Floating City (31 page)

At some point, you gotta choose.

I'm sure Angela and I were thinking the same thing. Carla was running this race handicapped. She didn't understand what it really meant to manage people, how to motivate them to survive the nightly abuse and also motivate
yourself.
That was what Margot had lost, the reason she was quitting, the reason she was so bitter. She had begun to succeed as a manager, she had often told me, the day she accepted that
somebody
was going to get hurt. Being violated was part of the game. But at least she could choose not to be the victim.

It was all so sad. Angela was going to go back upstairs, at least. God bless her for that. She shrugged her shoulders and started to wipe her eyes.

“I'm sorry we had to meet like this,” Margot said, and now the compassion was back in her voice.

“Yes,” Angela said. Just that and nothing more, but it said everything. She squeezed my hand.

Six months later, Carla killed herself.

•   •   •

T
he calendar turned again. It was now 2007, a full decade since I first came to Columbia University and the city of New York. I was in a strip club in northern New Jersey looking for new venues for another study of the sex economy. I needed to find club managers and dancers who would talk about the journey so many of them took from dancing to full-time sex work. In this bustling industrial corridor just outside New York, the strip clubs were small neighborhood places where the TVs showed the game on mute while women danced to loud rock and roll. The owner of this one, a gruff but amiable fellow named Jimmy, had studied sociology at a community college and liked to talk with me about growing up in the working class. Twenty feet away, a young Latina woman was sitting on the lap of a burly white man wearing a green Caterpillar hat. She reminded me of Carla. With each beer, the burly man grew rowdier. Jimmy got up a few times and made a move in his direction, and each time the man waved him off with a promise he would calm down.

Suddenly, the burly man threw the young Latina down and put his foot on her throat. He poured his beer on her face and then dragged her out of the bar by her hair.

Jimmy went into the back of the bar and grabbed what looked to be a short baseball bat. I followed him outside, along with a dozen other customers. The burly man had pinned the young woman against the outside wall of the bar and he was smacking her in the face with his open palm.

Jimmy walked up to him as the burly man wound up for one more strike to her face. Just as he put his fist in the air, Jimmy clobbered him with the bat across the back of his neck. The man lost his grip and the girl fell and Jimmy swung the bat again.
Whack! Whack!
The man fell down next to the girl.

Then Jimmy pulled the girl up and told her, “That's it—you're
done. I don't want to see you back here. I told you nicely that you weren't ready, and you didn't listen. So get the fuck out.”

He turned to the small crowd and told them to go back inside. “People are trying to sleep. Let's be respectful.”

I slid down against the wall. My knees were weak and I was about to throw up.

Jimmy came over and grabbed my arm with the same hard grip he'd used to drag up the Latina. “No,” he said. “Don't do it.”

All the faces of all the women I had seen in situations like this came swimming into my head. Carla. Angela. All the horrible stories I had heard.

“Don't go there,” Jimmy said.

I tried to talk, but it just came out like this: “I can't . . . I can't . . . I can't . . .”

A week earlier, the night we had met, I had told Jimmy that I was nearing the end of my work. The nights were too long, I explained. I was getting worn out. “Bullshit,” he'd said. “You're scared—I can see it. You want to save these women, and you don't know how, and it's eating you up.” He felt the same way, he said. All these crazy women reminded him of his wife. Men were protectors, and it didn't matter whether she was your wife or some low-rent streetwalker. It hurts to see them like this. Especially when you can't do anything about it.

Now he said, “You
can.
Go home, but come back. Come back once. After that, you can stop. But you have to come back once.”

He lit a cigarette and gave it to me, then lit another one for himself.

“You can sleep here if you want or you can go home, but it's important that you come back. Get back on the horse.”

“I'm done, Jimmy,” I said. I started to cry and I buried my hands in my face, embarrassed that he was seeing this. The study I wanted to complete, the book I wanted to write, the documentary
film I hoped someday to complete—I was sick of everything and ready to throw it all away.

“Someone has to get beat,” he said. “That's the game. Someone gets fucked up, gets a beating. You can't change it. Go home.”

He walked back into the club as I sat and sobbed.
Someone has to get beat
. First Margot, now Jimmy. The image of Joshi came into my mind, arranging his toy soldiers on his knees. It was all just too hard to accept.

Finally, I pulled myself together and called a cab. On the long drive down those dark industrial streets toward the lights of Manhattan, a strange thought came into my head. In the ragged alleys of Newark, in the strip clubs of Manhattan, in the back of a porn shop in Hell's Kitchen, on the elegant sofa of an upscale madam, I had found a community. Like Mortimer, the dying man who depended on the kindness of prostitutes; like Martin, who found comfort among his fellow johns; like Angela, with her tolerant priest and the small army of sex workers who loved her, I also had people looking after me. And I had the advantage of growing success with the research that mattered so much to me, a morale booster if ever there was one.

With the help of Angela and Margot, I had gathered enough contacts in the upper-end of the sex trade to launch a study of several hundred women in several cities, and I finally managed to build a big enough sample of women to satisfy the scientists of mainstream sociology. But the truth was, all my scientific detachment about the “informants” and “research subjects” was a dodge, along with my glorious collection of
n
's. Margot was right about me. In a vast city where I felt alone, in a country where I had been struggling to find my own way, I had searched out a small army of weary soul mates who did their best to point me home. And this wasn't some character flaw or research failure but the business of life working itself out, especially life on any kind of margin. These im
provised communities gave support and also resonance. Their lives rippled through me, my life rippled through theirs, we extended our support systems outward through one another and into the beyond that threatened and beckoned us. The only real difference was that I was also taking notes, quantifying and categorizing, applying the tools of science to the journey we were all taking together.

And Jimmy was right too. I had to come back. Even if it was just for one more night, I didn't want this to be my last memory of the underbelly world. I owed all of them that much. I owed them so much more.

•   •   •

I
saw Margot one more time. She said she wanted to hear my proposal for the regionwide study of the sex economy in New York. But when I showed her my list of the issues I would be studying, she gave them a quick glance and went back to talking to me as if I was a client. “Make a list. You want interviews? Fine. You want to meet more people like me? Fine. Cops? Whatever you want, let me know. But do it quick because I don't know how long I can do this.”

A few months later, she quit the business and moved to Arizona. I never saw her again.

Angela called me once from the Dominican Republic, but I didn't even get a chance to speak to her. She left a message on my answering machine saying she wanted to put the past behind her.

Shine I met a few more times. Once it was back in the old bar, having a drink at the end of the day. He had a bad cough and was as gloomy as an accountant at the height of tax season, loaded to breaking with everyone's miseries and lies. He asked what I was doing and I told him I was giving everything up for a while—no more sex workers, no more johns, no more rich kids. I was even taking a break from the documentaries. It was all too much for me. I couldn't figure out a way to hold it all together.

“It's probably a good time to take a break,” he said.

I sensed the pity in his voice and rejected it. “It's not a break, Shine. I wanted to map all the patterns and figure out the code. I wanted to find a way to connect everything. I wanted to show that people like Angela and Carla and Manjun weren't so different from people like Analise and J.B. I wanted to show them a way out.”

That was the truth. This wasn't about science. I wanted to show them a way out and I had failed. “I
failed
,
”
I said.

With that, emotion welled up from so many places. Memories of the porn store, of the apartment in Brooklyn, of the time I accompanied Carla to that diner to meet with Margot. I even remembered the magazines I looked at in the newsstand when I left them alone to get to know each other.
Foreign Affairs
!
I felt like crying and kept pouring the feelings into a soliloquy about New York and my fear that I would never really figure out this enormous protean city no matter how big a study I could build.
“I
failed
,
”
I said again.

Shine met my eyes. He took a deep breath and glanced up at the television and put an ice cube in his mouth, sucking on it pensively. When he looked back, I got the feeling he had returned from a distant place. “Did I ever tell you how my older brother died?”

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.

•   •   •

M
y 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.”