Jo Jo began with confidence. “Basically, she can’t be …”
She stopped, struggling to find the right words.
“Jo Jo doesn’t want to be insulting,” Kimberly said.
Jo Jo sat forward. “Here’s what I mean,” she said. “I was at Zanies the other night. The club was kind of empty. I was waiting for my date—he got caught in traffic. I saw this girl get dumped by this guy. Really weird. He just threw down the money and left. I knew what was going on. She was from an escort service. I could tell. So I went up to her and tried to calm her down. Said I knew what that feels like. After about an hour she says she wants to leave her agency and asked if I can help. You know what? Not a chance. Why? She was, like, this working-class girl. Fucking Julia Roberts. What the hell does she know about the ballet or fine art? I mean, you are never just sucking someone’s dick. Sometimes you don’t even do that. They have to feel comfortable with you in public.”
“And you have to know when to shut your mouth too,” Kimberly added. “Those girls, the Puerto Ricans and white trash, they sleep on fucking bunk beds. Our guys aren’t going to trust their reputations to some chick who hangs around the hotel looking for business.”
Jo Jo seemed a bit disappointed in me. “So that’s it? That’s what you do for a living? Spend all your time talking with girls like us?”
“I don’t meet a lot of people like you,” I said. “Usually just Puerto Ricans or white trash.”
“Funny,” she said.
I didn’t reply.
“Anyway, it’s not that fucking complicated. We like money, and this is a fast way to get it. What’s the big deal?”
I thought of Manjun, and how eagerly he tried to show me the divine in his degraded neighborhood. The poor I’d studied always seemed to need to rationalize their behavior, even if it was to make Scarface-style boasts about how little they cared about social norms. They had to make peace with their god somehow. Here it was the opposite. Not only did Analise and Kimberly and Jo Jo never feel pressed to justify their actions, they seemed to feel that victory was found in refusing to justify them.
Another mystery to explore.
• • •
The next time my phone rang, it was a friend telling me that Analise was in the hospital. I made some calls and finally reached J.B., who was still in California trying to become the next Harvey Weinstein. Some old guy got drunk and started beating on Brittany, who locked herself in the bathroom and called Analise for help. Analise tried to help and the client turned on her, giving her the beating he’d wanted to give Brittany. “Fucking Brittany,” J.B. said.
“Analise should have called the cops,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, right.”
J.B. didn’t get back for two days, but maybe business really did keep him, because he looked very upset when he finally got to the hospital. Usually he acted like a weary tour guide waiting for the last group to take their pictures of a monument; now he looked stunned by the sight of the monument burning down. “I couldn’t have done anything,” he said. “There was no way I could stop it.”
He said it as though he’d already said it to himself a thousand times.
We were standing outside the hospital, waiting for visiting hours. He lit a cigarette as I shivered, my hands shoved deep in my pockets. It was late March, when a blast of cold seems so unkind in the face of the coming spring, and all I had was my professorial corduroy jacket. My sympathy was stifled by the knowledge of what he’d really been doing out in LA. While taking a break from failing at making feature-length indie movies, he was putting his cash into porn films and partying late into the night with his new porn friends. I knew Analise wanted him to quit going out to LA, where he only seemed to lose their money. To which he would respond: “Look what you do! What right do you have to judge me?”
“She could at least appreciate how hard I work,” he said.
I mumbled something.
“The real problem is my family. I mean, she’s in the hospital. That could get the wrong kind of attention.”
That sounded like a canned phrase, perhaps one he had heard in his childhood: That could bring the wrong kind of attention, son. From previous conversations, I knew that what he meant was attention from the media, which would inevitably get to the one person in the world he most feared.
“So what happens if your old man finds out?” I asked.
“Um, I’d have to dump her. No question.”
I was flabbergasted. “You’re kidding me,” I said.
“Do you know who my father is? I used to spend summers working on the docks up and down the East Coast. Dad had invested a lot of money—importing, shipping, trading, all that stuff. When people got upset, you know, when things were getting a little bothersome, do you know what Dad did? Brought down some Hells Angels to beat the shit out of the strikers. Dad’s insane. He’d probably go after Analise’s whole fucking family.”
Now I was worried. “Could he really find out?” I asked.
“When you’re doing international work, you need deep contacts in the law because half the shit that goes on your ship is never declared. You can’t break the law on that scale without help. Somebody probably already called Dad. Man, it’s going to suck when I see him. It’s just going to suck.”
J.B. reached into his pocket for the last cigarette, crumpled up the pack, and threw it on the ground. He was wearing a dress shirt with thin pink stripes and a sweater thrown over his shoulders. He looked like JFK on a boat, steadying himself for the next wave.
“Wish my sister was here—she always knows how to handle things. But she lives in London with a fucking Paki who owns hotels.”
He noticed my existence and said, “Oh, sorry—I don’t mean you.” I was supposed to understand that he meant Paki Pakis, not an assimilated person like myself who understood important cultural intricacies like the Hustle and “Keep on Truckin’.”
“Kathryn knows how to take Dad on—because of the marriage she had to deal with a bunch of shit from everyone and now no one talks to her, so she doesn’t give a fuck. She never backs down. And her kids, man, they hate the old man. And he hates them back, which is hilarious. You should see him fighting with these little five-year-olds like they were real people, getting drunk and calling them all sorts of nasty names. And they just stand there and laugh at him.”
Already, I was imagining a study on intermarriage among the wealthy. Did intimate contact with another race stiffen all their spines in this way? Genuinely curious, I asked J.B. how she would handle the situation.
He let out a big sigh, I’m not sure why—either from longing or disappointment in his own ability to cope with his father. He glanced up toward Analise’s hospital room. “She’d be up there instead of down here smoking a cigarette,” he began. “And she’d be working the phones like a madwoman—she’d get my brother to fly out here, and he’d make my dad come too, and then when everyone was gathered she’d just come out and say it. ’Analise has been doing blah blah, making money blah blah.’ And you know what? We’d all probably end up being fucking proud of Analise!”
Did his brother know? I asked
J.B. nodded. “I told him.”
So why not call him? If he could work magic on the old man, why not ask for some help?
He looked ashamed. “He’s in Tokyo. I don’t want to bug him.” But his voice was wistful, as if he really wanted his brother’s help. I didn’t know much about his brother, but I knew he was older and successful in his own right. I imagined J.B. had asked him for help many times in the past. Too many times.
He looked at his watch. “I better get back up there,” he said.
Thrusting his hands deep into his pockets, he headed down the sidewalk toward the hospital doors.
• • •
I didn’t see Analise the rest of that month. She’d gone to the Hamptons to convalesce; I was busy finishing up a semester of teaching. She finally returned to New York in May 2005, which I remember because school wa
s almost out. When I went to visit her at her apartment, she opened the door with her bag already slung over her shoulder. “Want to help me run an errand?” she asked. We headed right out again.
She still looked slightly shaken. She had lost some weight too. We started walking west toward Chelsea and she fell into a desultory account of the days just past. The beach house was the perfect place to gather her thoughts, the sand got into everything, she told J.B. she didn’t want to see him for a while, the social scene was crazy but she avoided that.
“How’s he taking it?” I asked, steering her back.
“Junebug? He’s pissed. Says it’s all my fault—I should quit the business before something worse happens.”
“And what do you say?”
She cackled, giving me a glimpse of a more cynical Analise. “If I quit, where are you going to steal the money to launch your cinema empire?”
Was this how these events were going to affect her? I wondered. I pictured a pilgrim’s progress from innocence to experience that left her with the same Machiavellian approach to life she despised in her own parents. The psychology of entitlement required a victory. Was that the difference between her and the girls who didn’t “get” it?
Maybe she felt guilty, because she softened her tone. “You should check in with J.B. sometime. He likes you. And you’re both making movies now—maybe you can do some business.”
“I don’t exactly make his kind of movie,” I said.
“I realize that. But all that porn stuff is a side thing. He’s going legit, or at least he will be. I think he’s making some kind of urban-thriller-lower-depths thing. You can talk about aspect ratios or whatever.”
She stopped at a plain red metal door in a brick wall, putting her hand on the knob and grinning at me. “And you always wanted to hang around rich people—excuse me, investigate their secret codes.”
With that, she pulled open the door and led me into the building, which turned out to be an art gallery under construction. A pair of workers were running wires and putting up wallboard.
“This is what kept me going,” Analise said. “I kept thinking about this place.”
“Is this yours?” I asked, surprised.
“Yes! I mean, not yet, but soon, I hope. Kate owns it now.”
She’d been talking about doing something in the art world for years, but it was only when the money started pouring in—a few weeks before J.B. started stealing it, in fact—that she realized the time had come. Her friend Kate happened to be looking for investors, so it all came together quickly. She even managed to convince her mother to chip in a few dollars. With time and more money, she hoped to invest enough to become a partner. Impressed, I realized she was playing the game on a level almost inconceivable to Angela or even Margot: not to make the rent or lay up a nest egg, but to build wealth. They were selling piecework; she was creating leverage. Her sense of entitlement unleashed her ambition.
She led me to the back, where an older woman was issuing instructions to someone over the phone. “If they want us to host, it will have to be after December. Tell her we’re getting full, so she better act fast.”
She looked up at us and spread five fingers, the universal hand signal for Give me five minutes. Analise led me into another small room, where the walls were raw and the desk was a door on sawhorses.
“My office,” she said.
My heart leapt. “Your office?”
For the first time that day, Analise gave me a big smile. “Boy, do we have a lot to talk about.”
Again, I thought of Angela. Her Brooklyn apartment had been the first step toward some kind of financial stability, a small-business dream to clean ill-gotten gains, sign up for a credit card, and someday maybe even move back to the Dominican Republic with a little retirement savings. I’d lost count of the number of times she’d dreamily narrated this story, as though she was the lonely office worker staring at a postcard of Tahiti in her cubicle in mid-January. Manjun and Santosh and so many others did the same shuffle between illegitimate and legitimate economies, flouting the law when they needed to but always hoping for the day when they would be freed up from sex work altogether. For Analise and her crew, the jump between legal and illegal was more like a game, and losing didn’t mean death or prison; it just meant “Go back to Start. Do not pass Go.” To Analise, the chance to invest in Kate’s gallery was just a chance to advance to the next round and talk about herself with a new clarity and purpose. She wasn’t slumming; she was an entrepreneur.
Just at that moment, the other woman called her name and we went back to the main room. This was Kate. She seemed to know all about me. Carrying a pack of cigarettes and a cup of coffee, she led us out to a small backyard and the requisite smokers’ table and began to explain the situation as if I had come for that exact purpose. Which I suppose I had, without knowing it.
“Analise is going into the art business. It will take a year or two, but not much more than that.”
I looked at Analise. She took a deep breath and presented her case as if I were a jury—just as when Shine tried to convince me he had philanthropic intentions when he beat the crap out of the young black men who worked for him. “I decided I’m going to be really good at this, and I don’t care about the consequences.”
Was she serious? Was this some kind of psychological mechanism to allow her to keep moving forward?
“I was foolish—I admit that. I put myself in a vulnerable position. Because I was doing things halfway, playing at it like a little rich girl. So I have to decide, am I going to let some drunk asshole run my life? Some guy who beats up women? That’s who gets to make my decision? Or should I find a way to deal with it?”
At this point, Analise’s speech became halting. She still hadn’t figured out all the details, but the intention was clear. She was going to escalate her work as a madam. For the foreseeable future, which she expected to be of short duration, she would throw everything she had into the trade. Earn enough revenue, launder it through Kate’s gallery, where she would slowly build up an equity stake, then get out of the game. The key was to dive in deeper and focus her energies on running a productive business. She vowed not to get beat up in hotel rooms anymore, as if that was something she could completely control. She began talking about the ways she would be helping the Jo Jos and Kimberlys of the world, though she didn’t push it very far, because even she knew that charity didn’t suit her. But she was clear on the main point: no more lollygagging; time to get serious and make a real go of it. In the great American tradition, she was determined to offer the best possible service for a good price.
Female empowerment seemed like an odd issue to bring into this decision, but it wasn’t the first time I’d heard prostitution put in those terms. Streetwalkers and high-end escorts alike talked about the autonomy and feelings of self-efficacy they earned from the skillful sale of their bodies. And they were always talking about their savvy exit strategies. Managers like Margot and Analise were especially prone to this. In fact, nearly every escort service manager, madam, and pimp I’d ever met loved to talk about the day they would quit. Very few really enjoyed directing other women to sell their bodies, and the ones who did often turned to drugs to numb their pain and guilt. Some of this was endemic to the life of any hustler, however. I had heard Santosh and Shine speak of similar dreams. This seemed to be a natural product of the strange relationship to the future people have when they start experiencing success in the black market. They realize that the only real future is with the thieves that come after their money and the police who come after their freedom. So they pretend the future is bright.
Shakespeare said it best: if you have no virtue, assume one. But watching Analise put on her new disguise as full-time-madam-for-a-while brought the illusion and the danger home to me. I could see how it helped her push ahead through her fear, but if she actually started believing in her fictions, where would she stop? What dangers would she overlook?
I also had an intuition
that the relationship with Kate was not going to work out. It was just a feeling, but the thing about laundering money seemed like a bad sign. Analise was taking on too many risks. She was wealthy and she didn’t need to worry about hiding and laundering her cash. That was the kind of thing Shine and other ghetto entrepreneurs had to worry about. So why go into business with Kate? What did Kate give her that she felt she was lacking? Something didn’t feel right.
Maybe Kate sensed my skepticism. She tapped her cigarette against the edge of the metal table as a reflective expression came over her face. “I’ve known Analise since she was a baby,” she said. “Our families spend summers together.”
The phone rang and she said she’d be back in a minute, crushing her cigarette under the toe of her stiletto. Analise began filling in the rest. A musician, Kate quit school to travel and her father cut her off. Her mother still sent her money through their lawyers, but she didn’t touch it, said she’d give it to her kids when the time came.
“Why an art gallery?” I asked.
“A lot of men come here,” Analise said. “She gets to know them real well.”
I sighed.
At least she’d finally decided to let go of Brittany, she said. “She’s acting totally crazy. She’s calling up people at their offices and setting up dates herself.”
Point by point, she filled me in on the rest of her business plan. There were planned investments in new artists, especially beautiful young females who would attract wealthy men to the gallery, exhibitions and liaisons with galleries in Paris, Rome, Mumbai. I couldn’t tell whether the illicit activity would be going global as well, but this was still the upper-class version of Shine I’d been searching for. Analise was also moving “downtown,” and using new connections to create new moneymaking schemes and capitalize on the worlds she could bring together. “Reach out and touch someone” was being given an uglier meaning. I did my best not to be judgmental, but I felt I was seeing a life unravel in front of me, with little of the empathy I felt when watching Carla or Angela succumb to similar pressures and desires. I realized then that the distancing effect of being a professional observer actually allows you to feel things you can’t feel as easily with your own friends. You expect more from people closer to you. You allow yourself to get angry with them. Maybe this was another reason I tended to study the poor. Maybe I really did find safety in their difference, even though I kept telling the world that treating them differently was patronizing. It was something to think about later, when things were more calm.
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