Clockers by Richard Price

First published: 1992

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: The 1990’s

Locale: New Jersey

Principal Characters:

• Strike (Ronald Dunham), a street-wise drug dealer
• Rodney Little, Strike’s boss
• Victor Dunham, Strike’s brother
• Rocco Klein, a homicide detective
• Erroll Barnes, one of Rodney’s lieutenants
• Darryl Adams, another of Rodney’s lieutenants
• Tyrone Jeeter, Strike’s twelve-year-old protégé

The Novel

Hung loosely onto a mystery plot, Clockers immerses the reader in the drug culture of inner-city housing projects, where wealth and death are equally certain and swift. In the low-income housing projects of Dempsy, located between Newark and Jersey City, drugs, crime, and despair never sleep. Violent deaths are commonplace and excite little interest. The plainclothes police teams, dubbed “the Fury” for the dilapidated Plymouth Furys they drive, are as ubiquitous and predictable as AIDS. They follow a daily schedule of harassment, dispiritedly roughing up the “clockers” (twenty-four-hour drug dealers) and carting away the bodies that litter the streets.

Life offers two choices to residents of “the tiger pits.” The first is honest hard work, a dead-end road to poverty from Strike’s point of view. The second is big money with little effort, dealing crack cocaine in parks, playgrounds, and bars. For Strike, the choice is obvious. Working as Rodney’s lieutenant, he supervises a team of clockers from his spot on a park bench. While they retail ten-dollar bottles hidden in pockets and socks, Strike swigs vanilla soda to soothe his bleeding ulcer. Strike follows the rules: Do not flaunt your wealth, do not get greedy, and do not sample the merchandise.

A rigid hierarchy governs the drug trade, and honesty among thieves is law. Rodney runs the neighborhood crack concession from his candy store. Rodney says he suspects Darryl Adams, another of his lieutenants who deals out of a fast-food restaurant, of buying from a second supplier who returns a higher commission. He implies that Strike must kill Darryl in order to prove his loyalty and move up in the operation. Terrified, Strike tells his brother, Victor, of what he believes to be an order to kill. Victor, a model citizen in this less than model community, has never been in trouble with the law, but he hints that “a friend” might handle things for Strike.

An unknown gunman slays Darryl outside a diner. Victor confesses to the crime. Strike thinks that Buddha Hat, the brutal enforcer of drug lord Champ, must have committed the crime. He plots to use his drug money to effect Victor’s release.

White homicide detective Rocco Klein believes that Victor is lying to protect Strike. Stuck with a dead-end job, a rocky marriage, and a drinking habit, Rocco dreams of seeing his life made into a film, but the futility of his existence drags him down, turning him increasingly bitter, brutal, and despondent. Obsessed with forcing a confession from Strike, he will go to any lengths to forge a single victory from a lifetime of defeats.

Rodney closes the ranks to defend his power base, and Erroll—dying of AIDS and with nothing to lose—is his willing agent. The boy Tyrone, dreaming of emulating Strike and growing wealthy, sets out to protect his hero.

In a typical detective story, Klein would solve the mystery, and Strike’s situation would be resolved, for better or worse. In Price’s uncompromising plunge into the netherworld of drugs and desperation, however, things do not turn out so neatly. Both Klein and the reader walk away with more questions than answers. Clockers is memorable not so much for its plot as for its bold depiction of the poverty and pain that trap and mold the people of Dempsy.

The Characters

Price peoples the Dempsy scene with characters that come off as chillingly complex and authentic. Stick-thin, high-strung, and intelligent, Strike operates within a code of conscience and honor. He never considers himself a criminal, merely a man doing a job that gives him some chance for a future. In neighborhoods outside his own, Strike feels threatened and outraged. Despite the gun he carries, the streets are not safe for him. He wishes the “knockos” (narcotics cops) would “do something about it.” Strike’s sometime girlfriend, a decade older than he, describes him as he wishes to be seen: “clean, neat, not loud with gold . . . alert, all serious and composed.” His outer composure, however, belies an inner turmoil. He finds the sight of drug use repugnant and turns away from it in disgust while chastising his clockers for open selling that could lead to arrest and loss of profits. Strike seeks the peace and security he knows will be forever denied him.

Rodney looms large—from some angles, he seems a god in heaven; from others, a devil in hell. He controls Strike and his other lieutenants with alternating compassionate nurturing and threats of violence, meted out in equal measure. Sexually promiscuous, Rodney nevertheless demands unfailing loyalty from his women, and he usually gets it. Worshipped and feared, Rodney wields the manipulative power of praise and the brute force of menace. He sits as king of the clockers. He will retain his throne at any cost.

Rocco Klein, the ruddy, heavy-set detective, cannot distinguish himself from his job; he has been at it too long. He has spent his life tracking, booking, and forgetting an “endless parade of shit-skinned losers.” He is as gray as his territory, scarcely differentiating himself from what he judges “dozens of sad-sack lives reduced to shopping bags reeking of b.o. and poverty.” Nevertheless, the restless spirit inside him will not let him give up. He wishes for something with “bigness in it, something that would halve his years.” Without it, he settles for a drink.

Strike’s brother Victor is the exception that proves the rule in Dempsy. Hard-working, soft-spoken, well respected by employers and family, he is nevertheless a tortured man. Although devoted to his wife and children, he spends too many hours alone in a bar. Is he capable of murder? Would he kill to advance Strike’s career or to soothe some inner turmoil of his own? Is his confession fact or foil? Probing Victor’s actions and motives sets Strike and Rocco in conflict with each other and with the unwritten laws of the streets.

Critical Context

Richard Price, famous for his in-depth, real-life research, spent two years riding with police and living among clockers and their clients. He filled a stack of notebooks with sights, sounds, and impressions before writing Clockers, and his first draft exceeded a thousand pages. He needed another eighteen months to achieve the remarkable precision of the finished work. Perhaps only the clockers themselves could judge the accuracy of Price’s work, but to outsiders, its tone rings true.

Price is a master of language, and Clockers is worth study for no other reason than to see how he captures the essence of an alien world. He writes with the lexicon of the projects. “Pipeheads” are crack smokers; drug runners are “mules.” “Redi Rocks” is crack ready to smoke; “stepping on it” is the process of diluting crack with sugar, laxative, or rat poison. His descriptions, while neither lengthy nor labored, reveal his themes. For example, an indoor homicide smells, to Rocco, like “watered-down Old Spice or a sweating fat lady—not altogether unpleasant, kind of intimate, the smell of a whole life opened up to him with all its embarrassments and little drawers.” The sounds of the police station’s receiving unit are “disembodied shouts and barks that ricocheted off the walls like bullets fired inside a steel drum.”

Price is a genius of dialogue. Each character speaks with a unique and consistent voice. Interactions are sharp, focused, lean, and rich. Pace and tension ebb and wane with an energy few writers can control. Price’s description and dialect bring the street drug trade to life. Acting more as a reporter than a fiction writer, Price takes his readers into the basements and back alleys of the urban wilderness.

Bibliography

Booklist. LXXXVIII, April 1, 1992, p. 1411.

Brezinski, Steve. Reviews of Clockers, by Richard Price. Antioch Review 50, no. 4 (Fall, 1992): 769. Brezinski states that Clockers should be required reading for politicians who think they have solutions for “urban unrest.”

Chicago Tribune. May 17, 1992, XIV, p. 5.

Howard, Gerald. “The Bonfire This Time.” Nation 254, no. 21 (June 1, 1992): 755-757. Howard asserts that Clockers will emerge as a modern classic, proving that fiction can still serve as “a vital agency of social witness and documentation.”

Linville, James. “The Art of Fiction CXLIV: Richard Price.” The Paris Review 38, no. 138 (Spring, 1996): 132. Details how Clockers was written and explores the cocaine addiction that plagued Price before he wrote it.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. June 14, 1992, p. 3.

The New York Review of Books. XXXIX, July 16, 1992, p. 23.

The New York Times Book Review. XCVII, June 21, 1992, p. 10.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXIX, March 9, 1992, p. 47.

Schwartz, Gil. “Moby Book: Big Reading for the Beach.” Fortune 126, no. 4 (August 24, 1992): 148-151. Judges Clockers an “intricate moral passion play . . . moving, unsentimental . . . wholly successful.”

Skow, John. “An American Tragedy.” Time 139, no. 23 (June 8, 1992): 89. Skow argues that Price has turned “no-exit reality into a superb reportorial novel.”

The Times Literary Supplement. June 26, 1992, p. 21.

The Wall Street Journal. July 3, 1992, p. A5.

The Washington Post Book World. XXII, May 24, 1992, p. 2.