In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio

In “Living with Crack,” Bourgois tackles the management of Ray’s crackhouse, the Game Room. The crackhouse was actually owned by Primo’s first cousin, Felix. Felix, however, was a horrible manager. He spent his time and energy preying on female addicts like teenage girls, using his influence to gain sexual favors. Bourgois notes that Primo was one of Felix’s best customers during the early crack epidemic in 1985. Primo admits he was a huge user, and he tells Bourgois some of the things he dealt with while using. Primo recalls a time when he was high and saw a Mexican man sleeping in the lobby of a building. The man had a gold ring on and didn’t look homeless. Primo asked the man for the time and when the man flashed his ring, Primo grabbed him and placed a knife at his back. He threatened the man and admits to Bourgois that he really would have stabbed him if the man hadn’t complied. Primo then goes on a rant about how Mexicans are "a joke" (79)and nothing like Puerto Ricans. He, his friend, and a girl he was seeing then robbed the man and took his ring. He also admits that they tricked the girl. They left her in the park with nothing while they took the gold chain and the ring and sold it. Caesar also admits that he enjoys consuming crack. He likens the feeling to eating potato chips: "You can't have just one. You need more, 'cause it's good" (80).

The narrative then returns to Felix’s story. Felix’s downfall came when he met up with one of his sexual conquests in a hotel, and his wife, Candy, found out. She went to the hotel, but Felix tried to jump out the window, only to break his foot on the fall. He then asked Primo to help out in the crackhouse while his foot healed. With Primo there, business got better. Primo also found himself going straight and devoting more time to managing than using. This was almost sidelined, however, when Candy shot Felix in the stomach for his extramarital affairs. When Felix healed, he was sent to prison for an unrelated weapons charge, and Candy sold the business to Ray, who had just come from prison himself.

Ray, it turns out, is a brilliant and adept manager for the Game Room. One of the things he does to turn a profit is to take a higher profit margin from his workers. Ray also plays to the cultural norms of his fellow Puerto Ricans by respecting these norms while also instilling fear through violence. He expertly shows others that he isn’t vulnerable, and that he can even be friendly when he wants. The Puerto Rican constructs of respect—"age, gender, and kinship" (53)—works in Ray’s favor as well. Most of those who work for him are related in some way or other, and he plays on this loyalty. One example given is when he asks Primo to be a godfather to one of his sons. This maneuver establishes a "compadre relationship" (82), or a familial bond through friendship. The compadre relationship is a powerful cultural norm in Puerto Rican culture, one that eschews solitary action for group action, and one that requires reciprocal actions among men. Ray also uses the fact that Puerto Rican culture dictates that women often set-up "serial households"(82) over the course of their lives, thereby connecting friends and family even more.

In “Curbing Addiction and Channeling Violence,” Bourgois takes a closer look at violence among his subjects. Even though Primo and Caesar are close friends, Caesar is prone to violent outbursts that come about from drugs and alcohol. The others have to detain him and stop him from going too far in the Game Room at times. Hebinges on crack every pay period, and then borrows or steals from even his friends. Despite these flaws, Primo admits that Caesar does an excellent job at being a lookout for the Game Room. One of the most important jobs for workers in the crackhouse is making sure no one disrespects Ray or the crackhouse. Only one person, a young man who was high on angel dust, dared to disrespect Ray in his business by starting an argument. Bourgois says the young man was carried away from the crackhouse with "a fractured skull" (88). Caesar jokes that his rage has a plus side. Namely, that he collects monthly checks for his illness, and that he aids this by attempting suicide occasionally. 

Even though Primo hired Caesar and trusts him, Ray doesn’t trust Caesar, which is why he’s never been formally initiated into Ray’s network. Caesar knows this, however, but doesn’t stop from aspiring to rise in Ray’s network. Caesar also knows that if he is ever sent to jail, Ray has his back. Ray might not trust him because of his anger issues, but he will help get him out. He knows how useful Caesar is for the Game Room’s security. Bourgois then turns to the interesting case of Benzie, who was hired to replace Caesar as lookout when Caesar had a falling out due to his crack addiction. Benzie actually had a legal job as a janitor, but he didn’t like how he was treated. Oddly enough, he was able to use his job under Primo as a way to diminish his drug habit: "He managed to limit his alcohol and cocaine-cum-heroin binging to weekends" (95). When he became a street seller, he had to have all of his wits and so went "straight" (81).

Bourgois next looks at spending. He notes that spending large amounts of money as soon as one gets it is not something unique to the underground economy and to people like Primo and Caesar. Because America is built on an infrastructure of material goods and services, even white- and blue-collar legal workers are guilty of spending "income windfalls" (91). It’s just that those in poverty, or those in his study of East Harlem, are more noticeable. Crack dealers also have fewer avenues to spend money legally, thereby reinforcing the underground economy with their money. For those like Primo, payment often comes in piece-rate commission. This means that Primo is paid based upon how well, or how much, he sells. Primo admits to Bourgois that he’d like a legal job, as many in the underworld of East Harlem would, but there aren’t enough opportunities for them. Bourgois notes that despite their desire to do and be better, many of his subjects are not able to make the connection between dependency and outcome. In other words, their reliance on drugs and need for crack as a source of income vies with their desire for legal work.

In the next section, “Management-Labor Conflict at the Game Room,” Bourgois outlines conflicts between Ray and his employees, most notably his war with Primo. To make more profit, Ray kept his other business, the Social Club, open for a 16-hour shift, meaning the bar was open every day except Sunday. He also spruced up the Social Club while neglecting the Game Room. This move allowed him to expand his power of influence over his employees, but ultimately led to a showdown between Ray and Primo when Primo was demoted to a senior salesman from the position of manager. Another employee, Tony, was then hired, thereby limiting Primo to working only two nights a week. Ray told Primo that the changes were due to his excessive tardiness and his inability to stop violence from breaking out at the Game Room. Primo retaliated by becoming more dependent on drugs and alcohol and by being even more tardy, which in turn caused Ray to fire him outright for two-week probationary periods.

Conflict also arose between Caesar and Ray. Caesar was subcontracted through Primo, but when Ray and Caesar got into arguments, Ray demanded that Primo fire Caesar. Primo refused, causing Ray to change Caesar’s work schedule as well. These changes meant that Caesar no longer worked on the coveted Thursday spot. This night was important because municipal workers got paid and spent their checks on Thursday night, meaning the night’s worker received a nice payout. These conflicts continued, and Bourgois next shows how Caesar and Primo internalized these workforce problems by joining together in their hatred for Tony. Tony, feeling slighted, then did his best to antagonize Caesar and Primo. Things were looking bleak when three bundles of crack mysteriously disappeared. The crack was inside the Pac-Man machine where it’s always kept, but disappeared between Primo’s Tuesday night shift and Tony’s Wednesday night shift. Everyone claimed innocence, with Ray wanting to kill or seriously injure the culprit. The next night another three bundles were stolen, angering Ray further. Because he couldn’t tell who stole the crack, he deducted the money from both Tony and Primo, but sales were so bad that he had to give them payment plans to repay him. Even though many people, including Bourgois, believed that Caesar was the culprit, it turned out to be Gato, the "jack-of-all-trades maintenance worker" (104). He’d fixed the Game Room so that there were false floorboards and was able to sneak into the Game Room when no one was around.

The people who surround the Game Room work as eyes and ears for Primo. As lookout, he provides these people with beer and occasional drugs. Primo befriends them to ensure their loyalty, something that Bourgois mentions is essential to keeping the Game Room out of trouble. Those in the street can warn Primo of violence before it starts and can help him in determining whether strangers are just new customers or undercover narcotics agents. Primo makes sure he doesn’t sell to people he doesn’t know or trust, and this helps the Game Room stay safe from the law.

Bourgois next turns to the sad state of the neighborhood itself to explain how the Game Room is also successful in not being raided constantly by the police. For starters, inner-city police are themselves "demoralized" (109). Other factors are incompetence and corruption. Cops who are fervent and adamant about their jobs in the neighborhood are unable to make the connections they need to find leads. Bourgois uses the example of himself, a white man who, even after he began attending police events to help combat drugs on the streets, was never recognized by local police on the street even after living there for more than five years.