Floating City

by Sudhir Venkatesh

  Today, she had invited two prosperous escorts, Morgan and Fiona, to her apartment. They were both very attractive, very well-dressed women with Prada on their backs and Blahniks on their feet. I had previously interviewed Morgan extensively—I was up to 150 interviews now, a good, solid data set—so there was already a level of trust when we all sat down.

  Margot poured tea from an English china pot. She offered milk and Splenda but no sugar or half-and-half. Then she dove in.

  “Listen, I want to tell you something. Based on my experience, you’re going to either die, get caught, get a disease, or lose all your money. I want to help you avoid that.”

  Morgan and Fiona looked at each other. “That’s a bit of a surprise,” Morgan said.

  “Yeah, we thought you were going to ask us to go into business with you. I was thinking, where’s the champagne?”

  “How silly of me. You’re the first hookers in history to put away a few grand. I should be asking you for advice.”

  “You called us, Margot.”

  “I did. ’Cause I want to help you. Sudhir’s the researcher, so he can correct me if I’m wrong, but most of the women who get to the point you’re at begin to fade away.”

  Margot looked over at me and I shot her a look that said, Thanks for dragging me into this. But I played along as best I could. “Most of the women I’ve met do start to run into trouble because they’re not smart with their money,” I said. “Planning for the future is not a strong suit among the people I’ve interviewed.”

  “We’re not idiots,” Morgan said. “We save a lot.”

  “You have cash,” Margot countered. “And even then you had to fuck that apartment broker to get a lease. What if you can’t fuck the next one?”

  Actually, it had been more complicated than that. Morgan had persuaded the broker to waive his fee and sponsor her at the bank, which enabled her to pass a credit check. In exchange, she had been sleeping with him for approximately three months without collecting any money.

  “Fiona, you’re no different. You’ve fucked half the city because you can’t get a credit card.”

  Fiona scowled and began fiddling with her cigarette pack.

  “Look, you guys are smart,” Margot continued. “A lot smarter than the other bozos I know, God bless them. At some point, you’re going to want to do something different. So I have a proposal for you.”

  Morgan shrugged her shoulders, giving in. Fiona followed her lead.

  “My estimate is that you each have about five thousand in the bank, maybe a little more but not much. You think you’re going to build it up, but let’s get real—on the cab ride over, you probably talked about going to St. Barts for a week or at least down to Miami Beach, right? You work so hard, you deserve it. And there’s guys there! There goes the five grand. And you have to buy clothes, right? There goes another two grand. And I bet your credit cards are maxed out if you have credit cards, so you’re blowing stupid money on bank fees.”

  Margot paused and watched the truth sink in.

  “I’m not telling you to live in a cave, but you need to change your relationship to money. Here’s my suggestion. Start lending out some of the cash you’ve saved. At a decent interest rate. Don’t rip people off, but start turning your cash into profit. I’ve done this. I’m telling you, it changes your way of thinking. Instead of money for things, you think of money for money—for the future.”

  Morgan looked interested now. “How much could we make?”

  “By the end of the year, your five grand could be seventy-five hundred. Without fucking anyone.”

  Seeing that she had them, at least for now, Margot continued in a rush. Find women and give them cash advances, get them to pay back a little each week, never let them skip, and keep all the money in the bank. She used a credit union on Long Island, where she opened an account for each woman and linked it to an account she controlled; each week the money just got subtracted from their accounts into hers. Then they had to start doing straight jobs, just a few hours a week but enough to get a legit paycheck. Waitress, hostess, whatever. They would have to cover the years without straight jobs when they went looking for a real one.

  After thirty minutes, Morgan still seemed skeptical. “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “But still, lending money … what if they don’t pay up?”

  That was the beauty of small sums and weekly payments, Margot explained. “You never lose too much. And it doesn’t happen as often as you’d think. Most hookers are basically honest, not that they get any credit for it.”

  Morgan still wasn’t convinced, but by the time they left, Fiona said she wanted another meeting once she’d had a chance to think it over. Or maybe she was so grateful finally to be getting her nicotine fix, she just wanted to make nice. I closed the door on her and turned to Margot.

  “No way this is going to work,” I said.

  Margot sniffed. “I’m not an idiot. If I can get one out of ten to see the light, that’s fine. And you don’t know everything.”

  We sat down again. She told me that she’d been telling some of her contractors—she always called them contractors now—that she was quitting the business soon. At first they all thought she was crazy. Lots of midlife crisis jokes. But soon they started to call her up—always secretly so that no one else would hear—to ask how she was going to do it.

  I could see that Margot was in some kind of pain, probably feeling guilty for her role in their lives as sex workers, and guilty for abandoning them too. This was common, something I’d seen many times in all illegal work, whether it was street hustlers earning a few dollars a week or high-level drug traffickers pulling in hundreds of thousands a year. Some kind of guilt always ate at them. But most couldn’t even dream of another life. That was what made Margot different. And part of this, I couldn’t help feeling, was the inspiration of New York City itself. Margot knew she was a player in the big show. She wasn’t just good; she was one of the best. That gave her a kind of social capital I hadn’t considered until now, the confidence to make a change. And even while she was pining away for a quiet house in the Southwest, she still daydreamed about the many businesses—dancing clubs, catering and entertainment businesses, cruise ship tours—she could start in New York. Each one fed the same underlying fantasy of helping other women to avoid subservient relationships to men.

  I thought this over and shook my head. “Margot, you’re going to miss all this.”

  She winked at me. “You are too.”

  I laughed. She was right.

  “You love being out there at two a.m. in some shitty little club,” she said.

  “And you love running hot girls like Morgan,” I said.

  “Yeah, but you think you’re different. You tell me how nuts the rich kids are, how amazing the poor people are, how much you feel for all the poor, suffering hookers. But we’re just like you. That’s what you can’t admit.”

  She was right again. This time I didn’t laugh. “I’m here because they don’t have a voice, Margot.”

  She shook her head as if she was disgusted with me. “They have a voice, Sudhir. They talk all the fucking time. You don’t have a voice is the problem. You feel like they could give you one. So you run to them—the feeble, the sick, the criminals, the crazies. Why do you always go to them? Think about it. Why do you always try to find in them something about who you are?”

  Margot was onto something, I knew. I didn’t like it, but she was right. I’d been doing this same kind of work for twenty years. Even though I was now aiming for the middle-class women and the rich, the motive wasn’t much different from when I studied the Chicago projects. I wasn’t exactly going for the wealthy lawyers or accountants. Even when a few called, like Martin, I ran away. I wanted the loners and the outcasts. I felt alone and different and sought out acceptance and wisdom from those who were equally stigmatized.

  Thinking about it amplified my discomfort. I didn’t want to study these worlds forever, I kept telling myself. But even as I s
pent my nights in the underworld of New York, I was also occasionally flying back to Chicago to follow the journey of the public housing families I’d studied over a decade ago as their homes were demolished and they found new places to live. More than 80 percent of them were ending up in neighborhoods just as poor and segregated and crime-ridden as the project towers they’d left. Dozens of tenants would call me just to talk about their inability to find a home, pay rent, or control their son or daughter in the unfamiliar new environment. Kids were dying; parents were going to jail. It was Groundhog Day, ghetto style. The definition of depressing.

  With the wounds of my divorce still fresh, I also couldn’t help resenting Margot a little bit. Her question turned me back inside. Was I studying the poor out of some prurient desire to feel better about myself? Many social scientists study inequality for their entire lives—I was hardly the only one—but there were probably fewer than a dozen who chose direct interpersonal contact over weeks and months and years. The surveys and phone interviews other researchers used helped them maintain a healthy emotional distance. I defended my need to see misery firsthand as a search for truth, but was truth an excuse for voyeurism under the cloak of science? Were my own prejudices and needs driving my search?

  But what would I do if I didn’t do this?

  I left Margot and went straight to a strip club to do an interview—three interviews, actually.

  My n’s were getting bigger all the time.

  • • •

  As 2005 was coming to an end, Angela called to say that she was leaving for the Dominican Republic. She was feeling depressed and wanted to be around family, she said. But she had a parting gift. She had found some Eastern European women and some Latinas who had managed to penetrate the upper reaches of the sex trade. They had all agreed to talk to me. If I came over to say good-bye, she would give me their phone numbers.

  When I arrived at her apartment, she was making Sunday dinner. The smells reminded me of the old Brooklyn apartment, and I almost expected Vonnie and Father Madrigal to walk in the door.

  Instead, Carla showed up. “Surprise!” she said.

  They were friends again? How did it happen?

  “Margot!” Carla said. “I learned a lot from her.”

  “Carla is like a queen bee around the bar,” Angela said, so proud she might have been talking about her own daughter. “Helps everyone. I’m so proud of her.”

  I knew that Margot was having a positive effect on Carla, if you can call changing from streetwalker to escort a positive thing. She was proud that Carla had become a “great date” and was now booking about four high-paying clients each month. Taking Margot’s advice, Carla had decided to stay in a subsidized apartment back in her old neighborhood and save her money to buy a condominium in the Bronx.

  “I have a picture of the building hanging above my bed,” Carla said.

  I smiled, picturing Margot telling her to “visualize” her goal.

  But Carla parted ways with Margot on one point. Margot thought Carla should limit her contact with friends and family in the projects. Get up and go to work and stay out of the drama, she’d said. Your friends will drag you down much quicker than anything you might do. Culturally and emotionally, Carla couldn’t accept that. Leaving the fishbowl was not so easy.

  I could see it from both sides. After all the drama surrounding the rich client who’d wanted to beat Carla up, when Margot finally started helping me again, I began beefing up my n’s with a much wider range of upper-end sex workers. I had spoken to women who worked in suburbs and in cities; some worked part-time, supplementing their regular jobs, while others saw sex as a full-time vocation. Some just danced at clubs—avoiding physical encounters—while others were phone sex operators. Soon I’d have enough to launch an expansive study of women who worked in three cities—Miami, New York, and Chicago. What particularly fascinated me was that their backgrounds were so different from either the streetwalkers I’d associated with Angela or the blue bloods in Analise’s employ. The women Margot found all hailed from small towns in states like Arkansas, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania and worked as far away as Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Miami—the global city as a network of cities. They approached their work in a much more businesslike frame of mind, changing their names and pooling expenses to buy condos and using a variety of Web-based platforms, from Facebook to Craigslist. One group had even formed an investment circle to take advantage of tips and advice from their rich clients.

  Margot kept trying to impress these lessons on Carla. “They never look back and neither should you!” Margot liked to say.

  But Carla would never leave her friends and family. She would probably never even leave the Lower East Side, despite that picture of the condo in the Bronx. In fact, she had already used some of her savings to give loans to a few friends who wanted to try what she was doing. They needed clothes, didn’t they? She even had dreams of becoming the Margot of Avenue A and was already, for a small commission, helping some young streetwalkers with dates and advice. “Sudhir,” she said, “these women need me.”

  The words were eerily familiar. Like Margot and Shine and Angela and Manjun and all the rest, success meant nothing to Carla unless it was reflected in the people she cared about. Her social capital was also her social cost. I couldn’t shake the thought that philanthropists never won in the black market, or that Carla’s charitable instincts were a reflection of her anxiety about her own future.

  When she went off to make a phone call, I asked Angela what she thought about all this. Wasn’t Carla risking her investment? Wasting time and energy she needed to create her new life?

  Angela shook her head. “If Carla was meant to make it out there, mi amor, she would have done it by now. I’m just happy she’s not on the pills.”

  “But I thought the whole point was to get out of here, get off the streets?”

  “We’re not like you, Sudhir. She’s nobody without us. She couldn’t put on her panties without us.”

  She laughed at that, then became serious. Margot wanted Carla to be white, she said. And that just wasn’t going to happen.

  I remembered the words of the contractor back in Chicago who’d told me he hated taking jobs in white neighborhoods. “The ghetto’s like a fish tank,” he said. “You struggle all the time trying to make enough to get out of the tank, but as soon as you get out there and feel the heat, you try to jump back in.” This was more complicated than fear of a white planet. If you spend your life on the edge of a cliff, you know you need people to help you in times of trouble. Carla had had the experience of that rich white client who’d beat her and got his money back. She had no recourse, no established social system to support her. Why would she want to put herself through that? But in the ghetto, everyone knows everyone and everyone owes everyone and there’s always someone who would do you a favor—who has to do you a favor.

  This was the diametric opposite of Analise and J.B. and their dreams of heroic individual achievement, which explained a lot. There was no doubt where my sympathies lay. But the problem was, Carla’s choice exposed her to new dangers. If she was trying to manage teenage streetwalkers, you didn’t need a psychic to see another slow-motion car wreck coming her way.

  • • •

  A few months later, I found myself in another kind of fish tank. This one was an elegant Park Avenue apartment with a Lichtenstein print hanging on the wall and a small ivory Buddha sitting in a wall sconce lit by a small spotlight. Analise’s friend’s place. They were in Bermuda for the week.

  I drifted into the kitchen, where Analise’s guests looked like they were straight out of the J. Crew catalog—young men dressed in mock turtlenecks and blue blazers, a few skinny bored girlfriends. A full spread of sushi, caviar, champagne, and holiday cookies on the counter. Copper pans hung from a rack on the ceiling; a giant stove looked big enough to feed an army.

  And the black marble countertop made a splendid surface to cut cocaine on, judging from the line
s spread out in a boastful array.

  And there was Brittany, swaying through the room in a gold Carolina Herrera dress with one naked shoulder. She had landed in trouble and come running back to Analise, of course, and she was worse than ever. She’d gossip about Analise’s escort service to anyone who would listen, talk openly about trips to Paris with clients, brag about sleeping with UN diplomats because they “had immunity and so no one goes to jail!” Her sense of privilege seemed to undermine the modesty and self-awareness a person needed to think tactically, which made the threat of some kind of explosion constant.

  As Brittany sloshed around the room, a single thin strap worked overtime to keep the dress on her shoulder. To me it seemed to evoke their whole hanging-from-a-thread operation. On her right ankle, she wore a sparkly diamond chain that added another touch of decadence to her black-heeled shoes. With one arm around an unsuspecting man, she put a hand gently on the small of his back and used the other to raise up her skirt just enough to show her panties. Then she laughed like it was all a big joke.

  Shine stood idly at the living room window, an unlit Kool dangling from his hand. He looked sharp in a black beret, clutching a rocks glass filled with whiskey and Coke. His sleeveless shirt made a display of the tattoo on his biceps, a crucifix with a legend written in calligraphy beneath: He Knows.

  J.B. was talking to him. “I’m probably going to the Rose Bowl,” he said. “It’s incredible, man. Maybe someday I’ll take you with me.”

  Shine looked at him with thinly concealed disdain. “I guess I prefer the Sugar Bowl myself,” he said.

  J.B. said one of his films had run into “creative” problems, so he was back to making porn to raise some fresh capital. His grand plan was to use some of the girls who worked for Analise. He fiddled with a new pack of Dunhills and sighed. “Analise and I want to leave,” he said.