Floating City

by Sudhir Venkatesh

  Shine had grown used to that world and those habits. He could put on his player face, put his arm around someone, and talk in such a way that their interests seemed aligned, but everyone knew his slick talk was backed up by force. As Al Capone said so well, “You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.” As Shine stepped away from his neighborhood, he was likely to find himself in situations where his old tricks would make things worse instead of better. He worried about the same thing, I know. What if, when pressure escalated, he acted emotionally or instinctively? The ghetto code could betray him. And what if his new hard-shoe customers refused to pay? How would he respond if his new employees stole from him? I couldn’t imagine him pushing Evalina or some white club kid the way he pushed the boys in his crew.

  I felt for Shine. He was going to have to develop new rules and routines and approaches—a whole new criminal style—all while unwinding one business, developing another, learning a complex new culture, and avoiding the cops. No wonder he looked so harried.

  But no matter how sordid the world, there was something heroic in that dogged expression of Shine’s. He wasn’t going to give up. He was going to take on his sea of troubles or die trying. Drug dealer and thug he may have been, but sometimes it was hard not to admire him.

  • • •

  To the police or the city government, Shine’s attempt to fire young men and hire new staff might look like empty scenes from a TV crime show—a little tension, a whiff of danger, nothing more. In fact, Shine was deftly managing one of the most significant transformations in the inner-city labor market to occur in decades: the decline of the vibrant crack economy that had given thousands of part-time jobs to the disadvantaged. Refusing to fade away like so many of his peers, he approached the problem in a way that was methodical, precise, and keenly self-aware—just the attributes the manager of a complex business would need.

  Adaptations like this are another thing too many sociologists ignore. They tend to see people living in the margins of society as people stuck in some kind of rut. Successful people are proactive, they’re seekers and strivers adjusting and readjusting to the world around them, the thinking goes, so the poor must have lost their drive somehow, or never had any. Or in another variation on the theme, the poor live in neighborhoods that rarely change, that remain economically and racially segregated, while the world around them is eating Asian fusion and watching British actors play American cops on TV. It’s the old myth of the “undeserving poor,” always a justification for cutting back on social programs. But Shine and Angela and Carla and Manjun were just as hardworking and conscientious and proactive as anyone in the middle or upper classes. Just like big-time capitalists, they took huge risks and struggled to keep up with New York’s fast pace and endless competition. Though their personal income levels and the socioeconomic status of their neighborhoods might not be shifting greatly, they were not the passive subjects so many sociologists used to fuel their paternalistic claim as all-knowing fathers for societal orphans. In fact, they were quite dynamic in both thought and action, and they also scrambled to keep up with a world that was transforming blindingly fast, even if the benefits of all that creative destruction did not accrue to them quite as rapidly as to wealthier strivers.

  As my tone may hint, this is a pet peeve. For the last decade, I’ve been fighting the stereotypes of the poor that began to pervade American society after the publication of the infamous Moynihan Report in 1965, which argued that the history of slavery and generations of single-parent matriarchal families had created a “tangle of pathology” that made it difficult for many inner-city blacks to enter the social mainstream. The truth in this analysis took a backseat to the blaming, it seemed to me. White families had high divorce and addiction rates too, but their entry into the job market wasn’t blocked by patronizing assumptions about their tangle of pathology. Suburbs also bred family dysfunction, not to mention some of the highest rates of alcohol and drug addiction, domestic abuse, and other forms of delinquency, but you didn’t hear people talk about the tangle of suburban pathology. Poverty has been growing faster in the suburbs than in the inner city since 2000, but a dozen years later the cliché of the urban poor remains intact. My argument, based on the experience of my years in the Chicago ghetto, is that the poor are actually more resilient and economically creative because they have much bigger obstacles to overcome—just as a small house built by hand can be much more impressive than a mansion built by experts.

  I was sentimental to focus so much on positive outcomes, I knew. As any sociologist worth her degree can show you, American society is built in such a way that social class divisions are reinforced every day, not overturned. We tend to end up in social and economic positions much like preceding generations of our families. That’s partly why social scientists can predict where one will end up by capturing only a few personal attributes, like race, education, parents’ income, and so on. In the last twenty years, in fact, American class divisions have grown so durable that social mobility has all but frozen. Still we worship at the altar of meritocratic advancement, telling ourselves that success is just one lucky strike away.

  How the sameness of class gets reproduced is not always easy to see. I’ve always preferred the sociologist Elliot Liebow’s description, written nearly a half century ago as he observed “streetcorner men” in our nation’s capital: “Many similarities between the lower-class Negro father and son … [result] from the fact that the son goes out and independently experiences the same failures, in the same areas … What appears as a dynamic, self-sustaining cultural process is, in part at least, a relatively simple piece of social machinery which turns out, in rather mechanical fashion, independently produced look-alikes.” Exposure to the same circumstances is not going to yield highly novel outcomes for most of the poor. Expecting advances for the masses when the conditions don’t change is folly.

  Nevertheless, another rule in sociology says, Don’t let aggregate data explain individual behavior. This is called the “ecological fallacy.” Though Shine and Angela could end up looking a lot like their parents, trolling the ghetto and eking out a living, this was not necessarily a guaranteed outcome. And that’s why outcomes are themselves deceptive. They tell you little about the aspirations that drive people to rise above their circumstances. Not only Shine and Angela but Carla, Manjun, Vonnie, Santosh, and dozens of others at the bottom of the income spectrum militantly refused to accept their predicted fate. They wanted something more, and were clearly willing to take great risks along the way. And the ingredients in the recipe seemed increasingly to include the ability to work across the city, not just in familiar neighborhoods where friend and foe knew one another intimately, but in parts of the city where the rules and norms were completely unknown and often upsetting.

  Was that the magic ingredient? If so, what were its secrets? I wasn’t certain, but clearly some of my subjects had more of this skill than others. As I kept discovering, mixing with strangers in unfamiliar worlds is no simple task. Santosh alone seemed to be succeeding on both sides of the spectrum, working smoothly with the undocumented but just as smoothly with the mainstream world. Manjun was out of the race. Angela was on the bench for a while, again. Carla and Shine were still in the running. Even if I never left the low-income world, I would feel I was seeing an amazing event, a veritable pageant of the human spirit. Despite the harshest of climates, they were so resilient and ever seeking.

  But as a sociologist, I reminded myself again, I wasn’t there to showcase survival. That wasn’t what the people themselves were after. They never thought of themselves as victims seeking to overcome great odds for a few bread crumbs. In their eyes, they were pursuing an American dream in the Big Apple just like anybody else. It would be insufferably patronizing for me to talk about them as survivors. A question more true to their dreams would be: what traits helped people win and how did they acquire them?

  To answer that question, I still had to get mysel
f out of the ghetto and into the winner’s circle. This was still proving to be surprisingly difficult—until the day I reached into a notebook and took out a small piece of paper that my friend on the police force had given me back when Manjun disappeared. At the time I’d been fixated on contacting Manjun and took it as Officer Michael’s way of distracting me. Then the saga of Angela and Carla took over my life. But now I remembered talking to the officer about my dreams of launching a big study of the Hell’s Kitchen underworld, and his enthusiasm for my idea that it was ground zero for the changes being wrought in New York. He wouldn’t have just shrugged that off. He knew I’d be desperate for another way to tell the story. Maybe he was trying to tell me something.

  On the paper, Michael had scribbled a phone number and a name: Margot Kerry.

  CHAPTER 5

  SEX IS A PASSPORT

  Not so fast!” I cried. The bar was hot and crowded and I was feeling dizzy. The noise from the crowd rang in my ears.

  But Margot Kerry burbled merrily along, telling me the secrets of her trade. A bartender has to want you in his bar, she said. Maybe the bartender hears of a guy looking for a date. Some bartenders received a fee per week, others per client. You bring your high-priced clients to the bar, their drinks always get filled first. Bartenders in Midtown got lots of requests for phone numbers, bartenders in Soho not so much. A bartender who really liked you would even kick out your competitors. A bartender would hold cash if you were afraid of being robbed. Strip club managers were another link in the chain, a source of new girls. A car dealer laundered Margot’s money by reselling her brand-new car the same day she bought it, giving her clean cash back.

  Clearly, she was enjoying the opportunity to demonstrate mastery of her secret world, the world I had been trying to break into for so many long months. But my pen didn’t seem to be working very well.

  “I like this,” Margot was saying. “I never really get a chance to talk about my life without feeling ashamed. Thank you for not making me feel that way.”

  Margot was in her mid-thirties, flamboyant and redheaded and harried looking, the kind of person who is always lighting another cigarette and somehow makes it look glamorous. She gave off the air of having suffered and survived with all her compassion and sense of humor intact, which I found very comforting. Every five minutes her phone would ring and she would answer all the calls immediately. “I can help,” she would say. “Leave it to me.”

  I tried to make mental notes as the sentences streamed out of her mouth. But the world began to slide away from me like a camera going out of focus. My blood sugar was dropping way too low, I realized.

  Margot noticed and waved at the bartender, who quickly ushered us into a back room and helped lower me down onto an old sofa.

  “Panic attack,” I gasped.

  This had been happening for a year. In the middle of lecturing to my class, riding a city bus, or just buying groceries, I’d feel a wave of anxiety so strong I’d nearly pass out. Where it came from, I had no idea.

  Margot sat next to me, stroking my hand and saying soothing things. I have to admit I found her presence very calming. I felt that she would be completely accepting of anything I did, which was an unfamiliar feeling—a great feeling. I guess I needed it more than I realized. When I was breathing more calmly, she asked, “Anything you want to talk about? I’m pretty good with people’s troubles. God knows, I’ve gone through nearly everything myself.”

  But I was too embarrassed. This whole thing was already so unprofessional.

  “Girl troubles? You don’t look like a ’guy trouble’ sort of guy.”

  I hesitated. “If I tell you, do you promise we’ll never talk about it again?”

  “Whatever you want.”

  Somehow, that unleashed the floodgates. I told her about the people I was meeting and the people I needed to meet. I talked about global cities and underground networks, about invisible communities in Mortimer’s bar and Manjun’s store, and Lord knows what else. A friend told me to float and that’s what I was doing—yesterday Harlem, Brooklyn today, and tomorrow wide open. I was beginning to see how each person I met would take me to a new place and introduce me to a new person, who would take me someplace else, known as “snowball sampling” in the sociology trade. But my snowball was steadily turning into a snowboulder. People I cared about were getting hurt and disappearing. I was trapped on a speeding train that was going in a direction I didn’t want to go. I wanted to get off the train, escape the routine, separate from my wife, move to France. “I’m not even sure what kind of sociologist I want to be,“ I said.

  “Drink some water,” Margot said.

  I did as she told.

  “Go back to ’separate from my wife.’”

  I told her the story. It wasn’t anything special, just a boy and a girl and a series of sad disagreements made all the sadder by the fact that we loved each other. Under these circumstances, obsessive fieldwork in the hood made sense to me. Anything was better than, ugh, feeling.

  Gradually my breathing began to return to normal and I could feel relief coming to the surface.

  “Deal with the things that cause you pain and start doing things that make you feel better,” Margot said. “Can you try to do that?”

  I straightened myself up and told her I thought this would be a good time to go home and lie down. Hopefully, we could meet another time when I was feeling a little less deranged.

  Of course, my little breakdown turned out to be the best thing I could have done. That’s humanity for you. Once I melted into a puddle in her presence, Margot seemed to view me as a kindred spirit. She was affectionate and supportive, the friend I didn’t even know I needed. We began meeting in various upscale hotel bars, always in some private nook provided by a friendly bartender, quickly achieving a level of intimacy I had never experienced before on the job. I was used to others growing attached to me because I listened without judgment, but I never expected the table to turn.

  Each meeting also yielded juicy kernels of professional insights. The bartender sometimes stopped by for a break, which gave me the chance to launch a few quick questions: How many women a night come to the bar selling sex? How do clients find out about you? If we met in a hotel bar, Margot would explain who was involved in their operation, who made it all go down so that the john and his hired friend could meet without fuss or capture. I was learning a lot, but I still had the generalizability problem to deal with: Was she a unique case? Would she connect me to other people like her in the sex trade? Were the bartenders and hotel clerks and cab drivers in her network representative of larger trends in the sex trade? If she was an exceptional case, there would be no point in even launching a formal study: none of my academic colleagues would be interested in a single person’s experience, only those shared by the multitudes.

  The truth was, Margot fascinated me. Raised in the working-class suburbs of New York and New Jersey, the daughter of a teacher and a construction foreman, she went to public schools with lots of other Irish Catholics, maintained a solid B-plus average, and was active in her church. After high school, she married a bond salesman and moved to Manhattan, where she worked part-time in a law firm and went to college at night. The plan was to get a law degree and become a solid and productive member of the middle class.

  Such a classic all-American life. The best kind of childhood, blessed with solid values and a sense of security unimaginable to much of the world. And yet it all unraveled in an instant when she caught her husband in an affair. Divorce and heavy drinking followed, and one night, broke and needing a place to stay after a fight with her parents, she convinced herself that she wanted to sleep with an old friend who had always wanted her. Really she did it for a place to sleep. And thereby crossed an invisible line.

  In the bar where she told this story, I watched her face as she explained the next step. She didn’t seem sad, just determined to lay it out there. “A few nights later, I was in Stanton’s Bar down near Wall Street,” she
said, teasing the ice cubes in her drink with a straw. “I was taking shots of whiskey with a bunch of traders who knew my husband, and one of those bastards flashed two hundred dollars in my face. He said it was mine if I gave him a blow job in the bathroom.”

  Her husband would feel humiliated if it got back to him. And she could fill her old friend’s refrigerator. And she was already sleeping with one guy for a place to stay, so what difference did it make? So she took the bastard’s hand and led him to the bathroom.

  A week later, another one of her husband’s friends offered her five hundred dollars.

  After that, she kept looking for a regular job. But the easy money was too easy. She found some good bars and learned how to spot the men with free-spending ways and struck up friendships with women who were working the same bars. Most of them were just like her, college educated with some work history as paralegals or clerks. They started loaning one another clothes, recommending doctors, trading information.

  Early on, she got them working in pairs. “There’s a particular kind of guy who goes to a bar at five or six in the afternoon,” she explained eagerly. “He’s either commuting or traveling, or he has something to do in town later that night, and he’s feeling a little lonely. Easy prey! The only thing you have to figure out is how to make them feel like they aren’t getting a hooker, just a nice girl who ’needs a little help,’ quote unquote. So having another pretty girl with you makes it seem less trashy.”

  Gradually, she became the den mother. When someone was in trouble, she would get the call. Like Manjun and Angela, she had gathered the invisible threads of a community around her. But she veered wildly. She would brood, drink, take anti-anxiety meds, then vow to change her life and go straight. Once she even landed a job as a human resources manager in a large accounting firm. Now everything looked different. The long hours, the office politics, the aggressive men who wanted to impress everyone with what go-getters they were. How gross it all was. And she still had to turn the occasional trick to make ends meet.