Floating City Page 17

  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 ha
d 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.