THE PRICE YOU PAY is my most autobiographical novel to date. Previous novels NARROWS GATE and THE MAYOR OF POLK STREET are both set in a fictionalized Hoboken, N.J., where I was born and raised, and some minor events have a basis in fact. But those books are set well before I was born. They’re largely the product of research about the mob and the entertainment industry.
In THE PRICE YOU PAY, what’s on the page is often akin to reporting with some tweaking. The protagonist Mickey Wright attends the same college at the same time as I did, goes to Sunday Mass and trudges home to his family’s walk-up apartment as I did, and is a Teamster working in an office in a trucking company in Jersey City, N.J., as I did. He’s a bit more gullible than I was, but he’s pretty much a kid in a young man’s body – which is how I might’ve been described by the dock workers who called me “College Boy.” Mickey and I both witnessed criminal activity. We ran errands and told lies. Violence wasn’t ever far away. Though I was never in the kind of jeopardy Mickey faces, it didn’t take much imagination on my part to know that I could’ve been. Had my father been anything like Mickey’s father, who places his son among the hardboiled Teamsters and insists he be loyal to them, things might’ve been very different for me.
A reasonable question is: If THE PRICE YOU PAY is set in 1973, why did it take you almost 50 years to write it? There are two general answers to the question. I’ve long been the kind of person who moves on; that is, when the thing is done, it’s done. My wife Diane and I married in 1981, six years after I left the trucking company. One evening, we were watching a “60 Minutes” segment on the Teamster local I had belonged to – Local 560 which was run by associates of the Genovese crime family and was seized by the Justice Department. At one point in the segment, there was a perp walk. Pointing, I said, “I know that guy. And that guy. I know that guy too.” Diane looked at me with astonishment: I had never mentioned to her that I had been a Teamster. That period was just a sliver of time in my life.
The other reason I waited so long was there was no counterweight to the most sordid parts of the story based on actual events. If you know my work, you know I am a hopeful writer who believes in justice and the inherent goodness of most of us. There really wasn’t much of that in what I recalled. It wasn’t until it occurred to me to give Mickey a career path and a girlfriend from outside the culture in which he was raised that I found my story. Prior to putting words to the page, I asked myself: Can a naïve young man who wants a wholesome career and is in love with a sweet young woman from a caring, principled middle-class family break free from his father and the worst of the Teamsters?
I tell you in all sincerity that, until I wrote the final chapter, I didn’t know the answer.
Jim Fusilli is the author of ten novels including THE MAYOR OF POLK STREET and its predecessor NARROWS GATE, which George Pelecanos called “equal parts Ellroy, Puzo and Scorsese” and Mystery Scene magazine said “must be ranked among the half-dozen most memorable novels about the Mob.”
