Floating City (4 page)

But what did it mean to frame “community” as a network? Especially in the underground economy, a dangerous place by definition, where patterns of life were fragile and elusive? And these New Yorkers were moving not just in physical space; they were also reaching beyond their preordained lot in life. Capturing this might mean setting aside other equally tried-and-true sociological principles, such as
Where we come from defines who we are
or
Education is
the key predictor of success
. Those truisms weren't going to explain why a crack dealer was going to art shows or why the daughter of a wealthy financier was moonlighting as a madam. I was watching entrepreneurship in its truest and fullest sense, risk taking for both material gain and personal transformation. Since New York's underground economy gave its residents a chance to reinvent themselves across worlds—since it was the chance encounter across predictable boundaries that could bring people like Shine and Analise more dollars or stature—I needed a sociology built less on neighborhoods and more on the networks anthropologist Clifford Geertz called “webs of significance.” By watching the underground economy's hidden strivers, I could record a form of social mobility that had little to do with college degrees or handshakes at corporate boardrooms. And though the pursuits of the underground were the timeless essence of New York, money and success, they also spoke to what the city was becoming in the twenty-first century: global in feel and increasingly fast paced, its people endlessly shuttling across familiar social landscapes and tribal boundaries as they wove new patterns in the world. This was the future being made, and I was there to document it.

My excitement began to rise.

At the same time, so did a queasy feeling. None of these ideas felt solid or certain or quantifiable on a spreadsheet in any way. They felt like quickened breaths, much like the ones I took when Analise told me about her new profession. I wasn't in formal research mode and certainly couldn't explain any of this in a way that would be comprehensible to most of my colleagues. I hadn't yet done any of the things a good researcher should do: design a careful study, be a skeptic, find more data, and keep questioning until some version of truth arose. But the feeling alone was already raising fundamental questions about how I did my work and what it was good for. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I was compelled to ques
tion the framework that had given so much meaning to my life, the lines I had drawn around myself. I couldn't sit. I had to move. I had to follow where things took me.

•   •   •

I
left Analise sitting on the guest room bed, a bit forlorn and a bit drunk, a beautiful, lost girl who had somehow become an enthusiastic criminal. I walked back down the hall and stood in the doorway to the living room. The vodka glasses were still on the table. I was woozy too, drunker than I'd thought. A drifting feeling washed over me, maybe the oldest feeling I knew: the fear of being unmoored and unattached and lost. I had no idea what to do next.

This unsettling doubt was the flash that finally lit up the pattern in the rich chaos of the last five years. Five years of prostitutes, drug dealers, madams, johns, porn clerks, and cops finally began to make sense, or at least hint at the possibility of making sense. The first pages of this book had just been written, and now all I had to do was learn how to read them—to understand this story, and my own.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

N
ow spin the wheel back to those first tentative steps. A new century was looming, bright and shining with possibility. I was settling into New York City, starting my exciting new job at Columbia University as a young professor striking out for the first time. I couldn't wait to set up a new apartment, get to know my new colleagues and students, and develop some new research projects.

A few warning signs appeared. My wife and I felt conflicted about leaving Chicago. I started to feel guilty about moving us out of the comfortable home we had created in the Midwest.

Columbia wasn't the easiest place to start my career, but it was the best place. The university had a reputation for treating young faculty poorly. Rarely did they grant tenure, and when they did, junior professors were still thought of as expendable labor. Most of my friends and advisers urged me not to take the job. But I turned down the other offers that came my way—including one from the downtown competitor, NYU—because I was hungry and I felt I needed the stature and challenge of an Ivy League badge. The pressure cooker of the University of Chicago taught me that I needed a high-stakes environment to motivate me.

The department was going through a period of transition. In a bitter struggle between two competing visions of sociology, Herbert Gans represented the discipline's original aim. A public intellectual who wrote for a wide audience, he carried the mantle of the great old Columbia sociologists, like Robert Merton and C. Wright
Mills, who combined vivid storytelling with thoughtful explorations of great national issues.

But a genuine respect for this tradition sat uneasily next to the growing belief that sociology should be a science. Gans's contemporaries, like Harrison White (a trained physicist) and his enigmatic and ambitious student Peter Bearman, were formalists who fought for a much narrower, lab-coat view of the discipline, focusing on objective research and academic sobriety. This had been the trend since the 1960s, when young sociologists decided to fight for their legitimacy as scientists by drawing a contrast with the swashbuckling anthropologists and new journalists. Opinions hardened to the point where many scholars had a knee-jerk definition of academic quality—if too many people can read your work, it must not be very good. But if you could quantify your research and make it sufficiently unreadable, then you were onto something. Translated into my life, the warning was simple: “Write
only
for sociologists, because a popular book might jeopardize your chances for tenure.”

I was caught in the middle, searching for my own way. Truth be told, I shared the same view of sociology as Bearman and the scientists: only through careful, systematic observation and analysis could we really learn about the world. I didn't want to give that up. In my own career, I had gained a great deal of credibility by being objective and attentive to detail. Being seen as a scientist opened up doors and helped me to avoid the “activist” label used to dismiss researchers who become advocates for various methods of social change. I spent as much time with White and Bearman as I could, learning as much as I could about their approach.

At the same time, I knew I was hired because my research spoke to social issues like race, inequality, and the fate of our cities, subjects that fell squarely into Columbia's legacy of encouraging the public intellectual tradition. In this regard, I had already been schooled by working with Professor William Julius Wilson in Chicago. As my graduate adviser, Wilson always insisted that the scien
tific method alone was incapable of swaying the opinion of policy makers or the public. You also had to write well. You had to tell a story. Wilson would do it with epochal books like
The Declining Significance of Race
and
The Truly Disadvantaged
,
in which his vivid and passionate writing reached beyond the academic community and changed the way his generation looked at poverty. I wanted to reach out to a larger audience too, to touch hearts and minds of people who were riding the train to work as well as those sitting in offices making public policy.

With this in mind, I had spent many hours in the university archives in Chicago researching the history of the field. I discovered that the two contrasting visions were, in fact, the original tension that caused its birth. One of the founding fathers was Robert Park, a journalist by training. He argued for a sociology that could inform the public. He incorporated the criticisms of the scholars who were pushing for a more scientific, empirical approach, recognizing the dangers, inherent in journalism, of anecdotal portraits that proved nothing of broader significance. In the piles of archival notes I noticed that one scholar had scribbled, “Rigor and Relevance.” That summed it up for me: truthful, scientifically valid insights that are comprehensible and that speak to timely social issues. I tried to achieve these two objectives with my first book for the general public,
Gang Leader for a Day.
Its success meant that a few more people understood the complicated struggles for America's urban poor, from their complex strategies for putting food on the table to fending off the local drug lord. More truth and fewer clichés meant better social policy and, ultimately, better lives for the people I studied. That was the theory, anyway.

But the two visions were like warring bulls. If you went too deep into storytelling, you were labeled a journalist. If you went too far into hard-nosed, number-crunching science, you were doomed to the bookshelves of specialists. When I arrived at Columbia, I couldn't find a middle ground. Although my colleagues were sup
portive and encouraging, everyone gave me the same intimidating advice: publish in the leading journals (which were all dominated by scientists) or you won't receive tenure. It seemed that I would have to pursue wider relevance at my own risk.

For me, it was a devil's bargain. As an ethnographer, I was confronted with a problem that went far beyond literary style. My specialty was selecting from the chaos and splendor of the given world one small part that could stand for the whole: the perfect research topic, the world in a grain of sand. But the approach of the lab coats was statistical. They favored long questionnaires, computer analysis, lots of numbers from the United States Census. They'd laugh at me if I focused on one small part of the city. And I couldn't even argue that they were completely wrong. I wasn't a journalist studying individuals. What I found
had
to be applicable to a bigger population. I would have to say something about the entire city—
all New Yorkers
!
And right then, I could barely find the subway.

•   •   •

S
tart with what's comfortable,
I told myself,
and hope it takes you somewhere
. Since my work on Chicago crack dealers was my academic foundation, it made sense to start from there. My entry point came via Michael Clark, a major player in the Midwest drug scene. I had known him for years and written about him without upsetting him too much. Back in 1997, he had offered me the help of a cousin in New York called Shine. “He'll hook you up,” he promised. Then he took my notebook into his hands and wrote down a phone number.

I didn't call Shine right away. I wanted to discover the city on my own, and calling Shine felt like a crutch. But after stumbling around Harlem trying to strike up conversations with drug dealers and sex workers without much success, I got out the notebook and dialed the number.

Shine lived less than a mile from my new apartment, it turned out, but he was down in Harlem and I was up in Morningside Heights. Coming to New York, I had expected a replay of my experience at the University of Chicago, where arriving students were given maps divided into safe and unsafe neighborhoods and warned repeatedly about which ones to avoid—all the black neighborhoods, basically. And to some extent, the tiny incline of Morningside Park, one block long and barely steep enough to be called a hill, did create an invisible barrier between the worlds of Columbia University and Harlem.

But here was my first lesson, unnoticed at the time, in the ways in which New York is not Chicago. The friendly neighborhood bar I had just discovered was also Shine's friendly neighborhood bar. A warm and unpretentious place where most of the customers worked for small local businesses, it was a pleasant contrast to the university environment and certainly better than the noisy off-campus places jammed with students. I'd leave the West End to the ghosts of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. I just felt more comfortable among working people.

Shine laughed when I told him the name of the bar. “Hell, I'll be there tonight watching the game,” he said. “Drop on by.”

When I headed over after work, walking fast in the brisk winter air, I wondered how I could have overlooked a major ghetto drug dealer among the ordinary working people. But when I saw him, I immediately saw why. Shine was a large man, fit and athletic, with a quiet, watchful presence, but his dark blue pants and dark shirt made him look like a U.S. postal worker taking a break after the day's shift. In a room of uniformed men, nearly all black and Latino, he blended right in.

I ordered a drink from the bar and carried it to his booth, sitting down across from him.

For a moment, we didn't speak—just sat, surprisingly comfortable, taking each other in.

“How's Michael?” Shine finally asked, his white teeth making a crisp contrast against his red lips and black skin as he smiled. “How's he living?”

“Good, good,” I muttered. “He's settling down.”

“That nigger's been settling down since he came into this world,” Shine said.

“Yeah, but if you're that good . . .”

You don't even need to try
, the old line was. Ghetto wisdom. I didn't have to finish the thought because Shine knew just what I meant, and he knew that I knew that he knew. Social codes like this are how people signal their allegiances, and I had learned them well during my long immersion in Chicago's drug culture.

“He's good with people,” Shine continued, speaking with respect. “Knows how to get them moving. Nigger practically turned around his neighborhood, that's what I heard.”

By this, Shine meant that Michael had taken such effective dictatorial control of his drug block that he'd made it both safe (which made his neighbors cooperative) and extremely profitable, all while staying out of jail. In response, I tried to stay positive without endorsing his crimes.

“Yeah, he's successful—and his kid, Jackie, she's going to take over the world. She's five. What an amazing little kid.”

Trying to fill in the silence between small talk, I added, “New York's not as friendly as Chicago.”

Shine looked skeptical. “You like friendly people?”

“Sure. Of course. Who doesn't?”

“This ain't Chicago, my brother,” Shine said. “You can't get far with friendly out here.”

But then he frowned and looked at me more closely, pondering the mystery of my character for a long, silent moment. Finally, he came to a conclusion. He nodded and lifted his glass to take a gulp of ice. “I can see how you got along with niggers,” he said. “You
don't seem all that scary, so they can't see you coming. That's how you get 'em to tell you all our secrets, ain't it?”

The way he said it, laughing and crunching the ice between his teeth, it came out like the sly compliment of one hustler to another. I couldn't help feeling a momentary pleasure.

“So what next? What's your plan?” Shine said. “You want to move into the projects here?”

This had been on my mind since the day I'd arrived in the city, of course.
What next? What should I study?
The thing I'd noticed right away was the same thing everybody notices, the special energy of the place. Chicago's beauty was wrapped up in its Midwestern sameness, the predictable rhythms of its people, the solid embrace of caste and clan. In contrast, New York seemed like chaos barely held together. I wanted to do something that tapped into that somehow. Even if I could put all the office politics aside, another study of crack gangs trapped in the projects didn't seem the most promising pursuit.

“So this will be the last time I see you,” Shine said.

“Maybe,” I answered.

We stayed very solemn for a moment, then cracked up laughing. Relaxing another notch, we drifted into a conversation about Michael and the other Chicago characters we had in common, which became the story of how I'd wandered into the projects one day and got taken hostage by Michael's gang. “Next thing I know, I'm moving in—and seven years go flying by.”

Shine kept his head down, a diamond glittering in his ear. “Michael said you were writing a book,” he said.

In my experience, there was one good way to explain an enterprise like mine to someone like Shine. “Everybody's got to hustle,” I said.

Shine nodded solemnly at the tabletop. “Everyone hustles,” he agreed. “Especially around here.”

So we understood each other. We were good. I went back to my current obsession. “The city seems too big, too hard to get my hands around. I'm not sure where to start. I'm not sure where to hang out. How do I even know where the significant locations are going to be?”

Shine was about to get up to refresh his drink, but the bartender made a motion to stay put; he would bring a drink over. Shine settled back into his chair with a sigh. He could see that I was frustrated. Setting up a pattern that would last for many years, he responded with matter-of-factness. “Just keep on keepin' on, that's what my auntie says.”

“Yeah, but keep on keeping on
where
?”

He laughed. “That's exactly what
I
said.”

For a moment he was quiet. The noise of the bar rose up around us and pushed us closer together. Shine leaned forward and shook his head. “Shit, I've been doing the same thing for years. I'm getting itchy, man. I keep asking myself, What next? What's the next thing I can get into and
do
something with? So I was talking to my auntie and she says that—'Just keep on keeping
on,
nephew'—and I sit there thinking to myself, What the
fuck
is this woman talking about? Has she even heard the concerns I am expressing? The whole
point
is
where to go
.”