I used to work in publishing and met Richard Price shortly after Clockers was released. It was obvious that Dempsy was a foil for JC. I was curious about a certain hotel he wrote about in the book -- the details are sketchy since I read it about 15 years ago, but he describes a hotel in JC frequented by drug users and prostitutes. Anyway, he told me the name of the place it was based on, some fleabag along 1/9 near the Lincoln Tunnel. I forget the name, something like the Royal Motel or something similar...

Quote:

" . . . a fictional city he calls Dempsy, loosely based on Jersey City." is, of course, an homage to the famous boxing match held here.

Sleepy-Eyed Writer, Wandering Byzantium

The New York Times
By CHARLES McGRATH
Published: March 2, 2008

You might not know it to look at him, but the novelist Richard Price has over the years picked up what one of his characters might call some cheddar. He has a house in Gramercy Park and a summer place out on the Island; his work has earned him an Edgar award for television writing, an Academy Award nomination and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. But Mr. Price, who grew up in the Parkside Projects, has shed neither his Bronx accent nor any of his street-smarts.

He is still wary, even a little jumpy at times. Walking around the Lower East Side, where his new novel, ?Lush Life,? is set, he could easily be mistaken for one of the locals. Pale, thin, high-strung, with the baggy eyes of someone who doesn?t get enough sleep, he could even be a guy looking to score a little coke ? something Mr. Price admits to doing with regularity back in the ?80s. He walks quickly, jokes a lot without smiling much, and, as readers of his books know, has a pitch-perfect mastery of urban speech in all its varieties. He may be the only middle-aged white man in America who can say ?True dat? without sounding ridiculous.

Now 58, Mr. Price published his first book, ?The Wanderers,? set in the blue-collar Bronx of his childhood, when he was just 24 and barely out of Cornell ? from which he emerged, he has said, even streetier and more Bronx-sounding than when he began ? and the M.F.A. program at Columbia, where his models were Hubert Selby and Lenny Bruce.

He has published steadily every since, eventually turning from more or less autobiographical work to books like ?Clockers? and ?Freedomland,? big, Dickensian novels about the drug trade and life in the projects. He has also written the screenplays for ?Clockers,? ?The Color of Money? (for which he received the Oscar nomination), ?Sea of Love? and ?Mad Dog and Glory,? among other movies, and recently he has written some episodes for the HBO series ?The Wire,? which won him the Edgar. He?s one of a handful of contemporary novelists to work for Hollywood and emerge more or less unscathed.

Like ?Clockers? and ?Freedomland,? ?Lush Life? is at its core a thriller or a mystery story ? about a holdup ending in a murder. ?I tend to like crime for a backbone,? Mr. Price said recently. ?An investigation will take you through a landscape.? The landscape in this case ? the subject of the book, really ? is the Lower East Side, which Mr. Price depicts as a neighborhood of colliding populations: the few remaining Jewish old-timers; the people from the projects; the La Boh?mers, as he calls them, the trust-fund couples with their M.F.A.?s and videocams; the Chinese immigrants, many of them illegal, who sleep, stacked on shelves, in some of the old tenements.

The book?s hero ? if you can call him that ? is a 35-year-old named Eric Cash, a restaurant manager with a drug conviction who has done a little acting, published a short story in a defunct literary magazine and is now working ? or rather, not working ? on his screenplay. He?s modeled partly on himself, Mr. Price said. ?He?s me if what has been hadn?t been. I?ve always been interested in when the hyphen disappears ? you know, actor-waiter, cabdriver-writer ? and you have to settle for who you are.? Every now and then you sense that Mr. Price may still feel a little hyphenated himself, with one foot in the old Lower East Side, where he no longer strictly belongs, and one foot in the present, whose permanence he distrusts a little.

About the Lower East Side today, Mr. Price said, ?This place is like Byzantium. It?s tomorrow, yesterday ? anyplace but today.? He added that he sometimes thinks of the neighborhood as a very busy ghost town, where many of the ghosts milling around still speak Yiddish.

Mr. Price?s last three novels have all been set in a fictional city he calls Dempsy, loosely based on Jersey City. ?The whole idea of Dempsy was I didn?t want to feel journalistically beholden to a real place,? he said. ?It was the other place, the one next to wherever you are. But to fictionalize the Lower East Side would defeat the whole purpose. What drew me was the place itself.?

He added that he originally thought of writing a historical novel, one that would dramatize the experience of the immigrant Jews who thronged the Lower East Side a hundred years ago. ?But then I realized that?s probably the most well-documented immigrant movement in history,? he said. ?A guy comes over here, and his first job is working in a sweatshop. His second job is writing a novel about a guy working in a sweatshop. How am I going to do this better than Henry Roth did??

History was nevertheless on Mr. Price?s mind one morning in late fall when he walked around the neighborhood, revisiting some of the places that inspired his novel. His grandparents got their start in the Lower East Side, he explained, and while Mr. Price was growing up his father worked here as a window dresser for the many small clothing shops that used to be an important part of the neighborhood economy.

?In a way the whole place has come full-circle in five generations,? Mr. Price said. ?A hundred years ago there were Jews trying to claw their way out of here, and now the descendants of those people are paying $2,000 a month to live in what used to be their tenements.? He wrote the novel partly with his two daughters in mind, he added. ?They?re city kids ? they grew up here, and it?s not as if they weren?t aware of my family?s history. But I?m not sure they put that Lower East Side together with this cool place to go to clubs, with cool stores to shop in.?

First stop on the tour was Schiller?s Liquor Bar, the model for Caf? Berkmann, the restaurant that Eric Cash manages in the novel. Mr. Price took great pleasure in pointing out that though the place looks like a remodeled pharmacy from the ?20s or ?30s, everything from the pressed-tin ceiling to the chicken-wire windows to the de-silvered mirrors was discovered by the owners in old warehouses and installed to look as if it had been there forever. ?It?s all a stage set,? he said, ?and now it?s, like, venerable.? He was even more pleased to discover another instance of art imitating life in a parking lot just across the street: a film crew from ?Law & Order? setting up a crime scene that included two corpses.

Mr. Price then zigzagged all over the neighborhood, pointing out landmarks: the many desanctified synagogues, some of them turned into homes; the double-decker storefronts, one above street level, one below; the ?hanging gardens? of fire escapes, as he called them, on former tenement blocks; the old Jewish red-light district on Allen Street; the Jade Fountain liquor store, on Delancey, whose sign reads, ?As Old as Hills.?

On Rivington, across the street from Babeland, the sex-toy emporium, he paused in front of a vacant lot that was once the site of a famous synagogue, the First Roumanian-American Congregation. A year or so ago the roof collapsed, Mr. Price explained, and seemingly overnight the building was torn down, leaving only the rear wall and its stained-glass Star of David. ?The candlesticks were standing up in the rubble,? he said, ?and the whole place looked like an experimental stage set ? like Shakespeare in the Park.?

Everywhere he went Mr. Price was alert to signs of change and yuppification, to the spread of wine bars and fashion boutiques. He noted the invisible boundary on Clinton Street, for example, marking the up-and-coming blocks where the liquor stores no longer sell Thunderbird, and where, imitating a ma?tre d?, he said: ?Sorry, you can?t get in this restaurant ? you didn?t make a reservation three weeks ago.? Pointing to a high-rise apartment tower at the east end of Delancey Street, where apartments that used to be owned only by union members now sell on the open market, Mr. Price said, ?In the winter you can actually see Christmas decorations on some of the terraces now. It?s like a demographic light board. You total up the Christmas lights and get a WASP head count.?

On Orchard Street, where outdoor vendors were selling discount pants and shirts and suspiciously cheap leather jackets, much as they would have 40 or 50 years ago, he said: ?This is like those potato fields out in the Hamptons that the farmers sell for a million dollars. In a couple of years it will all be gone. These guys are already assembled at the funeral home, only they don?t know it.?

Mr. Price?s previous novel, ?Samaritan,? about a Hollywood television writer who returns home to teach in a city school ? something that Mr. Price himself has done ? came out in 2003. ?Lush Life? took so long to finish, he said, in part because he spent so much time researching it ? talking to people, riding around with the neighborhood police and sometimes just walking around.

?I always like to hang out,? he said, ?because, one, it?s a way of avoiding really writing; and, two, sometimes God is a crackerjack novelist and you can plagiarize the hell out of him.? He particularly liked hanging out with cops, he said, ?because I?m so not a cop myself. Being with them gets me out of my own self-consciousness.? ?Lush Life? begins with an undercover team Mr. Price calls the Quality of Life Task Force, who troll the late-night traffic coming off the Williamsburg Bridge, looking for cars that drive slowly and properly signal for a lane change. These automatically get stopped on the principle that anyone so law-abiding must be up to no good.

Another reason the book took so long is that Mr. Price felt obligated to the neighborhood ? he wanted to get it right, all the chaos, all the texture ? and wound up writing far too much. ?I threw out 300 pages,? he said. ?Not voluntarily.?

When he finally, reluctantly, showed the manuscript to his editor, he explained, it felt less like a submission than an intervention. ?There was just so much here,? he said, ?and I fell in love with everything. I had two novels. It was as if my novel had had a novel. Congratulations, you?ve just had a nine-and-a-half-pound novel!? He shook his head and added, ?You never really learn how to write a book, because every one is different.?

Mr. Price was in no hurry to get home, it turned out, because he was avoiding work on his new project, an adaptation of Tom Rob Smith?s ?Child 44,? a thriller set in Stalinist Russia, for the film director Ridley Scott. ?The older you get, the less time you want to spend doing stuff for money,? he said, and he mentioned the novelist Richard Yates, who once told him, ?I don?t have time left for screenplays.?

Mr. Price said: ?That?s how I feel now. I have less patience for writing this thing that may never happen.? But he added: ?The most valuable thing I can buy with money now is time, and at the speed with which I write I have to alternate books with screenplays. I have to buy my time. And then, whichever thing I?m doing, I always wish I was doing the other.?

About working for Hollywood, he said: ?I know now to take everything in stride. The first thing you have to learn is that an artist doesn?t have much choice when he?s a hired pen. The second thing is that it?s the kiss of death when you hand in a script and they say, ?What a great read!? That means: ?See you. Don?t let the door hit you on the way out.? ?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/boo ... gewanted=1&_r=1&ref=books