Floating City

by Sudhir Venkatesh

  I had experienced this kind of invisibility once before, in Chicago. In the black communities in the 1990s, it was relatively easy to move about as a South Asian, because people just assumed that I was a member of some family that owned a liquor store or deli. In other words, I was relatively unthreatening. Standing around street corners or bars became routine, and people would have their conversations in my presence without feeling that I was an outside threat. Here I was more of a social curio, a vaguely subservient role that made me uncomfortable. It was hard to imagine them taking me seriously enough to let me observe them as a professional. I fantasized a job on a house-cleaning crew, arriving at one mansion after another just at the moment the owners began to exhibit socially significant behavior. At the same time, whenever I did get a chance to watch this privileged tribe from the sidelines, I felt wistful. Their parties were like one long beer commercial with tanned faces, silky hair, natural cotton fabrics, and toothy white grins. They seemed so breezy and light, so certain that nothing too real would ever weigh them down. I wondered what it was like to live inside that feeling.

  I also kept wondering what kind of research project I could devise to formalize my interest. It would have to be something subtle, I knew. The poor often feel obligated to respond to the authority figures who poke and prod them, but rich people are the opposite—they don’t like to be studied and have no problem shutting the door. So how could I get that door open?

  On this night, I found my way across the park and into the elegant side streets with their limestone mansions. The club they’d invited me to had a door without a sign, which led down to a catacomb with multiple levels. I found Betsy, who began introducing me to everyone.

  “Here’s someone you should meet,” Betsy said, and I turned to see a familiar face: Analise. I hadn’t seen her since the days of my Harvard wine tasting, when she’d given me the gracious education on viniculture that kept me looking marginally less of a fool. She had a red tinge in her hair this time, but she still had the slender offhand grace that whispered old money. “Can you recommend a good Chianti?” she said, a conspiratorial grin on her face.

  “I’m not sure there is a good Chianti,” I answered.

  Betsy looked puzzled. “So you know each other?”

  We confessed that we did. Like a good host, she soon found an excuse to disappear and let us catch up on old times.

  “So how are you?” Analise asked.

  “Good, real good. I’m teaching here now.”

  “NYU?”

  “Columbia.”

  She congratulated me, and I asked what she was doing.

  “A bunch of different pointless jobs,” she said. “You know, trying to find my thing.”

  I told her I was thinking about going to France. I mentioned that my marriage wasn’t doing so well. Something about her seemed to invite those kinds of confessions. She rattled off the various jobs she’d held after college—a financial services firm “full of men who make you sick,” a three-month stint at an antique furniture gallery owned by a friend of her mother’s. “I had to sit there all day and smile at eighty-year-olds who came in. I ended up mostly making tea while they talked about some godforsaken event that happened a hundred years ago.”

  Her chirpy manner was forced, but her voice grew increasingly soft, and the softness brought more truth. She mentioned a boyfriend who was not altogether supportive. This led to a tangled story of her current impasse with her parents, who wanted her to find something meaningful to do with her life that didn’t include anything she actually wanted to do, like opening an art gallery. “Too risky,” they’d said. “Great, Mom,” she’d said back. “Give me the list of boring safe options that kill your soul and let me choose one of those.”

  She mentioned going back to India, where her uncle had some kind of school. She talked about a previous visit when her parents were having a marital drama. “I just sat and ate and worked with the kids on art stuff. It’s so calm there. I feel like I go crazy here. I love going there. I get away from all this.” She raised her hands and shoulders, as if to blame the skyscrapers around us for her current troubles.

  I noticed that she kept looking around to see if anyone was watching us talk.

  Then she said she had some new business opportunities and would like some advice. I found this strange, particularly since I had very little understanding of commerce—at least not the legal kind—but I agreed to meet her. With that, she went off to greet some friends. Not until much later did I understand that her business as a madam was the subject she was broaching. She was just getting started then, managing a couple of friends, and the new business opportunities were new girls who wanted to work with her. She was probably hoping I could give her some inside knowledge.

  Betsy came back and introduced me to more people, all pleasant enough. But after a few of the usual questions—“What do you teach?” “Were you born here?” “What does your name mean?”—there was frighteningly little to talk about. I could have been the statue on the mantel. With each brief exchange, the idea of doing research on the upper class began to feel more remote. Their complete indifference made my usual ethnographic fly-on-the-wall approach seem almost humiliating, a symphony of awkward silences. How could you do serious research on people who barely bothered to listen to your questions?

  • • •

  Just a few weeks after Carla had left, Angela called to say they couldn’t make the rent. I was stunned. I was sure she would find someone else to take Carla’s place. Vonnie mentioned that Angela had difficulty trusting the white Eastern European women she’d tried to bring aboard, and I had a sinking feeling that Angela’s social fears might undermine the operation. I went over to the Brooklyn apartment to hear how this part of her story ended. When I got there, Angela and Vonnie were standing in front of the building looking at the beaten-up black pickup truck that was carting their stuff away. It was already full, and that meant another trip, which meant hours of waiting.

  We went back upstairs and sat on a few boxes with a bottle of cheap red wine on the floor in front of us. We spent an hour counting monthly expenses, delinquent clients, and money owed. “Carlos needs to pay us two fifty, no?” “Ooh! Don’t forget that one white dude who smelled so bad! He gave me three hundred just so I wouldn’t tell anyone he was a crybaby!” “I think Carla made three thousand one month, no? Or was she lying?” In the end, we figured out that they’d actually come out a bit ahead. After two years of struggle and strife, courage and persistence and men who sometimes didn’t smell so good, they came away with a combined total of $750. It wasn’t nearly enough. So their year of hope and struggle would end with a retreat back to the Lower East Side.

  They asked me what I thought, looking back, about the whole experiment. Not ready to trust my feelings, I leaned on sociology. There are always setbacks in American stories, I said, but the important thing is setting out on the journey. “You moved out. You moved here. It didn’t last as long as you wanted, but—”

  “We learned our lesson,” Angela said. She was not in the mood for social science.

  I hated to hear her say that. There could be all kinds of lessons. Some of the lessons could be ideas to do better next time. I started again to try to weave a positive tale, but Vonnie interrupted me.

  “Nobody here wants to see a bunch of dumb Latina whores.”

  Her bitterness pierced the room. Why hadn’t it worked? they kept wondering aloud. Their laughter and cries kept pointing to the unassailable quality of race. Vonnie’s explanation, though painful and crude, was hard to refute outright. From what I’d heard and seen, there didn’t seem to be an overwhelming demand for Latina sex workers of their age. But they all could have exercised better judgment and made better business decisions. They could have thought more carefully about renting an apartment, dipping their toes in with a few weeks’ rental at one of the motels that lined the expressways. Angela’s suspicion of the white sex workers might have hurt them too, and they also could have
tried bringing on more of the younger women like Carla from their own neighborhood and class. But they weren’t looking for such narrow rationales. Their own hearts were pointing elsewhere, to something more absolute and ineffable. Maybe it was a way of being in the world, an ethnic style that wasn’t suited to recruiting customers in this gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood.

  Their experiences made me think more deeply about the notion of floating. Global cities offered new social connections that could be monetized, aboveground and below in the black market. However, the capacity to make unfamiliar connections could also turn life into a series of ruthless commodified relationships. Capitalism turned everything into a potentially salable object but it didn’t guarantee there would be buyers. So for those trying to sell something, the risk of failure was always present. Vonnie and Angela showed just the right kind of entrepreneurial fervor, capitalizing on global New York’s invitation to float, to cross barriers and break new economic ground. But New York could not promise buyers, and anything that floats can also sink.

  Vonnie broke the silence. “We weren’t asking for a mansion, Sudhir. We just wanted to get out of the fucking projects and move upstate with our kids, maybe go back to Santo Domingo for a visit.”

  I lowered my head.

  But Angela, as always, forced herself to look on the bright side. At least Carla was on her way, she reminded us. She had that thing young people had. She would make it and they could watch her and be happy.

  “She better not forget who her friends are,” Vonnie said. “When she comes running back …”

  While she tried to think of an appropriate threat, Angela stopped her. “If she comes running back,” she said, “we’ll be there for her.”

  I hoped it was true.

  • • •

  Angela’s circumstances put into relief one of the hardest decisions for any entrepreneur: when to call it quits and close up shop.

  Shine was showing me another: for any employer large or small, the toughest part of life is letting workers go when sales start to slip. A formal severance meeting with the human resources manager can calm the rupture between boss and employee, helping to reduce the possibility of embezzlement or vandalism.

  In the underground economy, alas, no such formal mechanisms exist. Which raises a number of questions: How do people manage teams when the activity is illegal? How do they ensure trust and confidentiality, and what do they do with an uncooperative employee? Carla and Manjun, two people who had experienced great vulnerability, stood in sharp contrast to the drug lords I knew who led their workers as if they were managing a McDonald’s: people had shifts, with specified daily duties, and responsibilities to meet sales targets. If they failed, they were fired (or beaten, or docked pay).

  But those in the underground who faced rapidly declining economic climates had no clear signposts to guide them. For example, Shine had been juggling his staffing levels since the end of 2001, hiring during times of steady supply and cutting back as supplies tightened. Just as Vonnie and Angela were packing up and calling it quits, Shine had made his final transition out of the street trade and was busily recruiting new employees to sell cocaine to white customers. But this meant two complicated tasks: hiring the right new workers and letting go of the street thugs.

  Shine had always believed that it was risky to let an employee walk without a conversation about shared expectations. In this sense, he was a great business manager. He made it clear that his expectations included continued discretion. Any talking about him or his operation would carry significant negative repercussions. But if they kept their mouths shut, he might have work for them again one day.

  The problem with this rational approach was that these were a) young men and b) young men with no alternatives and c) young men. They wanted to make their money now. And they weren’t completely wrong. In fact, you could say their attitude was the result of a perfectly rational cost-benefit analysis of the underground economy in which they found themselves. It’s hard to take the long-term view in a world where there might not be a long term.

  One day, with his operations now firmly placed in the powdered cocaine market, I watched Shine lay off one of these young guys. They were talking on the stoop of Shine’s brownstone when I walked up. He motioned for me to stop so the young guy couldn’t see me listening to the conversation.

  “You got a lot in you,” Shine was saying. “You survive, you understand. You got what it takes. To survive. That’s all it’s about around here.”

  The kid looked like a teenager who had just been scolded by his teacher. “Momma’s still gonna be pissed at me,” he said, taking off his baseball cap and scratching his head. “She’s gonna beat my ass when I tell her.”

  “Well, then, you need to get some more work,” said Shine, looking impatient. “If you need to pay that rent, then you better pay that rent. Find a job or something.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” the young man kept saying, shaking his head. “I mean, she’s really gonna be pissed.”

  “How much you bringing in?”

  “About two hundred. Mostly just for the place. Clarisse went to jail, so, you know, I had to step up.”

  “I can respect that,” Shine said. “You a man, you got to step up. I know it’s rough, but you were good and, like I said, if I get rolling again, I’m calling you first.”

  “Yeah, man. I appreciate that, but I need some work. Maybe I could just work one corner for you, by myself. You know, maybe you could just front me something. We could keep it low down, you know, just me working out there.”

  “Man, that’s on you,” Shine answered. “You can get your own shit, my brother. This whole place is yours.” Shine opened up his arms and puffed out his chest.

  “No, man. I can’t. Ain’t got nothing. I’m out. I can’t front nothing. I need someone to back me up.”

  “Okay, man, we’re going back where we started. I told you that we’re done. That’s it. You got all the opportunity you need right now. Just get out there.”

  “No, man. It’s not that easy. I’m just figuring that you and me, we could just do something small.”

  Shine started laughing. “My brother, you need to hear what I’m saying.”

  “No, no, no,” the young man said. He stuck out his chest in a display of confidence, then glanced over at me. I was leaning against the stoop, making no attempt to hide my eavesdropping. He looked back at Shine. “Maybe we talk about this tomorrow because I really need to work.”

  Shine stood up, shrugging his shoulders. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, shortie. It’s done. You dig?”

  “Oh, man, I don’t know. I say we just keep on hustling.”

  Shine sighed and gestured to me, asking me to come up the stairs and into the building. I walked past the young man. He didn’t look like he was going to leave anytime soon. I knew the feeling. If you don’t accept the news you’ve just heard, if you just wait long enough, perhaps it will turn out to have been a bad dream.

  • • •

  A few weeks later in a Harlem bar, Shine finally told me the story of the momentous transition he was going through. For the first time in almost a decade, he didn’t have at least one crew member on the corner twenty-four/seven. Instead, he was hiring more women like his cousin Evalina, people who could move more comfortably in the downtown social world. He had decided to reinvent himself, to go for it without the safety valve of having just a few dealers on the street. He was pushing all the chips on powdered cocaine. On the white market. While once his client base was 90 percent black and Latino, that number would soon drop to less than 10 percent.

  To me, the parallels to Vonnie and Angela seemed ominous. Could Shine really travel outside his own home base and set up shop in the white world? So many things could go wrong; so much was uncertain. Despite the criminal nature of his ambitions, I couldn’t help feeling nervous for him.

  The first item on his list was to assemble his new team. Finding the right people for the job wasn’t easy,
he said. He wasn’t even sure what attributes he should be seeking. Could his employees be black? Would women or men be more appropriate? Did they need white references?

  Meanwhile, his exit interviews with his existing crew began taking on an existential cast. “These young guys just run around now, acting fucking stupid,” he complained. “At least with me, they learned how to do things the right way.” But he was disappointed that they hadn’t learned from him how to think in more sober ways. They still lacked the discipline he felt was needed for success in the world of business. “I have a duty to these guys, but they have to trust me. If they watch me survive, they can learn.”

  In my experience, gang leaders never think of themselves as running a ruthless criminal enterprise. They think of themselves as race heroes in a polarized America, but it’s a vision of the country that seems, to me, antiquated—like something out of the 1950s or ’60s. They are always reaching out to troubled young men who need adult male mentorship to survive, always doing a good deed for the neighborhood—until something ugly happens. But I had seen behind the curtain. I knew that when one of these young men didn’t take getting fired in the right spirit, gang leaders like Shine didn’t send them off with hugs and a motivational speech. They simply beat the pulp out of them. That’s how it was done.