Floating City (29 page)

But J.B. just laughed and slapped his hand down on my pages again. “Don't waste your time, Sudhir. This is the real stuff—real poignant human shit. We could make money with this!”

•   •   •

T
he next time I heard from Analise, she was calling to ask for advice. Her frustrations with Brittany had put her on a roller coaster. One day she loved her, the next day she wished they had never gone into business together. Today she was ready to get rid of Brittany forever but wasn't sure how to do it. The parallels to Shine and Juan struck me again. Brittany was feeling the same kind of cocksure rebellion as Juan:
Look how great I'm doing! I can make it on my own!
Why do I need to carry this guy?

Having Tito arrange a beatdown didn't seem appropriate, so I had to tell Analise that I had no great ideas to offer. But, of course, I'd be thrilled for an opportunity to observe as she fired her.

“We're going to meet at the gallery space on Thursday,” Analise told me. “Bring your brass knuckles.”

When I arrived, Kate and her staff were in the front of the gallery preparing a photographic exhibit on street life in New York
City. Pictures of crowds crossing Times Square were interspersed with shots of small family businesses in Canarsie, East New York, Astoria, and other communities in the city's outer boroughs. The pictures were simple and beautiful. Most were taken by European photographers because a prominent European car company had underwritten the exhibition.

I went straight to Analise's office. She looked good, elegant as always and perfect for a gallery. The first words out of her mouth were: “To be honest, I'm not sure I ever imagined doing this without her. That's my fear. Not that I couldn't do it, but we're kind of joined at the hip.”

I pictured Juan's face, that stubborn refusal to accept how things had changed. “I thought your mind was all made up,” I said.

Analise hesitated, biting her lip, and I could see how deep the problem went. Underneath all the confidence she was trying to exude, she was deeply anxious about the unknowns ahead. Brittany and J.B. weren't just employees or business partners. They were a part of her foundational network, and I was beginning to understand that the business of border crossing was more complicated than just mustering the courage to explore new worlds. It also meant leaving old worlds, or negotiating a new relationship to the old worlds. The poor ghetto entrepreneurs who feared leaving their own little fishbowls weren't just afraid they'd be eaten by bigger fish; they were also afraid of being greeted as outsiders when they tried to return home. Even Analise, with all her entitled individualism, still needed the comfort of a network. Crossing boundaries didn't mean leaving your friends, family, and former business partners in the dust; it meant trying to keep the old while finding the new—not so much developing new networks as
extending
the networks you already had. Margot was the exception—her friends and family had shunned her. But for Analise, Brittany wasn't just a friend and contractor but also a reminder of who she was and where she belonged. Shine could have just moved to another bar and left
Juan behind, but that would have left him a little more alone. The underlying challenge was existential: if in a world so big Juan was just a loose end, wasn't Shine kind of a loose end too?

“Yeah, but anyone can
say
those things!” Analise laughed. “You have to
do
it.” Then she sighed and shrugged and let out a small laugh. “I guess the problem is, the men she brings in are the most steady—it's never just a date here and there. It's the guy who wants to come back. And that's all Brittany. She gets them to return, like, several times a month! No one else is that good.”

Brittany arrived at the gallery an hour early. We were both surprised. She walked into the back room, where we were sitting, and immediately lit a cigarette.

Smoking wasn't allowed in the gallery. Analise was about to tell her to put out the cigarette, but Brittany read her mind. “I don't care! This is not my greatest day, Analise. But you wanted to talk so here I am.”

Analise didn't seem to know how to start. I sat silently, trying to disappear.

“Well, are we going to talk or not?” Brittany said. She was obviously high, no doubt on cocaine.

Analise took a deep breath. “You're screwing up,” she said. “
A lot
.”

“That's one way of looking at it.”

“Oh, yeah? What's the other way of—?”

Analise stopped herself in midsentence. She tried to calm down.

“You don't do what I do,” Brittany continued. “That's the fucking problem, Analise. So unless you know how to make it out there, I'd try to be less fucking bossy. You've been a real fucking pain in the ass lately and I'm tired of it.”

That got Analise going again. “You're pissing people off,” she said. “Showing up late, not showing up, showing up wasted out of your fucking mind. You can't piss everyone off, Brittany, and just think it's okay and nothing will happen.”

Brittany just puffed on her cigarette, as if she was alone at a bus stop.

“The hotel, Brittany,” Analise continued. “You really think it was okay to yell at the bartenders, to trash the room, and then just leave the guy sitting there like that? He has a wife, Brittany. You can't just . . .
expose
people like that.”

“Fuck you, Analise. Really. I mean, I can't take it anymore.”

Analise stared into her hands. She took out a cigarette and started walking toward the door.

“That's it?” Brittany yelled. “We're done?”

“I don't know anymore, Brittany. You're such a fucking pain to work with. You don't seem to want to work with me, and to tell you the truth, I'm finding it hard to work with you.”

“You know what, Analise? I'll make it easier for you.
I'm
done. That's it. How about that? Does that solve your problems?”

“Yeah, it kind of does,” Analise said, her lips pursed in anger.

Brittany got up and stormed out, which left Analise looking stunned. She walked slowly out of the office and toward the back of the gallery into the garden.

Analise had broken up with Brittany many times, but they always forgave and forgot, or almost did. This dated back to their school days, but it was actually not an unusual pattern in the escort world, where sex workers frequently quit on a manager or agency only to come crawling back a few months later. Economists call this “sunk costs.” It was hard for Analise or Shine to get rid of people because they had already invested so much time and effort trying to make it work. Friends just call it loyalty.

But this time, it was different. After storming out of the gallery, Brittany started making moves on some of the other girls who were working with Analise. She was better at finding customers, she told them. They could make more money working for her. This betrayal Analise took hard. The next time I dropped by the gallery to find out how things were going, she excused herself for a quick trip
to the bathroom that left her sniffing and starry-eyed. She fell back into her chair and let out a big sigh. “I have to do something, or else I'm finished.”

“What do you mean, 'finished'?”

Brittany had poached five of her best clients, she said. “I can't risk having a catfight, you understand? I would rather just get out, just stop everything, than let the news get out that I'm fighting with her. Can you imagine what would happen? I mean, she's got such a big mouth.”

“Well, maybe it's a sign,” I said. “I mean, is this
really
what you want to be doing your whole life?”

Analise shook her head. She had a better idea, apparently. “Shine is going to help me.”

So there it was, the arcs of my story connecting. I wasn't too surprised. After Shine and Analise met in the art gallery, I had a sense their lives would intertwine. Of course, I hated the idea. They would have met at the party anyway, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I was responsible. And I was jealous too, I have to admit. But the scientist in me—thank God for him!—was excited. The connection Analise and Shine had made was precisely the point I was trying to make with my work. The global city was bringing together people of varying classes, ethnicities, and backgrounds, and here was
une liaison dangereuse
as poignant and lucrative as any other. The novelty wasn't necessarily the upstairs-downstairs quality. That was as old as the city itself, or older—you could reach back to Mesopotamia to see slaves and nobles courting. But here was a business venture that blurred all the ready-made distinctions between legal and illegal commerce, that required the collaboration of two brokers to translate the languages and codes of two different worlds. Shine provided the coke, Analise provided the clients. Shine provided the muscle, Analise identified the parameters of the conflicts. As much as I didn't really want to see this play out, it made complete sense. The question was, how long
would it last? Could they survive the inherent tensions that had sunk Angela?

The truth was, the change in Analise depressed me. When I was a kid in college, the idea of entropy struck me hard: all that is solid melts into air, creative destruction, and so on. A factory is always one innovation away from becoming obsolete. Everything is always in the process of falling apart. The bourgeois succeeded because they
didn't
cling to tradition. Instinctively, despite all their protestations to the contrary, they embraced entropy.

Entropy rang true to me because I was going through so many personal changes. It rang true in New York's underground too. Everyone was constantly on the precipice of change. You had to learn how to get out, change your focus, accept losses, fail quickly, and move on. Success required self-awareness.

This was the theory. But in practice, I hated to see Analise going through this particular episode of creative destruction. Shine too. They both were failing, but their ambition and nerve wouldn't let them quit. It was heartbreaking. Maybe their resilience would help them solve each other's problems, or maybe they'd drag each other down to destruction, exposure, and arrest. There were dangers I knew all too well, dangers that could sink them. One was obvious. The police are all about patrolling social boundaries, and many of them hate the sight of “salt and pepper” mixing in the same shaker. But police actually arrest few black marketers. There are simply too many of them, and an arrest could spark violence from newbies fighting for market share. The real hazards would be linked to the inner demons that fueled their ambitions—greed, jealousy, reckless behavior, an inflated sense of their capacities. Selling drugs or running an escort service isn't what usually lands you in jail, after all. It's the inability to approach your involvement in a moderate way. Too many people want to be a kingpin
.
The handful who grow slowly and never deal with strangers are rarely caught. That's why crossing boundaries screams “
Danger!”

Examined with colder eyes, the adventures of Shine and Analise could be a fascinating experiment. Two very different people with very different cultural assets, both were struggling to thrive in the invisible economy. Which assets would be most useful? Which would be most destructive?

From what I'd seen so far, I would have to conclude that the low side of this particular high-and-low equation had more power. Shine understood the black market and didn't shy away from the messiness. He had a better sense of when to push forward and when to pull back. He was protected by his ghetto cool, his mask of indifference. Like other drug kingpins I'd seen, he knew that today's failure could be tomorrow's success, and slowing down or taking a loss could be the key to staying in the game for the long haul. But Analise didn't seem to have those instincts. Her ambition and elite recklessness clouded her judgment. She wanted to be in control of everything and also wanted to throw all caution away. Maybe this too was an aspect of her elite culture code, a privileged person's refusal to scale back to a more modest operation that would let her scrape by without the glamour of a big success. But there was danger in the way she kept talking about some happy place in the future when the dirt of her illegal enterprise would be magically washed away. She thought that people like her made the rules and could break them too. But dreamers don't thrive in the world of crime. The underground is perfectly suited for the self-aware business manager who knows her limits, and what the market (and the cops) will bear.

The whole thing was like watching a car crash in slow motion: you're helpless to stop the inevitable and wincing with every crunch of metal. But too close for comfort also meant that I couldn't turn away. For better or worse, I had to see what would happen next.

EXIT STRATEGIES

M
argot called, asking if I'd like to come watch some of her missionary work—lately, she had been helping her “contractors” organize their financial lives, teaching them basic investment principles, persuading landlords to give leases without background checks, even cosigning loans. She was becoming more and more obsessed with the idea of exit strategies. “We all exit,” she told me more than once. “You can do it at thirty or fifty, but one day you're going to stop—and then what? These girls have got to learn to
think.
”

Obviously, she was talking to herself.

This was a subject scholars of sex work rarely explored. Many of the women at Margot's level of the industry had high school diplomas and college degrees. They certainly had acquired experience as skilled hosts and conversationalists. They had learned to navigate complex social situations and negotiate with a wide variety of people. But they couldn't exactly put their skills on a résumé. How did they make the transition to a normal life?

Today, she had invited two prosperous escorts, Morgan and Fiona, to her apartment. They were both very attractive, very well-dressed women with Prada on their backs and Blahniks on their feet. I had previously interviewed Morgan extensively—I was up to 150 interviews now, a good, solid data set—so there was already a level of trust when we all sat down.

Margot poured tea from an English china pot. She offered milk and Splenda but no sugar or half-and-half. Then she dove in.

“Listen, I want to tell you something. Based on my experience, you're going to either die, get caught, get a disease, or lose all your money. I want to help you avoid that.”

Morgan and Fiona looked at each other. “That's a bit of a surprise,” Morgan said.

“Yeah, we thought you were going to ask us to go into business with you. I was thinking, where's the champagne?”

“How silly of me. You're the first hookers in history to put away a few grand. I should be asking
you
for advice.”

“You called us, Margot.”

“I did. 'Cause I want to help you. Sudhir's the researcher, so he can correct me if I'm wrong, but most of the women who get to the point you're at begin to fade away.”

Margot looked over at me and I shot her a look that said,
Thanks for dragging me into this.
But I played along as best I could. “Most of the women I've met do start to run into trouble because they're not smart with their money,” I said. “Planning for the future is not a strong suit among the people I've interviewed.”

“We're not idiots,” Morgan said. “We save a
lot
.”

“You have
cash
,” Margot countered. “And even then you had to fuck that apartment broker to get a lease. What if you can't fuck the next one?”

Actually, it had been more complicated than that. Morgan had persuaded the broker to waive his fee and sponsor her at the bank, which enabled her to pass a credit check. In exchange, she had been sleeping with him for approximately three months without collecting any money.

“Fiona, you're no different. You've fucked half the city because you can't get a credit card.”

Fiona scowled and began fiddling with her cigarette pack.

“Look, you guys are smart,” Margot continued. “A lot smarter than the other bozos I know, God bless them. At some point, you're going to want to do something different. So I have a proposal for you.”

Morgan shrugged her shoulders, giving in. Fiona followed her lead.

“My estimate is that you each have about five thousand in the bank, maybe a little more but not much. You think you're going to build it up, but let's get real—on the cab ride over, you probably talked about going to St. Barts for a week or at least down to Miami Beach, right? You work so hard, you deserve it. And there's
guys
there! There goes the five grand. And you have to buy clothes, right? There goes another two grand. And I bet your credit cards are maxed out if you have credit cards, so you're blowing stupid money on bank fees.”

Margot paused and watched the truth sink in.

“I'm not telling you to live in a cave, but you need to
change your relationship to money
. Here's my suggestion. Start lending out some of the cash you've saved. At a decent interest rate. Don't rip people off, but start turning your cash into
profit
. I've done this. I'm telling you, it changes your way of thinking. Instead of money for things, you think of money for
money—
for the future.”

Morgan looked interested now. “How much could we make?”

“By the end of the year, your five grand could be seventy-five hundred. Without fucking anyone.”

Seeing that she had them, at least for now, Margot continued in a rush. Find women and give them cash advances, get them to pay back a little each week, never let them skip, and keep
all
the money in the bank. She used a credit union on Long Island, where she opened an account for each woman and linked it to an account she controlled; each week the money just got subtracted from their ac
counts into hers. Then they had to start doing straight jobs, just a few hours a week but enough to get a legit paycheck. Waitress, hostess, whatever. They would have to cover the years without straight jobs when they went looking for a real one.

After thirty minutes, Morgan still seemed skeptical. “Maybe you're right,” she said. “But still, lending money . . . what if they don't pay up?”

That was the beauty of small sums and weekly payments, Margot explained. “You never lose too much. And it doesn't happen as often as you'd think. Most hookers are basically honest, not that they get any credit for it.”

Morgan still wasn't convinced, but by the time they left, Fiona said she wanted another meeting once she'd had a chance to think it over. Or maybe she was so grateful finally to be getting her nicotine fix, she just wanted to make nice. I closed the door on her and turned to Margot.

“No way this is going to work,” I said.

Margot sniffed. “I'm not an idiot. If I can get one out of ten to see the light, that's fine. And you don't know everything.”

We sat down again. She told me that she'd been telling some of her contractors—she always called them contractors now—that she was quitting the business soon. At first they all thought she was crazy. Lots of midlife crisis jokes. But soon they started to call her up—always secretly so that no one else would hear—to ask how she was going to do it.

I could see that Margot was in some kind of pain, probably feeling guilty for her role in their lives as sex workers, and guilty for abandoning them too. This was common, something I'd seen many times in all illegal work, whether it was street hustlers earning a few dollars a week or high-level drug traffickers pulling in hundreds of thousands a year. Some kind of guilt always ate at them. But most couldn't even dream of another life. That was what
made Margot different. And part of this, I couldn't help feeling, was the inspiration of New York City itself. Margot knew she was a player in the big show. She wasn't just good; she was one of the best. That gave her a kind of social capital I hadn't considered until now, the confidence to make a change. And even while she was pining away for a quiet house in the Southwest, she still daydreamed about the many businesses—dancing clubs, catering and entertainment businesses, cruise ship tours—she could start in New York. Each one fed the same underlying fantasy of helping other women to avoid subservient relationships to men.

I thought this over and shook my head. “Margot, you're going to miss all this.”

She winked at me. “You are too.”

I laughed. She was right.

“You love being out there at two a.m. in some shitty little club,” she said.

“And you love running hot girls like Morgan,” I said.

“Yeah, but
you
think you're different. You tell me how nuts the rich kids are, how amazing the poor people are, how much you feel for all the poor, suffering hookers. But we're
just like you.
That's what you can't admit.”

She was right again. This time I didn't laugh. “I'm here because they don't have a voice, Margot.”

She shook her head as if she was disgusted with me. “
They
have a voice, Sudhir. They talk all the fucking time.
You
don't have a voice is the problem. You feel like they could
give
you one. So you run to them—the feeble, the sick, the criminals, the crazies. Why do you always go to them? Think about it. Why do you always try to find in them
something about who you are
?”

Margot was onto something, I knew. I didn't like it, but she was right. I'd been doing this same kind of work for twenty years. Even though I was now aiming for the middle-class women and the rich,
the motive wasn't much different from when I studied the Chicago projects. I wasn't exactly going for the wealthy lawyers or accountants. Even when a few called, like Martin, I ran away. I wanted the loners and the outcasts. I felt alone and different and sought out acceptance and wisdom from those who were equally stigmatized.

Thinking about it amplified my discomfort. I didn't want to study these worlds forever, I kept telling myself. But even as I spent my nights in the underworld of New York, I was also occasionally flying back to Chicago to follow the journey of the public housing families I'd studied over a decade ago as their homes were demolished and they found new places to live. More than 80 percent of them were ending up in neighborhoods just as poor and segregated and crime-ridden as the project towers they'd left. Dozens of tenants would call me just to talk about their inability to find a home, pay rent, or control their son or daughter in the unfamiliar new environment. Kids were dying; parents were going to jail. It was Groundhog Day, ghetto style. The definition of depressing.

With the wounds of my divorce still fresh, I also couldn't help resenting Margot a little bit. Her question turned me back inside. Was I studying the poor out of some prurient desire to feel better about myself? Many social scientists study inequality for their entire lives—I was hardly the only one—but there were probably fewer than a dozen who chose direct interpersonal contact over weeks and months and years. The surveys and phone interviews other researchers used helped them maintain a healthy emotional distance. I defended my need to see misery firsthand as a search for truth, but was truth an excuse for voyeurism under the cloak of science? Were my own prejudices and needs driving my search?

But what would I do if I didn't do this?

I left Margot and went straight to a strip club to do an interview—three interviews, actually.

My
n
's were getting bigger all the time.

•   •   •

A
s 2005 was coming to an end, Angela called to say that she was leaving for the Dominican Republic. She was feeling depressed and wanted to be around family, she said. But she had a parting gift. She had found some Eastern European women and some Latinas who had managed to penetrate the upper reaches of the sex trade. They had all agreed to talk to me. If I came over to say good-bye, she would give me their phone numbers.

When I arrived at her apartment, she was making Sunday dinner. The smells reminded me of the old Brooklyn apartment, and I almost expected Vonnie and Father Madrigal to walk in the door.

Instead, Carla showed up. “Surprise!” she said.

They were friends again? How did it happen?

“Margot!” Carla said. “I learned a lot from her.”

“Carla is like a queen bee around the bar,” Angela said, so proud she might have been talking about her own daughter. “Helps everyone. I'm so proud of her.”

I knew that Margot was having a positive effect on Carla, if you can call changing from streetwalker to escort a positive thing. She was proud that Carla had become a “great date” and was now booking about four high-paying clients each month. Taking Margot's advice, Carla had decided to stay in a subsidized apartment back in her old neighborhood and save her money to buy a condominium in the Bronx.

“I have a picture of the building hanging above my bed,” Carla said.

I smiled, picturing Margot telling her to “visualize” her goal.

But Carla parted ways with Margot on one point. Margot thought Carla should limit her contact with friends and family in the projects. Get up and go to work and stay out of the drama, she'd said.
Your friends will drag you down much quicker than
anything you might do
. Culturally and emotionally, Carla couldn't accept that. Leaving the fishbowl was not so easy.

I could see it from both sides. After all the drama surrounding the rich client who'd wanted to beat Carla up, when Margot finally started helping me again, I began beefing up my
n
's with a much wider range of upper-end sex workers. I had spoken to women who worked in suburbs and in cities; some worked part-time, supplementing their regular jobs, while others saw sex as a full-time vocation. Some just danced at clubs—avoiding physical encounters—while others were phone sex operators. Soon I'd have enough to launch an expansive study of women who worked in three cities—Miami, New York, and Chicago. What particularly fascinated me was that their backgrounds were so different from either the streetwalkers I'd associated with Angela or the blue bloods in Analise's employ. The women Margot found all hailed from small towns in states like Arkansas, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania and worked as far away as Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Miami—the global city as a network of cities. They approached their work in a much more businesslike frame of mind, changing their names and pooling expenses to buy condos and using a variety of Web-based platforms, from Facebook to Craigslist. One group had even formed an investment circle to take advantage of tips and advice from their rich clients.