THE SHIFTING GROUND BENEATH YOUR FEET
In the autumn of 2002, after my first few months of coming to the porn store, Manjun invited me out into the neighborhood. “Let us go make a walk and visit.” For a moment I felt as if I were back in Chicago, where my interview subjects often led me through their neighborhoods to teach me about their lives.
As Manjun walked, he held his head high with his hands interlaced behind his back in the Indian fashion, his balding head reflecting the neon lights above. “Mr. Sudhir,” he began, “you told me you are here with me because you want to see differently, yes?”
He was referring to a much interrupted conversation we had been conducting in the odd moments when there were no customers in his store. He knew I was anxious to get deeper into the underground economy in New York, and that one porn store in Hell’s Kitchen could only be a piece of the story.
“Yes,” I answered. “Very much.”
He sensed my impatience.
“Mr. Sudhir, look and tell me what do you see?”
I looked around. I saw sex stores, bodegas, a diner, a Chinese takeout place, a few people standing around smoking cigarettes and drinking liquor from bottles in brown paper bags. Across the street, two Hispanic women shivered on the sidewalk as they met the gaze of passing drivers. “The usual scene,” I said.
“This is the most spiritual place in the city,” he said. “No doubt. No doubt.”
He dragged me up to a tall black man standing outside an adult video store. “Shoomi!” he cried. “How is your evening?”
The man responded with African formality. “Manjun, my friend. I am very well tonight. Please tell me, what is happening in your life? How is your family?”
Manjun said everyone was very well. “I want you to meet my very good friend. A professor! He teaches at the prestigious Columbia Collegiate University of New York. He is expert in human civilization. And mathematics.”
Like a good South Asian, Manjun always managed to reference my “mathematics” degree.
“He wants to look at the below-the-belly world,” Manjun explained. “The world of new people like us. He thinks we have no god.”
Manjun was joking, but I had to register outrage. “I didn’t say that!” I turned to Shoomi, spreading my hands to show that I was a reasonable man, unlike certain other people on the sidewalk. “I study the black market, which some people call the underbelly of society. Meaning the margins of society. The way Manjun says it, it sounds dirty.”
Shoomi put his hand on my shoulder affectionately. “Mr. Professor, don’t get lost in the garbage. That is my message to you. The garbage will only distract you. You have to look at the people.”
“Yes, the people,” Manjun said.
“Still, there is a lot of garbage,” I said with a laugh.
Shoomi looked at me with pity. “Mr. Professor, I have been here five years. I have finally brought over to this country my wife and three daughters from Nigeria. The first week, I took my daughters on the train and I bring them here. I tell them, this is where I work. I work at this store, I work in this area. It is filled with many different kind of people. Lots of garbage. But the people are like you. They are searching. We are all searching. That is what I told my daughters.”
Manjun suggested that I couldn’t see the god because I didn’t believe in God myself.
“Perhaps that is true,” Shoomi answered. “Americans are losing their faith. But are you American? You sound American, but don’t act American.”
This was something I heard a lot from foreigners. I had too much patience to be American, they said. I was willing to let things unfold instead of trying to make them happen. I was never sure whether to be flattered or insulted. And explaining it always seemed like an endless pit of complication. “I was raised here,” I began, “but I was born in India and—”
“You are Indian then,” Shoomi said. “You are not born here.”
“Just like us!” Manjun cried.
With that Shoomi began naming the people he considered members of our improvised tribe, a litany that reminded me of the “begats” in the Bible. “Kurana at the gas station. Works all the time, prays all the time! Hindu. The newspaper stand is Ahmed—Muslim like me. Over there, getting on his bike, my good amigo José. Catholic. That police officer, very good man, also Catholic.”
“What about your friend Santosh?” Manjun said. “He prays a lot!”
“And your friend who works on weekends,” Shoomi said. “He is an imam, no?”
Of course, nobody wants to be lumped into an oppressed group. They wanted to be sure I saw them as more than a social problem. They were still coming up with names when a small brown man rolled up to us on a battered old bicycle, an empty thermal pizza box tied to the back.
“Carlos, my friend. What is happening in your life?” Shoomi said.
Carlos had a big smile on his face. His eyes were jet black and full of excitement. He pointed a thumb backward toward his chest. “Soy un padre,” he said.
“Your baby came?” Shoomi translated. “Yes! Very good! Congratulations, Carlos!”
Carlos took out his wallet and produced a small picture of the mother, child, and some family members. “Very pequeño,” he said, looking for the English words.
“Very nice, Carlos. I send you from my heart all the prayers for great blessings for your child.”
But Manjun seemed concerned. “Are they coming here?”
Shoomi pointed at the photo and flapped his hands to mime a plane flying to the United States. “They come here?” he asked. He pointed to the sidewalk. “Aquí?”
Carlos looked sad. Shaking his head, he put the photo back in his wallet and said good-bye. As he rode off, I saw him wipe his eyes with the back of his hand.
“You see?” Shoomi said to me.
• • •
Walking around Manjun’s neighborhood helped me to make some quick counts. Within three blocks, there were nine porn stores like his. Some sold adult DVDs alongside music CDs and popular movies; others offered peep shows behind the adult video aisles. There were also live shows with female dancers. Many of these businesses operated illegally, which brought a steadily increasing level of risk. Ever since Mayor Giuliani launched his “quality of life” campaign to make the city more attractive to tourists and the returning suburbanites, the police had been cracking down on “nuisances” that ranged from squeegee men who cleaned car windshields at traffic lights to adult entertainment venues like Manjun’s store. The squeegee men had mostly disappeared from view, and some of the store owners had moved to the industrial waterfronts of Queens and the Bronx. But most just toned down the signage, moved the dirty stuff to the back of the store, and waited to see how hard things would get.
A week after our first walk around the neighborhood, Manjun introduced me to two homeless men who were masters of panhandling, squeegee work, recycling, petty theft, and shoplifting. Another time it was a South Asian kiosk vendor with a clever sideline in stolen passports and temporary work visas. Then the pastor of a church on Fifty-first Street who was famous for getting illegals day care and nanny jobs. He wanted me to see the goodness in his little corner of the world. But his innate desire to look on the bright side made me skeptical.
There were too many heartwarming tales. I had to have my own independent way of finding these stories, and I needed to see things for myself. For a sociologist, half the job is trying to see the holes in your theory. I needed more prostitutes, more pimps, more madams, more under-the-table employment brokers, more counterfeiters who dealt in fake social security cards—not just the Manjun-approved ones. I especially needed to find more illegal immigrants and learn how the underground economy helped keep them alive.
One day I told Shine about my frustration. I meant nothing by it. We were just talking and I was complaining in an ordinary way, as you would about any work problem. I told him that no one really had done a study on the complicated lives of people who toiled underground and it could really help my career. I may have admitted that I was starting to fear that Chicago was the only place I could be a successful academic. Okay, maybe I was whining.
The very next time I arrived at the store, Shine was standing at the counter laughing with Manjun. I had just begun to say hello when a customer came up with a mangled copy of a DVD. “Got a better copy of this?”
“I’ll look in back,” I said.
Shine was amused. “They can’t tell you apart, my brother. Your brown ass looks just as porn clerk as me and Jun.”
Manjun laughed too. “He find his true calling! Maybe he take my place!”
When I was digging through the boxes in the back room, Manjun left Shine at the cash register and came up to me. “I hear you want to meet some more people. You don’t think I am helping you enough?”
“No, no, no,” I said. “You’re helping me so much. I just think you want me to see the good things and good people here, and I’m researching, you know, the below-the-belly world.”
Manjun nodded and said to me bluntly, “Mr. Professor, I find what you need. Just know, please, that life changes. Sometimes it changes very fast. Look, I help you, okay? But anything you want, you should tell me now. Tomorrow, I don’t know. You understand?”
“Not really,” I said.
Manjun was sweating, I noticed. And he had been wearing the same clothes for the last few weeks, which was unusual, because he was a fastidious man, attentive to his hygiene. He sat down on the cot and waved me away when I asked what was wrong.
I walked toward the front of the store and confronted Shine. “What did you say to him? He looks like he’s having a heart attack!”
“Look, do you want my help or not?’ Shine responded impatiently. “You wanted to find people like Jun, right? Jun said he’ll find them. So what’s the problem?”
“I don’t want you to pressure him.”
Shine gave me a smile that said I didn’t know how the world worked.
“You must be getting something out of this,” I said.
This may not have been the nicest thing to say. But it was frustrating dealing with all of Shine’s secrecy, and since we couldn’t talk openly about things, I often turned to sarcasm to express my concerns. And I may have been extra suspicious because my experience in Chicago taught me that secrets could be dangerous. In one case, some local gang leaders used my research to find new underground traders to extort. But at the same time, trying to expand my list of contacts in order to gauge the feasibility of a study didn’t seem too risky. I just didn’t want to end up helping Shine expand his own business at my expense.
Now he was even more amused. “And what if I am getting something out of this, my brother? What if I am? We ain’t in church, are we?”
In the underground, he was telling me, everyone is a user and everyone is a resource. I was no different.
Looking back, I have to admit he gave me fair warning.
• • •
From the back room of the porn shop, I was beginning to map the ways that the local underground economy spread into the world beyond. My first priority was to interview enough women working indoors to finish my collaboration with the Urban Justice Center. Angela’s help was crucial here. I spoke to dozens of streetwalkers right in the back of the store. Sometimes the women took me around the neighborhood and pointed out the doctor that gave them off-the-books health care, the bartender who stored their money safely, the hair salons that gave them reduced rates. The information came quickly and I wrote it down as fast as I could.
Sex brings people together, literally but also socially. It seemed to weave its threads all through this hidden world, bringing the community together in a thousand different ways. South Asians clerked and managed the video stores. West African men stood outside dance clubs to recruit johns. The wives of those West Africans provided day care to mothers who sold sexual services. Mexicans and Central Americans toiled clandestinely inside the video parlors and clubs as cleaners and laborers. And since the sex workers I was meeting came from every corner of the world—from Europe and Africa and Australia, from China and Singapore and Brazil—you could say the invisible thread of sex was weaving the whole world together. Certainly they were as global a phenomenon as a multinational executive on his corporate jet.
Angela’s role in the life of Manjun’s shop seemed to perfectly demonstrate my thesis. The illegal money she brought in helped keep the legal business alive, and the legal business gave her a refuge for conducting her illegal business. There was no clear line between underground and aboveground. With her peers, I tried to trace the same connections through monetary transactions. How much did they earn? Where did they save and launder their money? Did they have credit cards or did they use loan sharks? With each answer, I was able to tease out a surprisingly elaborate infrastructure that ranged from Manjun’s store to the strip bars and peep shows, to the bars, hotels, and health clinics. I began to see that these women weren’t supporting drug habits—the conventional and suspiciously convenient view of prostitutes—but more likely families, neighborhoods, businesses. And most of the women also had other part-time gigs, often legal, that wove them into the community in another way.
But the underground economy didn’t stop at sex and drugs, of course. Day laborers told me they earned only minimum wage for cleaning bodegas and washing dishes. Most worked sixty to seventy hours per week at multiple jobs. Each job brought them an average of three hundred dollars a week and lasted about nine to twelve months. They piled together in astonishingly cramped apartments, most of which violated every possible city zoning code. The security guards at the porn shops brought home about five dollars an hour, but their hours varied, so they also drove taxis and gypsy cabs. Homeless persons panhandled, shined shoes, and—when they could get away with it—washed car windshields at the more lively intersections. They made about a hundred dollars in any given week and they were routinely arrested for vagrancy, loitering, shoplifting, and other petty criminal acts.
On and on I went, gathering data and identifying broad economic patterns. But good sociology is always a mixture of close focus and long shot. You dial in and pull back, dial in and pull back, a delicate dance over the data gaps. And as I pulled back, it became quite clear that, for many immigrants and underclass Americans in the area, the story of living in the global metropolis wasn’t at all glamorous. It was one of worsening outcomes and increasing vulnerability. This was most visible in the decline of street prostitution, for example. Women who might have brought home three hundred or four hundred dollars a night before told me they were barely making a hundred dollars a night and fought with one another over the lone john walking the streets. They were all depressed, and without a clear sense of what the future held.
I felt the need to learn more about their vulnerability as well as the associations, like those of Mortimer and his friends, that helped them make ends meet. Since my work with the Urban Justice Center had given me expertise in the sexual underground, and since the sale of sex was so integral to this world as well, it made sense to keep sex work as a point of focus. I decided to look into the infrastructure that supported the sex workers to see what kinds of social networks wrapped around the sex trade to make the economy function. And to address the generalizability problem, I needed to broaden my reach. In 2003, I decided to focus on Manjun and three other South Asian–born store clerks who worked in the neighborhood. Two were from Bangladesh, one from India, and one from Pakistan—populations I had never studied. The challenge was figuring out how to win their trust.
For the first few months, I met them on a casual basis, usually with Manjun during his after-work meals and tea breaks. Eventually I began to tell them about my anxieties about understanding New York, because I find that sharing my own personal anxieties is a useful means of building a relationship. I told them that I’d love to launch an in-depth study of the changes taking place around them. I told them I needed to find people who really trusted me, people who would allow me to enter their lives for long periods, before I could really start a long-term study. I was about to get into the subject of sex when one of them interrupted me with a knowing wink. “You should see what goes on in my store.”
• • •
This was Santosh, the oldest and the most successful of the four. At fifty-three, he was part owner of a thriving business and the patriarch of a large family that included his wife, his mother, several brothers and their families, two sons, and a daughter-in-law who was expecting the baby who would make him a grandfather. But the success of his American life was completely rooted in the underground economy of sex.
He told me his story as he stood behind the counter of his store, stuffing years of epic immigrant drama into the snatched moments between sales. He arrived in 1993 and started off driving a cab. On a good night, he made one hundred dollars. After a year, he realized he could make a little more on slow nights by leaving his meter off and driving men around in search of prostitutes. Sometimes he’d walk away and let them use the backseat. In time, he developed a knowledge of bathhouses in Midtown and brothel brownstones up in central and Spanish Harlem where sex workers waited behind every door. In a ten-mile radius, he could find his customers a partner of any race, nationality, or sexual persuasion they desired. Each john gave him ten or twenty dollars to find a brothel or bathhouse, sex workers tipped him what they could afford at the end of the week, and the brothel owners paid ten dollars per client. He told his wife he was “consulting” for some businesses, which freed him up to drive the taxi nearly every night, and before long his illegal earnings were as high as two thousand dollars a month—more than he made for cab driving.
One day, a friend suggested he invest in a video store. He bought 15 percent of the store and started working there as a night clerk. But the bathhouse operators and sex workers wanted to keep working with him as well, so he made extra revenue by telling his customers and cab drivers where to find a brothel, bathhouse, or private sex club. All of this earned enough for him to bring his brothers and mother to the United States, but they all thought he was still a software consultant.
“What if they come into this store and find you behind the desk?” I asked him.
He smiled. “If they find me here, then it is they who have to do the explaining to me!”
Azad was another clerk who came to my aid. An immigrant from Pakistan, he now worked at a kiosk that sold newspapers and snacks. On the long afternoons when business was slow, he told me that his first job in America had been at a newspaper stand in Chelsea, a legal enterprise although he was paid off the books and therefore made very little money. After a few months, a prostitute who lived in the public housing development across the street offered to pay him ten dollars if he could refer any customers, and that same afternoon a customer asked if he knew which building that blond hooker lived in. Was he going to throw money away?
Soon Azad provided this service for the woman’s friends too. Sometimes he held cash for them or stepped out of the kiosk to let them change their clothes. He earned about a hundred fifty dollars per week—more than half what he made selling newspapers—which he saved so he could bring his family over. Eventually he found a better job as a clerk in a Midtown bodega, but his experienced eye fell on the street prostitutes and he soon discovered they had similar needs. Teaming up with another bodega clerk, Rajesh, he created a network of local store owners and clerks and deliverymen, along with johns, drug dealers, and black marketers. The key was the kiosk vendors. Tourists at a local hotel might ask a bellhop where they could find prostitutes or drugs. The bellhop would tell a kiosk vendor, who would call Azad and Rajesh, who would alert a drug dealer or prostitute. Or a deliveryman from a local restaurant would hear of some available cocaine and check in with Azad and Rajesh, who would put the word out among the kiosk vendors, who would put the word out to all the bellhops and clerks in their network.
For his part, Manjun stumbled directly into his life of crime. The porn shop was the very first job he landed on arrival and the shop workers had already had in place a deal with local sex workers, which was why the back room had a bed. Women could entertain their clients for a fee of twenty dollars an hour, which was much less than the hot-sheets hotels charged. Sometimes they came in just to rest, so the fee was lower. And sometimes, a prostitute or petty criminal would want to hide from the police for a few hours; they’d pay fifty dollars an hour. Manjun resisted at first, but he needed five thousand dollars to bring over his wife and infant son, and the extra money could save him years of waiting. It did save years—he was able to send the five thousand dollars in just six months, sparing her the difficult life of a single mother in Bangladesh.
But all this was invisible to the mainstream culture, and this invisibility would soon have consequences. As Mayor Giuliani began his cleanup of the Times Square area, nobody in power gave any thought to the thousands of “support” people whose survival would be affected when the economic driver of sex was removed from the scene. And the optimistic view that these workers would be forced toward more legitimate work turned out to be puritanical hypocrisy—it was crime itself that gave these men an entrée into the straight world. In time, Santosh began selling laptops of dubious origin, Rajesh started offering small short-term loans, and Azad operated an increasingly successful sideline as a job referral service for undocumented immigrants. Whenever otherwise legitimate employers found themselves in need of some quick off-the-books labor—and they often did, even the hedge fund titans and investment banks down on Wall Street—Azad made it happen for them with one phone call.
All of Manjun’s friends had been robbed at gunpoint. None of them had health insurance or unemployment insurance or 401(k) contributions, and the taxes deducted from their paychecks went into the ether because none of them had real social security numbers. I heard the same story again and again from Central American dishwashers, West African security guards, and Mexican laborers. They lived day to day, always looking over their shoulder, hiding their crimes from the police and their success from thieves. And sometimes, as I would soon see, they lost the battle.
• • •
As the months passed, a grim mood fell across Ninth Avenue Family Video. On the very same block, a man stabbed another man in a drunken fight, a woman was found shot to death, and a drug dealer shot a man who had come from the suburbs to buy crack—a white man. That brought the police out in force. I avoided the streets myself, afraid of being the subject of a random answers-the-description stop-and-frisk.
One particular night stands out in my memory. Even from the back of the store, I could feel the cold coming through the front door every time a customer walked in. The crash of the door slamming back into its frame made the small chime seem not just unnecessary but purposely annoying. Manjun was constantly in motion, fussing with things and sighing heavily. Almost every hour he brought me a fresh cup of tea.
Manjun’s son kept me company. Joshi was ten now, and he had grown up in the porn store. He was playing with his Ping-Pong paddle and a small rubber ball, slapping the ball with relentless focus against the one small patch of wall that wasn’t covered by X-rated DVDs. Wall, floor, paddle. Wall, floor, paddle. Wall, floor, paddle.
Sitting with him felt comfortable. With his brown skin and quiet, introspective skill at amusing himself while the adults were busy, he seemed like a younger version of myself.
We heard a voice at the door and Joshi put the paddle down and slipped away. It was Angela, come to check her voice mail and drink a hot cup of coffee. She held four fingers up and stuck her tongue out to signal exhaustion and relief, meaning she’d had four dates so far that night and would very much like to flop down in front of a TV. “I can’t do this much longer,” she whispered.
I liked Angela a lot. From the first night, she was open and honest, admitting right away that she was a sex worker. But she was unlike most of the other immigrant and low-income streetwalkers I had studied in New York and Chicago. She had ambition and the courage to cross borders. She came to Manjun’s store because she wanted to escape from her usual traveling grounds in the East Side projects to a better neighborhood where she could meet a wealthier clientele.
That night, I could see in her face the toll of accommodating so many men. It was painful to see. She was only thirty-four but always looked so tired that she appeared to be nearly a decade older. And business had been getting steadily worse since the Giuliani reforms. For the last few months, Angela was averaging just one client per night. Sometimes not even one.
Gradually, she told me her story. She’d come to the United States as a young girl, but death and mental illness had taken her parents and left her alone on the Lower East Side. She was just a teenager, hungry and undocumented, and ended up trading sex for food. She worked Avenues B and C for a decade, then moved to Hell’s Kitchen to try the Midtown tourist trade. She’d been jailed many times, though she always said that “an arrest is just a chance to make a friend on the police.” This optimism, this insistence on seeing the seeds of future opportunity in every setback, defined her character. It probably explained much of her desire to branch out of the projects. And despite her difficult life, she was always kind and patient.
“Three of my own and one black,” she told me that night. Each transaction had been fifty dollars, all in the bathroom of a bar on Eleventh Avenue. Two of the men lived in Harlem, one on the Lower East Side, and one in Hell’s Kitchen. Accidentally, the last man had given her a bruise on her arm during his climax. “At least they took hand jobs,” she said.
But she was okay to keep working, she said.
I could tell Angela wanted a moment alone. Maybe she needed a drink or some pills. It wasn’t my business to judge. I left her in the back room and joined Manjun and Joshi in the front. Five minutes later she left with a wave and a smile, and I offered to put Joshi to bed.
His small cot was pressed against the far wall, lengthwise to the twin bed that Angela and her friends used. After many nights alone, he had his own routine. First he opened a small bag of clothes in the corner and took out his pajamas. After changing into them, he made a quick visit to the bathroom to brush his teeth, then ran to the front of the store to kiss his father good night. He returned rubbing his eyes and climbed aboard the creaky cot. He pulled the blanket over his head and whispered to his toy soldier for a moment or two before falling asleep.
I sat in the chair watching him, trying not to fall asleep myself while I waited for the next prostitute to come with some data. There were only a few patrons in the aisles, a couple of drunken college boys and an amorous couple. In the convex mirrors hanging from the ceiling, I saw hands and bodies reflected in strange proportions. Outside, an older man looked in and hesitated, nervous to enter. Everyone looked clammy and preserved under the fluorescent lights.
Finally, the last interview was finished. But Manjun didn’t want me to go. “Twenty more minutes I am done too. Come with me—eat Sula’s special midnight dinner.”
Manjun’s wife, Sula, cooked in an Indian restaurant, so I was tempted. But it was too late, I said. I had to get some sleep.
The expression on Manjun’s face went from eager to desperate. “I’m in trouble, Mr. Sudhir,” he confessed. An inventory of the store had shown stock missing, so the boss wanted Manjun and the other clerks to take a cut in their paychecks to make up for it. But the money he earned from the back room was dwindling, with less and less sex business every month. Even worse, a few weeks earlier a man had walked into the video store and ordered Manjun to empty the cash register. Manjun gave him four hundred dollars in small bills. Then the thief dragged him to the back room and demanded the “other money,” meaning the rental payments from the sex workers, which Manjun kept in a small locker. It was twelve hundred dollars in all, a devastating loss. He’d been saving the money for his many needs, from Joshi’s school clothes to Sula’s doctor bills, but it also represented the future: a possible trip to Bangladesh, a down payment on a business venture, a sign of accomplishment to keep him going when he felt depressed. Most of all, perhaps, it represented the promise that he would only have to resort to such illegal schemes temporarily. Now he would have to scale back his dreams or move even deeper into the underground.
“You must come home with me,” he said. “That is the only way Sula will not yell at me!”
He softened me with a cup of hot tea, milky and sweet, with a few cloves and pods of cardamom, reminders of my Indian childhood so sharp they rendered me unable to refuse.
The truth was, I didn’t want to go home either. After ten years of marriage, my wife was talking about a separation. We were very young when we got married and our “priorities were changing,” as they say. I wasn’t ready to talk about any of this yet, but I didn’t mind a little comfort from a South Asian family that reminded me so much of my own.
Off we went on the 7 train, rumbling deep into the heart of Queens. Manjun carried the sleeping Joshi wrapped in a blanket.
When we arrived, Sula gave a warm hello to me and a cold nod to her husband. She took Joshi in a possessive way calculated to demonstrate her irritation and disappeared into the bedroom.
Manjun sighed. Ever since Sula had started working, Joshi had had to sleep half the night at the store. They couldn’t afford a babysitter. Sula hated it. And she was in some kind of mysterious pain that had been troubling her for almost six months. Neither she nor Manjun would tell me what was wrong, just that they couldn’t afford a “women’s doctor.”
When she came back into the room, Sula started right in on Manjun. “Why must we live like this, in this country? Why have you brought me here?”
She even made me a character in their drama. “Sudhir would never fail his wife,” she said. “Sudhir is a real man, not like you. He takes care of family!”
Joshi came to the door, his sleep disturbed by the raised voices. I offered to put him back to bed and left them to their squabble. Joshi refused my offer to read and got down on the floor and took a plastic soldier in each hand, speaking to them softly while moving them across his raised knees. The sight shot the ache of an old memory through me. So many times I did the exact same thing, hiding in my room while my mother raised her voice against my father and this “godforsaken country.” So many times the shy voice that searched for the right English word turned into a piercing instrument of marital war. Whenever a silence blossomed and we saw a glimmer of relief, my mother would find a new focus for her rage.
With the raised voices of his parents beating through the door, Joshi put his soldiers on sentry duty and got into bed. Would he remember this moment for the rest of his life? Would part of him always be ten years old and anchored to the battlefield of his bedroom floor, fighting an imaginary war to distract himself from the source of pain?
• • •
A few days later, I watched Manjun come into the back room of Ninth Avenue Family Video with another cup of sweet cardamom tea. As I took the white Styrofoam cup, I noticed that his hand was shaking.
“Still nervous?”
Since the robbery and his pay cut, he seemed to be getting more anxious by the day. But he shook his head. “The chances are very slim something like that happens twice. I should be com-fort-able.”
The additional emphasis on the last word seemed intended to lend it the air of scientifically determined fact.
Something had been puzzling me. How did the thief know about the extra money? “Are you sure you never told the ladies?” I asked.
Manjun didn’t want to talk about it. His face was resigned. I was sure one of the sex workers had discovered Manjun’s cash reserve and told someone either knowingly or accidentally. But Manjun didn’t like to distrust people.
“What about Officer Michael?” I asked. I had a feeling that my history-loving friend on the police force would do everything he could to help someone like Manjun.
But Manjun still hadn’t reported the robbery to the police.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I told him.
“Maybe tomorrow,” Manjun said. Then his eyes went flat, staring blindly into a wall of gay porn. “Or maybe I go home.”
“Bangladesh?”
“Maybe Delhi. Anywhere. Nothing here for me now.”
“How does Sula feel?”
“But what will you do? How will you make a living?”
He shrugged his shoulders, put the cup of tea on the steps, and waved a hand at the sea of erections and open mouths, shaved bodies and swollen breasts. “What do I do here, my friend? What do I do here?”
The mood lifted a little when Angela and her friend Kristina arrived, their night’s work done. “Angela hit the jackpot,” Kristina said.
That meant Angela had had three clients, two quick exchanges in a bar and one local store owner whose wife was out of the country. Kristina had only had one.
Since Angela began confiding in me, her efforts to penetrate the Midtown tourist trade had become the subject of much discussion in Manjun’s store. She knew that I’d been working on my study of the indoor sex market with the Urban Justice Center, where she had received help in the past with some legal issues and lease negotiations with her landlord. Since she was one of the women who hoped to leave the streets for more lucrative venues like hotels and private calls to apartments, she began sharing her own ideas about what to study and what kind of support they really needed. Shyly, she talked about her discomfort in posh Midtown bars. She said she didn’t understand how to advertise herself online but was taking lessons from some more Internet-savvy friends. “I’d really like a bank account,” she told me. “I need a Visa card. And I need to find good doctors who can help me for a few bucks. Or some kind of legit side job just so the cops don’t steal my money when they stop me and find all of it in my pocket. I need to be cleaned.”
The irony in her use of “clean” made me laugh. The very same word that the media used to describe Giuliani’s strategy to make Manhattan more hospitable acquired a subterranean shade coming out of Angela’s mouth, raising echoes of money laundering and identity changes. But the same sentiment held true in both cases. Just as Midtown was changing from seedy to mainstream, Angela wanted to wash out the streetwalker and move to the more acceptable domain of “escort services.”
Figuring out how to make this change was not easy, particularly for an immigrant woman who was not comfortable applying for jobs, who felt ashamed of her difficulty communicating in English, and whose life until that point had been limited to the Lower East Side and the various Caribbean countries where her family had lived. The several dozen women she had introduced me to, including other Latinas and European immigrants like Kristina, as well as white Americans who were transplants to the city, all shared the same passion. And the same obstacles. Without a credit history or bank account, it was hard for them to rent an apartment, apply for a job, or otherwise think of a life beyond their nightly vocation.
But they all were managing, and their improvised methods fascinated me. Kristina told me about a group of women who could find landlords willing to rent an apartment (or sometimes just a bedroom) for cash and no contract. Angela convinced several doctors on the Lower East Side to treat her friends. An ex–social worker from Greenpoint came to Manjun’s shop at night to counsel women and set up appointments at health clinics and day care centers back in Brooklyn.
It was becoming clear that a community like Mortimer’s did exist in this world too, but it wasn’t geographically rooted to a single neighborhood. Just as Manjun’s friends helped to show me the complex infrastructure of the local underground economy, Angela and her coworkers helped me see that my instincts had a solid foundation: for the modern city’s sex workers, community was networked. The new sex trade was no longer confined to seedy neighborhoods but spread through friendships and clients all over the city. These kinds of impromptu social links across distant areas of a city had been identified as far back as the 1960s by Chicago sociologist Morris Janowitz, who called them “communities of limited liability.” Back then, he had been looking at whites and suburbanites who had cars and greater mobility. Like me, he was looking through a Chicago lens that probably led him to assume that black and brown members of the underclass were more fixed in their neighborhoods. But from what I could see so far, Manjun and his friends had managed to create the same networked pattern. The question was, given how vulnerable they all seemed to be, would the networks endure? Were they a model for the future or just a fleeting adaptation?
The fact was, Angela and her friends were still barely eking out a basic living, which placed them in constant risk of a sudden catastrophic blow of bad luck. Soon I would witness the terrible stress this put on every one of their brave and creative attempts to shore up their defenses.
• • •
On a frigid Saturday night in November, when frost crazed the windows of the overheated shops, Angela and Kristina had finished up their evening’s work and come to rest in Manjun’s back room.
“Maybe I’m too old for this,” Kristina said.
“Of course you’re too old, sweetie!” Angela answered.
Kristina was from Romania, but the differences in language and background didn’t seem to hamper her friendship with Angela. She pulled a small bottle of whiskey out of her bag and poured them each a slug.
Manjun appeared at the door to the back room looking apologetic. This meant it was collection time. Angela pulled out a small wad of bills, but Kristina said she didn’t have enough this week. She was broke and really sorry. Manjun waved her concern down with both hands. “You go home. Be safe,” he said.
Kristina looked embarrassed. “You’re very sweet, Jun.”
When Manjun went back up front, Angela leaned close and whispered, “I’m not going to last here much longer.”
I wasn’t surprised. With one client a night, the writing was on the wall. I expected her to say she was going to return to the Lower East Side, but she wasn’t giving up that easily.
“I go back home and think about things,” she said. “Then I try again.” She laughed. “Maybe downtown. I don’t know. I don’t like quitting.”
“You never struck me as the quitting type,” I said.
But then Angela sighed and started talking about other women who were similarly unsuccessful and who were retreating—some to other neighborhoods, some to other lines of work. The sudden shift from optimism to gloom struck me as ominous. I didn’t know her well enough at that point to know how resilient she really was, but right then she sounded like a woman on the verge of real depression.
A strange, unexpected feeling came over me. In Chicago, on another research project, I’d watched the demolition of projects send thousands of families into homelessness and poverty worse than anything they had experienced before. I had seen hundreds of black men, just teenagers, arrested for selling crack, their lives scrambled forever for a few hundred dollars a week. Now I seemed to be hearing a new version of that old sad tale. Maybe it was my own frustration coming out, but I was desperately eager to understand what it would take for people to avoid these fates. I could count on one hand the number of Chicago gang members who’d stayed out of jail, saved their money, and found work in the legitimate economy. The same seemed true of these other illegal economies. At the same time, every time I picked up a copy of the Village Voice there seemed to be more and more advertisements from individuals and agencies offering sex for sale. Someone was making money. If it wasn’t Angela and her friends, who was it? What was the pattern of success and failure? What was the range of outcomes? Failure? Prison? Death? A successful integration into the new country? Return to the homeland with money in the bank? Again, my need for generalizability made me hungry to search out all possibilities.
Predictable but unattractive thoughts nagged at me. Those who fared better were probably white, middle class—people who did have bank accounts and credit cards and all the things Angela couldn’t access. But these thoughts were sheer prejudice, and just as likely to be false as true. Only data could determine the real reasons.
As Angela finished her morose monologue, we both saw Manjun sitting in the front of the store looking even more despondent than she sounded.
“Sula’s sick,” she whispered. “That’s why he’s worried.”
Feeling helpless, I sighed heavily. Angela held out her whiskey bottle. “Let it go, mi amor.”
I took a quick slug and coughed, then slid down onto the cot. Up around us a silence rose, broody as a wet November day. You’d think that, after a decade at this, I could accept the suffering of the people I studied. But it hurt to think that nothing I could write would really change the lives of people like Angela and Manjun. Sociology had been founded with grand dreams of reforming society, but now the short-term reformers were putting their hopes in economics. Pay people to attend school, starve them to induce productivity, use threat of lower pay if performance suffered. Even if all of life’s problems really could be answered with incentives and numbers, I didn’t want to live in a world where Manjun was just a “wage laborer” and his suffering nothing more than a “market externality.”
A few days later, things got much worse. Christmas was around the corner, and I was planning to visit my parents in California. I took the subway down Ninth Avenue just to drop off a gift I hoped would mean as much to Joshi as it had once meant to me—the ultimate South Asian nerd heirloom, The World Book Encyclopedia. I had become ridiculously fond of that little kid.
But when I walked into the store, there was a new clerk working behind the counter. “Where’s Manjun?” I asked. The clerk answered me in the broken English of a brand-new immigrant. “He no work here.” He had no idea where Manjun was. Or even who he was. He wasn’t friendly about it either. I pushed my way through the store and peeked into the back room. There was no trace of Manjun’s belongings, not even the meager collection of DVDs Joshi used to watch. The beds were gone too, which meant that Angela and the other prostitutes must also have moved on. A small endangered world had disappeared forever.
I rushed to see Santosh, who looked pale and exhausted. “Please, not now,” he pleaded. The store was filled with customers. “I cannot give it to you now. You will meet me, later tonight.”
“Give me what? Where is Manjun?”
“You haven’t come for his money?” His voice trailed off and he began rubbing his head.
“Santosh, what money? Do you know where Manjun is?”
“Come back tonight, later. Things will be quiet and I will talk with you.”
I looked for some of Manjun’s other friends, but none were at their jobs. I called Angela and some of the sex workers who’d worked out of Manjun’s store in the past, but not a single one answered her phone. I went to his home in Queens and no one answered the doorbell.
A few hours later, I returned to Santosh’s video store. He was gone. He’d left early, they said.
The next day, I managed to connect with Officer Michael. He picked me up in his car and we drove to a quiet street. “You know what it’s like, Sudhir,” he said. “These places, life can turn from good to bad just like that.”
The thief had come back. He’d beat Manjun pretty badly, sending him to the hospital. Because of the severity of the attack, local police believed Manjun had been letting someone sell drugs from inside the store, and the thief had come looking for the stash.
I couldn’t believe this. Manjun was losing money on the bed rental business because of his soft heart at a time when he really couldn’t afford it. That was the kind of person he was, a good person. I couldn’t believe he had ventured into the drug trade. Something was missing, some part of the story was invisible to us—and now the secretive rules of the underground were affecting me. My friend was lost because of some kind of underground conflict resolution mechanism that we couldn’t see.
This is what normal people go to the police to solve—and to lawyers, small-claims courts, and all the other arms of the justice system. But in the underground, the law is typically not a helpful protector. Manjun’s underworld option would have been to pay for protection, but I couldn’t imagine the mild South Asian gentleman searching out those kinds of helpers. Here is where the real fragility of the underground became clear to me. It was fine for me to talk about the provisional communities that gathered around a cause like Mortimer’s, but I could not avoid the darker side of this world. There was real violence here. And yet, whatever Manjun had done or not done, I honestly did not know whether I wanted to find out the truth. Unlike the big-n researchers who work the telephone and never see the nameless souls who give them forty-five uninterrupted minutes, an ethnographer is always haunted by his subjects and their tragic vulnerabilities. Insight gets more painful when you grow close to people.
• • •
A few weeks later, after returning from the holidays, I dropped by Manjun’s old store again. No sign of him. I looked for Shoomi; no sign of him either. Most of the porn stores seemed to be going out of business too, replaced by wine bars and children’s clothing stores. The end of the year must have meant the end of their leases too.
Santosh was gone as well. I’d heard that, using the small profit from his porn career, he’d opened a restaurant near the main subway stop in Jackson Heights, so I went up to ask him to lunch. As I entered, an older woman wearing a long red sari led out two Indian men who looked as if they had just landed at JFK, bags in hand, bleary eyed and hungry. She shouted in Santosh’s direction, “Why do they all come today?”
Santosh grabbed her arm and steered her toward the back room. He returned with two small cups of tea, strong and milky sweet.
“Sometimes I miss our old place,” he said. “It was nice there—mostly because I could get away from here!”
It turned out that the restaurant had been part of Santosh’s mini empire for a while. The angry woman in the red sari was his wife. And the two Indians were part of yet another business Santosh had going: smuggling undocumented immigrants into the United States.
Smiling at his relentless enterprise, I asked him how much he charged for his smuggling services. “Five thousand!” he said. “And ten thousand for all settlement-related ac-tiv-i-ties.” He said the final word slowly, with mocking precision.
“‘Activities’,” I said, smirking. “That’s a nice word for it.”
“Two weeks’ comfort and station.”
“Station?”
“Food, clothing, introductions.”
In a matter of thirty minutes, Santosh gave me a very nice sketch of the market, including the number of brokers and the dangers. He also filled me in on the old neighborhood. Azad was still working in the black market, Rajesh had found a job as an accountant, some had children in college already. It felt like old times, which reminded me of why I was there.
“Have you heard anything of our old friend?” I asked.
He shrugged. As far as he knew, Joshi and Sula were heading off to Bangladesh; they were both doing well.
“And Manjun?”
Santosh sighed. “We sacrifice for our families.”
Finally, he told me what really happened when Manjun’s money was stolen. He’d been involved in drugs and “bad things” with another man who knew where he was hiding the cash, and that man was the one who’d robbed him. The “bad things” included counterfeit documents, he admitted.
“But where’s Manjun now?” I asked, afraid of the answer.
Santosh raised the tea to his mouth. “We know only of his family.” But he was being evasive—I could tell.
“Please,” I begged.
He sighed and sipped his tea. Finally he said, “Sudhir, we find that Manjun was doing something not very pleasant.”
Getting the story out of him took some time, but in the end I gathered that Manjun had been involved with some very dangerous people, and under their pressure he found himself forcing women from India to become prostitutes—to live in a brothel for a short stint in order to pay their family debts. The horror of this was what had been making him unravel back when I thought he was just worried about being robbed.
“And now?” I asked.
Santosh took a deep breath. “I don’t think we will ever see him again.”
This is why nobody would speak to me, he explained. “It is very important that the rest of us don’t know anything—that we don’t talk or say anything. Our ignorance is what can save us, and keep us in this country. And for you, I would also suggest that you not ask too many questions. That is not a safe way to be.”
Saddened, I began talking about the needs of survival in a foreign land, finding a way to excuse the terrible things my friend had done. But Santosh grabbed my hand from across the table. “Surviving is easy,” he said with a forceful voice I had never heard from him. “We are so much smarter than most of these people, so much better educated, and we work so hard and do nasty things, but they succeed without effort. And the demons visit you at night.”
Understanding dawned slowly. In Santosh’s view, Manjun had made a fatal error. He’d listened to his demons.
Eat from the hand of a demon, and his hand becomes your hand. How often had I seen this in the underground economy? People who generally lived good, decent lives turned to the illicit world to make a buck, and then it began to suck them in. Santosh was saying that Manjun could have made different choices, could have changed his attitude or his approach or his exposure, could have imagined a different future. But the demon’s hand had become his hand, and it was too easy to keep on letting that hand do its dark work. At the same time, of course, Santosh recognized that as a poor brown immigrant in the United States, Manjun had few real options and had to seize the opportunities that became available to him. That was what made it so sad.
After that, Santosh and I had little more to say to each other. Talking about Manjun had drained us.
He asked that I come back in two weeks, for a small party for his grandchild. When the day arrived, I found the restaurant filled with balloons and streamers and “Happy Birthday” signs, and everyone greeted me as “Mr. Professor.” When the party was over, Santosh came over to me and sighed. “It is important that you see this side too. This is the side I want you to remember. Not just the sadness. Maybe even you can remember your own time growing up—very much like this, no?”
“Yes, Santosh. Very much,” I said as my eyes began tearing up.
• • •
Years later, I still turn back to Santosh’s words, because it is the counsel that I have received countless times from the disenfranchised, whether single mothers in the Chicago projects or immigrants seeking out opportunities in the global city. Don’t pity us. Don’t treat us like victims. We’re more than our hardships. But fine as that advice is, I was grappling with two seemingly contradictory thoughts. First was a vision of global New York as an unrestricted field of opportunity where even the low-income immigrant could climb the ladder and experience a better life, as Santosh had. The second was global New York as a ruthlessly hierarchical town with great social benefits for the victors and potentially devastating consequences for the losers. Perhaps this was how things had always been, whether for the early Italians or the great Irish migration. New York offered opportunities, but made no promises. This too was a form of globalization: white Europeans migrating in droves to America, creating bursting-at-the-seams ethnic enclaves where they could make a new home for themselves, often rooting their eventual Americanization in off-the-books marketplaces where people bartered, lent money, paid one another under the table, and so on—all excellent training in the spirit of American entrepreneurship. As they established credit, found legitimate jobs, and moved into the social mainstream, it would help them achieve great success.
But now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, globalization had brought about a much different narrative of assimilation. Today’s immigrants were more likely to be brown and black, from Africa and Asia. Since 2000, most of the immigrants who have come to New York City have been from Mexico, Ghana and sub-Saharan Africa, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and China. By 2005, historian Nancy Foner would find, recent immigrants made up a startling 37 percent of the city population. If you counted their American-born children, then the figure rose to half of all New Yorkers. This new wave of immigrants couldn’t just shorten their names and lose their accents. Nor did they seem to be moving from menial work to well-paying factory or government positions—those jobs had disappeared in global cities. Instead, these immigrants were servicing the well-to-do via poorly paid service sector work, as clerks, cab drivers, cleaners, nannies, busboys, and so on. Most such jobs paid off the books and offered little hope of advancement or recourse when things went wrong. And unlike previous generations of low-income workers, these recent immigrants weren’t joining unions for a step up the ladder; as the new century began in New York City, nearly one in three lived in poverty.
One problem became increasingly apparent to me. As I watched immigrants like Angela, Manjun, Shoomi, and their peers shuttle through the city, I noticed they always had limited relations with people outside their social class and ethnic group. They may have worked for an upper-class clientele, but these relationships were hierarchical. Angela talked about finding wealthy white clients and Manjun dreamed of taking his engineering skills into a corporate job, but the chances seemed small. It was painful to acknowledge the reasons. They spoke poor English and they had dark skin. Most of all, perhaps, they just didn’t seem interested in the lifestyle that is the second currency of global New York: the music and movies and art and food that people talk about when they are enjoying relations that are not hierarchical. They seemed to be stuck in their own ethnic worlds, their social courage weakened by the demon’s hand.
If there was any real hope for these newcomers to latch onto, it was the traditional hope immigrants put in the prospects of their children. But these too had grown more slender. As sociologist Mary Waters and her colleagues discovered, more than half of the second-generation immigrant children in New York would attend or graduate from a four-year college or university. But the pace of globalization today has become so fast and ruthless, with capital zipping from place to place at such hyperspeed, taking jobs and resources along with it, we seem to be at risk of creating a new class of the long-term disenfranchised. So many of the people I saw in Manjun’s neighborhood had made the wrong bet. They didn’t see the change coming, and now they had to be cleared out. That has always happened, but never so fast or so universally, or in such utter obscurity. Today’s champions of globalization are so busy celebrating the wondrous wealth and the charming artifacts of food and music produced by international interchange that they have little time for the plight of the invisible underclass that helps make it happen.
Alas, my time here was up too. With Angela also on her way out, Manjun’s disappearance meant the end of my tenure in Hell’s Kitchen. Too many other people I knew were moving on as well. The neighborhood was now deep into the transformation that one critic called “the suburbanization of New York.” Average household income had doubled from 1990 to 2000 and average rents rose correspondingly, a pace that accelerated into the new century. I decided it was time to start floating again, perhaps to renew my long-stalled effort to research the other end of the illegal income spectrum. But as the weeks passed, I couldn’t stop worrying about Manjun.
One day I went back downtown to press Officer Michael for more details.
“You don’t know what we know,” he said flatly. “We think he might have been pressured into doing all the things he did.”
Michael wouldn’t say. “We told him to get the hell out of town, or at least go hide.”
But how would Manjun live? How would his family live? They had, I admitted, some issues with their papers.
“He’ll be okay. Just give it time. I’m sure you’ll hear from him.”
But I had a sense I never would, and I never did. It was hard for me to accept, even harder because of the way Officer Michael seemed to be shrugging it off as just another ordinary event in the life of the neighborhood.
The only thing I could do was stay true to the pursuit that had brought us together. I had to keep moving out across the city, following threads and crossing boundaries to see where the underground could take me.