Floating City by Sudhir Venkatesh Page A

that supported the sex workers to see what kinds of social networks wrapped around the sex trade to make the economy function. And to address the generalizability problem, I needed to broaden my reach. In 2003, I decided to focus on Manjun and three other South Asian–born store clerks who worked in the neighborhood. Two were from Bangladesh, one from India, and one from Pakistan—populations I had never studied. The challenge was figuring out how to win their trust.
    For the first few months, I met them on a casual basis, usually with Manjun during his after-work meals and tea breaks. Eventually I began to tell them about my anxieties about understandingNew York, because I find that sharing my own personal anxieties is a useful means of building a relationship. I told them that I’d love to launch an in-depth study of the changes taking place around them. I told them I needed to find people who really trusted me, people who would allow me to enter their lives for long periods, before I could really start a long-term study. I was about to get into the subject of sex when one of them interrupted me with a knowing wink. “You should see what goes on in my store.”
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    T his was Santosh, the oldest and the most successful of the four. At fifty-three, he was part owner of a thriving business and the patriarch of a large family that included his wife, his mother, several brothers and their families, two sons, and a daughter-in-law who was expecting the baby who would make him a grandfather. But the success of his American life was completely rooted in the underground economy of sex.
    He told me his story as he stood behind the counter of his store, stuffing years of epic immigrant drama into the snatched moments between sales. He arrived in 1993 and started off driving a cab. On a good night, he made one hundred dollars. After a year, he realized he could make a little more on slow nights by leaving his meter off and driving men around in search of prostitutes. Sometimes he’d walk away and let them use the backseat. In time, he developed a knowledge of bathhouses in Midtown and brothel brownstones up in central and Spanish Harlem where sex workers waited behind every door. In a ten-mile radius, he could find his customers a partner of any race, nationality, or sexual persuasion they desired. Each john gave him ten or twenty dollars to find a brothel or bathhouse, sex workers tipped him what they could afford at the end of the week, and the brothel owners paid ten dollars per client. He told his wife he was “consulting” for some businesses, which freed him up to drive the taxi nearly every night, and before longhis illegal earnings were as high as two thousand dollars a month—more than he made for cab driving.
    One day, a friend suggested he invest in a video store. He bought 15 percent of the store and started working there as a night clerk. But the bathhouse operators and sex workers wanted to keep working with him as well, so he made extra revenue by telling his customers and cab drivers where to find a brothel, bathhouse, or private sex club. All of this earned enough for him to bring his brothers and mother to the United States, but they all thought he was still a software consultant.
    â€œWhat if they come into this store and find you behind the desk?” I asked him.
    He smiled. “If they find me here, then it is
they
who have to do the explaining to me!”
    Azad was another clerk who came to my aid. An immigrant from Pakistan, he now worked at a kiosk that sold newspapers and snacks. On the long afternoons when business was slow, he told me that his first job in America had been at a newspaper stand in Chelsea, a legal enterprise although he was paid off the books and therefore made very little money. After a few months, a prostitute who lived in the public housing development across the street offered to pay him ten dollars if he