Norman Green

Shooting Doctor Jack

SHOOTING DOCTOR JACK was my first book. I was back in Brooklyn, my third time there. My friend B.T. and I had a business on Troutman Street, which was one of those streets where you rolled up your windows, locked your doors, and didn’t tarry. It was the late nineties, and the crack epidemic was in full roar. Not many people talked about it, though, despite the devastation it was causing, you didn’t hear much about it on the six o’clock news. There’s a story here, I kept telling myself that, every morning on my commute in from New Jersey, but as much as I like writing, it never seemed like a reasonable aspiration, not to me. Well, I’ll tell you something, it’s one thing to drive past a crack whore on a street corner and think, ‘isn’t that too bad,’ but it’s another thing altogether to watch a pretty girl spread across the hood of a car or shoved up against a Dumpster, doing what she has to do to get what she needs. It’s worse yet to watch her deteriorate over time, and even worse when you can’t keep that distance, when you interact with her every day as she hits you up for a buck or a cigarette, when she warns you that some guys were trying to break into your place the night before.

It made me wanna cry.

It took two years to write the book, with about a year off, right in the middle, to walk around feeling discouraged about it. Troutman Street was the protagonist, in a way, and I did my best to make it as real as I could. The other characters, Fat Tommy, the operator, Stoney, the drunk and dope fiend, and Tuco, the lost kid with maybe one chance in a thousand, they’re inventions, but they’re real, too. Hang around a place like T street long enough, you’ll meet them.

My wife says they’re all me, but I don’t see it.

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