EXIT STRATEGIES
Margot called, asking if I’d like to come watch some of her missionary work—lately, she had been helping her “contractors” organize their financial lives, teaching them basic investment principles, persuading landlords to give leases without background checks, even cosigning loans. She was becoming more and more obsessed with the idea of exit strategies. “We all exit,” she told me more than once. “You can do it at thirty or fifty, but one day you’re going to stop—and then what? These girls have got to learn to think.”
Obviously, she was talking to herself.
This was a subject scholars of sex work rarely explored. Many of the women at Margot’s level of the industry had high school diplomas and college degrees. They certainly had acquired experience as skilled hosts and conversationalists. They had learned to navigate complex social situations and negotiate with a wide variety of people. But they couldn’t exactly put their skills on a résumé. How did they make the transition to a normal life?
Today, she had invited two prosperous escorts, Morgan and Fiona, to her apartment. They were both very attractive, very well-dressed women with Prada on their backs and Blahniks on their feet. I had previously interviewed Morgan extensively—I was up to 150 interviews now, a good, solid data set—so there was already a level of trust when we all sat down.
Margot poured tea from an English china pot. She offered milk and Splenda but no sugar or half-and-half. Then she dove in.
“Listen, I want to tell you something. Based on my experience, you’re going to either die, get caught, get a disease, or lose all your money. I want to help you avoid that.”
Morgan and Fiona looked at each other. “That’s a bit of a surprise,” Morgan said.
“Yeah, we thought you were going to ask us to go into business with you. I was thinking, where’s the champagne?”
“How silly of me. You’re the first hookers in history to put away a few grand. I should be asking you for advice.”
“You called us, Margot.”
“I did. ’Cause I want to help you. Sudhir’s the researcher, so he can correct me if I’m wrong, but most of the women who get to the point you’re at begin to fade away.”
Margot looked over at me and I shot her a look that said, Thanks for dragging me into this. But I played along as best I could. “Most of the women I’ve met do start to run into trouble because they’re not smart with their money,” I said. “Planning for the future is not a strong suit among the people I’ve interviewed.”
“We’re not idiots,” Morgan said. “We save a lot.”
“You have cash,” Margot countered. “And even then you had to fuck that apartment broker to get a lease. What if you can’t fuck the next one?”
Actually, it had been more complicated than that. Morgan had persuaded the broker to waive his fee and sponsor her at the bank, which enabled her to pass a credit check. In exchange, she had been sleeping with him for approximately three months without collecting any money.
“Fiona, you’re no different. You’ve fucked half the city because you can’t get a credit card.”
Fiona scowled and began fiddling with her cigarette pack.
“Look, you guys are smart,” Margot continued. “A lot smarter than the other bozos I know, God bless them. At some point, you’re going to want to do something different. So I have a proposal for you.”
Morgan shrugged her shoulders, giving in. Fiona followed her lead.
“My estimate is that you each have about five thousand in the bank, maybe a little more but not much. You think you’re going to build it up, but let’s get real—on the cab ride over, you probably talked about going to St. Barts for a week or at least down to Miami Beach, right? You work so hard, you deserve it. And there’s guys there! There goes the five grand. And you have to buy clothes, right? There goes another two grand. And I bet your credit cards are maxed out if you have credit cards, so you’re blowing stupid money on bank fees.”
Margot paused and watched the truth sink in.
“I’m not telling you to live in a cave, but you need to change your relationship to money. Here’s my suggestion. Start lending out some of the cash you’ve saved. At a decent interest rate. Don’t rip people off, but start turning your cash into profit. I’ve done this. I’m telling you, it changes your way of thinking. Instead of money for things, you think of money for money—for the future.”
Morgan looked interested now. “How much could we make?”
“By the end of the year, your five grand could be seventy-five hundred. Without fucking anyone.”
Seeing that she had them, at least for now, Margot continued in a rush. Find women and give them cash advances, get them to pay back a little each week, never let them skip, and keep all the money in the bank. She used a credit union on Long Island, where she opened an account for each woman and linked it to an account she controlled; each week the money just got subtracted from their accounts into hers. Then they had to start doing straight jobs, just a few hours a week but enough to get a legit paycheck. Waitress, hostess, whatever. They would have to cover the years without straight jobs when they went looking for a real one.
After thirty minutes, Morgan still seemed skeptical. “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “But still, lending money . . . what if they don’t pay up?”
That was the beauty of small sums and weekly payments, Margot explained. “You never lose too much. And it doesn’t happen as often as you’d think. Most hookers are basically honest, not that they get any credit for it.”
Morgan still wasn’t convinced, but by the time they left, Fiona said she wanted another meeting once she’d had a chance to think it over. Or maybe she was so grateful finally to be getting her nicotine fix, she just wanted to make nice. I closed the door on her and turned to Margot.
“No way this is going to work,” I said.
Margot sniffed. “I’m not an idiot. If I can get one out of ten to see the light, that’s fine. And you don’t know everything.”
We sat down again. She told me that she’d been telling some of her contractors—she always called them contractors now—that she was quitting the business soon. At first they all thought she was crazy. Lots of midlife crisis jokes. But soon they started to call her up—always secretly so that no one else would hear—to ask how she was going to do it.
I could see that Margot was in some kind of pain, probably feeling guilty for her role in their lives as sex workers, and guilty for abandoning them too. This was common, something I’d seen many times in all illegal work, whether it was street hustlers earning a few dollars a week or high-level drug traffickers pulling in hundreds of thousands a year. Some kind of guilt always ate at them. But most couldn’t even dream of another life. That was what made Margot different. And part of this, I couldn’t help feeling, was the inspiration of New York City itself. Margot knew she was a player in the big show. She wasn’t just good; she was one of the best. That gave her a kind of social capital I hadn’t considered until now, the confidence to make a change. And even while she was pining away for a quiet house in the Southwest, she still daydreamed about the many businesses—dancing clubs, catering and entertainment businesses, cruise ship tours—she could start in New York. Each one fed the same underlying fantasy of helping other women to avoid subservient relationships to men.
I thought this over and shook my head. “Margot, you’re going to miss all this.”
She winked at me. “You are too.”
I laughed. She was right.
“You love being out there at two a.m. in some shitty little club,” she said.
“And you love running hot girls like Morgan,” I said.
“Yeah, but you think you’re different. You tell me how nuts the rich kids are, how amazing the poor people are, how much you feel for all the poor, suffering hookers. But we’re just like you. That’s what you can’t admit.”
She was right again. This time I didn’t laugh. “I’m here because they don’t have a voice, Margot.”
She shook her head as if she was disgusted with me. “They have a voice, Sudhir. They talk all the fucking time. You don’t have a voice is the problem. You feel like they could give you one. So you run to them—the feeble, the sick, the criminals, the crazies. Why do you always go to them? Think about it. Why do you always try to find in them something about who you are?”
Margot was onto something, I knew. I didn’t like it, but she was right. I’d been doing this same kind of work for twenty years. Even though I was now aiming for the middle-class women and the rich, the motive wasn’t much different from when I studied the Chicago projects. I wasn’t exactly going for the wealthy lawyers or accountants. Even when a few called, like Martin, I ran away. I wanted the loners and the outcasts. I felt alone and different and sought out acceptance and wisdom from those who were equally stigmatized.
Thinking about it amplified my discomfort. I didn’t want to study these worlds forever, I kept telling myself. But even as I spent my nights in the underworld of New York, I was also occasionally flying back to Chicago to follow the journey of the public housing families I’d studied over a decade ago as their homes were demolished and they found new places to live. More than 80 percent of them were ending up in neighborhoods just as poor and segregated and crime-ridden as the project towers they’d left. Dozens of tenants would call me just to talk about their inability to find a home, pay rent, or control their son or daughter in the unfamiliar new environment. Kids were dying; parents were going to jail. It was Groundhog Day, ghetto style. The definition of depressing.
With the wounds of my divorce still fresh, I also couldn’t help resenting Margot a little bit. Her question turned me back inside. Was I studying the poor out of some prurient desire to feel better about myself? Many social scientists study inequality for their entire lives—I was hardly the only one—but there were probably fewer than a dozen who chose direct interpersonal contact over weeks and months and years. The surveys and phone interviews other researchers used helped them maintain a healthy emotional distance. I defended my need to see misery firsthand as a search for truth, but was truth an excuse for voyeurism under the cloak of science? Were my own prejudices and needs driving my search?
But what would I do if I didn’t do this?
I left Margot and went straight to a strip club to do an interview—three interviews, actually.
My n’s were getting bigger all the time.
As 2005 was coming to an end, Angela called to say that she was leaving for the Dominican Republic. She was feeling depressed and wanted to be around family, she said. But she had a parting gift. She had found some Eastern European women and some Latinas who had managed to penetrate the upper reaches of the sex trade. They had all agreed to talk to me. If I came over to say good-bye, she would give me their phone numbers.
When I arrived at her apartment, she was making Sunday dinner. The smells reminded me of the old Brooklyn apartment, and I almost expected Vonnie and Father Madrigal to walk in the door.
Instead, Carla showed up. “Surprise!” she said.
They were friends again? How did it happen?
“Margot!” Carla said. “I learned a lot from her.”
“Carla is like a queen bee around the bar,” Angela said, so proud she might have been talking about her own daughter. “Helps everyone. I’m so proud of her.”
I knew that Margot was having a positive effect on Carla, if you can call changing from streetwalker to escort a positive thing. She was proud that Carla had become a “great date” and was now booking about four high-paying clients each month. Taking Margot’s advice, Carla had decided to stay in a subsidized apartment back in her old neighborhood and save her money to buy a condominium in the Bronx.
“I have a picture of the building hanging above my bed,” Carla said.
I smiled, picturing Margot telling her to “visualize” her goal.
But Carla parted ways with Margot on one point. Margot thought Carla should limit her contact with friends and family in the projects. Get up and go to work and stay out of the drama, she’d said. Your friends will drag you down much quicker than anything you might do. Culturally and emotionally, Carla couldn’t accept that. Leaving the fishbowl was not so easy.
I could see it from both sides. After all the drama surrounding the rich client who’d wanted to beat Carla up, when Margot finally started helping me again, I began beefing up my n’s with a much wider range of upper-end sex workers. I had spoken to women who worked in suburbs and in cities; some worked part-time, supplementing their regular jobs, while others saw sex as a full-time vocation. Some just danced at clubs—avoiding physical encounters—while others were phone sex operators. Soon I’d have enough to launch an expansive study of women who worked in three cities—Miami, New York, and Chicago. What particularly fascinated me was that their backgrounds were so different from either the streetwalkers I’d associated with Angela or the blue bloods in Analise’s employ. The women Margot found all hailed from small towns in states like Arkansas, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania and worked as far away as Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Miami—the global city as a network of cities. They approached their work in a much more businesslike frame of mind, changing their names and pooling expenses to buy condos and using a variety of Web-based platforms, from Facebook to Craigslist. One group had even formed an investment circle to take advantage of tips and advice from their rich clients.
Margot kept trying to impress these lessons on Carla. “They never look back and neither should you!” Margot liked to say.
But Carla would never leave her friends and family. She would probably never even leave the Lower East Side, despite that picture of the condo in the Bronx. In fact, she had already used some of her savings to give loans to a few friends who wanted to try what she was doing. They needed clothes, didn’t they? She even had dreams of becoming the Margot of Avenue A and was already, for a small commission, helping some young streetwalkers with dates and advice. “Sudhir,” she said, “these women need me.”
The words were eerily familiar. Like Margot and Shine and Angela and Manjun and all the rest, success meant nothing to Carla unless it was reflected in the people she cared about. Her social capital was also her social cost. I couldn’t shake the thought that philanthropists never won in the black market, or that Carla’s charitable instincts were a reflection of her anxiety about her own future.
When she went off to make a phone call, I asked Angela what she thought about all this. Wasn’t Carla risking her investment? Wasting time and energy she needed to create her new life?
Angela shook her head. “If Carla was meant to make it out there, mi amor, she would have done it by now. I’m just happy she’s not on the pills.”
“But I thought the whole point was to get out of here, get off the streets?”
“We’re not like you, Sudhir. She’s nobody without us. She couldn’t put on her panties without us.”
She laughed at that, then became serious. Margot wanted Carla to be white, she said. And that just wasn’t going to happen.
I remembered the words of the contractor back in Chicago who’d told me he hated taking jobs in white neighborhoods. “The ghetto’s like a fish tank,” he said. “You struggle all the time trying to make enough to get out of the tank, but as soon as you get out there and feel the heat, you try to jump back in.” This was more complicated than fear of a white planet. If you spend your life on the edge of a cliff, you know you need people to help you in times of trouble. Carla had had the experience of that rich white client who’d beat her and got his money back. She had no recourse, no established social system to support her. Why would she want to put herself through that? But in the ghetto, everyone knows everyone and everyone owes everyone and there’s always someone who would do you a favor—who has to do you a favor.
This was the diametric opposite of Analise and J.B. and their dreams of heroic individual achievement, which explained a lot. There was no doubt where my sympathies lay. But the problem was, Carla’s choice exposed her to new dangers. If she was trying to manage teenage streetwalkers, you didn’t need a psychic to see another slow-motion car wreck coming her way.
• • •
A few months later, I found myself in another kind of fish tank. This one was an elegant Park Avenue apartment with a Lichtenstein print hanging on the wall and a small ivory Buddha sitting in a wall sconce lit by a small spotlight. Analise’s friend’s place. They were in Bermuda for the week.
I drifted into the kitchen, where Analise’s guests looked like they were straight out of the J. Crew catalog—young men dressed in mock turtlenecks and blue blazers, a few skinny bored girlfriends. A full spread of sushi, caviar, champagne, and holiday cookies on the counter. Copper pans hung from a rack on the ceiling; a giant stove looked big enough to feed an army.
And the black marble countertop made a splendid surface to cut cocaine on, judging from the lines spread out in a boastful array.
And there was Brittany, swaying through the room in a gold Carolina Herrera dress with one naked shoulder. She had landed in trouble and come running back to Analise, of course, and she was worse than ever. She’d gossip about Analise’s escort service to anyone who would listen, talk openly about trips to Paris with clients, brag about sleeping with UN diplomats because they “had immunity and so no one goes to jail!” Her sense of privilege seemed to undermine the modesty and self-awareness a person needed to think tactically, which made the threat of some kind of explosion constant.
As Brittany sloshed around the room, a single thin strap worked overtime to keep the dress on her shoulder. To me it seemed to evoke their whole hanging-from-a-thread operation. On her right ankle, she wore a sparkly diamond chain that added another touch of decadence to her black-heeled shoes. With one arm around an unsuspecting man, she put a hand gently on the small of his back and used the other to raise up her skirt just enough to show her panties. Then she laughed like it was all a big joke.
Shine stood idly at the living room window, an unlit Kool dangling from his hand. He looked sharp in a black beret, clutching a rocks glass filled with whiskey and Coke. His sleeveless shirt made a display of the tattoo on his biceps, a crucifix with a legend written in calligraphy beneath: He Knows.
J.B. was talking to him. “I’m probably going to the Rose Bowl,” he said. “It’s incredible, man. Maybe someday I’ll take you with me.”
Shine looked at him with thinly concealed disdain. “I guess I prefer the Sugar Bowl myself,” he said.
J.B. said one of his films had run into “creative” problems, so he was back to making porn to raise some fresh capital. His grand plan was to use some of the girls who worked for Analise. He fiddled with a new pack of Dunhills and sighed. “Analise and I want to leave,” he said.
“The party?”
“The city,” he said. On a sailing ship, one of his father’s smaller vessels. It would be a good break from all this, once the porn flick was finished.
Shine scowled, doubtless thinking the same thing I was—nice fantasy if you could get it, and J.B. probably could. But lesser mortals could not.
Shine smiled and gave me a curious look. “Well, you finally got out of my neighborhood.” He turned away and looked out the window toward Harlem, as though he wanted to be saved from what New York had become.
A few minutes later, Analise started banging on a bathroom door. “Brittany! C’mon.”
From inside the bathroom, Brittany groaned. “That fucker told me this shit was clean.”
Analise shook her head in disgust. “I bet you don’t even know the guy’s name, do you?” She hit the bathroom door one more time and told Brittany to get her shit together, goddamn it. A moment later Brittany came out, looking dazed. “Did Michael go home? Where did that fucker go?”
“I gave him to Jo Jo,” Analise said.
Brittany shot her a furious glare. “Fuck, Ana!”
“You’re too wasted,” Analise said, her voice icy.
“You’re like my fucking mother sometimes,” Brittany said.
During their breakup, Analise had told me that she and Brittany would always be in each other’s lives. Now I saw what she meant. They were locked in the same battle forever, Brittany insisting she was indispensable and demanding constant emotional stroking, Analise forever trying to turn Brittany into a slightly less controlled version of herself. I wandered away in a state of melancholy tenderness and spent the rest of the evening standing in the kitchen talking to Evalina and one of J.B.’s depraved preppy filmmakers. At different times, I glanced across the room and saw Analise and Shine together, or J.B. and Analise together, or Analise and Brittany together. I had a feeling that they were all in a space capsule together, floating in a weightless world.
Finally Analise walked over to me and asked how I was doing.
“This is weird,” I said.
She led me out onto the balcony so she could smoke a cigarette. Shine was already out there smoking.
“You okay?” Analise asked.
“I’m okay,” I said.
“You don’t look okay, my brother,” Shine said.
I tried to laugh. “Truthfully? Don’t you think it’s strange that you two are working together? Don’t you think it’s strange that you and Brittany are back together? And what about J.B.?”
But Analise shook her head. “The problem isn’t us,” she said. “The problem is you.”
Shine nodded. “She’s got a point, Sudhir.”
I was completely floored. My Harlem broker had met my Upper East Side broker and together they were running a citywide brothel, and I had the problem?
“I’m going to be honest with you,” Shine said. “Since I’ve known you, you been meeting up with all these people—Manjun and Angela and Carla and Martin and Margot and all these people—and you don’t do nothing with it.”
Why were they attacking me? I was an academic trying to penetrate a variety of subcultures in hopes of writing that great book or documentary. I had done studies. I was gaining access, entrée, insights. This was Margot all over again.
Shine continued. “You think I’m uptown and she’s downtown and how the fuck can we hang out? Fuck you, man. Why the fuck not? You doing the same thing. You teach them rich kids uptown, you make films downtown with downtown people. What makes you so different?”
A good question, I had to admit.
“I’m done with this shit in a year,” Analise said. “Shine will move on to another level. None of us are fixed in place, Sudhir. But you are. You go from story to story and group to group but you’re always in the same place, looking in from outside. And now you’re freaked out because you don’t know what’s inside and outside anymore.”
She was right. That was it exactly. How odd that the ultimate insider, America’s daughter, understood me better than anyone. I was trying to make a box big enough to fit everyone into and she and Margot just climbed right out and pointed at the box I was in. They finally broke through my Chicago framework and put me in that New York state of mind I’d heard so much about. It was probably the same reason Martin freaked me out so much, because his world came too close at that vulnerable moment in my life. I couldn’t maintain my borders.
“But that’s what’s so great about this city—everyone who wants to be different gets to be different. It doesn’t matter.”
With that, she threw her cigarette off the balcony and followed Shine back into the party.
Shine shot me a look as he walked away. He didn’t need to say anything because his expression said it all. You can’t stand there watching or the wave will hit you. At some point, you gotta choose.
• • •
A few months after that, Angela called. Carla had been beaten up once again. She had gone to a hotel room where one of her teenage protégées was working. The date was going bad, the woman called Carla from the bathroom, and Carla arrived to find the man tweaked out on coke and the girl locked in the bathroom. The man beat Carla so bad she couldn’t answer questions in her hospital bed for three days. When she came out of her daze, she kept telling Angela how proud Margot would have been.
Angela wanted me to put her in touch with Margot. “Carla won’t listen to me. Says, ’Only Margot understands what I’m trying to do.’”
Margot had been in the Southwest, looking for a new place to live. But I got in touch with her and we made plans for the three of us to visit Carla at her apartment.
When we got there, we found Carla propped up on some pillows that looked as if they’d been borrowed from a child’s bedroom. She was all bandaged and bruised and crazed from painkillers and humiliation. She wanted revenge, she said. She was going to get Ricky to go kick that motherfucker’s ass into the next world.
Margot took a small chair and pulled it next to the bed. She stared at Carla, ignoring her talk of revenge. Finally Carla pulled herself up on the pillows and spoke through clenched teeth. “Why is it that you can do this, but I can’t? I’m no idiot. It’s not fair.”
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Margot said. “That’s the worst thing you can do.”
“It’s not fair, Margot,” Carla cried.
“Fair? No, it’s not. But why am I here?”
Angela and I were standing at the back of the room, by the door. I saw Angela look at Margot curiously, wondering what kind of strategy she was using. I was wondering the same thing.
“Carla, why am I here?” Margot repeated.
“I don’t know,” Carla said meekly.
“Well, if you don’t know, I don’t know either.” Margot looked around the room, taking me and Angela in too. “I’m done with this. I’m getting out. You want to whine and bitch, you do it to Sudhir—he’s not going anywhere.”
“I’m not whining,” Carla said.
“Yes, you are! You’re whining! I’m so sick of listening to whores whine about their pathetic fucking lives, Carla. If you want to play in this game, you have two choices: either you let the girls get beat up or you get beat up. Someone’s going to get beat up. Which one do you want?”
Carla didn’t know what to say. “I don’t know. I—”
“Well?” said Margot. “Which is it? Them or us?
“These are my friends,” Carla said. “I’m not letting no asshole beat up my friends.”
“See, that’s your fucking problem, Carla,” Margot said, standing up to leave. “Those hookers are not your friends. They work for you. They’re the thing standing between you and a better life. Get your head together and stop being a whiny little bitch.”
With that, Margot walked out of the room. Angela and I followed her through the dank hallway, into the dimly lit elevator, and outside the housing project building, a twenty-floor monument to government paternalism that seemed particularly futile on this sad night. In fact, I thought, Carla and the building had a lot in common. She wanted to be there for her friends and offer a helping hand as they tried to make it as prostitutes in a world that was the definition of nasty, brutish, and short. She wanted to be their Angela and make them feel good about themselves, she wanted to be their Margot and make them learn to better themselves, but all she had learned from her journeys across all those borders was how to get her ass kicked. Now Margot was telling her the same thing all the critics of government support said. Low-cost housing and welfare and health care and that sweet Angela love just made you weak. To win at this game, you had to be tough. You couldn’t be their friend. You had to be like Shine. You had to know when to cut your losses and move on. It was, in the end, a business.
At some point, you gotta choose.
I’m sure Angela and I were thinking the same thing. Carla was running this race handicapped. She didn’t understand what it really meant to manage people, how to motivate them to survive the nightly abuse and also motivate yourself. That was what Margot had lost, the reason she was quitting, the reason she was so bitter. She had begun to succeed as a manager, she had often told me, the day she accepted that somebody was going to get hurt. Being violated was part of the game. But at least she could choose not to be the victim.
It was all so sad. Angela was going to go back upstairs, at least. God bless her for that. She shrugged her shoulders and started to wipe her eyes.
“I’m sorry we had to meet like this,” Margot said, and now the compassion was back in her voice.
“Yes,” Angela said. Just that and nothing more, but it said everything. She squeezed my hand.
Six months later, Carla killed herself.
The calendar turned again. It was now 2007, a full decade since I first came to Columbia University and the city of New York. I was in a strip club in northern New Jersey looking for new venues for another study of the sex economy. I needed to find club managers and dancers who would talk about the journey so many of them took from dancing to full-time sex work. In this bustling industrial corridor just outside New York, the strip clubs were small neighborhood places where the TVs showed the game on mute while women danced to loud rock and roll. The owner of this one, a gruff but amiable fellow named Jimmy, had studied sociology at a community college and liked to talk with me about growing up in the working class. Twenty feet away, a young Latina woman was sitting on the lap of a burly white man wearing a green Caterpillar hat. She reminded me of Carla. With each beer, the burly man grew rowdier. Jimmy got up a few times and made a move in his direction, and each time the man waved him off with a promise he would calm down.
Suddenly, the burly man threw the young Latina down and put his foot on her throat. He poured his beer on her face and then dragged her out of the bar by her hair.
Jimmy went into the back of the bar and grabbed what looked to be a short baseball bat. I followed him outside, along with a dozen other customers. The burly man had pinned the young woman against the outside wall of the bar and he was smacking her in the face with his open palm.
Jimmy walked up to him as the burly man wound up for one more strike to her face. Just as he put his fist in the air, Jimmy clobbered him with the bat across the back of his neck. The man lost his grip and the girl fell and Jimmy swung the bat again. Whack! Whack! The man fell down next to the girl.
Then Jimmy pulled the girl up and told her, “That’s it—you’re done. I don’t want to see you back here. I told you nicely that you weren’t ready, and you didn’t listen. So get the fuck out.”
He turned to the small crowd and told them to go back inside. “People are trying to sleep. Let’s be respectful.”
I slid down against the wall. My knees were weak and I was about to throw up.
Jimmy came over and grabbed my arm with the same hard grip he’d used to drag up the Latina. “No,” he said. “Don’t do it.”
All the faces of all the women I had seen in situations like this came swimming into my head. Carla. Angela. All the horrible stories I had heard.
“Don’t go there,” Jimmy said.
I tried to talk, but it just came out like this: “I can’t . . . I can’t . . . I can’t . . .”
A week earlier, the night we had met, I had told Jimmy that I was nearing the end of my work. The nights were too long, I explained. I was getting worn out. “Bullshit,” he’d said. “You’re scared—I can see it. You want to save these women, and you don’t know how, and it’s eating you up.” He felt the same way, he said. All these crazy women reminded him of his wife. Men were protectors, and it didn’t matter whether she was your wife or some low-rent streetwalker. It hurts to see them like this. Especially when you can’t do anything about it.
Now he said, “You can. Go home, but come back. Come back once. After that, you can stop. But you have to come back once.”
He lit a cigarette and gave it to me, then lit another one for himself.
“You can sleep here if you want or you can go home, but it’s important that you come back. Get back on the horse.”
“I’m done, Jimmy,” I said. I started to cry and I buried my hands in my face, embarrassed that he was seeing this. The study I wanted to complete, the book I wanted to write, the documentary film I hoped someday to complete—I was sick of everything and ready to throw it all away.
“Someone has to get beat,” he said. “That’s the game. Someone gets fucked up, gets a beating. You can’t change it. Go home.”
He walked back into the club as I sat and sobbed. Someone has to get beat. First Margot, now Jimmy. The image of Joshi came into my mind, arranging his toy soldiers on his knees. It was all just too hard to accept.
Finally, I pulled myself together and called a cab. On the long drive down those dark industrial streets toward the lights of Manhattan, a strange thought came into my head. In the ragged alleys of Newark, in the strip clubs of Manhattan, in the back of a porn shop in Hell’s Kitchen, on the elegant sofa of an upscale madam, I had found a community. Like Mortimer, the dying man who depended on the kindness of prostitutes; like Martin, who found comfort among his fellow johns; like Angela, with her tolerant priest and the small army of sex workers who loved her, I also had people looking after me. And I had the advantage of growing success with the research that mattered so much to me, a morale booster if ever there was one.
With the help of Angela and Margot, I had gathered enough contacts in the upper-end of the sex trade to launch a study of several hundred women in several cities, and I finally managed to build a big enough sample of women to satisfy the scientists of mainstream sociology. But the truth was, all my scientific detachment about the “informants” and “research subjects” was a dodge, along with my glorious collection of n’s. Margot was right about me. In a vast city where I felt alone, in a country where I had been struggling to find my own way, I had searched out a small army of weary soul mates who did their best to point me home. And this wasn’t some character flaw or research failure but the business of life working itself out, especially life on any kind of margin. These improvised communities gave support and also resonance. Their lives rippled through me, my life rippled through theirs, we extended our support systems outward through one another and into the beyond that threatened and beckoned us. The only real difference was that I was also taking notes, quantifying and categorizing, applying the tools of science to the journey we were all taking together.
And Jimmy was right too. I had to come back. Even if it was just for one more night, I didn’t want this to be my last memory of the underbelly world. I owed all of them that much. I owed them so much more.
• • •
I saw Margot one more time. She said she wanted to hear my proposal for the regionwide study of the sex economy in New York. But when I showed her my list of the issues I would be studying, she gave them a quick glance and went back to talking to me as if I was a client. “Make a list. You want interviews? Fine. You want to meet more people like me? Fine. Cops? Whatever you want, let me know. But do it quick because I don’t know how long I can do this.”
A few months later, she quit the business and moved to Arizona. I never saw her again.
Angela called me once from the Dominican Republic, but I didn’t even get a chance to speak to her. She left a message on my answering machine saying she wanted to put the past behind her.
Shine I met a few more times. Once it was back in the old bar, having a drink at the end of the day. He had a bad cough and was as gloomy as an accountant at the height of tax season, loaded to breaking with everyone’s miseries and lies. He asked what I was doing and I told him I was giving everything up for a while—no more sex workers, no more johns, no more rich kids. I was even taking a break from the documentaries. It was all too much for me. I couldn’t figure out a way to hold it all together.
“It’s probably a good time to take a break,” he said.
I sensed the pity in his voice and rejected it. “It’s not a break, Shine. I wanted to map all the patterns and figure out the code. I wanted to find a way to connect everything. I wanted to show that people like Angela and Carla and Manjun weren’t so different from people like Analise and J.B. I wanted to show them a way out.”
That was the truth. This wasn’t about science. I wanted to show them a way out and I had failed. “I failed,” I said.
With that, emotion welled up from so many places. Memories of the porn store, of the apartment in Brooklyn, of the time I accompanied Carla to that diner to meet with Margot. I even remembered the magazines I looked at in the newsstand when I left them alone to get to know each other. Foreign Affairs! I felt like crying and kept pouring the feelings into a soliloquy about New York and my fear that I would never really figure out this enormous protean city no matter how big a study I could build. “I failed,” I said again.
Shine met my eyes. He took a deep breath and glanced up at the television and put an ice cube in his mouth, sucking on it pensively. When he looked back, I got the feeling he had returned from a distant place. “Did I ever tell you how my older brother died?”
I shook my head.
“Nigger came back from the Middle East, post-trauma or whatever they call it, all depressed and hopeless about everything. Violent sometimes, real jittery. He used the same word. Failed. ’I failed.’ I told him, ’Don’t ever use that word. Say changed, brother. Say, I changed.’”
Shine put his drink down. Our eyes met.
“And you?” I asked.
“When I was little, I used to go downtown. Did I ever tell you that? I used to go and look at all the art. Man, I loved it.”
“Your brother told me,” I said.
“So there I am, hanging with all these white boys. I’m thinking, man, if I could put that art up in my house . . .”
“You want to open up a gallery?” I said.
He nodded. “Maybe. Maybe I do. And white folk helped me figure it out—shit, I never thought I’d say that!”
At that moment, I realized that Shine was going to be fine. He might even turn into a big success. My hunch about his low power was right. He had a way of accepting his past and all the fumbles, mistakes, and missed opportunities, and he was perpetually open to new worlds and new opportunities. He had a way of forgiving himself. Maybe it was those childhood trips to the Metropolitan. Maybe it was New York. Failure would never define him. Longevity did. And in the underworld, that was half the battle. Learning to step back, reassess, reimagine.
As if he could read my mind, he turned the tables and asked me a startling question. “Can you still write a book?”
“What?” I said.
“Can you still write a book?”
He said it as if this was the obvious question only a simpleton would overlook. And the truth was, it was precisely the question that was secretly tormenting me. I owed it to Angela and Carla, to Manjun and Analise and even Shine himself to rescue from the stream of time all the moments and truths they had shared. Maybe their little piece of reality represented the whole or maybe just a part, but it was still human and true and added something to the sum of knowledge. And telling the story was another way to extend their explorations a little further out of the fishbowl.
But it all felt so far beyond me. I still had so many more questions than answers. Thrown, I made a tree-falls-in-the-forest joke. “If you write a book and no one reads it, did you really write a book?”
He laughed, and in that moment I saw that he wasn’t worried about me either. He had a hunch about my powers too. The thought gave me strength.
My last serious conversation with Analise also took place in a bar, but it was much different from my conversation with Shine. While she nursed one vodka tonic after another, she talked about turning over her operation to Kate and either investing her free cash in the art gallery or pulling her money out. Or she would go to India and help expand her uncle’s school. Then on to Paris, where there was an opportunity to open up a clothing boutique. Her world was a Romper Room of second chances, a tribute to the endless vistas of globalization as practiced by the rich.
“On August fifteenth,” she said, “I’ll be in India and it will be like this never happened.”
The alternative was turning into a version of her mother, staying on the Upper East Side and living a comfortable life without meaning or challenge.
“Most of my people have no purpose,” she said. “They have causes, but no purpose. The best I can do is to keep on going.”
But I was still reacting to her weightless vision about the global Romper Room ahead. It didn’t seem fair that she had so many options and others had so few.
“The problem with your people is that you all believe this is your world,” I said. “You guys make the rules and you can change them whenever you need to. Dabble in prostitution or go off to India and teach the little brown children—and there are never any consequences.”
“Let’s be realistic. I’m done with New York. And isn’t that what you wanted? For me to quit ’dabbling in prostitution’?”
All I could do was laugh. “I don’t even know where to begin. Most people I see are so utterly aware of consequences. Squatters, drug dealers, gang members—they’re all acutely aware of what the future might bring.”
“But so are all my friends,” she said. “It’s a basic human trait to be curious about how you act and what will happen. That’s why I’m going to India. I get to reinvent myself. My family is here, but I can leave them for a while. I can be someone else, which is what I always wanted.”
I knew I wouldn’t see her again. Even though I had never launched a formal study of Analise, I had been in this place before many times when previous studies neared completion. The exchange is never a simple one. As hard as it is to spend years observing someone in the criminal world without developing all kinds of complex feelings, good and bad, it is equally difficult to be the one who is observed. The time comes when the thing just naturally wants to end. So I decided I would treat her the way I treated any research subject when the study was over, just close the book and move on to the next tribe—which was, I suppose, exactly what she was doing too. It’s natural to blink before you turn the page.
But before I got a chance to say good-bye, she asked about my plans.
As Shine suggested, I tried to begin my speech with “I changed.” And as I spoke, I realized I actually liked her approach to reinvention. Like Shine, she had the gift of being open and it was her strength as it was his. India had been her Metropolitan Museum, perhaps, the thing that gave her a talent for detachment from her class. I wished I could have embraced the same detachment so quickly and decisively myself.
“I’m not sure what I’ll do. Probably write a book on sex workers. But part of me really wants to make films.”
She gave me the look of disbelief she always gave me when I talked about making documentaries, even though I had already made three of them by that time. Doubtless J.B.’s film career colored her opinion. But I also think she might have been telling me that she didn’t think they were my real talent. And I knew she was right too. What I was good at was listening to people for a long time, the way I had listened to her. That was what mattered.
But I wasn’t as decisive as Analise. Maybe I didn’t have that luxury. Instead, like Shine, I had to sit for a while and let it all sink in. I had to figure out a way to bring together all the worlds inside myself, the ethnographer and the scientist and the filmmaker and the guy who hung out with strangers until they became friends. I had seen something unique in New York, I was sure of that. Even my colleagues at Columbia had become supportive, encouraging me to keep taking the roads without street signs, the roads that led across borders most people didn’t know existed. In a short while, those roads would take me into worlds I could never have imagined entering, from the Department of Justice to posh Madison Avenue advertising agencies, where listening to people’s stories and uncovering sociological truths turned out to be just as rewarding as it could be in academia. After all my anxiety and growing pains, the university’s long history of interdisciplinary exploration and emphasis on public involvement made it a perfect intellectual home.
I contemplated making another list: “What I Saw and Heard and Felt in the Underbelly of the Global City.” Instead, I just started writing about the people I had met and the stories I had heard. For the first time, I wasn’t judging New York based solely on what made it different from Chicago. It was possible for me to imagine my experience there on its own. I had come to New York as a sociologist trained to see the city of the twentieth century, with its fixed ways that spoke lovingly to the traditions and bonds that made America so inviting, the importance of neighborhoods and the power of community. At the same time, on a personal level, I arrived in this city famous for welcoming newcomers as a newcomer eager to take advantage of the city’s willingness to permit reinvention and rebirth. I discovered that the new globalized open city suggested, in itself, a radical new approach that would echo the world it was absorbing.
But the global city didn’t wipe out the older virtues. In this sense there were more similarities between New York and Chicago than I first realized. Place still mattered in New York, neighborhoods still had meaning in New Yorkers’ lives, and the ordinary sense of home was still rooted in familiar neighborhood ecologies that lent comfort and security. But the global city also retrofitted and turbocharged these behaviors for a bigger stage. Because New York created connections at dizzying speed, but many of them didn’t last—the key to success was the talent to use and lose improvised social ties. Exploit them when they could serve you and discard them without too much grief when they didn’t, just as Santosh put away the memory of Manjun and moved on with his life, as Margot packed up and left the women she had tried so hard to save, as Shine and Analise shrugged off their old costumes and stepped into new roles. The recipe for success seemed to involve a particular form of self-awareness, a gift for detachment from the fixed comforts of neighborhood and class and identity even as one sought to leverage them: forgive your sins, let go your failures, create yourself afresh, and live for another day. After all, there are always new opportunities. The city constantly changes. So why not you?
Was this possible for everyone? Hardly. In fact, most of the people who tried to float ended up sinking, especially if the measure of success was class mobility or economic advancement. Most of the people whom I met when I arrived in the city were now either dead, isolated, stuck in some rut, or remaindered to daily survival with little but their regrets to sustain them. Nevertheless, the very same people exceeded my fondest sociological caricatures. Whatever box I used to define them proved limiting because they didn’t define themselves by their outcomes.
There is a famous Chicago saying: “We don’t want nobody nobody sent.” Translated: go at it alone, dream of making it by yourself, and you’ll end up alone and defeated. The protections of clannishness create their own limitations, many of which are clearly mental. But in New York there is a greater sense that boundaries are rooted in perception alone. They are not permanent obstacles. Over and over, the experiences of everyone I met showed me that a strange encounter or changed circumstance was an opportunity to be seized. Manjun could have left the porn shop when he found out that it was linked to the sex trade, Margot could have walked away from her Wall Street suitors when they offered to pay for sex, and Shine could have remained content to roam about his backyard rather than befriend Midtown bartenders. The connections that New York forged were not a fun form of tourism but opportunities for economic mobility and social advancement. Unlike Chicago, where relentless ambition was frowned upon as a sign of unneighborly behavior, New York gave you license and added fuel to the fire. It encouraged you to question your station in life. And, yes, some people failed. The old stories of race and class still had relevance, though they were less predictive. Margot and Analise walked away with more money and new opportunities, while Angela and Manjun and Carla found it harder to escape. But Shine and Santosh learned from their ethnic and social limitations and continued to press forward.
The threads connecting the global city may be invisible, but they can be found in stories. Just as when a pioneering group of Chicago professors went out, a century ago, into a city reeling from the turbulence of immigration and massive economic changes and wandered the alleyways and skyscrapers gathering up stories without judgment or evaluation, giving birth to a pragmatic, boots-to-the-ground, uniquely American school of sociology, stories were once again the best and possibly the only way to make sense of a chaotic place like New York. Because each story was a thread, and only by weaving them all together could you make anything whole. The classic New York stories of aspiration and transgression are sociologically useful not just because they evoke the voice of the storyteller, putting flesh back on the n’s abstracted by science into data, but because they reveal the structure of the city itself. That first scene at the gallery when Shine and Analise crossed paths, for example. As a data point in a computer graph it is almost meaningless. But seen through the pattern laid down by our accumulation of stories it becomes yet another tale of improvisation in a world of shifting values and social roles. And if the upper-end madam and the ghetto thug were both improvising their supposedly fixed social roles, if their way of relating and even their styles were subject to such rapid revisions—as if they were merely a fiction agreed on between two people—then it was a short step to admitting that succeeding in a life of crime wasn’t so different from making art. The global city, like the canvas, provided the structure, but the rest was in the individual’s hands, making each Angela and Manjun a kind of artist whose art and job consisted in crafting the latest, most up-to-date version of themselves and offering it to the city for final judgment. Is this the “me” that will finally make it?
As I mentioned earlier, a diverse group of leaders, from government leaders to foundation presidents, has begun to make similar arguments. The skill, ingenuity, and resilience of those taking an “alternate economic path” in life cannot be boiled down to the laws they transgress, they say. From Accra to Chennai, Shanghai to São Paulo, global cities in their sheer enormity have taught us that the underground economy gives millions of people their only chance at survival. We ignore their needs (and potential contributions) at our own risk. If this book helps encourage that trend, no outcome could make me happier.
Some time after this, I did see Shine one more time. It was at a party somewhere on the East Side. We didn’t really have that much to say because we’d said it all already, but I remember that we stood together and looked out the window on the glittering city below us. I thought of describing the films I had made, the studies completed and the tenure achieved, evidence that I had changed instead of failed, but I managed to suppress the urge. We stood side by side in comfortable silence. The city below us was as endless and baffling as it was when we’d met ten years before, and it would still be just as endless and baffling a hundred years from now, an infinite array of options and challenges and invisible threads waiting to gather us into its numinous weave. And maybe I still didn’t see the pattern complete, maybe I would always have more questions than answers, but I had to keep extending my little community of words out into the world just as Shine had to keep selling drugs and dreaming about that art gallery. Because this was New York City, and those twinkling lights were a million different worlds beckoning us with their delicious possibilities of knowledge and commerce. We might not know all the answers, but at least we knew what we had to do.
We had to float.