I’ve been friends with Ben Schrank since before electricity. We’re lucky enough to hear about his love of Richard Price, a writer close to my heart. Ben’s novel, Love is a Canoe just went on sale, and it getting raves all over town.

When We Fell In Love by Ben Schrank

I turned nine at the beginning of the summer of 1978. I spent the month of July at Camp Meadowlark, in the Berkshires, while my mother was at Yaddo, where she began to apply paint directly to canvas with just her hands. My mother met Richard Price at Yaddo that summer and she brought home a paperback copy of his debut, The Wanderers.

I still have that copy of the book. It is pictured here, with my name in block letters above the title. And on the back cover you can see my graffiti ‘B’, in faded rollerball pen. My mother tells me that I took it from her and read it at least five times that fall. I’ve written elsewhere about the end of that summer, when she sat down with me in Long Island, in an itchy rope hammock under an enormous oak tree in the backyard of someone else’s country house and asked me whether I ought to be reading a book meant for adults. I don’t know how I convinced her, but I also don’t think I would have let her wrestle the book out of my hands.

My mother didn’t have much to worry about, but only because there was a lot I didn’t understand and I wasn’t going to ask her for an explanation. In the scene I read before she came out to sit with me, in the story called The Love Song of Buddy Borsalino, when Buddy asks Richie if he has any bags because he might have sex with Despie, I thought he meant brown paper bags. I couldn’t figure out what he’d do with a brown paper bag while he was trying to have sex. Spit in it? Put it over his head? Explode in the bag? How? Characters talked about coming everywhere in that book but I had no better sense of what coming meant or what it might feel like than I understood how it might feel when Emilio Capra brought his son Joey to his knees with a single blow at the end of the third chapter, called The Game, or the meaning of the razor marks on Nina Becker’s neck that she showed to Eugene in Coda: The Rape. I read those stories over and over again. But I was not able to add context to the world those characters lived in, with its beatings and racist taunts and the alcohol fueled fury. I couldn’t conjure images of the housing projects with elevators that smelled of piss or the roach killers Eugene wore, or of the fearsome three hundred pound skinhead called Terror. I never heard Dion sing The Wanderer until I inadvertently listened to Cousin Brucie’s radio show many years later.

I grew up in Park Slope, in a brownstone, close to Prospect Park. I had a dim understanding that The Wanderer’s world was in a borough near mine and that Park Slope rubbed up against neighborhoods similar to the Wanderer’s North Bronx. But I was not allowed to cross to the north side of Flatbush, or walk west too far below Seventh Avenue or south of fourth Street. Now people talk about the South Slope and the North Slope and a dozen other mini-neighborhoods as they parse out their school and coffee shop and housing options. When I was growing up, there was Park Slope and every place that surrounded it was where we were not allowed to go.

There was talk at school about the FSB, the Fifth Street Boys (Why did they want to hurt me and the other kids in my lunch group? How many of them were there? Could they all really live on Fifth Street?). And my friends and I started running back to school or home the moment we got half a block or more north of PS 321. I spent my afternoons with a babysitter called Seal who was gay and had David Cassidy’s haircut. I ate Lipton’s chicken noodle soup from a shallow bowl, alone in my mother’s dining room on President Street under an art deco chandelier made of bunches of grapes that made purple light dance over bookcases filled with old copies of the Partisan Review when I stood up from the table too fast. I slurped my soup and my cup of milk with The Wanderers propped in front of me.

I understood the funny parts of The Wanderers and the frustrations with girls and the character’s insecurities. But the Bronx remained an abstraction, a place filled with shocking amounts of violence and sex perpetrated by teenagers who were to me, at nine, broken heroes, torn up near-men who acted and were acted upon. Eugene and Richie and Turkey and Perry didn’t learn. They didn’t change or grow or become heroes. They got slashed with knives or kicked in the ribs. They threw Molotov cocktails at the Pharaohs. They tried to have sex with girls and walked out of their family’s apartments without eating dinner. They made their moms angry and disappointed and they didn’t give a shit. In The Warlord, C’s little brother Dougie says, “I’m running away from home.” His father says, “Don’t forget your toothbrush.” And I laughed and laughed. In Park Slope in 1978, the concept of an adult saying something sarcastic to a child was hilarious and impossible. Adults took kids seriously. They took me seriously. I talked about what I was reading and they listened. I sat at the dinner table with my mom’s friends and talked to them about The Wanderers. Of course I was precocious and knew nothing. But nobody knocked me out of my chair.

Because I was nine, The Wanderers couldn’t reveal to me how sex feels, or how getting beaten up doesn’t hurt as much as you imagine (though I would find out how it feels to get chased home by the FSB and punched in the head soon enough). No. What I found in the The Wanderers was what I learned to look for in all fiction, in place of morality or the life affirming lessons found in The Hardy Boys (which I also read, dutifully, at my grandparent’s house). I found out that in good stories, things happened to people. Or people did things. Afterward, they felt bad. Or good. Or nothing.

The copy on the back of The Wanderers jacket said ‘And most of all there’s Richard Price. He probably lived it, and now he tells all about it. And that amazed me. This survivor had borrowed aspirin from my mom! But more amazing was that this guy who probably lived it, this Richard Price, didn’t get in the way and tell the reader what to think. The story happened. It was wild and sad. Whether I or any other reader felt better or worse afterward was not Richard Price’s concern. I must have begun to understand how good fiction worked after the fourth or fifth time I read The Wanderers. I also learned that girls like C stuffed their bras with tissue. Although why a girl would do that and why a boy like Richie who acted so tough would take care to look away while she undressed and hid the tissue, I did not understand until years later.