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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."