Philadelphia Weekly

Brian McManus, music editor at a two-bit rag called Philadelphia Weekly, a paper no one reads, hunkers down over the toilet, pukes again. This time, a huge heave, Mother of All Up-Chucks, last night's Indian food spraying all over the back of the porcelain. McManus flushes just as a guy he recognizes from ad sales but whose name he does not know enters, stench of curry and stomach acid moistening both their peepers as they avoid eye contact.

Back at his cube, McManus lights a cigarette. Interns stare in mock horror, fake cough. Fuck 'em. Too young to know their assholes from their elbows, much less judge. Besides, he's been trying to quit, goddamn Camel girls following him to every watering hole he frequents.

He looks over his questions again, feels nauseated. Terrible, and he knows it. In 10 minutes he'll be on the phone with a literary giant, Richard Price, and he's coming with this weak shit? He hiccups, pickled cauliflower resting a third of the way up his esophagus before deciding to go easy on him, cut him a break, and head back down south. He sips coffee from a cup, his eighth this morning.

McManus stares at Price's picture on his desk, Price's hang-dog eyes lurking at him from the cover of the New York Times Book Review. They'd just showered the guy's new book, his eighth, Lush Life, with the type of critical praise that's likely to make you go soft, start believing your own hype.

Thing is, Price deserves it.

He's been shitting gold since the nubile age of 24 when he wrote the critically heralded The Wanderers. Since then, you'd have to use both hands and one and a half feet to keep track of the guy's to-the-moon achievements--Bloodbrothers, Clockers, Freedomland, Samaritan, eps of the HBO series The Wire, Oscar-nominated screenplay for The Color of Money--highly regarded, all.

Eight minutes. Dry heave.

Lush Life is a hardbound hand-tossed literary grenade. McManus read its 455 pages over the weekend, living in it for eight and nine hours at a time like he'd punched a clock. The book is the story of Eric Cash, a failed writer/actor/everything who's given up the ghost on his dreams, has begun to begrudgingly accept his fate as a manager at a restaurant called Berkmann's on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Every three weeks or so a new boatload of dreamers--all Bambi-eyed and innocent--comes drifting into Berkmann's doors looking for employ, each one a cruel reminder of Cash's Big Plan gone RIP.

Cash, 35, finds himself fuming with discontent more and more often, especially around Ike Marcus, Berkmann's new, young, confident, hot-shot bartender. The two, by chance, wind up whetting their whistles at the same bar after work, decide to make a night of it. They're robbed. Cash gets away clean. Marcus not so much. His last spoken words, "Not tonight, my man." Fuck he think this is, the movies?

Six minutes.

The investigation that follows takes us behind the doors of NYPD's eighth precinct, where bullshit rolls downhill at the speed of greased lightning and the only thing keeping pace is ineptitude. The detectives assigned to the case--a woman cop named Yolanda and an Irishman named Matty Clark--follow non-leads into housing projects, Asian "boat houses," Jewish delis and all through the bowels of the very diverse LES where--along the trail--we pick a couple berries off the hoodlum bush; young boys with tough-as-leather exteriors but soft-as-silk guts, none of them as captivating as Tristan, a 15-year-old with a stepfather so abusive he'd rather piss out his fourth-story bedroom window than cross the path of the man's La-Z-Boy.

Breaks your heart 100 times over.

Price presses our noses in the messy, ugly, despicable, oft glossed-over reality of today's New York City-turned-Disneyland, where MFAs puke blue $12 cocktails a few blocks from project kids earning illegal livings; Price never letting up; meticulously clocking every beat of street life like a human fuckin' metronome. McManus reading it, wondering, "All these guys--Price, Bourdain, etc.--who complain about the whitewashing of New Sterile Fake No More Peep Shows in Times Square New York, why not just move to Philly where the dirt remains?"

From Lush Life's jacket: "Richard Price is the greatest writer of dialogue, living or dead, this country has ever produced." The quote's from Dennis Lehane. And Lehane's not blowing smoke. Price has a mimic's ear that would give the black guy from the Police Academy movies wood for days. Reading the dialogue in Lush Life is like being brought a dead bird from your cat. Crafty motherfucker.

One minute?

Panicked. Pale.

Richard Price

McManus remembers to breathe, starts giving himself a pep talk. It's not as though he's young in the game. Hell, around the offices of PW, he's practically a card-carrying member of the AARP. He's spent some time on Interview Row, rounded the bases at You're the First Person to Ask That Park. But this was different. This was Price. Those other interviews? Bands. Dumb fuckin' bands. Dumb bands saying the same shit over and over and over and over and ...