Floating City

by Sudhir Venkatesh

  “The party?”

  “The city,” he said. On a sailing ship, one of his father’s smaller vessels. It would be a good break from all this, once the porn flick was finished.

  Shine scowled, doubtless thinking the same thing I was—nice fantasy if you could get it, and J.B. probably could. But lesser mortals could not.

  Shine smiled and gave me a curious look. “Well, you finally got out of my neighborhood.” He turned away and looked out the window toward Harlem, as though he wanted to be saved from what New York had become.

  A few minutes later, Analise started banging on a bathroom door. “Brittany! C’mon.”

  From inside the bathroom, Brittany groaned. “That fucker told me this shit was clean.”

  Analise shook her head in disgust. “I bet you don’t even know the guy’s name, do you?” She hit the bathroom door one more time and told Brittany to get her shit together, goddamn it. A moment later Brittany came out, looking dazed. “Did Michael go home? Where did that fucker go?”

  “I gave him to Jo Jo,” Analise said.

  Brittany shot her a furious glare. “Fuck, Ana!”

  “You’re too wasted,” Analise said, her voice icy.

  “You’re like my fucking mother sometimes,” Brittany said.

  During their breakup, Analise had told me that she and Brittany would always be in each other’s lives. Now I saw what she meant. They were locked in the same battle forever, Brittany insisting she was indispensable and demanding constant emotional stroking, Analise forever trying to turn Brittany into a slightly less controlled version of herself. I wandered away in a state of melancholy tenderness and spent the rest of the evening standing in the kitchen talking to Evalina and one of J.B.’s depraved preppy filmmakers. At different times, I glanced across the room and saw Analise and Shine together, or J.B. and Analise together, or Analise and Brittany together. I had a feeling that they were all in a space capsule together, floating in a weightless world.

  Finally Analise walked over to me and asked how I was doing.

  “This is weird,” I said.

  She led me out onto the balcony so she could smoke a cigarette. Shine was already out there smoking.

  “You okay?” Analise asked.

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  “You don’t look okay, my brother,” Shine said.

  I tried to laugh. “Truthfully? Don’t you think it’s strange that you two are working together? Don’t you think it’s strange that you and Brittany are back together? And what about J.B.?”

  But Analise shook her head. “The problem isn’t us,” she said. “The problem is you.”

  Shine nodded. “She’s got a point, Sudhir.”

  I was completely floored. My Harlem broker had met my Upper East Side broker and together they were running a citywide brothel, and I had the problem?

  “I’m going to be honest with you,” Shine said. “Since I’ve known you, you been meeting up with all these people—Manjun and Angela and Carla and Martin and Margot and all these people—and you don’t do nothing with it.”

  Why were they attacking me? I was an academic trying to penetrate a variety of subcultures in hopes of writing that great book or documentary. I had done studies. I was gaining access, entrée, insights. This was Margot all over again.

  Shine continued. “You think I’m uptown and she’s downtown and how the fuck can we hang out? Fuck you, man. Why the fuck not? You doing the same thing. You teach them rich kids uptown, you make films downtown with downtown people. What makes you so different?”

  A good question, I had to admit.

  “I’m done with this shit in a year,” Analise said. “Shine will move on to another level. None of us are fixed in place, Sudhir. But you are. You go from story to story and group to group but you’re always in the same place, looking in from outside. And now you’re freaked out because you don’t know what’s inside and outside anymore.”

  She was right. That was it exactly. How odd that the ultimate insider, America’s daughter, understood me better than anyone. I was trying to make a box big enough to fit everyone into and she and Margot just climbed right out and pointed at the box I was in. They finally broke through my Chicago framework and put me in that New York state of mind I’d heard so much about. It was probably the same reason Martin freaked me out so much, because his world came too close at that vulnerable moment in my life. I couldn’t maintain my borders.

  “But that’s what’s so great about this city—everyone who wants to be different gets to be different. It doesn’t matter.”

  With that, she threw her cigarette off the balcony and followed Shine back into the party.

  Shine shot me a look as he walked away. He didn’t need to say anything because his expression said it all. You can’t stand there watching or the wave will hit you. At some point, you gotta choose.

  • • •

  A few months after that, Angela called. Carla had been beaten up once again. She had gone to a hotel room where one of her teenage protégées was working. The date was going bad, the woman called Carla from the bathroom, and Carla arrived to find the man tweaked out on coke and the girl locked in the bathroom. The man beat Carla so bad she couldn’t answer questions in her hospital bed for three days. When she came out of her daze, she kept telling Angela how proud Margot would have been.

  Angela wanted me to put her in touch with Margot. “Carla won’t listen to me. Says, ’Only Margot understands what I’m trying to do.’”

  Margot had been in the Southwest, looking for a new place to live. But I got in touch with her and we made plans for the three of us to visit Carla at her apartment.

  When we got there, we found Carla propped up on some pillows that looked as if they’d been borrowed from a child’s bedroom. She was all bandaged and bruised and crazed from painkillers and humiliation. She wanted revenge, she said. She was going to get Ricky to go kick that motherfucker’s ass into the next world.

  Margot took a small chair and pulled it next to the bed. She stared at Carla, ignoring her talk of revenge. Finally Carla pulled herself up on the pillows and spoke through clenched teeth. “Why is it that you can do this, but I can’t? I’m no idiot. It’s not fair.”

  “Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Margot said. “That’s the worst thing you can do.”

  “It’s not fair, Margot,” Carla cried.

  “Fair? No, it’s not. But why am I here?”

  Angela and I were standing at the back of the room, by the door. I saw Angela look at Margot curiously, wondering what kind of strategy she was using. I was wondering the same thing.

  “Carla, why am I here?” Margot repeated.

  “I don’t know,” Carla said meekly.

  “Well, if you don’t know, I don’t know either.” Margot looked around the room, taking me and Angela in too. “I’m done with this. I’m getting out. You want to whine and bitch, you do it to Sudhir—he’s not going anywhere.”

  “I’m not whining,” Carla said.

  “Yes, you are! You’re whining! I’m so sick of listening to whores whine about their pathetic fucking lives, Carla. If you want to play in this game, you have two choices: either you let the girls get beat up or you get beat up. Someone’s going to get beat up. Which one do you want?”

  Carla didn’t know what to say. “I don’t know. I—”

  “Well?” said Margot. “Which is it? Them or us?

  “These are my friends,” Carla said. “I’m not letting no asshole beat up my friends.”

  “See, that’s your fucking problem, Carla,” Margot said, standing up to leave. “Those hookers are not your friends. They work for you. They’re the thing standing between you and a better life. Get your head together and stop being a whiny little bitch.”

  With that, Margot walked out of the room. Angela and I followed her through the dank hallway, into the dimly lit elevator, and outside the housing project building, a twenty-floor monument to government paternalism that seemed particu
larly futile on this sad night. In fact, I thought, Carla and the building had a lot in common. She wanted to be there for her friends and offer a helping hand as they tried to make it as prostitutes in a world that was the definition of nasty, brutish, and short. She wanted to be their Angela and make them feel good about themselves, she wanted to be their Margot and make them learn to better themselves, but all she had learned from her journeys across all those borders was how to get her ass kicked. Now Margot was telling her the same thing all the critics of government support said. Low-cost housing and welfare and health care and that sweet Angela love just made you weak. To win at this game, you had to be tough. You couldn’t be their friend. You had to be like Shine. You had to know when to cut your losses and move on. It was, in the end, a business.

  At some point, you gotta choose.

  I’m sure Angela and I were thinking the same thing. Carla was running this race handicapped. She didn’t understand what it really meant to manage people, how to motivate them to survive the nightly abuse and also motivate yourself. That was what Margot had lost, the reason she was quitting, the reason she was so bitter. She had begun to succeed as a manager, she had often told me, the day she accepted that somebody was going to get hurt. Being violated was part of the game. But at least she could choose not to be the victim.

  It was all so sad. Angela was going to go back upstairs, at least. God bless her for that. She shrugged her shoulders and started to wipe her eyes.

  “I’m sorry we had to meet like this,” Margot said, and now the compassion was back in her voice.

  “Yes,” Angela said. Just that and nothing more, but it said everything. She squeezed my hand.

  Six months later, Carla killed herself.

  • • •

  The calendar turned again. It was now 2007, a full decade since I first came to Columbia University and the city of New York. I was in a strip club in northern New Jersey looking for new venues for another study of the sex economy. I needed to find club managers and dancers who would talk about the journey so many of them took from dancing to full-time sex work. In this bustling industrial corridor just outside New York, the strip clubs were small neighborhood places where the TVs showed the game on mute while women danced to loud rock and roll. The owner of this one, a gruff but amiable fellow named Jimmy, had studied sociology at a community college and liked to talk with me about growing up in the working class. Twenty feet away, a young Latina woman was sitting on the lap of a burly white man wearing a green Caterpillar hat. She reminded me of Carla. With each beer, the burly man grew rowdier. Jimmy got up a few times and made a move in his direction, and each time the man waved him off with a promise he would calm down.

  Suddenly, the burly man threw the young Latina down and put his foot on her throat. He poured his beer on her face and then dragged her out of the bar by her hair.

  Jimmy went into the back of the bar and grabbed what looked to be a short baseball bat. I followed him outside, along with a dozen other customers. The burly man had pinned the young woman against the outside wall of the bar and he was smacking her in the face with his open palm.

  Jimmy walked up to him as the burly man wound up for one more strike to her face. Just as he put his fist in the air, Jimmy clobbered him with the bat across the back of his neck. The man lost his grip and the girl fell and Jimmy swung the bat again. Whack! Whack! The man fell down next to the girl.

  Then Jimmy pulled the girl up and told her, “That’s it—you’re done. I don’t want to see you back here. I told you nicely that you weren’t ready, and you didn’t listen. So get the fuck out.”

  He turned to the small crowd and told them to go back inside. “People are trying to sleep. Let’s be respectful.”

  I slid down against the wall. My knees were weak and I was about to throw up.

  Jimmy came over and grabbed my arm with the same hard grip he’d used to drag up the Latina. “No,” he said. “Don’t do it.”

  All the faces of all the women I had seen in situations like this came swimming into my head. Carla. Angela. All the horrible stories I had heard.

  “Don’t go there,” Jimmy said.

  I tried to talk, but it just came out like this: “I can’t … I can’t … I can’t …”

  A week earlier, the night we had met, I had told Jimmy that I was nearing the end of my work. The nights were too long, I explained. I was getting worn out. “Bullshit,” he’d said. “You’re scared—I can see it. You want to save these women, and you don’t know how, and it’s eating you up.” He felt the same way, he said. All these crazy women reminded him of his wife. Men were protectors, and it didn’t matter whether she was your wife or some low-rent streetwalker. It hurts to see them like this. Especially when you can’t do anything about it.

  Now he said, “You can. Go home, but come back. Come back once. After that, you can stop. But you have to come back once.”

  He lit a cigarette and gave it to me, then lit another one for himself.

  “You can sleep here if you want or you can go home, but it’s important that you come back. Get back on the horse.”

  “I’m done, Jimmy,” I said. I started to cry and I buried my hands in my face, embarrassed that he was seeing this. The study I wanted to complete, the book I wanted to write, the documentary film I hoped someday to complete—I was sick of everything and ready to throw it all away.

  “Someone has to get beat,” he said. “That’s the game. Someone gets fucked up, gets a beating. You can’t change it. Go home.”

  He walked back into the club as I sat and sobbed. Someone has to get beat. First Margot, now Jimmy. The image of Joshi came into my mind, arranging his toy soldiers on his knees. It was all just too hard to accept.

  Finally, I pulled myself together and called a cab. On the long drive down those dark industrial streets toward the lights of Manhattan, a strange thought came into my head. In the ragged alleys of Newark, in the strip clubs of Manhattan, in the back of a porn shop in Hell’s Kitchen, on the elegant sofa of an upscale madam, I had found a community. Like Mortimer, the dying man who depended on the kindness of prostitutes; like Martin, who found comfort among his fellow johns; like Angela, with her tolerant priest and the small army of sex workers who loved her, I also had people looking after me. And I had the advantage of growing success with the research that mattered so much to me, a morale booster if ever there was one.

  With the help of Angela and Margot, I had gathered enough contacts in the upper-end of the sex trade to launch a study of several hundred women in several cities, and I finally managed to build a big enough sample of women to satisfy the scientists of mainstream sociology. But the truth was, all my scientific detachment about the “informants” and “research subjects” was a dodge, along with my glorious collection of n’s. Margot was right about me. In a vast city where I felt alone, in a country where I had been struggling to find my own way, I had searched out a small army of weary soul mates who did their best to point me home. And this wasn’t some character flaw or research failure but the business of life working itself out, especially life on any kind of margin. These improvised communities gave support and also resonance. Their lives rippled through me, my life rippled through theirs, we extended our support systems outward through one another and into the beyond that threatened and beckoned us. The only real difference was that I was also taking notes, quantifying and categorizing, applying the tools of science to the journey we were all taking together.

  And Jimmy was right too. I had to come back. Even if it was just for one more night, I didn’t want this to be my last memory of the underbelly world. I owed all of them that much. I owed them so much more.

  • • •

  I saw Margot one more time. She said she wanted to hear my proposal for the regionwide study of the sex economy in New York. But when I showed her my list of the issues I would be studying, she gave them a quick glance and went back to talking to me as if I was a client. “Make a list. You want interviews? Fine.
You want to meet more people like me? Fine. Cops? Whatever you want, let me know. But do it quick because I don’t know how long I can do this.”

  A few months later, she quit the business and moved to Arizona. I never saw her again.

  Angela called me once from the Dominican Republic, but I didn’t even get a chance to speak to her. She left a message on my answering machine saying she wanted to put the past behind her.

  Shine I met a few more times. Once it was back in the old bar, having a drink at the end of the day. He had a bad cough and was as gloomy as an accountant at the height of tax season, loaded to breaking with everyone’s miseries and lies. He asked what I was doing and I told him I was giving everything up for a while—no more sex workers, no more johns, no more rich kids. I was even taking a break from the documentaries. It was all too much for me. I couldn’t figure out a way to hold it all together.

  “It’s probably a good time to take a break,” he said.

  I sensed the pity in his voice and rejected it. “It’s not a break, Shine. I wanted to map all the patterns and figure out the code. I wanted to find a way to connect everything. I wanted to show that people like Angela and Carla and Manjun weren’t so different from people like Analise and J.B. I wanted to show them a way out.”

  That was the truth. This wasn’t about science. I wanted to show them a way out and I had failed. “I failed,” I said.

  With that, emotion welled up from so many places. Memories of the porn store, of the apartment in Brooklyn, of the time I accompanied Carla to that diner to meet with Margot. I even remembered the magazines I looked at in the newsstand when I left them alone to get to know each other. Foreign Affairs! I felt like crying and kept pouring the feelings into a soliloquy about New York and my fear that I would never really figure out this enormous protean city no matter how big a study I could build. “I failed,” I said again.

  Shine met my eyes. He took a deep breath and glanced up at the television and put an ice cube in his mouth, sucking on it pensively. When he looked back, I got the feeling he had returned from a distant place. “Did I ever tell you how my older brother died?”