In Search of Respect

Bourgois starts with a quote from Felix, who felt important and respected when running the Game Room, but then reveals that the crack trade is like “any other risky private sector retail enterprise,” and would be “overwhelmingly routine and tedious” if it did not include a sense of danger.

In the section “Living with Crack,” Bourgois explains the Game Room’s origins: Felix, Primo’s cousin and Ray’s old friend, originally founded it but ran it badly—he “did not insulate himself from the police” and spent most of his time sleeping with teenage addicts, to the chagrin of his wife Candy.

Primo buys his supply at the Game Room in those days, after leaving his job, wife, and child to move back in with his mother and start mugging people to fund his habit. He tells Bourgois about robbing and threatening to kill a drunk Mexican man in his aunt’s apartment building. (Caesar, who is addicted at the time of Bourgois’s research, interrupts to comment on how much he loves crack).

One day, Candy discovers Felix sleeping with her sister, and the confrontation leads to him hurting his ankle, either from jumping off a staircase landing or from a knife Candy throws at him. He enlists Primo to help manage the crackhouse, and ironically working there is what gets Primo to quit crack. Some time later, Candy shoots Felix (also for sleeping with her sister) and he goes to prison as soon as he gets out of the hospital. Candy sells the Game Room to Ray, who has just returned from prison.

In “Restructuring Management at the Game Room,” Bourgois explains what happens after Ray takes over the crackhouse and imposes his stricter rules, but leaves Primo in charge. “A brilliant labor relations manager,” Ray uses controlled violence and gestures of friendship to control his workers, most of whom are family (by blood, marriage, or “fictive kinship arrangement[s]” like being godparents to one another’s children or having those children with the same women). The Game Room’s profits soar after Ray takes control, both improves quality and cuts prices, and kicks out rival gangs who begin filtering into his block. He soon opens two more crackhouses.

Within a year, Primo is in the upper echelons of Ray’s business hierarchy: he gets “benefits” (protection if he gets arrested, gifts, and fancy dinners), but the people he hires as lookouts, like Caesar, get nothing but the pay he negotiates with them. Caesar’s predecessor Benzie disrespected too many people, so Primo fired him, but Primo does not trust Caesar either. And Primo himself often berates customers, especially African Americans and women.

Under “Curbing Addiction and Channeling Violence,” Bourgois elaborates on Caesar’s unpredictable behavior whenever he goes on a crack binge—he steals and attacks people, but he and Primo remain close, perhaps “because [Primo] sympathized with Caesar’s crack addiction” (since Primo himself quit through stable work at the Game Room), or perhaps because he can pay Caesar (like the other addicts who work as lookouts) in crack instead of cash. Primo tries changing Caesar’s pay schedule to limit his drug usage, but Caesar mostly remains an effective employee, in part because of his penchant for violence. Caesar brags about nearly killing a man with a baseball bat, an episode Bourgois remembers vividly, and he gets social security money because he is “a certified nut case.”

Unlike Caesar, during his time at the Game Room Benzie managed to quit crack, replacing it with powder cocaine and occasional heroin. And interestingly, Benzie had a legal job doing boat maintenance, which he quit to deal. Primo and Benzie reminisce about how much they used to make—at least $200 a night—and how they used to blow all of it on hotels and parties.

In the section “Minimum Wage Crack Dealers,” Bourgois turns explicitly to “the mystery of why most street-level crack dealers remain penniless.” Like most people, they overspend when they earn a lot in a short period of time, and unlike most people, they have “limited options for spending [this] money constructively in the legal economy.” While they brag about their high pay, it is not so simple. They are paid based on what they sell, which on average comes out to a wage of $7-8 an hour (double the minimum in the 1980s). Sometimes they make much more, and they tend to remember the best nights at the expense of the average ones. One day, Bourgois looks through Primo’s wallet to figure out how much he is making and accidentally finds $15 worth of food stamps, which Primo says is from his mother “for emergencies.”

Besides dealing’s low wages, Bourgois continues, it is also horrible work: it is dangerous and the Game Room lacks heating and air conditioning, a bathroom and a telephone. People sit around on “grimy milk crates and bent aluminum schools” under an exposed light bulb, withstanding the “smell of urine and vomit.” Primo emphasizes that he hates it. Benzie regrets losing his old job doing maintenance at the yacht club after spending all night partying and all morning with a woman. Eventually, Benzie steals from Ray and ends up in jail, then starts working a minimum wage job when he gets out. He still does drugs on the weekends, during which he tells Primo how great it is to work legally and proclaims (while sniffing cocaine) that he “do[es] not do drugs.” For the first time, he says, he has self-respect.

Primo also sometimes admits to Bourgois that he would “rather be legal,” making reliable money and looking forward to building wealth in the future. But people get into dealing for the opposite reason—Bourgois will cover this more in depth in the following chapter, but essentially, they see legal labor as degrading and inhumane. One lookout, Willie, recalls signing up for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals—because he loves animals—and then learning that his job is to collect the corpses of euthanized animals in carts for garbage collection.

Under “Management-Labor Conflict at the Game Room,” Bourgois notes that Primo’s status as the crackhouse boss makes his own lack of legal opportunities less obvious to those working under and buying from him. However, when Ray begins investing heavily in his other business, the Social Club next to La Farmacia, he grows more demanding and begins cutting into Primo’s authority: Ray hires his own lookouts and lowers Primo’s per-piece salary. In response, Primo starts drinking and using drugs more often, and Ray starts working him part-time. (This is also a response to the further increased quality and decreased prices of the Game Room’s competitors.)

The Game Room gets moved, then shut down, then reopened with an inferior product (since Ray’s former supplier got imprisoned). Primo and Caesar speculate about what Ray must be thinking and complain about their low pay. But, when Bourgois probes the topic, they launch back into war stories about their highest-paying nights and proclaim they are looking forward to the beginning of the new month (when “monneeey” comes in). Ray and the new guy he hires to take over part of Primo’s shift, Tony, grow more and more suspicious of Primo and Caesar, especially when crack starts disappearing. Everyone suspects Caesar, but the culprit is actually “Ray’s jack-of-all-trades maintenance worker” Gato. Ray beats Gato up and forces him to start selling crack to pay back the supply he stole. To boot, Ray negotiates down Tony’s salary, knowing that Tony and Primo hate each other too much to work together and demand better treatment.

Under the heading “The Crackhouse Clique: Dealing with Security,” Bourgois explains that, despite his difficulties, Primo still appears to run the show, and is popular among the large crowd that always hangs out around the crackhouse (especially the teenage girls). Bourgois later realizes that these omnipresent loiterers help inform Primo about the competition, “camouflage the comings and goings of the emaciated addicts,” distract the police (especially the 72-year-old one-eyed alcoholic Abraham, who collects quarters from the game machines), and protect the crackhouse against potential mugging or attacks.

In fact, the Game Room does get robbed twice during Bourgois’s research, and being around friends makes Primo’s job feel less perilous and means there is always a witness if something goes wrong. In fact, Bourgois’s “white face” was probably part of this deterrence strategy—potential robbers probably thought he was an undercover cop, so would stay away from the Game Room. And, of course, Primo’s army of acquaintances also helps him weed out undercover cops.

Despite making “tens of thousands” of sales and moving at least a million dollars during Bourgois’s research, Primo only gets arrested twice, and this is a more frequent rate of arrest than those at Ray’s other operations. The police, in short, are incompetent and distant from the community—in five years, they never learn to recognize Bourgois, who is invariably the only white man around and even starts going to police-led “community outreach meetings.” In the Game Room, Primo and his associates sold in spots shielded from view and made sure too much crack was never visible at once. They also have to learn to judge when to hide their drugs to avoid a police raid, but not to do it so often that it gets in the way of sales.

Primo tells Bourgois how he learned to spot and reject cops. His one criminal conviction came when he carelessly sold to a man without looking at him, and then got caught in the process of stashing the drugs. But his only punishment was probation. And he avoided jail after his second arrest when the police mixed him up with Caesar and undermined the prosecutor’s case.