SEX IS A PASSPORT
Not so fast!” I cried. The bar was hot and crowded and I was feeling dizzy. The noise from the crowd rang in my ears.
But Margot Kerry burbled merrily along, telling me the secrets of her trade. A bartender has to want you in his bar, she said. Maybe the bartender hears of a guy looking for a date. Some bartenders received a fee per week, others per client. You bring your high-priced clients to the bar, their drinks always get filled first. Bartenders in Midtown got lots of requests for phone numbers, bartenders in Soho not so much. A bartender who really liked you would even kick out your competitors. A bartender would hold cash if you were afraid of being robbed. Strip club managers were another link in the chain, a source of new girls. A car dealer laundered Margot’s money by reselling her brand-new car the same day she bought it, giving her clean cash back.
Clearly, she was enjoying the opportunity to demonstrate mastery of her secret world, the world I had been trying to break into for so many long months. But my pen didn’t seem to be working very well.
“I like this,” Margot was saying. “I never really get a chance to talk about my life without feeling ashamed. Thank you for not making me feel that way.”
Margot was in her mid-thirties, flamboyant and redheaded and harried looking, the kind of person who is always lighting another cigarette and somehow makes it look glamorous. She gave off the air of having suffered and survived with all her compassion and sense of humor intact, which I found very comforting. Every five minutes her phone would ring and she would answer all the calls immediately. “I can help,” she would say. “Leave it to me.”
I tried to make mental notes as the sentences streamed out of her mouth. But the world began to slide away from me like a camera going out of focus. My blood sugar was dropping way too low, I realized.
Margot noticed and waved at the bartender, who quickly ushered us into a back room and helped lower me down onto an old sofa.
“Panic attack,” I gasped.
This had been happening for a year. In the middle of lecturing to my class, riding a city bus, or just buying groceries, I’d feel a wave of anxiety so strong I’d nearly pass out. Where it came from, I had no idea.
Margot sat next to me, stroking my hand and saying soothing things. I have to admit I found her presence very calming. I felt that she would be completely accepting of anything I did, which was an unfamiliar feeling—a great feeling. I guess I needed it more than I realized. When I was breathing more calmly, she asked, “Anything you want to talk about? I’m pretty good with people’s troubles. God knows, I’ve gone through nearly everything myself.”
But I was too embarrassed. This whole thing was already so unprofessional.
“Girl troubles? You don’t look like a ’guy trouble’ sort of guy.”
I hesitated. “If I tell you, do you promise we’ll never talk about it again?”
“Whatever you want.”
Somehow, that unleashed the floodgates. I told her about the people I was meeting and the people I needed to meet. I talked about global cities and underground networks, about invisible communities in Mortimer’s bar and Manjun’s store, and Lord knows what else. A friend told me to float and that’s what I was doing—yesterday Harlem, Brooklyn today, and tomorrow wide open. I was beginning to see how each person I met would take me to a new place and introduce me to a new person, who would take me someplace else, known as “snowball sampling” in the sociology trade. But my snowball was steadily turning into a snowboulder. People I cared about were getting hurt and disappearing. I was trapped on a speeding train that was going in a direction I didn’t want to go. I wanted to get off the train, escape the routine, separate from my wife, move to France. “I’m not even sure what kind of sociologist I want to be,“ I said.
“Drink some water,” Margot said.
I did as she told.
“Go back to ’separate from my wife.’”
I told her the story. It wasn’t anything special, just a boy and a girl and a series of sad disagreements made all the sadder by the fact that we loved each other. Under these circumstances, obsessive fieldwork in the hood made sense to me. Anything was better than, ugh, feeling.
Gradually my breathing began to return to normal and I could feel relief coming to the surface.
“Deal with the things that cause you pain and start doing things that make you feel better,” Margot said. “Can you try to do that?”
I straightened myself up and told her I thought this would be a good time to go home and lie down. Hopefully, we could meet another time when I was feeling a little less deranged.
Of course, my little breakdown turned out to be the best thing I could have done. That’s humanity for you. Once I melted into a puddle in her presence, Margot seemed to view me as a kindred spirit. She was affectionate and supportive, the friend I didn’t even know I needed. We began meeting in various upscale hotel bars, always in some private nook provided by a friendly bartender, quickly achieving a level of intimacy I had never experienced before on the job. I was used to others growing attached to me because I listened without judgment, but I never expected the table to turn.
Each meeting also yielded juicy kernels of professional insights. The bartender sometimes stopped by for a break, which gave me the chance to launch a few quick questions: How many women a night come to the bar selling sex? How do clients find out about you? If we met in a hotel bar, Margot would explain who was involved in their operation, who made it all go down so that the john and his hired friend could meet without fuss or capture. I was learning a lot, but I still had the generalizability problem to deal with: Was she a unique case? Would she connect me to other people like her in the sex trade? Were the bartenders and hotel clerks and cab drivers in her network representative of larger trends in the sex trade? If she was an exceptional case, there would be no point in even launching a formal study: none of my academic colleagues would be interested in a single person’s experience, only those shared by the multitudes.
The truth was, Margot fascinated me. Raised in the working-class suburbs of New York and New Jersey, the daughter of a teacher and a construction foreman, she went to public schools with lots of other Irish Catholics, maintained a solid B-plus average, and was active in her church. After high school, she married a bond salesman and moved to Manhattan, where she worked part-time in a law firm and went to college at night. The plan was to get a law degree and become a solid and productive member of the middle class.
Such a classic all-American life. The best kind of childhood, blessed with solid values and a sense of security unimaginable to much of the world. And yet it all unraveled in an instant when she caught her husband in an affair. Divorce and heavy drinking followed, and one night, broke and needing a place to stay after a fight with her parents, she convinced herself that she wanted to sleep with an old friend who had always wanted her. Really she did it for a place to sleep. And thereby crossed an invisible line.
In the bar where she told this story, I watched her face as she explained the next step. She didn’t seem sad, just determined to lay it out there. “A few nights later, I was in Stanton’s Bar down near Wall Street,” she said, teasing the ice cubes in her drink with a straw. “I was taking shots of whiskey with a bunch of traders who knew my husband, and one of those bastards flashed two hundred dollars in my face. He said it was mine if I gave him a blow job in the bathroom.”
Her husband would feel humiliated if it got back to him. And she could fill her old friend’s refrigerator. And she was already sleeping with one guy for a place to stay, so what difference did it make? So she took the bastard’s hand and led him to the bathroom.
A week later, another one of her husband’s friends offered her five hundred dollars.
After that, she kept looking for a regular job. But the easy money was too easy. She found some good bars and learned how to spot the men with free-spending ways and struck up friendships with women who were working the same bars. Most of them were just like her, college educated with some work history as paralegals or clerks. They started loaning one another clothes, recommending doctors, trading information.
Early on, she got them working in pairs. “There’s a particular kind of guy who goes to a bar at five or six in the afternoon,” she explained eagerly. “He’s either commuting or traveling, or he has something to do in town later that night, and he’s feeling a little lonely. Easy prey! The only thing you have to figure out is how to make them feel like they aren’t getting a hooker, just a nice girl who ’needs a little help,’ quote unquote. So having another pretty girl with you makes it seem less trashy.”
Gradually, she became the den mother. When someone was in trouble, she would get the call. Like Manjun and Angela, she had gathered the invisible threads of a community around her. But she veered wildly. She would brood, drink, take anti-anxiety meds, then vow to change her life and go straight. Once she even landed a job as a human resources manager in a large accounting firm. Now everything looked different. The long hours, the office politics, the aggressive men who wanted to impress everyone with what go-getters they were. How gross it all was. And she still had to turn the occasional trick to make ends meet.
The last straw? A supervisor who offered her a raise in exchange for sex, a smug and grubby powermonger who assumed the worst about her. But if she had offered sex in exchange for a raise, she’d have been labeled a whore. She’d probably have been fired. What a bunch of hypocrites!
Instead, Margot drove up to Maine and took long walks in the woods. “I guess I owned up to who I was,” she told me. “I knew I didn’t want to work in an office. I knew I had a skill that men would pay a lot for. So the question was, could I do it in an intelligent way, without hurting myself, and maybe even save a little money?” Then she drove back to New York and returned to sex work with her eyes open. No booze, no meds. She started exercising, bought a computer and some financial planning software. She made sixty-five thousand dollars her first year. In time, she went from den mother to setting up dates and charging commissions. Business was booming. Madam Margot was born.
• • •
Margot’s work as a sex broker was opening up a whole new upscale world to me. I was seeing things I had never seen before. She was so strong, so confident. Unlike Angela, who also had these qualities, Margot had no need to sell sex herself. She could make money and earn a measure of social power just helping other women do so. She wasn’t abused or supporting a drug habit; she didn’t have the social or legal obstacles that kept Manjun and his friends trapped in the underground. She had a line of credit and some investments. In the eyes of outsiders, she was just another middle-class woman living the good life in New York City.
Some people might ask, she said, Why suffer the risks and stigma of selling sex if you have other options? The way she looked at it, selling sex was her other option. “New York gave me a second chance. A lot of other places, I would have married again, had kids, been miserable. But here, I can reinvent myself. And you can judge me, you can put me down and call me names or whatever, but you can’t take away the fact that I am succeeding.”
As an immigrant, I recognized her defiant ambition in my bones—it was the ringing sound of the American dream. Is that possible? I wondered. Can sex work become a theater of aspiration like any other job? Can a prostitute even have an American dream?
• • •
Shine was taking me deeper into his world too. After church services one Sunday, he invited me to his family’s place. They had the bay window apartment of a brownstone on a tree-lined street, a lovely location. Inside, I felt as if I was back in Chicago. Plastic covered the lone couch. A thick, dark blue shag carpet lay on all the floors. Religious pictures and symbols hung on all the walls; a few African prints and masks sat on side tables. Black-and-white family photos showed stern, hardened African-American faces in the middle of farmland. Everything seemed tied to the past.
Shine seemed amused at my interest in the pictures. “Just a bunch of country folk, ain’t we?”
A giant black man, built like a tractor and at least six foot five, appeared behind us. Shine grabbed him in an affectionate bear hug. This was Shine’s brother Michael, a former college basketball star turned real estate agent. The first time I met him, he put me through a hazing process that ranged from “Who do you know in Chicago?” to “How much do you know about black culture?” I still wasn’t sure whether I had passed, because he generally gave me a wide berth.
“I’m going to get a plate of food,” Shine said. “Sudhir, want something?”
“Coming,” I said, turning back to the photographs for a last look. One was particularly haunting: a large print of a tall black man with a brown suit and a smart beige hat, black briefcase in hand, New York City in the background. He stood on a sidewalk with brownstones on either side of him. A child was walking past him. A green bicycle lay on the sidewalk, forgotten.
Michael was watching me. “Shine ever tell you about our father?”
“No,” I said.
“Came on a ship right before the war. Got drafted. Sixteen children—that we know about!”
He laughed and continued speaking in an odd staccato style. “I’m the second youngest. Shine’s the youngest. Three in jail. Me and Shine never been. Poppa lost his mind after 1990. When he lost his job. Depressed, couldn’t get out of it. Drinking like you ain’t never seen. Killed himself one day. Just shot himself in the head. In the basement. Shine and I were upstairs. He started shaking, I’ll never forget it. We both knew what had happened. I got my blanket and wrapped my dad up. The bloodstain is still on the floor. Momma still ain’t been down there. Shine won’t go down. Ten years, and they still won’t go down there.”
Michael paused. He wiped his upper lip, which had a few beads of perspiration. “After that, ain’t nothing been the same. Ain’t starving or nothing, doing fine as far as that goes. But something is gone that ain’t ever gonna come back.”
I had met Shine’s mother a few times, but she said very little except to welcome me and then walk to her bedroom.
“We moved Momma into a new house,” Michael continued. “We fixed it up, bought the upstairs for my auntie. But she wanted to come back here. And the top floor, that’s where my other brother stay.”
“Shine never talks about it,” I said.
“And he never will,” Michael said.
It all made so much sense. Like his father, Shine was withdrawn and focused on an inner goal. Like his mother, he was a bit of a ghost in the world. This is what I was thinking when he called from the kitchen. “Sudhir, get your ass in here and try this mac ’n’ cheese.”
Country food. Feeling moved by Michael’s story and the comforting family atmosphere, I walked into the kitchen to take a plate of gooey orange happiness from Shine’s hand—a hand that was swollen and cut, yellow-black bruises flaring from a couple of red gashes. I couldn’t help staring at it.
“This fucking kid Juan,” Shine said, spitting out the name. “He’s selling downtown. Can you believe that? I fire him because I’m selling downtown, so he decides to take me on. He found out which clubs and bars I work and now he’s in there trying to sell his own shit!”
I knew Juan. He was barely nineteen. I didn’t think he could get into bars and clubs, much less take on a well-connected gangster like Shine. Nor did I know he was a well-connected thug himself. What muscle did he have to ensure that he could withstand Shine’s retaliation—which was assuredly coming?
It had started innocently enough, Shine explained. Juan wanted to be more than a runner and started recruiting a few customers, always giving Shine his cut. I remembered hearing Shine express some concern about this a few months earlier, only because he didn’t think Juan had good people skills, but he shrugged it off because he had so much else on his mind. Then, apparently, Juan started making friends with some downtown bartenders. He told Shine he was just being a friendly guy. But Shine suspected he was slipping them money to compete with Evalina, and that’s when the confrontation began. Now he couldn’t even get the punk to meet with him.
Retaliation had to come quickly and decisively or else Juan would detect weakness in Shine. But Shine and I both knew that this was no longer a ghetto dispute. A downtown bar was involved, which meant white people were involved, so the old rules didn’t apply. Now Shine had to figure out how to deal with a dispute in the new world he was trying to conquer. Characteristically, he said he would be patient. Taking a deep breath as if trying to gather that patience on the spot, he said he would catch up with Juan at church.
“But his parents will be there,” I said, shocked that he would transgress boundaries in this almost sacrilegious way. Even for drug dealers, churches were off-limits.
“That’s exactly why I’m doing it there,” Shine says. “If he runs, everyone will think he’s guilty.”
• • •
Pieces were starting to fall into place. The story about punishing Juan gave me an important glimpse of the perils of Shine’s downtown experiment. At the same time, Margot was bringing me into her world, and soon I would be interviewing more of the elite white sex workers in her network. And even if Angela’s efforts at marketing innovation and product development had failed, they’d brought me out of the ghetto and across many boundaries.
Then there was Analise, the ultimate insider. Around the time Shine gave Juan his beatdown, she started calling me and asking if I wanted to catch up. Of course, the answer was yes. I genuinely liked her as a person, but I was downright fascinated by everything she represented—beautiful and young and rich, she and her careless young friends were the end of all the striving, the focal point that organized the world. If you had told me at the time that Analise was secretly running an elite escort service, I would have laughed in your face. But that was the period when she was just getting started in the business, which might have been one of the reasons she reached out to me.
Our schedules clashed until one day she called and invited me to join her gang for a screening of her boyfriend’s first movie, an NYU student film he had financed with about three hundred thousand dollars that he’d raised from family and friends. She had contributed a hefty sum herself, so she was listed as a producer. They held the event at her aunt’s luxurious apartment on East Eighty-fourth, a Xanadu of mahogany and marble. Due to a last-minute crisis, I arrived very late. The doorman called, then hung up the phone and told me the party would be coming down.
A few minutes later, ten people tumbled through the front door, first men bearing bottles of champagne and then women in their slinky dresses and heels. Analise was crying and two women were comforting her. “Just ignore that asshole,” said one. “You don’t deserve that shit.”
That was my first glimpse of Brittany, who looked as beautiful and dangerous as a Greek goddess. Analise reached her hand out to me and whispered, “Sorry. Just come along. I’ll explain later.”
Then J.B. came out. He was hunched into a dark plaid coat and looked like he shouldn’t be leaving his bed, much less the building. He pointed at us. “You fucking bitch! All of you fucking bitches! You have no fucking idea what I fucking do!”
J.B. wiped his mouth and staggered out underneath the green awning that extended over the sidewalk. He grabbed my shoulder and held on for balance, glaring at Analise. “You want the money? Is that what you want?”
Brittany stepped forward. “Why don’t you just shut up?”
“It’s none of your damn business,” J.B. sneered.
“Yes it is, asshole. You’re not getting into this car.”
“Fuck that shit. I’m walking.”
At this point, J.B. steered me toward Fifth Avenue. His friends followed.
“J.B.—get back here!” Analise yelled. “You’re being ridiculous. We’re all sorry. Let’s just move on.”
“Fuck you!” J.B. yelled back.
J.B. led us down Fifth Avenue, alongside Central Park. A guy named Michael came up to walk with us. “Don’t worry about her,” he said.
“It’s her money.”
“You can raise money, man. It’s all about the material.”
“See, she doesn’t even get that. She’s so fucking out of touch. I’ve got the material, man.”
J.B. stopped at a bench, looking across Fifth Avenue to some millionaire’s apartment building. One of his friends popped open a champagne bottle and handed it to J.B.
I took the moment to whisper to one of the guys. “What happened?”
“Sundance rejected his movie.”
Meanwhile, J.B. was chugging. Then he burped and put his head in his hands. “All of you can fuck off and die for all I care,” he said.
Then he stood up and swept his arm forward like a Shakespearean actor, gave a slight bow—and retched. It came out like a tube of chicken broth, one long projectile that nearly reached the street.
Michael just kept smoking and talking and so did the others, completely ignoring this bizarre outburst. “You should go out to LA,” one said. “This is the wrong town for what you’re doing.”
“It was my first film,” J.B. said. “First film. Does anyone get that? You know what my uncle Frank said? ’Better get a job, kid. Go work for your dad.’ Fucking lowlife who steals from his own company.”
Again, J.B. opened his mouth and let loose a stream of vomit. This time it was less perfectly columnar and some sprinkles hit his shoes.
“My fucking brain is going to explode,” J.B. said, dropping his head back into his hands.
Some of the other guys began to drift away, heading back toward the limo. They didn’t seem disgusted, just bored. I was the opposite, rooted to the spot, completely mesmerized by this strangely nonchalant behavior. I’d seen friends vomit, but they usually moaned and groaned and promised not to do it again. I’d seen fraternity brothers vomit, but that was usually in the context of a wild bacchanal. I’d seen heroin addicts vomit, but that was like a medical event. I’d seen nothing like this matter-of-fact display anywhere else.
A few weeks later, I saw it again. This time it was Brittany. We were just outside the Plaza Hotel, walking north. She took two steps into the park, threw up in the bushes right next to the gate, and came back to finish her sentence. “She should go out there and try to find a place, and see how crazy it is!” We walked along fairly steadily with only a little weaving, listening to Brittany denounce her mother for the horribly unmaternal act of kicking Brittany out of the family’s penthouse apartment. Then she darted into the bushes and threw up again.
Another time, outside a Chelsea art gallery, I saw one of the rich kids vomit into a trash can and turn to welcome friends while wiping his mouth. Then there was another J.B. episode. It began to seem as though every evening would end with some preppie youth stopping the cab or limo and taking a few minutes to launch the half-processed remains of the evening’s booze and food onto the side of the street. They did it theatrically, turning the sidewalk into a stage, transforming themselves into the aggrieved and tragic protagonists of some great imaginary drama. I was aware of the risks of sociological voyeurism and the impulse to treat them like animals in a zoo, but I still couldn’t help wondering: Was a certain style of drunkenness an aspect of class distinction? Was this some kind of socioeconomic marker, perhaps even a form of personal expression? Were they throwing up all the expectations they’d been forced to swallow?
One thing was clear: like Shine and Angela and Carla, these rich kids sure believed in the possibility of renewal. But theirs followed an existential purging so violent it seemed like a bid for redemption. Then they would pop another champagne cork and swallow some more renewal in a bottle. And the price of the bottle seemed to matter, as if it elevated their behavior above mere squalor. I wasn’t sure whether to be disgusted or impressed. Was this the dark secret at the heart of the American dream? A Roman level of thirst and self-loathing? My colleagues in the history and literature departments talked breezily about the end of the American empire—I felt I now had some data points for their argument.
As I watched this play unfold I couldn’t help but wonder about Carla’s and Shine’s respective strivings. If they were going to navigate these worlds, I hoped they wouldn’t be required to show their excellence at purging. I started to have my doubts that they could survive it. I was invisible, but they, as blacks and Latinos, would inspire animus. Maybe Carla was right: animus was just the other side of sexual desire. Maybe Shine was right: you could simultaneously look down at blacks while wanting to party with them. But the people who seemed even less fit for life in this ruthless version of America—Angela and Vonnie and Manjun and Joshi and all the others—how long could they last?
How long could I last?
• • •
A few weeks after Angela and Vonnie moved out of their Brooklyn apartment, a spring thunderstorm hit New York. With the rain falling in great drifting sheets, Carla and I could barely see the sidewalk in front of us. We dashed from one awning to another. Fortunately, it was a quiet Sunday morning and we had the sidewalk to ourselves.
I hadn’t expected Carla to be moving so quickly, but she was determined not to waste time. Maybe it was the specter of Angela and the fear of suddenly turning from the hot young thing into the cleaning lady. As we approached our destination, she stopped and looked straight into my eyes. “Can you tell I’m high?” she demanded. “The truth. Can you tell?”
Her last client liked to give “skiing lessons,” and Carla was nothing if not a willing student. But the shadow of a store awning obscured her face. “I think you’re okay,” I said, trying to sound encouraging. In fact, though, the cocaine hangover was making her look shaky.
“That shit was really speedy,” she said. “I hope I can do this.”
“Just focus. And remember, you have something she wants.”
Carla nodded and took a deep breath, trying her best to relax.
A police officer named Terry Wallace told Carla she should get off the streets and go to work for Margot Kerry. I had nothing to do with it. But as soon as I heard Wallace’s idea, I thought it was brilliant. Since her beating, Carla had lost her swagger. Angela and Vonnie had replaced her. She was on antidepressants. Everything seemed bleak to her. She was so nervous, she asked if I would go along for comfort.
“My last job interview,” she said in a doom-ridden voice, “a lousy cashier gig at a Target out on Long Island. I fucked the guy and still didn’t get the job.”
I saw Margot in the restaurant window and she waved. As I opened the door for Carla, I heard her take a few deep breaths and calm herself before crossing to shake Margot’s hand.
Margot was now my perfect source. Slowly, as we got to know each other better and trust developed, she grew interested in my research questions and even offered to set up my next study, an in-depth look into the lives of elite women who had come to New York to work in the upper reaches of the sex trade. I was already dreaming about the publications our alliance could generate. No one had managed to gather systematic, scientific information on this segment of the underground before.
I left them alone to talk, telling them I wanted to get some air. Next door, there was a magazine store. I browsed and mused about what I had just seen, a white woman and a Hispanic woman meeting for a drink. There should have been nothing remarkable about that, and certainly there were white women and Hispanic women who formed friendships in the ordinary world. But in the world of sex work, the meeting between Margot and Carla was almost inconceivable. Rich white men have always transgressed social barriers by having sex with poor dark-skinned women. Now these two were trying to buck history and economics to come together, a tiny revolution of the human spirit. I hadn’t seen this in all my years of watching Chicago’s sex work. Such were the opportunities that New York seemed to offer. Again, there were no guarantees and it isn’t scientific to fixate on outcomes, but the boundary crossing not only brought distant people together, it gave them a chance to make a new social unit that defied categories and norms. In the next few years, however, I would interview dozens of madams and high-end sex workers and still be able to count on one hand this kind of socioeconomic and ethnic mixing. Lots of madams dreamed of creating ethnic “stables” to cater more effectively to the interests of rich white men; much fewer were interested in truly blurring the lines. In retrospect, this makes Margot and Carla’s effort even more touching than it was at the time.
When I went back to the restaurant, I saw Margot squeezing Carla’s shoulder while Carla wiped tears from her eyes.
“We were just saying how much we had in common even though our lives have been so different,” Margot said.
Carla wiped away another tear. “Thank you for understanding, Ms. Kerry.”
“I can’t get her to call me Margot.”
Taking my arrival as her cue, Carla said good-bye, hugging Margot. She thanked her again, then tottered out of the restaurant on her spike heels. Margot sat back down and let out a huge sigh. “These women are going to be the death of me,” she said.
“Who, Carla?”
“Probably. She’ll disappoint me just like the rest. They drink a lot, they’re always on coke, they don’t show up. Like this girl Louise—a huge, huge earner, used to be an accountant with Microsoft, but, man, is she living the life she never had in college.”
Soon Louise would flame out, Margot said; then there would be a recovery period and possibly a return to work. Carla would probably go through the same spiral. The spirited ones always had big weaknesses. But Carla had ambition and she was pretty, Margot continued. Even if she didn’t have much culture—or the right kind of culture—they could work on that.
This took me back to Angela and Vonnie’s apartment, listening to their embarrassment about being “too Latina” to succeed in white New York, and to Shine’s need to deal with Juan. Sociologists often have furious academic debates about the qualities people need to move across social classes. Is it hard skills like reading ability or computer literacy? Or do the “soft assets,” like your accent or knowledge of the indie film scene, help you land the job? Margot’s need to reeducate Carla was another cultural battle that was also an economic battle. Without knowing it, Margot was lining up with French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who called these soft assets “cultural capital.” To really make the big bucks, Carla would have to learn to appreciate good food, to discuss politics and the opera—just as I had learned, with Analise’s help, to negotiate the eating clubs at Harvard. More and more, the ability to cross boundaries with some cultural competence was starting to look like a requirement for success. Carla would need to learn to deal with wealthy white johns, to talk white and act white and perhaps even have sex in a more “white” style. In her own way, Margot was also crossing boundaries by building this bridge between the two worlds. The economic need to stretch made them stronger.
The problem is that this attitude can easily slip into racism. To Margot, difference was also an economic asset. “I’m sure she dresses like a little Puerto Rican slut, so I’ll have to invest a few thousand in clothes,” she told me. “But I do need a hot young ethnic girl.”
She let the thought trail away and fixed her examining gaze on me. “But how are you doing?” she asked.
This was typical. Since that first meeting in the dark little Soho bar where I got dizzy, Margot and I had spent hours and hours in the corners and private rooms of many bars, and she seemed to move almost instinctively into a therapeutic mode—much as, I imagine, she did with the troubled young women who worked for her. It felt weird being in the same position as them, but Margot had a way of listening with such complete acceptance. I was hooked.
“Watch the drinking,” she said. “Just slow down. What’s the rush?”
Work wasn’t going well. The documentary I had been making about the last days of a Chicago public housing project was an exciting new adventure for me, but I was nervous about the reception from my colleagues at Columbia and the wider academic world. Not only were documentaries a marginal activity for serious sociologists, they were easily cast aside as “journalistic.” Elite universities were pressuring faculty to leave once they’d started to veer toward work that appealed to the general public.
Most of my fears would prove unfounded. As I showed some of the other professors the video, I got a surprisingly warm reception in some ways. Many told me of their own dabbling in photography, music, or art, which led to enthusiastic discussions about how to enliven sociology. But they also looked at me as if I’d just shown them a sweater I’d knitted, not a new professional venture. Filmmaking was a hobby. My takeaway was that it wasn’t a great idea to become known as unconventional—a few of my colleagues even warned me that the same people who were “curious” today would come after me with fangs tomorrow.
A few months earlier, in fact, the chair of the sociology department had requested a private preview. The bad news was that the chair was Peter Bearman, the academic formalist who disdained the narrative school of engaged sociology. Though Bearman had been a strong supporter of my work so far, he could easily turn against me. We watched a DVD of the documentary in his apartment, just me and Bearman and his wife. When the movie ended, he applauded—and spent the next forty-five minutes detailing all of its terrible flaws. “Now you can get back to doing real sociology,” he concluded.
“But I want to reach a bigger audience,” I said. “I want to reach people who would never crack a sociology book. How is that a bad thing?”
He shook his head, a dismissive expression on his face. “It will never take the place of real, deep sociology,” he responded. “Just don’t be confused about that.”
To be fair, his specific criticisms were actually very smart and helpful. But he had put his finger on my greatest fear. At a time when my marriage was falling apart and everything in my life seemed particularly unsettled and provisional, I was trying to create myself as something new, a filmmaker and public advocate who could step out of the trenches of dry statistics into a policy role. I wanted to cross the boundaries like the great sociologists before me, bold scholars like Herb Gans, C. Wright Mills, and Robert Merton. Maybe Bearman was doing me a favor. He was telling me that I couldn’t pull this off, that I didn’t have enough cultural capital.
I must have slumped in my chair. His wife jumped to my defense once again. “Peter, maybe you should try being his colleague instead of his father.”
When I got to this part of the story, Margot smiled. “Women always want to take care of you, Sudhir. Be grateful for that. You love your work. Just try to get yourself back into it and focus on that.”
She was right. What I really needed was a new project that I could dive into, a new world of data that no one else could access. That would cheer me up. Maybe it was finally time for her to help me get started with my study of high-end sex workers? We’d been talking about it for months. I could really use it now.
Margot frowned. She reached across the table, covering my hand with her own. “Can I tell you something honestly? You’re not ready.”
I took offense. I had been interviewing prostitutes and drug dealers since I was a grad student living on peanut butter and day-old bread. What could she possibly mean?
“Well, you seem, um, not totally together.”
Margot’s words hit me hard and sharp. As much as I tried to repress the happenings in my personal life, my troubles kept seeping out and affecting me in unanticipated moments. My mind shot back to my insanely quiet apartment, the one place where I didn’t want to go. My wife and I were now living apart. We both knew that divorce was a fait accompli, but we were both stalling because it was a painful path that neither of us really wanted to pursue. We were trying to help each other move on and find a better life, which made everything so much worse. After one of our well-meaning talks about our “changing priorities,” even a sappy TV commercial could bring me to the verge of tears.
Where once the inability to face my marital troubles produced panic attacks, now I was in full denial mode. I tried to make myself busy so I wouldn’t have to deal with my personal strife. Taking on a few dozen interviews would be a great way to pass the time. Throw in a few strip clubs, hotels, and bars where I could hang out and observe the sex economy, and there would be only a few hours of the day left for ruminating on my failure as a husband. Thank God for fieldwork!
Margot clearly saw my desperation oozing out. She made soothing sounds, stroking my hand. “Listen, Sudhir. I could get you fifty women tomorrow.”
“It’s just conversation,” I said. “I just want to talk. That’s all. I mean, I really need a new project. I think it would be good for me to dive into something.”
“You really believe that?”
What I believed was that she was getting way too psychological.
“You know who you are going to meet, right? Twenty-five-year-old girls who are beautiful and in pain. You’re a sucker for that kind of woman, Sudhir. And they’ll have stories, and you’ll get wrapped up in the drama, and you’ll want to save them and it’ll be a big disaster.”
“Margot, I have never slept with a prostitute.”
She laughed. Then her expression turned serious. “Why don’t you start with people who do what I do?”
I wasn’t sure what she meant.
“Managers,” she answered. “You could learn a lot.”
Until that moment, I’m ashamed to say, the idea had never occurred to me. I had seen the escort agency staff as people who were keeping me from talking to sex workers. “What would I study?” I asked.
Margot threw up her hands. “Are you kidding me? We make this whole thing run! We set up the dates, we lend them money, we find them drugs, we get their kids day care, we buy them clothes, we talk to their boyfriends who suspect what’s going on. The other day, I negotiated a cash payment with a landlord under the table. Want me to keep going? I mean, the women just show up and open their legs. People like me do the real work.”
Somehow, Margot’s way of taking charge relaxed my fierce hold on the world. Why not let myself be guided by the generosity and insights of someone else, even if she happened to be a former Catholic schoolgirl from New Jersey who had become a Manhattan sex broker?
Margot’s phone rang. “Sweetie, relax. Sweetheart—relax and tell me what happened . . .”
Margot covered the phone and turned toward me. “Sorry—two girls went to meet the same client.” She thought for a second and added, “You should listen to this. These are two girls who keep calling me for help. They work for an agency downtown.”
She looked around and saw that nobody was nearby, so she put her phone on the table and put it on speaker. “Are you both there?”
Two small distant voices in the phone said yes.
“Who had the guy first?”
“I did,” one of the voices said.
“For how long?”
“I think six months now.”
“Kelly, how about you?”
“He’s been calling me. Maybe this is the fourth time.”
“Okay, Kelly, you’ve had him a lot less. Did he mention Liz to you?”
“Um, yes, I suppose,” Kelly replied. She seemed confused. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Did he propose a three-way?”
“He made some jokes.”
“Jesus, Kelly.” Margot shook her head. “Never talk about three-ways. Did he ask you for a freebie too?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s playing you. Trying to push down your price. If you were working for me, I’d tell you both to dump him. It’s not worth it. It’s too crazy out there, and you need to help each other.”
“Okay, Margot,” Kelly said meekly.
Margot hung up the phone without saying anything more. She looked at me. “See what I mean?”
I kicked myself for not following this trail earlier. I knew that the lack of a friendly legal system encourages people on the fringes of society to find their own systems of organization. I had studied clergy members who intervene between warring gangs. I had seen block club leaders settle gang conflict on the street. Even in New York, all of this was playing out in front of my eyes. How many times had I seen the bartender in Mortimer’s pub address a minor gambling dispute or a fight between a sex worker and her client? In Manjun’s neighborhood, the cops probably could have made a separate side business just helping various underground merchants and their customers negotiate among themselves. Now, watching Margot, I finally realized that she also regulated her little slice of the underground economy through the constant phone consultations I had viewed until this moment as little more than annoying interruptions.
Now that I was finally paying attention, Margot filled me in on the backstory. She’d still been in her den mother phase when a girl named Karina called her out of the blue. She told Margot she had been walking out of a strip club in Union Square when a security guard beat her up and took her date’s wallet, so they were holed up in a hotel and the man, a corporate lawyer, was freaking out because it was way past time to go home to his wife and children and he didn’t have any cash or credit cards. So Margot grabbed some cash and rushed to the hotel, where she concocted an alibi and called a limo driver to take the lawyer home. Then she went to the club and negotiated a peace with the club manager.
Three days later, the corporate lawyer gave Margot two thousand dollars for her services, the club manager gave her one thousand dollars, and even Karina forked over a few hundred. “It was that night, I suppose, when I realized that I had a skill,” Margot told me.
I thought of Shine. He always had a story about some conflict he had to resolve, warring gang members or some disgruntled local loan shark. At times, the issue concerned his operation, but often he was a third-party mediator for other aggrieved parties. Angela was the same. I’d always thought these were just positive stories that made them feel good to tell, or boasts after a few glasses of wine, not something central to their lives. But Margot had just told me it was all about making connections. That’s why she called her agency Manhattan Nights, because she connected people for sexy nights and jumped into action if the night turned ugly. Glorious or dangerous, there was never a middle ground. It was a business but also a worldview, she said.
I felt a tingle going up my back. Connections.
Some of my original questions started to flood back. The global city was new for sociologists because people transcended borders and boundaries in novel ways. New Yorkers had side lives in Los Angeles and London, Londoners had business and personal affairs in Paris, Parisians owned real estate in Manhattan. Everyone assumed this pancultural connectivity was exclusively the domain of the rich, who could afford air travel and second homes, but all that I had seen pointed to another layer of connectivity: one among the laboring classes that was hidden from casual view, partly because of its relation to illegal and illicit realms. For the underbelly world, making connections also meant learning to communicate across unfamiliar landscapes. It required rapid acquisition of social capital. That was the way to prosper in new worlds where people’s expectations and norms could differ. And since unfamiliarity always produces the possibility of conflict, these “language skills” could mean the difference between survival and defeat. Manjun, for example, had failed through shyness or fear or sheer time pressure to establish diplomatic relations with people outside his immediate social sphere. So when he became involved with local thugs, he couldn’t access the right assistance. Angela failed in Brooklyn because her ties to the locals were too thin. Aside from Carla, she had no one to help her make the connections she needed. And Karina, as Margot told the story, was so thinly connected she had to turn to a stranger when she got in a jam. In each of these cases, a wider range of cross-border connections was the key element.
The pattern reminded me of international law. As any law school professor could tell you, people who make transactions across government boundaries (smugglers, for example) face constant trouble because the nature of their business precludes them from calling upon national authorities in times of conflict. So they have to provide their own security. More important, they have to reach across the real borders to create an alternate set of rules and norms. But because these rules are not written down or formalized through courts, they involve layers of ambiguity that create constant conflicts. The pressures and temptations associated with large sums of cash, sex, and drugs explain much of the rest of their trouble. In all these circumstances, informal ambassadors like Shine or Margot become valuable advisers. They have the ability to talk in both directions of the class divide and aren’t intimidated by differences in race or culture. They have an ability to think on their feet, to adapt to the moment and the circumstance. In some ways it might be a matter of simple curiosity. They aren’t fixed in place the way other people are, don’t take comfort and identity from their surroundings in the same way. They are always looking over the fence to see what’s coming next, always hunting out the next juicy bargain or sweet deal.
In sociological terms, these people are brokers. Usually this refers to local actors with social capital rooted in their familiarity of other locals—in a bar, a neighborhood, a housing project. New York was showing me a new side of this concept. Analise couldn’t do background checks of the women who performed for her wealthy clientele, so she relied on cultural checks. As uncomfortable as Shine felt with his white clients, their mutual needs conspired to create a new Shine who could operate between the two worlds. Army brats and Foreign Service kids who spend years living in foreign countries often develop what they call a “third culture,” a mixture of two worlds that isn’t one or the other but something new. Perhaps I was seeing the Third Shine and the Third Margot. This was cultural capital of a particular kind, and my instinct and personal experience told me that the world would need more and more of it as time went on.
In the underbelly of New York, then, the future was being born. Or so it seemed to me in that moment of excitement.