Floating City (3 page)

But Analise was in no condition to see the humor. “I knew from the start he was ripping me off,” she was saying. “But I always thought he'd fess up, you know? Just hit rock bottom and promise to pay it back. But there was always more coke, and more drinking, and more fighting.”

I said I was sorry, and realized I meant it.

“Now I'll be all alone,” she said.

She reached for the box of Kleenex on the table. “Sudhir, I want
to tell you something. I don't really trust a lot of people with this . . .”

At that moment, I felt a tingle up my neck. Analise wanted to confess, to share, to make me see her in the round and recognize her hidden qualities. I had been at this exact point so many times before. Waiting for moments like this is my job, basically. They are a wonderful gift of trust from one person to another. All I had to do was receive her message in the calm, detached, professional way I usually did. But after a decade of listening to Chicago's underworld and nearly half that time in New York, I still found it hard to listen to these confessions, and this one felt especially hard. I wasn't prepared for this from someone successful, someone who didn't need to be crossing into the underworld—someone I
knew.

She didn't seem to notice my dismay at all. “There are a lot of people whose money he took,” she continued. “I wish it was just mine, but he has other people's money.”

That sent me reeling in another direction. Other people's money? This answered Question A but raised a few more:

e) What other people?

f) Why did she have their money?

g) What were they likely to do when they found out their money was gone?

A lot more of the alphabet was still to come, I feared.

Analise ducked her head, looking shy for a moment. “Do you remember what I told you about Brittany?”

I assumed she meant about her dating rich men. Or maybe something with drugs, which would make more sense to me—I had trouble seeing Brittany as anybody's courtesan.

“Yes, of course,” I said. “I hope she's having more success—or maybe not!”

“Well, I guess I should've told you more about her.”

“Like I said, you don't have to—”

“I manage her.”

I went silent as I considered various possible interpretations of the word “manage.” The previous night's conversation about Boston came back and I remembered Brittany saying she was tired of dinner. And I remembered what Analise had said back.

“And a bunch of other girls,” Analise added.

“Wow. Okay,” I said. I felt a crazy impulse to just get up and leave the room, until I remembered I was in my own home. “That's great!”

Trying to act casual, I practically shouted the words.

“It's not fucking great,” Analise said. “Please don't treat me like an idiot.”

“No, I mean—not
great
but just, you know, great for you if that's, you know—”

She cut into my babble with force. “I make
good
money. Money that J.B. fucking stole. And I keep some of their cash because they don't feel safe keeping it at home. Which J.B. also stole.”

With that, the whole story came out. She didn't get started managing women like Brittany through planning or ambition, she said. It's just that everyone else was so incompetent
.
Brittany would offer to pay for the hotel room—at the St. Regis! Her friends were worse. They'd pay for town cars, they'd pay for dinner, even supply a little free cocaine. The men were totally taking advantage of them. In no time at all, Analise had doubled their earnings. It was organizational skills like everything else, scheduling and getting people paid, simple stuff really. But success attracted other clients and one day Analise woke up and realized she was running a business, just as she'd told her parents she would. And a fairly substantial one. “I'm good at it,” she said with a shrug. “What can I say?”

I didn't know how to respond. I was still in a state of shock.

“I feel like I'm helping people,” she added.

Those exact words I had heard many times before. Criminals always try to frame their actions in some high-minded way. Sex
workers tell me they are “therapists” offering a quasi-medical service. Drug dealers say they are taking money away from the bad elements in their community. And even though all my training and personal inclinations discouraged judgment, it was disturbing to hear the same words—the same rationalization exactly—from Analise. I couldn't resist the response that blurted out. “That's what they all say.”

She seemed surprised that I'd challenged her so bluntly. She thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “I guess I like the thrill of it,” she admitted.

Finally, I felt my professional side start to stir. If we were going to go down this road, she was going to have to take me a little more seriously. “Listen, you know I study this stuff,” I began, using my best college professor voice. “I don't judge the others, and I won't judge you.”

She nodded.

“But you're a—”

I didn't want to say “pimp” or “madam.” I paused to gather my thoughts.

“You're a
broker.
That's different.”

“You say 'different' in a judgmental way. You just said you weren't going to judge me.”

“I mean different like more dangerous. I don't think you have any idea what you're getting into, or how vulnerable you are.” I knew I was hemming and hawing and that judgment was underneath it. Most of the time, I just took in whatever craziness people told me about their lives. But I had seen terrible things happen in this world. Over and over, I'd seen people who were basically good acting savagely in the name of money and fear and respect. I kept coming back to the difference in our relationship. Maybe Analise was something short of a true friend, but she wasn't a research subject either. Should I take out my notebook or conduct an intervention? I didn't know.

“What I'm doing is not like what Brittany is doing,” she said. “If I was doing that, forget it. My friends, my reputation, my whole world would be over. But this is different. I'm just a manager.”

What psychological mechanism, I wondered, persuades an intelligent, sophisticated person to believe in superhero powers of invisibility and invincibility? I was both fascinated and outraged. “This whole
world
is dangerous! You think you can keep it a secret? You really think Brittany isn't telling anyone?”

She thought for a moment, then shrugged sheepishly. “Well, maybe. But I'll deny deny deny.”

Was she really stumbling into this so thoughtlessly? Should I keep listening to these foolish rationalizations? Or should I be the good friend who shocks her back into clear-eyed thought? After all, I was a student of this world. I knew more than I ever wanted to know about its pitfalls and tragedies. The least I could do was give her some idea of the trouble she was getting into.

“Can I tell you the number one thing the 'brokers' I know worry about? It's not the police.”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“It's the image. The idea that they use drugs and violence to maintain their hold over confused young girls who were probably sexually abused by uncles and fathers. That's what makes it okay to send them to jail for a long time. I mean, weren't you sharing cocaine with Brittany last night? Imagine how that would sound in court.”

“That's fucking crazy!” Analise yelled, throwing herself back on the couch so hard she spilled her vodka. “You've seen Brittany! Like I have to force drugs on her so she'll obey my evil wishes.”

“I don't think that 'like I have to force drugs on her' is going to be an effective defense in court,” I said.

Calmer now, I went into professional sociologist mode. The need to put Analise's activities into an analytic frame took over. “How many women do you manage?”

From my voice, you'd think I had a clipboard and a number 2 pencil.

Analise's eyes widened. She wasn't expecting specific questions. But I have found that specific and even minutely detailed questions actually relax people, grounding their confessions in scientific objectivity.

“Five,” she answered. “Sometimes six or seven. But five on a regular basis.”

“Okay, five,” I said. Pondering the other people I knew in her line of work and all the activities I had entered into little boxes and charts over the last few years, I began running the numbers in my head. “So you're pulling in, I'd say, at least five thousand dollars per week. At least. But I figure that probably five weeks won't be profitable because you'll be on vacation or whatever, so I'd say you'll earn about a hundred thousand dollars a year on this. And you're probably laundering it through Max, yes?”

Max was her family lawyer. I knew him from some foundation work. Her expression showed me I had scored a direct hit.

“So you're evading currency laws and tax laws and banking six figures and you're telling me you've never even nudged any one of your five young employees to work extra or keep working or—what was it you told Brittany yesterday? 'So just drink'?”

“That's an awful thing to say,” Analise said.

“I'm sorry, but you're a 'broker.' That's what brokers do.”

“That really hurts, Sudhir.”

“Think about it, Analise. Have you had that conversation yet, the one where one of the women says she wants to stop? You'd lose twenty thousand dollars a year. Are you sure you won't try to talk her into sticking it out just a little bit longer? 'Just one more time'? What if Junebug says he'll leave you if you don't give him money to buy an amazing script he found?”

The vodka was making me belligerent. She ducked her head and I continued.

“I
know
this shit, Analise. One night something bad happens in some fucked-up hotel and they come crying to you and you talk them down. You calm them. You may even call the dude and calm
him
because you don't want him to be a threat and you're the perfect broker-manager-psychiatrist who thinks of everything and covers all the bases. And you feel great! Because you did it! You came through! They needed you and you got the job done! And you got paid! And maybe you even got the client to pay you extra to keep things out of the press, because, well . . . that's just how
good
you
are
.”

By then, Analise was crying. When I noticed, I felt awful. The poor thing just got beat up by her boyfriend and here I was haranguing her. “I'm sorry,” I said. “That was really uncalled-for.”

“You're right,” she said. “I'm a pimp.”

“No! I got carried away. You took me by surprise.”

“But I
like
this job,” she said. “I like helping these girls. I
am
helping them.”

Suddenly she lifted her head up and started to laugh. “And okay, no, I am not Mother Teresa. I do like the thrill of it. I do. I like
crime.
”

The truth was, Analise probably
was
helping them. In the high-paid world of New York prostitution, I had learned, the majority of “brokers” were women who “age out” by moving from selling their bodies to managing or “helping” others who did. And all the ones I had met were, like Analise, white and fairly well educated. They played a variety of roles, from consigliere to confidante. The best helped their women find doctors and lawyers and helped them manage their money—for a fee, of course—by laundering it and setting up legitimate bank accounts. They offered counsel in times of trouble and got them out of jail with a call to a friendly cop. Eventually, some even helped them exit the sex trade for marriage or a comfortable retirement. As much as I could have sat there
describing this underground sorority, I mostly wanted Analise to see the dark side too.

But this was a good place to stop. I suggested she get some sleep.

She looked up at me with a shy expression. “Will you keep on talking to me about this stuff? Not tonight, but sometime. It feels good to talk about it, and nobody else understands.”

This made me feel very strange. Again, listening to intimate confessions is my job. Trust is an emotion I've spent a lifetime learning to encourage. But on this night something was off. In my teaching and writing, I would often repeat with confidence a statement that now strikes me as downright reckless:
The poor live in the same world as you and me, and it's the job of the sociologist to demonstrate these relationships.
Now Analise was teaching me an uncomfortable truth. In real life, I did seem to feel more comfortable studying people of a lower economic and educational level. I hated admitting it. It hurt to admit it. But it was true. I had been trained to fit people into boxes, to draw lines between drug dealer and sex worker and rich kid and socialite. In fact, the entire premise of academic sociology is that each individual has his own little world and economy that can be studied and charted out, so the smart thing to do, in order to document social roles, is find people who are
not
changing.

My own background was hobbling me too. Like it or not, as a “Chicago sociologist” I had internalized the idea that the Chicago style of urban living was universal: that people stayed in neighborhoods segregated by race and class, blacks with blacks and whites with whites, poor separated from rich, and their children living in the same way, the patterns passed down through generations. Now
that
was a setting handmade for a sociologist. All an eager, aspiring young ethnographer had to do was hang out long enough for the locals to let you into their lives. Shine had been telling me since our very first meeting to get a car and drive around the city and get a
feeling for the immensity of it—the huge variety of communities and peoples and neighborhoods—but I'd dismissed it as the usual boilerplate advice people give tourists. The truth was, despite all my own concerns about the transition from Chicago and my tentative steps into the rich variety of worlds contained in the city of New York, broad and shallow was just not my style. I really did believe in immersion. Find a place, hang out, get to know the people, and keep coming back. But Shine kept pushing me. “You need to move around more, you understand? I keep telling you, but you don't listen.” Now I was realizing that Shine and Analise were teaching me the same thing. So were many of the other New Yorkers I had met and studied. They were all pointing me away from the idea of static, unchanging lives to the themes of movement and change. Instead of drawing boundaries, they were crossing them. Instead of looking for places to anchor their work, they were constantly pulling their anchors up and putting them down elsewhere, wherever a new opportunity arose. My challenge was similar. New York was different and it needed its own kind of sociology. It required new concepts beyond
neighborhood
and a new method of immersion that wasn't fixed in place. These people were on the move. That was the defining fact about them, and their true community seemed to be the sum of all the relationships they were forging, the many social ties that they formed as they crossed the terrain of the city. So losing the notion of geographic areas as primordial urban units of socialization was my first step.