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Life Among the Clockers
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20540 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1992 |
2,494 Words |
| Author
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Herb Boyd
Herb Boyd is an urban anthropologist and journalist. His
forthcoming book, coedited with Robert Allen, is Brotherman:
Stories and Essays by and about Black Men Writers (Ballantine
Books, 1993). |
Richard Price's Clockers takes as its subject the terrible tragedy unfolding daily in several communities across the nation--and certainly in my own. And whether we view it s a novel or as ethnography, it pales in comparison to the current reality here in Harlem, where for nearly five years our neighborhood has been held hostage by a band of violent drug dealers and their overlords.
You can see them from one end of my block to the other, dealers clustered on corners, glaring from stoops, stationed in front of stores and crowding the vestibules of apartment buildings. Up and down the block, at all hours of the day and night there is an endless procession of clockers with their vicious pit bulls, crack whores, zombies, wackos, touts, and street people waiting for the latest "drop" of fresh cocaine in order to get a new supply to sell, barter, or consume. Each morning our sidewalk is littered with the remains of a crack (cocaine smoking) session. It is impossible to get to the corner without stepping over a butane torch and a depleted Zippo lighter, empty crack vials, or what's left of a broken glass pipe--the "glass dick in crack-whore lingo.
Nearby Riverside Park--where many of our neighbors assemble for their early morning exercise of running, walking, and stretching--always resembles a deserted campsite; scattered here and there are empty beer cans, chicken bones, half-eaten doughnuts, candy wrappers, cigarette butts, strips of aluminum foil, and plastic juice containers. It is not unusual, either, to find two or three members of the band sprawled on the park benches, sometimes in a trancelike state or slumbering, partly alert, red-eyed, and slobering for a quarter. Half-dazed, they are no less menacing. This was not a problem in the park as recently as six months ago, but lately there has been a horbe of new wretches, evenly divided between men and women, Hispanics and African Americans.
In many apartment buildings where the landlords and tenants have been less than vigilant, even the elevator--when it is working--is a cubicle for the dealers and their customers. In the winter, the various little coves in the halls are useful hideouts and resting places, which often are fought over.
Traveling to the store or the nearest subway stop means running a gauntlet of dread and danger. Earlier this year on Broadway, our main drag, a young girl and her father were wounded when they were caught in the cross fire between rival gangs fighting over drug turf. Several months ago, I was told that the Uzi reports we heard outside out
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