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Introduction: Richard Price's Clockers
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20533 |
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BOOK WORLD
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11 / 1992 |
349 Words |
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Most Americans do not have a crack cocaine problem, and yet, the soaring costs of the so-called drug war--record murder rates, overflowing prisons, the spread of AIDS, the frequency of carjackings and drive-by shootings--make clear that the crack industry is everybody's problem. To no one more so than to Richard Price's Strike, a teenage inner-city dealer who despises the drug, hates the business, and wants to get out as soon as possible. Strike saves his profits and bides his time, in contrast to his young hirelings, called "clockers," who live by the tyranny of the two-minute clock (that being the limit of their long-range planning and, as Strike's overlord sarcastically observes, two minutes is as long as a clocker can keep money in his pocket.) Strike knows that what he is doing is evil, but given the squalid environs of his upbringing, he tries to tell himself that it is the lesser of evils. Tries. Because Strike is never far from family members and friends whose quiet heroism puts the lie to his argument. Thus does Price's novel Clockers, excerpted in the following pages, take us deftly into the grim heart of the big-city drug problem, which turns out to be another problem of the human heart.
Strike's boss, Rodney, offers him an opportunity for advancement if he "gets" a dealer who has been cheating Rodney out of profits. In the excerpt, Strike struggles over how to commit the murder, until he decides to accomplish the task just the way Rodney would--get somebody else to do it.
Following the excerpt are three commentaries. Literary scholar Robert Geary discusses Clockers as a work of fiction that brings the nightmare of drug-dealing to life and reminds us of the mysteries of human choices. Herb Boyd, an urban anthropologist
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