Hey boy, you can’t find anything better than what I got for you. Call me today. I could be your momma, whatever you want me. You won’t forget me. No no no you won’t!
She showed me some of the replies:
Are you coming down off drugs, or did you forget to go to the third grade?
Go back and light up that pipe, bitch.
“Were there any nice e-mails?” Vonnie asked.
“Sure,” Angela said.
“Show us those.”
“I don’t save those,” Angela said.
Vonnie nodded her head as if she understood perfectly. “That’s what it’s all about, baby. We think we deserve these shitty lives.”
I winced. More than any other people in society, the poor beat themselves up when things are going badly. They believe what society tells them to believe, that their troubles are their own fault. This is one of the saddest things I have learned as a sociologist.
Angela winced too, recognizing the truth in Vonnie’s words.
But the two women had also ventured down a more ambitious path, looking for an apartment in Brooklyn—not an apartment to live in, but an apartment for a group of women like themselves to use instead of alleys and cars, hot-sheet motels and the back rooms of porn stores. In a rented apartment, they could attract better clients and have greater control. A client who would settle for oral on the street would be more likely to stay for more. A man who didn’t want to use a condom might feel more civilized in the comfort of a bedroom, might relax and talk and even become a regular. Most important of all, a professional atmosphere would shift the meaning of the interaction and take it out of the realm of the furtive and criminal.
The place they found was by the wharfs and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, an area packed with working-class men. There were also hipsters moving in all around, and they hoped to service this whiter, more middle-class clientele as well. At first it was Angela, Vonnie, and another streetwalker named Cincy, but two months went by and they were barely getting five guys a week between the three of them. Realizing they needed to change fast or go under, they made an impressive entrepreneurial move: they found the perfect person to break them out of their lower-class rut, a kind of sexual ambassador who could reach out to the other nations and classes of Brooklyn. She was that young dark thing of male fantasy, ideal for attracting the kinds of customers they couldn’t attract on their own. The downside was, she was crazy wild and barely eighteen—in fact, she still lived with her parents.
Her name was Carla Consuelo.
• • •
Months later, in 2004, I arrived to the smell of frying onions and friendly chatter. This was a nightly ritual, the women of the apartment cooking and drinking a little before the evening’s work began. They were drinking vodka, but they opened a bottle of red wine for me.
Father Madrigal sat across from me, smiling beneficently. Once a week, he came by to offer a prayer. He was from Angela’s parish and he’d been working on her for almost a decade.
The peace was interrupted by a fist hammering on the door. “Open up, guys,” a voice shouted in the hall.
Vonnie frowned and Angela sighed. The rule was simple. Two of the women entertained clients while a third sat in the tiny living room to remind the johns that they were not alone. The fourth took the night off. Angela and Vonnie were convinced that three was the magic number that made it look more like roommates.
But here was Carla, once again determined to break that one simple rule.
“Go home, Carla,” Cincy said. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
“My money’s just as good as y’alls,” Carla shouted.
Angela opened the door and in stumbled Carla in her tight glittery clothes and wild black hair, a little bit drunk. She noticed Father Madrigal and blushed red, knowing he knew the rules as well as she did. “There’s no men here,” she said. “It’s early. Anyway, it’s a stupid rule.”
Cincy stood next to Carla like a point guard. “But you agreed to that stupid rule,” she said. “We all agreed to the stupid rule.”
Carla sniffed the pot. “Beef stew,” she wailed piteously.
Angela had met Carla in the bars and saw right away she was different from the others. She and Vonnie and Cincy felt uncomfortable with young white clients, embarrassed by their foreign accents, but Carla liked going to gallery openings and felt comfortable in Greenpoint and Williamsburg and the other areas where young hipsters were starting to arrive. She boasted that she was making “white friends” and she used the taunts on occasion to leverage advantages—like first rights to weekend nights at the apartment. She also understood the Internet and knew how to find young white guys in chat rooms. She particularly liked to find men who had recently moved to New York. “I like it when they tell me they never got fucked like that before,” she said. The problem was, Carla was impossible to control.
“Do you think I don’t want to come eat beef stew when it’s your night?” Cincy said, her tone merciless.
The list of qualities Cincy disliked in Carla was long. She would show up for work drunk and show no caution approaching men. She was convinced she’d never get arrested. She was convinced she’d never get cut or beat up. She’d get on her knees outside the driver’s-side door. She’d get in the backseat. She’d go into empty lots and alleys. She was constantly asking for trouble, and Cincy didn’t want to be standing in the way when it came.
Most of the time they attributed Carla’s behavior to heavy drinking, pills, and coke use—which wasn’t exactly uncommon, but most women eventually realized that they needed to have their wits about them to ward off potential abusers and thieves. Drinking with the john was fine; drink more than him and you were playing with fire. It was hard for me to watch Carla, but this was all just part of ethnography: you learn about social life by watching people screw up, put themselves in danger, or otherwise act the fool. And Carla’s constant rule breaking and dancing on the edge was, for me, a means of understanding the rules of the game that were often unspoken—or spoken behind my back. She was the gift that kept on giving, alas.
“Fine,” Carla said. “I’ll work outside. I’d rather be by myself anyway—the one person in this fucking world I can count on.”
Out she went, slamming the door behind her.
A second later the door opened again and she poked her head in. “If I need to use the bathroom, you better let me in!”
Angela asked if I would help set the table and everyone else got back to what they were doing as if nothing had happened, talking about kids and vacations and upcoming clearance sales at their favorite outlet stores. Father Madrigal made his usual mild comments about repentance and reform.
At the door, I teased him. “How do you persist in such a hopeless cause?”
He looked amused. “I’m a man of faith,” he said.
After he left, Vonnie took her turn at making the apartment a place of business, putting away the dishes and cleaning the bedrooms. This was part of the sofa sitter’s duties. I said good-bye and made my way to a local bar to write up my notes for a few hours.
Later, I went back to see how the night had gone. The women were on break. They’d already delivered the first part of the night’s earnings to a secure location (a friend’s apartment) and cleaned up the bedrooms. They had about half an hour until the bars started closing and the streets filled up. Angela went in to clean the bathroom.
Vonnie was standing in the window smoking a cigarette. “Man, that bitch is drunk. Look at her stagger.”
Cincy walked to the window. Down the street on the other sidewalk some woman was staggering like Frankenstein. She turned the corner and disappeared in the direction of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. A group of young men pointed and laughed.
“Oh, Jesus,” Vonnie said.
“What?”
“That’s Carla!”
Vonnie and Cincy ran out the door and down the street. I hesitated for a moment, wondering whether to wait for Angela, then follow
ed. When I caught up to them, Vonnie was running directly down the middle of the street in two-inch heels, furiously determined. Carla had fallen to the pavement and was writhing like a wounded animal.
She was wounded. Vonnie and Cincy got to her at the same time, and Vonnie pulled back Carla’s hair. Carla’s lip was bulging and black with blood, and a gash on her neck was pulpy and red; her skirt and pantyhose were torn and bloody. She reached for Vonnie and her broken, bloody hands shook.
“Are you okay?” Vonnie said. “Can you get up?”
Carla looked like she was about to pass out. Vonnie told me to grab her waist and together we carried her out of the road.
On the sidewalk, broken glass glittered in the streetlights. We ended up laying Carla on the hood of a car. I reached for my cell phone.
“Call Father,” Vonnie said. “No police.”
I stood there, frustrated. What should I do? Go along with them or call the damn police like a normal person? I didn’t want to get sucked into their criminal value structure and end up doing the wrong thing.
But Vonnie looked adamant.
Angela arrived screaming. “Oh, God! Are you all right, baby?”
Cincy was already talking to a friend at a local hospital. “They’re on their way, sweetie,” she said.
I took out my handkerchief and pressed it to the blood. It turned red immediately, which made me a little dizzy.
“Where was you, sweetie?” Vonnie said. “You have to tell me, okay? C’mon, baby, where was you at? That’s all I need to know.”
Carla squirmed on the car hood, motioning with her fingers.
“Around the corner? By the car lot?”
Carla blinked.
“Which car? Which car was you in, sweetie?”
Why was she playing amateur detective? I had no idea. There was a lot of blood. The pain these women went through was so random and pointless. A couple of times a year, they could count on it. I felt so useless. All I ever did was sit there and take notes.
Carla had no answer, just a helpless look, so Vonnie nodded and bent down to fix her shoes. Vonnie’s long, curly brown hair was falling in her eyes, her mascara running, her face flushed scarlet from exertion. “Sudhir,” she ordered, “come with me!”
I had never seen a woman in heels run so fast. Vonnie was in her mid-thirties and smoked at least a pack of cigarettes per day, but she tore through the broken bottles and cigarette butts and sheets of tumbleweed newspaper like the Road Runner down a cartoon canyon. I was about ten yards behind her when she reached the edge of a parking lot. She pulled back a torn part of the chain-link fence and bent down to slide through. Panting, I pushed after her.
“Fuck, where is it?” Vonnie said. She was running around the lot, between parked cars. Suddenly she stopped. Between the fence and a line of cars, a small mattress was pushed into the gap. Brown wet spots on it must have been fresh blood. Vonnie knelt down in a meadow of yellowing valet parking tickets and looked under the cars.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Look for money, Sudhir. Her purse. And her knife.”
Carla was supposed to carry a small knife for safety. She was supposed to put the money in her shoe or her bra and only keep a couple of tens in her purse for change, because johns will ask for change and then rob you. In that purse there should also be a cell phone, for emergency calls, but no ID to let a nutty john know your address. Her ID would be under the mattress or in a paper bag that looked like garbage. You had to have ID for the cops.
I saw a piece of something brown under a rock. It was the edge of her wallet. So we had her ID but no money or knife.
Vonnie found the pocketbook behind a car tire. Made of cheap plastic, it had been torn to pieces, its contents scattered—lipstick, crumpled receipts, a small mirror. Vonnie kept bending over to pick things up.
We heard a siren and headed back to the corner, where Angela and Cincy were watching as two emergency services personnel bent over Carla. Quickly, they packed her onto a stretcher and loaded her onto the ambulance.
We were left on the street. Everything felt very empty.
“It’ll be okay,” Vonnie said.
Angela looked at her phone. “Father Madrigal is going to the hospital,” she said, sounding relieved.
• • •
At the apartment, Vonnie called a friend at a local gypsy cab service. Angela ran upstairs to get clothes for Carla. Then we made our way through the half-deserted Brooklyn streets to the Kings County Hospital emergency room.
Outside, Angela got a little hysterical. She was crying and saying this never would have happened if she hadn’t tried to change Carla—that sort of thing. The others told her not to blame herself, but she couldn’t stop. Finally, Cincy and I decided to stay with Angela outside while Vonnie went up to check things out. We huddled by the entrance in a blast of heat from a vent, stroking her hair.
Vonnie returned after ten minutes. Carla would be okay, she said. She’d lost some blood and needed some stitches. Father Madrigal was inside. He wanted us to return to their apartment. The police were coming and it wouldn’t be good for them to be here.
“I’m not going to leave,” Angela said, stubborn in her loyalty to Carla. Vonnie tried to convince her the cops would be attracted to “three hookers” standing outside the hospital, but she wouldn’t budge.
Finally, they agreed to go for a walk. They spent the next hour strolling through the neighborhood around the hospital and debating their options.
“I sometimes wonder what it would take for me to kill a man,” Angela muttered.
The question hung in the blustery air. Her friends looked at each other, and then over at me.
“Dios, Dios …” Angela’s voice trailed off. She rubbed her eyes and leaned on a rusted steel post, blowing into her cupped hands to stay warm. She shifted her weight back and forth, breathing heavily. An old pain in her right leg made standing in one position uncomfortable. She burrowed inside her pocketbook and pulled out three ibuprofen tablets, swallowing them quickly without water.
An ambulance passed by and turned toward the emergency room. The four of us looked up simultaneously. A group of twentysomething hipsters passed by us in a hurry, blowing smoke from their cigarettes.
“I mean, they just make you so angry. They get you real close to wanting to do it,” Angela continued. Her voice grew shaky.
Vonnie reached over and pulled Angela into her chest. Angela started to cry again, the third time in ten minutes.
“You cannot protect people, you understand,” Vonnie said. “God protects—not you, sweetie.” The neon sign of the corner bodega flickered above.
Finally Vonnie’s phone rang. It was Father Madrigal. The police would want to talk to each of them the next day. “Please, go back to the apartment,” he said.
Reluctantly, the three women agreed. I rode back with them and got them settled in with some hard-earned vodka-and-Cokes. Out on the street again, drained and hammer-eyed, I went looking for a cab.
• • •
The hospital discharged Carla two days later and she returned to her parents’ house. When the other three women and I dropped by that afternoon to see how she was doing, the cuts on her face were still stitched and covered with bandages and the bruises on her arms had ripened to an eggplant purple. “I used that knife just like y’all told me,” she said. “Cut him real good.”
But her bravado had a brittle quality. We could tell she was still scared. Anxiety and fatigue covered her like an invisible film.
At the hospital, she said, she’d told the nurses she’d been beat up by her boyfriend and begged them not to call the police. But they did. If it hadn’t been for Father Madrigal, the cops would have spread the story all over the neighborhood. At least he convinced them to be discreet.
Not that it would do any good. “He’s going to come after me,” she said.
No, he won’t, we all assured her. The police would catch him first.
“I’ve
been getting calls …” Carla said, trailing off. When the women dug it out of her, it turned out she had given the guy her number. He was calling and hanging up. It had to be him. And he knew about the apartment too. The one thing Vonnie had feared had now come true.
“You told him?!”
“Not exactly.”
“What do you mean, ’not exactly’?” Vonnie demanded, suddenly furious.
“I didn’t give him the address. I just said, you know, it was down at this end of the street.”
Angela looked devastated. “He knows the street?”
I couldn’t help thinking about how different things could be for women in the sex trade. A regular escort service required some information from clients, a real telephone number at the very least, and the legal pretense of being an “escort” made working with the police more possible. But most of those women were white. For minorities and immigrants working on the streets or on their own, few such protections existed. The devastated expression on Angela’s face came from realizing that the apartment didn’t give them much safety either. I knew that the psychological toll of trying to change their lives and failing would be even heavier than just accepting their immigrant plight, and I wondered how long it would be before Angela just gave up—on the apartment, on their dreams, on everything. The problem was that there were now many others depending on her courage.
Carla looked up. “Um, do you think I could stay there? While I’m recovering, I mean?”
She was afraid to stay with her parents. They had just found out that she’d been selling her body and she was afraid of what they might do—especially her father, who could get violent.
• • •
Back at the apartment, the women debated. “That guy has our address,” Vonnie said. “I know this girl. I’m sure she bragged about how nice it was.”
“Word’s going to get out this place ain’t safe,” Cincy said. “We got people who tell other people. Like, we have twenty people just from that factory over near the bridge. If one of them comes up here and that man breaks in, then it’s over! He goes back and tells everyone, ’Hey, I was fucking one of them and some boyfriend came by, all jealous and shit.’ Won’t nobody come around here no more.”
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