Floating City

by Sudhir Venkatesh

  I shook my head.

  “Nigger came back from the Middle East, post-trauma or whatever they call it, all depressed and hopeless about everything. Violent sometimes, real jittery. He used the same word. Failed. ’I failed.’ I told him, ’Don’t ever use that word. Say changed, brother. Say, I changed.’”

  Shine put his drink down. Our eyes met.

  “And you?” I asked.

  “When I was little, I used to go downtown. Did I ever tell you that? I used to go and look at all the art. Man, I loved it.”

  “Your brother told me,” I said.

  “So there I am, hanging with all these white boys. I’m thinking, man, if I could put that art up in my house …”

  “You want to open up a gallery?” I said.

  He nodded. “Maybe. Maybe I do. And white folk helped me figure it out—shit, I never thought I’d say that!”

  At that moment, I realized that Shine was going to be fine. He might even turn into a big success. My hunch about his low power was right. He had a way of accepting his past and all the fumbles, mistakes, and missed opportunities, and he was perpetually open to new worlds and new opportunities. He had a way of forgiving himself. Maybe it was those childhood trips to the Metropolitan. Maybe it was New York. Failure would never define him. Longevity did. And in the underworld, that was half the battle. Learning to step back, reassess, reimagine.

  As if he could read my mind, he turned the tables and asked me a startling question. “Can you still write a book?”

  “What?” I said.

  “Can you still write a book?”

  He said it as if this was the obvious question only a simpleton would overlook. And the truth was, it was precisely the question that was secretly tormenting me. I owed it to Angela and Carla, to Manjun and Analise and even Shine himself to rescue from the stream of time all the moments and truths they had shared. Maybe their little piece of reality represented the whole or maybe just a part, but it was still human and true and added something to the sum of knowledge. And telling the story was another way to extend their explorations a little further out of the fishbowl.

  But it all felt so far beyond me. I still had so many more questions than answers. Thrown, I made a tree-falls-in-the-forest joke. “If you write a book and no one reads it, did you really write a book?”

  He laughed, and in that moment I saw that he wasn’t worried about me either. He had a hunch about my powers too. The thought gave me strength.

  • • •

  My last serious conversation with Analise also took place in a bar, but it was much different from my conversation with Shine. While she nursed one vodka tonic after another, she talked about turning over her operation to Kate and either investing her free cash in the art gallery or pulling her money out. Or she would go to India and help expand her uncle’s school. Then on to Paris, where there was an opportunity to open up a clothing boutique. Her world was a Romper Room of second chances, a tribute to the endless vistas of globalization as practiced by the rich.

  “On August fifteenth,” she said, “I’ll be in India and it will be like this never happened.”

  The alternative was turning into a version of her mother, staying on the Upper East Side and living a comfortable life without meaning or challenge.

  “Most of my people have no purpose,” she said. “They have causes, but no purpose. The best I can do is to keep on going.”

  But I was still reacting to her weightless vision about the global Romper Room ahead. It didn’t seem fair that she had so many options and others had so few.

  “The problem with your people is that you all believe this is your world,” I said. “You guys make the rules and you can change them whenever you need to. Dabble in prostitution or go off to India and teach the little brown children—and there are never any consequences.”

  “Let’s be realistic. I’m done with New York. And isn’t that what you wanted? For me to quit ’dabbling in prostitution’?”

  All I could do was laugh. “I don’t even know where to begin. Most people I see are so utterly aware of consequences. Squatters, drug dealers, gang members—they’re all acutely aware of what the future might bring.”

  “But so are all my friends,” she said. “It’s a basic human trait to be curious about how you act and what will happen. That’s why I’m going to India. I get to reinvent myself. My family is here, but I can leave them for a while. I can be someone else, which is what I always wanted.”

  I knew I wouldn’t see her again. Even though I had never launched a formal study of Analise, I had been in this place before many times when previous studies neared completion. The exchange is never a simple one. As hard as it is to spend years observing someone in the criminal world without developing all kinds of complex feelings, good and bad, it is equally difficult to be the one who is observed. The time comes when the thing just naturally wants to end. So I decided I would treat her the way I treated any research subject when the study was over, just close the book and move on to the next tribe—which was, I suppose, exactly what she was doing too. It’s natural to blink before you turn the page.

  But before I got a chance to say good-bye, she asked about my plans.

  As Shine suggested, I tried to begin my speech with “I changed.” And as I spoke, I realized I actually liked her approach to reinvention. Like Shine, she had the gift of being open and it was her strength as it was his. India had been her Metropolitan Museum, perhaps, the thing that gave her a talent for detachment from her class. I wished I could have embraced the same detachment so quickly and decisively myself.

  “I’m not sure what I’ll do. Probably write a book on sex workers. But part of me really wants to make films.”

  She gave me the look of disbelief she always gave me when I talked about making documentaries, even though I had already made three of them by that time. Doubtless J.B.’s film career colored her opinion. But I also think she might have been telling me that she didn’t think they were my real talent. And I knew she was right too. What I was good at was listening to people for a long time, the way I had listened to her. That was what mattered.

  But I wasn’t as decisive as Analise. Maybe I didn’t have that luxury. Instead, like Shine, I had to sit for a while and let it all sink in. I had to figure out a way to bring together all the worlds inside myself, the ethnographer and the scientist and the filmmaker and the guy who hung out with strangers until they became friends. I had seen something unique in New York, I was sure of that. Even my colleagues at Columbia had become supportive, encouraging me to keep taking the roads without street signs, the roads that led across borders most people didn’t know existed. In a short while, those roads would take me into worlds I could never have imagined entering, from the Department of Justice to posh Madison Avenue advertising agencies, where listening to people’s stories and uncovering sociological truths turned out to be just as rewarding as it could be in academia. After all my anxiety and growing pains, the university’s long history of interdisciplinary exploration and emphasis on public involvement made it a perfect intellectual home.

  I contemplated making another list: “What I Saw and Heard and Felt in the Underbelly of the Global City.” Instead, I just started writing about the people I had met and the stories I had heard. For the first time, I wasn’t judging New York based solely on what made it different from Chicago. It was possible for me to imagine my experience there on its own. I had come to New York as a sociologist trained to see the city of the twentieth century, with its fixed ways that spoke lovingly to the traditions and bonds that made America so inviting, the importance of neighborhoods and the power of community. At the same time, on a personal level, I arrived in this city famous for welcoming newcomers as a newcomer eager to take advantage of the city’s willingness to permit reinvention and rebirth. I discovered that the new globalized open city suggested, in itself, a radical new approach that would echo the world it was absorbing.

  But the global city didn’t wip
e out the older virtues. In this sense there were more similarities between New York and Chicago than I first realized. Place still mattered in New York, neighborhoods still had meaning in New Yorkers’ lives, and the ordinary sense of home was still rooted in familiar neighborhood ecologies that lent comfort and security. But the global city also retrofitted and turbocharged these behaviors for a bigger stage. Because New York created connections at dizzying speed, but many of them didn’t last—the key to success was the talent to use and lose improvised social ties. Exploit them when they could serve you and discard them without too much grief when they didn’t, just as Santosh put away the memory of Manjun and moved on with his life, as Margot packed up and left the women she had tried so hard to save, as Shine and Analise shrugged off their old costumes and stepped into new roles. The recipe for success seemed to involve a particular form of self-awareness, a gift for detachment from the fixed comforts of neighborhood and class and identity even as one sought to leverage them: forgive your sins, let go your failures, create yourself afresh, and live for another day. After all, there are always new opportunities. The city constantly changes. So why not you?

  Was this possible for everyone? Hardly. In fact, most of the people who tried to float ended up sinking, especially if the measure of success was class mobility or economic advancement. Most of the people whom I met when I arrived in the city were now either dead, isolated, stuck in some rut, or remaindered to daily survival with little but their regrets to sustain them. Nevertheless, the very same people exceeded my fondest sociological caricatures. Whatever box I used to define them proved limiting because they didn’t define themselves by their outcomes.

  There is a famous Chicago saying: “We don’t want nobody nobody sent.” Translated: go at it alone, dream of making it by yourself, and you’ll end up alone and defeated. The protections of clannishness create their own limitations, many of which are clearly mental. But in New York there is a greater sense that boundaries are rooted in perception alone. They are not permanent obstacles. Over and over, the experiences of everyone I met showed me that a strange encounter or changed circumstance was an opportunity to be seized. Manjun could have left the porn shop when he found out that it was linked to the sex trade, Margot could have walked away from her Wall Street suitors when they offered to pay for sex, and Shine could have remained content to roam about his backyard rather than befriend Midtown bartenders. The connections that New York forged were not a fun form of tourism but opportunities for economic mobility and social advancement. Unlike Chicago, where relentless ambition was frowned upon as a sign of unneighborly behavior, New York gave you license and added fuel to the fire. It encouraged you to question your station in life. And, yes, some people failed. The old stories of race and class still had relevance, though they were less predictive. Margot and Analise walked away with more money and new opportunities, while Angela and Manjun and Carla found it harder to escape. But Shine and Santosh learned from their ethnic and social limitations and continued to press forward.

  The threads connecting the global city may be invisible, but they can be found in stories. Just as when a pioneering group of Chicago professors went out, a century ago, into a city reeling from the turbulence of immigration and massive economic changes and wandered the alleyways and skyscrapers gathering up stories without judgment or evaluation, giving birth to a pragmatic, boots-to-the-ground, uniquely American school of sociology, stories were once again the best and possibly the only way to make sense of a chaotic place like New York. Because each story was a thread, and only by weaving them all together could you make anything whole. The classic New York stories of aspiration and transgression are sociologically useful not just because they evoke the voice of the storyteller, putting flesh back on the n’s abstracted by science into data, but because they reveal the structure of the city itself. That first scene at the gallery when Shine and Analise crossed paths, for example. As a data point in a computer graph it is almost meaningless. But seen through the pattern laid down by our accumulation of stories it becomes yet another tale of improvisation in a world of shifting values and social roles. And if the upper-end madam and the ghetto thug were both improvising their supposedly fixed social roles, if their way of relating and even their styles were subject to such rapid revisions—as if they were merely a fiction agreed on between two people—then it was a short step to admitting that succeeding in a life of crime wasn’t so different from making art. The global city, like the canvas, provided the structure, but the rest was in the individual’s hands, making each Angela and Manjun a kind of artist whose art and job consisted in crafting the latest, most up-to-date version of themselves and offering it to the city for final judgment. Is this the “me” that will finally make it?

  As I mentioned earlier, a diverse group of leaders, from government leaders to foundation presidents, has begun to make similar arguments. The skill, ingenuity, and resilience of those taking an “alternate economic path” in life cannot be boiled down to the laws they transgress, they say. From Accra to Chennai, Shanghai to São Paulo, global cities in their sheer enormity have taught us that the underground economy gives millions of people their only chance at survival. We ignore their needs (and potential contributions) at our own risk. If this book helps encourage that trend, no outcome could make me happier.

  Some time after this, I did see Shine one more time. It was at a party somewhere on the East Side. We didn’t really have that much to say because we’d said it all already, but I remember that we stood together and looked out the window on the glittering city below us. I thought of describing the films I had made, the studies completed and the tenure achieved, evidence that I had changed instead of failed, but I managed to suppress the urge. We stood side by side in comfortable silence. The city below us was as endless and baffling as it was when we’d met ten years before, and it would still be just as endless and baffling a hundred years from now, an infinite array of options and challenges and invisible threads waiting to gather us into its numinous weave. And maybe I still didn’t see the pattern complete, maybe I would always have more questions than answers, but I had to keep extending my little community of words out into the world just as Shine had to keep selling drugs and dreaming about that art gallery. Because this was New York City, and those twinkling lights were a million different worlds beckoning us with their delicious possibilities of knowledge and commerce. We might not know all the answers, but at least we knew what we had to do.

  We had to float.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My colleagues in the Department of Sociology, the Committee on Global Thought, and the Institute for Research in African-American Studies provided vibrant intellectual spaces to grow and mature as a sociologist. Herbert Gans challenged me to write intelligibly so that I might contribute to a more enlivened public discourse. William Julius Wilson remains a caring and generous mentor. Saskia Sassen, Farah Griffin, Steven Gregory, David Stark, Shamus Khan, Alford Young, Alexandra Murphy, and Eva Rosen were wonderful interlocutors. Doug Guthrie saw me through this journey, patiently telling me to exercise patience. Katchen Locke was supportive and wise throughout.

  Ann Godoff saw a book early on, where I saw only scribbles. I couldn’t have taken a step without her leadership. Suzanne Gluck taught me how to find my voice; the authors in her orbit find themselves enriched beyond words. John H. Richardson held my hand—and sometimes my pen—and taught me how to tell a story. David Lobenstine read early drafts with the right mix of insight and prodding. I’m indebted to Andy Celli for his grace and counsel, and to Stephen Dubner for constant encouragement.

  Jonathan Knee, a terrific writer and colleague, gave generously of his time, scanning each page with the eye of a master storyteller. Larry Kamerman introduced me to cinema. His own films have been an inspiration and few are better teachers of the craft. To Matt McGuire, Sunil Garg, Nathaniel Deutsch, Ethan Michaeli, David Sussman, Baron Pineda, and Daniel Brown, I’m eternally grateful for your friendship. To
Robert and Judy Millner, thank you for opening up your hearts and your home. I couldn’t have studied sex work in New York without the support of the Urban Justice Center. They work tirelessly on behalf of sex workers and they remain a beacon for those with nowhere else to turn. Maxine Doogan taught me more than anyone about the daily struggles of the sex work community—and she spoke up for me on countless occasions when the arrows came my way. Thank you, Maxine.

  More than anyone else, my father helped me survive elite education; he taught me to remain confident when waters were unsettled. Little did I know he was also teaching me how to be a father to my own son. From my mother, I learned the value of giving voice to those less fortunate. My sister, Urmila, is that compassionate and loving person you can’t live without.

  My wife, Amanda, is the loveliest person I know. Thank you for Theodore.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I began researching New York City’s underground economy in 1997. Commuting from Massachusetts made an extended study impractical, though I did manage to develop contacts with several black marketers. In 1999, after joining Columbia University, I was awarded a grant to gather oral histories of black Americans in New York and Chicago who worked in the city’s illegal trades. That body of work culminated in a monograph on the underground economy of one Chicago neighborhood.

  For New York, the experience catalyzed my interest in economies that transcended a single neighborhood. I worked with the Sex Worker Project at the Urban Justice Center (UJC) on their study of indoor sex work. My students and I collaborated with UJC staff to interview sex workers living and working in all five boroughs of New York City, as well as northern New Jersey. We completed interviews, which were given to the UJC, and we kept field notes on our own about our experiences speaking with people in the sex trade. That material was featured in a UJC report and an academic publication.