ADVENTURES IN ROLE PLAYING
In my office, I remembered the advice of my very first sociology teacher, Aaron Cicourel: “Stop every few months, and go over your data. This will help identify what you know and, more important, what you don’t know.”
I took out a pen and paper and began to make a list.
For the Urban Justice Center, I had conducted more than a hundred interviews with streetwalkers—good, solid work. I had some rich if idiosyncratic adventures with Shine in Harlem, a lot more of the same with Manjun and Angela and Margot, plus a lot of dry wells and a ton of doors slammed in my face. But I had learned something from every encounter and the evidence was starting to accumulate. My feel for New York was slowly starting to approach my understanding of Chicago. But I still feared I had small n’s and that size would matter.
Maybe the list would help. On the left side, I put a header:
LOW INCOME
I knew about the history of underground activity in Harlem. Shine and his neighborhood had given me deep lessons in how all of this had come to be, including the roots of modern-day black markets in central Harlem. That part looked sound. I also had solid contact information for immigrant sex workers, day laborers, gypsy cab drivers, nannies, cooks, and dishwashers. When the time was right, I could easily turn this access into a sociological study on their earnings, lives, and family struggles.
On the right side of the page, I put another header:
MIDDLE & UPPER CLASS
This category included Margot and Analise, money launderers, strip club owners, the doctors and lawyers who serve them. But I hadn’t really conducted systematic interviews. Even though I had years of exploration under my belt, everything still felt impressionistic, especially compared to the more scientific approach of my colleagues.
From this list, as almost always happens, a question jumped out at me. Maybe this clunky scheme of low, middle, and upper class was itself a by-product of that old way of thinking about cities as bounded ecologies, neighborhoods separate in form and function with distinct groups living in each one. The sociologist Manuel Castells calls New York and other global centers like London and Paris “informational cities” in order to highlight the move away from traditional ways of carving up urban spaces. In informational cities, location still matters but the real currency is now mobile assets like information or connections. A new sociology of boundary crossers would have to study the role that networks—however fleeting they may be—play in refashioning this mobile world. But you couldn’t look only at finance, real estate, and corporate capital. According to some economists, the underground economy likely represents somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of an urban economy. This was too large to ignore. If my hunch about New York’s black market economy was right—if the underground was organizing people in new ways that shrugged off constraints of the past, sending people across borders with a new mix of soft and hard skills—then it could very well be redefining the underlying organization of the city as a whole. Sociology couldn’t neatly put Shine in his drug dealer box and Margot in her madam box and Analise in her Tiffany box and hope even to make sense of it all, much less grasp its potential scope.
Yes, this was the most meaningful question. Economists might try to pin down the individual ingredients people needed to jump up a class—education, experience, know-how, etc.—or they might focus on how big each class was and what percentage of income they made legally and illegally or how much the government lost in failing to tax black markets. But a sociologist could ask whether new classes were forming, new cultures and new ways of living that had the potential to make over the global city. That was the worthy goal, the paradigm shift that could effect meaningful change. Imagine a future Giuliani who saw the underground as vital to the city, a vibrant place that welcomed immigrants and provided a wide range of skills and services. He might then stop enacting what the urbanist Neil Smith calls “revanchist” policies, in which the modus operandi is to kick out the disenfranchised standing in the way of gentrification. He might even look at the informal and sometimes illegal adventurers of the underground as important new voices in the great urban chorus.
Actually, this was already happening in the developing world. Many governments had realized they couldn’t stop people from bartering, devising off-the-books credit schemes, or failing to report their income, so they just accepted it and tried to make sure it didn’t harm either individuals or society at large. For example, in the BRIC nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China—governments have put large sums of money behind programs that merge existing informal moneymaking schemes with modern enhancements like microlending and skills training. The point isn’t to legalize prostitution or build a better drug trade, but to direct the resources of human will and aspiration in a more productive direction. Couldn’t a New York mayor recognize these underground traders, brokers, and ne’er-do-wells in the same way?
With my pen in hand, I mulled over what I had learned from Margot, Carla, Analise, and Shine. They differed in many ways but all seemed to have one thing in common: the refusal to let race or sex or even wealth keep them in their designated social slots. Once again, I wondered if they could be said to make up a distinct social class of their own, a kind of third class suspended between the two worlds they inhabited. Maybe that was too highfalutin’ a question. But “criminal” was such an imperfect word to describe them, considered in the fullness of their actions. These people were seekers. As much as the peppiest young entrepreneur in any Silicon Valley garage, they dreamed of changing their worlds. And in their daily lives as ordinary citizens and consumers, their illegitimate earnings helped many legitimate businesses stay afloat. In that sense, they were pillars of the community.
Again, my instinct told me that the answer lay in connecting the underworld to the overworld. But here I was still facing the old problem of tracing those connections. Since the higher classes don’t seem to give social scientists the same respect and deference as the poor—Margot seemed to take downright pleasure in treating me like a clueless child—I had to find another way to gain a more profound level of trust. Again I heard the voice of Professor Cicourel. “You’re never neutral when you go out there,” he told my very first class on fieldwork. “Understanding what you mean in their world is your greatest advantage.”
What he meant was, you are never a “scientist” to people in the field, because they just translate your reality into their terms. So my role in the ghettos of Chicago became “poor graduate student.” This isn’t a question of concealment so much as the opposite, revealing what you want and who you really are. I just let people know the questions I cared about and the problems I wanted to solve so they could come up with their own ideas about how to participate. Instead of seeing my work as extractive—me sucking information out of them—I learned to think of it as collaborative: us working on joint problems together. Fortunately, it turns out most people like helping graduate students.
Now I had to find fresh ways to collaborate, a fresh role to inhabit. I didn’t want to be a tourist, but I couldn’t pass for a real insider either. I certainly wasn’t a pimp or coke dealer or strip club investor. My real interest was basically unchanged from the grad student days: just to document their lives as accurately as possible. So if I was going to reveal what I really wanted and who I really was in terms that would translate effectively, maybe I should be . . .
A documentary filmmaker! It helped that I actually was a documentary filmmaker. I had learned that while the wider public often didn’t see what academic knowledge would do for them, they seemed to find the idea of collaborating on a film more attractive. The academic articles could come later, when trust was built and I had a better sense of what research I might undertake. And maybe there would be actual documentaries; some of the stories had a lot of promise.
Of course, I ran the risk of annoying the stuffier solons of the academy. For them you wear either the scholar hat or the filmmaker hat, and the idea of any blurring in status is horrifying. But I thought the precise medium for storytelling was irrelevant and the important thing was to meet the audience where the audience gathered—not to be “correct” in some dusty library. Wearing the filmmaker hat would mean working in a different way with people like Margot: as collaborators instead of scientist and subject. And as soon as that idea entered my mind, I could see how she would welcome the change. It might finally erase the distinctions that were keeping us apart.
I would have to be careful. In the wake of infamous research studies like the Tuskegee trials, in which scientists let syphilis go untreated in order to study it, universities set up systems to verify the use of ethical methods. At Columbia, there were several boards that vetted research. I had always followed their rules closely, using false names and fake addresses so that no one could trace my notes back to individuals, and it had approved my formal study on sex workers. I also contacted these boards when I first started to hang out with Shine, but when I explained I had no research questions and wasn’t gathering data, just trying to meet people who might help me reach such goals at some point in the future, it stamped my activity “journalism” and left me to find my own way. Still, I wanted to know whether there were any special rules for filmmaking.
I asked for a meeting, which took place in a quiet conference room, the footfalls of students echoing in the hall outside. “How do I apply for approval if I’m about to interview women for a film—not for scientific research?” I asked.
“Why are you making films?” a board member asked.
“Am I not allowed to make films?”
“You’re a scientist. They usually don’t make films.”
“But I do.”
I told them about my documentary on Chicago housing projects, which was soon to air on PBS.
One board member sighed. “Well, that kind of creativity makes our lives difficult.”
“Films are journalism,” another board member said. “We don’t monitor journalism.”
“So if it’s journalism, I don’t need to fill out any paperwork?”
“No.”
They dismissed me with a request that I bring no more petitions concerning journalism or filmmaking.
• • •
My instinct proved solid. Once I started talking about the possibility of filming a testament to her unique world, Margot became much more interested in helping me. She said the hardest places to access would be strip clubs, so she accompanied me to several around the city and introduced me to the managers. Even after the first hour in their presence, with Margot in the room, I got a fresh picture of their jobs as a mixture of salespeople, security directors, and personnel directors. They talked about the diversity of dancers they needed to keep on staff to cater to the wide variety of tastes men had, which increasingly included an indeterminate mixture of blacks, Asians, and Latinas they referred to using the blanket term “ethnics.” From the drift of the conversation, it became clear they were hoping Margot would become their conduit to these populations, which gave me a new sense of the scale of her operation.
All of the managers said that, in a perfect world, they’d keep the sex work off premises. “Look, I know it has to happen,” one said, “because men want it. But I can’t stand the hookers that come in. Better they go to the hotels in the Bronx, where nobody gives a damn.”
The newcomers were the worst, another said. “They think the clubs are going to be the safest place—off the streets, with security all around. Maybe they pick up a guy and go to a hotel, or screw them in the back. But these amateurs—that’s what they really are—they’re usually the first to get hurt because they don’t know what’s going on. Either their dates beat them up or my guys do.”
The police officers I knew said much the same. They’d also seen a remarkable increase in the number of “amateurs,” often women who began as dancers or actors and decided to sell sexual services on the side. The cops were also struck by the increasingly wide range of backgrounds of the sex workers they were arresting, who came from every country in Eastern Europe and Central America, plus Asia and Africa too. They rattled off strings of place names as if they were trying to win a prize for naming all the countries on the globe.
After the strip club introductions, Margot set up three calls with managers of escort agencies. The idea was the same: she would be on the line to back me up and intervene should I say anything amiss; I would talk generally about my research interests and see if I could establish a level of trust.
I wasn’t quite sure how to prepare. The standard first step in sociology is a review of the existing literature, but there was no existing scientific literature on madams and pimps. The standard first step for documentarians is similar: have other films been made on this topic? The pickings were slim. I decided to treat these interviews essentially as prep work, asking the women to help me understand exactly how to approach their colleagues so as to ensure participation.
In this way, I was able to gather a surprising amount of information. All three of Margot’s contacts were women in their thirties. Two were divorced, one engaged. Two had college degrees. One had a background in corporate human resources and the other two had held various administrative and sales positions. Working three or four nights a month, they made between eighty thousand and a hundred thousand dollars a year. Two rented, the third owned a condo in Brooklyn. Each employed five or six women and numerous irregulars who floated between sex trade and straight work. But these facts were less interesting than the way the managers answered the questions, using their education and savvy to calculate their responses on the fly. That was the main reason there was so little research on the role of the underground economy in the lives of the middle class and the wealthy, I realized. They were too smart for us. They could see us coming. And while participating in the cause of “scholarship” may have seemed a distant, abstract, or worthless pursuit to them, they all loved the idea of the documentary. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was standing at the dawn of the reality TV age, when the trade-off between shame and fame had begun to disappear. But instead of looking down on this as mere hunger for celebrity, I began to see it in the opposite way: as a beautiful desire to translate their experiences to the wider world in the most popular medium of the era.
So when all the boxes were filled, I couldn’t stop thinking about Angela and all the other low-income women who had revealed so much of themselves, exposing their most painful and intimate secrets to me with such heartbreaking generosity. All that data would grow deeper from a solid basis of comparison. I owed it to them to keep pushing. For that matter, I owed it to them to broadcast their story in the most effective medium I could. So I risked annoying Margot by asking each of the three brokers if I could talk to any of their employees directly.
Two refused outright. “I don’t mind telling you about me, but I need to protect these women,” one said.
The third was a manager named Darlene. Margot was called away just before we finished that call, so I took that moment to pop my question.
“I could probably introduce you to a couple of people,” Darlene said.
That night, she gave my phone number to two of her employees.
The next day, both women called. I started with my usual “looking for advice” approach, asking them for the best strategies to win over the trust of their peers. Before long I had learned they were both white and twenty-five, earned about fifty thousand dollars a year working just two or three days per week, had high school degrees, and had come from the South to New York to be actresses. Both had been beaten up by a client at least once. Both had been forced to perform sexual acts against their will.
The first one stopped there. But the one who called herself Cathy told me she had plenty of time and was happy to answer any question I could throw at her. Thrilled, I asked her to name the hotels and bars she worked. She got out her date book and reeled off her last month of appointments with an efficiency that would have impressed Bill Gates. I asked about conflicts she had experienced, the biggest challenges she faced, the most annoying details—just throwing out whatever topic came to my mind—and she kept tossing back answers as if we were playing some fun information game. I wrote down the details as fast as I could, then ventured the uncomfortable question of what acts she performed and what she charged for them.
Cathy told me everything, adding amusing details wherever she could. “That guy, he actually was working for a publishing company,” she said at one point. “I told him I kept a journal and he said he would really like to help me get it published—as long as I didn’t put his name in it!”
Cathy told me about gypsy cab drivers who found her dates, probably some of Manjun’s friends from Hell’s Kitchen. She mentioned doctors who gave discount medical care or drugs. She talked about the emotional impact too. Even accounting for bravado, it was striking how differently she and the Angelas of the world viewed their lives. Instead of shame and fatalism, there was a note of defiance.
When she finally had to go, Cathy offered to hook me up with her friends too. She seemed to understand my n problem instinctively, actually volunteering concern that she would be able to get me a wide enough sample to represent the full range of upper-end sex workers operating in the city. “The industry is changing so quickly,” she said. “You have to talk to as many people as possible. Some of us like hotels, some are online only. There’s a wide variety.”
Within a week, I had talked with fourteen high-end sex workers, all white, all from middle-class backgrounds, 80 percent from outside New York. They broke down into two basic groups. First, the aspiring artist type, who came to the city to act, model, or dance. They worked as massage therapists or physical trainers and supplemented their incomes through sex work once every few weeks, earning between thirty thousand and sixty thousand dollars a year. Sex work helped keep their American dream alive.
The second group came from the lower rungs of the business world, mostly saleswomen, paralegals, administrative assistants, or human resource associates. They were a few years older than the aspiring artists; like Margot, many had turned to sex work after divorce or professional frustration. For them, hooking was just a way to get by and maybe even settle the score a little—to make men pay for their sins.
For all of these women, sex had become a general currency. In exchange for referrals, they slept with bellhops, hotel clerks, strip club employees, and gypsy cab drivers. For medical care, they slept with doctors and dentists. When money was tight, they borrowed from strip club managers, bartenders, and clients, and sex often became their means of repayment. Strip club managers were particularly notorious for using debt to force women to sleep with patrons and friends.
The material seemed so rich. Soon after, I got permission from Columbia to start a long-term research study and quickly landed a major research grant. I began to hire assistants. Separately, with my own funds, I also hired a videographer, filmed a dozen of the interviews, and began trying to raise money to make the documentary. Finally, all my efforts seemed to be gaining momentum.
• • •
Cathy called me again a month later. She was no longer working for Darlene. “I work for Tori now,” she gushed. “I couldn’t believe it when she said she was about to see you!”
At that moment, I was just heading out of my apartment for my first interview with Tori, an Ivy League graduate who managed a very exclusive agency on the Upper East Side and also invested in several strip clubs in New York and Florida. Her clients were such prominent people, she had been very reluctant to grant the interview, so I was surprised she had blabbed about it to Cathy. “Tori told you I was going to speak with her?” I asked.
“I’m the reason you’re talking to her!” Cathy said. “Tori and I go way back. We took dance together for years. She wasn’t going to call you, but I told her you were a nice person.”
“I don’t know what to say,” I said.
“You don’t have to say anything,” she cried in her excitable way. “And I have something else that you are definitely going to like—one of my clients wants to talk to you!”
“A john?”
“Martin. He’s a really nice guy.”
This surprised me. Except for my inspiring experience with Mortimer, johns were the one part of the sex work equation I had barely explored. There was already plenty to do with the drug dealers and sex workers and I probably assumed that most men wouldn’t want to talk about paying for sex. But Cathy said she’d been telling Martin about how open I was and that I never made her feel like a criminal. “I think he just wants to talk with someone,” she said. “He hasn’t been feeling so hot lately.”
I didn’t see myself in the role of analyst for frustrated men, I said.
Cathy became indignant. “You said you wanted to learn all about this world, didn’t you? Well, he’s part of this world. It wouldn’t even exist without him.”
A few days later, I found myself sitting across from Martin in yet another hotel bar. He was a tall, lanky man wearing a tailored tweed suit with a blue pocket square, his straight blond hair falling over his eyes as he spoke. He kept pushing it back as if each strand had been assigned a particular place on his head. “I guess it started about three years ago,” he began, “when things started to fall apart.”
I hadn’t even asked a question! We were barely past hello. Slow down, I told him, and began taking him through my standard disclosure conversation: that I work for Columbia, that I wasn’t actually studying johns in a formal way at that time, that I wouldn’t use his real name, that I—
“I’m not worried,” Martin cut in. “I trust Cathy completely.”
“Martin, I’m obligated to make sure you under—”
“Did I tell you about how many guys I know are in the same situation?” he continued. “At least twenty! It’s like the dirty little company secret. But we’re not deadbeats, okay? I want you to know that. We are responsible people who are unhappy with our wives for one reason or another, you know, and we all have our personal flaws and compulsions. But we don’t want to break up our families.” He repeated his key line. “We are responsible people.”
But didn’t compulsive and secretive behavior suggest something more serious? Wasn’t sex addiction a possibility?
An expression of scorn crossed his face. “I read that stuff in the media. It makes no sense to me. Bottom line, my wife doesn’t listen to me. Cathy listens.”
Either he anticipated skepticism or my face revealed it, because he launched into a protest before I could even get out a response. “Most of the time, I don’t even have sex with Cathy! I can count if you want—Cathy said you liked numbers. Last week, I met her twice—no sex. The week before, we were intimate once and not the other time. Before that, it was June and we had . . .” He thought for a moment. “Six meetings, I believe, and sex three times. So we’re averaging 50 percent sex.”
But if the emotional exchange was half the point, I asked, wouldn’t it make more sense to have a real affair? Then at least you’d know your paramour wasn’t being nice just for the money.
I still didn’t get it, Martin said. Affairs were too risky, too irresponsible. The exchange of money protected him. “See, it’s not like an affair, because I’m not interested in Cathy for anything long term. Cathy is good for me because she knows that I am married and I’m not going to leave my wife. She’s there to take the pressure off. Hell, if my wife knew as much about me as Cathy does, she’d be sending her thank-you cards!”
“So seeing prostitutes is good for your marriage,” I said, the sarcasm naked in my voice.
“Of course,” Martin said. He seemed exasperated for a moment, then he asked me quietly, “Haven’t you ever had marriage troubles?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact.”
“Then you understand.”
If he meant the hunger to be with a friendly young woman who did not think you were a bad and repulsive person, I certainly did. But it offended me to be drawn into his world in this way. I wasn’t here to talk about me. I was the scientist, not the subject. (I realize now how defensive this sounds, but I was raw enough from my personal troubles, and the act of observation seems to require a certain protective distance.)
“It sounds like what you really need is a marriage counselor,” I said. “Or a psychologist.”
Martin shook his head. “I’m not into the therapy thing. This feels better. Talking to Cathy, that feels a lot better.”
With that, he began to unspool the message he’d come to deliver, an odd mixture of apology and boasting. “The thing you have to understand is, guys like me, we’re big earners. High achievers. We were jocks in school, we’re rising stars at investment banks and law firms, and we aren’t going to a goddamn therapist to sit there and whine about how Mommy didn’t love us. That guy is a loser. But a guy who spends a thousand dollars to command the attention of a beautiful young girl, especially if he doesn’t even fuck her, that guy is a player. And when that guy goes home, he’s going to be less stressed out and angry. He’s going to be a better husband.”
As Martin continued, he chose his words carefully, loading them with just the right amount of emphasis, putting on a performance that was supposed to impress me with its brilliant, blinding honesty. “You’re a good listener,” he said when he was finished.
With a bit of embarrassment, I realized that I was filling the role Cathy usually played for him. At the same time, I was starting to fantasize about yet another documentary, about the complicated lives and complex motives of the high-end john.
“I think a bunch of my friends are itching to talk to you about this,” Martin said. “Do you mind if they call you?”
“I—I—I don’t know what to say,” I stammered.
But Martin’s phone was vibrating on the table. “Sorry, that’s my office. Gotta go.”
He rushed out, leaving me sitting at the table.
• • •
When I got home that night, my empty apartment greeted me like a tomb. I hated coming home. All the things my wife had left behind reminded me that I had failed. The coffee table mocked me. The lamps rebuked me. I wanted to burn them all. On one visit to my parents’ house I was so upset, I threw away nearly every trophy, picture, and memento I had saved from my childhood, as if those years were somehow responsible for how badly things had gone wrong. All this made me more eager to plunge into a new round of interviews.
But sometimes even that backfired. One spring night, I came home and saw I had a voice mail message. I felt that little burst of hope. Maybe it would be something good!
Instead, it was Margot with shocking news. “Carla just robbed a client,” she said.
What!? I couldn’t believe it. Little frightened Carla, so recently the victim of an assault? Who had been so excited to work for Margot? Who had been so determined to break out of her cultural trap and achieve something? It seemed impossible. Just a few nights earlier, Margot was telling me that she’d sent Carla out on three dates so far and all the clients had given very positive feedback. She finally had that fiery young ethnic girl. She was thanking me. What could possibly have gone wrong?
The voice mail continued with more detail: Carla had gone to an expensive hotel with a businessman, attacked him, stolen five thousand dollars, and fled. Now he was threatening to call the police unless he got his money back.
That was all she knew. Carla wouldn’t return her calls. “You’re part of this,” Margot said. “You have to help me find her.”
This was now officially one of my worst nightmares. I was a researcher, a disinterested academic. I couldn’t get involved in sorting out assaults and robberies. But I felt I owed Margot. And Carla was in trouble. I had to think of her too.
Do the right thing, I told myself. Picking up the phone, I punched the numbers for Margot’s office. I was prepared to tell her that I would go to Carla’s apartment immediately and do whatever I could to sort this out.
Instead, Margot started yelling at me. “I can’t believe you spoke to Darlene’s girls! Why would you do that without talking to me? Didn’t I tell you I didn’t think it was a good idea? And then you go and do it behind my back?”
Taken completely by surprise, I felt my voice get shaky. “I—I’m sorry. I thought Darlene was going to tell you.”
How could this have happened between her message and my call? It couldn’t have been twenty minutes.
“She did tell me! She told me she’s really pissed because that girl Cathy told you all this shit she shouldn’t have told you!”
I wheedled and pleaded, insisting Cathy hadn’t told me anything confidential or damaging. But Margot wouldn’t yield. She’d trusted me and I took advantage of her and now this little twit Cathy was telling all her friends that I was going to help them organize for better pay and better working conditions and maybe even make them famous with my documentary.
“What?” I said.
“Yeah, you’re like Cesar Chavez for these women. Darlene thinks you’re trying to poach her girls.”
“Poach her girls? That’s absolutely insane.”
“That’s what I was trying to tell you, genius. When these psychotic ladies find someone who listens to their sob stories, they think he’s Prince Charming. And suddenly it’s Professor Venkatesh this and Sudhir that and I have Darlene screaming in my ear.”
She went on for some time, telling me I should have listened to her and my judgment was suspect and thanks but no thanks for the offer of help with Carla but there was real life involved here, it wasn’t some kind of research project . . .
When she hung up, I felt horrible. I had made my fair share of fumbles in my work, but this was on another level. I knew that doors opened only a few times before they closed forever. I had finally gained enough access to carry out a study of sex across the entire region if I wanted—I was ready to make appointments with strip club managers, hotel clerks, bartenders—and I had blown it all by becoming too eager. My dreams of success were falling like a mist.
The worst part was, Margot was right. I should have anticipated this kind of problem. In nearly every study I’d done of illegal worlds, I had experienced the shocking speed of rumor. That’s why I was usually so patient, waiting months to ensure that people knew exactly what my intentions and research questions were. This was all because of the divorce, because of my impatience and my hunger. I should have gone more slowly. I got greedy. And I really should have kept Margot in the loop. She was the one who was speaking up for me, opening doors for me. What would I do now? Was there any way to win back her trust? Or was it hopeless and broken like every other goddamn thing in my miserable life?
• • •
The answering machine taketh away, but the answering machine giveth also. After Margot’s message there was a second one, from Martin. With great excitement in his voice, he said he wanted me to meet him for a drink. He named a private club on Forty-fourth Street.
I said I’d come right down.
On the way, I thought about telling Martin what had just happened with Margot. If anyone knew how difficult “easy women” could be, he would be the guy. And we’d bond and I’d get the access I needed and write the study and make the documentary and all would be glorious again. But as I got closer to the club, walking past the elegant hotels of Midtown, the idea began to disturb instead of comfort me. This was the portal to the high-end sex trade. The doormen I passed were actually middlemen. The valet could put you in a cab to a brothel. Looking through Martin’s eyes, I saw a glutton’s feast. But when I looked through my own eyes, even though I was after information instead of sex, I also saw a glutton’s feast—and I didn’t want to have anything in common with Martin.
Inside the bar, Martin was sitting with two other well-dressed businessmen. They were loud and happy, well into their first drink at just past three in the afternoon. They greeted me as if they’d known me for a lifetime. “Sit, sit,” one of the men said, pushing a chair into a more welcoming angle.
Martin was grinning. “I told you there’d be interest in this,” he said.
The men shot out their hands. “I’m Jonathan,” one said. “This is Nate.”
I ordered a drink as Jonathan continued with the story he was telling, something about a fight at the office. When my drink came, Nate cut him off. “Enough about the office. Let’s talk about sex.”
They all looked at me. I looked back at them. Nobody wanted to start.
Finally, Nate laughed. “Let’s start with this—what do you think about us?”
I didn’t know what to say. First I had to get to know them, I said.
“It’s not a crime,” Nate said. “What we’re doing is not a crime.”
“Actually, paying for sex is a crime,” I said. It felt cleaner that way. But oddly, that seemed to spark them.
“Paying for a good time is not a crime,” Nate said.
“You’re writing a book?” Jonathan asked.
“Not sure. I’ve been moving to documentaries lately.”
Jonathan studied me for a moment. “No faces, right?”
“Yeah,” Nate said. “You gotta put us behind a screen and disguise us with those Darth Vader voices.”
The last thing I wanted to do was expose them as individuals, I explained. I was going to add that using false names to protect privacy was actually part of the university rules, but that just reminded me that I had no interest in studying them. I started to get anxious. I wanted to get out of the world of johns.
But Jonathan took a breath and made up his mind. “Ask me anything. I have no shame.”
Again, I wasn’t sure what to ask. Jonathan helped me. “You’re looking for the Big Reason. The Big Why. Why do we do it? Why put our marriages at risk? Why risk the scandal? But it’s really not that complicated.”
Nate shook his head in violent disagreement. “It is complicated. I mean, it sure can get complicated. That’s why you have to keep seeing different women. Don’t get attached.”
“And what if they get attached to you?”
Nate looked glum. Clearly, attachment was a big issue that I’d never considered.
Jonathan leaned closer and confided, “Nate just went through this. What was her name? The one who rented an apartment on your block because she thought you loved her!”
Nate put his head in his hands, theatrically ashamed. “I should never have taken her to the fucking Caribbean.”
“One ride in first class and she’s yours forever,” Jonathan said with an evil laugh.
Nate began telling the story, his voice ranging between comedy act and confession. Then Jonathan jumped in with a story of his own, the prison of his marriage to a woman he married too young.
Eventually, Martin stepped in. “Sudhir, the thing all men ask themselves”—he always used my name before he said what was really on his mind, I noticed—“is a very simple question. Do you want to do it again? Knowing what you know, risking what you risk, do you still want to meet the next lithe young woman in the next expensive hotel?”
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 Margot 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.
“Martin, we’ve had this conversation before. What you do with your life is really not—really not—my business. Maybe you should speak with someone?”
He shook his head in a definite way. He had made up his mind. “It’s time I moved on,” he said. “You helped me understand that. You listened to me. You didn’t make me feel stupid or strange or abnormal. That’s why I want you here when Marjorie comes. You should be here for the end of the story.”
“Marjorie is coming here?” I said, my voice incredulous.
“She should be here in five minutes.”
“Jesus, Martin. Your wife is coming here? Does she know what you have planned? What are you going to say exactly?”
Martin laughed at my anxiety. “Look, I’m going to tell her about Cathy and me, about our relationship. Lord, I feel liberated.”
Somehow, I knew I would end up the bad guy in this. His wife would turn against me in shock or embarrassment just because I was there at such a bizarre moment.
“There’s going to be all sorts of surprises.” Martin chortled, and a chill came over me. I reached out and took hold of his forearm, noticing the soft silk of his jacket. Even I didn’t want this level of access into the personal lives of others.
Martin took out a white manila folder. His face beamed with the beatific expression of a penitent returned from confession, an expression I had seen before after particularly far-reaching interviews. “I gathered some notes for you. I thought I owed you something. Take it as a sign of gratitude. Some of my friends, the ones you met—we all thought it was something great you were doing. A lot of them felt the same as me. It’s just not something so easy to talk about.”
“Martin, please. I think we should slow down.”
But Martin kept talking, so pumped up he barely heard me.
“You should have this. I think this information will help you.”
Martin pushed the folder in front of me. I stared at it, wondering what he meant by “information.” Martin practiced law, but he was also an accountant. We had talked in detail about the financial structure of the upper-end sex industry. I sensed that the papers had some hard data on his personal expenditures, and perhaps that of his friends. Despite my resolution, this was tempting.
“I interviewed them. My friends,” Martin said, proud as a student submitting his senior thesis. “Well, sort of. I mean, I did my best. I don’t know if it’s perfect—you know, from a bookkeeping perspective.”
Martin rubbed his hands together—another new gesture.
“Martin, you’re a lunatic. I can’t take this.”
“No, no, no. You deserve it . . .” he said.
His voice trailed off. I looked around the bar. As dinnertime approached, the room was filling up with well-dressed middle-aged women in elegant dresses, their sparkling jewels echoing the dripping chandeliers above. Some were busy with their phones. Was one of them Martin’s wife? When Martin started his confession, she would look over at me and know that I already knew the whole story, that I was there to witness her reaction, and she’d be completely justified in hating me. With each woman who passed, I felt a growing sense of doom.
When I turned back to Martin, he was saying how much pain I was in. Not him, me.
In fact, all the guys felt bad for me.
That was it, the proverbial final straw. Sociology has to stop somewhere and what better place than this—the definitive example of too close for comfort, and way too close for objective science. I muttered some words of apology under my breath and bolted out of the restaurant, leaving Martin to meet his wife alone.
But on this dash past the glamorous hotel marquees to the safety of the subway that would take me home, new questions nagged at me: In a world of shifting borders and permeable barriers, was my anxiety a symptom or a clue? What did too close for comfort mean?
I was about to find out.