Floating City

by Sudhir Venkatesh

  Jonathan rubbed his hand over his jaw. “I have to get out of my fucking marriage.”

  Nate asked if I was married. I nodded.

  “So you know what it’s like.”

  I nodded again, not sure how far I wanted to go with this.

  “You just stop listening to each other,” Nate continued.

  “You stop doing a lot of things,” Martin said.

  “I know,” I said. “I’m separated.”

  As if I had said the secret password, the three men exchanged glances that turned into smiles. “I knew it,” Nate said. “I knew there was a reason you were so interested!”

  I glared at Martin. He knew damn well he’d all but forced me into this meeting. What had he been telling them?

  “What’s it like to be separated?” Jonathan asked.

  “Separation is hard,” Nate said.

  This led to a discussion of comfort, which they viewed in a surprisingly straightforward way. Because women had wounded us, each in our own way, all men need comfort. And because women had wounded us, each in our own way, there was only one way to heal that wound. And only when the wound healed a little could we go back to our normal lives and our normal wives.

  By the end of 2004, after nearly fifteen years of research, I could count on two hands the number of conversations I had had with johns. But every single conversation had one feature in common: they all wanted to confess, to be heard, to create community around their desire. None of them wanted to believe they were doing anything harmful. They all wanted a way out of the isolation of their secrecy. In fact, while my mind wandered, Nate began arguing that the need for comfort somehow made prostitution legal—or, at least, “not a real crime.”

  All the men grinned. In fact, there was a big poker game coming up at the end of the week, right here at the club. You should come! It would be great! “Just come and meet everyone. You’ll learn everything you want. They’re great guys.”

  “Let me think about it,” I said, mumbling something about objectivity and detachment. But after we’d said good-bye and I began walking back to the subway, I asked myself what I was doing with these men. I felt bad because it was so obvious they wanted to talk, to share, to escape their isolation. But in sociology there’s a rule of thumb: just because something is interesting, that doesn’t make it relevant. I was studying the experiences of sex workers at the higher end of the income scale. Did I really need the views of johns?

  I walked on past the fancy hotels, past the doormen and valets and clerks who all played a role in this vast interconnected web of sexual commerce. Musing about a documentary was one thing, I told myself, and the idea that I might break ground on a hidden world excited my ego. But on a scientific level, I had to stay more focused.

  Or was I just afraid?

  The truth was, these men were exactly the kind of thing I was looking for, another connection between high and low. But they were also a mirror. Their loneliness was my loneliness, their need for comfort identical to my own. And looking in that mirror was not something I wanted to do.

  As I walked past another hotel, under an old-fashioned gold marquee, the doorman gave me a welcoming nod. I ducked my head and hurried for the subway.

  • • •

  Once again, the phone broke the gloom inside my apartment. Margot was calling again, this time from somewhere on the street. The lively sounds of cars and construction came forward whenever her voice stopped. “You gotta come help me, Sudhir. I need to find Carla right away. Things are messed up, I don’t know what’s going on, and I can’t find her.”

  Margot sounded confused. This was not like her.

  “I’m on my way—but what happened?”

  “Carla got beat. I had it backwards. I just found out. I feel like a real asshole, Sudhir. That guy was talking at me and I don’t know Carla all that well and I just—I fucked up. I should have trusted her.”

  The new story was that the client had a penchant for a type of sexual role play that involved physical abuse—actual slapping and hitting. When Carla refused to continue without a lot more money and the eager client went to get some, she called a friend for help.

  I could picture the scene. Carla wouldn’t want to fail. She probably thought, Just stay put and solve the problem or else Margot will fire me.

  But Margot thought it was her fault. She felt terrible about it. “I’ve seen this happen before,” she said. “These young women, they get beat, they go through a bad stretch, they don’t trust anyone. I should have worked with her more. She just seemed so strong. And then this guy beats her too.”

  Now Margot was worried that Carla would give up and go running back to the projects—where, ironically, she probably faced a much greater likelihood of violence.

  This was definitely a possibility. I thought of Shine. In his world, violence was routine, practically a requirement. Years of bitter experience had taught them there was no other way to enforce their unwritten laws. But for people like Carla and especially Margot, violence was still shocking. In a way, on a professional level, this actually helped Margot by giving her a market for her conflict resolution services. But it also meant that she needed to prove and re-prove the utility of her soft approach. Taking on the Carlas of the world made it difficult since they were likely to ratchet things up by taking disputes and inflaming them. And looking at it from Carla’s point of view, that was another reason moving up was so scary. When you exist between worlds, the rules are in flux and you don’t know how to handle things. Soft or hard? The old way or the new way? Which do you choose when your life might depend on it?

  There was yet another ugly complication. The john had hired a private detective to find Carla. This was surprising because he was a prominent lawyer from Washington D.C., and usually people like that fade into the woodwork when things get dicey. But he was so furious at being “cheated” he actually seemed willing to risk his reputation, or perhaps he felt this was a necessary preemptive strike to save his reputation. So despite her distress over Carla’s pain and suffering, Margot really needed to find her and talk her into giving back the money. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right, but it would really be better for all of them.

  This was way out of my pay grade. “Maybe we should talk to a friendly police officer,” I suggested.

  “I told Michael already. There’s nothing he can do.”

  “Margot, just to be clear, I cannot be involved in anything criminal,” I said. I enunciated each word.

  Then I said to hell with it and went out looking for Carla. The Lower East Side was her home neighborhood, so I headed there. It didn’t take long to find out that she’d been living with a friend and working out of a local bar. And in that bar I found her. “Margot’s looking for you,” I said. “She knows that bastard beat you up and she’s sorry.”

  Carla broke into tears. She’d been so miserable, she said. She didn’t want to disappoint Margot, didn’t want her to know things had gone so wrong. She would have taken the beating for five thousand dollars. She was planning to! She never should have called her ex-boyfriend. “This is my ticket,” she kept saying. “I have to get out of here. Look at this place. I need to do something different with my life.”

  I told her about the private detective. Then I told her Margot wanted the money back.

  Carla wailed. “I don’t know how to get the money back!”

  The guy who had it was Ricky, the ex-boyfriend. Ricky was really mad about what had happened to her. He wanted to go after the john and demand more money and possibly even beat him some more. If she asked him for the money to give back, he’d probably beat her up himself.

  “Maybe I could just work it off?” she asked me, her expression a mixture of fear and hope.

  That was not a message I wanted to carry. I didn’t even want to think about it. I just told Margot how to get ahold of Carla, and a few days later she called to say she had defused the crisis by paying Carla’s debt out of her own pocket. Carla did not need to know that Mar
got had first gotten the figure reduced to a grand.

  “Carla needs to get back out there,” Margot told me, “or she’ll feel like it was her fault. You don’t want to go through life feeling like a victim.”

  Margot always seemed to work her magic in the direction of more sex work, I thought. Funny how that worked out. But maybe it wasn’t as calculating as it seemed—maybe she understood these women and their struggles because she was tuned to their unhappiness. That would explain why Carla’s setback bothered her so much. She was really a big-hearted person who identified with her employees.

  Then she’d gone and ruined it. “I need to find some pretty young brown girls,” she said. “Black girls too. The next big sex trend is going to be all about jungle fever. Trust me.”

  • • •

  Two months later, Margot called and said she had some news for me. She was creating a finishing school for hot young black and brown women. “None of them trusts each other, none of them likes each other, they can’t cooperate like normal people. So they’re fighting and doing stupid things and making bad decisions.”

  Like in a sex-work Stand and Deliver, she was going to help turn them around. Classes began the following week. Maybe I’d like to come.

  A week later, Margot’s apartment looked like a makeshift classroom. Five attractive young Latinas sat on couches and chairs while Margot paced in front of them. “What’s the first thing you do in the hotel?” she asked them.

  “Tell the bartender what room you’re going to,” said Carla, like a proud student.

  “Right,” said Margot. “You can’t always call me because your phone may not work, or you may lose it. So you have to tell the guy at the bar.”

  Another one said she didn’t trust the bartenders. They would look at her funny when she talked, and sometimes they kicked her out.

  “You have to trust them, okay?” Margot said. “They work with me.”

  Margot explained how to open up a bank account to keep the cash away from their family. She told them not to wear dark makeup around white men, to lighten their hair if they could do it without looking trashy. She told them not to say too much and to keep their smiles coy. She talked to them about buying fewer things of higher quality, thus saving money while advancing their cultural capital.

  “What’s the first thing you do after you get your guy naked?” she asked.

  “You take your clothes off—duh,” one answered.

  “Wrong.”

  Other answers came. “Get the money.” “Jump on the bed.” “Slide to your knees.” Margot shook her head each time.

  Finally she said, “You tell him how big his dick is.”

  Carla snorted. “So we lie to him?”

  Margot nodded. “If he’s fat, you tell him you love a big guy. If he’s skinny, tell him you love his six-pack. And you always tell him that nobody ever made you feel like this before.”

  The women were skeptical. Sex work in the projects was much more cut-and-dried. If they laid it on too thick, they said, the johns might get pissed and hit them.

  But Margot knew her clientele. Over the next six months, Carla and her friends doubled their income. A $75 session became $150, and sometimes tourists mistook them for equals and paid as much as $250. A few even did well enough to leave the projects, especially after Margot helped them find apartments where they could sleep with the landlord in exchange for rent. Which is why I was so surprised the day Margot, after chirping along about how much progress they were making, suddenly broke into tears.

  “What’s the matter?” I said.

  “Watching them make one stupid mistake after another. It’s making me crazy.”

  But she didn’t have to do it, I helpfully pointed out. I had been thinking for a while now that the jungle fever market was a risky experiment for her. The profit was in the upscale market—that’s where everyone wanted to be—so why would she want to move in the other direction? Especially since she had begun talking about her long-term goal of moving out west and starting a beauty salon or other small-business venture. Why saddle herself with so many temperamental, troubled women?

  “It’s what I do,” she said in a voice of gloom. “It’s the same thing I do with you. I manage them, I manage you. I’m responsible for everyone.”

  “You’re not responsible for me,” I said.

  She exploded with a scornful laugh. “If it wasn’t for me, none of these girls would be talking to you.”

  She was upset, but there was no reason to talk to me that way. “If it wasn’t for you,” I said, “I’d have found somebody else.”

  “Please, Sudhir. I’m tired. I don’t have the energy to deal with your ego right now.”

  Awkwardly, I made some forced polite excuse and left. Out on the sidewalk, the sunlight was too bright and I had a dislocated feeling. The good-bye had been too abrupt. I shouldn’t have reacted so emotionally. Maybe I had gotten too close to Margot.

  I looked up and down the street, not sure what to do with myself. It was still early and I didn’t want to go back home.

  • • •

  As 2005 rolled around, I started to think about what I’d learned. It was time to go back to the office and make another list: “Things I Learned About Life in the Global City by Looking Underground.”

  a) Definitely, New York is not Chicago. Say good-bye to the old-sociology idea of life revolving around tight-knit neighborhoods.

  b) In the new world, culture rules. How you act, how you dress, and how you think are part of your tool kit for success. (It’s a dangerous thought because it could easily lead to blaming the poor, but it’s been increasingly accepted by other sociologists.)

  c) The ability to cross boundaries is vital. New York forces multiple social worlds upon you whether you like it or not, and even porn clerks and drug dealers need to learn to cross social lines smoothly.

  d) The poor are just like you and me … except when they’re not.

  e) _______

  As I reached that last one, I realized again that I’d better focus my research or else I would keep drifting. I had to ask myself why I kept reaching this impasse. As much as I wanted to reach the upper reaches of New York, only a few avenues seemed to be feasible. In fact, only one: sex.

  Maybe the world was trying to tell me something. Maybe sex was the ideal means of crossing the boundaries that defined and connected New York City. This most intimate of behaviors, which all humans are trained from birth to consider private and individual, might be the secret thread drawing New Yorkers from all walks of life together. I considered the facts as I understood them so far. As the sex economy changed with the times, every social worker, escort manager, cop, and porn store owner had his or her own theories and reasons to explain the changes, but all their stories had two common features: the new conditions and the great sums of cash floating around. The escort managers talked about the large numbers of women from middle-income backgrounds who were arriving in New York with a surprising new openness to the idea of using sex work to supplement poorly paying straight jobs. The social workers and strip club managers talked about the struggles among different ethnic groups who were all competing for their piece of the Big Apple pie. The cops talked about the turn from the drug cultures of the past to the incredible sums of money that “classier” sex workers were able to earn—some were pulling down a hundred thousand dollars per year or more, raising the ambitions of ordinary streetwalkers and sending them, like Angela, into new neighborhoods and more ambitious pursuits. Finally, the city was experiencing a wave of ethnic mixing and permeable class barriers unseen since the glorious turmoil of the late nineteenth century, when the first large waves of European immigrants gave birth to the ideal of America as a vast melting pot.

  Were these theories accurate? Did they hold true for the city as a whole or were they merely small phenomena among a few special classes? As soon as I completed my latest series of interviews, I would have a broader range of hard data. But everyone I met seemed to be
telling the same story.

  Which brought me to the problem of Martin. Sociology insists on moving from the specific to the general, and I believe in sociology. I remembered some advice Herb Gans gave me when I arrived at Columbia: if my story could be written by a journalist for the New York Times, then there may not be a reason for me to write it. He was trying to tell me that things that were interesting weren’t necessarily useful. And the fact was, I had no real sociological question to ask about Martin—just a vague interest that might someday turn into one—and it was frankly hard to picture the foundation or branch of government that would finance a study of high-end johns who work on Wall Street. It was time to get more rigorous. I would tell him that I could talk to him now and again as a friend, but nothing more.

  The next time we met, I arrived at the hotel first and ordered a drink. Looking around the bar, I saw a pair of attractive young women sitting together nearby. Were they colleagues having a drink after work? Or sex workers pairing up for plausible denial? Either way, the sight of them steeled my resolve. No more hanging out for the sake of hanging out. I had plenty of work to do on the sex workers themselves, an actual suffering population. Martin was history.

  I looked up to see him standing in front of me. “I’m taking your advice,” he said.

  “What advice is that?”

  “I’m going to tell my wife. It’s the right thing to do. You taught me that.”

  Sitting down, he pursed his lips and made a pop sound, a definitive smack to demonstrate the intensity of his determination. Several other patrons at the bar turned to look and he did it again. Pop, pop.

  “Martin,” I said, speaking with the special emphasis you’d use with someone who might be in a coma. “I—never—said—any—thing—about—telling—your—wife.”

  Martin smiled radiantly. “You helped me see things clearly,” he said, removing his wire-rimmed glasses and cleaning them with his crisp white handkerchief. This was one of his trademark behaviors, along with cleaning his glass rim, tapping the table, making thumbs-up signs, and now this new smacking sound with his mouth. He seemed to manifest himself in weird physical gestures.