Floating City (21 page)

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.

ADVENTURES IN ROLE PLAYING

I
n my office, I remembered the advice of my very first sociology teacher, Aaron Cicourel: “Stop every few months, and go over your data. This will help identify what you know and, more important, what you
don't
know.”

I took out a pen and paper and began to make a list.

For the Urban Justice Center, I had conducted more than a hundred interviews with streetwalkers—good, solid work. I had some rich if idiosyncratic adventures with Shine in Harlem, a lot more of the same with Manjun and Angela and Margot, plus a lot of dry wells and a ton of doors slammed in my face. But I had learned something from every encounter and the evidence was starting to accumulate. My feel for New York was slowly starting to approach my understanding of Chicago. But I still feared I had small
n
's and that size would matter.

Maybe the list would help. On the left side, I put a header:

LOW INCOME

I knew about the history of underground activity in Harlem. Shine and his neighborhood had given me deep lessons in how all of this had come to be, including the roots of modern-day black markets in central Harlem. That part looked sound. I also had solid contact information for immigrant sex workers, day laborers, gypsy cab drivers, nannies, cooks, and dishwashers. When the time was right, I could easily turn this access into a sociological study on their earnings, lives, and family struggles.

On the right side of the page, I put another header:

MIDDLE & UPPER CLASS

This category included Margot and Analise, money launderers, strip club owners, the doctors and lawyers who serve them. But I hadn't really conducted systematic interviews. Even though I had years of exploration under my belt, everything still felt impressionistic, especially compared to the more scientific approach of my colleagues.

From this list, as almost always happens, a question jumped out at me. Maybe this clunky scheme of low, middle, and upper class was itself a by-product of that old way of thinking about cities as bounded ecologies, neighborhoods separate in form and function with distinct groups living in each one. The sociologist Manuel Castells calls New York and other global centers like London and Paris “informational cities” in order to highlight the move away from traditional ways of carving up urban spaces. In informational cities, location still matters but the real currency is now mobile assets like information or connections. A new sociology of boundary crossers would have to study the role that networks—however fleeting they may be—play in refashioning this mobile world. But you couldn't look only at finance, real estate, and corporate capital. According to some economists, the underground economy likely represents somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of an urban economy. This was too large to ignore. If my hunch about New York's black market economy was right—if the underground was organizing people in new ways that shrugged off constraints of the past, sending people across borders with a new mix of soft and hard skills—then it could very well be redefining the underlying organization of the city as a whole. Sociology couldn't neatly put Shine in his drug dealer box and Margot in her madam box and Analise in her Tiffany box and hope even to make sense of it all, much less grasp its potential scope.

Yes, this was the most meaningful question. Economists might
try to pin down the individual ingredients people needed to jump up a class—education, experience, know-how, etc.—or they might focus on how big each class was and what percentage of income they made legally and illegally or how much the government lost in failing to tax black markets. But a sociologist could ask whether
new
classes were forming, new cultures and new ways of living that had the potential to make over the global city.
That
was the worthy goal, the paradigm shift that could effect meaningful change. Imagine a future Giuliani who saw the underground as vital to the city, a vibrant place that welcomed immigrants and provided a wide range of skills and services. He might then stop enacting what the urbanist Neil Smith calls “revanchist” policies, in which the modus operandi is to kick out the disenfranchised standing in the way of gentrification. He might even look at the informal and sometimes illegal adventurers of the underground as important new voices in the great urban chorus.

Actually, this was already happening in the developing world. Many governments had realized they couldn't stop people from bartering, devising off-the-books credit schemes, or failing to report their income, so they just accepted it and tried to make sure it didn't harm either individuals or society at large. For example, in the BRIC nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China—governments have put large sums of money behind programs that merge existing informal moneymaking schemes with modern enhancements like microlending and skills training. The point isn't to legalize prostitution or build a better drug trade, but to direct the resources of human will and aspiration in a more productive direction. Couldn't a New York mayor recognize these underground traders, brokers, and ne'er-do-wells in the same way?

With my pen in hand, I mulled over what I had learned from Margot, Carla, Analise, and Shine. They differed in many ways but all seemed to have one thing in common: the refusal to let race or sex or even wealth keep them in their designated social slots.
Once again, I wondered if they could be said to make up a distinct social class of their own, a kind of third class suspended between the two worlds they inhabited. Maybe that was too highfalutin' a question. But “criminal” was such an imperfect word to describe them, considered in the fullness of their actions. These people were seekers. As much as the peppiest young entrepreneur in any Silicon Valley garage, they dreamed of changing their worlds. And in their daily lives as ordinary citizens and consumers, their illegitimate earnings helped many legitimate businesses stay afloat. In that sense, they were pillars of the community.

Again, my instinct told me that the answer lay in connecting the underworld to the overworld. But here I was still facing the old problem of tracing those connections. Since the higher classes don't seem to give social scientists the same respect and deference as the poor—Margot seemed to take downright pleasure in treating me like a clueless child—I had to find another way to gain a more profound level of trust. Again I heard the voice of Professor Cicourel. “You're never neutral when you go out there,” he told my very first class on fieldwork. “Understanding what
you
mean in
their
world is your greatest advantage.”

What he meant was, you are never a “scientist” to people in the field, because they just translate your reality into their terms. So my role in the ghettos of Chicago became “poor graduate student.” This isn't a question of concealment so much as the opposite, revealing what you want and who you really are. I just let people know the questions I cared about and the problems I wanted to solve so they could come up with their own ideas about how to participate. Instead of seeing my work as
extractive
—me sucking information out of them—I learned to think of it as
collaborative
: us working on joint problems together. Fortunately, it turns out most people like helping graduate students.

Now I had to find fresh ways to collaborate, a fresh role to inhabit. I didn't want to be a tourist, but I couldn't pass for a real
insider either. I certainly wasn't a pimp or coke dealer or strip club investor. My real interest was basically unchanged from the grad student days: just to document their lives as accurately as possible. So if I was going to reveal what I really wanted and who I really was in terms that would translate effectively, maybe I should be . . .

A documentary filmmaker! It helped that I actually
was
a documentary filmmaker. I had learned that while the wider public often didn't see what academic knowledge would do for them, they seemed to find the idea of collaborating on a film more attractive. The academic articles could come later, when trust was built and I had a better sense of what research I might undertake. And maybe there would be actual documentaries; some of the stories had a lot of promise.

Of course, I ran the risk of annoying the stuffier solons of the academy. For them you wear either the scholar hat or the filmmaker hat, and the idea of any blurring in status is horrifying. But I thought the precise medium for storytelling was irrelevant and the important thing was to meet the audience where the audience gathered—not to be “correct” in some dusty library. Wearing the filmmaker hat would mean working in a different way with people like Margot: as collaborators instead of scientist and subject. And as soon as that idea entered my mind, I could see how she would welcome the change. It might finally erase the distinctions that were keeping us apart.

I would have to be careful. In the wake of infamous research studies like the Tuskegee trials, in which scientists let syphilis go untreated in order to study it, universities set up systems to verify the use of ethical methods. At Columbia, there were several boards that vetted research. I had always followed their rules closely, using false names and fake addresses so that no one could trace my notes back to individuals, and it had approved my formal study on sex workers. I also contacted these boards when I first started to hang
out with Shine, but when I explained I had no research questions and wasn't gathering data, just trying to meet people who might help me reach such goals at some point in the future, it stamped my activity “journalism” and left me to find my own way. Still, I wanted to know whether there were any special rules for filmmaking.

I asked for a meeting, which took place in a quiet conference room, the footfalls of students echoing in the hall outside. “How do I apply for approval if I'm about to interview women for a film—not for scientific research?” I asked.

“Why are you making films?” a board member asked.

“Am I not allowed to make films?”

“You're a scientist. They usually don't make films.”

“But I do.”

I told them about my documentary on Chicago housing projects, which was soon to air on PBS.

One board member sighed. “Well, that kind of creativity makes our lives difficult.”

“Films are journalism,” another board member said. “We don't monitor journalism.”

“So if it's journalism, I don't need to fill out any paperwork?”

“No.”

They dismissed me with a request that I bring no more petitions concerning journalism or filmmaking.

•   •   •

M
y instinct proved solid. Once I started talking about the possibility of filming a testament to her unique world, Margot became much more interested in helping me. She said the hardest places to access would be strip clubs, so she accompanied me to several around the city and introduced me to the managers. Even after the first hour in their presence, with Margot in the room, I got a fresh picture of their jobs as a mixture of salespeople, security
directors, and personnel directors. They talked about the diversity of dancers they needed to keep on staff to cater to the wide variety of tastes men had, which increasingly included an indeterminate mixture of blacks, Asians, and Latinas they referred to using the blanket term “ethnics.” From the drift of the conversation, it became clear they were hoping Margot would become their conduit to these populations, which gave me a new sense of the scale of her operation.

All of the managers said that, in a perfect world, they'd keep the sex work off premises. “Look, I know it has to happen,” one said, “because men want it. But I can't stand the hookers that come in. Better they go to the hotels in the Bronx, where nobody gives a damn.”

The newcomers were the worst, another said. “They think the clubs are going to be the safest place—off the streets, with security all around. Maybe they pick up a guy and go to a hotel, or screw them in the back. But these amateurs—that's what they really are—they're usually the first to get hurt because they don't know what's going on. Either their dates beat them up or my guys do.”

The police officers I knew said much the same. They'd also seen a remarkable increase in the number of “amateurs,” often women who began as dancers or actors and decided to sell sexual services on the side. The cops were also struck by the increasingly wide range of backgrounds of the sex workers they were arresting, who came from every country in Eastern Europe and Central America, plus Asia and Africa too. They rattled off strings of place names as if they were trying to win a prize for naming all the countries on the globe.

After the strip club introductions, Margot set up three calls with managers of escort agencies. The idea was the same: she would be on the line to back me up and intervene should I say anything amiss; I would talk generally about my research interests and see if I could establish a level of trust.

I wasn't quite sure how to prepare. The standard first step in sociology is a review of the existing literature, but there was no existing scientific literature on madams and pimps. The standard first step for documentarians is similar: have other films been made on this topic? The pickings were slim. I decided to treat these interviews essentially as prep work, asking the women to help me understand exactly how to approach their colleagues so as to ensure participation.

In this way, I was able to gather a surprising amount of information. All three of Margot's contacts were women in their thirties. Two were divorced, one engaged. Two had college degrees. One had a background in corporate human resources and the other two had held various administrative and sales positions. Working three or four nights a month, they made between eighty thousand and a hundred thousand dollars a year. Two rented, the third owned a condo in Brooklyn. Each employed five or six women and numerous irregulars who floated between sex trade and straight work. But these facts were less interesting than the way the managers answered the questions, using their education and savvy to calculate their responses on the fly. That was the main reason there was so little research on the role of the underground economy in the lives of the middle class and the wealthy, I realized. They were too smart for us. They could see us coming. And while participating in the cause of “scholarship” may have seemed a distant, abstract, or worthless pursuit to them, they all loved the idea of the documentary. Although I didn't know it at the time, I was standing at the dawn of the reality TV age, when the trade-off between shame and fame had begun to disappear. But instead of looking down on this as mere hunger for celebrity, I began to see it in the opposite way: as a beautiful desire to translate their experiences to the wider world in the most popular medium of the era.