Concrete Dreamland
Coming of Age in Underground New York
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
From an award-winning artist who was featured in Humans of New York comes a bold personal narrative about overcoming family trauma, addiction, poverty—and forging a creative life in the greatest city in the world.
Born in Brooklyn in 1963, Patrick Dougher grew up in some of the most turbulent and culturally impactful periods of NYC's history. Often neglected as a child by his parents—a father who struggled with alcohol addiction and an overworked mother who struggled to make ends meet—he learned to fend for himself. Now a renowned visual artist, musician, actor and writer, Dougher brings to the page his memories, struggles, personal revelations, and a life intimately tied to the realities of growing up Black and disenfranchised on the streets of one of the most remarkable cities in the world.
Concrete Dreamland is tragic and triumphant, gritty and hard, poetic and outrageously funny. Told in Dougher's brutally raw and courageously honest voice, these stories act as snapshots of a life lived in extremes: from gangsters to God, street style to sexuality, to recovery from drug addiction and alcoholism. He tells of his adventures as a pre-hip hop “hard rock' and an original Black punk rocker surviving during the dangerous days of the crack and AIDS epidemic in NYC, while also sharing tales of racism, homelessness, and his many brushes with fame and death.
Audacious, unique, and moving, Concrete Dreamland is an unforgettable story of addiction, redemption, and life on the streets of a vanishing New York.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Music, drugs, and a search for belonging animate this kaleidoscopic debut from artist and drummer Dougher. In percussive prose, Dougher recalls growing up with a pronounced contrarian streak in 1970s and '80s Brooklyn as the son of an Irish Catholic father and a Black Jehovah's Witness mother. Major motifs include substance abuse—Dougher first got drunk at the age of six—and the poverty, prostitution, and homelessness that followed before, at 38, Dougher joined AA and rebuilt his life. The narrative unfolds in a string of gonzo, nonlinear anecdotes: Dougher barely escapes with his family from an elevator crash; he's hunted by a serial killer; he endures a beat-down from white hoodlums in middle school; he's nearly shot while standing up to a drug dealer. For all its heavy material, however, the book's mood is often buoyant. There are grace notes, like Dougher's "magical" encounters with pop singers Prince and Sade, whom he played music for, and David Byrne, whom he once met in Tompkins Square Park; and he celebrates his neighborhood's charismatic denizens, including a criminal warrior-prophet named Freddy ("He could quote chapter and verse from the Bible, Quran, and Bhagavad Gita, and he kept those holy books on top of a stack of German porno magazines"). The resulting tale of endurance is both hard-bitten and heartfelt.
