Floating City

by Sudhir Venkatesh

  “What I’m doing is not like what Brittany is doing,” she said. “If I was doing that, forget it. My friends, my reputation, my whole world would be over. But this is different. I’m just a manager.”

  What psychological mechanism, I wondered, persuades an intelligent, sophisticated person to believe in superhero powers of invisibility and invincibility? I was both fascinated and outraged. “This whole world is dangerous! You think you can keep it a secret? You really think Brittany isn’t telling anyone?”

  She thought for a moment, then shrugged sheepishly. “Well, maybe. But I’ll deny deny deny.”

  Was she really stumbling into this so thoughtlessly? Should I keep listening to these foolish rationalizations? Or should I be the good friend who shocks her back into clear-eyed thought? After all, I was a student of this world. I knew more than I ever wanted to know about its pitfalls and tragedies. The least I could do was give her some idea of the trouble she was getting into.

  “Can I tell you the number one thing the ’brokers’ I know worry about? It’s not the police.”

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “It’s the image. The idea that they use drugs and violence to maintain their hold over confused young girls who were probably sexually abused by uncles and fathers. That’s what makes it okay to send them to jail for a long time. I mean, weren’t you sharing cocaine with Brittany last night? Imagine how that would sound in court.”

  “That’s fucking crazy!” Analise yelled, throwing herself back on the couch so hard she spilled her vodka. “You’ve seen Brittany! Like I have to force drugs on her so she’ll obey my evil wishes.”

  “I don’t think that ’like I have to force drugs on her’ is going to be an effective defense in court,” I said.

  Calmer now, I went into professional sociologist mode. The need to put Analise’s activities into an analytic frame took over. “How many women do you manage?”

  From my voice, you’d think I had a clipboard and a number 2 pencil.

  Analise’s eyes widened. She wasn’t expecting specific questions. But I have found that specific and even minutely detailed questions actually relax people, grounding their confessions in scientific objectivity.

  “Five,” she answered. “Sometimes six or seven. But five on a regular basis.”

  “Okay, five,” I said. Pondering the other people I knew in her line of work and all the activities I had entered into little boxes and charts over the last few years, I began running the numbers in my head. “So you’re pulling in, I’d say, at least five thousand dollars per week. At least. But I figure that probably five weeks won’t be profitable because you’ll be on vacation or whatever, so I’d say you’ll earn about a hundred thousand dollars a year on this. And you’re probably laundering it through Max, yes?”

  Max was her family lawyer. I knew him from some foundation work. Her expression showed me I had scored a direct hit.

  “So you’re evading currency laws and tax laws and banking six figures and you’re telling me you’ve never even nudged any one of your five young employees to work extra or keep working or—what was it you told Brittany yesterday? ’So just drink’?”

  “That’s an awful thing to say,” Analise said.

  “I’m sorry, but you’re a ’broker.’ That’s what brokers do.”

  “That really hurts, Sudhir.”

  “Think about it, Analise. Have you had that conversation yet, the one where one of the women says she wants to stop? You’d lose twenty thousand dollars a year. Are you sure you won’t try to talk her into sticking it out just a little bit longer? ’Just one more time’? What if Junebug says he’ll leave you if you don’t give him money to buy an amazing script he found?”

  The vodka was making me belligerent. She ducked her head and I continued.

  “I know this shit, Analise. One night something bad happens in some fucked-up hotel and they come crying to you and you talk them down. You calm them. You may even call the dude and calm him because you don’t want him to be a threat and you’re the perfect broker-manager-psychiatrist who thinks of everything and covers all the bases. And you feel great! Because you did it! You came through! They needed you and you got the job done! And you got paid! And maybe you even got the client to pay you extra to keep things out of the press, because, well … that’s just how good you are.”

  By then, Analise was crying. When I noticed, I felt awful. The poor thing just got beat up by her boyfriend and here I was haranguing her. “I’m sorry,” I said. “That was really uncalled-for.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “I’m a pimp.”

  “No! I got carried away. You took me by surprise.”

  “But I like this job,” she said. “I like helping these girls. I am helping them.”

  Suddenly she lifted her head up and started to laugh. “And okay, no, I am not Mother Teresa. I do like the thrill of it. I do. I like crime.”

  The truth was, Analise probably was helping them. In the high-paid world of New York prostitution, I had learned, the majority of “brokers” were women who “age out” by moving from selling their bodies to managing or “helping” others who did. And all the ones I had met were, like Analise, white and fairly well educated. They played a variety of roles, from consigliere to confidante. The best helped their women find doctors and lawyers and helped them manage their money—for a fee, of course—by laundering it and setting up legitimate bank accounts. They offered counsel in times of trouble and got them out of jail with a call to a friendly cop. Eventually, some even helped them exit the sex trade for marriage or a comfortable retirement. As much as I could have sat there describing this underground sorority, I mostly wanted Analise to see the dark side too.

  But this was a good place to stop. I suggested she get some sleep.

  She looked up at me with a shy expression. “Will you keep on talking to me about this stuff? Not tonight, but sometime. It feels good to talk about it, and nobody else understands.”

  This made me feel very strange. Again, listening to intimate confessions is my job. Trust is an emotion I’ve spent a lifetime learning to encourage. But on this night something was off. In my teaching and writing, I would often repeat with confidence a statement that now strikes me as downright reckless: The poor live in the same world as you and me, and it’s the job of the sociologist to demonstrate these relationships. Now Analise was teaching me an uncomfortable truth. In real life, I did seem to feel more comfortable studying people of a lower economic and educational level. I hated admitting it. It hurt to admit it. But it was true. I had been trained to fit people into boxes, to draw lines between drug dealer and sex worker and rich kid and socialite. In fact, the entire premise of academic sociology is that each individual has his own little world and economy that can be studied and charted out, so the smart thing to do, in order to document social roles, is find people who are not changing.

  My own background was hobbling me too. Like it or not, as a “Chicago sociologist” I had internalized the idea that the Chicago style of urban living was universal: that people stayed in neighborhoods segregated by race and class, blacks with blacks and whites with whites, poor separated from rich, and their children living in the same way, the patterns passed down through generations. Now that was a setting handmade for a sociologist. All an eager, aspiring young ethnographer had to do was hang out long enough for the locals to let you into their lives. Shine had been telling me since our very first meeting to get a car and drive around the city and get a feeling for the immensity of it—the huge variety of communities and peoples and neighborhoods—but I’d dismissed it as the usual boilerplate advice people give tourists. The truth was, despite all my own concerns about the transition from Chicago and my tentative steps into the rich variety of worlds contained in the city of New York, broad and shallow was just not my style. I really did believe in immersion. Find a place, hang out, get to know the people, and keep coming back. But Shine kept pushing me. “You need to move around more, you u
nderstand? I keep telling you, but you don’t listen.” Now I was realizing that Shine and Analise were teaching me the same thing. So were many of the other New Yorkers I had met and studied. They were all pointing me away from the idea of static, unchanging lives to the themes of movement and change. Instead of drawing boundaries, they were crossing them. Instead of looking for places to anchor their work, they were constantly pulling their anchors up and putting them down elsewhere, wherever a new opportunity arose. My challenge was similar. New York was different and it needed its own kind of sociology. It required new concepts beyond neighborhood and a new method of immersion that wasn’t fixed in place. These people were on the move. That was the defining fact about them, and their true community seemed to be the sum of all the relationships they were forging, the many social ties that they formed as they crossed the terrain of the city. So losing the notion of geographic areas as primordial urban units of socialization was my first step.

  But what did it mean to frame “community” as a network? Especially in the underground economy, a dangerous place by definition, where patterns of life were fragile and elusive? And these New Yorkers were moving not just in physical space; they were also reaching beyond their preordained lot in life. Capturing this might mean setting aside other equally tried-and-true sociological principles, such as Where we come from defines who we are or Education is the key predictor of success. Those truisms weren’t going to explain why a crack dealer was going to art shows or why the daughter of a wealthy financier was moonlighting as a madam. I was watching entrepreneurship in its truest and fullest sense, risk taking for both material gain and personal transformation. Since New York’s underground economy gave its residents a chance to reinvent themselves across worlds—since it was the chance encounter across predictable boundaries that could bring people like Shine and Analise more dollars or stature—I needed a sociology built less on neighborhoods and more on the networks anthropologist Clifford Geertz called “webs of significance.” By watching the underground economy’s hidden strivers, I could record a form of social mobility that had little to do with college degrees or handshakes at corporate boardrooms. And though the pursuits of the underground were the timeless essence of New York, money and success, they also spoke to what the city was becoming in the twenty-first century: global in feel and increasingly fast paced, its people endlessly shuttling across familiar social landscapes and tribal boundaries as they wove new patterns in the world. This was the future being made, and I was there to document it.

  My excitement began to rise.

  At the same time, so did a queasy feeling. None of these ideas felt solid or certain or quantifiable on a spreadsheet in any way. They felt like quickened breaths, much like the ones I took when Analise told me about her new profession. I wasn’t in formal research mode and certainly couldn’t explain any of this in a way that would be comprehensible to most of my colleagues. I hadn’t yet done any of the things a good researcher should do: design a careful study, be a skeptic, find more data, and keep questioning until some version of truth arose. But the feeling alone was already raising fundamental questions about how I did my work and what it was good for. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I was compelled to question the framework that had given so much meaning to my life, the lines I had drawn around myself. I couldn’t sit. I had to move. I had to follow where things took me.

  • • •

  I left Analise sitting on the guest room bed, a bit forlorn and a bit drunk, a beautiful, lost girl who had somehow become an enthusiastic criminal. I walked back down the hall and stood in the doorway to the living room. The vodka glasses were still on the table. I was woozy too, drunker than I’d thought. A drifting feeling washed over me, maybe the oldest feeling I knew: the fear of being unmoored and unattached and lost. I had no idea what to do next.

  This unsettling doubt was the flash that finally lit up the pattern in the rich chaos of the last five years. Five years of prostitutes, drug dealers, madams, johns, porn clerks, and cops finally began to make sense, or at least hint at the possibility of making sense. The first pages of this book had just been written, and now all I had to do was learn how to read them—to understand this story, and my own.

  CHAPTER 2

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  Now spin the wheel back to those first tentative steps. A new century was looming, bright and shining with possibility. I was settling into New York City, starting my exciting new job at Columbia University as a young professor striking out for the first time. I couldn’t wait to set up a new apartment, get to know my new colleagues and students, and develop some new research projects.

  A few warning signs appeared. My wife and I felt conflicted about leaving Chicago. I started to feel guilty about moving us out of the comfortable home we had created in the Midwest.

  Columbia wasn’t the easiest place to start my career, but it was the best place. The university had a reputation for treating young faculty poorly. Rarely did they grant tenure, and when they did, junior professors were still thought of as expendable labor. Most of my friends and advisers urged me not to take the job. But I turned down the other offers that came my way—including one from the downtown competitor, NYU—because I was hungry and I felt I needed the stature and challenge of an Ivy League badge. The pressure cooker of the University of Chicago taught me that I needed a high-stakes environment to motivate me.

  The department was going through a period of transition. In a bitter struggle between two competing visions of sociology, Herbert Gans represented the discipline’s original aim. A public intellectual who wrote for a wide audience, he carried the mantle of the great old Columbia sociologists, like Robert Merton and C. Wright Mills, who combined vivid storytelling with thoughtful explorations of great national issues.

  But a genuine respect for this tradition sat uneasily next to the growing belief that sociology should be a science. Gans’s contemporaries, like Harrison White (a trained physicist) and his enigmatic and ambitious student Peter Bearman, were formalists who fought for a much narrower, lab-coat view of the discipline, focusing on objective research and academic sobriety. This had been the trend since the 1960s, when young sociologists decided to fight for their legitimacy as scientists by drawing a contrast with the swashbuckling anthropologists and new journalists. Opinions hardened to the point where many scholars had a knee-jerk definition of academic quality—if too many people can read your work, it must not be very good. But if you could quantify your research and make it sufficiently unreadable, then you were onto something. Translated into my life, the warning was simple: “Write only for sociologists, because a popular book might jeopardize your chances for tenure.”

  I was caught in the middle, searching for my own way. Truth be told, I shared the same view of sociology as Bearman and the scientists: only through careful, systematic observation and analysis could we really learn about the world. I didn’t want to give that up. In my own career, I had gained a great deal of credibility by being objective and attentive to detail. Being seen as a scientist opened up doors and helped me to avoid the “activist” label used to dismiss researchers who become advocates for various methods of social change. I spent as much time with White and Bearman as I could, learning as much as I could about their approach.

  At the same time, I knew I was hired because my research spoke to social issues like race, inequality, and the fate of our cities, subjects that fell squarely into Columbia’s legacy of encouraging the public intellectual tradition. In this regard, I had already been schooled by working with Professor William Julius Wilson in Chicago. As my graduate adviser, Wilson always insisted that the scientific method alone was incapable of swaying the opinion of policy makers or the public. You also had to write well. You had to tell a story. Wilson would do it with epochal books like The Declining Significance of Race and The Truly Disadvantaged, in which his vivid and passionate writing reached beyond the academic community and changed the way his generation looked at poverty. I wanted to rea
ch out to a larger audience too, to touch hearts and minds of people who were riding the train to work as well as those sitting in offices making public policy.

  With this in mind, I had spent many hours in the university archives in Chicago researching the history of the field. I discovered that the two contrasting visions were, in fact, the original tension that caused its birth. One of the founding fathers was Robert Park, a journalist by training. He argued for a sociology that could inform the public. He incorporated the criticisms of the scholars who were pushing for a more scientific, empirical approach, recognizing the dangers, inherent in journalism, of anecdotal portraits that proved nothing of broader significance. In the piles of archival notes I noticed that one scholar had scribbled, “Rigor and Relevance.” That summed it up for me: truthful, scientifically valid insights that are comprehensible and that speak to timely social issues. I tried to achieve these two objectives with my first book for the general public, Gang Leader for a Day. Its success meant that a few more people understood the complicated struggles for America’s urban poor, from their complex strategies for putting food on the table to fending off the local drug lord. More truth and fewer clichés meant better social policy and, ultimately, better lives for the people I studied. That was the theory, anyway.

  But the two visions were like warring bulls. If you went too deep into storytelling, you were labeled a journalist. If you went too far into hard-nosed, number-crunching science, you were doomed to the bookshelves of specialists. When I arrived at Columbia, I couldn’t find a middle ground. Although my colleagues were supportive and encouraging, everyone gave me the same intimidating advice: publish in the leading journals (which were all dominated by scientists) or you won’t receive tenure. It seemed that I would have to pursue wider relevance at my own risk.

  For me, it was a devil’s bargain. As an ethnographer, I was confronted with a problem that went far beyond literary style. My specialty was selecting from the chaos and splendor of the given world one small part that could stand for the whole: the perfect research topic, the world in a grain of sand. But the approach of the lab coats was statistical. They favored long questionnaires, computer analysis, lots of numbers from the United States Census. They’d laugh at me if I focused on one small part of the city. And I couldn’t even argue that they were completely wrong. I wasn’t a journalist studying individuals. What I found had to be applicable to a bigger population. I would have to say something about the entire city—all New Yorkers! And right then, I could barely find the subway.