Epilogue 2003

Summary

I have maintained a warm friendship with Primo since publishing the first edition of this book. I visit him at least once a year, usually over a period of several weeks each summer. He tells me how everyone who used to sell crack for Ray is doing, and we try to visit as many of our old friends and acquaintances from the block as possible. As of my last visit during the summer of 2002:

Primo's mother died and Primo was evicted from her housing project apartment on the one-strike-you're-out ruling for an outstanding charge of heroin possession (not sale!). For five years he lived in the project apartment of Candy's sister, Esperanza. He has maintained a stable relationship with her daughter, Jasmine, who worked as a cashier in a discount store for three years and then switched to becoming a teller with full benefits at a neighborhood bank in the South Bronx. Primo continues to refrain from drug dealing and from consuming alcohol or cocaine. An undocumented Senegalese street vendor of bootleg videotapes converted him to the Muslim religion and he no longer eats pork. He does, however, occasionally sniff heroin and claims to still enjoy the high despite being on a new semiexperimental heroin treatment medicine derived from a longer-acting version of methadone, levo-alpha-acetyl-methadol (LAAM). He developed a full-blown addiction to heroin when he was working during the summers as a night porter in a luxury high-rise building (Bourgois, 2000).