A Brother-Sister Tale

Steve Geng followed a very different path from his sister, New Yorker writer and editor Veronica Geng. Her death in 1997 became the catalyst for his memoir, Thick as Thieves (Reviews, Jan. 29).

What brought you to writing at such a late age?

I won this lottery over at Gay Men's Health Crisis, where I'd go for free lunches. The prize was a semester at NYU, I could pick any course. I took one called, "Making a Novel Happen." I didn't know what I was doing. I was just trying to impress the girls in the class, whatever, but it was a huge amount of fun.

You hadn't even known your sister was sick.

I couldn't get in touch with her. Her friends wouldn't return my calls.

Why should they? I had been a scoundrel. When I began the book, I had this irrational rage that I'd been robbed of the chance to be there for her.

Yet the book is as much about your adventures as it is about your relationship with Veronica.

A lot of it was a hell of a lot of fun. Paris was a great place to be a teenager in 1960. There was a huge revolution as well as the Algerian crisis, with people blowing up cafes. The best years of jazz. I was scoring great hash.

You spent much of the '60s and '70s in New York City.

New York was different then.

You know, the cheap hotels, the all-night Times Square movies. I remember this James Bond triple bill where I was nodding out and I'd wake up to see Bond flitting across the screen. I still don't know which film was which. I used to go up to Harlem to score, and there would be hordes of people all over 116th and Lenox, a sea of bodies. It was out on the street. One time I went to Chelsea to cop, and Keith Richards was coming out of the place.

Your sister's legacy played a major role in finding a publisher.

It was my sister's old friends—big-time editors and writers—who took my calls and read the manuscript and created some buzz. Otherwise, people might have said, "Oh, just another junkie memoir." It was like Veronica was looking out for me from beyond the grave.