Floating City

by Sudhir Venkatesh

  The truth was, I didn’t want to go home either. After ten years of marriage, my wife was talking about a separation. We were very young when we got married and our “priorities were changing,” as they say. I wasn’t ready to talk about any of this yet, but I didn’t mind a little comfort from a South Asian family that reminded me so much of my own.

  Off we went on the 7 train, rumbling deep into the heart of Queens. Manjun carried the sleeping Joshi wrapped in a blanket.

  When we arrived, Sula gave a warm hello to me and a cold nod to her husband. She took Joshi in a possessive way calculated to demonstrate her irritation and disappeared into the bedroom.

  Manjun sighed. Ever since Sula had started working, Joshi had had to sleep half the night at the store. They couldn’t afford a babysitter. Sula hated it. And she was in some kind of mysterious pain that had been troubling her for almost six months. Neither she nor Manjun would tell me what was wrong, just that they couldn’t afford a “women’s doctor.”

  When she came back into the room, Sula started right in on Manjun. “Why must we live like this, in this country? Why have you brought me here?”

  She even made me a character in their drama. “Sudhir would never fail his wife,” she said. “Sudhir is a real man, not like you. He takes care of family!”

  Joshi came to the door, his sleep disturbed by the raised voices. I offered to put him back to bed and left them to their squabble. Joshi refused my offer to read and got down on the floor and took a plastic soldier in each hand, speaking to them softly while moving them across his raised knees. The sight shot the ache of an old memory through me. So many times I did the exact same thing, hiding in my room while my mother raised her voice against my father and this “godforsaken country.” So many times the shy voice that searched for the right English word turned into a piercing instrument of marital war. Whenever a silence blossomed and we saw a glimmer of relief, my mother would find a new focus for her rage.

  With the raised voices of his parents beating through the door, Joshi put his soldiers on sentry duty and got into bed. Would he remember this moment for the rest of his life? Would part of him always be ten years old and anchored to the battlefield of his bedroom floor, fighting an imaginary war to distract himself from the source of pain?

  • • •

  A few days later, I watched Manjun come into the back room of Ninth Avenue Family Video with another cup of sweet cardamom tea. As I took the white Styrofoam cup, I noticed that his hand was shaking.

  “Still nervous?”

  Since the robbery and his pay cut, he seemed to be getting more anxious by the day. But he shook his head. “The chances are very slim something like that happens twice. I should be comfort-able.”

  The additional emphasis on the last word seemed intended to lend it the air of scientifically determined fact.

  Something had been puzzling me. How did the thief know about the extra money? “Are you sure you never told the ladies?” I asked.

  Manjun didn’t want to talk about it. His face was resigned. I was sure one of the sex workers had discovered Manjun’s cash reserve and told someone either knowingly or accidentally. But Manjun didn’t like to distrust people.

  “What about Officer Michael?” I asked. I had a feeling that my history-loving friend on the police force would do everything he could to help someone like Manjun.

  But Manjun still hadn’t reported the robbery to the police.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I told him.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” Manjun said. Then his eyes went flat, staring blindly into a wall of gay porn. “Or maybe I go home.”

  “Bangladesh?”

  “Maybe Delhi. Anywhere. Nothing here for me now.”

  “How does Sula feel?”

  “It is her idea.”

  “But what will you do? How will you make a living?”

  He shrugged his shoulders, put the cup of tea on the steps, and waved a hand at the sea of erections and open mouths, shaved bodies and swollen breasts. “What do I do here, my friend? What do I do here?”

  The mood lifted a little when Angela and her friend Kristina arrived, their night’s work done. “Angela hit the jackpot,” Kristina said.

  That meant Angela had had three clients, two quick exchanges in a bar and one local store owner whose wife was out of the country. Kristina had only had one.

  Since Angela began confiding in me, her efforts to penetrate the Midtown tourist trade had become the subject of much discussion in Manjun’s store. She knew that I’d been working on my study of the indoor sex market with the Urban Justice Center, where she had received help in the past with some legal issues and lease negotiations with her landlord. Since she was one of the women who hoped to leave the streets for more lucrative venues like hotels and private calls to apartments, she began sharing her own ideas about what to study and what kind of support they really needed. Shyly, she talked about her discomfort in posh Midtown bars. She said she didn’t understand how to advertise herself online but was taking lessons from some more Internet-savvy friends. “I’d really like a bank account,” she told me. “I need a Visa card. And I need to find good doctors who can help me for a few bucks. Or some kind of legit side job just so the cops don’t steal my money when they stop me and find all of it in my pocket. I need to be cleaned.”

  The irony in her use of “clean” made me laugh. The very same word that the media used to describe Giuliani’s strategy to make Manhattan more hospitable acquired a subterranean shade coming out of Angela’s mouth, raising echoes of money laundering and identity changes. But the same sentiment held true in both cases. Just as Midtown was changing from seedy to mainstream, Angela wanted to wash out the streetwalker and move to the more acceptable domain of “escort services.”

  Figuring out how to make this change was not easy, particularly for an immigrant woman who was not comfortable applying for jobs, who felt ashamed of her difficulty communicating in English, and whose life until that point had been limited to the Lower East Side and the various Caribbean countries where her family had lived. The several dozen women she had introduced me to, including other Latinas and European immigrants like Kristina, as well as white Americans who were transplants to the city, all shared the same passion. And the same obstacles. Without a credit history or bank account, it was hard for them to rent an apartment, apply for a job, or otherwise think of a life beyond their nightly vocation.

  But they all were managing, and their improvised methods fascinated me. Kristina told me about a group of women who could find landlords willing to rent an apartment (or sometimes just a bedroom) for cash and no contract. Angela convinced several doctors on the Lower East Side to treat her friends. An ex–social worker from Greenpoint came to Manjun’s shop at night to counsel women and set up appointments at health clinics and day care centers back in Brooklyn.

  It was becoming clear that a community like Mortimer’s did exist in this world too, but it wasn’t geographically rooted to a single neighborhood. Just as Manjun’s friends helped to show me the complex infrastructure of the local underground economy, Angela and her coworkers helped me see that my instincts had a solid foundation: for the modern city’s sex workers, community was networked. The new sex trade was no longer confined to seedy neighborhoods but spread through friendships and clients all over the city. These kinds of impromptu social links across distant areas of a city had been identified as far back as the 1960s by Chicago sociologist Morris Janowitz, who called them “communities of limited liability.” Back then, he had been looking at whites and suburbanites who had cars and greater mobility. Like me, he was looking through a Chicago lens that probably led him to assume that black and brown members of the underclass were more fixed in their neighborhoods. But from what I could see so far, Manjun and his friends had managed to create the same networked pattern. The question was, given how vulnerable they all seemed to be, would the networks endure? Were they a model for the future or just a fleeting adaptation?
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  The fact was, Angela and her friends were still barely eking out a basic living, which placed them in constant risk of a sudden catastrophic blow of bad luck. Soon I would witness the terrible stress this put on every one of their brave and creative attempts to shore up their defenses.

  • • •

  On a frigid Saturday night in November, when frost crazed the windows of the overheated shops, Angela and Kristina had finished up their evening’s work and come to rest in Manjun’s back room.

  “Maybe I’m too old for this,” Kristina said.

  “Of course you’re too old, sweetie!” Angela answered.

  Kristina was from Romania, but the differences in language and background didn’t seem to hamper her friendship with Angela. She pulled a small bottle of whiskey out of her bag and poured them each a slug.

  Manjun appeared at the door to the back room looking apologetic. This meant it was collection time. Angela pulled out a small wad of bills, but Kristina said she didn’t have enough this week. She was broke and really sorry. Manjun waved her concern down with both hands. “You go home. Be safe,” he said.

  Kristina looked embarrassed. “You’re very sweet, Jun.”

  When Manjun went back up front, Angela leaned close and whispered, “I’m not going to last here much longer.”

  I wasn’t surprised. With one client a night, the writing was on the wall. I expected her to say she was going to return to the Lower East Side, but she wasn’t giving up that easily.

  “I go back home and think about things,” she said. “Then I try again.” She laughed. “Maybe downtown. I don’t know. I don’t like quitting.”

  “You never struck me as the quitting type,” I said.

  But then Angela sighed and started talking about other women who were similarly unsuccessful and who were retreating—some to other neighborhoods, some to other lines of work. The sudden shift from optimism to gloom struck me as ominous. I didn’t know her well enough at that point to know how resilient she really was, but right then she sounded like a woman on the verge of real depression.

  A strange, unexpected feeling came over me. In Chicago, on another research project, I’d watched the demolition of projects send thousands of families into homelessness and poverty worse than anything they had experienced before. I had seen hundreds of black men, just teenagers, arrested for selling crack, their lives scrambled forever for a few hundred dollars a week. Now I seemed to be hearing a new version of that old sad tale. Maybe it was my own frustration coming out, but I was desperately eager to understand what it would take for people to avoid these fates. I could count on one hand the number of Chicago gang members who’d stayed out of jail, saved their money, and found work in the legitimate economy. The same seemed true of these other illegal economies. At the same time, every time I picked up a copy of the Village Voice there seemed to be more and more advertisements from individuals and agencies offering sex for sale. Someone was making money. If it wasn’t Angela and her friends, who was it? What was the pattern of success and failure? What was the range of outcomes? Failure? Prison? Death? A successful integration into the new country? Return to the homeland with money in the bank? Again, my need for generalizability made me hungry to search out all possibilities.

  Predictable but unattractive thoughts nagged at me. Those who fared better were probably white, middle class—people who did have bank accounts and credit cards and all the things Angela couldn’t access. But these thoughts were sheer prejudice, and just as likely to be false as true. Only data could determine the real reasons.

  As Angela finished her morose monologue, we both saw Manjun sitting in the front of the store looking even more despondent than she sounded.

  “Sula’s sick,” she whispered. “That’s why he’s worried.”

  Feeling helpless, I sighed heavily. Angela held out her whiskey bottle. “Let it go, mi amor.”

  I took a quick slug and coughed, then slid down onto the cot. Up around us a silence rose, broody as a wet November day. You’d think that, after a decade at this, I could accept the suffering of the people I studied. But it hurt to think that nothing I could write would really change the lives of people like Angela and Manjun. Sociology had been founded with grand dreams of reforming society, but now the short-term reformers were putting their hopes in economics. Pay people to attend school, starve them to induce productivity, use threat of lower pay if performance suffered. Even if all of life’s problems really could be answered with incentives and numbers, I didn’t want to live in a world where Manjun was just a “wage laborer” and his suffering nothing more than a “market externality.”

  A few days later, things got much worse. Christmas was around the corner, and I was planning to visit my parents in California. I took the subway down Ninth Avenue just to drop off a gift I hoped would mean as much to Joshi as it had once meant to me—the ultimate South Asian nerd heirloom, The World Book Encyclopedia. I had become ridiculously fond of that little kid.

  But when I walked into the store, there was a new clerk working behind the counter. “Where’s Manjun?” I asked. The clerk answered me in the broken English of a brand-new immigrant. “He no work here.” He had no idea where Manjun was. Or even who he was. He wasn’t friendly about it either. I pushed my way through the store and peeked into the back room. There was no trace of Manjun’s belongings, not even the meager collection of DVDs Joshi used to watch. The beds were gone too, which meant that Angela and the other prostitutes must also have moved on. A small endangered world had disappeared forever.

  I rushed to see Santosh, who looked pale and exhausted. “Please, not now,” he pleaded. The store was filled with customers. “I cannot give it to you now. You will meet me, later tonight.”

  “Give me what? Where is Manjun?”

  “You haven’t come for his money?” His voice trailed off and he began rubbing his head.

  “Santosh, what money? Do you know where Manjun is?”

  “Come back tonight, later. Things will be quiet and I will talk with you.”

  I looked for some of Manjun’s other friends, but none were at their jobs. I called Angela and some of the sex workers who’d worked out of Manjun’s store in the past, but not a single one answered her phone. I went to his home in Queens and no one answered the doorbell.

  A few hours later, I returned to Santosh’s video store. He was gone. He’d left early, they said.

  • • •

  The next day, I managed to connect with Officer Michael. He picked me up in his car and we drove to a quiet street. “You know what it’s like, Sudhir,” he said. “These places, life can turn from good to bad just like that.”

  The thief had come back. He’d beat Manjun pretty badly, sending him to the hospital. Because of the severity of the attack, local police believed Manjun had been letting someone sell drugs from inside the store, and the thief had come looking for the stash.

  I couldn’t believe this. Manjun was losing money on the bed rental business because of his soft heart at a time when he really couldn’t afford it. That was the kind of person he was, a good person. I couldn’t believe he had ventured into the drug trade. Something was missing, some part of the story was invisible to us—and now the secretive rules of the underground were affecting me. My friend was lost because of some kind of underground conflict resolution mechanism that we couldn’t see.

  This is what normal people go to the police to solve—and to lawyers, small-claims courts, and all the other arms of the justice system. But in the underground, the law is typically not a helpful protector. Manjun’s underworld option would have been to pay for protection, but I couldn’t imagine the mild South Asian gentleman searching out those kinds of helpers. Here is where the real fragility of the underground became clear to me. It was fine for me to talk about the provisional communities that gathered around a cause like Mortimer’s, but I could not avoid the darker side of this world. There was real violence here. And yet, whatever Manjun had done or not done, I h
onestly did not know whether I wanted to find out the truth. Unlike the big-n researchers who work the telephone and never see the nameless souls who give them forty-five uninterrupted minutes, an ethnographer is always haunted by his subjects and their tragic vulnerabilities. Insight gets more painful when you grow close to people.

  • • •

  A few weeks later, after returning from the holidays, I dropped by Manjun’s old store again. No sign of him. I looked for Shoomi; no sign of him either. Most of the porn stores seemed to be going out of business too, replaced by wine bars and children’s clothing stores. The end of the year must have meant the end of their leases too.

  Santosh was gone as well. I’d heard that, using the small profit from his porn career, he’d opened a restaurant near the main subway stop in Jackson Heights, so I went up to ask him to lunch. As I entered, an older woman wearing a long red sari led out two Indian men who looked as if they had just landed at JFK, bags in hand, bleary eyed and hungry. She shouted in Santosh’s direction, “Why do they all come today?”

  Santosh grabbed her arm and steered her toward the back room. He returned with two small cups of tea, strong and milky sweet.

  “Sometimes I miss our old place,” he said. “It was nice there—mostly because I could get away from here!”

  It turned out that the restaurant had been part of Santosh’s mini empire for a while. The angry woman in the red sari was his wife. And the two Indians were part of yet another business Santosh had going: smuggling undocumented immigrants into the United States.

  Smiling at his relentless enterprise, I asked him how much he charged for his smuggling services. “Five thousand!” he said. “And ten thousand for all settlement-related ac-tiv-i-ties.” He said the final word slowly, with mocking precision.

  “‘Activities’,” I said, smirking. “That’s a nice word for it.”

  “Two weeks’ comfort and station.”