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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."