Floating City (13 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you mean, 'comfortable'?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once again, no one said anything.

“A hundred eighty dollars a month.”

“That's it?” Michael said, surprised.

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

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

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

“I'm so sorry,” Betsy said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It's a date,” I said.

•   •   •

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

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

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

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

Ouch.

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

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

She showed me some of the replies:

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

Go back and light up that pipe, bitch.

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

“Sure,” Angela said.

“Show us those.”

“I don't save those,” Angela said.

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

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

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