1 - Violating Apartheid in the United States

Summary

We love listening to you talk. It makes us laugh. You sound just like a television advertisement.

giggling eight-year-old

My research on the streets of Spanish Harlem almost came to a disastrous end just after the halfway point when I inadvertently “disrespected” Ray, the man who owned the crackhouses where I spent much of my time between 1985 and 1990. It was just after midnight, and Ray was visiting his most profitable sales point to make sure the manager of the late-night shift had opened punctually. Business was booming and the heavyset, thirty-two-year-old Puerto Rican crack entrepreneur was surrounded by his coterie of employees, friends, and wanna-be acquaintances – all eager for his attention. We were on the corner of 110th Street by the entrance to the Lexington Avenue subway station right in front the abandoned four-story tenement building occupied by Ray's dealers. He had camouflaged the ground floor as an after-hours bootleg social club and pool hall. Ray and many of his employees had grown up in this very tenement before its Italian owner burned it down to collect its insurance value. Their corner has long been nicknamed “La Farmacia” because of the unique diversity of psychoactive substances available: from standard products like heroin, Valium, powder cocaine, and crack to more recherché, offbeat items like mescaline and angel dust.