BOUNDARY ISSUES
Shine said he had some news for me, so we met at a bar near my office. He told me the church confrontation didn’t work. Juan just denied selling coke right there in front of everybody. Now Shine was moving to plan B.
Before he could say any more, we were interrupted by a very upset young black woman. “They asked me to leave!” she cried.
Shine put down his soda, turned, and looked her up and down. Her wide eyes made it clear she’d been doing coke, and her hands were shaking, so it seemed she was probably coming down off an elephant-strength buzz. She even had the little bluish black blotches hard-drug addicts get on their faces. “Who? Where?” Shine asked.
“The dude at that bar downtown. Said I shouldn’t come in anymore.”
“What did he say exactly?”
“Said, ’You got to get out of here.’ But this dude was in the bathroom and he was about to come back, so I said I had a friend who was still in the bathroom. And he said, ’I don’t care. You gotta leave.’”
“Did you get to everyone?” Shine asked.
“I couldn’t. He told me to leave!”
“Next time, wait outside. Don’t leave people hanging like that if they’re waiting for shit. They get nervous, shit happens. I got to tell you everything?”
I was surprised Shine was using someone so strung out as a runner. The transition from the street crew really wasn’t going well, apparently. He seemed disgusted. “Wait over there,” he told the woman, pointing to a seat in the corner. “We got to talk when I’m through with the professor.” She started to obey, but he stopped her with a question. “Did you see any East Side niggers there?”
“I don’t know . . . It was a pretty big place.”
“Was everyone white?”
“Yeah, I guess. I mean, there were some talking Spanish, Dominicans or something.”
“How many of them?”
“Like two or three?”
Shine looked like steam was going to come out of his ears. “Was it two or was it three?” he said.
People looked over. This wasn’t normal for him. Something was wrong.
“Three. Just a bunch of young dudes having a beer.”
“I don’t think so,” said Shine. He took out his phone from his coat pocket and walked outside to make a call. The girl went off to her appointed space. I sipped my beer.
A few minutes later, Shine walked back in and sat down. He didn’t say anything and I could tell he wanted some time to cool off, so I put a few dollars on the table and said good-bye.
Later that evening, he called to explain. Shine’s access to the bars depended on the bartenders who received a fee for allowing his runners to come and go. As he suspected, Juan had paid one of them off. This meant that Shine’s drug runners would no longer be allowed to come inside—tall black women in Wall Street bars stood out, so it was easy for the bartenders to tell who was a runner. That son of a bitch Juan was taking over his sales spots, Shine said. Which was bad enough on its own, but it was also dangerous, since Shine and his runners were now walking into potential law enforcement traps—what if the bartender called the police the moment one of Shine’s employees walked in? Without an agreement, there was nothing to stop them from dropping the dime. The cops made their bust, Juan walked in, and everyone was happy—except Shine.
This fight with Juan was costing him. How much worse would it get? And how could he raise the heat without scaring the white customers and killing the whole business?
“All it takes is for one of those dudes to let the police know where I’m hanging out,” Shine said. “I’m out there with no protection.”
What it added up to was, Juan could use his relationship with these white customers to hurt the guy who’d given him the idea of forming relationships with white customers in the first place—a bitter twist indeed. And Juan’s cousins were high-ranking gang members themselves, which meant that Shine had to work within a very narrow framework of acceptable street justice or risk violent retaliation. “That boy could fuck me over pretty quick,” Shine muttered.
That was another surprise. Street-savvy entrepreneurs like Shine never admit vulnerability. They can’t risk a chink in the armor. He knew he could trust me, but still—dealing in bars outside Harlem had clearly put him outside his comfort zone. A small shift in the cocaine market and all that was solid in Shine’s life was melting into air. Marx would have been fascinated, Milton Friedman amused. The creative destruction of capitalism—change or die—was sending this resourceful and determined man into bars where he didn’t know the manager, to hotels filled with security he’d never met, to white customers he didn’t trust. And “die” wasn’t a metaphor.
The frustration I’d seen on his face at the bar that day spoke volumes. In sociological terms, Shine was coming to the painful realization that he was missing some aspect of cultural capital, that he wasn’t quite in line with the tribal codes of this new world. He could pull off the small talk—half the battle and no small accomplishment—but the rules of conflict still eluded him. And conflict was a sine qua non of life underground. People in Harlem’s black market understood physical force. He could threaten a person or even their family members and everybody knew the limits. Nobody would dream of going to the cops, so you solved problems on your own, but self-reliance also increased the likelihood that force would be used. In sociological terms, physical confrontation was a social norm that had to be dealt with off the books.
But the white bartender? Who knew how someone like that would react? Shine kept muttering about the right ways to settle conflicts in the “white world.” If you couldn’t beat someone up, he wondered, what worked? Persuasion? Rational informed discussion? The whole thing was giving him a headache. He had tens of thousands in the game, he said, and he’d better figure things out before he lost the money and his reputation along with it. The only thing he knew for sure was that whatever he decided to do, he’d have to do it fast. “I might not be around for a few days,” he said.
I didn’t ask what he was planning. For my own safety, it was better not to know.
• • •
It took a while to find the right time,” Shine said. His voice was very quiet.
We were alone in the kitchen of his mother’s house. This was the first time I’d seen him since the day the tall black woman had come into the bar all coked out a few months earlier.
“Juan?” I asked.
He nodded.
My stomach lurched. His original plan, I remembered, had been to face him down at church. I pictured that skinny kid, imagined his dignified working-class parents standing at the church door talking to the priest. I saw them look down at the sidewalk and the expressions of horror and shame as they saw Shine confront their son. In a research study I would have filed this under “informal regulation mechanisms of the underground economy.” Now the only thing I could think was, How could law-abiding, God-fearing parents stand to watch that? How could they bear it, knowing they couldn’t call the police because that would only make things worse? What kind of society had we created?
I guess Shine could see the distress on my face. “I’ll tell you about it later,” he said. We sat at the table without saying much, eating his mother’s comfort food. I felt very melancholy. This was not a side of him I ever wanted to see.
When we were finished, we went for a walk down the sidewalks of Harlem and Shine told me the story. For five hundred dollars, he’d hired an older man named Tito to help him track Juan’s whereabouts. Tito lived in the neighborhood and could move around without being detected. He had spent over a decade in jail for drug trafficking and nobody would pay him a living salary after he got out, so he served as a hired gun for underground traders. He’d do anything from party security to beating up deadbeats to shaking down local business owners.
Tito’s report was thorough. Juan had four young women, girls really, who lived with their mothers in Harlem and worked in stores or offices downtown. They found customers and Juan came down to meet them. Tito also learned that Juan was looking for a basement apartment in the Bronx, which was significant because basements were popular places to store drugs and weapons. Juan was even starting to interview young guys to run for him. And though he didn’t have security guards, he usually traveled in a group that was bound to be armed.
Tito suggested that Shine grab Juan as the young man was leaving a building on 134th Street, where one of the girlfriends lived. A small alleyway that separated two brownstones would make a splendid spot for a beating.
In the meantime, Shine did make a few more stabs at settling the dispute. He got a female to carry a message. Juan ignored it. Then he approached him on the street. Just find your own bars, Shine said. Take Brooklyn and give me Soho. But Juan had an attitude. He said he’d developed clients and bartenders and turned them over and now he should get a cut. “You owe me money. I want my money.” The claim itself was innovative, a revolution against the established pecking order, and the thing that angered Shine even more than a goddamn nineteen-year-old runner asking for an equity stake in his business was the idea that he’d told the kid he didn’t want him cultivating customers in the first place. Now the little bastard wanted a reward for ambition Shine never wanted him to have. Offer shares to a crewmember? The idea was outrageous. The whole system would collapse. He could always find another person willing to accept a day’s pay for a day’s work.
Under different circumstances, I might have laughed—Shine sounded so much like an archconservative denouncing unions and the minimum wage. But in this world, the loss of market share led to consequences that were immediate, personal, and painful.
Juan was much smaller than Shine, but Tito helped hold him down while Shine applied his form of human resources counseling. He focused on Juan’s face, making sure to open some good cuts that would leave a lasting impression on the young man. A “bunch of good shots to the mouth” drove the message home.
Shine shook his wounded hand and smiled. The thing was, right up until the last punch, Juan was muttering about the money he was owed. Shine had left the kid lying on the ground in a pool of his own blood and he still wouldn’t give up. He’d be back.
“What if he brings his cousins with him?” I asked.
Shine just sighed and stared ahead. We walked a few blocks in silence. Then he sighed and cursed Juan’s name a few times before saying he would probably have to go into business with the little bastard.
“Are you kidding? After what you just did to him?”
“Had to do that, man.”
I didn’t know what to say. It was so unemotional, so Machiavellian—so professional. There was something simultaneously frightening and attractive about Shine’s ability to dispense force in this dispassionate way, as if he had given a mild rebuke to a subordinate—nothing personal, just business.
The immediate concern was more basic: Shine couldn’t just ignore the bar downtown. It would look like he was showing weakness and that would tell Juan and his cousins to move back in, which would open the gates to all kinds of trouble. This wasn’t like the regular business world. Burger King could shut down a franchise without worrying about Mickey D coming to whack him. But if Shine fought for the territory the way he would up in Harlem, it would freak out the white boys and the cops who protected them. He was back at the practical problem of crossing this particular border. He still didn’t know how to handle the white bartender or the upper-end clients. He couldn’t bring Tito to each bar Juan’s crew had taken over. What he needed now was the ability to surf through an unsettled period when the context was changing from what had come before—the quality sociologist Ann Swidler has called possessing the right “cultural repertoire.” In a period of flux, when the old way of behaving is not working, a broad set of experiences and references seems to give a person the ability to find new rituals and mechanisms of success. Failing that, the only solution is to find a broker, or “rabbi,” who could support him.
The A train rumbled under our feet and Shine turned to look at me. He held my eyes and smiled with an odd, amused expression, resigned and a bit puzzled.
“I’ll give him the bars. I mean, he’ll have to pay my cut—I won’t just give them to him. But I want out of those goddamn bars anyway. That’s the kind of thing that gets cops all excited. They don’t give a fuck about some street corner in Harlem with grannies and schoolkids walking by, but a bar full of white boys getting shitfaced must be protected at all costs.”
I understood his point. If he stayed in Harlem and sold to the locals and the few middle-class white tourists, he was considered a nuisance but not a threat. But what would that leave him? I wondered. If he gave up the streets and the bars, what was left?
He read my mind. As we paused at the curb, respecting the red light only as long as it took to check the traffic—the code of the New York pedestrian—he smiled and slapped me on the shoulder. “Art,” he said.
“Art?”
“Galleries. Openings. Those people got tons of money, and they like to party. And it’s a scene where you can be . . . colorful.”
He grinned.
It sounded like a good plan, I said, but it also sounded like an even harder nut to crack than the bars in Soho. How was a guy like him going to find his way into a world like that?
Shine seemed amused. He knew I’d been hanging out in artsy circles since beginning the documentary work, so maybe he thought I was being proprietary. “You think I never heard of Jackson Pollock? I’ve been to the goddamn Metropolitan. I went there on school trips.”
I said nothing.
“Anyway,” he said, “my cousin’s an artist. Evalina—you know her. She’s in a show that’s opening on Saturday down in Soho. No shit, artsy types just like yourself have welcomed her just like she was one of them.”
I sensed a dig there, a hint of competitiveness. Was he saying I didn’t welcome him as an equal? Could he really be nervous about status after telling me he’d just beat a man and left him in a pool of blood?
“Why don’t you come?” he said, grinning now. “That should be fun for you—you can see me work your crowd. Might even be some friends of yours there.”
I said yes, of course.
This brings us back to where the story began, to the gallery opening when Shine and Analise first met and the shocking scene—shocking to me, at least—when Analise came to my house and told me she was in the same business as Margot. Of all the connections between high and low I could have imagined or desired, this was the least possible crossing of the last possible boundary.
By that point, so much had already happened. In Hell’s Kitchen, I had learned the secrets of one New York neighborhood’s underground economy. I had seen people and places changed by the rapid globalization of New York. I’d determined that the sex trade would be a fitting way to write about the boundary crossings that defined contemporary New York and followed the natural connections that had led me out of the ghetto. Margot and Darlene and their friends were giving me a new perspective on the underground economy throughout the city. But Analise was about to remind me how little I knew.
We didn’t see each other for a few weeks after her confession. Then she called with an unusual request. In all our time together, we’d rarely met outside of public places. This time, she wanted me to come directly to her place, a ground-floor two-bedroom just off Gramercy Park.
When I got there, the decoration process was still under way. Framed prints and lithographs leaned against the wall, a paint can sat on spread newspaper, furniture had been shoved against walls waiting for placement. She immediately brought up J.B. He had left for Los Angeles to develop some new film projects. Her money had been “wasted on a movie that’s never going to get into Sundance.” Her face was drawn.
Now she was trying to make a break. This apartment was part of it. She had asked her mother for a raise on her allowance and rented this place, a new place for a new life. “Look!” she said. “It even has a garden.” Ever hopeful—that was the Analise I’d known before. I grew hopeful too. She was going to dump the idiot boyfriend and abandon her life of crime.
She made tea and took me out to the backyard.
“Check this out,” she said, opening up a laptop on a small round cocktail table. On a second table pushed next to it sat a portable file box with about two dozen manila folders marked with different-colored tabs. Each sheet had a weekly revenue and a monthly “intake to date” sum scribbled, and scratched out and updated. That way, Analise didn’t have to flip through the pages inside the folder, which also provided data on historical revenue, biographical information, hotel rates, and services performed.
These were the records for her escort service. “So you’re not going to quit,” I said.
“I’m going to do it better,” she answered. “I have to winnow this down,” she said. “I’ve got about five or six reliables, I figure, and ten I don’t know if I can trust.”
She started describing the challenges. These were privileged, willful young women long on looks and short on business sense. They were giving away “freebies” to potential clients, getting drunk, forgetting to cultivate relationships. It was ridiculous. She even tried sitting them down for some basic instructions on how to handle difficult situations, but they were too busy texting or dreaming about a trip to St. Barts to pay her any mind. So they kept making the same mistakes, kept losing money, and kept putting themselves through unnecessary dangers.
“I really can’t help you,” I said. “I mean, I’m not sure exactly what it is you want me to do—or say.”
“I just wanted you to see how I’m dealing with things,” she said. “I mean, I’m trying not to be stupid. I don’t want to do this forever, but . . .”
She stopped, then narrowed her eyes as if she was looking at the truth behind the truth. “All I know is, the more money I make, the more confident I feel. Like, if I have money, I can finally talk back to my parents.”
We laughed—who doesn’t know what that feels like? My story wasn’t so different. I was obsessed with data instead of money, but we both had chosen to focus our efforts on worlds far more hard-edged than those we were born into. The more I could penetrate the underground, the better I felt about myself. If it was marginal, criminal, or tinged with outsider status, count me in. The seedier, the better. My recent divorce had multiplied the impulse, pushing me to the margins among the outcast and the criminal. At times I told myself I was following in the footsteps of Robert Merton, examining the links between the deviant and the mainstream. But why so many risk takers, why so many criminals and class traitors? Since the day I walked into the Chicago projects, I’d felt more comfortable with those the rest of society had written off as expendable.
I sat down and examined her color-coded file system. “I can’t believe how organized you are,” I said.
She brought out a long, eleven-by-fourteen piece of paper marked up like a time line. On the top, in pencil, there were years that delineated columns: 2008, 2009, 2010, and so on. All the future dates were listed neatly, each a half inch apart, as if time moved in linear beats. There looked to be various milestones and markers of achievement, some indecipherable. On the sides, she had scribbled various notes, indicating rows: “Kate,” “India,” “Paris,” “Hamptons real estate,” “Cash,” “Trust.”
“This is your future?”
“I told you, I’m doing this for a year or so, and then I’m gone.”
There was a blank space under “Cash.”
My mind started racing. This was a golden opportunity, the leap into the upper classes I had dreamed of making, and it was coming through sex. It was too good to be true. At the same time, I felt terrible about it.
“What’s the ideal number?” I asked. “For you to quit, I mean.”
I was looking for an out, probably. Or at least a termination date.
“Not sure,” she responded.
Analise grabbed the client folders and started making piles. These eight were good. Clare, too temperamental, no dates this month. Jo Jo, always busy. Twice a week, trip to Miami.
“Let’s call Amy. I’ll put her on speaker.”
“Who’s Amy?” I asked.
Amy was a possible new girl. She’d just come down from Connecticut College, a little young but she said she’d dated a bit already to get through school.
The phone stopped ringing and a voice said hello.
“Amy, how are you?” Analise shouted. She turned on the speaker and laid the phone on the table. “Listen, I’m putting you on speaker and my friend Sudhir is here, helping me figure stuff out. I want to talk to you about some things.”
No problem, said Amy, but she had to take a minute to walk outside and find a private spot. Analise and I waited.
“Hey! I’m back. Sorry, I’m at a press event for BMW.”
“Oh, you’re still doing PR?”
“Yeah, it’s my dad’s friend’s company. But they’re only hiring part-time right now.”
“Well, so that’s what I wanted to talk with you about,” Analise said. “I’m a little worried you sounded unsure. You said you dated in Rhode Island?”
“Yes, I did date in college a few times—”
“But you realize it’s going to be different here,” Analise interrupted. “This is New York.”
“Well, a lot of the men were from Boston,” Amy said.
Analise snorted.
“I think I’m ready,” Amy pleaded. “I know you probably need a firm commitment, but I want to do this and Kimberly said you were a great person to work for. I think I could really be good for you.”
Analise came back with a tone of cold precision. “What I need to know is, how many days can I count on you?”
“At least two,” Amy said. “Maybe three, I don’t know. And what I meant was, the men I dated, they weren’t off the street or anything. They took me to plays, to these amazing dinners. One took me to Maine for the weekend. They were serious men.”
“So you can travel?”
“Yes,” Amy replied quickly. “I can do that. I don’t have anything that I need to stay here for.”
“Do you have a pet?”
“Yes, a small cat.”
“But you’re cool leaving it?”
“Oh, yes—I just did. Went to St. Barts. I have a friend who cat-sits.”
“What about friends? How are you going to deal with your friends?”
“They know I date. My girlfriends, I mean. Some of them do it too, so it’s not a big deal. I don’t know. I guess I could do whatever you needed. I don’t have to tell them.”
“Well, that worries me, to be honest. It’s never a good idea to talk about your business. Or my business.”
“I would never do that,” Amy said. “But my girlfriends, they got me into it. But they weren’t very good at it. I was the best one.”
“Why?” Analise asked.
“Well, I really like to listen and have a good time. Guys at college are just so boring and these guys were taking me to all these amazing places.”
Analise rolled her eyes. Infatuation with rich men bored her. “How much do you need to make?”
“I live in Chelsea. My parents own the condo, so that’s all good. I get five grand from them for other stuff.”
“That’s not enough for a girl in the city!”
“Tell me about it!” Amy said.
“Long term?”
“Well, I guess I want to be an agent. My aunts, they’re both agents. One does actors. I think I could really be good at that.”
“I would need you to make me the priority,” Analise said. “At least for six months. I mean, I can’t have you not show up for shit. I won’t take that, okay?”
“Of course.”
With that, Analise signed off. To me, it seemed that Amy was perfect and Analise was on the verge of hiring her.
Instead, her expression turned to scorn. “Really, does she really think I’m going to give her a shot?”
Amy seemed smart, devoted, able to put off peer pressure. What more did Analise want?
“I don’t hire whores,” Analise said.
Sometimes Analise and her friends used the phrase “in the middle” for women who liked to hang out with elites but who were not elite themselves. It was considered the height of gaucherie. Analise walked toward the kitchen and opened up a cabinet in search of vodka. “I can’t do anything with that. Except worry. I’d rather have a bunch of Brittanys than that boring girl.”
The problem with Brittany, she continued, was that she was wild and willful and despised the men she dated.
“That can’t be good for business,” I said.
“Are you kidding? It drives them wild. They can’t wait to get her naked and put her in her place.”
But Brittany was starting to act increasingly unstable—throwing up, passing out, fighting with clients and bartenders and cab drivers and even police officers. Analise was going to have to do something about it. And even with that, she was still worth a dozen Amys. “I don’t want to hear a girl say she dates ’serious’ men from Boston,” she said in a withering voice.
This disappointed me. Analise had been so welcoming, so open. She was the one rich girl I knew who was—speaking of class traitors—always ready to open her arms to outsiders. Now she was policing the very boundaries that kept women like Carla and Angela on the bottom.
Under the loose pages before us, Analise’s brand-new cell phone began to vibrate toward the edge of the table like some kind of burrowing animal trying to escape.
As Analise reached for her phone, two women came through the patio door. I wasn’t sure if they had just arrived or if they’d been in the apartment all along.
“It’s freezing out there!” one of them shouted.
Analise didn’t look up. “Yes, that’s right. I’ll need a large—no, a large. Yes, I know, but last time you gave me the smallest room in the hotel. A large. Okay, how many times do I have to say this? Do you speak English?”
The rest of us laughed. Analise could be so unforgiving.
“I want the room on the sixth floor, 623. Okay? And if you don’t give it to me, then the three nights I book each week will go down to zero.”
Analise looked up at us, rubbing her hands through her hair. “I give these idiots five thousand dollars a month. No appreciation.” Then she made a quick introduction. “Kimberly, Jo Jo, Sudhir.”
Both women had blond hair with dark roots; both were dressed casually in sweats and tights and leggings as if they’d just come from the gym or a revival of Flashdance. Jo Jo was smoking one of those long Nat Sherman cigarettes. We shook hands and exchanged rote smiles.
“I worked three nights this week,” Jo Jo said. “I need a break. I’m going to Aruba.”
“Too bad. Mr. X wants you Friday,” Analise said.
Jo Jo pouted unconvincingly—apparently Mr. X was a valued customer.
“And me?” Kimberly said.
“I’m on the phone,” Analise answered, waving Kimberly away.
“This bitch gets a full week, and you can’t get me anything?”
Interrupted once again, Analise widened her eyes and cupped the phone. “Those are all return visits,” she said, her voice cutting.
Kimberly glared at Jo Jo, who laughed and preened a little. “What can I say? They like my style.”
“Fuck you,” Kimberly said, taking a cigarette from the brown box on the table without asking.
There was a moment of silence; then Analise started talking on the phone again. “Hello? Yes, hi! Yes, it’s me—you recognized my voice? Oh, Lord, that’s so lovely in this day and age. Thank you. I’d like two tickets, but they have to be in the box—my client can’t see very well and his hearing is not so great. Of course, five hundred sounds reasonable. Just hold them at the box office and I’ll have a car come by in an hour to pick them up.”
When Analise hung up, Kimberly asked in a sullen voice who was getting to go to a Broadway show.
Mercilessly, Analise shook her head. “The tickets are for Brittany, and not for Broadway—the Met.”
Kimberly looked puzzled. “They’re going to a museum?”
“To the opera,” Analise said.
Her cutting tone made me fear for Kimberly’s future as an escort, which snapped me awake. All of this was so sudden and novel, such a peculiar and fascinating new revelation about this remarkable person I thought I knew. This wasn’t some happy little clubhouse for rich kids.
“I think maybe I should take off,” I said. “You guys are—”
Analise frowned. “Oh, don’t worry so much. No secrets here.”
No secrets? It was all secrets. “I can’t just sit here unless they know that I have certain professional obligations regarding confidentiality and—”
Analise launched into a fairly precise version of my standard predisclaimer disclaimer: “Although Sudhir is not currently engaged in a formal study, he is a university researcher,” etc. It was impressive. She even parodied my formal diction. And of course, neither of the two women blinked a false eyelash. She was their boss. What did she expect them to say?
Letting out a sigh, I reached into Analise’s cigarette box myself. If you can’t beat ’em . . .
Jo Jo winked at me. “Long day?” she said. I shrugged a little, acknowledging that it had been, and Jo Jo scooted her chair over closer to me. “Analise told me what you do—gangs, drugs, women of the night. You must have an exciting life.”
At this point, she actually batted her eyes. She wasn’t trying to be subtle.
“I’m in bed by nine,” I said.
“Why are we so interesting to you? It’s just sex. Sex and money—oldest things in the world.”
“Yeah, except it’s a lot of money. And you’re already rich. You’re white, you take vacations around the world. I bet you have maids.”
“Of course,” Jo Jo said.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Kimberly said. “Everybody has a cleaning lady. Even my cleaning lady has a cleaning lady.”
“Still, you have so many other options.”
Kimberly took over. “You seem pretty judgmental for a sociologist. I’m not sure why anyone talks to you when you say shit like that.”
Fascinating, I thought. On the lower economic rungs, the reaction to direct questions like mine is much more humble. But Manjun didn’t have a cleaning lady. Angela didn’t have a cleaning lady. “Objectively, you have other options,” I said. “Most of the women I study don’t.”
Jo Jo said things were complicated, launching into a meandering history of her family that went back to the American Revolution. “I went to Yale,” she said. “Got my degree, came to New York, tried the nine-to-five thing. No, thank you. Jesus, that was a living hell. So my dad cut me off. He says it’s good for my character.”
She cackled.
With Analise, she was making ten thousand dollars a month.
“Are we fucked up? Probably. I take Vicodin, snort coke, get drunk off my ass. But who doesn’t? I don’t see a lot of psychological masterpieces out in the straight world.”
Listening to them made me think about Angela and the problem of the “soft” assets she didn’t seem to possess. Relative wealth and the accompanying sense of privilege gave these women something cultural that was important for succeeding in this world—simple nonchalance, a sense of entitlement that nothing could threaten. The critical difference was that it came so naturally, while Angela and Carla and even Margot had to make an effort. I could relate. Just as I had learned about wine and opera to look like less of a fool in Harvard’s eating clubs, those women had to study the ways of the rich men they wanted to attract. But Kimberly and Jo Jo were like creatures from another planet, exuding a sense of privilege so serene it seemed to justify itself. My first thought was that money could never buy this, but then I realized that only money could buy it. My Columbia colleague Shamus Khan captured its essence in a study of the boarding school elite: ease and privilege.
But that was my take. What did Jo Jo and Kimberly think separated them from other women? I wondered. If another woman wanted to work for Analise, what qualities would she need?
Jo Jo began with confidence. “Basically, she can’t be . . .”
She stopped, struggling to find the right words.
“Jo Jo doesn’t want to be insulting,” Kimberly said.
Jo Jo sat forward. “Here’s what I mean,” she said. “I was at Zanies the other night. The club was kind of empty. I was waiting for my date—he got caught in traffic. I saw this girl get dumped by this guy. Really weird. He just threw down the money and left. I knew what was going on. She was from an escort service. I could tell. So I went up to her and tried to calm her down. Said I knew what that feels like. After about an hour she says she wants to leave her agency and asked if I can help. You know what? Not a chance. Why? She was, like, this working-class girl. Fucking Julia Roberts. What the hell does she know about the ballet or fine art? I mean, you are never just sucking someone’s dick. Sometimes you don’t even do that. They have to feel comfortable with you in public.”
“And you have to know when to shut your mouth too,” Kimberly added. “Those girls, the Puerto Ricans and white trash, they sleep on fucking bunk beds. Our guys aren’t going to trust their reputations to some chick who hangs around the hotel looking for business.”
Jo Jo seemed a bit disappointed in me. “So that’s it? That’s what you do for a living? Spend all your time talking with girls like us?”
“I don’t meet a lot of people like you,” I said. “Usually just Puerto Ricans or white trash.”
“Funny,” she said.
I didn’t reply.
“Anyway, it’s not that fucking complicated. We like money, and this is a fast way to get it. What’s the big deal?”
I thought of Manjun, and how eagerly he tried to show me the divine in his degraded neighborhood. The poor I’d studied always seemed to need to rationalize their behavior, even if it was to make Scarface-style boasts about how little they cared about social norms. They had to make peace with their god somehow. Here it was the opposite. Not only did Analise and Kimberly and Jo Jo never feel pressed to justify their actions, they seemed to feel that victory was found in refusing to justify them.
Another mystery to explore.
The next time my phone rang, it was a friend telling me that Analise was in the hospital. I made some calls and finally reached J.B., who was still in California trying to become the next Harvey Weinstein. Some old guy got drunk and started beating on Brittany, who locked herself in the bathroom and called Analise for help. Analise tried to help and the client turned on her, giving her the beating he’d wanted to give Brittany. “Fucking Brittany,” J.B. said.
“Analise should have called the cops,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, right.”
J.B. didn’t get back for two days, but maybe business really did keep him, because he looked very upset when he finally got to the hospital. Usually he acted like a weary tour guide waiting for the last group to take their pictures of a monument; now he looked stunned by the sight of the monument burning down. “I couldn’t have done anything,” he said. “There was no way I could stop it.”
He said it as though he’d already said it to himself a thousand times.
We were standing outside the hospital, waiting for visiting hours. He lit a cigarette as I shivered, my hands shoved deep in my pockets. It was late March, when a blast of cold seems so unkind in the face of the coming spring, and all I had was my professorial corduroy jacket. My sympathy was stifled by the knowledge of what he’d really been doing out in LA. While taking a break from failing at making feature-length indie movies, he was putting his cash into porn films and partying late into the night with his new porn friends. I knew Analise wanted him to quit going out to LA, where he only seemed to lose their money. To which he would respond: “Look what you do! What right do you have to judge me?”
“She could at least appreciate how hard I work,” he said.
“The real problem is my family. I mean, she’s in the hospital. That could get the wrong kind of attention.”
That sounded like a canned phrase, perhaps one he had heard in his childhood: That could bring the wrong kind of attention, son. From previous conversations, I knew that what he meant was attention from the media, which would inevitably get to the one person in the world he most feared.
“So what happens if your old man finds out?” I asked.
“Um, I’d have to dump her. No question.”
I was flabbergasted. “You’re kidding me,” I said.
“Do you know who my father is? I used to spend summers working on the docks up and down the East Coast. Dad had invested a lot of money—importing, shipping, trading, all that stuff. When people got upset, you know, when things were getting a little bothersome, do you know what Dad did? Brought down some Hells Angels to beat the shit out of the strikers. Dad’s insane. He’d probably go after Analise’s whole fucking family.”
Now I was worried. “Could he really find out?” I asked.
“When you’re doing international work, you need deep contacts in the law because half the shit that goes on your ship is never declared. You can’t break the law on that scale without help. Somebody probably already called Dad. Man, it’s going to suck when I see him. It’s just going to suck.”
J.B. reached into his pocket for the last cigarette, crumpled up the pack, and threw it on the ground. He was wearing a dress shirt with thin pink stripes and a sweater thrown over his shoulders. He looked like JFK on a boat, steadying himself for the next wave.
“Wish my sister was here—she always knows how to handle things. But she lives in London with a fucking Paki who owns hotels.”
He noticed my existence and said, “Oh, sorry—I don’t mean you.” I was supposed to understand that he meant Paki Pakis, not an assimilated person like myself who understood important cultural intricacies like the Hustle and “Keep on Truckin’.”
“Kathryn knows how to take Dad on—because of the marriage she had to deal with a bunch of shit from everyone and now no one talks to her, so she doesn’t give a fuck. She never backs down. And her kids, man, they hate the old man. And he hates them back, which is hilarious. You should see him fighting with these little five-year-olds like they were real people, getting drunk and calling them all sorts of nasty names. And they just stand there and laugh at him.”
Already, I was imagining a study on intermarriage among the wealthy. Did intimate contact with another race stiffen all their spines in this way? Genuinely curious, I asked J.B. how she would handle the situation.
He let out a big sigh, I’m not sure why—either from longing or disappointment in his own ability to cope with his father. He glanced up toward Analise’s hospital room. “She’d be up there instead of down here smoking a cigarette,” he began. “And she’d be working the phones like a madwoman—she’d get my brother to fly out here, and he’d make my dad come too, and then when everyone was gathered she’d just come out and say it. ’Analise has been doing blah blah, making money blah blah.’ And you know what? We’d all probably end up being fucking proud of Analise!”
Did his brother know? I asked
J.B. nodded. “I told him.”
So why not call him? If he could work magic on the old man, why not ask for some help?
He looked ashamed. “He’s in Tokyo. I don’t want to bug him.” But his voice was wistful, as if he really wanted his brother’s help. I didn’t know much about his brother, but I knew he was older and successful in his own right. I imagined J.B. had asked him for help many times in the past. Too many times.
He looked at his watch. “I better get back up there,” he said.
Thrusting his hands deep into his pockets, he headed down the sidewalk toward the hospital doors.
• • •
I didn’t see Analise the rest of that month. She’d gone to the Hamptons to convalesce; I was busy finishing up a semester of teaching. She finally returned to New York in May 2005, which I remember because school was almost out. When I went to visit her at her apartment, she opened the door with her bag already slung over her shoulder. “Want to help me run an errand?” she asked. We headed right out again.
She still looked slightly shaken. She had lost some weight too. We started walking west toward Chelsea and she fell into a desultory account of the days just past. The beach house was the perfect place to gather her thoughts, the sand got into everything, she told J.B. she didn’t want to see him for a while, the social scene was crazy but she avoided that.
“How’s he taking it?” I asked, steering her back.
“Junebug? He’s pissed. Says it’s all my fault—I should quit the business before something worse happens.”
“And what do you say?”
She cackled, giving me a glimpse of a more cynical Analise. “If I quit, where are you going to steal the money to launch your cinema empire?”
Was this how these events were going to affect her? I wondered. I pictured a pilgrim’s progress from innocence to experience that left her with the same Machiavellian approach to life she despised in her own parents. The psychology of entitlement required a victory. Was that the difference between her and the girls who didn’t “get” it?
Maybe she felt guilty, because she softened her tone. “You should check in with J.B. sometime. He likes you. And you’re both making movies now—maybe you can do some business.”
“I don’t exactly make his kind of movie,” I said.
“I realize that. But all that porn stuff is a side thing. He’s going legit, or at least he will be. I think he’s making some kind of urban-thriller-lower-depths thing. You can talk about aspect ratios or whatever.”
She stopped at a plain red metal door in a brick wall, putting her hand on the knob and grinning at me. “And you always wanted to hang around rich people—excuse me, investigate their secret codes.”
With that, she pulled open the door and led me into the building, which turned out to be an art gallery under construction. A pair of workers were running wires and putting up wallboard.
“This is what kept me going,” Analise said. “I kept thinking about this place.”
“Is this yours?” I asked, surprised.
“Yes! I mean, not yet, but soon, I hope. Kate owns it now.”
She’d been talking about doing something in the art world for years, but it was only when the money started pouring in—a few weeks before J.B. started stealing it, in fact—that she realized the time had come. Her friend Kate happened to be looking for investors, so it all came together quickly. She even managed to convince her mother to chip in a few dollars. With time and more money, she hoped to invest enough to become a partner. Impressed, I realized she was playing the game on a level almost inconceivable to Angela or even Margot: not to make the rent or lay up a nest egg, but to build wealth. They were selling piecework; she was creating leverage. Her sense of entitlement unleashed her ambition.
She led me to the back, where an older woman was issuing instructions to someone over the phone. “If they want us to host, it will have to be after December. Tell her we’re getting full, so she better act fast.”
She looked up at us and spread five fingers, the universal hand signal for Give me five minutes. Analise led me into another small room, where the walls were raw and the desk was a door on sawhorses.
“My office,” she said.
My heart leapt. “Your office?”
For the first time that day, Analise gave me a big smile. “Boy, do we have a lot to talk about.”
Again, I thought of Angela. Her Brooklyn apartment had been the first step toward some kind of financial stability, a small-business dream to clean ill-gotten gains, sign up for a credit card, and someday maybe even move back to the Dominican Republic with a little retirement savings. I’d lost count of the number of times she’d dreamily narrated this story, as though she was the lonely office worker staring at a postcard of Tahiti in her cubicle in mid-January. Manjun and Santosh and so many others did the same shuffle between illegitimate and legitimate economies, flouting the law when they needed to but always hoping for the day when they would be freed up from sex work altogether. For Analise and her crew, the jump between legal and illegal was more like a game, and losing didn’t mean death or prison; it just meant “Go back to Start. Do not pass Go.” To Analise, the chance to invest in Kate’s gallery was just a chance to advance to the next round and talk about herself with a new clarity and purpose. She wasn’t slumming; she was an entrepreneur.
Just at that moment, the other woman called her name and we went back to the main room. This was Kate. She seemed to know all about me. Carrying a pack of cigarettes and a cup of coffee, she led us out to a small backyard and the requisite smokers’ table and began to explain the situation as if I had come for that exact purpose. Which I suppose I had, without knowing it.
“Analise is going into the art business. It will take a year or two, but not much more than that.”
I looked at Analise. She took a deep breath and presented her case as if I were a jury—just as when Shine tried to convince me he had philanthropic intentions when he beat the crap out of the young black men who worked for him. “I decided I’m going to be really good at this, and I don’t care about the consequences.”
Was she serious? Was this some kind of psychological mechanism to allow her to keep moving forward?
“I was foolish—I admit that. I put myself in a vulnerable position. Because I was doing things halfway, playing at it like a little rich girl. So I have to decide, am I going to let some drunk asshole run my life? Some guy who beats up women? That’s who gets to make my decision? Or should I find a way to deal with it?”
At this point, Analise’s speech became halting. She still hadn’t figured out all the details, but the intention was clear. She was going to escalate her work as a madam. For the foreseeable future, which she expected to be of short duration, she would throw everything she had into the trade. Earn enough revenue, launder it through Kate’s gallery, where she would slowly build up an equity stake, then get out of the game. The key was to dive in deeper and focus her energies on running a productive business. She vowed not to get beat up in hotel rooms anymore, as if that was something she could completely control. She began talking about the ways she would be helping the Jo Jos and Kimberlys of the world, though she didn’t push it very far, because even she knew that charity didn’t suit her. But she was clear on the main point: no more lollygagging; time to get serious and make a real go of it. In the great American tradition, she was determined to offer the best possible service for a good price.
Female empowerment seemed like an odd issue to bring into this decision, but it wasn’t the first time I’d heard prostitution put in those terms. Streetwalkers and high-end escorts alike talked about the autonomy and feelings of self-efficacy they earned from the skillful sale of their bodies. And they were always talking about their savvy exit strategies. Managers like Margot and Analise were especially prone to this. In fact, nearly every escort service manager, madam, and pimp I’d ever met loved to talk about the day they would quit. Very few really enjoyed directing other women to sell their bodies, and the ones who did often turned to drugs to numb their pain and guilt. Some of this was endemic to the life of any hustler, however. I had heard Santosh and Shine speak of similar dreams. This seemed to be a natural product of the strange relationship to the future people have when they start experiencing success in the black market. They realize that the only real future is with the thieves that come after their money and the police who come after their freedom. So they pretend the future is bright.
Shakespeare said it best: if you have no virtue, assume one. But watching Analise put on her new disguise as full-time-madam-for-a-while brought the illusion and the danger home to me. I could see how it helped her push ahead through her fear, but if she actually started believing in her fictions, where would she stop? What dangers would she overlook?
I also had an intuition that the relationship with Kate was not going to work out. It was just a feeling, but the thing about laundering money seemed like a bad sign. Analise was taking on too many risks. She was wealthy and she didn’t need to worry about hiding and laundering her cash. That was the kind of thing Shine and other ghetto entrepreneurs had to worry about. So why go into business with Kate? What did Kate give her that she felt she was lacking? Something didn’t feel right.
Maybe Kate sensed my skepticism. She tapped her cigarette against the edge of the metal table as a reflective expression came over her face. “I’ve known Analise since she was a baby,” she said. “Our families spend summers together.”
The phone rang and she said she’d be back in a minute, crushing her cigarette under the toe of her stiletto. Analise began filling in the rest. A musician, Kate quit school to travel and her father cut her off. Her mother still sent her money through their lawyers, but she didn’t touch it, said she’d give it to her kids when the time came.
“Why an art gallery?” I asked.
“A lot of men come here,” Analise said. “She gets to know them real well.”
I sighed.
At least she’d finally decided to let go of Brittany, she said. “She’s acting totally crazy. She’s calling up people at their offices and setting up dates herself.”
Point by point, she filled me in on the rest of her business plan. There were planned investments in new artists, especially beautiful young females who would attract wealthy men to the gallery, exhibitions and liaisons with galleries in Paris, Rome, Mumbai. I couldn’t tell whether the illicit activity would be going global as well, but this was still the upper-class version of Shine I’d been searching for. Analise was also moving “downtown,” and using new connections to create new moneymaking schemes and capitalize on the worlds she could bring together. “Reach out and touch someone” was being given an uglier meaning. I did my best not to be judgmental, but I felt I was seeing a life unravel in front of me, with little of the empathy I felt when watching Carla or Angela succumb to similar pressures and desires. I realized then that the distancing effect of being a professional observer actually allows you to feel things you can’t feel as easily with your own friends. You expect more from people closer to you. You allow yourself to get angry with them. Maybe this was another reason I tended to study the poor. Maybe I really did find safety in their difference, even though I kept telling the world that treating them differently was patronizing. It was something to think about later, when things were more calm.
Toward the end of that summer, I decided to take Analise’s advice and check in on Junebug—in my mind, that’s what I still called him. I had seen him a few times since the night at the hospital, once at a screening and once in his production offices, when he was a completely different person—much more at ease and in control. He even got me to suggest some “urban” story lines for his next movie. Now that he was in production on a legitimate film, I was curious to see how he was managing the transition.
I dropped by his new office a few days later. The scale of his operation surprised me. At least ten production people were drinking coffee amid legal pads and laptops, a pair of whiteboards were covered with scheduling details, props and costumes awaited final touches. “Sorry, Sudhir,” he said. “We’re running a little late.” Then he turned to his crew, all business. “The new pages won’t be here until Monday, but everything is the same in terms of the schedule. So let’s try to get the casting done—which means you, Jimmy. Try to focus on the job instead of chatting up the hotties.”
When they were finished, J.B. asked me to step outside on the roof to smoke a cigarette. “Never go into business with friends. My dad keeps telling me that.”
“Those guys are your friends?”
“I went to boarding school with them.”
“Lost any yet?” I joked.
J.B. smirked. “I’m not sure I ever had any to lose.”
They were all part of an investors circle, he explained. They had money but no experience, and they all wanted to get into movies, so they’d each put up a half million bucks for a shot at the glory of cinema. “Which means that everybody gets to give their input,” he said with another cynical laugh.
They had been doing this for a few films now, starting with student films and then porn and now this. I asked how much money they’d spent so far.
“A lot.”
“Lost much?”
J.B. laughed. “I put fifteen grand into dot-com stocks just before the crash of 2000. I’m never playing the market again.”
I understood the lure of films, I said. You could reach such a wide audience. But I couldn’t conceive of gambling away thousands of dollars.
“That’s the difference between you and us,” he said, shaking his head as if in pity. “We know you have to get in the game and stay in the game. Because once you’re in the game, you’re in the game.”
Back inside, I handed J.B. an outline I had written for him—Carla’s story, basically, starting with the beating and then her push into the escort business. I expected him to put it aside and read it later, or not read it at all. Instead he asked me to sit down and leaned back in his desk chair like a mogul, holding the pages in front of his face. A few minutes later he tilted forward and slapped the pages on his desk. “These are great,” he said. “Let me pay you for this.”
“I’d rather get to know your rich investor friends,” I said.
He laughed. “Never going to happen.”
“I don’t want to poach them.”
He knew what I was after. He cocked his head and gave me an appraising look. “What do you make of this tribe, Mr. Anthropologist? Figured it out yet?”
With that, I knew I could eventually get him to cooperate. Despite his cloak of cynicism and the standoffishness that seemed to be part of having money, he was as susceptible as most of us are to Carl Jung’s great maxim: The desire to reveal is greater than the desire to conceal.
“I have a few theories,” I said.
One theory, in fact, was that my initial assumption about the remoteness of the rich was wrong. I had a hunch that Analise’s newfound commitment to life as a madam and J.B.’s playful resistance to my interest both shared the same eager motive. Analise wanted to prove that her skills and savvy outweighed her wealth, and J.B. wanted me to see him as something more than a category (preferably, as the next Samuel Goldwyn). Both wanted me to see them as making it on their own. They wanted me to recognize them as authentic themselves rather than mere products of their gilded environment—which struck me as bitterly ironic, since poor people, authentic almost by definition, rarely seemed to give a damn about whether they made it by pulling up their own bootstraps. Those who had so little were only too happy to take help from anyone willing to give it.
But J.B. just laughed and slapped his hand down on my pages again. “Don’t waste your time, Sudhir. This is the real stuff—real poignant human shit. We could make money with this!”
• • •
The next time I heard from Analise, she was calling to ask for advice. Her frustrations with Brittany had put her on a roller coaster. One day she loved her, the next day she wished they had never gone into business together. Today she was ready to get rid of Brittany forever but wasn’t sure how to do it. The parallels to Shine and Juan struck me again. Brittany was feeling the same kind of cocksure rebellion as Juan: Look how great I’m doing! I can make it on my own! Why do I need to carry this guy?
Having Tito arrange a beatdown didn’t seem appropriate, so I had to tell Analise that I had no great ideas to offer. But, of course, I’d be thrilled for an opportunity to observe as she fired her.
“We’re going to meet at the gallery space on Thursday,” Analise told me. “Bring your brass knuckles.”
When I arrived, Kate and her staff were in the front of the gallery preparing a photographic exhibit on street life in New York City. Pictures of crowds crossing Times Square were interspersed with shots of small family businesses in Canarsie, East New York, Astoria, and other communities in the city’s outer boroughs. The pictures were simple and beautiful. Most were taken by European photographers because a prominent European car company had underwritten the exhibition.
I went straight to Analise’s office. She looked good, elegant as always and perfect for a gallery. The first words out of her mouth were: “To be honest, I’m not sure I ever imagined doing this without her. That’s my fear. Not that I couldn’t do it, but we’re kind of joined at the hip.”
I pictured Juan’s face, that stubborn refusal to accept how things had changed. “I thought your mind was all made up,” I said.
Analise hesitated, biting her lip, and I could see how deep the problem went. Underneath all the confidence she was trying to exude, she was deeply anxious about the unknowns ahead. Brittany and J.B. weren’t just employees or business partners. They were a part of her foundational network, and I was beginning to understand that the business of border crossing was more complicated than just mustering the courage to explore new worlds. It also meant leaving old worlds, or negotiating a new relationship to the old worlds. The poor ghetto entrepreneurs who feared leaving their own little fishbowls weren’t just afraid they’d be eaten by bigger fish; they were also afraid of being greeted as outsiders when they tried to return home. Even Analise, with all her entitled individualism, still needed the comfort of a network. Crossing boundaries didn’t mean leaving your friends, family, and former business partners in the dust; it meant trying to keep the old while finding the new—not so much developing new networks as extending the networks you already had. Margot was the exception—her friends and family had shunned her. But for Analise, Brittany wasn’t just a friend and contractor but also a reminder of who she was and where she belonged. Shine could have just moved to another bar and left Juan behind, but that would have left him a little more alone. The underlying challenge was existential: if in a world so big Juan was just a loose end, wasn’t Shine kind of a loose end too?
“Yeah, but anyone can say those things!” Analise laughed. “You have to do it.” Then she sighed and shrugged and let out a small laugh. “I guess the problem is, the men she brings in are the most steady—it’s never just a date here and there. It’s the guy who wants to come back. And that’s all Brittany. She gets them to return, like, several times a month! No one else is that good.”
Brittany arrived at the gallery an hour early. We were both surprised. She walked into the back room, where we were sitting, and immediately lit a cigarette.
Smoking wasn’t allowed in the gallery. Analise was about to tell her to put out the cigarette, but Brittany read her mind. “I don’t care! This is not my greatest day, Analise. But you wanted to talk so here I am.”
Analise didn’t seem to know how to start. I sat silently, trying to disappear.
“Well, are we going to talk or not?” Brittany said. She was obviously high, no doubt on cocaine.
Analise took a deep breath. “You’re screwing up,” she said. “A lot.”
“That’s one way of looking at it.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s the other way of—?”
Analise stopped herself in midsentence. She tried to calm down.
“You don’t do what I do,” Brittany continued. “That’s the fucking problem, Analise. So unless you know how to make it out there, I’d try to be less fucking bossy. You’ve been a real fucking pain in the ass lately and I’m tired of it.”
That got Analise going again. “You’re pissing people off,” she said. “Showing up late, not showing up, showing up wasted out of your fucking mind. You can’t piss everyone off, Brittany, and just think it’s okay and nothing will happen.”
Brittany just puffed on her cigarette, as if she was alone at a bus stop.
“The hotel, Brittany,” Analise continued. “You really think it was okay to yell at the bartenders, to trash the room, and then just leave the guy sitting there like that? He has a wife, Brittany. You can’t just . . . expose people like that.”
“Fuck you, Analise. Really. I mean, I can’t take it anymore.”
Analise stared into her hands. She took out a cigarette and started walking toward the door.
“That’s it?” Brittany yelled. “We’re done?”
“I don’t know anymore, Brittany. You’re such a fucking pain to work with. You don’t seem to want to work with me, and to tell you the truth, I’m finding it hard to work with you.”
“You know what, Analise? I’ll make it easier for you. I’m done. That’s it. How about that? Does that solve your problems?”
“Yeah, it kind of does,” Analise said, her lips pursed in anger.
Brittany got up and stormed out, which left Analise looking stunned. She walked slowly out of the office and toward the back of the gallery into the garden.
Analise had broken up with Brittany many times, but they always forgave and forgot, or almost did. This dated back to their school days, but it was actually not an unusual pattern in the escort world, where sex workers frequently quit on a manager or agency only to come crawling back a few months later. Economists call this “sunk costs.” It was hard for Analise or Shine to get rid of people because they had already invested so much time and effort trying to make it work. Friends just call it loyalty.
But this time, it was different. After storming out of the gallery, Brittany started making moves on some of the other girls who were working with Analise. She was better at finding customers, she told them. They could make more money working for her. This betrayal Analise took hard. The next time I dropped by the gallery to find out how things were going, she excused herself for a quick trip to the bathroom that left her sniffing and starry-eyed. She fell back into her chair and let out a big sigh. “I have to do something, or else I’m finished.”
“What do you mean, ’finished’?”
Brittany had poached five of her best clients, she said. “I can’t risk having a catfight, you understand? I would rather just get out, just stop everything, than let the news get out that I’m fighting with her. Can you imagine what would happen? I mean, she’s got such a big mouth.”
“Well, maybe it’s a sign,” I said. “I mean, is this really what you want to be doing your whole life?”
Analise shook her head. She had a better idea, apparently. “Shine is going to help me.”
So there it was, the arcs of my story connecting. I wasn’t too surprised. After Shine and Analise met in the art gallery, I had a sense their lives would intertwine. Of course, I hated the idea. They would have met at the party anyway, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was responsible. And I was jealous too, I have to admit. But the scientist in me—thank God for him!—was excited. The connection Analise and Shine had made was precisely the point I was trying to make with my work. The global city was bringing together people of varying classes, ethnicities, and backgrounds, and here was une liaison dangereuse as poignant and lucrative as any other. The novelty wasn’t necessarily the upstairs-downstairs quality. That was as old as the city itself, or older—you could reach back to Mesopotamia to see slaves and nobles courting. But here was a business venture that blurred all the ready-made distinctions between legal and illegal commerce, that required the collaboration of two brokers to translate the languages and codes of two different worlds. Shine provided the coke, Analise provided the clients. Shine provided the muscle, Analise identified the parameters of the conflicts. As much as I didn’t really want to see this play out, it made complete sense. The question was, how long would it last? Could they survive the inherent tensions that had sunk Angela?
The truth was, the change in Analise depressed me. When I was a kid in college, the idea of entropy struck me hard: all that is solid melts into air, creative destruction, and so on. A factory is always one innovation away from becoming obsolete. Everything is always in the process of falling apart. The bourgeois succeeded because they didn’t cling to tradition. Instinctively, despite all their protestations to the contrary, they embraced entropy.
Entropy rang true to me because I was going through so many personal changes. It rang true in New York’s underground too. Everyone was constantly on the precipice of change. You had to learn how to get out, change your focus, accept losses, fail quickly, and move on. Success required self-awareness.
This was the theory. But in practice, I hated to see Analise going through this particular episode of creative destruction. Shine too. They both were failing, but their ambition and nerve wouldn’t let them quit. It was heartbreaking. Maybe their resilience would help them solve each other’s problems, or maybe they’d drag each other down to destruction, exposure, and arrest. There were dangers I knew all too well, dangers that could sink them. One was obvious. The police are all about patrolling social boundaries, and many of them hate the sight of “salt and pepper” mixing in the same shaker. But police actually arrest few black marketers. There are simply too many of them, and an arrest could spark violence from newbies fighting for market share. The real hazards would be linked to the inner demons that fueled their ambitions—greed, jealousy, reckless behavior, an inflated sense of their capacities. Selling drugs or running an escort service isn’t what usually lands you in jail, after all. It’s the inability to approach your involvement in a moderate way. Too many people want to be a kingpin. The handful who grow slowly and never deal with strangers are rarely caught. That’s why crossing boundaries screams “Danger!”
Examined with colder eyes, the adventures of Shine and Analise could be a fascinating experiment. Two very different people with very different cultural assets, both were struggling to thrive in the invisible economy. Which assets would be most useful? Which would be most destructive?
From what I’d seen so far, I would have to conclude that the low side of this particular high-and-low equation had more power. Shine understood the black market and didn’t shy away from the messiness. He had a better sense of when to push forward and when to pull back. He was protected by his ghetto cool, his mask of indifference. Like other drug kingpins I’d seen, he knew that today’s failure could be tomorrow’s success, and slowing down or taking a loss could be the key to staying in the game for the long haul. But Analise didn’t seem to have those instincts. Her ambition and elite recklessness clouded her judgment. She wanted to be in control of everything and also wanted to throw all caution away. Maybe this too was an aspect of her elite culture code, a privileged person’s refusal to scale back to a more modest operation that would let her scrape by without the glamour of a big success. But there was danger in the way she kept talking about some happy place in the future when the dirt of her illegal enterprise would be magically washed away. She thought that people like her made the rules and could break them too. But dreamers don’t thrive in the world of crime. The underground is perfectly suited for the self-aware business manager who knows her limits, and what the market (and the cops) will bear.
The whole thing was like watching a car crash in slow motion: you’re helpless to stop the inevitable and wincing with every crunch of metal. But too close for comfort also meant that I couldn’t turn away. For better or worse, I had to see what would happen next.