Rumpled black leather jacket, stained sweatshirt, flyaway hair, impressively dark circles under his eyes -- if Dustin Hoffman had gone into prizefighting, he'd look something like Richard Price. As the 49-year-old writer stalks around a downtown Manhattan cafe looking for coffee, what he really looks like, however, is this: an aging version of one of the walking time bomb greasers in "The Wanderers," his slashing first book.

Price still has the look, but he's come a long way from the Parkside Projects in the northeast Bronx. His ticket out was "The Wanderers" (1974), a series of surreal, swaggering takes on urban teen life, published when he was 24. He followed up that success with two more well-received novels -- "Bloodbrothers" in 1976, "Ladies' Man" in 1978 -- before a much-publicized cocaine habit, and a shaken sense of his own talent, dragged him into a long, hard funk. "I wasn't even that big of a doper," he says now. "I was definitely bush league. But enough that it sort of preoccupied me for three years."

Price climbed out of his literary funk, if not his drug habit, by going Hollywood. He quickly became an A-list screenwriter, churning out such work as "The Color of Money," "Sea of Love" and "Ransom." "[Screenwriting] kept me in the writing game, and it also showed me I was able to write about things that were not connected to my autobiography," he says. "Because before that I felt like the only things I could really write about were things I'd been through. I was 32 years old and on my fourth autobiography. You wonder, how bored can you get?"

Fiction remains Price's first love, however, and his talents are undimmed. In 1994 he published "Clockers," an adept, sprawling and deeply humane tale of life amid the urban crack wars. He returns to that same blighted landscape -- and consolidates the fictional gains he made in "Clockers" -- in his new novel, "Freedomland." The book, an urban spin on the Susan Smith kidnapping case, is about what happens when a woman is carjacked while her young son is sleeping in the back seat. The child goes missing, and a series of acidly drawn characters is sucked into the tale -- notably an affable community-based cop named Lorenzo and an aggressive local journalist named Jesse, who fights to get the woman's story. Price's stark, neon-lit prose, more than the tale itself, is what puts "Freedomland" over the top; he rarely wastes a word.

Price, who lives in New York with his wife, downtown artist Judy Hudson, and their two daughters, spoke with Salon recently about "Freedomland" and a host of other topics -- Rudy Giuliani's urban policies, the allure of screenwriting and the idiosyncrasies of raising kids in New York City. After he'd gotten a few cups of coffee into his gut, he seemed like a genuinely nice guy.

You're famous for the research you do before writing your books. Did you do much for "Freedomland"?

You know, on "Clockers" I ran with cops, but this time I sort of ran with police shack reporters.

What's a "police shack" reporter?

You know, guys whose newspapers are given offices in One Police Plaza. Whoever's in charge of public relations for the police says, "All right, we got something going out there." And these guys will run out -- Kennedy Airport, the Bronx, around the corner. I really liked it. I also ran around with a lot of reporters down in South Carolina when Susan Smith confessed.

How did you happen to be down there?

I don't know. I didn't even realize I was following the story in New York, and then something happened. When they said she confessed, it retroactively hit me: "Oh, that's that lady that was telling everybody, 'Please help me find my son.'" I never did this before, but I jumped on a plane and went down to Charlotte and rented a car and went down to Union, S.C. I was nervous because I had no idea what to do. But fortunately I ran into a couple of reporters from New York and Boston who either recognized me or I recognized them, and I struck up a couple of situational friendships. And I ran with these guys and saw how they did their work. It was like discovering cops like I did on "Sea of Love" -- wow man, you go with these people and you get into all kinds of shit. And it's great, you get paid for it, and you're not even responsible. They're doing it and you're just hanging on. It's fun. When I got back to New York, I ran into a couple of guys from the Daily News, and so I'm running around with them.

Then I hooked up with this freelance video crew. They just prowl the streets with a police radio from 11 o'clock at night until dawn because all the TV news stations pack up their own crews at 11. So what they do is, they hear there's a fire in the Navy yard and they're on the phone to Channel 5, to Channel 9, to Channel 11, "All right, we're on our way to the fire, can we get a precommitment on the footage?" They're like kamikazes, making the deal as they're going. And once they're there, they are the hardest guys to keep out. Because they're, like, nuts. They should have bandannas with Japanese writing on them.

Then, as I was going to one of these things in the middle of the night in Brooklyn, all these guys looked at this reporter for one of the tabloids -- whose name I'll leave out -- they looked at him with awe and reverence. Because this guy was 10 times more nuts than they were. I mean, this guy does not comprehend the word "no" in any language or any gesture. So I went over and introduced myself and he had heard of "Clockers," so I started running with this guy out of the police shack. That's how I got [my character] Jesse, basically. This guy was a dynamo. He did some of his own writing, but basically he dumped this stuff into the phone to his editor for rewrite. And he just kept going, just kept going. And I really related to that, because it was like when I was running around with the cops on "Clockers," with the crime scene units. Couldn't wait for the phone to ring -- what's happenin', what's happenin'. I realized, it's a way of life. Writing doesn't even count, it's just being there, getting there, seeing this stuff. Doing something with it.

The whole point of doing all this research, by the way, is not to use it so much as to throw it away. Because you feel like, "All right, I know the parameters of reality. Now I feel confident to make stuff up." I try to scramble a lot of stuff. I emerge with characters that are three quarters in my head and one quarter what I saw.

You mentioned the Susan Smith case. Your book has obvious parallels to Smith's story.

Well, the whole thing was sort of triggered by the Susan Smith case. I can't really hide that.

Were you as shocked as everyone else when she confessed?

Like a lot of other people, I didn't realize that I sort of semi-knew she was lying all along. You don't even know you're aware of it. Sort of like driving and daydreaming. All of a sudden you come to and it's 10 minutes later and you're still on the road, and hey, somebody's been driving. I'd been following it without even realizing it. And when she confessed, I had this retroactive thing like, "I knew that! I knew that all along."

As with the Susan Smith case, there's a racial aspect to the apparent kidnapping in "Freedomland." In both situations, a black man is accused of taking a white child, and the media goes crazy over it.

I don't think Susan Smith was an active racist. In fact, when I went to her sentencing trial, the defense brought all these black female prison guards -- she had been in prison for a while at the time of the sentencing -- and they came up to say that she didn't seem like a redneck or a cracker or a racist or anything. And I don't really think she was, any more than anybody else who lives in that part of the country. But it's just like a cultural reflex. The whole point is that, if you're a black guy reading the Daily News and somebody said, "There's a jack by a black guy," you'd probably believe it too. It's numbers. Police have said there's more white drug addicts than black drug addicts in this country, which surprises a lot of people. But in terms of in the city -- urban, random crime -- you say a black guy did it, who's gonna argue with that?

Do you see a way to shake this double standard? The white kid goes missing and it's front page news and the black kid goes missing and it's a column inch?

There is no way around it. It sells newspapers. This is what people want to hear. I mean, you had three kids kidnapped up in Harlem from a playground a couple of years ago, it barely got ink. When black people get killed in the city, the only way it's going to wind up in the papers is if it's not in a black neighborhood and they were wearing a suit, or if there was at least three of them.

Is that some kind of rule?

I don't know. All I can tell you is this: When I ran around with the crime scene unit, we responded to homicides in all five boroughs. I'd seen maybe 30, 40 murders. The only time I ever saw news people there was when the victim was white. And of course the victim is white maybe 10 percent of the time, 5 percent of the time. That's the other myth -- people feel like these black criminals are so dangerous, and that [whites] are the victims. The greatest victim of black crime is black people. I mean, people don't leave their neighborhood to do what they're going to do.

"Freedomland" is set in New Jersey, not in New York City, but were you tempted, this time out, to take on Rudy Giuliani's urban policies? All I know about politics is what I read in the paper. I don't really have any extracurricular interest in Giuliani. I have opinions -- but I'm not politically active in any way. Do you have any take on Giuliani's policies? What he's doing right, wrong? Well, here's a guy whose statistics are all good, but I don't really know enough to know if it's him or if it's stuff that Dinkins implemented -- or if it's just the fact that crack has more or less gone away. Stuff happens, he takes the credit and blames the other administration. The other administration says, "This is all the stuff that we implemented, and now it's coming to bear fruit and he's catching the fruit right up." This book is to some degree about children -- how they affect people's lives and their choices. Now that you have kids, are you shy about doing some of the things you used to do, in terms of reporting? The only thing I wouldn't do with them as a factor is ... I don't feel good disappearing for a couple of days. But it's not like what I do is so dangerous that I think about my children being fatherless or something like that. It's really an exaggeration of the "you are there" element of it. Your children, I would guess, have a pretty different life than you had as a child in the Bronx. How much do you want them to know about the tougher aspects of life in New York City today? It depends how you tell them about stuff, and how old they are. But I basically want them to know everything. I don't want to tell them anything prematurely, where they won't be able to understand something but it'll freak 'em out to hear it. The whole thing is to ask, "When is it appropriate?" Drugs are becoming an issue, so now's the time to talk about how bad life was on drugs. My girls are 11 and 13 -- you know it's an issue, it's a real issue. And I have something to say on the subject. I wouldn't tell them that when they were 7, you know. How much of a toll did drugs take on you? Well, I bounced back in every kind of way. There was no permanent damage. It still haunts me. And I wasn't even that big of a doper. I was definitely bush league. But enough that it preoccupied me for three years. I still think about what it was like. It's scary. I think most people can bounce back from a stupid drug habit. I would say the majority of people that I know who went through something bad with that are here to talk about it and are in better shape than they were even before they were doing it. Age'll do that to you. You don't have the elasticity. The price is too high. You've spoken about drugs to high school students. What can you say to a kid about them, or about smoking, that won't rebound on you -- that won't make them want to do it even more? I'm not a crusader, but I'm happy to do it. These kids at the junior high school age, if they smoke or something like that, it's not because they crave a cigarette, it's because it's verboten. And hopefully most of them will do it for, like, "I did it, now I don't have to do it anymore." It depends on the kid. If you want to guarantee your kid's going to do it, come on like a nightmare and say, "Don't you dare ... if I ever ... blah blah blah." I mean, I know my daughter's going to smoke. Because everybody else is, she's going to try it. I can't stop that, I'm not a cop. It's probably true for a lot of things. I think the worst thing you can do is make it so that she or he can't talk about it. My daughter was told something about herself in school that made her uncomfortable -- the way she was behaving, she was acting up. She told me, and she's 11, and I kind of like freaked a bit. She was like, "Look, at least I told you." And she was right. I'm not so naive to think I'm hearing half of it, at best. But I think the most important thing is that, whatever they do, you're not somebody to hide from. You gotta give a little if you want to get a little. It's tricky. One of the main characters in "Freedomland" is a community-based cop named Lorenzo. Where did the character come from? Lorenzo's sort of based on a guy who I worked with, and he's my own creation. That's what I mean about going out in the field -- I wouldn't even know people like this exist. In the housing projects in a bad neighborhood, cops are basically considered an occupying army. But every once in a while there's a guy who has street charisma. Who has a different attitude. Who sees himself as a member of the community as much as he sees himself as a superego on the community. And people respond to that and he responds to the way people are responding. You know, his head gets kinda big. But it increases his commitment. He likes the jazz of it. He's flawed, though -- I mean, everybody's inconsistent. There are no saints out there. The other main character is the local journalist who finds herself involved in the book's kidnapping. Have you done this kind of reporting? Not news reporting. I've done a lot of journalism for magazines. I don't particularly like it. And most of them are cultural profiles. People in music or movies. I have a hard time with it. I remember I did this article on Richard Gere for Rolling Stone, and it was in the middle of this drug phase I was going through, so like everything was off the wall. And I hand in a 30-page article, late, and it was supposed to be the cover article. Not only did I hand it in late, not only was it 30 pages, but I forgot to put in things like what movies he was in, where was he born, how old is he. They were very nice about it, but I think I was two sentences away from a butterfly net. You've said that Hubert Selby's "Last Exit to Brooklyn" was one of the books that saved your life. How so? I think the greatest tribute or compliment you can give a work of art, in any form, is not about how much you appreciate it, but how much you can't wait to get out of there -- to go home and do your own thing. Because the thing made you so crazy to write, or to paint or to do something. And Herbert Selby's book was one of the first things I read that made me feel that way. How old were you? About 15. I mean, I always liked the idea of being a writer before that, but Selby's book was the first time I saw life that was moderately like my own Bronx housing project, like Brooklyn housing projects and Red Hook, and the labor strikes, and the drag queens and the bennies. I was a very sheltered working-class kid, but I did see enough. I could hear it, I could recognize it. Before that, the things that I loved had really nothing to do with validating my life experiences -- John Steinbeck or J.D. Salinger or Charles Dickens. I would love to read it but there was nothing in there that would stir me to write. "Last Exit" was kind of scary and it was disorienting and it was familiar. And I never had that experience. I mean, Kino diving for the pearl in "The Pearl" might be a riveting story, but it doesn't remind me of my old Kentucky home, I'll tell ya. Selby's book was the first thing, and it just shocked me. It's like the shock of recognition. And it made me very excited about the possibilities of me, my world, my family, my friends. It's valid grounds for literature? Holy shit!

How early were you writing fiction? Oh, I was writing in elementary school. What happens is that when you're a kid, you know, everybody hates themselves, but they always have this one thing that they feel makes them different. Everybody's got an ace in the hole. For me, I could write. I was a precocious writer. For another kid, he was the best athlete. For a girl, she was the smartest math student or the prettiest or the most physically developed. For another boy, it was like he was a great dresser. Everybody's like, "What's the one thing I can hang on to desperately, so I can feel like a member of the human race? I've got one thing." And for me it was writing. What were you thinking when you went to Cornell to get a degree in labor relations? I had grown up in a working-class house, and my parents had Depression-era childhoods. So the idea of going to college to be something in the arts was incomprehensible and frivolous and exorbitant -- and with no payback. So I had it drilled into me, you know, that the whole point of college, other than getting an education, is getting a job. Getting security. So it never even entered my mind to be an English major or something. I really had to do something. I wound up at Cornell in their School of Industrial and Labor Relations. I didn't even know what the hell that meant -- I thought it was advertising. And it was a state division, so it was easier to get into than Cornell Arts and Sciences. You know, you got the Cornell car sticker, but it was a division of Cornell. It was like a back door into an Ivy League school. And I went for it. It seemed irresponsible to want to be a writer, because someday you're going to have to support a family. But as it turns out, it was a very good thing to do. If you want to be a writer, I think the worst thing you can be is an English major because you become so self-conscious about great writing and how this one did it and how that one did it. It would paralyze you. To make your first messy baby steps right after you read "The Death of Ivan Illych" or "Why I Live at the P.O." I read a lot, but I didn't read anything I was supposed to read. But to be a writer, I feel like it's just important to study anything. Or nothing. Don't study writing, whatever you do. How did you find the time to write the stories that became "The Wanderers"? Were you working then? Actually, I wasn't. When I graduated from Cornell, I had started writing. I took all my electives in creative writing. And I would do readings in a cafe in the basement of the Arts & Sciences building -- it had these fake Parthenon statues and it was a real hippie beat coffeehouse. One day a week, in the afternoon, they'd do readings. I'd read every weekend, I was really turned on by it. Then when I applied to graduate school, I also applied to MFA programs, and I got into Columbia, but I also got into Harvard for education, Syracuse for advertising, law school. I didn't know what the fuck to do. And I still didn't feel I had any right to pursue a writing career. My parents wouldn't understand it, and by extension I thought to myself, "How can I be bad like that?" The way it turns out, I wound up going to Columbia, saying, "I'll give it a shot. I'll start it for a year, and then I'll go to law school." I started writing, and the stories in "The Wanderers" just caught on very early. The head of the writing program at Columbia read them. I didn't even know I was writing a book. I was just writing these nostalgic sort of apocryphal half-bullshit stories about growing up. And he passed it on to a literary agent who only read like 40 pages and said, "When you're ready, I'm ready." And that's all it took. Obviously, he's not going to send out 30 pages of an unknown writer, but I felt like I'd gotten validated by the establishment. OK, this is the Good Housekeeping Seal of Literary: "You've Got a Future." It really helped. I'd go to class once a week, and people would read their stuff, so it was an ongoing kind of consciousness about being in a community of writers, and I'd just knock off a short story a week. Pretty soon I had a couple of them in Antaeus magazine. A guy in my class, Daniel Halpern, was a poet, and he was writing in Antaeus and I had read a section of "The Wanderers," what was to be "The Wanderers." Everybody in the class hated it because it was about a fight between the Italians and the blacks, and the Italians won, so it's politically incorrect. And everybody kind of hated it and Halpern said, "Can I have it for Antaeus?" Once it was in a magazine, you know, it was just like a chain reaction. I was too naive to know that writing is a long haul and you've got to keep at it. I just lucked out because I got a publisher within a year. If nothing came of that stuff, I don't know if I would have stayed with it. I probably would have folded in a year or two and done something responsible -- business school, law school, who knows. At that time the median age of a novelist writing their first novel was 40. Which makes sense -- you've got to have a bit of a life. Now it looks like the median age is, like, 3. It's because of the MFA programs; they're creative writing factories. But I didn't know. I was just writing. I was only 23, I'm in Manhattan, it's real exciting, I'm not worried. You were, what, 24 when the book was published? That must have really turned your life around. I think the reason why the book was published was as much what I was writing about -- which was white working-class kids, pre-Vietnam -- as it was the writing. Those people never got written about. It wasn't like "Grease is the word"; it was before that kind of stuff. People hadn't read about characters like this in a dog's age.

Let me ask you about movies, about Hollywood. Has writing screenplays hurt or helped you as a writer? I think it kept me in the writing game once I felt tapped out as a novelist. It gave me a second career. And it certainly buys me the time to write novels. I think the most important thing a writer can buy is time to write. Most writers I know, unless they're pretty well set up, they have to do stuff to make ends meet. Stuff away from writing. And it's usually teaching -- they spend a whole bunch of hours a week reading kid stuff, and it takes its toll on you. Now, screenwriting, they don't pay me for nothing -- I'm working like crazy. But the pay is so off-the-wall. And it got my confidence back, when I started getting success in movies. When [my fiction wasn't going well] I was at the tail end of the drug thing, and I was just, like, rock bottom. And I started doing screenplay stuff. Of course I'm working with guys like Don Simpson. He didn't really aid and abet; I was aiding and abetting myself, but it's Hollywood. You got a drug problem and now you're going to work in Hollywood? You think that's a good thing or a bad thing? But I straightened myself out and applied myself to the screenplays, since I didn't really know what else to write about. And it kept me in the writing game, and it also showed me I was able to write about things that were not connected to my autobiography. Because before that I felt like the only things I could really write about were things I'd been through. I was 32 years old and on my fourth autobiography. You wonder, how bored can you get? It took me out of myself. I had to write about a pool hustler, or a policeman, and I realized that I can make shit up. It's also hard, it's very hard to say "No more," because it is so alluring, and no matter how shocking the movie was that was made out of your script, there's always the hope that the next one is going to be the one. The next one's going to be "Raging Bull II." It's going to be my "Mean Streets." It rarely or never is, but hope springs eternal, so you keep in the game. You're thinking, like, this time I'm working with this guy and this guy and this guy, how could I say no? Well, you have to say no, because after a while you realize that all you're doing is screenwriting. It's like calling yourself an actor, and you're waiting tables. After a while, if you don't stop doing that, you're a waiter. Are you as proud of any of your screenplays as you are of your fiction? Some of them I liked. But you know the only thing I look back on and really like is "Clockers," the book. And there are segments of the movies that I think are really great, and there are segments of movies I think are really great because they transcended what I wrote. See, the problem with screenplays is, if you write thoroughly and intimately, the guy does this, this and this, an actor will read that and he'll go, "Hey man, I could phone it in. It's all here." And the director will go, "Wow, just follow these numbers." And oftentimes movies based on scripts like that are not as good as movies that are based on more sketchy scripts, because it demands more from the actor, it demands more from the director. And so it can boomerang on you. Having written so many screenplays and been so successful, is it hard to sit down and write a novel without wondering what kind of movie it will make? I never do. Now this book, "Freedomland," I sold it to Scott Rudin before I wrote a word. And I didn't do that on purpose. I know Scott Rudin. I did "Ransom" with him, and he was a casting director on "The Wanderers" back in the '70s. So I knew the guy and I musta had lunch with him and told him what I was working on, but I don't even remember. And next thing I know, he called up my agent and made this huge offer to buy it outright. And first I said, "No, no, no, I don't want to do that, because I'll have this guy breathing down my neck." Then all of a sudden I said, "What am I, nuts? It's going to take years to write this thing. How am I gonna pay Con Ed? I know, I'll take this offer." I never thought about the movie. Scott never called me, in terms of, "Well, where's my property?" He never asked to see pages. He's great. It's like having your cake and eating it too. I got all of the money and none of the pressure. However, now it's time to pay the piper. How so? I've got to write the script. That was part of the deal originally? Yeah, see, they keep wanting you to do stuff for this money they give you, and I find it really annoying ... Is anything happening with it at this point? It's not even in my head. I just got my first copy of the book yesterday, the actual book from the bindery. I'm not looking forward to it; it's really hard to do your own book, because it's your book. The analogy I always use is, when it's your book it's your baby. But when somebody buys it, it's not your baby anymore, and they hire you as a baby sitter on what used to be your baby. And if they don't like you, they're going to fire you as a baby sitter, off your natural-born baby. That'll make you crazy. Music's a big part of this book, and it features prominently in your work in general. The mother in this book, Brenda, lives for a certain kind of soul music. What does music mean to you as a writer? I know that's a broad question ... No, I understand what you mean. I'll tell you exactly what it means to me and my work. It's what gets me writing. It puts me in the mood and it's less dangerous than having a girlfriend. It puts you in touch with your tortured soul, and you can write now. You can hide inside music. You can become somebody else listening to music. I never go to concerts. I buy a lot of CDs, but they're always old chitlin-circuit R&B. It's sort of like non-Motown, unslick -- it's either Motown alternative or pre-Motown. It all comes to an end about the mid-'60s. I don't even know what's going on in music right now. Do you keep regular hours as a writer? Yeah, you have to be fairly disciplined or you're going to wind up feeling like Kafka's bug or something. You know, if you don't get out of bed for three days, nobody's going to notice. So you have to. I have to impose a schedule on myself. So yeah, I have an office. It's in the Flatiron Building. Sometimes I don't want to go. And it's OK. It's not like I have a homework assignment that's due or a term paper. But by and large I have to try to keep to a schedule. Otherwise, you know, I get really depressed. Do you work five days a week? Four days a week. But there'll be days where I'll go out to Long Island, where I have a house. When I have a work crunch, I'll work 15 hours a day out there. Some days here I'll be lucky if two hours is a great day. You know, it depends on the environment. Do you read your reviews? Do they ever bother you? It depends who's writing them and what they say. If I get a bad review from somebody and the content of what they're saying is bullshit, it's annoying but it doesn't bother me. If it's a writer I respect and I think he or she's got a good point, yeah, it bothers me. It really depends on who's saying it and what they're saying. I mean, I'll get a great review that will make me feel good, then I'll get good reviews from other people that make me feel great. It's like, at what level are they approaching this book? Sometimes you can learn a lot from your reviews, if you can stomach them. If there seems to be a consensus of opinion about something you didn't do, there's a good chance that it's something that you needed to do. Last question: When will your daughters be old enough to read your books? Well, one of them is already knocking on the door to read "The Wanderers." She's 13. So I'd say about a year or two. There's a danger in getting kids books at too young an age. The danger is not protecting them, but they're too young to appreciate it, and it's dull and it's senseless. I still can't read Jane Austen because I had to read "Pride and Prejudice" in the eighth grade. Very good timing is really important, because there are books that will hit you at 14 in a way that they wouldn't be able to after, before or when you're an adult. It just speaks to you right now. And if you read them at 14, you've just ruined that author for this kid, because the kid was too young, it's just the most boring Thomas Hardy bullshit, Jane Austen bullshit. You give that book to somebody when they're ready, and they get it. So I'm not really worried about my daughters' reading "The Wanderers" because of a lot of curse words or graphic sex. I mean, of course I am -- but more important is, I don't want her to read that book now if she's supposed to read it when she's 17 or 18. So I'm protecting my stuff in that way. I don't want to wind up being my daughter's "Pride and Prejudice."