What is a Price Leatherbarrow?
He's a boy...I've known a bunch of 'em...A young fragile living thing, on it's own in a wondrous-wicked-woundup-wasted-wild-worried-wisedup-warmbodi ed world. Earning his daily crepes and cokes by writing the facts of love.
He's a man...I've known a bunch of 'em...He looks good, dresses good, lives good, eats, drinks, loves, breathes, dances, sings, cries good. Barely in his twenties, he's been there already. No one is born sophisticated. It's a place you have to crawl to, crawling out of hayseed country, over miles of pavement, past Trouble, past corners and forks with no signs to point you, till you get there and wake up wiser.
He's arrived. He writes to you about the long crawl and makes you have to listen. He's there.
UPDATE:
We have spoken before of Price the Child. Of Price the Fair. Of Price the Petite.
Tonight, we must speak of Price the Man.
Tonight, he grew 10 inches warmer in our eyes, entering enthusiastically into the cosmetology profession.
Tonight he is back to his first and best place--near a mirror and countless people, all of them professional escorts to his hairstyles.
That precisely is the heart of the matter: Price before a mirror--combing, praying, hairspraying, exhausting, smashing, flying--and by these words we mean an intensity that is not that of a boy. Not cute, but electric. Not charming, devastating. Not piquant, but whole.
A man now.
What happened to Price since we last saw him, we did not ask. Nor do we often ask of our thermometer why its rise. Or of Krakatao why its flames. What we do know is this: that it is right for boy to become Man.
And tonight, we saw just how right Man can be.
-S.C.