Floating City (16 page)

A young woman approached the group, clearly interested in talking to Shine. But he ignored her. She smiled, but he kept his movements small, as if he was wrapped in plastic, probably because he believed that too much expressiveness “makes white people feel threatened,” as he put it once.

The woman started talking to him, asking questions and not letting monosyllabic answers discourage her. I decided to weave my way over and listen in. When I got close enough, she was talking about the thrill of Manhattan.

“I want to do something special,” she said. “
That's
why I moved here. Isn't that what New York is all about? I mean, you live here. You
know
this.”

“Right, right,” Shine was muttering.

“I mean, I'm not going to be working in this shitty office job for long. I'm going to have this really cool fashion line, for everyone. Like this! See this dress—do you think people in New York would like it?”

“Sure,” Shine said.

“Hey, Abbie! You have to meet Chris—he knows everything about New York. Abbie's going to be an agent. She's got this amazing job. She gets to go hear music all night.”

“Right,” Shine said.

Finally, the barman came over and asked Shine if he wanted to step outside for a smoke. Michael said he would join them.

When they returned, Shine said it was time to go. He didn't
like to stay in bars long. He thought he had a big sign on his face that said, “Drug Trafficker on the Prowl.”

He wanted to walk out by himself, I knew. I couldn't figure out why, but Shine strategized about everything. So I said good-bye and stayed at the bar.

Michael shook Shine's hand, trying his best to mimic a ghetto greeting. “Thursday, right?” He leaned forward for a bro hug. I figured they were setting up another time for a more business-oriented visit. One by one, peer group by peer group, Shine was determined to make his experiment work.

I started to do some back-of-the-bar-napkin calculations. From earlier observations of drug dealers, I knew that a peer group was good for about fifteen hundred dollars per month, but only for about nine to twelve months. I never understood why a drop-off occurred after this point—perhaps the group disbanded, maybe a few stopped taking drugs, maybe a new dealer came along with a cheaper product. Since he was hiring a half dozen people to help, each costing about one thousand dollars per month, Shine would need to make at least fifteen thousand dollars per month to make his new venture sustainable. This meant ten groups, or a standing pool of fifty to seventy-five customers.

And this was just the minimum. Shine would want to expand. American to his core, he believed that bigger was always better.

Expansion was possible in two ways. He could continue recruiting new customers personally, a laborious and inefficient use of his valuable time and energy. Or he could recruit bartenders, security guards, and bellhops to find customers for him. That way, he controlled places instead of people. The places stayed the same and new people were always drifting through.

But Midtown and Wall Street businesses were not Harlem street corners. As he made friends with the bartenders and bellhops, Shine had to tread carefully. He would have no basis for trust and
not much experience to guide him. We spoke often about this vulnerability, but he usually shrugged it off as “just another thing you have to deal with.” I admired the positive attitude, but at what point would his optimism land him in prison?

•   •   •

B
y this time, Columbia had awarded me tenure and I was on my way to being named full professor. I owed much of this to the support of my colleagues and Peter Bearman, who had risen to department chair. I was publishing articles with Steven Levitt in prestigious academic journals and finishing a scholarly book on Chicago's underground economy, all boosting my academic bona fides
.
But I still felt like a one-trick pony, and all my successes were based on the research I had done in Chicago. New York still felt foreign and unknown.

The Chicago projects I had studied were starting to get torn down, and I was traveling there to follow families as they were evicted and forced to relocate. As a break from the scholarly work, I started to experiment with filming these families in an effort to make my first documentary. I was itching to tell Shine, because I hoped he might let me make a film of his escapades, but I was afraid he'd mock me for trying to rise above my station. I wanted to wait until I had something in the can, preferably with an Oscar for best documentary.

As a result, I was too busy to spend much time following Shine around the city.

Occasionally, we would meet quickly at a neighborhood bar and he would give me updates—or, rather, he would give me hints and leave me to figure out what was really going on. Even with a professional sociologist, Shine loved being a man of mystery. “One thing you learn in the game is that the faster you figure out the whole
white people thing
,” he said with emphasis, “the longer you'll stay out of jail.”

This was the kind of oblique statement that required decoding. “So . . . I take it things are going
well
?”

“Yeah, you know how it is,” he said, motioning to the bartender for a refill.

“No! I don't know how it is!” I laughed. “You have to
tell
me.”

“Put it like this—one day at a time.”

I sighed. “So you're not broke and on your ass yet?”

“No. But you never know. Don't look for the future, 'cause you'll get stuck in the past. My grandma told me that.”

I shook my head in defeat. “Okay, okay. Let me see if I understand. You have maybe—I'm guessing, a handful of steady clients? But not enough. You still haven't hired any good contact men, but you know you need to because no three-hundred-pound black street dealer is going to sell coke in Wall Street and not get noticed. So for now you need to keep going to these stupid hotels and bars yourself. But you hate it. On the other hand, it's still a new market full of opportunity and you haven't given up.” I paused. “How am I doing?”

“Didn't say you were wrong.” He laughed.

“I'd say you're at 40 percent of where you want to be. Maybe you have two bars locked down? A few bartenders? No hotels yet, because you'd be smiling right now if you did.”

He smiled and I knew he was lying.

“So you're getting there, but it's slow and you're burning cash. You haven't figured out security yet. Something doesn't feel right about these places. And you definitely don't like walking around with that much on your person. Am I still on track?”

Shine didn't even look me in the eye. Now I
knew
I was nailing it.

That's how it went most of the times we met. It felt like a conversation with Deep Throat. But what I really needed, if I wanted to launch another formal study—and I always did—was for Shine to introduce me to these bartenders and bellhops so I could put
some meaty details in a grant application and hire research assistants and all the rest of the formal machinery that makes hanging out with drug dealers academically respectable. Once again, I had to be patient.

•   •   •

W
hile I was waiting for Shine to come through, Betsy, Michael, and Carter started inviting me to their parties. There were two kinds. The artsy parties happened down in Soho and the East Village, where their artsy friends lived. The family parties were all on the Upper East Side, where their parents lived. At both, people drank and caroused with bohemian abandon late into the night. Sometimes I felt like Jim Fowler on
Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom
, gazing at strange creatures from the safety of my ethnographic pith helmet. They had their own idiosyncratic phrases that made no sense unless you knew the people and places they referenced, and they seemed entirely uninterested in bringing outsiders into their peer group except for entertainment—the role I probably filled. Perhaps I should have found this offensive, but the only emotions I felt were the distanced ones that accompany invisibility. Even in the projects, where I couldn't have been more different from the locals, I was acknowledged with warmth and nearly always offered a plate of food or a drink before anyone else—an honored guest. Here, they looked past me as if I was the help. Even after I'd met a few of them a half dozen times and they'd asked me who I was, whether I was in New York for vacation, they would forget every detail of the previous conversations, including the fact that they had taken place. Some were friendly, but others ignored me outright. Since I was as dark as any of their servants, I shouldn't have been surprised. But it still stung.

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?