“Station?”
“Food, clothing, introductions.”
In a matter of thirty minutes, Santosh gave me a very nice sketch of the market, including the number of brokers and the dangers. He also filled me in on the old neighborhood. Azad was still working in the black market, Rajesh had found a job as an accountant, some had children in college already. It felt like old times, which reminded me of why I was there.
“Have you heard anything of our old friend?” I asked.
He shrugged. As far as he knew, Joshi and Sula were heading off to Bangladesh; they were both doing well.
“And Manjun?”
Santosh sighed. “We sacrifice for our families.”
Finally, he told me what really happened when Manjun’s money was stolen. He’d been involved in drugs and “bad things” with another man who knew where he was hiding the cash, and that man was the one who’d robbed him. The “bad things” included counterfeit documents, he admitted.
“But where’s Manjun now?” I asked, afraid of the answer.
Santosh raised the tea to his mouth. “We know only of his family.” But he was being evasive—I could tell.
“Please,” I begged.
He sighed and sipped his tea. Finally he said, “Sudhir, we find that Manjun was doing something not very pleasant.”
Getting the story out of him took some time, but in the end I gathered that Manjun had been involved with some very dangerous people, and under their pressure he found himself forcing women from India to become prostitutes—to live in a brothel for a short stint in order to pay their family debts. The horror of this was what had been making him unravel back when I thought he was just worried about being robbed.
“And now?” I asked.
Santosh took a deep breath. “I don’t think we will ever see him again.”
This is why nobody would speak to me, he explained. “It is very important that the rest of us don’t know anything—that we don’t talk or say anything. Our ignorance is what can save us, and keep us in this country. And for you, I would also suggest that you not ask too many questions. That is not a safe way to be.”
Saddened, I began talking about the needs of survival in a foreign land, finding a way to excuse the terrible things my friend had done. But Santosh grabbed my hand from across the table. “Surviving is easy,” he said with a forceful voice I had never heard from him. “We are so much smarter than most of these people, so much better educated, and we work so hard and do nasty things, but they succeed without effort. And the demons visit you at night.”
Understanding dawned slowly. In Santosh’s view, Manjun had made a fatal error. He’d listened to his demons.
Eat from the hand of a demon, and his hand becomes your hand. How often had I seen this in the underground economy? People who generally lived good, decent lives turned to the illicit world to make a buck, and then it began to suck them in. Santosh was saying that Manjun could have made different choices, could have changed his attitude or his approach or his exposure, could have imagined a different future. But the demon’s hand had become his hand, and it was too easy to keep on letting that hand do its dark work. At the same time, of course, Santosh recognized that as a poor brown immigrant in the United States, Manjun had few real options and had to seize the opportunities that became available to him. That was what made it so sad.
After that, Santosh and I had little more to say to each other. Talking about Manjun had drained us.
He asked that I come back in two weeks, for a small party for his grandchild. When the day arrived, I found the restaurant filled with balloons and streamers and “Happy Birthday” signs, and everyone greeted me as “Mr. Professor.” When the party was over, Santosh came over to me and sighed. “It is important that you see this side too. This is the side I want you to remember. Not just the sadness. Maybe even you can remember your own time growing up—very much like this, no?”
“Yes, Santosh. Very much,” I said as my eyes began tearing up.
• • •
Years later, I still turn back to Santosh’s words, because it is the counsel that I have received countless times from the disenfranchised, whether single mothers in the Chicago projects or immigrants seeking out opportunities in the global city. Don’t pity us. Don’t treat us like victims. We’re more than our hardships. But fine as that advice is, I was grappling with two seemingly contradictory thoughts. First was a vision of global New York as an unrestricted field of opportunity where even the low-income immigrant could climb the ladder and experience a better life, as Santosh had. The second was global New York as a ruthlessly hierarchical town with great social benefits for the victors and potentially devastating consequences for the losers. Perhaps this was how things had always been, whether for the early Italians or the great Irish migration. New York offered opportunities, but made no promises. This too was a form of globalization: white Europeans migrating in droves to America, creating bursting-at-the-seams ethnic enclaves where they could make a new home for themselves, often rooting their eventual Americanization in off-the-books marketplaces where people bartered, lent money, paid one another under the table, and so on—all excellent training in the spirit of American entrepreneurship. As they established credit, found legitimate jobs, and moved into the social mainstream, it would help them achieve great success.
But now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, globalization had brought about a much different narrative of assimilation. Today’s immigrants were more likely to be brown and black, from Africa and Asia. Since 2000, most of the immigrants who have come to New York City have been from Mexico, Ghana and sub-Saharan Africa, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and China. By 2005, historian Nancy Foner would find, recent immigrants made up a startling 37 percent of the city population. If you counted their American-born children, then the figure rose to half of all New Yorkers. This new wave of immigrants couldn’t just shorten their names and lose their accents. Nor did they seem to be moving from menial work to well-paying factory or government positions—those jobs had disappeared in global cities. Instead, these immigrants were servicing the well-to-do via poorly paid service sector work, as clerks, cab drivers, cleaners, nannies, busboys, and so on. Most such jobs paid off the books and offered little hope of advancement or recourse when things went wrong. And unlike previous generations of low-income workers, these recent immigrants weren’t joining unions for a step up the ladder; as the new century began in New York City, nearly one in three lived in poverty.
One problem became increasingly apparent to me. As I watched immigrants like Angela, Manjun, Shoomi, and their peers shuttle through the city, I noticed they always had limited relations with people outside their social class and ethnic group. They may have worked for an upper-class clientele, but these relationships were hierarchical. Angela talked about finding wealthy white clients and Manjun dreamed of taking his engineering skills into a corporate job, but the chances seemed small. It was painful to acknowledge the reasons. They spoke poor English and they had dark skin. Most of all, perhaps, they just didn’t seem interested in the lifestyle that is the second currency of global New York: the music and movies and art and food that people talk about when they are enjoying relations that are not hierarchical. They seemed to be stuck in their own ethnic worlds, their social courage weakened by the demon’s hand.
If there was any real hope for these newcomers to latch onto, it was the traditional hope immigrants put in the prospects of their children. But these too had grown more slender. As sociologist Mary Waters and her colleagues discovered, more than half of the second-generation immigrant children in New York would attend or graduate from a four-year college or university. But the pace of globalization today has become so fast and ruthless, with capital zipping from place to place at such hyperspeed, taking jobs and resources along with it, we seem to be at risk of creating a new class of the long-term disenfranchised. So many of the people I saw in Manjun’s neighborhood had made the wrong bet. They didn’t see
the change coming, and now they had to be cleared out. That has always happened, but never so fast or so universally, or in such utter obscurity. Today’s champions of globalization are so busy celebrating the wondrous wealth and the charming artifacts of food and music produced by international interchange that they have little time for the plight of the invisible underclass that helps make it happen.
Alas, my time here was up too. With Angela also on her way out, Manjun’s disappearance meant the end of my tenure in Hell’s Kitchen. Too many other people I knew were moving on as well. The neighborhood was now deep into the transformation that one critic called “the suburbanization of New York.” Average household income had doubled from 1990 to 2000 and average rents rose correspondingly, a pace that accelerated into the new century. I decided it was time to start floating again, perhaps to renew my long-stalled effort to research the other end of the illegal income spectrum. But as the weeks passed, I couldn’t stop worrying about Manjun.
One day I went back downtown to press Officer Michael for more details.
“You don’t know what we know,” he said flatly. “We think he might have been pressured into doing all the things he did.”
Doing what? Selling drugs?
Michael wouldn’t say. “We told him to get the hell out of town, or at least go hide.”
But how would Manjun live? How would his family live? They had, I admitted, some issues with their papers.
“He’ll be okay. Just give it time. I’m sure you’ll hear from him.”
But I had a sense I never would, and I never did. It was hard for me to accept, even harder because of the way Officer Michael seemed to be shrugging it off as just another ordinary event in the life of the neighborhood.
The only thing I could do was stay true to the pursuit that had brought us together. I had to keep moving out across the city, following threads and crossing boundaries to see where the underground could take me.
CHAPTER 4
MOVING ON UP
Two years after Al Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center, immigrants to New York continued to experience heightened scrutiny even if they were legal residents of the country. The Patriot Act and related legislation gave enhanced surveillance and investigative powers to law enforcement and imposed new restrictions on the freedom of immigrants to travel into and out of the United States. Deportations had risen by 30 percent. The undocumented moved from neighborhood to neighborhood and borough to borough, seeking off-the-books work while keeping a low profile. Some ran into visa troubles, lost their jobs, and had to return home.
When I heard from Santosh or my other friends from Midtown, the stories tended to be of either the on-a-treadmill or the crashed-and-burned variety. They stood in sharp contrast to the conventional stories that depicted South Asians in the United States largely as professionals who experienced great economic stability for themselves and their children. Most didn’t even manage the mini-mart life of Apu on The Simpsons. Santosh tried to expand his restaurant and catering services, but hard times had sent him back to his lucrative but illegal sideline as part of the “underground railroad” for undocumented immigrants. I could tell how things were going by the look on his face. If he greeted me with a smile and introduced me all around, he was having a legal period, but if he became stern and fatherly and told me to keep working hard and focus on the important things, then I knew he was into something murky. The same pattern held with Rajesh and the others, who all dipped back into the illegal economy whenever they lost jobs or ran into other trouble. Off the books, they drove cabs, washed dishes, cleaned offices, even repaired office computers. Some took seasonal work in upstate hotels run by other South Asians. With wages so low and travel restrictions so harsh, many were using video chat to watch their kids grow up in their home country.
But all of them held on to the dream. Maybe that was another reason I kept turning to Shine and Angela. They were actually doing it. In very different ways, they were systematically making a climb up the economic ladder. Not with complete success, of course. Angela’s various attempts to recruit clients from Midtown had been a disaster, and she had been unable to find a stable of white corporate clients for private dates. In fact, she was now back licking her wounds on the Lower East Side. But she was still looking for new ways to get ahead. “Maybe I join one of those agencies,” she joked one day. “Someone out there has to like dark meat, no?” She would soon focus on an ambitious plan to organize a group of street prostitutes to rent an apartment and run their own bordello.
For Shine, the climb meant a new drug.
I discovered his scheme one afternoon in a bar on Lenox Avenue. The spring of 2003 was coming, with joggers hitting the streets, merchants repainting their storefronts, the annual renewal finally under way. We were sitting at a bar and I was telling Shine about a project I was doing with the economist Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics. Inspired by research on how wealthy Internet entrepreneurs had learned to reinvent their careers after the collapse of the dot-com bubble, we wanted to find young black men who had joined gangs about a decade earlier. How would they reinvent themselves when their criminal careers played out? “Basically,” I said, “we’re trying to answer a simple question nobody ever thought to ask before. What happens to gang members as they grow old?”
“Hell, you ought to study me,” Shine said.
The thought had occurred to me, of course. But Shine had kept me at a distance, never letting me past his guard far enough to find out the things that mattered to a sociologist. To start with, was he really such a big underground success or was he exaggerating his achievements to come off like a big shot? After all this time, I couldn’t say for sure. I knew that he drove a fancy German car and helped to support a large family, that he kept many thousands in a bank account and hid more in various nooks and stash points around Harlem until he could spend or launder it into reportable income. He certainly seemed conversant with the crack trade, so I had no real doubts where he was getting his money. Beyond that, I had no hard numbers. But I did know that the crack market was slowing down, and that he’d been trying all kinds of new things: a chop shop in the Bronx, a small pushcart business with two street vendors selling fried chicken and rice, a five-thousand-dollar investment in his uncle’s small hatmaking business (black women still wore glorious hats to church, as you could see any Sunday morning all over Harlem). Now he warmed to this theme, but it all sounded fairly small time. He had another small investment in a shop where one of his aunts told fortunes with tarot cards. He was helping three neighbors start an underground business refurbishing old television sets. He even spent one colorful three-month stint trying to make it as a pimp.
“A pimp? Did you get a furry hat and everything?”
Shine didn’t find my teasing amusing. Apparently, failure as a pimp had bruised his male ego. “I’m too easygoing. They took advantage of me. I’m too nice to be a pimp.”
“I guess crack brings out a much friendlier crowd,” I said.
He laughed. “They are when they want that smoke. Friendliest motherfuckers you ever saw.”
But all his efforts had come to nothing, or at least nothing in terms of his previous income. Now Shine had a new idea, which he confessed a bit sheepishly. “I’m selling powder.”
“Powder?”
“Powdered cocaine. The kind white people use.”
Alas, the powdered cocaine market was proving difficult to crack, so to speak. He was having a hell of a time finding customers. This was because much of the market base for powdered cocaine is white and fairly well-off. He certainly couldn’t use his usual set of street dealers, who would look and feel like Martians at a Wall Street bar. “They’re too young and too stupid,” he grumbled.
I couldn’t believe it. “You can’t possibly be telling me that you don’t know anyone who buys powdered cocaine in the city of New York?”
“I know plenty of people, but coke is a weird thing. With crack, people keep coming back ’cause it doesn�
�t last that long. They come back every hour. People who get the blow, they get enough for a night or maybe a weekend.”
“So find one of them and sell him some,” I said.
“But they’ve already got their own steady. I’m not a steady to nobody, and I don’t want to be poaching somebody else’s customers and get shot in an alley. I gotta find new customers. It’s a tricky thing.”
He had done a good deal of consumer behavior research, he said. Specifically, he’d called all the powdered cocaine dealers he knew, hung out at parties with his middle-class friends, even tried to purchase coke himself at a few bars. Shine believed that blow was mostly sold at parties and clubs or delivered directly to customers at their homes, but he didn’t like phone delivery businesses and didn’t seem to be attending the right kind of parties.
What he really needed was a cousin with connections in the art market—or better yet, some idiot who could introduce him to a troubled young heiress with a taste for cocaine, of course. But neither of us knew that then—Evalina was still looking for herself in California, and the night Shine and Analise would meet at the art gallery was still more than a year away. This left him with what looked like a single option: finding new customers in public spaces—upscale bars, luxury hotels, strip clubs, even parks. He had been canvassing a few of these spots with Cohan, another trafficker in his neighborhood who was losing business, but they attracted too much attention from security. Once at a hotel bar, they’d actually been thrown out.
“What did you wear?” I asked.
“Same shit I have on now,” he said.
I looked him over. Two hundred and fifteen pounds of solid black man in a bright green tracksuit, a baseball hat with the Yankees logo, and a diamond-studded necklace. The Adidas on his feet were white enough for a hospital operating room.
“How did you approach people?”
He told a series of amusing stories. Thinking that white men would be drawn to black women, he said, he took a small group of sexy young women to a Wall Street bar. The mission was to flirt and sell cocaine. But the girls were nervous and got so loud and drunk, they embarrassed him. Next he brought along a pair of Dominican gun brokers who said they dealt with rich white people all the time, but Shine’s coke made them paranoid and they threatened to shoot the hotel manager. Veering 180 degrees, he asked a famous black preacher to meet him at a Soho lounge on the theory that people who saw them together would trust him a little bit more and he could approach them later. But the preacher was disgusted at the ten-dollar martinis and criticized him for spending his money in the wrong neighborhood, leaving in a huff that soured Shine’s whole night. Finally, he tried sending the girls back down just to pick up guys and tell them about this great coke dealer they knew—the ultimate low-pressure sale—but they came back and said they just flat-out hated hanging out with the rich white people. There was nothing to talk about. They felt ignored.
Floating City Page 10
