• • •
Over the next few months, by dint of persistent effort, I did manage to convince eight or ten women to talk to me at least briefly. They told me about the fees they paid the clubs, the costs of renting the back rooms, the risks of being harassed or even beaten up for failing to pay. They told me that sometimes when they were in tight spots they had to take loans from the club manager, and also spoke of helpful managers who protected them from abusive johns. But were the experiences these women described common or idiosyncratic? Was there a set of close ties like in the Chicago projects, where the gangs looked like the enemy within but were in fact intimately tied to their neighbors? How did the clubs compare to the Internet? To the back pages of the alternative weeklies? And how did all the players and levels tie together? I would have to get a lot more n’s before I could call it serious research. And I still needed a consigliere to help me put a frame around it.
Then it happened. I found my strip club Analise and the new world finally began to open for me.
His name was Mortimer Conover. I met him in a bar in Hell’s Kitchen, where he stood out because he was an old-school sport who always wore a jacket and tie and pocket square. He must have been in his mid-seventies, but his passion for the ladies of the evening was undiminished.
“I can travel the whole world in one night,” Mortimer liked to say. “I can go to Russia and Missouri and Mexico and the Dominican Republic and never leave the neighborhood.”
Mortimer held down the corner booth of a bar on Ninth Avenue, the same place he’d been patronizing for the last twenty years. Completely nondescript, with a sign that read “Bar” hanging over a wooden door, it was the sort of place you could walk by and not even realize it was there. Inside it was nothing but a line of booths and bar stools, which bore a vague resemblance to a watering trough in a feedlot. Mortimer sat in the back opining on politics, sports, great Irish politicians, and the mysteries of female psychology.
He followed predictable patterns. First an old-fashioned. Then a glass of water. Then multiple glasses of red wine. Periodically he would walk out back and light his pipe. When he started slurring his words, he would switch to tea. Between drinks, he would slip in a few moments with a lady friend.
Of his past, Mortimer said little. He had been “in business,” he said. His crippled right hand had been injured in “the war,” though he would never specify which war. His son, John, was a construction foreman who lived in Elizabeth, New Jersey. His grandchildren were all in high school and he carried the photos in his wallet to prove it. His heartbreak was his daughter-in-law. “I’m a sexual predator, according to her,” Mortimer explained one night, his voice wistful and bruised.
Eventually, Mortimer told me the story. When he was already in his sixties and retired from his job, he’d approached a woman in a strip club with an offer of money for sex. She turned out to be an undercover police officer. A furor ensued. His son nearly refused to pick him up from jail, and his daughter-in-law, a devout Christian, cut him off completely. No more invitations to Thanksgiving dinner, no more weekends with the children.
Mortimer kept me company on many nights as I waited around for a sex worker to grant me an interview, but I never noticed any health issues. That changed the night he collapsed on the floor of the bar. One minute he was holding court as usual and the next he flopped down writhing in obvious pain. His lady friend rushed to the bar phone and speared out the numbers for 911 with her long fake nails. A heart attack, everyone figured.
It was a stroke. When Mortimer came back to the bar a month later, his left hand was a claw like his right hand and he couldn’t even grab his drinking glass. His eyesight had weakened, and now he wore thick black eyeglasses. He limped and needed help walking or climbing stairs. When I helped him to the bathroom or into the garden to smoke his pipe, his hand shook ferociously.
Everyone in the bar seemed to adjust naturally to his new state. The bartender put a straw in his drink and even found some straws that held up in hot tea. Mortimer now felt nervous carrying cash around, so the bar manager kept a running tab for each of the women he slept with and Mortimer paid once at the end of the week. There was always a gypsy cab to drive him home, a service that included a personal escort upstairs to his apartment. Several of the sex workers made sure his fridge was filled with sandwiches and his bathroom had toilet paper. And to save him from exhausting trips home, the porn shop next door made up a little room in the back where Mortimer could enjoy his ladies of the night.
This fascinated me. This underground world had adapted to protect its own, creating an impromptu community of sorts. Gradually I realized this was the same thing I had seen among drug dealers and prostitutes, often in response to an outside threat. These types of communities weren’t locally based or geographically segregated, like the ones in Chicago, but were latent everywhere in an intricate web of social relations and ready to emerge in response to specific events and situations. Put more simply, had there been no Mortimer who needed help, the “Mortimer community” would never have surfaced.
Not only that, but further questioning revealed that most of the ladies hadn’t had sex with Mortimer in years. Usually they would just take their clothes off and let him fondle them while he told tales of past loves. I would find out later that this turns out to be surprisingly common, which suggests that many prostitutes may deserve their claim to being lay therapists. As one sardonic Russian prostitute would tell me about a rich client, “Most of the time, I tell him why he shouldn’t leave his wife.”
Even as I saw a group of people coalesce around Mortimer, I was hesitant to call it a community. It wasn’t a community in the sense of some suburban cul-de-sacs or a church group in which people have placed a label on their common bond. Mortimer’s friends were helpful to one another, but their ties were not rooted in religion, ethnicity, neighborhood, or even a common stigma like race or sexual identity. When asked, Mortimer’s supporters said they were simply doing what you’d do for a friend who needs help. “There’s another guy like this down the street,” they would say, or “You should see this guy across town who’s doing so much worse.” And this was not the only bar where the prostitutes and johns passed their time together. There seemed to be many such informal networks, ad hoc communities built upon mutual interest and affection. And these people came together by crossing all sorts of boundaries, like race and class, that sociologists usually think of as keeping people apart. Mortimer was a white man living off retirement income; the women helping him were lower-income Latinos and blacks. In the same way, the bar was filled with Irish cops and corporate white-collar workers, but there were always a dozen or so North African immigrants who congregated each evening in the corner. In this little bar, this little world, they were all tied together for better and worse. Half the patrons owed money to the other half—mostly for sex—but they also lent money to each other and fixed each other’s cars, bet on sports events and sold each other electronic equipment. As people spent more time in the bar, in fact, they were almost expected to take part in these ventures. Reciprocity became a means of signaling that one was local, to be trusted, and such trust would become the basis for receiving the kind of treatment that Mortimer was now getting.
For me, this could pose problems. There were only so many times I could say, “I’m just here as Mortimer’s friend. I have no interest in lending you five hundred dollars for your surefire illegal moneymaking scheme.” But Shine’s words kept returning to me. These were floating communities. I knew from earlier research that you could always count on things to go wrong in underground trading, and surely these communities were as precarious and fickle as any of the bonds formed in the black market. Floating may have signaled some kind of fluidity, but it certainly didn’t mean floating free. I’d seen people get kicked out of the bar or lose the trust necessary to be a commercial partner. Typically, someone will try to profit from their relationships, conflicts will ensue, people will take sides, and the little world
splinters. How long would Mortimer’s network survive?
But I had seen enough to want more. If I could find the right places—if I could follow the right people—I might see something that was invisible to most of the world.
• • •
Tonight Shine was behind the wheel of his black German sedan, cruising south down Malcolm X Boulevard on a mission he would not reveal. Shine’s way of hiding his life from me behind the calm demeanor of a power player was frustrating, especially since I told him I wasn’t studying him. Maybe part of it was as simple as learning to trust me, but his style reminded me of the gang leaders I knew in Chicago: they loved to boast and give the impression of success. Most who said they were high earners couldn’t even afford to live on their own, as Steven Levitt and I documented in the study made famous by Freakonomics. I was dying to ask Shine to talk straight about these subjects, but it didn’t seem to be the best time to bring this up.
With one hand on the wheel, Shine steered an arc from 110th Street onto the country road that cut right down through Central Park. We skimmed past joggers and bicyclists, close enough that I could have touched them with an extended hand. A few shouted at us to slow down. But Shine was intent on the same old sermon—I had to bounce, I had to float, I had to jump and hop and bob and weave. He made it sound exhausting and mandatory, like a vast and endless gym class.
Now he was physically dragging me along. The cold night air swept over the convertible’s windshield and into our faces. My eyes wouldn’t stop tearing and everyone seemed to be staring at us, wondering why the hell we were driving with the top down on such a chilly night.
“This is New York!” Shine continued. “We’re like hummingbirds, man. We go flower to flower. Didn’t they teach you that in Chicago?”
“No,” I said. “They taught me to sit your ass down and don’t ask no questions.”
He laughed like that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “Shit! You really did get schooled by black folk!”
Perhaps to emphasize his point, he started running through red lights. You’d think that a drug dealer would be careful in public, but apparently prudence clashes with the manly virtues required by the drug trade.
This was the first time Shine and I had been together outside Harlem, I realized. I sure hoped he knew what he was doing.
Up ahead, the road emerged from the park into the brownstone rows of the West Side. I felt the impulse to escape, to get in a cab and go somewhere quiet and safe.
He made a quick turn on Fifty-seventh Street and headed west into Hell’s Kitchen. Once dominated by the tough Irish street gangs memorialized in the Sean Penn movie State of Grace, it had joined the vast number of New York neighborhoods that couldn’t seem to make up their minds about what they wanted to be. Gentrification was slowly blooming along Ninth Avenue in the form of frat guy nightclubs and endless ethnic restaurants, but these bits of trendiness were sandwiched in between mini red-light districts, where porn shops and seedy bars seemed to fill entire blocks. Along Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, where factories and warehouses were interspersed with turn-of-the-century brick apartment buildings, the signature sound was the steady beeping of trucks as they backed into loading docks. Yuppie couples with expensive strollers coexisted with big Puerto Rican families and urban hipsters. Cheap hotels and adult video parlors sat next to gleaming new condos and renovated brownstones. In this sense, Hell’s Kitchen had become a sort of postmodern neighborhood, stuck between genres—just like the world music my more artsy academic colleagues admired.
Once again, all this would have been a rare sight in Chicago. Gentrification and urban development took place there, to be sure. Indeed, the national program of “urban renewal” was first developed in Chicago in an effort to reclaim seedy areas. But Chicago mayors typically sent bulldozers into down-and-out neighborhoods and then resold the land for private development—sports stadiums, universities, highways. It was a rapid-fire form of social bleaching. Gentrification in New York was like an IV drip. As old buildings came down, property changed hands, creating new neighborhoods in a more organic way. As a result, transitional communities cropped up where ethnics and social classes mixed with one another, sometimes harmoniously and sometimes less so. This was now happening in Chelsea, where the number of artists and gay families was growing every day. It was happening all over Brooklyn, where hipsters were tearing down the aluminum siding put up by working-class Poles and Italians and reinventing the neighborhoods for a new century. I wondered how the original residents adapted when they discovered that their borders were so permeable.
Shine pulled up in front of a porn shop. The plastic sign read “Ninth Avenue Family Video.” A woman waved at us through the store window.
“Angela,” Shine said. “She’s cool. You’ll like her.”
We walked in and Angela gave Shine a big hug. She started speaking in Spanish, joking with Shine that his hair was turning gray. Still caught in her embrace, Shine reached over the counter to shake the clerk’s hand. “Jun, my brother, what’s happening?”
Jun was a small, gentle-looking South Asian man in a blue plaid shirt. He had wispy black hair that scraggled about his head as if it was lost. “Not much, not much,” he said.
Shine introduced me. I reached my hand across the counter.
“Manjun,” he responded, grasping my hand in both of his. “It is my honor to meet you.”
Angela took my hand next, her eyes so soft and comforting she could have been taking in a long-lost relative. I immediately felt relaxed.
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?
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