richard Price doesn’t like to be pigeonholed in the crime section of bookstores. “I don’t want to be genre-ized,” he said in an interview. So just let’s call this masterful book a story about the intersection of cops with the high and low life on the Lower East Side. A combination of crime fighting and intelligence-gathering.
Price cuts his characters out of multi-faceted cloth. They are deeply resonant human beings who carry emotions on their sleeves and flaws in their actions:
— Eric, 35, the guy left holding the bag after the mugging, is basically decent but has fallen through the cracks of his own dreams and mopes through empty days as a restaurant manager.
— Tristan and Little Dap are two standouts among the assorted ne’er-do-wells who poison the landscape, at once pitiful and despicable, hopeless and touching.
— Matty and Yolanda are detectives on the case. Melded together like yin and yang, they are cops who care.
Matty is under pressure from his superior to make an arrest. “You got a hell of a lot of explaining to do,” his boss yells. “How come you didn’t tell us how weak this case was?”
“How many times did you hear me say, ‘I have some real problem with him being the perp on this?’ Matty retorts. “And all I ever heard back from you and everybody else was wrap him, pull the plug…”
Yolanda grew up in the projects and offers a rare tenderness to the urchins she targets with “liquid eyes that seemed perpetually on the verge of tears and a voice like a hug.” Softer in tongue than Matty but sharp as a whip, he always defers to her on the street.
Price is a New Yorker and he gets all the moves right. The synaptic intonations. The commotion on the streets. The cauldron of immigrants who live there and the rich white kids who come down to the nightclubs. The short scenes crackle.
“My affection and my focus have always been working-class, welfare-class life in urban trenches,” Price says.
And that’s what “Lush Life” — Price took the title from the melancholy jazz song — is all about.
Twenty-five years ago Price was a cocaine addict who “discovered what you see of the world when you have a police escort. I just became obsessed with seeing human behavior in extremis.” Of course that’s what he’d want to write about.
After recovery, Price made connections with police and began hanging with them, riding around at night and tagging along as they conducted stakeouts. He loved those times. “The way life unfolds, it’s very random and chaotic,” he says.
Price was a writer for HBO’s mini-series The Wire and is the author of seven novels. Clockers, published in 2001, is about the drug trade in Jersey City and was made into a film by Spike Lee in 1995. It’s the rare book that won praise from conservatives for its portrayal of the cops and from liberals for its empathy with the addicts.
You can’t do better than this fast-paced, literary, New York City crime novel. If you pack it in your hand luggage on a plane trip across country, the hours will fly by. But if you read it on the subway, be careful — you’re likely to miss your stop.
— Guest Butler Audrey Hoffer is a publicist and freelance writer in Washington, DC.
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To buy the Audio CD of “Lush Life” from Amazon.com, click here.
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