Lush LifeLush Life
Title rated 3.65 out of 5 stars, based on 65 ratings(65 ratings)
Book, 2008
Current format, Book, 2008, 1st ed, No Longer Available.Book, 2008
Current format, Book, 2008, 1st ed, No Longer Available. Offered in 0 more formatsStill living on the Lower East Side and waiting tables in a restaurant, thirty-five-year-old Eric Cash has every reason in the world to be jealous of Ike Marcus, a handsome, well-liked, ambitious young man on the way to the top, until he is supposedly gunned down by two street thugs while walking one night with Eric. By the author of Clockers.
Still living on the Lower East Side and waiting tables, thirty-five-year-old Eric Cash has every reason to be jealous of Ike Marcus, an ambitious young man on the way to the top, until he is supposedly gunned down by street thugs while walking one night with Eric.
A tale of two lower east sides: one a high-priced bohemia, the other a home to hardship, its residents pushed to the edges of their time-honored turf.
It's 2003, and after eight years downtown, Eric Cash is falling further and further behind in his plans to become an actor. Or a writer. Or a restaurateur. To become anything but what he is - the oldest employee at Cafe Berkmann. So if the new bartender pissed him off, who could blame him? Ike Marcus has confidence. He had hustle. Most of all, in a neighborhood where thirty is the new fifty, Ike was young. Then one evening a street kid from the "other" Lower East Side stepped up to them and pulled a gun. Ike's last words were "Not tonight, my man."
At least, that's Eric's version.
So, what do you do?" Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers. Artist, actor, screenwriter . . . But now he's thirty-five years old and he's still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving the people he wanted to be. What does Eric do? He manages. Not like Ike Marcus. Ike was young, good-looking, people liked him. Ask him what he did, he wouldn't say tending bar. He was going places--until two street kids stepped up to him and Eric one night and pulled a gun. At least, that's Eric's version.
In Lush Life, Richard Price tears the shiny veneer off the "new" New York to show us the hidden cracks, the underground networks of control and violence beneath the glamour.Lush Life is an Xray of the street in the age of no broken windows and "quality of life" squads, from a writer whose "tough, gritty brand of social realism . . . reads like a movie in prose" (Michiko Kakutani,The New York Times).
Still living on the Lower East Side and waiting tables, thirty-five-year-old Eric Cash has every reason to be jealous of Ike Marcus, an ambitious young man on the way to the top, until he is supposedly gunned down by street thugs while walking one night with Eric.
A tale of two lower east sides: one a high-priced bohemia, the other a home to hardship, its residents pushed to the edges of their time-honored turf.
It's 2003, and after eight years downtown, Eric Cash is falling further and further behind in his plans to become an actor. Or a writer. Or a restaurateur. To become anything but what he is - the oldest employee at Cafe Berkmann. So if the new bartender pissed him off, who could blame him? Ike Marcus has confidence. He had hustle. Most of all, in a neighborhood where thirty is the new fifty, Ike was young. Then one evening a street kid from the "other" Lower East Side stepped up to them and pulled a gun. Ike's last words were "Not tonight, my man."
At least, that's Eric's version.
So, what do you do?" Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers. Artist, actor, screenwriter . . . But now he's thirty-five years old and he's still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving the people he wanted to be. What does Eric do? He manages. Not like Ike Marcus. Ike was young, good-looking, people liked him. Ask him what he did, he wouldn't say tending bar. He was going places--until two street kids stepped up to him and Eric one night and pulled a gun. At least, that's Eric's version.
In Lush Life, Richard Price tears the shiny veneer off the "new" New York to show us the hidden cracks, the underground networks of control and violence beneath the glamour.Lush Life is an Xray of the street in the age of no broken windows and "quality of life" squads, from a writer whose "tough, gritty brand of social realism . . . reads like a movie in prose" (Michiko Kakutani,The New York Times).
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- New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
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