In Search of Respect (Epilogue)

Cambridge Books Online
http://ebooks.cambridge.org/
In Search of Respect
Selling Crack in El Barrio
Philippe Bourgois
Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511808562
Online ISBN: 9780511808562
Hardback ISBN: 9780521815628
Paperback ISBN: 9780521017114
Chapter
Epilogue pp. 328-338
Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511808562.012
Cambridge University Press
EPILOGUE
Sometimes at night I stand in front of my son. I just look at him, and I

cry. I be thinking: "I don't deserve such a good little nigga'. And besides
Felipe, what's gonna happen to him? I'm twenty-six years old already. I
mean, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing in life. I don't got no
direction. You gotta help me Felipe please!
Caesar
I returned to New York City during the spring and part of the summer
and fall of 1994 to make the final revisions on this manuscript and
prepare this epilogue. As it goes to press:
Primo has not sold drugs for more than three years and has cut his ties
to Ray. He no longer sniffs cocaine or even drinks alcohol. As a matter
of fact, on one occasion when an acquaintance from the Game Room
insisted on buying him a beer, he discreetly poured it into the gutter.
For the third summer in a row, Primo has found a temporary job,
earning $500 a week before taxes, as a night porter in a luxury high-rise
condominium building on the Upper East Side. He is replacing the fulltime, unionized night porters who go on vacation during the summer
months. Primo missed several days of work when he was hospitalized for
a week because of an asthma attack precipitated by an allergic reaction to
debris he cleaned up in the condominium building's maintenancerepair
facility. Primo persuaded his doctors not to "write him up for asthma,"
because he fears that management will not hire him on a full-time basis,
due to his medical condition.
Primo's only outstanding legal problem is caused by a collection
agency attempting to recover the money he borrowed to pay for the
328
Downloaded from Cambridge Books Online by IP 130.39.62.90 on Mon Aug 24 22:24:07 BST 2015.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511808562.012
Cambridge Books Online Cambridge University Press, 2015
Epilogue
tuition of the maintenance-engineer vocational training institute that
went bankrupt and never issued him a graduation certificate. The interest
on his original $2,400 loan has raised his debt to more than $4,000. The
collection agency seized $1,700, the full amount of his 1994 income
tax refund.
Maria asked Primo to move out of her household because of his sexual
involvement with another woman. Primo now lives in his mother's highrise housing project apartment along with his oldest sister. Despite
breaking up with Maria, Primo visits her regularly and has a close, warm
relationship with his youngest son, three-year-old Primo Jr., whom he
frequently takes out for walks.
Primo's fifty-nine-year-old mother has AIDS and is suffering from
dementia. He wonders if the fact that her brain has been affected is
related to a battering she received several years ago from a boyfriend who
beat her unconscious with a New York City police lock, "you know those
long metal bars that come up from the floor and lean against the middle
of a door to keep it from getting bashed in that's what he hit her
with." She suffered a serious concussion and the doctors warned her at
that time of possible long-term neurological complications.
New York City Housing Authority inspectors took advantage of
Primo's mother's mental vulnerability and arranged to interview her in
private in order to document the amount of her son's income and his
dates of residence in her apartment. They are threatening to institute
collection procedures for several thousand dollars in recalculated back
rent to reflect Primo's undeclared legal income.
Primo also worries about the safety and welfare of his eleven-year-old
son, Papito, who failed fifth grade in a parochial school in the South
Bronx, where he lives with his mother and his three half brothers and
sisters. For four months, Papito's mother, Sandra, forbade Primo from
seeing Papito after Primo's mother reported her to the Bureau for Child
Welfare (BCW) when Papito took shelter in her apartment following a
beating by Sandra's newest boyfriend, the father of her fourth child. This
tension, however, defused sufficiently for Papito to spend six weeks at
Primo's mother's apartment during the summer.
Maria lost her subsidized apartment and was forced to move back with
her young son into her alcoholic mother's project apartment. She is
determinedly looking for her own, independent place, but has not been
able to save enough money to pay for the security deposit for an apart 329
Epilogue
ment in a private tenement building. After several attempts at working
at fast-food restaurants - including at a McDonald's managed by Primo's
oldest sister - Maria continues to receive welfare and food stamps. Primo
voluntarily provides her with child support payments when he is working
legally, but this does not change her economic situation significantly as
his cash contributions are monitored by New York City's Family Court
and are deducted from the payments Maria receives for food stamps and
from Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Although Maria hopes
eventually to be reunited with Primo in a conjugal household, she
refuses to let him live with her until he commits himself to long-term
sexual fidelity.
Caesar no longer sells drugs. He continues to receive a monthly SSI
check and lives with Carmen, their three-and-a-half-year-old son, Caesar
Jr., Carmen's seven-year-old son, Papo, and her nine-year-old daughter,
Ruby, in his grandmother's former project apartment opposite the Game
Room. Caesar's grandmother, who is now in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's disease, left the old-age home where she had been interned and
moved into her younger sister's nearby tenement apartment.
Caesar continues to smoke most of his SSI checks during once-a-month
crack binges. He also sniffs heroin regularly. Carmen supplements her
welfare check by selling Avon products. The household was recently
visited by an inspector from the BCW when a public school teacher
reported Carmen's eldest daughter, Ruby, for exhibiting signs of psychological and physical abuse. Apparently Ruby is deeply depressed and
never talks in class. Carmen periodically takes refuge at her sister Maria's
house with her children to escape Caesar's beatings.
When my wife and I visited Caesar and Carmen, their youngest son,
Caesar Jr., joined us in the living room and exhibited the vitality of a
healthy, happy three-year-old. His older brother and sister, however,
were "visiting their father's grandmother in Florida." This was in early
June when school was still in session, so they may be shifting their
permanent household to their father's kin because of their stepfather's
abuse.
Caesar came to a Father's Day party at Maria's project apartment. He
arrived with Carmen and their son, Caesar Jr., who had a fresh bruise on
his right cheekbone that Caesar and Carmen say comes from falling off of
a bed. Caesar left the party early when he became angry at Primo for
refusing to lend him money to buy heroin. In May, Carmen placed Caesar
330
Epilogue
on a waiting list for admittance to a drug treatment program run by
Phoenix House. Caesar agreed to intern himself in the facility, but when
treatment spaces had still not been made available by August, Carmen
finally threw Caesar out of the household after he sold their television set.
His aunt paid for his train ticket to visit another aunt in Ocala, Florida,
hoping this will keep him away from crack.
Candy no longer sells drugs or works. She suffered a grave disappointment upon graduating from her court-ordered nurse's aide training course
when the downtown podiatry office where she found a job proved to be
"a bunch of scandalous, conniving schemers." They specialized in diagnosing fictitious ailments and operating needlessly on people's feet. This
enabled them to submit padded bills to Medicaid and other, private,
insurance companies. Candy lasted almost a year before becoming too
disgusted to continue with her employer's illegal antics. She did not,
however, miss any welfare payments as she had been working under her
false social security number.
Candy continues to live with her husband, Felix, and four of their five
children in the same high-rise project apartment. Both Candy and Felix
drink and use cocaine on weekends, but Felix supposedly no longer beats
Candy. According to Primo, "No way! Felix don't hit Candy. That
nigga' learned his lesson, boy." Candy also became the foster parent for
two of Luis and Wanda's four children when they were seized by BCW
following Luis's incarceration and Wanda's full-time addiction to crack
three years earlier.
Felix continues to work in demolition and window renovation. His
$2oo-per-week salary is off the books, however, and does not jeopardize
his family's welfare payments or its Medicaid eligibility. He recently
renovated the windows of the apartment of the television star Joan
Rivers. He claims she gave him a gold-plated pin and served lunch to the
entire construction crew.
Felix and Candy's twenty-year-old son, Junior, has fathered two children by two different teenage girls. According to Primo, "Junior is an
idiot out there." He dropped out of high school at fifteen when his
mother was hired at the podiatry center, so that he could baby-sit his
little sister, Lillian, during the day. Candy helped him evade New York's
truancy by promising the authorities that he would join the Conservation
Corps upon turning sixteen. He subsequently dropped out of the Conservation Corps after only two months because "them niggas was too wild."
Epilogue
In the years since then, he has been smoking marijuana every day. He
passed through a period of robbing from everyone around him until he
was finally arrested for his second felony offense, selling crack to an
undercover police officer. He spent a year and a half in prison, where by
coincidence he served time on Riker's Island with his Uncle Luis. Primo
told me that Luis tried to give Junior a weapon, "you know, like, a
pencil or something sharp so he could stab somebody in the eye. You
know, like, just to defend himself, in case somebody tries to mess with
him." Junior refused his uncle's weapon, and according to Primo, "He
started tearing instead." Junior consequently had to be placed in "P.C.,
that's protective custody, where they lock up the feeble niggas, in
solitary confinement."
After his release from prison, Junior worked briefly as a cable television
installer. According to Primo, he is now "in-and-out of selling drugs
but he's scared of prison boy!" He continues to live with his mother,
father, and younger sisters in their project apartment. I ran into Junior
at the entrance to his mother's building at 1:00 a.m. I would not have
recognized him had he not called out to me. He was sporting a scruffy
beard, had a blue bandanna wrapped, gang-style, around his head, and
had lost all his baby fat. In fact, he appeared almost emaciated. I invited
him to come to a baptism party that Tony was hosting for his six-monthold baby, but he declined with embarrassment. I politely left the scene
when a crack addict approached him, as I had suddenly realized he did
not want to have to admit to me that he was working the late-night shift
for Carlos, the same stairwell crack dealer who sometimes pays Candy to
let him use her kitchen to prepare his product.
Junior keeps in touch with his younger cousin, Angelo, who also
dropped out of school to become a pothead. Angelo lives with his
grandmother, as both his parents are heavy drug users, and are constantly
"in-and-out of jail."
Candy's oldest daughter, Tabatha, still lives in her own separate project apartment in Brooklyn and just gave birth to her second child. She
broke up with the child's father, but according to Primo she is doing
well. The new boyfriend she lives with has adopted the baby, treating it
as his own. She works legally, but off the books in a boutique in
Brooklyn. Jackie is now seventeen years old and has successfully completed tenth grade at an alternative public school downtown. Her boyfriend was recently incarcerated in a federal prison.
332
Epilogue
Candy's brother has full-blown AIDS and receives welfare. I saw him
walking fast down the street, well past midnight, toward an active crackcopping corner.
Benzie continued to work in food preparation at a downtown health
club until June 1994. He kept his job for more than five years and was
earning $320 a week before taxes. I visited him with Primo in Metropolitan Hospital where he was having seven screws and a metal plate removed
from his calcaneus bone (heel), which he shattered into five pieces last
year in a drunken midnight car accident in El Barrio with Caesar and
Primo. He continues to live in a tenement in Brooklyn with his girlfriend
from four years ago. She works as a radio dispatcher for a taxi service in
El Barrio. Upon his release from the hospital, Benzie "invested" the
$1,500 he won in a lawsuit over the car accident by hiring two friends
to open a new marijuana sales spot, three blocks uptown from the
Game Room.
Willie married an African-American woman and lives in Virginia,
where his older brother found him "a paperwork job in the military." On
his last visit to El Barrio he went on a crack binge, but apparently
managed to return to his job and family in Virginia once his money
ran out.
Tony manages a heroin-copping corner in the neighborhood. Before
that, he had quit working for Ray to manage a crack sales point in his
mother's building. He continues to live with his three-year-old daughter
and his twenty-one-year-old wife, Clara, who recently had a new baby.
The size of the baptism party he organized for his newborn in a local
housing project community center rivaled any of the parties Ray sponsored when the Game Room and the Social Club were still in business.
Ray is occasionally seen in the neighborhood, "driving around in an
Excalibur always with a different woman." According to Caesar, "looks
to me like he's a retired drug kingpin," but Primo says "he's scrambling
somewhere up in the Bronx," where he lives with his wife, Gloria, and
their two children in one of the buildings he bought at a police auction.
When Primo asked Ray why he never visited, Ray answered aggressively
that he had his own friends in the Bronx and did not have the time or
the need to come to El Barrio anymore.
Little Pete is in prison on a felony count of crack sales to an undercover
officer. Six months before his incarceration he was shot six times in a
phone booth in the Bronx, where he was trying to open up an indepen333
Epilogue
dent crack sales point with an African-American partner. At the time he
was living with his mother, whose heroin-addicted husband (Little Pete's
stepfather) had just died of AIDS.
Nestor is serving an extended prison sentence for shooting a Mexican
immigrant he was trying to mug. New-immigrant Mexicans continue to
move into El Barrio despite the violence against them. In the mid-1990s,
half of all the foreign-born children in the school district came from
Mexico. Their proportion of the officially censused population of El
Barrio grew by 332.9 percent in the 1980s more than twice the rate
for Mexicans in the rest of New York City, who increased by 159.8
percent. l Tensions are palpable, as Primo explained to me while pointing
to a young Mexican man crossing the street ahead of us. "Makes me feel
like shit when I see them, 'cause I know they work for cheaper than me."
Luis was given a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence for selling crack.
He enrolled in a drug treatment program while incarcerated and was
promoted to peer counselor. This granted him an early release from
prison on a four-month probationary drug treatment furlough. He lives
with a sister in his former housing project and has been looking - so far
unsuccessfully - for space in a residential treatment facility. Instead, he
receives acupuncture as an outpatient from a downtown hospital. He
admits to intense cravings for crack whenever "I got money in my
pocket," but he anticipates being able to remain clean until his earlyrelease probationary period formally ends and he will no longer be subject
to weekly urine tests. Currently, if he "gives a dirty urine," he will be
returned to prison to finish the remainder of his sentence.
According to Primo, "Luis even said he was willing to work." Luis's
wife, Wanda, is living with a lover in her same project apartment after
recovering from being a sex-for-crack prostitute on upper Park Avenue.
She has filed for divorce papers and has placed a legal order of protection
on Luis. Luis claims she enjoys taunting him by affectionately embracing
her new lover when she passes him on the street. Luis is obsessed by
Wanda's new boyfriend and promises to beat both of them up once he
completes his probation and parole. All four of Luis and Wanda's children
have been split up among three different foster parents. Their oldest boy
is thirteen but has already dropped out of school. Their oldest daughter,
who became HIV positive after receiving a tainted blood transfusion at
Metropolitan Hospital, was placed in foster care with Candy. She died in
February 1995 at the age of twelve. Primo commends Luis for seeking
334
Epilogue
out all of his other children, "those he had by outside women," to "take
them out on walks" and express his affection.
Primo's former girlfriend, Jaycee, still drinks and sniffs cocaine. She
moves back and forth with her twelve-year-old son between her mother's
project apartment in El Barrio and the West Side home of a new Colombian boyfriend, who sells drugs and frequently beats her up.
Angel and Manny still live with their mother, Iris, in her tenement
apartment, which is also used by her new boyfriend as a base for storing
the crack that he sells downstairs on the stoop of their building. Their
mother continues to work as bartender at an after-hours club, and Manny
serves as a runner in her boyfriend's crack operation. Angel used to sell
crack for one of the companies operating in the housing projects opposite
their tenement: "I worked for a moreno [African-American] company even
though I used to hang out with the boricuas [Puerto Ricans] and that
was a problem." He and a lookout used to each earn ten dollars for every
bundle (fifty vials at three dollars each) they sold. He claims they could
sell fifty vials in approximately forty-five minutes on a good night,
earning about a hundred dollars during a typical eight-hour shift. He
recently quit selling drugs, however, when a judge sentenced him to five
years probation on a felony plea bargain for "reckless endangerment."
The police had arrested Angel after he shot at a cabdriver in a bungled
holdup. He managed to convince the police that he was merely drunk
and had been shooting aimlessly in the air. In fact, as he explained to
me, "I was mad, and aimed right into the back of the cab, but the driver
just drove away." His best friend, Lestor, who also used to visit museums
with us and drew crayon pictures in my apartment, is currently serving a
ten-year sentence for shooting a member of a rival project stairway youth
crewgang. Angel currently works off the books cleaning a restaurant
downtown and his little brother, Manny, sometimes helps him. His
girlfriend moved in with him following the birth of their son in April
1994. She receives SSI.
Caesar's cousin Eddie (who spent time in reform school with Caesar as
a youth) continues to work as a New York City Transit Authority bus
driver and he has fathered several new children by different women.
Abraham, Primo's adopted grandfather, passed away in 1994 from old
age and alcoholism. He was living in a housing project for the elderly
with one of Candy's sisters and her three daughters. Candy's sister's
family was evicted by the Housing Authority following Abraham's death.
335
Epilogue
A substitute apartment was eventually found for Candy's sister's family
in a nearby set of projects a few blocks from the Game Room. In the
process, however, Candy's sister had a nervous breakdown and had to be
hospitalized for her depression. Her boyfriend was allowed to keep custody of her three teenage daughters during the interim and they were not
placed in foster care. Nevertheless, two of her daughters became pregnant
during the transitional months.
Primo's oldest sister no longer manages a McDonald's downtown; she
reduced her hours to half time so she could look for a better job. She is
one of the 120 individuals who buy the Sunday New York Times on La
Farmacia's corner. Primo says, "She buys it for the want ads, and sends
out hundreds of resumes every week." I helped her rewrite her standardized cover letter and resume, and learned that she had no other work
experience besides McDonald's, despite being almost thirty years old.
She refused my suggestion of constructing an "exaggerated" work history,
and hopes nevertheless to find an "office job" through the want ads. She
recently bought a new Jeep Cherokee on credit. She parks it in front of
their housing project but it has never been vandalized or burglarized
because, as Primo explains, "people know her, and respect her, I guess."
Primo's middle sister recently moved out of her project apartment in El
Barrio to a private apartment complex in New Jersey. She has separated
from her husband because of his "verbal abuse." He continues to work as
a porter in an office building on Wall Street and pays child support.
Primo's sister is looking for an affordable day-care arrangement for her
three young children so she can return to work as a nurse's aide at Beth
Israel Hospital in downtown Manhattan.
Primo's youngest sister just moved from the South Bronx to Poughkeepsie, New York, where she bought a $170,000 house with her husband,
who qualified for a "veteran's loan." Her husband continues to drive a
United Parcel Service delivery truck, but she had to leave her job at a
small department store in El Barrio. She is pregnant with their second
child.
The block where I lived has not changed appreciably, despite the closing
of the Game Room in 1992. The Game Room's premises were renovated
and it is currently occupied by a legal video movierental outlet. There
are two new crack sales spots on the block: One operates out of a formerly
legal hairdressing salon; the other is on the stoop of Angel and Manny's
building. Both of the teenage-run, discount crack-selling spots, located
336
Epilogue
in separate project stairways, are still in business. The bogus botanka that
sells powder cocaine on the block is also still in operation. A new and
apparently well-run and completely legal bodega opened on the block.
One of the abandoned tenements opposite the housing projects was
renovated with public funds and it houses formerly homeless families.
The tenement where Manny and Angel live, however, has fallen into
grave disrepair since the death of its elderly Italian landlord, and is on
the verge of becoming uninhabitable.
La Farmacia's corner has also not changed significantly despite the
permanent closing of Ray's social club. The Palestinian-run grocery store
that subsequently occupied the social club's former premises is closed,
following a major fire that also damaged the abandoned building above
it. The other Palestinian-Yemeni-owned corner grocery store still sells
120 copies of the New York Times every Sunday, and has even begun
stocking 65 copies of the newspaper for sale each weekday. Emaciated
addicts and dealers continue to congregate at La Farmacia's corner,
twenty-four hours a day, hawking a wide array of illicit drugs.
I saw one of the formerly pregnant women who used to frequent the
Game Room, hanging out on the curb in front of the new hairdressing
salon crackhouse. She is pregnant once again. Caesar claims she has had a
total of four babies since she started smoking crack, and that none of her
children live with her. Witnessing her situation, and seeing several other
incidents with parents abusing their children during the few weeks that
I spent back in El Barrio in the spring and early summer of 1994 made
me realize I had lost the defense mechanisms that allow people on the
street to "normalize" personal suffering and violence. For example, I still
cannot forget the expression in the terrified, helpless eyes of the five-yearold boy who was watching his mother argue with a cocaine dealer at 2:00
a.m. in the stairway of a tenement where Primo and I had taken shelter
from a thunder shower on my second night back in the neighborhood.
Primo shrugged when I tried to discuss the plight of the child with him,
"Yeah, Felipe, I know, I hate seeing that shit too. It's wack."
337

In Search of Respect (Epilogue)

Transféré par

Informations du document

Titre original

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

In Search of Respect (Epilogue)

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Cambridge Books Online

Sometimes at night I stand in front of my son. I just look at him, and I

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi