Floating City

by Sudhir Venkatesh

  Now he was even more amused. “And what if I am getting something out of this, my brother? What if I am? We ain’t in church, are we?”

  In the underground, he was telling me, everyone is a user and everyone is a resource. I was no different.

  Looking back, I have to admit he gave me fair warning.

  • • •

  From the back room of the porn shop, I was beginning to map the ways that the local underground economy spread into the world beyond. My first priority was to interview enough women working indoors to finish my collaboration with the Urban Justice Center. Angela’s help was crucial here. I spoke to dozens of streetwalkers right in the back of the store. Sometimes the women took me around the neighborhood and pointed out the doctor that gave them off-the-books health care, the bartender who stored their money safely, the hair salons that gave them reduced rates. The information came quickly and I wrote it down as fast as I could.

  Sex brings people together, literally but also socially. It seemed to weave its threads all through this hidden world, bringing the community together in a thousand different ways. South Asians clerked and managed the video stores. West African men stood outside dance clubs to recruit johns. The wives of those West Africans provided day care to mothers who sold sexual services. Mexicans and Central Americans toiled clandestinely inside the video parlors and clubs as cleaners and laborers. And since the sex workers I was meeting came from every corner of the world—from Europe and Africa and Australia, from China and Singapore and Brazil—you could say the invisible thread of sex was weaving the whole world together. Certainly they were as global a phenomenon as a multinational executive on his corporate jet.

  Angela’s role in the life of Manjun’s shop seemed to perfectly demonstrate my thesis. The illegal money she brought in helped keep the legal business alive, and the legal business gave her a refuge for conducting her illegal business. There was no clear line between underground and aboveground. With her peers, I tried to trace the same connections through monetary transactions. How much did they earn? Where did they save and launder their money? Did they have credit cards or did they use loan sharks? With each answer, I was able to tease out a surprisingly elaborate infrastructure that ranged from Manjun’s store to the strip bars and peep shows, to the bars, hotels, and health clinics. I began to see that these women weren’t supporting drug habits—the conventional and suspiciously convenient view of prostitutes—but more likely families, neighborhoods, businesses. And most of the women also had other part-time gigs, often legal, that wove them into the community in another way.

  But the underground economy didn’t stop at sex and drugs, of course. Day laborers told me they earned only minimum wage for cleaning bodegas and washing dishes. Most worked sixty to seventy hours per week at multiple jobs. Each job brought them an average of three hundred dollars a week and lasted about nine to twelve months. They piled together in astonishingly cramped apartments, most of which violated every possible city zoning code. The security guards at the porn shops brought home about five dollars an hour, but their hours varied, so they also drove taxis and gypsy cabs. Homeless persons panhandled, shined shoes, and—when they could get away with it—washed car windshields at the more lively intersections. They made about a hundred dollars in any given week and they were routinely arrested for vagrancy, loitering, shoplifting, and other petty criminal acts.

  On and on I went, gathering data and identifying broad economic patterns. But good sociology is always a mixture of close focus and long shot. You dial in and pull back, dial in and pull back, a delicate dance over the data gaps. And as I pulled back, it became quite clear that, for many immigrants and underclass Americans in the area, the story of living in the global metropolis wasn’t at all glamorous. It was one of worsening outcomes and increasing vulnerability. This was most visible in the decline of street prostitution, for example. Women who might have brought home three hundred or four hundred dollars a night before told me they were barely making a hundred dollars a night and fought with one another over the lone john walking the streets. They were all depressed, and without a clear sense of what the future held.

  I felt the need to learn more about their vulnerability as well as the associations, like those of Mortimer and his friends, that helped them make ends meet. Since my work with the Urban Justice Center had given me expertise in the sexual underground, and since the sale of sex was so integral to this world as well, it made sense to keep sex work as a point of focus. I decided to look into the infrastructure that supported the sex workers to see what kinds of social networks wrapped around the sex trade to make the economy function. And to address the generalizability problem, I needed to broaden my reach. In 2003, I decided to focus on Manjun and three other South Asian–born store clerks who worked in the neighborhood. Two were from Bangladesh, one from India, and one from Pakistan—populations I had never studied. The challenge was figuring out how to win their trust.

  For the first few months, I met them on a casual basis, usually with Manjun during his after-work meals and tea breaks. Eventually I began to tell them about my anxieties about understanding New York, because I find that sharing my own personal anxieties is a useful means of building a relationship. I told them that I’d love to launch an in-depth study of the changes taking place around them. I told them I needed to find people who really trusted me, people who would allow me to enter their lives for long periods, before I could really start a long-term study. I was about to get into the subject of sex when one of them interrupted me with a knowing wink. “You should see what goes on in my store.”

  • • •

  This was Santosh, the oldest and the most successful of the four. At fifty-three, he was part owner of a thriving business and the patriarch of a large family that included his wife, his mother, several brothers and their families, two sons, and a daughter-in-law who was expecting the baby who would make him a grandfather. But the success of his American life was completely rooted in the underground economy of sex.

  He told me his story as he stood behind the counter of his store, stuffing years of epic immigrant drama into the snatched moments between sales. He arrived in 1993 and started off driving a cab. On a good night, he made one hundred dollars. After a year, he realized he could make a little more on slow nights by leaving his meter off and driving men around in search of prostitutes. Sometimes he’d walk away and let them use the backseat. In time, he developed a knowledge of bathhouses in Midtown and brothel brownstones up in central and Spanish Harlem where sex workers waited behind every door. In a ten-mile radius, he could find his customers a partner of any race, nationality, or sexual persuasion they desired. Each john gave him ten or twenty dollars to find a brothel or bathhouse, sex workers tipped him what they could afford at the end of the week, and the brothel owners paid ten dollars per client. He told his wife he was “consulting” for some businesses, which freed him up to drive the taxi nearly every night, and before long his illegal earnings were as high as two thousand dollars a month—more than he made for cab driving.

  One day, a friend suggested he invest in a video store. He bought 15 percent of the store and started working there as a night clerk. But the bathhouse operators and sex workers wanted to keep working with him as well, so he made extra revenue by telling his customers and cab drivers where to find a brothel, bathhouse, or private sex club. All of this earned enough for him to bring his brothers and mother to the United States, but they all thought he was still a software consultant.

  “What if they come into this store and find you behind the desk?” I asked him.

  He smiled. “If they find me here, then it is they who have to do the explaining to me!”

  Azad was another clerk who came to my aid. An immigrant from Pakistan, he now worked at a kiosk that sold newspapers and snacks. On the long afternoons when business was slow, he told me that his first job in America had been at a newspaper stand in Chelsea, a legal enterprise although he was paid off the books an
d therefore made very little money. After a few months, a prostitute who lived in the public housing development across the street offered to pay him ten dollars if he could refer any customers, and that same afternoon a customer asked if he knew which building that blond hooker lived in. Was he going to throw money away?

  Soon Azad provided this service for the woman’s friends too. Sometimes he held cash for them or stepped out of the kiosk to let them change their clothes. He earned about a hundred fifty dollars per week—more than half what he made selling newspapers—which he saved so he could bring his family over. Eventually he found a better job as a clerk in a Midtown bodega, but his experienced eye fell on the street prostitutes and he soon discovered they had similar needs. Teaming up with another bodega clerk, Rajesh, he created a network of local store owners and clerks and deliverymen, along with johns, drug dealers, and black marketers. The key was the kiosk vendors. Tourists at a local hotel might ask a bellhop where they could find prostitutes or drugs. The bellhop would tell a kiosk vendor, who would call Azad and Rajesh, who would alert a drug dealer or prostitute. Or a deliveryman from a local restaurant would hear of some available cocaine and check in with Azad and Rajesh, who would put the word out among the kiosk vendors, who would put the word out to all the bellhops and clerks in their network.

  For his part, Manjun stumbled directly into his life of crime. The porn shop was the very first job he landed on arrival and the shop workers had already had in place a deal with local sex workers, which was why the back room had a bed. Women could entertain their clients for a fee of twenty dollars an hour, which was much less than the hot-sheets hotels charged. Sometimes they came in just to rest, so the fee was lower. And sometimes, a prostitute or petty criminal would want to hide from the police for a few hours; they’d pay fifty dollars an hour. Manjun resisted at first, but he needed five thousand dollars to bring over his wife and infant son, and the extra money could save him years of waiting. It did save years—he was able to send the five thousand dollars in just six months, sparing her the difficult life of a single mother in Bangladesh.

  But all this was invisible to the mainstream culture, and this invisibility would soon have consequences. As Mayor Giuliani began his cleanup of the Times Square area, nobody in power gave any thought to the thousands of “support” people whose survival would be affected when the economic driver of sex was removed from the scene. And the optimistic view that these workers would be forced toward more legitimate work turned out to be puritanical hypocrisy—it was crime itself that gave these men an entrée into the straight world. In time, Santosh began selling laptops of dubious origin, Rajesh started offering small short-term loans, and Azad operated an increasingly successful sideline as a job referral service for undocumented immigrants. Whenever otherwise legitimate employers found themselves in need of some quick off-the-books labor—and they often did, even the hedge fund titans and investment banks down on Wall Street—Azad made it happen for them with one phone call.

  All of Manjun’s friends had been robbed at gunpoint. None of them had health insurance or unemployment insurance or 401(k) contributions, and the taxes deducted from their paychecks went into the ether because none of them had real social security numbers. I heard the same story again and again from Central American dishwashers, West African security guards, and Mexican laborers. They lived day to day, always looking over their shoulder, hiding their crimes from the police and their success from thieves. And sometimes, as I would soon see, they lost the battle.

  • • •

  As the months passed, a grim mood fell across Ninth Avenue Family Video. On the very same block, a man stabbed another man in a drunken fight, a woman was found shot to death, and a drug dealer shot a man who had come from the suburbs to buy crack—a white man. That brought the police out in force. I avoided the streets myself, afraid of being the subject of a random answers-the-description stop-and-frisk.

  One particular night stands out in my memory. Even from the back of the store, I could feel the cold coming through the front door every time a customer walked in. The crash of the door slamming back into its frame made the small chime seem not just unnecessary but purposely annoying. Manjun was constantly in motion, fussing with things and sighing heavily. Almost every hour he brought me a fresh cup of tea.

  Manjun’s son kept me company. Joshi was ten now, and he had grown up in the porn store. He was playing with his Ping-Pong paddle and a small rubber ball, slapping the ball with relentless focus against the one small patch of wall that wasn’t covered by X-rated DVDs. Wall, floor, paddle. Wall, floor, paddle. Wall, floor, paddle.

  Sitting with him felt comfortable. With his brown skin and quiet, introspective skill at amusing himself while the adults were busy, he seemed like a younger version of myself.

  We heard a voice at the door and Joshi put the paddle down and slipped away. It was Angela, come to check her voice mail and drink a hot cup of coffee. She held four fingers up and stuck her tongue out to signal exhaustion and relief, meaning she’d had four dates so far that night and would very much like to flop down in front of a TV. “I can’t do this much longer,” she whispered.

  I liked Angela a lot. From the first night, she was open and honest, admitting right away that she was a sex worker. But she was unlike most of the other immigrant and low-income streetwalkers I had studied in New York and Chicago. She had ambition and the courage to cross borders. She came to Manjun’s store because she wanted to escape from her usual traveling grounds in the East Side projects to a better neighborhood where she could meet a wealthier clientele.

  That night, I could see in her face the toll of accommodating so many men. It was painful to see. She was only thirty-four but always looked so tired that she appeared to be nearly a decade older. And business had been getting steadily worse since the Giuliani reforms. For the last few months, Angela was averaging just one client per night. Sometimes not even one.

  Gradually, she told me her story. She’d come to the United States as a young girl, but death and mental illness had taken her parents and left her alone on the Lower East Side. She was just a teenager, hungry and undocumented, and ended up trading sex for food. She worked Avenues B and C for a decade, then moved to Hell’s Kitchen to try the Midtown tourist trade. She’d been jailed many times, though she always said that “an arrest is just a chance to make a friend on the police.” This optimism, this insistence on seeing the seeds of future opportunity in every setback, defined her character. It probably explained much of her desire to branch out of the projects. And despite her difficult life, she was always kind and patient.

  “Three of my own and one black,” she told me that night. Each transaction had been fifty dollars, all in the bathroom of a bar on Eleventh Avenue. Two of the men lived in Harlem, one on the Lower East Side, and one in Hell’s Kitchen. Accidentally, the last man had given her a bruise on her arm during his climax. “At least they took hand jobs,” she said.

  But she was okay to keep working, she said.

  I could tell Angela wanted a moment alone. Maybe she needed a drink or some pills. It wasn’t my business to judge. I left her in the back room and joined Manjun and Joshi in the front. Five minutes later she left with a wave and a smile, and I offered to put Joshi to bed.

  His small cot was pressed against the far wall, lengthwise to the twin bed that Angela and her friends used. After many nights alone, he had his own routine. First he opened a small bag of clothes in the corner and took out his pajamas. After changing into them, he made a quick visit to the bathroom to brush his teeth, then ran to the front of the store to kiss his father good night. He returned rubbing his eyes and climbed aboard the creaky cot. He pulled the blanket over his head and whispered to his toy soldier for a moment or two before falling asleep.

  I sat in the chair watching him, trying not to fall asleep myself while I waited for the next prostitute to come with some data. There were only a few patrons in the aisles, a couple of drunken college boys and an a
morous couple. In the convex mirrors hanging from the ceiling, I saw hands and bodies reflected in strange proportions. Outside, an older man looked in and hesitated, nervous to enter. Everyone looked clammy and preserved under the fluorescent lights.

  Finally, the last interview was finished. But Manjun didn’t want me to go. “Twenty more minutes I am done too. Come with me—eat Sula’s special midnight dinner.”

  Manjun’s wife, Sula, cooked in an Indian restaurant, so I was tempted. But it was too late, I said. I had to get some sleep.

  The expression on Manjun’s face went from eager to desperate. “I’m in trouble, Mr. Sudhir,” he confessed. An inventory of the store had shown stock missing, so the boss wanted Manjun and the other clerks to take a cut in their paychecks to make up for it. But the money he earned from the back room was dwindling, with less and less sex business every month. Even worse, a few weeks earlier a man had walked into the video store and ordered Manjun to empty the cash register. Manjun gave him four hundred dollars in small bills. Then the thief dragged him to the back room and demanded the “other money,” meaning the rental payments from the sex workers, which Manjun kept in a small locker. It was twelve hundred dollars in all, a devastating loss. He’d been saving the money for his many needs, from Joshi’s school clothes to Sula’s doctor bills, but it also represented the future: a possible trip to Bangladesh, a down payment on a business venture, a sign of accomplishment to keep him going when he felt depressed. Most of all, perhaps, it represented the promise that he would only have to resort to such illegal schemes temporarily. Now he would have to scale back his dreams or move even deeper into the underground.

  “You must come home with me,” he said. “That is the only way Sula will not yell at me!”

  He softened me with a cup of hot tea, milky and sweet, with a few cloves and pods of cardamom, reminders of my Indian childhood so sharp they rendered me unable to refuse.