CHAPTER 4

MOVING ON UP

Two years after Al Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center, immigrants to New York continued to experience heightened scrutiny even if they were legal residents of the country. The Patriot Act and related legislation gave enhanced surveillance and investigative powers to law enforcement and imposed new restrictions on the freedom of immigrants to travel into and out of the United States. Deportations had risen by 30 percent. The undocumented moved from neighborhood to neighborhood and borough to borough, seeking off-the-books work while keeping a low profile. Some ran into visa troubles, lost their jobs, and had to return home.

When I heard from Santosh or my other friends from Midtown, the stories tended to be of either the on-a-treadmill or the crashed-and-burned variety. They stood in sharp contrast to the conventional stories that depicted South Asians in the United States largely as professionals who experienced great economic stability for themselves and their children. Most didn’t even manage the mini-mart life of Apu on The Simpsons. Santosh tried to expand his restaurant and catering services, but hard times had sent him back to his lucrative but illegal sideline as part of the “underground railroad” for undocumented immigrants. I could tell how things were going by the look on his face. If he greeted me with a smile and introduced me all around, he was having a legal period, but if he became stern and fatherly and told me to keep working hard and focus on the important things, then I knew he was into something murky. The same pattern held with Rajesh and the others, who all dipped back into the illegal economy whenever they lost jobs or ran into other trouble. Off the books, they drove cabs, washed dishes, cleaned offices, even repaired office computers. Some took seasonal work in upstate hotels run by other South Asians. With wages so low and travel restrictions so harsh, many were using video chat to watch their kids grow up in their home country.

But all of them held on to the dream. Maybe that was another reason I kept turning to Shine and Angela. They were actually doing it. In very different ways, they were systematically making a climb up the economic ladder. Not with complete success, of course. Angela’s various attempts to recruit clients from Midtown had been a disaster, and she had been unable to find a stable of white corporate clients for private dates. In fact, she was now back licking her wounds on the Lower East Side. But she was still looking for new ways to get ahead. “Maybe I join one of those agencies,” she joked one day. “Someone out there has to like dark meat, no?” She would soon focus on an ambitious plan to organize a group of street prostitutes to rent an apartment and run their own bordello.

For Shine, the climb meant a new drug.

I discovered his scheme one afternoon in a bar on Lenox Avenue. The spring of 2003 was coming, with joggers hitting the streets, merchants repainting their storefronts, the annual renewal finally under way. We were sitting at a bar and I was telling Shine about a project I was doing with the economist Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics. Inspired by research on how wealthy Internet entrepreneurs had learned to reinvent their careers after the collapse of the dot-com bubble, we wanted to find young black men who had joined gangs about a decade earlier. How would they reinvent themselves when their criminal careers played out? “Basically,” I said, “we’re trying to answer a simple question nobody ever thought to ask before. What happens to gang members as they grow old?”

“Hell, you ought to study me,” Shine said.

The thought had occurred to me, of course. But Shine had kept me at a distance, never letting me past his guard far enough to find out the things that mattered to a sociologist. To start with, was he really such a big underground success or was he exaggerating his achievements to come off like a big shot? After all this time, I couldn’t say for sure. I knew that he drove a fancy German car and helped to support a large family, that he kept many thousands in a bank account and hid more in various nooks and stash points around Harlem until he could spend or launder it into reportable income. He certainly seemed conversant with the crack trade, so I had no real doubts where he was getting his money. Beyond that, I had no hard numbers. But I did know that the crack market was slowing down, and that he’d been trying all kinds of new things: a chop shop in the Bronx, a small pushcart business with two street vendors selling fried chicken and rice, a five-thousand-dollar investment in his uncle’s small hatmaking business (black women still wore glorious hats to church, as you could see any Sunday morning all over Harlem). Now he warmed to this theme, but it all sounded fairly small time. He had another small investment in a shop where one of his aunts told fortunes with tarot cards. He was helping three neighbors start an underground business refurbishing old television sets. He even spent one colorful three-month stint trying to make it as a pimp.

“A pimp? Did you get a furry hat and everything?”

Shine didn’t find my teasing amusing. Apparently, failure as a pimp had bruised his male ego. “I’m too easygoing. They took advantage of me. I’m too nice to be a pimp.”

“I guess crack brings out a much friendlier crowd,” I said.

He laughed. “They are when they want that smoke. Friendliest motherfuckers you ever saw.”

But all his efforts had come to nothing, or at least nothing in terms of his previous income. Now Shine had a new idea, which he confessed a bit sheepishly. “I’m selling powder.”

“Powder?”

“Powdered cocaine. The kind white people use.”

Alas, the powdered cocaine market was proving difficult to crack, so to speak. He was having a hell of a time finding customers. This was because much of the market base for powdered cocaine is white and fairly well-off. He certainly couldn’t use his usual set of street dealers, who would look and feel like Martians at a Wall Street bar. “They’re too young and too stupid,” he grumbled.

I couldn’t believe it. “You can’t possibly be telling me that you don’t know anyone who buys powdered cocaine in the city of New York?”

“I know plenty of people, but coke is a weird thing. With crack, people keep coming back ’cause it doesn’t last that long. They come back every hour. People who get the blow, they get enough for a night or maybe a weekend.”

“So find one of them and sell him some,” I said.

“But they’ve already got their own steady. I’m not a steady to nobody, and I don’t want to be poaching somebody else’s customers and get shot in an alley. I gotta find new customers. It’s a tricky thing.”

He had done a good deal of consumer behavior research, he said. Specifically, he’d called all the powdered cocaine dealers he knew, hung out at parties with his middle-class friends, even tried to purchase coke himself at a few bars. Shine believed that blow was mostly sold at parties and clubs or delivered directly to customers at their homes, but he didn’t like phone delivery businesses and didn’t seem to be attending the right kind of parties.

What he really needed was a cousin with connections in the art market—or better yet, some idiot who could introduce him to a troubled young heiress with a taste for cocaine, of course. But neither of us knew that then—Evalina was still looking for herself in California, and the night Shine and Analise would meet at the art gallery was still more than a year away. This left him with what looked like a single option: finding new customers in public spaces—upscale bars, luxury hotels, strip clubs, even parks. He had been canvassing a few of these spots with Cohan, another trafficker in his neighborhood who was losing business, but they attracted too much attention from security. Once at a hotel bar, they’d actually been thrown out.

“What did you wear?” I asked.

“Same shit I have on now,” he said.

I looked him over. Two hundred and fifteen pounds of solid black man in a bright green tracksuit, a baseball hat with the Yankees logo, and a diamond-studded necklace. The Adidas on his feet were white enough for a hospital operating room.

“How did you approach people?”

He told a series of amusing stories. Thinking that white men would be drawn to black women, he said, he took a small group of sexy young women to a Wall Street bar. The mission was to flirt and sell cocaine. But the girls were nervous and got so loud and drunk, they embarrassed him. Next he brought along a pair of Dominican gun brokers who said they dealt with rich white people all the time, but Shine’s coke made them paranoid and they threatened to shoot the hotel manager. Veering 180 degrees, he asked a famous black preacher to meet him at a Soho lounge on the theory that people who saw them together would trust him a little bit more and he could approach them later. But the preacher was disgusted at the ten-dollar martinis and criticized him for spending his money in the wrong neighborhood, leaving in a huff that soured Shine’s whole night. Finally, he tried sending the girls back down just to pick up guys and tell them about this great coke dealer they knew—the ultimate low-pressure sale—but they came back and said they just flat-out hated hanging out with the rich white people. There was nothing to talk about. They felt ignored.

As he talked, I realized I had misunderstood Shine. Though he lived very close to the geographical center of Manhattan and appeared to have no hesitation about traveling to any part of the city to see friends or to shop, he was not as confident as he appeared. “I’m an entrepreneur,” he liked to say, always with pride in his voice. He had no doubts about his mastery of the rules of commerce. But his courage had definite geographical boundaries. When it came to his business, he always spoke about the city as a series of distinct sectors, and Midtown was as distant as Beijing as far as cocaine sales were concerned. The phrases he used to describe it were “down there” or “out there” or even “where they are.”

Thinking back, I realized that whenever we traveled south, he became self-conscious about his appearance. He also modified his gait, toning down the rhythmic swagger that came naturally to him up in Harlem. I knew that he had some white friends and some wealthy friends too, but that didn’t seem to make a difference. Accepting white people’s money also meant accepting their power to judge him.

Suddenly it hit me. For Shine, the rich white world wasn’t just a new business market. It was a testing ground. It was a mountain to climb. It was as much a psychological challenge as it was an economic need.

I could relate.

“Maybe you should consider changing your look a little bit,” I said.

He pretended to be struck by my genius. “Get some horn-rims and a button-down shirt? Oh, yeah! Or maybe some plaid. Yeah, I’d look pretty good in plaid!”

As I would soon discover, he’d been studying back copies of Esquire and GQ. He was way ahead of me. That wasn’t the problem.

“The problem is, I’m just not comfortable hanging out in those places by myself,” he said.

The next shoe didn’t take long to fall.

“Why don’t you go with me?” he said.

Shine’s invitation was not exactly the kind of entrée I wanted into the upper reaches of the black market, but with few other doors opening, I couldn’t really pass up the opportunity. Still, it raised all sorts of conundrums for me. One in particular, painfully familiar from my experiences with Chicago gangs: how much of an accessory was I when I merely observed a crime? I learned that there was no legal obligation to report someone who was looking for new drug spots. Only capital crimes like murder or child abduction required a citizen to make a report or face charges herself. I knew I was heading down a road that would make me very uncomfortable at the least.

The exact nature of our relationship was another puzzle. We weren’t exactly friends, but we were definitely friendly. How should that affect my decision? Was I too close or not close enough?

Despite all this, I was dying to watch him in action, If everything he told me was true, my quest would feel much more solid—and vice versa.

•   •   •

Around this time another door opened, leading me into the upper reaches of New York society. I was on the board of a Lower East Side nonprofit organization, La Bodega de la Familia, that helped ex-offenders make a productive return to society after time spent in jail or prison. Through Angela, I had also become well acquainted with the Latino community that was being gentrified by white hipsters and artists. She frequently invited me to her apartment in a local housing project, which gave me the feeling of warmth I had missed since leaving Chicago’s public housing families (and the promise of additional interviews with Angela’s sex worker friends down the road). The Bodega board position also introduced me to some fascinating people on the opposite side of the social spectrum, specifically wealthy young New Yorkers who had begun to take an interest in their family’s social causes. On travels to Cuba, Peru, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and other developing countries, they had seen lending, construction, small business, and farming all take place outside government strictures, often on the basis of little more than verbal agreements. They became fascinated by the different ways poor people around the world used informal off-the-books means to make ends meet, and wanted to encourage the same entrepreneurial spirit in U.S. ghettos. I began telling them about my adventures on the Lower East Side, hoping I might be able to nudge some of their family largesse in the direction of La Bodega.

To my surprise, during a lull in the conversation, they began talking about the black market activities in their own circle of wealthy young philanthropists. Some bought and sold fancy sports cars or raced them around the world, others financed independent films, still others gambled or invested in businesses, all of it carefully hidden from the taxman as well as from parents. Getting away with it was kind of a sport.

The irony was overwhelming. The same basic activity—hustling in the shadows of the law and getting away with it—was a sport for one group and a matter of life and death for another. What a story that would make, comparing and contrasting high and low as I wove those two threads together. It was also quite a challenge to the popular assumption that the underground is the province of the underclass. Clearly I needed to spend more time with the upper classes. But once again I didn’t press, trusting in my infinitely-patient-ethnographer-on-the-wall approach. At most I dropped some hints.

Soon enough, an invitation came. Carter Williams was the heir to an insurance fortune, a privileged young black man who had zero knowledge of street culture. Michael and Betsy Winters were white, the children of a New York investment banker. They were all recent Columbia University graduates preparing to take over established family charities. Although none of them was exactly burning with a passion for philanthropy, they wanted to do an honest job of it.

They first approached me after reading some of my writings on urban poverty, asking me where I thought they could be most effective. I started by giving them a quick-and-dirty introduction to the budgets of poor people—how much a person got from welfare and food stamps, how much he spent for groceries, how much it cost to buy a monthly bus pass. Then we moved to more complex matters, like welfare policy and how to evaluate charitable programs. I also assigned them books like Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities and Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here, then led them in discussions of the best way to make an impact with their donations. Listening to them talk, I kept thinking how great it would be if I could study them formally. It would be my Coming of Age in Samoa, with pastels—a pleasing reversal of the usual “tribal” ethnography.

One time, early in our acquaintance, I took them to Harlem for a crash course in living poor. They had all been social science majors, so I assumed they were already familiar with the basics of low-income life—a painful error, it turned out.

We took a cab to 145th Street and got out in front of a boxy old tenement with a rusted fire escape running down the front of the building. Our host was Silvia McCombs, a single mother of three. Inside, her apartment was modest and neat, filled with plaster saints and handmade objects like tea cozies and blankets. She had televisions blaring in each of the rooms, all set to Christian preachers warning about the devil.

“Silvia,” I began, “we’ve been reading about bureaucracies. You know, welfare offices, health clinics, caseworkers who make sure you aren’t making money and getting rich off welfare. These guys don’t understand the ’man in the house’ rule.”

“I don’t understand it either,” said Silvia. “It’s bullshit.”

With that, she was off. Like many people who feel their hard-won expertise is always ignored, Silvia was thrilled to finally get a hearing. The “man in the house” rule was a clause (ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1968) that canceled a woman’s welfare if she had a man living in the house. It was sexist and destructive, it broke up families, and it was racist because similar kinds of government aid for other citizens (for white farming families, for example) didn’t include morality clauses or behavioral restrictions. But for minorities, all sorts of humiliating and patronizing rules were invented.

When she slowed down, I explained that Michael and Betsy and Carter had a specific focus, which was figuring out how to use their money to help people get off welfare and back to work.

“That’s right,” Betsy said with touching enthusiasm. “My father asked my brother and me to focus on helping people get work. Because ultimately, work is really what makes us happy.”

Silvia fixed Betsy with a skeptical gaze. Her eyes lingered on the Chanel bag and the expensive Burberry coat with the velvety chocolate nap. “Really? And what do you do? For work, I mean.”

“Well, right now I’m helping to manage my father’s estate,” Betsy answered.

Silvia took out a pack of menthol cigarettes and a lighter with a little cozy around it that she had knitted herself, laying them out methodically as if arraying weapons for battle. She was clearly enjoying herself. “No, no, no,” Silvia said, her voice growing sharp. “I mean, what do you do?”

“I evaluate the prospects of trying to help people better themselves. With our family’s money, we believe we can have a major impact on poverty in the city. In fact, the mayor is keen on—”

“Fuck the mayor, sweetheart,” Silvia said, taking a drag on her cigarette and blowing it to the side. “What do you do? What do you make? What do you sell? What do you serve to people? You understand me? What is your job?”

Carter broke in. “It’s very simple, really. We try to figure out if you’re worth helping. That’s number one. Should we give you money? Then we want to know how much. What do you really need to help you get a job? We don’t want to give too much because then there will be less for the next person. So that takes a bit of figuring out and that’s how we spend our days.”

“Shit, now we’re getting somewhere,” Silvia said. “So what do you want to know?” She put on a heavy mammy accent. “’Cause I sho would like to gets me some of that money you be having, boss.”

Carter tugged at his herringbone jacket, gathering his dignity along with the fabric. “Well, how much would it take to get you to a point where you’re comfortable enough to go out and get a job?”

“What do you mean, ’comfortable’?”

“The necessities. Child care, food, transportation, rent.”

While Silvia pondered, Betsy jumped in. “Just a ballpark figure would get us started. Something around fifty thousand dollars?”

Silvia looked startled. “Fifty thousand dollars a year?”

Betsy faltered. “Well, I don’t know. Seventy-five thousand?”

Silvia looked up at the ceiling. “Lord, you have finally heard my prayers!” she said, sarcasm dripping. Taking another drag off her cigarette, she looked over at me. “You getting a piece of this, Sudhir?”

“No, ma’am,” I answered. I couldn’t hide my own smirk, so I dropped my head and hoped the three students wouldn’t notice.

Shaking her head in wonder and disappointment, Silvia turned back to the group. “What do you kids think I live on now? I mean, look around you. I hope this place doesn’t seem dirt poor. I try to keep things tidy. Try to give my kids a decent home. I’m not embarrassed. So guess—how much do you think I live on?”

Carter looked around. “Thirty-five thousand dollars a year?”

“Thirty-five thousand dollars a year,” Silvia repeated. “Thirty-five thousand dollars a year! And where am I getting all of this money?”

“From the federal government,” Michael said. “That’s why we as private citizens are trying to find—”

But Silvia cut him off. The game wasn’t funny anymore, and her voice turned coldly factual. “Do you know what I get from welfare every month?” Silvia asked. No one answered. “About eight hundred dollars. That pays for clothes, subways, school materials, food, cleaning supplies, phone, cable. Some of it, anyway. You know what I get in food stamps?”

Once again, no one said anything.

“A hundred eighty dollars a month.”

“That’s it?” Michael said, surprised.

“That’s it. And I get SSI for disability, ’cause I can’t walk right, so that pays my rent. That’s my big stroke of luck—having a disability. Lots of folks don’t have that kind of good luck.”

Betsy looked genuinely shocked. “You mean, you live on nine hundred eighty dollars a month? In New York? Who can live on that kind of money? I mean, good Lord.”

“Tell me about it,” Silvia said. “You gotta lock your money up in a box in this city. They got hands reaching out and grabbing every second of every day. They got theirs and they want to get yours too. And I spend every other minute I have trying to scrounge up a little more money, babysitting and cleaning and helping people out—all off the books, of course, so I’m committing a crime too, just to keep from losing my welfare. Just like I commit a crime if I dare to have a man stay!”

“I’m so sorry,” Betsy said.

“Don’t apologize, sweetheart. That’s just the way it is.”

I decided that this was enough for one day and nudged everyone into thank-yous and good-byes. Afterward, I was sure I would never hear from Michael, Betsy, and Carter again. All I had done was burst their bubbles. I was probably doing more harm than good. I saw my dreams of high-priced philanthropic consultancy vanish, not to mention any hope of a research project on the underground market activities of the American elite.

But months later, the three heirs returned. The meeting with Silvia had shaken them, they confessed. It showed them how isolated they had been, and shamed them for treating New York as a playground. Of course, maybe Silvia could have made a little more effort . . .

I began working with them individually, mostly offering them advice on particular matters that concerned their philanthropy: how to measure success, how long a family would need help before things might turn around, what the best way to deploy their resources was—education, health, criminal justice reform? I actually ended up taking them to Chicago, where I introduced them to many more poor families and to the institutions that served them. Mostly these were productive visits, although there were plenty of Silvias in Chicago who challenged their views.

Watching them wrestle with all this was quite touching. They were sincerely putting their entire belief systems at risk, and I had to give them credit. At a certain point, though, I remembered Silvia’s hammering Betsy about what kind of work she did, and a fresh irony hit me. Neither Silvia nor Betsy was employed in any literal sense. Silvia couldn’t find a job and Betsy didn’t need one. They actually did have something in common!

My fantasy of a blue-blood Coming of Age in Samoa swept back. If I could find a way to compare and contrast these two people and the two groups they represented, maybe that would be a way to give a fresh look at the unexamined relationships of the high and low worlds of the global city. Betsy and Michael and Carter always said they wanted to pay me, but I shrugged it off. So next time I saw them, I made a semi-joke about this crazy idea I had for a “tribal” study of the Blue Blood Nation. They laughed and said I should come out with them whenever I wanted.

“It’s a date,” I said.

•   •   •

All that summer, Angela hid out on the Lower East Side. As another winter descended on New York City, I went down to her apartment to see how she was doing. The heat was radiating up the walls and the lights of the bridges on the East River glittered in the window, a bit of distant glamour to brighten the tenement life. Angela was putting out plates and decorations for her oldest daughter’s fifteenth birthday. Her friend Vonnie was in the tiny kitchen making a clatter.

After Manjun disappeared, Angela agreed to introduce me to immigrant women in her community who were willing to let me study their lives. I met with several dozen immigrant women, half documented and half undocumented. They were nearly all single mothers, cycling between boyfriends and living with other family members to get by. Prostitution was a valuable source of income when other opportunities disappeared. Few were full-time street workers—in fact, almost half admitted selling their bodies only a few times a year. “Kids need gifts,” one woman told me. The few who could read and write in English found menial jobs as cleaners, clerks, and cashiers. The jobs typically lasted a year or so, at which point they were back searching. These were the success stories. The women’s peers who worked as babysitters or house cleaners were constantly in search of work, and so they turned to sex more often and for longer periods.

If my sights were set on documenting low-income New York, I had now formed a sample for a formal study. But hardly any of these women were catering to wealthier New Yorkers, so my dream of tracing the threads between high and low was still escaping me.

Then another door opened. At the birthday party, we fell into a conversation about the usual subject, prostitution. Angela said that, after leaving Manjun and Hell’s Kitchen, she and Vonnie had been trying to get into one of the new escort agencies that were cropping up all over town. “They all tell me the same thing: ‘Too old, look like a whore, look like a drug addict, look like an immigrant.’ They tell me, ‘The men want that young dark thing for their fantasies. They don’t want their nanny!’”

Ouch.

They tried the Internet too. Angela showed me a listing she had posted:

Hey boy, you can’t find anything better than what I got for you. Call me today. I could be your momma, whatever you want me. You won’t forget me. No no no you won’t!

She showed me some of the replies:

Are you coming down off drugs, or did you forget to go to the third grade?

Go back and light up that pipe, bitch.

“Were there any nice e-mails?” Vonnie asked.

“Sure,” Angela said.

“Show us those.”

“I don’t save those,” Angela said.

Vonnie nodded her head as if she understood perfectly. “That’s what it’s all about, baby. We think we deserve these shitty lives.”

I winced. More than any other people in society, the poor beat themselves up when things are going badly. They believe what society tells them to believe, that their troubles are their own fault. This is one of the saddest things I have learned as a sociologist.

Angela winced too, recognizing the truth in Vonnie’s words.

But the two women had also ventured down a more ambitious path, looking for an apartment in Brooklyn—not an apartment to live in, but an apartment for a group of women like themselves to use instead of alleys and cars, hot-sheet motels and the back rooms of porn stores. In a rented apartment, they could attract better clients and have greater control. A client who would settle for oral on the street would be more likely to stay for more. A man who didn’t want to use a condom might feel more civilized in the comfort of a bedroom, might relax and talk and even become a regular. Most important of all, a professional atmosphere would shift the meaning of the interaction and take it out of the realm of the furtive and criminal.

The place they found was by the wharfs and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, an area packed with working-class men. There were also hipsters moving in all around, and they hoped to service this whiter, more middle-class clientele as well. At first it was Angela, Vonnie, and another streetwalker named Cincy, but two months went by and they were barely getting five guys a week between the three of them. Realizing they needed to change fast or go under, they made an impressive entrepreneurial move: they found the perfect person to break them out of their lower-class rut, a kind of sexual ambassador who could reach out to the other nations and classes of Brooklyn. She was that young dark thing of male fantasy, ideal for attracting the kinds of customers they couldn’t attract on their own. The downside was, she was crazy wild and barely eighteen—in fact, she still lived with her parents.

Her name was Carla Consuelo.

•   •   •

Months later, in 2004, I arrived to the smell of frying onions and friendly chatter. This was a nightly ritual, the women of the apartment cooking and drinking a little before the evening’s work began. They were drinking vodka, but they opened a bottle of red wine for me.

Father Madrigal sat across from me, smiling beneficently. Once a week, he came by to offer a prayer. He was from Angela’s parish and he’d been working on her for almost a decade.

The peace was interrupted by a fist hammering on the door. “Open up, guys,” a voice shouted in the hall.

Vonnie frowned and Angela sighed. The rule was simple. Two of the women entertained clients while a third sat in the tiny living room to remind the johns that they were not alone. The fourth took the night off. Angela and Vonnie were convinced that three was the magic number that made it look more like roommates.

But here was Carla, once again determined to break that one simple rule.

“Go home, Carla,” Cincy said. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

“My money’s just as good as y’alls,” Carla shouted.

Angela opened the door and in stumbled Carla in her tight glittery clothes and wild black hair, a little bit drunk. She noticed Father Madrigal and blushed red, knowing he knew the rules as well as she did. “There’s no men here,” she said. “It’s early. Anyway, it’s a stupid rule.”

Cincy stood next to Carla like a point guard. “But you agreed to that stupid rule,” she said. “We all agreed to the stupid rule.”

Carla sniffed the pot. “Beef stew,” she wailed piteously.

Angela had met Carla in the bars and saw right away she was different from the others. She and Vonnie and Cincy felt uncomfortable with young white clients, embarrassed by their foreign accents, but Carla liked going to gallery openings and felt comfortable in Greenpoint and Williamsburg and the other areas where young hipsters were starting to arrive. She boasted that she was making “white friends” and she used the taunts on occasion to leverage advantages—like first rights to weekend nights at the apartment. She also understood the Internet and knew how to find young white guys in chat rooms. She particularly liked to find men who had recently moved to New York. “I like it when they tell me they never got fucked like that before,” she said. The problem was, Carla was impossible to control.

“Do you think I don’t want to come eat beef stew when it’s your night?” Cincy said, her tone merciless.

The list of qualities Cincy disliked in Carla was long. She would show up for work drunk and show no caution approaching men. She was convinced she’d never get arrested. She was convinced she’d never get cut or beat up. She’d get on her knees outside the driver’s-side door. She’d get in the backseat. She’d go into empty lots and alleys. She was constantly asking for trouble, and Cincy didn’t want to be standing in the way when it came.

Most of the time they attributed Carla’s behavior to heavy drinking, pills, and coke use—which wasn’t exactly uncommon, but most women eventually realized that they needed to have their wits about them to ward off potential abusers and thieves. Drinking with the john was fine; drink more than him and you were playing with fire. It was hard for me to watch Carla, but this was all just part of ethnography: you learn about social life by watching people screw up, put themselves in danger, or otherwise act the fool. And Carla’s constant rule breaking and dancing on the edge was, for me, a means of understanding the rules of the game that were often unspoken—or spoken behind my back. She was the gift that kept on giving, alas.

“Fine,” Carla said. “I’ll work outside. I’d rather be by myself anyway—the one person in this fucking world I can count on.”

Out she went, slamming the door behind her.

A second later the door opened again and she poked her head in. “If I need to use the bathroom, you better let me in!”

Angela asked if I would help set the table and everyone else got back to what they were doing as if nothing had happened, talking about kids and vacations and upcoming clearance sales at their favorite outlet stores. Father Madrigal made his usual mild comments about repentance and reform.

At the door, I teased him. “How do you persist in such a hopeless cause?”

He looked amused. “I’m a man of faith,” he said.

After he left, Vonnie took her turn at making the apartment a place of business, putting away the dishes and cleaning the bedrooms. This was part of the sofa sitter’s duties. I said good-bye and made my way to a local bar to write up my notes for a few hours.

Later, I went back to see how the night had gone. The women were on break. They’d already delivered the first part of the night’s earnings to a secure location (a friend’s apartment) and cleaned up the bedrooms. They had about half an hour until the bars started closing and the streets filled up. Angela went in to clean the bathroom.

Vonnie was standing in the window smoking a cigarette. “Man, that bitch is drunk. Look at her stagger.”

Cincy walked to the window. Down the street on the other sidewalk some woman was staggering like Frankenstein. She turned the corner and disappeared in the direction of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. A group of young men pointed and laughed.

“Oh, Jesus,” Vonnie said.

“What?”

“That’s Carla!”

Vonnie and Cincy ran out the door and down the street. I hesitated for a moment, wondering whether to wait for Angela, then followed. When I caught up to them, Vonnie was running directly down the middle of the street in two-inch heels, furiously determined. Carla had fallen to the pavement and was writhing like a wounded animal.

She was wounded. Vonnie and Cincy got to her at the same time, and Vonnie pulled back Carla’s hair. Carla’s lip was bulging and black with blood, and a gash on her neck was pulpy and red; her skirt and pantyhose were torn and bloody. She reached for Vonnie and her broken, bloody hands shook.

“Are you okay?” Vonnie said. “Can you get up?”

Carla looked like she was about to pass out. Vonnie told me to grab her waist and together we carried her out of the road.

On the sidewalk, broken glass glittered in the streetlights. We ended up laying Carla on the hood of a car. I reached for my cell phone.

“Call Father,” Vonnie said. “No police.”

I stood there, frustrated. What should I do? Go along with them or call the damn police like a normal person? I didn’t want to get sucked into their criminal value structure and end up doing the wrong thing.

But Vonnie looked adamant.

Angela arrived screaming. “Oh, God! Are you all right, baby?”

Cincy was already talking to a friend at a local hospital. “They’re on their way, sweetie,” she said.

I took out my handkerchief and pressed it to the blood. It turned red immediately, which made me a little dizzy.

“Where was you, sweetie?” Vonnie said. “You have to tell me, okay? C’mon, baby, where was you at? That’s all I need to know.”

Carla squirmed on the car hood, motioning with her fingers.

“Around the corner? By the car lot?”

Carla blinked.

“Which car? Which car was you in, sweetie?”

Why was she playing amateur detective? I had no idea. There was a lot of blood. The pain these women went through was so random and pointless. A couple of times a year, they could count on it. I felt so useless. All I ever did was sit there and take notes.

Carla had no answer, just a helpless look, so Vonnie nodded and bent down to fix her shoes. Vonnie’s long, curly brown hair was falling in her eyes, her mascara running, her face flushed scarlet from exertion. “Sudhir,” she ordered, “come with me!”

I had never seen a woman in heels run so fast. Vonnie was in her mid-thirties and smoked at least a pack of cigarettes per day, but she tore through the broken bottles and cigarette butts and sheets of tumbleweed newspaper like the Road Runner down a cartoon canyon. I was about ten yards behind her when she reached the edge of a parking lot. She pulled back a torn part of the chain-link fence and bent down to slide through. Panting, I pushed after her.

“Fuck, where is it?” Vonnie said. She was running around the lot, between parked cars. Suddenly she stopped. Between the fence and a line of cars, a small mattress was pushed into the gap. Brown wet spots on it must have been fresh blood. Vonnie knelt down in a meadow of yellowing valet parking tickets and looked under the cars.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Look for money, Sudhir. Her purse. And her knife.”

Carla was supposed to carry a small knife for safety. She was supposed to put the money in her shoe or her bra and only keep a couple of tens in her purse for change, because johns will ask for change and then rob you. In that purse there should also be a cell phone, for emergency calls, but no ID to let a nutty john know your address. Her ID would be under the mattress or in a paper bag that looked like garbage. You had to have ID for the cops.

I saw a piece of something brown under a rock. It was the edge of her wallet. So we had her ID but no money or knife.

Vonnie found the pocketbook behind a car tire. Made of cheap plastic, it had been torn to pieces, its contents scattered—lipstick, crumpled receipts, a small mirror. Vonnie kept bending over to pick things up.

We heard a siren and headed back to the corner, where Angela and Cincy were watching as two emergency services personnel bent over Carla. Quickly, they packed her onto a stretcher and loaded her onto the ambulance.

We were left on the street. Everything felt very empty.

“It’ll be okay,” Vonnie said.

Angela looked at her phone. “Father Madrigal is going to the hospital,” she said, sounding relieved.

•   •   •

At the apartment, Vonnie called a friend at a local gypsy cab service. Angela ran upstairs to get clothes for Carla. Then we made our way through the half-deserted Brooklyn streets to the Kings County Hospital emergency room.

Outside, Angela got a little hysterical. She was crying and saying this never would have happened if she hadn’t tried to change Carla—that sort of thing. The others told her not to blame herself, but she couldn’t stop. Finally, Cincy and I decided to stay with Angela outside while Vonnie went up to check things out. We huddled by the entrance in a blast of heat from a vent, stroking her hair.

Vonnie returned after ten minutes. Carla would be okay, she said. She’d lost some blood and needed some stitches. Father Madrigal was inside. He wanted us to return to their apartment. The police were coming and it wouldn’t be good for them to be here.

“I’m not going to leave,” Angela said, stubborn in her loyalty to Carla. Vonnie tried to convince her the cops would be attracted to “three hookers” standing outside the hospital, but she wouldn’t budge.

Finally, they agreed to go for a walk. They spent the next hour strolling through the neighborhood around the hospital and debating their options.

“I sometimes wonder what it would take for me to kill a man,” Angela muttered.

The question hung in the blustery air. Her friends looked at each other, and then over at me.

“Dios, Dios . . .” Angela’s voice trailed off. She rubbed her eyes and leaned on a rusted steel post, blowing into her cupped hands to stay warm. She shifted her weight back and forth, breathing heavily. An old pain in her right leg made standing in one position uncomfortable. She burrowed inside her pocketbook and pulled out three ibuprofen tablets, swallowing them quickly without water.

An ambulance passed by and turned toward the emergency room. The four of us looked up simultaneously. A group of twentysomething hipsters passed by us in a hurry, blowing smoke from their cigarettes.

“I mean, they just make you so angry. They get you real close to wanting to do it,” Angela continued. Her voice grew shaky.

Vonnie reached over and pulled Angela into her chest. Angela started to cry again, the third time in ten minutes.

“You cannot protect people, you understand,” Vonnie said. “God protects—not you, sweetie.” The neon sign of the corner bodega flickered above.

Finally Vonnie’s phone rang. It was Father Madrigal. The police would want to talk to each of them the next day. “Please, go back to the apartment,” he said.

Reluctantly, the three women agreed. I rode back with them and got them settled in with some hard-earned vodka-and-Cokes. Out on the street again, drained and hammer-eyed, I went looking for a cab.

•   •   •

The hospital discharged Carla two days later and she returned to her parents’ house. When the other three women and I dropped by that afternoon to see how she was doing, the cuts on her face were still stitched and covered with bandages and the bruises on her arms had ripened to an eggplant purple. “I used that knife just like y’all told me,” she said. “Cut him real good.”

But her bravado had a brittle quality. We could tell she was still scared. Anxiety and fatigue covered her like an invisible film.

At the hospital, she said, she’d told the nurses she’d been beat up by her boyfriend and begged them not to call the police. But they did. If it hadn’t been for Father Madrigal, the cops would have spread the story all over the neighborhood. At least he convinced them to be discreet.

Not that it would do any good. “He’s going to come after me,” she said.

No, he won’t, we all assured her. The police would catch him first.

“I’ve been getting calls . . .” Carla said, trailing off. When the women dug it out of her, it turned out she had given the guy her number. He was calling and hanging up. It had to be him. And he knew about the apartment too. The one thing Vonnie had feared had now come true.

“You told him?!”

“Not exactly.”

“What do you mean, ’not exactly’?” Vonnie demanded, suddenly furious.

“I didn’t give him the address. I just said, you know, it was down at this end of the street.”

Angela looked devastated. “He knows the street?”

I couldn’t help thinking about how different things could be for women in the sex trade. A regular escort service required some information from clients, a real telephone number at the very least, and the legal pretense of being an “escort” made working with the police more possible. But most of those women were white. For minorities and immigrants working on the streets or on their own, few such protections existed. The devastated expression on Angela’s face came from realizing that the apartment didn’t give them much safety either. I knew that the psychological toll of trying to change their lives and failing would be even heavier than just accepting their immigrant plight, and I wondered how long it would be before Angela just gave up—on the apartment, on their dreams, on everything. The problem was that there were now many others depending on her courage.

Carla looked up. “Um, do you think I could stay there? While I’m recovering, I mean?”

She was afraid to stay with her parents. They had just found out that she’d been selling her body and she was afraid of what they might do—especially her father, who could get violent.

•   •   •

Back at the apartment, the women debated. “That guy has our address,” Vonnie said. “I know this girl. I’m sure she bragged about how nice it was.”

“Word’s going to get out this place ain’t safe,” Cincy said. “We got people who tell other people. Like, we have twenty people just from that factory over near the bridge. If one of them comes up here and that man breaks in, then it’s over! He goes back and tells everyone, ’Hey, I was fucking one of them and some boyfriend came by, all jealous and shit.’ Won’t nobody come around here no more.”

Vonnie steered the conversation back to Carla’s request. “She knows the rules,” Vonnie said. “And we’re not breaking them because she got herself into this stupid mess. No one hangs out here unless they’re making money.”

Not only that, but having Carla recover at the apartment would make it impossible to bring clients there. She would have to stay with her parents, regardless of the risks.

By the end of the week, though, they were missing Carla’s income. Despite all her difficulties, she was the best earner among them. And she was always good for her share of the rent and expenses. To keep her slot open, they would have to work seven days a week, and there was still laundry, shopping, cleaning, and all the rest. They would have to find somebody new, at least for a while—but who?

“Gloria?”

“Maria?”

“I like Kusha, that Russian girl. Doesn’t even drink.”

A knock on the door announced Father Madrigal, come to make a somber announcement. I took his hat and coat. He agreed, after much persuasion, to sit down at the table and accept a plate of pork, rice, beans, and plantains, but he didn’t pick up his fork. “I want you to think seriously about what happened,” he told them.

The women stopped moving and looked at him. With his elbows on the arms of his chair, he rubbed his hands over and over, gathering his thoughts between his palms.

“You came into each other’s lives for a reason,” he continued. “Not just for your needs, for money and shelter. You came because you were called to each other. I want you to think about that.”

He paused. The women looked from one to another and then back at him.

“And I want you to think about your obligation to Carla,” he added.

Vonnie moved her chair suddenly. She lit a cigarette and walked over to the window, shaking her head. “Father, I know where this is going, but I can’t do it.”

Angela, Cincy, and I sat quietly.

Father Madrigal began rubbing his hands again. “Well, I realize you are all under many pressures. You may not be able to do anything, and I understand why Carla can’t stay here. But she was hurt badly. She is your partner and your friend. And she’s in a dangerous situation at home.”

No one said anything. There was nothing anyone could say. It was all true.

There was a shelter for victims of domestic abuse, Father Madrigal explained. He had spoken to the manager already. But it would cost some money.

“How much, Father?” Vonnie said, looking miserable and furious at the same time. “How much?”

This was the first time anyone had ever used a harsh tone with Father Madrigal. He looked at her, more puzzled than offended.

“I’m sorry, Father,” Vonnie said softly.

Father Madrigal raised his hand. “This is hard on you. I know. But her needs will not be permanent needs. The room is $350 and the church will cover her meals.”

Angela spoke quickly to take the floor from Vonnie. “Father, we’d be happy to pay. It’s just that we are also struggling.” She looked at Vonnie, then at Cincy, then back at Father Madrigal. “But we will find a way,” she said.

Father Madrigal nodded. Without another word about it, we ate, talking of Carla’s recovery and events in the neighborhood. Then Father Madrigal rose and said he would like to say a blessing. We all lowered our heads. “Holy Father, I call on you in the name of Jesus to bless each of these women and to guide them in their struggle. Give them healing, and the love that every child of God deserves.”

I heard a sniffle but didn’t want to raise my head. I think it was Vonnie.

“I’ll return in a few days to see how you are doing,” the priest said, taking his hat and coat. “Be safe.”

When his steps had faded, Cincy let out a sigh of relief and Vonnie poured herself another drink. “I don’t know how we’re going to do this, Angela.”

Angela didn’t reply. She moved the fork around her half-eaten plate of food.

Cincy said what was on everyone’s mind. “We have to find somebody else.”

Vonnie opened the window and lit another cigarette. “I’m worried about that man,” she said softly. “I mean, right now he could be in one of the cars down there.”

Angela looked up. “Please! Like we don’t have enough to worry about.”

“I’m worried,” Vonnie said. “I am. If she really cut him . . .”

They were always nervous about their safety around white men. Wasn’t the law always on their side?

•   •   •

A few weeks later, I dropped by again. The women had been trying some of Carla’s tactics. They visited local bars in pairs so they didn’t look so much like hookers. They almost never approached men directly, using Carla’s contacts with bartenders and security guards.

“Some of these young boys look like they just left home,” Vonnie said. “You can’t come on to them like whores.”

Angela laughed. “We just spend hours with them, drinking.”

“They ask, ’Do you know any gang members?’”

No luck. Not one of them wanted to come back to the apartment with them. Angela sighed.

“Carla could get these boys. She’s got the look they like. When they see her, it’s like going to the jungle or something. It’s dangerous, so they take a bite. But I look like their cleaning lady. They don’t want to fuck their cleaning lady.”

By the time another month had passed, they arrived at a crossroads. They had interviewed at least twenty women in their old neighborhood, but none of them had Carla’s ability to cross boundaries. All were intimidated by the white hipsters. Finally they decided to try a white woman, even though Vonnie had reservations about “going white.”

“A white woman might take over and start running everything,” she said. “Then we’ll be working for her.”

But they narrowed it down to a Bulgarian who was living down near Coney Island. She was thrilled to move closer to the center of town.

Then they went to tell Carla. But she had news for them.

“I’m joining an escort service. In Manhattan.”

She’d appreciated all their help, she said, and she would pay them back. They were stunned. For the first time, Angela seemed defeated. She was going to have to bring in strangers. They might help bring in the income, but could they be trusted? And what about Carla? Would Carla be okay without Angela to keep her under some sort of gentle control? But Angela couldn’t answer these questions. She had to move on. The rent had to be paid. What was she going to do?

A few weeks later, I met up with Carla and got her side of the story. I had to remind myself to stay neutral. She admitted that she didn’t have anything lined up yet in Manhattan, but said she was determined to try. That’s what the attack had taught her. “You know what? I’m beautiful and I’m young and I can do better than getting my ass fucked by some cheap-ass guy in that cheap-ass apartment. I need to get out there and make some real money. This is my chance—maybe my only chance—and I’m going to take it.”

•   •   •

From one world I flew to another like a shuttle through a loom. This night it was Shine again, picking me up near Columbia University in his sleek black sedan. We drove south to the heart of Midtown, parked in a paid parking lot, and went to an expensive hotel bar.

Inside, Shine and I both noticed the same thing right away. We were the only people of color in the place—among the clientele, that is. The busboys circling the tables and lounge area were Latino, and there was a black man behind the bar. Shine nodded at him and received a discreet nod in return.

We shrugged at each other as we took a seat. There was nothing to be said, so we just laughed.

The barman came up to Shine. “Good to see you again,” he said.

I shook my head and chuckled. All his talk about needing a wingman and the staff already recognized him. I half expected him to say “the usual,” but instead he ordered a whiskey on the rocks.

Work was getting out for the day, and the corporate crowd was starting to stroll through the doors. These weren’t bankers. They were entertainment, media, publishing, a little younger and hipper but still with money. A few men had suits with no ties, but most wore cleanly pressed pants and trim-fit collared shirts. They drank to manufactured drumbeats and synthesizer melodies.

Shine was wearing a soft purplish linen shirt, untucked and spread widely over his dark blue Diesel jeans, and a smart Rolex dangled off his wrist—not exactly corporate, but not quite “street” either.

“You win the bet?” the barman asked, cleaning a few glasses.

“Knicks lost,” Shine said. “Again.”

“Man, you don’t learn, do you?”

There was a pause and then the barman said quietly, “I’ll be on a break in about twenty if you want to grab a smoke.”

Shine nodded. Although he showed no expression, just the usual somber ghetto warrior face, I knew he was growing a little depressed about his inability to find customers. He knew he had to be patient, but the days without revenue were starting to pile up. So far the staff of this bar had been perfectly happy to “grab a smoke,” but hadn’t introduced him to any potential customers. He knew he had to take the time to build relationships, but how much time?

“Hey, man. You’re back,” a voice said. A young man with shiny black hair combed tightly back over his head (with a liberal dose of gel) came over and patted Shine on the back. “Michael. Remember me?”

The young man made a motion to the bartender for another round and gave Shine another pat. “Come over—join us. I’m getting killed in this game. You should take over.”

We looked over at a group of young white men and women, all standing with beers or pool cues in their hands, all fresh and new to the city, their youth contrasting with the stained wood and stained-glass lamps.

Shine hesitated and for once I could see through his armor. He was nervous. Welcome to the club, I thought.

“Yo, Chris! You want to play?”

Shine looked blank for a moment, then snapped alert. “Shit, that’s me.”

I’d wondered what name Shine was using in his life outside the ghetto. Now I knew. “Laugh at their jokes, Chris,” I suggested. “White people like that.”

“Fuck you,” he said, punching me on the arm and stepping past me toward the pool table. I swiveled my seat to watch him. He towered over the others around him, not just because he was taller. His presence simply took up more space. He was silent, they were chatty. He was still, they were jumpy. His black skin shone.

A young woman approached the group, clearly interested in talking to Shine. But he ignored her. She smiled, but he kept his movements small, as if he was wrapped in plastic, probably because he believed that too much expressiveness “makes white people feel threatened,” as he put it once.

The woman started talking to him, asking questions and not letting monosyllabic answers discourage her. I decided to weave my way over and listen in. When I got close enough, she was talking about the thrill of Manhattan.

“I want to do something special,” she said. “That’s why I moved here. Isn’t that what New York is all about? I mean, you live here. You know this.”

“Right, right,” Shine was muttering.

“I mean, I’m not going to be working in this shitty office job for long. I’m going to have this really cool fashion line, for everyone. Like this! See this dress—do you think people in New York would like it?”

“Sure,” Shine said.

“Hey, Abbie! You have to meet Chris—he knows everything about New York. Abbie’s going to be an agent. She’s got this amazing job. She gets to go hear music all night.”

“Right,” Shine said.

Finally, the barman came over and asked Shine if he wanted to step outside for a smoke. Michael said he would join them.

When they returned, Shine said it was time to go. He didn’t like to stay in bars long. He thought he had a big sign on his face that said, “Drug Trafficker on the Prowl.”

He wanted to walk out by himself, I knew. I couldn’t figure out why, but Shine strategized about everything. So I said good-bye and stayed at the bar.

Michael shook Shine’s hand, trying his best to mimic a ghetto greeting. “Thursday, right?” He leaned forward for a bro hug. I figured they were setting up another time for a more business-oriented visit. One by one, peer group by peer group, Shine was determined to make his experiment work.

I started to do some back-of-the-bar-napkin calculations. From earlier observations of drug dealers, I knew that a peer group was good for about fifteen hundred dollars per month, but only for about nine to twelve months. I never understood why a drop-off occurred after this point—perhaps the group disbanded, maybe a few stopped taking drugs, maybe a new dealer came along with a cheaper product. Since he was hiring a half dozen people to help, each costing about one thousand dollars per month, Shine would need to make at least fifteen thousand dollars per month to make his new venture sustainable. This meant ten groups, or a standing pool of fifty to seventy-five customers.

And this was just the minimum. Shine would want to expand. American to his core, he believed that bigger was always better.

Expansion was possible in two ways. He could continue recruiting new customers personally, a laborious and inefficient use of his valuable time and energy. Or he could recruit bartenders, security guards, and bellhops to find customers for him. That way, he controlled places instead of people. The places stayed the same and new people were always drifting through.

But Midtown and Wall Street businesses were not Harlem street corners. As he made friends with the bartenders and bellhops, Shine had to tread carefully. He would have no basis for trust and not much experience to guide him. We spoke often about this vulnerability, but he usually shrugged it off as “just another thing you have to deal with.” I admired the positive attitude, but at what point would his optimism land him in prison?

•   •   •

By this time, Columbia had awarded me tenure and I was on my way to being named full professor. I owed much of this to the support of my colleagues and Peter Bearman, who had risen to department chair. I was publishing articles with Steven Levitt in prestigious academic journals and finishing a scholarly book on Chicago’s underground economy, all boosting my academic bona fides. But I still felt like a one-trick pony, and all my successes were based on the research I had done in Chicago. New York still felt foreign and unknown.

The Chicago projects I had studied were starting to get torn down, and I was traveling there to follow families as they were evicted and forced to relocate. As a break from the scholarly work, I started to experiment with filming these families in an effort to make my first documentary. I was itching to tell Shine, because I hoped he might let me make a film of his escapades, but I was afraid he’d mock me for trying to rise above my station. I wanted to wait until I had something in the can, preferably with an Oscar for best documentary.

As a result, I was too busy to spend much time following Shine around the city.

Occasionally, we would meet quickly at a neighborhood bar and he would give me updates—or, rather, he would give me hints and leave me to figure out what was really going on. Even with a professional sociologist, Shine loved being a man of mystery. “One thing you learn in the game is that the faster you figure out the whole white people thing,” he said with emphasis, “the longer you’ll stay out of jail.”

This was the kind of oblique statement that required decoding. “So . . . I take it things are going well?”

“Yeah, you know how it is,” he said, motioning to the bartender for a refill.

“No! I don’t know how it is!” I laughed. “You have to tell me.”

“Put it like this—one day at a time.”

I sighed. “So you’re not broke and on your ass yet?”

“No. But you never know. Don’t look for the future, ’cause you’ll get stuck in the past. My grandma told me that.”

I shook my head in defeat. “Okay, okay. Let me see if I understand. You have maybe—I’m guessing, a handful of steady clients? But not enough. You still haven’t hired any good contact men, but you know you need to because no three-hundred-pound black street dealer is going to sell coke in Wall Street and not get noticed. So for now you need to keep going to these stupid hotels and bars yourself. But you hate it. On the other hand, it’s still a new market full of opportunity and you haven’t given up.” I paused. “How am I doing?”

“Didn’t say you were wrong.” He laughed.

“I’d say you’re at 40 percent of where you want to be. Maybe you have two bars locked down? A few bartenders? No hotels yet, because you’d be smiling right now if you did.”

He smiled and I knew he was lying.

“So you’re getting there, but it’s slow and you’re burning cash. You haven’t figured out security yet. Something doesn’t feel right about these places. And you definitely don’t like walking around with that much on your person. Am I still on track?”

Shine didn’t even look me in the eye. Now I knew I was nailing it.

That’s how it went most of the times we met. It felt like a conversation with Deep Throat. But what I really needed, if I wanted to launch another formal study—and I always did—was for Shine to introduce me to these bartenders and bellhops so I could put some meaty details in a grant application and hire research assistants and all the rest of the formal machinery that makes hanging out with drug dealers academically respectable. Once again, I had to be patient.

•   •   •

While I was waiting for Shine to come through, Betsy, Michael, and Carter started inviting me to their parties. There were two kinds. The artsy parties happened down in Soho and the East Village, where their artsy friends lived. The family parties were all on the Upper East Side, where their parents lived. At both, people drank and caroused with bohemian abandon late into the night. Sometimes I felt like Jim Fowler on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, gazing at strange creatures from the safety of my ethnographic pith helmet. They had their own idiosyncratic phrases that made no sense unless you knew the people and places they referenced, and they seemed entirely uninterested in bringing outsiders into their peer group except for entertainment—the role I probably filled. Perhaps I should have found this offensive, but the only emotions I felt were the distanced ones that accompany invisibility. Even in the projects, where I couldn’t have been more different from the locals, I was acknowledged with warmth and nearly always offered a plate of food or a drink before anyone else—an honored guest. Here, they looked past me as if I was the help. Even after I’d met a few of them a half dozen times and they’d asked me who I was, whether I was in New York for vacation, they would forget every detail of the previous conversations, including the fact that they had taken place. Some were friendly, but others ignored me outright. Since I was as dark as any of their servants, I shouldn’t have been surprised. But it still stung.

I had experienced this kind of invisibility once before, in Chicago. In the black communities in the 1990s, it was relatively easy to move about as a South Asian, because people just assumed that I was a member of some family that owned a liquor store or deli. In other words, I was relatively unthreatening. Standing around street corners or bars became routine, and people would have their conversations in my presence without feeling that I was an outside threat. Here I was more of a social curio, a vaguely subservient role that made me uncomfortable. It was hard to imagine them taking me seriously enough to let me observe them as a professional. I fantasized a job on a house-cleaning crew, arriving at one mansion after another just at the moment the owners began to exhibit socially significant behavior. At the same time, whenever I did get a chance to watch this privileged tribe from the sidelines, I felt wistful. Their parties were like one long beer commercial with tanned faces, silky hair, natural cotton fabrics, and toothy white grins. They seemed so breezy and light, so certain that nothing too real would ever weigh them down. I wondered what it was like to live inside that feeling.

I also kept wondering what kind of research project I could devise to formalize my interest. It would have to be something subtle, I knew. The poor often feel obligated to respond to the authority figures who poke and prod them, but rich people are the opposite—they don’t like to be studied and have no problem shutting the door. So how could I get that door open?

On this night, I found my way across the park and into the elegant side streets with their limestone mansions. The club they’d invited me to had a door without a sign, which led down to a catacomb with multiple levels. I found Betsy, who began introducing me to everyone.

“Here’s someone you should meet,” Betsy said, and I turned to see a familiar face: Analise. I hadn’t seen her since the days of my Harvard wine tasting, when she’d given me the gracious education on viniculture that kept me looking marginally less of a fool. She had a red tinge in her hair this time, but she still had the slender offhand grace that whispered old money. “Can you recommend a good Chianti?” she said, a conspiratorial grin on her face.

“I’m not sure there is a good Chianti,” I answered.

Betsy looked puzzled. “So you know each other?”

We confessed that we did. Like a good host, she soon found an excuse to disappear and let us catch up on old times.

“So how are you?” Analise asked.

“Good, real good. I’m teaching here now.”

“NYU?”

“Columbia.”

She congratulated me, and I asked what she was doing.

“A bunch of different pointless jobs,” she said. “You know, trying to find my thing.”

I told her I was thinking about going to France. I mentioned that my marriage wasn’t doing so well. Something about her seemed to invite those kinds of confessions. She rattled off the various jobs she’d held after college—a financial services firm “full of men who make you sick,” a three-month stint at an antique furniture gallery owned by a friend of her mother’s. “I had to sit there all day and smile at eighty-year-olds who came in. I ended up mostly making tea while they talked about some godforsaken event that happened a hundred years ago.”

Her chirpy manner was forced, but her voice grew increasingly soft, and the softness brought more truth. She mentioned a boyfriend who was not altogether supportive. This led to a tangled story of her current impasse with her parents, who wanted her to find something meaningful to do with her life that didn’t include anything she actually wanted to do, like opening an art gallery. “Too risky,” they’d said. “Great, Mom,” she’d said back. “Give me the list of boring safe options that kill your soul and let me choose one of those.”

She mentioned going back to India, where her uncle had some kind of school. She talked about a previous visit when her parents were having a marital drama. “I just sat and ate and worked with the kids on art stuff. It’s so calm there. I feel like I go crazy here. I love going there. I get away from all this.” She raised her hands and shoulders, as if to blame the skyscrapers around us for her current troubles.

I noticed that she kept looking around to see if anyone was watching us talk.

Then she said she had some new business opportunities and would like some advice. I found this strange, particularly since I had very little understanding of commerce—at least not the legal kind—but I agreed to meet her. With that, she went off to greet some friends. Not until much later did I understand that her business as a madam was the subject she was broaching. She was just getting started then, managing a couple of friends, and the new business opportunities were new girls who wanted to work with her. She was probably hoping I could give her some inside knowledge.

Betsy came back and introduced me to more people, all pleasant enough. But after a few of the usual questions—“What do you teach?” “Were you born here?” “What does your name mean?”—there was frighteningly little to talk about. I could have been the statue on the mantel. With each brief exchange, the idea of doing research on the upper class began to feel more remote. Their complete indifference made my usual ethnographic fly-on-the-wall approach seem almost humiliating, a symphony of awkward silences. How could you do serious research on people who barely bothered to listen to your questions?

•   •   •

Just a few weeks after Carla had left, Angela called to say they couldn’t make the rent. I was stunned. I was sure she would find someone else to take Carla’s place. Vonnie mentioned that Angela had difficulty trusting the white Eastern European women she’d tried to bring aboard, and I had a sinking feeling that Angela’s social fears might undermine the operation. I went over to the Brooklyn apartment to hear how this part of her story ended. When I got there, Angela and Vonnie were standing in front of the building looking at the beaten-up black pickup truck that was carting their stuff away. It was already full, and that meant another trip, which meant hours of waiting.

We went back upstairs and sat on a few boxes with a bottle of cheap red wine on the floor in front of us. We spent an hour counting monthly expenses, delinquent clients, and money owed. “Carlos needs to pay us two fifty, no?” “Ooh! Don’t forget that one white dude who smelled so bad! He gave me three hundred just so I wouldn’t tell anyone he was a crybaby!” “I think Carla made three thousand one month, no? Or was she lying?” In the end, we figured out that they’d actually come out a bit ahead. After two years of struggle and strife, courage and persistence and men who sometimes didn’t smell so good, they came away with a combined total of $750. It wasn’t nearly enough. So their year of hope and struggle would end with a retreat back to the Lower East Side.

They asked me what I thought, looking back, about the whole experiment. Not ready to trust my feelings, I leaned on sociology. There are always setbacks in American stories, I said, but the important thing is setting out on the journey. “You moved out. You moved here. It didn’t last as long as you wanted, but—”

“We learned our lesson,” Angela said. She was not in the mood for social science.

I hated to hear her say that. There could be all kinds of lessons. Some of the lessons could be ideas to do better next time. I started again to try to weave a positive tale, but Vonnie interrupted me.

“Nobody here wants to see a bunch of dumb Latina whores.”

Her bitterness pierced the room. Why hadn’t it worked? they kept wondering aloud. Their laughter and cries kept pointing to the unassailable quality of race. Vonnie’s explanation, though painful and crude, was hard to refute outright. From what I’d heard and seen, there didn’t seem to be an overwhelming demand for Latina sex workers of their age. But they all could have exercised better judgment and made better business decisions. They could have thought more carefully about renting an apartment, dipping their toes in with a few weeks’ rental at one of the motels that lined the expressways. Angela’s suspicion of the white sex workers might have hurt them too, and they also could have tried bringing on more of the younger women like Carla from their own neighborhood and class. But they weren’t looking for such narrow rationales. Their own hearts were pointing elsewhere, to something more absolute and ineffable. Maybe it was a way of being in the world, an ethnic style that wasn’t suited to recruiting customers in this gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood.

Their experiences made me think more deeply about the notion of floating. Global cities offered new social connections that could be monetized, aboveground and below in the black market. However, the capacity to make unfamiliar connections could also turn life into a series of ruthless commodified relationships. Capitalism turned everything into a potentially salable object but it didn’t guarantee there would be buyers. So for those trying to sell something, the risk of failure was always present. Vonnie and Angela showed just the right kind of entrepreneurial fervor, capitalizing on global New York’s invitation to float, to cross barriers and break new economic ground. But New York could not promise buyers, and anything that floats can also sink.

Vonnie broke the silence. “We weren’t asking for a mansion, Sudhir. We just wanted to get out of the fucking projects and move upstate with our kids, maybe go back to Santo Domingo for a visit.”

I lowered my head.

But Angela, as always, forced herself to look on the bright side. At least Carla was on her way, she reminded us. She had that thing young people had. She would make it and they could watch her and be happy.

“She better not forget who her friends are,” Vonnie said. “When she comes running back . . .”

While she tried to think of an appropriate threat, Angela stopped her. “If she comes running back,” she said, “we’ll be there for her.”

I hoped it was true.

•   •   •

Angela’s circumstances put into relief one of the hardest decisions for any entrepreneur: when to call it quits and close up shop.

Shine was showing me another: for any employer large or small, the toughest part of life is letting workers go when sales start to slip. A formal severance meeting with the human resources manager can calm the rupture between boss and employee, helping to reduce the possibility of embezzlement or vandalism.

In the underground economy, alas, no such formal mechanisms exist. Which raises a number of questions: How do people manage teams when the activity is illegal? How do they ensure trust and confidentiality, and what do they do with an uncooperative employee? Carla and Manjun, two people who had experienced great vulnerability, stood in sharp contrast to the drug lords I knew who led their workers as if they were managing a McDonald’s: people had shifts, with specified daily duties, and responsibilities to meet sales targets. If they failed, they were fired (or beaten, or docked pay).

But those in the underground who faced rapidly declining economic climates had no clear signposts to guide them. For example, Shine had been juggling his staffing levels since the end of 2001, hiring during times of steady supply and cutting back as supplies tightened. Just as Vonnie and Angela were packing up and calling it quits, Shine had made his final transition out of the street trade and was busily recruiting new employees to sell cocaine to white customers. But this meant two complicated tasks: hiring the right new workers and letting go of the street thugs.

Shine had always believed that it was risky to let an employee walk without a conversation about shared expectations. In this sense, he was a great business manager. He made it clear that his expectations included continued discretion. Any talking about him or his operation would carry significant negative repercussions. But if they kept their mouths shut, he might have work for them again one day.

The problem with this rational approach was that these were a) young men and b) young men with no alternatives and c) young men. They wanted to make their money now. And they weren’t completely wrong. In fact, you could say their attitude was the result of a perfectly rational cost-benefit analysis of the underground economy in which they found themselves. It’s hard to take the long-term view in a world where there might not be a long term.

One day, with his operations now firmly placed in the powdered cocaine market, I watched Shine lay off one of these young guys. They were talking on the stoop of Shine’s brownstone when I walked up. He motioned for me to stop so the young guy couldn’t see me listening to the conversation.

“You got a lot in you,” Shine was saying. “You survive, you understand. You got what it takes. To survive. That’s all it’s about around here.”

The kid looked like a teenager who had just been scolded by his teacher. “Momma’s still gonna be pissed at me,” he said, taking off his baseball cap and scratching his head. “She’s gonna beat my ass when I tell her.”

“Well, then, you need to get some more work,” said Shine, looking impatient. “If you need to pay that rent, then you better pay that rent. Find a job or something.”

“Yeah, I guess,” the young man kept saying, shaking his head. “I mean, she’s really gonna be pissed.”

“How much you bringing in?”

“About two hundred. Mostly just for the place. Clarisse went to jail, so, you know, I had to step up.”

“I can respect that,” Shine said. “You a man, you got to step up. I know it’s rough, but you were good and, like I said, if I get rolling again, I’m calling you first.”

“Yeah, man. I appreciate that, but I need some work. Maybe I could just work one corner for you, by myself. You know, maybe you could just front me something. We could keep it low down, you know, just me working out there.”

“Man, that’s on you,” Shine answered. “You can get your own shit, my brother. This whole place is yours.” Shine opened up his arms and puffed out his chest.

“No, man. I can’t. Ain’t got nothing. I’m out. I can’t front nothing. I need someone to back me up.”

“Okay, man, we’re going back where we started. I told you that we’re done. That’s it. You got all the opportunity you need right now. Just get out there.”

“No, man. It’s not that easy. I’m just figuring that you and me, we could just do something small.”

Shine started laughing. “My brother, you need to hear what I’m saying.”

“No, no, no,” the young man said. He stuck out his chest in a display of confidence, then glanced over at me. I was leaning against the stoop, making no attempt to hide my eavesdropping. He looked back at Shine. “Maybe we talk about this tomorrow because I really need to work.”

Shine stood up, shrugging his shoulders. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, shortie. It’s done. You dig?”

“Oh, man, I don’t know. I say we just keep on hustling.”

Shine sighed and gestured to me, asking me to come up the stairs and into the building. I walked past the young man. He didn’t look like he was going to leave anytime soon. I knew the feeling. If you don’t accept the news you’ve just heard, if you just wait long enough, perhaps it will turn out to have been a bad dream.

•   •   •

A few weeks later in a Harlem bar, Shine finally told me the story of the momentous transition he was going through. For the first time in almost a decade, he didn’t have at least one crew member on the corner twenty-four/seven. Instead, he was hiring more women like his cousin Evalina, people who could move more comfortably in the downtown social world. He had decided to reinvent himself, to go for it without the safety valve of having just a few dealers on the street. He was pushing all the chips on powdered cocaine. On the white market. While once his client base was 90 percent black and Latino, that number would soon drop to less than 10 percent.

To me, the parallels to Vonnie and Angela seemed ominous. Could Shine really travel outside his own home base and set up shop in the white world? So many things could go wrong; so much was uncertain. Despite the criminal nature of his ambitions, I couldn’t help feeling nervous for him.

The first item on his list was to assemble his new team. Finding the right people for the job wasn’t easy, he said. He wasn’t even sure what attributes he should be seeking. Could his employees be black? Would women or men be more appropriate? Did they need white references?

Meanwhile, his exit interviews with his existing crew began taking on an existential cast. “These young guys just run around now, acting fucking stupid,” he complained. “At least with me, they learned how to do things the right way.” But he was disappointed that they hadn’t learned from him how to think in more sober ways. They still lacked the discipline he felt was needed for success in the world of business. “I have a duty to these guys, but they have to trust me. If they watch me survive, they can learn.”

In my experience, gang leaders never think of themselves as running a ruthless criminal enterprise. They think of themselves as race heroes in a polarized America, but it’s a vision of the country that seems, to me, antiquated—like something out of the 1950s or ’60s. They are always reaching out to troubled young men who need adult male mentorship to survive, always doing a good deed for the neighborhood—until something ugly happens. But I had seen behind the curtain. I knew that when one of these young men didn’t take getting fired in the right spirit, gang leaders like Shine didn’t send them off with hugs and a motivational speech. They simply beat the pulp out of them. That’s how it was done.

Shine had grown used to that world and those habits. He could put on his player face, put his arm around someone, and talk in such a way that their interests seemed aligned, but everyone knew his slick talk was backed up by force. As Al Capone said so well, “You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.” As Shine stepped away from his neighborhood, he was likely to find himself in situations where his old tricks would make things worse instead of better. He worried about the same thing, I know. What if, when pressure escalated, he acted emotionally or instinctively? The ghetto code could betray him. And what if his new hard-shoe customers refused to pay? How would he respond if his new employees stole from him? I couldn’t imagine him pushing Evalina or some white club kid the way he pushed the boys in his crew.

I felt for Shine. He was going to have to develop new rules and routines and approaches—a whole new criminal style—all while unwinding one business, developing another, learning a complex new culture, and avoiding the cops. No wonder he looked so harried.

But no matter how sordid the world, there was something heroic in that dogged expression of Shine’s. He wasn’t going to give up. He was going to take on his sea of troubles or die trying. Drug dealer and thug he may have been, but sometimes it was hard not to admire him.

•   •   •

To the police or the city government, Shine’s attempt to fire young men and hire new staff might look like empty scenes from a TV crime show—a little tension, a whiff of danger, nothing more. In fact, Shine was deftly managing one of the most significant transformations in the inner-city labor market to occur in decades: the decline of the vibrant crack economy that had given thousands of part-time jobs to the disadvantaged. Refusing to fade away like so many of his peers, he approached the problem in a way that was methodical, precise, and keenly self-aware—just the attributes the manager of a complex business would need.

Adaptations like this are another thing too many sociologists ignore. They tend to see people living in the margins of society as people stuck in some kind of rut. Successful people are proactive, they’re seekers and strivers adjusting and readjusting to the world around them, the thinking goes, so the poor must have lost their drive somehow, or never had any. Or in another variation on the theme, the poor live in neighborhoods that rarely change, that remain economically and racially segregated, while the world around them is eating Asian fusion and watching British actors play American cops on TV. It’s the old myth of the “undeserving poor,” always a justification for cutting back on social programs. But Shine and Angela and Carla and Manjun were just as hardworking and conscientious and proactive as anyone in the middle or upper classes. Just like big-time capitalists, they took huge risks and struggled to keep up with New York’s fast pace and endless competition. Though their personal income levels and the socioeconomic status of their neighborhoods might not be shifting greatly, they were not the passive subjects so many sociologists used to fuel their paternalistic claim as all-knowing fathers for societal orphans. In fact, they were quite dynamic in both thought and action, and they also scrambled to keep up with a world that was transforming blindingly fast, even if the benefits of all that creative destruction did not accrue to them quite as rapidly as to wealthier strivers.

As my tone may hint, this is a pet peeve. For the last decade, I’ve been fighting the stereotypes of the poor that began to pervade American society after the publication of the infamous Moynihan Report in 1965, which argued that the history of slavery and generations of single-parent matriarchal families had created a “tangle of pathology” that made it difficult for many inner-city blacks to enter the social mainstream. The truth in this analysis took a backseat to the blaming, it seemed to me. White families had high divorce and addiction rates too, but their entry into the job market wasn’t blocked by patronizing assumptions about their tangle of pathology. Suburbs also bred family dysfunction, not to mention some of the highest rates of alcohol and drug addiction, domestic abuse, and other forms of delinquency, but you didn’t hear people talk about the tangle of suburban pathology. Poverty has been growing faster in the suburbs than in the inner city since 2000, but a dozen years later the cliché of the urban poor remains intact. My argument, based on the experience of my years in the Chicago ghetto, is that the poor are actually more resilient and economically creative because they have much bigger obstacles to overcome—just as a small house built by hand can be much more impressive than a mansion built by experts.

I was sentimental to focus so much on positive outcomes, I knew. As any sociologist worth her degree can show you, American society is built in such a way that social class divisions are reinforced every day, not overturned. We tend to end up in social and economic positions much like preceding generations of our families. That’s partly why social scientists can predict where one will end up by capturing only a few personal attributes, like race, education, parents’ income, and so on. In the last twenty years, in fact, American class divisions have grown so durable that social mobility has all but frozen. Still we worship at the altar of meritocratic advancement, telling ourselves that success is just one lucky strike away.

How the sameness of class gets reproduced is not always easy to see. I’ve always preferred the sociologist Elliot Liebow’s description, written nearly a half century ago as he observed “streetcorner men” in our nation’s capital: “Many similarities between the lower-class Negro father and son . . . [result] from the fact that the son goes out and independently experiences the same failures, in the same areas . . . What appears as a dynamic, self-sustaining cultural process is, in part at least, a relatively simple piece of social machinery which turns out, in rather mechanical fashion, independently produced look-alikes.” Exposure to the same circumstances is not going to yield highly novel outcomes for most of the poor. Expecting advances for the masses when the conditions don’t change is folly.

Nevertheless, another rule in sociology says, Don’t let aggregate data explain individual behavior. This is called the “ecological fallacy.” Though Shine and Angela could end up looking a lot like their parents, trolling the ghetto and eking out a living, this was not necessarily a guaranteed outcome. And that’s why outcomes are themselves deceptive. They tell you little about the aspirations that drive people to rise above their circumstances. Not only Shine and Angela but Carla, Manjun, Vonnie, Santosh, and dozens of others at the bottom of the income spectrum militantly refused to accept their predicted fate. They wanted something more, and were clearly willing to take great risks along the way. And the ingredients in the recipe seemed increasingly to include the ability to work across the city, not just in familiar neighborhoods where friend and foe knew one another intimately, but in parts of the city where the rules and norms were completely unknown and often upsetting.

Was that the magic ingredient? If so, what were its secrets? I wasn’t certain, but clearly some of my subjects had more of this skill than others. As I kept discovering, mixing with strangers in unfamiliar worlds is no simple task. Santosh alone seemed to be succeeding on both sides of the spectrum, working smoothly with the undocumented but just as smoothly with the mainstream world. Manjun was out of the race. Angela was on the bench for a while, again. Carla and Shine were still in the running. Even if I never left the low-income world, I would feel I was seeing an amazing event, a veritable pageant of the human spirit. Despite the harshest of climates, they were so resilient and ever seeking.

But as a sociologist, I reminded myself again, I wasn’t there to showcase survival. That wasn’t what the people themselves were after. They never thought of themselves as victims seeking to overcome great odds for a few bread crumbs. In their eyes, they were pursuing an American dream in the Big Apple just like anybody else. It would be insufferably patronizing for me to talk about them as survivors. A question more true to their dreams would be: what traits helped people win and how did they acquire them?

To answer that question, I still had to get myself out of the ghetto and into the winner’s circle. This was still proving to be surprisingly difficult—until the day I reached into a notebook and took out a small piece of paper that my friend on the police force had given me back when Manjun disappeared. At the time I’d been fixated on contacting Manjun and took it as Officer Michael’s way of distracting me. Then the saga of Angela and Carla took over my life. But now I remembered talking to the officer about my dreams of launching a big study of the Hell’s Kitchen underworld, and his enthusiasm for my idea that it was ground zero for the changes being wrought in New York. He wouldn’t have just shrugged that off. He knew I’d be desperate for another way to tell the story. Maybe he was trying to tell me something.

On the paper, Michael had scribbled a phone number and a name: Margot Kerry.