Floating City (8 page)

But Shine was already standing near the doorway to the back room. “Come on back here for a minute, Angela,” he said.

She gave me another melting smile and turned away.

“Jun, come too,” Shine said. “I need to talk with both of you. Sudhir, just watch the cash register for a few minutes.”

“What if people want something?”

“Just take their money,” Shine said.

I stepped behind the counter, feeling nervous and ridiculous. I had no idea how to open up the register.

The floor behind the counter was raised so the clerks could see better down the aisles—four aisles, eight walls, probably a thousand videotapes and DVDs on each wall. I'd never been surrounded by so much pornography. And I had no idea what I was doing here. Who was this Indian clerk and why was he in business with this amiable Latina woman? What did they have to do with Shine? What did they have to do with me?

“Yo—you guys got
Prison Girls Five
?”

A heavyset Latino man was calling up from aisle two, not even bothering to cross to the counter.

“Um, let me check,” I said.

I could see Shine speaking with Angela and Manjun in the far corner. They were all nodding their heads and interrupting one another, but I could only catch snatches of the conversation. Judging by the hand gestures, they were upset about something and feeling overwhelmed by life. Whatever it was, they seemed to be taking forever.

“I got to see those chicks in chains, bro. The Indian guy said you were getting it in.”

What would a real clerk say? Thinking of how I'd been treated by clerks in other situations, I aimed for the sweet spot between boredom and misanthropy. “Just what's on the shelf,” I said.

Two more patrons walked in. One asked if the store bought “used shit” from customers. “You have to come back when the manager is here,” I said. “Maybe twenty minutes?”

Finally, Manjun returned and traded places with me in the narrow space behind the counter. From the back of the store, Shine beckoned me. I walked down aisle two past a gauntlet of porn. In front of a metal shelf labeled “Foreign,” Shine and Angela waited like hosts on a receiving line.

“Angela said she and Manjun will help you,” Shine said. “Get her phone number. Or just come back and talk with Jun anytime. Sound good?”

“Sure,” I said tentatively, unsure where these introductions were going.

Angela gave me one more warm, motherly smile. Later, I would learn that Angela was not actually an employee of the store but a sex worker. This did not seem to affect her relationship with Manjun, however. The two of them worked together like partners. Manjun managed the store and earned extra income by allowing Angela and her friends to use the back room for their private dealings, with Shine providing drugs as necessary to Angela's friends and clients—a floating community if ever there was one. Angela was the glue that held it all together.

But right now, as I would soon learn, I was catching them just as demand for their services was disappearing due to the wider gentrification of the neighborhood. As strollers replaced strolling johns, the importance of their community would become significant in another way: as a way to see one another through the hardships to come.

“I'm not sure what Shine told you, but I'm a college professor,”
I began. “I'm working with an advocacy group in the city. I'm trying to study the world of—”

“I know, sweetie. I know,” Angela said, taking my arm and leading me toward the front of the store. “He told me you wanted to meet different kinds of people. I get it. But first— Well, since we're going to help you, we're in kind of a . . . Maybe you could help us a little? We're in a kind of
situación difícil
.”

Uh-oh. What had Shine promised them?

“Do you mind grabbing a few of those boxes and stocking the shelves? It's easy. The boxes are labeled and you just need to put things where they belong. Jun usually has a guy who comes around to help and he didn't show up today.”

Not knowing what else to do, I grabbed a box, opened it, and peeled away the blue plastic wrapping that held together each bundle of DVDs. I couldn't get over the adolescent sense that I was doing something wrong, but the sheer abundance of all the penises and breasts seemed to neutralize the effect. Box of porn in hand, I studied the shelves. Each section was clearly labeled with handwritten signs: “Gay,” “Extreme,” “For Women,” “New Adult,” “Bondage,” “New Releases,” “Foreign.” There was a sign for “Language” that stumped me for a moment. Did that mean foreign language or dirty language?

At the cash register, Shine, Manjun, and Angela were laughing about something. Shine knocked fists with Manjun and cast a look my way, grinning at the sight of me with a box of porn in hand. Then he hugged Angela and headed for the door, tossing me one last bit of advice:

“Have fun!”

•   •   •

S
hine didn't return for weeks. He and I both knew that I needed to get out of Harlem. My wheels were spinning and I'd been losing faith that I would see all that New York had to hide from the
law. I could tell that he'd grown tired of me complaining that I was not getting anywhere in my research. But the ride he gave me to Hell's Kitchen and to Manjun's store was exactly the boost I needed. Even this brief departure from Harlem helped me to focus my attention on the ways that different worlds came together underground. Just like Mortimer's bar, Manjun's store wove together a heady mix: Angela was Latino, but many of the sex workers who came in were Asian and Eastern European. If they couldn't afford a hotel room, they brought their clients—often white and working or middle class—to the video parlor. Day by day, the sex workers grew comfortable enough to discuss their dates with me in the room. Their repeat customers spanned the ethnic and class spectrum; a Midtown lawyer and a city bus driver were equally likely to shake Manjun's hand, pick up a DVD, and, if the mood was right, ask about a sex worker who might be free for a few hours. Cops dropped by nightly. Manjun always had free coffee and tea for them, though some came in for a little window shopping as well.

On many occasions, I saw acts of help and camaraderie like the ones I'd seen around Mortimer. Manjun's store had become a communication node like Mortimer's bar, where people came to advertise information and hear the latest news. When cops heard from Manjun that an abused woman was lying in a hotel, they sent over a social worker—a task police found much easier back in the days when prostitutes and social workers met one another on the streets. For cash under the table, doctors came to Manjun's store to service undocumented laborers who lacked insurance—two babies were delivered right there in the storeroom. Disputes were settled, small-business ventures were launched, women met men they could marry to acquire a resident alien card. On it went. Trading begat trading, all of which demanded reciprocity. Hang around long enough, and you were pulled into these exchanges. Fortunately, the longer I stayed, the more these locals began to associate me with Manjun. Eavesdropping on conversations was a lot easier when
people saw me as the nonthreatening Indian who stocked shelves, and the presumption of my low status also freed me up from having to enter into their schemes.

Gradually, between Mortimer and Manjun, I met people from a wide range of backgrounds who came together in this little underworld in a way that I had not seen in the Midwest. In the sex trade alone, I had seen empathetic doctors who sold pharma off the books, landlords who rented rooms by the month, loan sharks who laundered money, and fake-ID sellers who found visas for immigrant women. Each was rooted in a different community, but each spread roots far and wide across the city. I still had to figure out ways to observe people on the move—the invisible roots spreading, not the stately tree. I finally felt I had seen enough to be a contributor to a project with the Urban Justice Center, and even started to entertain the possibility of my own independent study down the road.

But I had already seen enough to temper any romanticism about the new New York. Yes, people were making connections and crossing boundaries. In fact, nearly everyone I met wanted to tell me how vast and interconnected the underground really was. Unfortunately, many of their stories turned out to be little more than boasts about underclass solidarity. It only took a little prodding to uncover darker tales of theft, physical abuse, deportation, and immigrants losing thousands of hard-earned dollars on off-the-books financial ventures gone awry. A few astute urbanists had tempered the celebration of global cities with warnings about how they would affect the underclass, pushing them into part-time jobs or the underground economy amid growing resentment against South Asians, Middle Easterners, and Muslims of various stripes. Some warned that Manhattan was becoming a “theme park.” Others pointed to city politicians who threw taxpayer dollars at high-profile financial service firms, a slap in the face to average New Yorkers who needed money for subways and schools.

More and more, I was seeing that life in this underworld couldn't have been more different from the Chicago projects where I'd last roamed. There, trust was an outcome of the likelihood of seeing the same neighbors day in and day out. Your enemy could be your business partner tomorrow and your romantic partner a year from now. Forgive and forget was practically a lease requirement. But when you entered new worlds with unfamiliar faces, how did the systems of trust and patterns of association
work
?
Predictability was vital in the underground, where people were always looking over their shoulders for the next predator, and the furious pace of New York only increased the anxiety. Just months after bringing his family to the United States, for example, Manjun was already beginning to see the Midtown sex trade crumble and his income from Angela and her friends disappear along with it. What did the global acceleration of people, resources, money, and opportunities do to the durability of social relationships? There must be new forms of danger to go with the new forms of opportunity, and I had to understand the hazards in order to understand the solutions.

Another thing that caught my attention in those early days was the flip side of failure and danger. Some people seemed to have been in the game for a long while—Shine and Angela, for example. They must have had a particular kind of competence that gave them the power to move across boundaries in more effective ways. What was the basis of that competence? That was the essential question that could lead to changes in government policy and new methods of helping this beleaguered community. But once again, I couldn't help but think of the Chicago model. There, a roaming gangster's best move was to befriend the local thug, cop, or community leader who could help him out of a jam. When Shine drove his car out of Harlem, who were his allies? Or were the assets softer here, like the capacity to talk your way out of trouble or into some juicy new scheme? Everyone who knew Shine talked about his
quiet, charismatic, persuasive nature. He was a “player,” they said. Perhaps his soft asset was a kind of proficiency across local languages and value structures, translating local idioms just like a UN diplomat working across international borders.

I had many questions, but still no answers. To add to the difficulty, the city itself was changing all around me. As Mayor Giuliani's second term ended, the city government had underwritten large-scale makeovers of seedier areas. Neighborhoods like Chelsea and the Lower East Side went through their spectacular rebirth as hip destinations for the young and artsy. Wall Street and Midtown saw an explosion in corporate relocations, and the middle and upper classes flocked back to the city along with the businesses that served them. Personally, I was still more comfortable sitting in a Chicago park where gangs have occupied the same corner for three generations, continuity that gave a historical context to what I was seeing. New York was making it hard for me to get too comfortable sitting in any one place. Without even looking for it, I was starting to experience the tension and dynamism my subjects lived with every day. Manjun's store may not be around much longer—
I had to float
.

THE SHIFTING GROUND BENEATH YOUR FEET

I
n the autumn of 2002, after my first few months of coming to the porn store, Manjun invited me out into the neighborhood. “Let us go make a walk and visit.” For a moment I felt as if I were back in Chicago, where my interview subjects often led me through their neighborhoods to teach me about their lives.

As Manjun walked, he held his head high with his hands interlaced behind his back in the Indian fashion, his balding head reflecting the neon lights above. “Mr. Sudhir,” he began, “you told me you are here with me because you want to see differently, yes?”

He was referring to a much interrupted conversation we had been conducting in the odd moments when there were no customers in his store. He knew I was anxious to get deeper into the underground economy in New York, and that one porn store in Hell's Kitchen could only be a piece of the story.

“Yes,” I answered. “Very much.”

He sensed my impatience.

“Mr. Sudhir, look and tell me what do you see?”

I looked around. I saw sex stores, bodegas, a diner, a Chinese takeout place, a few people standing around smoking cigarettes and drinking liquor from bottles in brown paper bags. Across the street, two Hispanic women shivered on the sidewalk as they met the gaze of passing drivers. “The usual scene,” I said.

“This is the most spiritual place in the city,” he said. “No doubt. No doubt.”

He dragged me up to a tall black man standing outside an adult video store. “Shoomi!” he cried. “How is your evening?”

The man responded with African formality. “Manjun, my friend. I am very well tonight. Please tell me, what is happening in your life? How is your family?”

Manjun said everyone was very well. “I want you to meet my very good friend. A
professor
! He teaches at the prestigious Columbia Collegiate University of New York. He is expert in human civilization. And
mathematics
.”

Like a good South Asian, Manjun always managed to reference my “mathematics” degree.

“He wants to look at the below-the-belly world,” Manjun explained. “The world of new people like us. He thinks we have no god.”

Manjun was joking, but I had to register outrage. “I didn't say that!” I turned to Shoomi, spreading my hands to show that I was a reasonable man, unlike certain other people on the sidewalk. “I study the black market, which some people call the
under
belly of society. Meaning the margins of society. The way Manjun says it, it sounds dirty.”

Shoomi put his hand on my shoulder affectionately. “Mr. Professor, don't get lost in the garbage. That is my message to you. The garbage will only distract you. You have to look at the people.”

“Yes, the people,” Manjun said.

“Still, there is a
lot
of garbage,” I said with a laugh.

Shoomi looked at me with pity. “Mr. Professor, I have been here five years. I have finally brought over to this country my wife and three daughters from Nigeria. The first week, I took my daughters on the train and I bring them here. I tell them, this is where I work. I work at this store, I work in this area. It is filled with many different kind of people. Lots of garbage. But the people are like you.
They are searching. We are all searching. That is what I told my daughters.”

Manjun suggested that I couldn't see the god because I didn't believe in God myself.

“Perhaps that is true,” Shoomi answered. “Americans are losing their faith. But are you American? You sound American, but don't act American.”

This was something I heard a lot from foreigners. I had too much patience to be American, they said. I was willing to let things unfold instead of trying to make them happen. I was never sure whether to be flattered or insulted. And explaining it always seemed like an endless pit of complication. “I was raised here,” I began, “but I was born in India and—”

“You are Indian then,” Shoomi said. “You are not born here.”

“Just like us!” Manjun cried.

With that Shoomi began naming the people he considered members of our improvised tribe, a litany that reminded me of the “begats” in the Bible. “Kurana at the gas station. Works all the time, prays all the time! Hindu. The newspaper stand is Ahmed—Muslim like me. Over there, getting on his bike, my good amigo José. Catholic. That police officer, very good man, also Catholic.”

“What about your friend Santosh?” Manjun said. “He prays a lot!”

“And your friend who works on weekends,” Shoomi said. “He is an imam, no?”

Of course, nobody wants to be lumped into an oppressed group. They wanted to be sure I saw them as more than a social problem. They were still coming up with names when a small brown man rolled up to us on a battered old bicycle, an empty thermal pizza box tied to the back.

“Carlos, my friend. What is happening in your life?” Shoomi said.

Carlos had a big smile on his face. His eyes were jet black and
full of excitement. He pointed a thumb backward toward his chest. “
Soy un padre
,” he said.

“Your baby came?” Shoomi translated. “Yes! Very good! Congratulations, Carlos!”

Carlos took out his wallet and produced a small picture of the mother, child, and some family members. “Very
pequeño
,” he said, looking for the English words.

“Very nice, Carlos. I send you from my heart all the prayers for great blessings for your child.”

But Manjun seemed concerned. “Are they coming here?”

Shoomi pointed at the photo and flapped his hands to mime a plane flying to the United States. “They come here?” he asked. He pointed to the sidewalk. “
Aquí?
”

Carlos looked sad. Shaking his head, he put the photo back in his wallet and said good-bye. As he rode off, I saw him wipe his eyes with the back of his hand.

“You see?” Shoomi said to me.

•   •   •

W
alking around Manjun's neighborhood helped me to make some quick counts. Within three blocks, there were nine porn stores like his. Some sold adult DVDs alongside music CDs and popular movies; others offered peep shows behind the adult video aisles. There were also live shows with female dancers. Many of these businesses operated illegally, which brought a steadily increasing level of risk. Ever since Mayor Giuliani launched his “quality of life” campaign to make the city more attractive to tourists and the returning suburbanites, the police had been cracking down on “nuisances” that ranged from squeegee men who cleaned car windshields at traffic lights to adult entertainment venues like Manjun's store. The squeegee men had mostly disappeared from view, and some of the store owners had moved to the industrial waterfronts of Queens and the Bronx. But most just toned down
the signage, moved the dirty stuff to the back of the store, and waited to see how hard things would get.

A week after our first walk around the neighborhood, Manjun introduced me to two homeless men who were masters of panhandling, squeegee work, recycling, petty theft, and shoplifting. Another time it was a South Asian kiosk vendor with a clever sideline in stolen passports and temporary work visas. Then the pastor of a church on Fifty-first Street who was famous for getting illegals day care and nanny jobs. He wanted me to see the goodness in his little corner of the world. But his innate desire to look on the bright side made me skeptical.

There were too many heartwarming tales. I had to have my own independent way of finding these stories, and I needed to see things for myself. For a sociologist, half the job is trying to see the holes in your theory. I needed more prostitutes, more pimps, more madams, more under-the-table employment brokers, more counterfeiters who dealt in fake social security cards—not just the Manjun-approved ones. I especially needed to find more illegal immigrants and learn how the underground economy helped keep them alive.

One day I told Shine about my frustration. I meant nothing by it. We were just talking and I was complaining in an ordinary way, as you would about any work problem. I told him that no one really had done a study on the complicated lives of people who toiled underground and it could really help my career. I may have admitted that I was starting to fear that Chicago was the only place I could be a successful academic. Okay, maybe I was whining.

The very next time I arrived at the store, Shine was standing at the counter laughing with Manjun. I had just begun to say hello when a customer came up with a mangled copy of a DVD. “Got a better copy of this?”

“I'll look in back,” I said.

Shine was amused. “They can't tell you apart, my brother. Your brown ass looks just as porn clerk as me and Jun.”

Manjun laughed too. “He find his true calling! Maybe he take my place!”

When I was digging through the boxes in the back room, Manjun left Shine at the cash register and came up to me. “I hear you want to meet some more people. You don't think I am helping you enough?”

“No, no, no,” I said. “You're helping me
so
much. I just think you want me to see the good things and good people here, and I'm researching, you know, the below-the-belly world.”

Manjun nodded and said to me bluntly, “Mr. Professor, I find what you need. Just know, please, that life changes. Sometimes it changes very fast. Look, I help you, okay? But anything you want, you should tell me now. Tomorrow, I don't know. You understand?”

“Not really,” I said.

Manjun was sweating, I noticed. And he had been wearing the same clothes for the last few weeks, which was unusual, because he was a fastidious man, attentive to his hygiene. He sat down on the cot and waved me away when I asked what was wrong.

I walked toward the front of the store and confronted Shine. “What did you say to him? He looks like he's having a heart attack!”

“Look, do you want my help or not?' Shine responded impatiently. “You wanted to find people like Jun, right? Jun said he'll find them. So what's the problem?”

“I don't want you to pressure him.”

Shine gave me a smile that said I didn't know how the world worked.

“You must be getting something out of this,” I said.

This may not have been the nicest thing to say. But it was frustrating dealing with all of Shine's secrecy, and since we couldn't talk openly about things, I often turned to sarcasm to express my concerns. And I may have been extra suspicious because my experi
ence in Chicago taught me that secrets could be dangerous. In one case, some local gang leaders used my research to find new underground traders to extort. But at the same time, trying to expand my list of contacts in order to gauge the feasibility of a study didn't seem too risky. I just didn't want to end up helping Shine expand his own business at my expense.

Now he was even more amused. “And what if I am getting something out of this, my brother? What if I am? We ain't in church, are we?”

In the underground, he was telling me, everyone is a user and everyone is a resource. I was no different.

Looking back, I have to admit he gave me fair warning.

•   •   •

F
rom the back room of the porn shop, I was beginning to map the ways that the local underground economy spread into the world beyond. My first priority was to interview enough women working indoors to finish my collaboration with the Urban Justice Center. Angela's help was crucial here. I spoke to dozens of streetwalkers right in the back of the store. Sometimes the women took me around the neighborhood and pointed out the doctor that gave them off-the-books health care, the bartender who stored their money safely, the hair salons that gave them reduced rates. The information came quickly and I wrote it down as fast as I could.

Sex brings people together, literally but also socially. It seemed to weave its threads all through this hidden world, bringing the community together in a thousand different ways. South Asians clerked and managed the video stores. West African men stood outside dance clubs to recruit johns. The wives of those West Africans provided day care to mothers who sold sexual services. Mexicans and Central Americans toiled clandestinely inside the video parlors and clubs as cleaners and laborers. And since the sex workers I was meeting came from every corner of the world—from
Europe and Africa and Australia, from China and Singapore and Brazil—you could say the invisible thread of sex was weaving the whole world together. Certainly they were as global a phenomenon as a multinational executive on his corporate jet.

Angela's role in the life of Manjun's shop seemed to perfectly demonstrate my thesis. The illegal money she brought in helped keep the legal business alive, and the legal business gave her a refuge for conducting her illegal business. There was no clear line between underground and aboveground. With her peers, I tried to trace the same connections through monetary transactions. How much did they earn? Where did they save and launder their money? Did they have credit cards or did they use loan sharks? With each answer, I was able to tease out a surprisingly elaborate infrastructure that ranged from Manjun's store to the strip bars and peep shows, to the bars, hotels, and health clinics. I began to see that these women weren't supporting drug habits—the conventional and suspiciously convenient view of prostitutes—but more likely families, neighborhoods, businesses. And most of the women also had other part-time gigs, often legal, that wove them into the community in another way.

But the underground economy didn't stop at sex and drugs, of course. Day laborers told me they earned only minimum wage for cleaning bodegas and washing dishes. Most worked sixty to seventy hours per week at multiple jobs. Each job brought them an average of three hundred dollars a week and lasted about nine to twelve months. They piled together in astonishingly cramped apartments, most of which violated every possible city zoning code. The security guards at the porn shops brought home about five dollars an hour, but their hours varied, so they also drove taxis and gypsy cabs. Homeless persons panhandled, shined shoes, and—when they could get away with it—washed car windshields at the more lively intersections. They made about a hundred dollars in
any given week and they were routinely arrested for vagrancy, loitering, shoplifting, and other petty criminal acts.