Like The Wire, for which it was no small source of inspiration, Clockers, Richard Price’s 1995 slab of streetwise-lit begs to be read in many ways. It’s a dense police procedural, a ghetto crime drama, a comment on race relations in the modern American city, and so on.
But to me this is really a novel about work.
In Clockers, characters on both sides of the law punch the clock in tired, inefficient bureaucracies because they’re incapable of doing anything else. There’s Strike – the sort of straight-laced and sensible crack dealer who’d just as likely do well in the grad program at EY – who spends his days packaging up goods (i.e. crack) and managing distributors whilst following various time-consuming protocols and indulging a shitty boss. On the police side there’s Rocco, the archetypal burnt out inner-city homicide detective, steadily wading through the dense waters of a jaded legal system that’s drowning in paperwork. And then between them both comes a perfectly average dude who might have been driven to murder by the grind of a perfectly average job.
So yeah, there’s a case that needs solving at the heart of Clockers – but the real mystery is why no one questions the shit they consistently trudge through in order to make a living. Strike fantasises about leaving town and starting afresh, but somehow that’s literally more terrifying than death. Rocco sticks it out because he’s got a kid and a pension on the line. Like the shift-working drug dealers referenced by the title, everyone in Clockers is trapped by market forces and an unquestioning devotion to the work – even when they know it doesn’t work. Jail might mean justice, but everyone’s already doing their time.
This sense of entrapment can also be felt in the claustrophobic, tightly-controlled workplaces which dominate Clockers. The cluttered back offices of the precinct station. The back rooms of fast food joints. Hermetically sealed vehicles – squad cars and drug runners – that travel the same blocks everyday. It’s a pressing mundanity, yet at the same time there’s an anxiety that comes with leaving these spaces. Rocco feels woefully out of place across the river in Manhattan. Strike only carries a gun when he crosses over into the Bronx. Even the Lincoln Tunnel is something of a threshold that threatens to break the sense of familiar routine these characters have learned to thrive on.
Which is a roundabout way of arriving at the title of this article – because Clockers, for all Price’s grubby nosings in the drug-trade, suggests that work itself is perhaps the most potent addiction. And not in the old-hat ‘workaholic’ sense either, which implies someone so deeply committed or invested in their work that they have a hard time letting go after they knock off. No, the truly addictive nature of work reveals itself only once the thrill of the first blast fades, and dedication gives way to drudgery. In Clockers, that’s why dealers keep coming back to the corner long after they’ve grown out of gold chains and turf wars, and detectives keep clocking on long after they’ve resigned themselves to being glorified street-cleaners, sweeping away each day’s criminal residue at night before clocking on in the morning to do it again.
It points to the fact that even the worst job offers the cheap high of a familiar routine. A ready-made structure for one’s days that spares you the anxiety of a totally open-ended existence. And just as the addict proper can’t fathom filling their days without all the little, time-consuming rituals that come with finding, funding, and taking drugs, a life without the routine of paid employment is kind of terrifying. What’s more, the longer one remains in a job past the point of novelty or excitement, the more this sense of auto-piloted routine intensifies and it becomes harder and harder to leave.
Like the TV show it inspired, Clockers does a formidable job at chronicling the minutiae of these workday routines on both sides of the law. To the point where the reader themselves is so immersed in them that the actual plot becomes less important than all the humdrum details; counting packages, mid-shift chinwags with local characters, disinterestedly flicking through a porn mag at the station after working late on a murder and so on. The characters can’t seem to get enough of these things, and neither can we.
Because it’s not just the routine that makes work so addictive, in the book and in real life. Instead, it’s the arcane knowledge one obtains by doing the same thing over and over. Speaking from experience, a middling government employee in a salary-banded job knows their shit – much like a practiced addict who can sniff out drugs in the desert and MacGyver an ersatz syringe out of a paperclip if need be.
There’s a pleasure that comes with knowing the place. The people. The bureaucracies that would thwart even the most persistent newcomer, and the corners you can cut. It’s knowing the names of the Egyptian janitors who hang out in a forgotten plant room. Calling in a favour from so-and-so in IT and being able to say things like “I owe you one” (it bears mentioning here that the BAU dialogue in Clockers is really, really good). Knowing where to find a set of keys for some forgotten storeroom and digging out a shrink-wrapped stationery set untouched since its purchase in 1993.
For me, there was a pride in it all. Sure, the resentment had begun to calcify, but when I was a teacher I knew the school and its people like the back of my hand. And that felt good even after the higher-order ‘purpose’ of the job had been buried six bureaucratic feet under. Unfortunately that’s an ephemeral knowledge you can’t bring with you, and which becomes meaningless once you’re confronted with new people and new systems – let alone a new career entirely.
So I read this macho block of crime fiction with a lot of empathy, and something like nostalgia for all that lost institutional knowledge. Because as forgettable as work is – we miss it once it’s gone.
Jackson's Ephemera 