In Search of Respect

The researcher's heart dropped at the possibility of accessing a crackhouse scene.
Felipe introduced the researcher to Primo.
Primo was shy and giggled, turning away as if to hide his face.
Carmen was asked, loudly in English, which precinct had picked the researcher up.
The researcher mumbled an embarrassed protest about not being an undercover officer.
The researcher claimed to want to write a book about "the street and the neighborhood."
The researcher slunk into the background after buying a round of beers.
The researcher prolonged the awkwardness by purchasing the wrong kind of beer.
Primo only drank 16-ounce bottles of Private Stock, a new brand of malt liquor.
Private Stock was marketed on Harlem billboards featuring brown-skinned women in leopard skins to attract young, inner-city street alcoholics.
It took less than two weeks for Primo to warm up to the researcher's presence.
The researcher had to pass the Game Room every day to reach the supermarket, bus stop, or subway.
Primo was usually outside the arcade surrounded by teenage girls.
Initially, they just nodded politely to each other.
After a week, Primo invited the researcher for a beer.
They shared Private Stocks with Maria, Primo's fifteen-year-old girlfriend, and Benito (Benzie), his lookout.
Benzie was a short, loud-voiced twenty-year-old whose swagger hid a limp from a dumdum bullet in his femur.
Primo invited the researcher into the back of the Game Room, where the crack supply was hidden.
He laid out a dime bag of powder cocaine, "We Are the World" brand, sold across the avenue under a mural for famine relief in Ethiopia.
The researcher worried about ruining rapport by turning down the offer.
Primo and Benzie were thrilled the researcher did not "sniff."
This was the researcher's first encounter with the contradictory code of street ethics that equates drug use with the work of the devil.
Primo, Benzie, Maria, and others had never interacted with a friendly white person before.
They were relieved the researcher was hanging out with them out of genuine interest rather than to obtain drugs.
The only whites they had seen closely were school principals, policemen, parole officers, and angry bosses.
Even their schoolteachers and social workers were largely African-American and Puerto Rican.
Primo had always wanted to converse with a representative of mainstream, “drug-free” white America.
The researcher spent a few hours at the Game Room crackhouse chatting with Primo, Benzie, or Caesar.
The researcher became an exotic object of prestige; the crackhouse habitués wanted to be seen in public with him.
The researcher had unwittingly stepped into a field of power relations.
The researcher's next challenge was to break through the impressions-management game playing that inverse power relationships inevitably entail.
Primo presented himself as superior to the "sinvergüenza mamao' [shameless scum] all around us here."
Primo tried to differentiate himself