Floating City (25 page)

“I interviewed them. My friends,” Martin said, proud as a student submitting his senior thesis. “Well, sort of. I mean, I did my best. I don't know if it's perfect—you know, from a
bookkeeping
perspective.”

Martin rubbed his hands together—another new gesture.

“Martin, you're a lunatic. I can't take this.”

“No, no, no. You deserve it
 . . .
” he said.

His voice trailed off. I looked around the bar. As dinnertime approached, the room was filling up with well-dressed middle-aged women in elegant dresses, their sparkling jewels echoing the dripping chandeliers above. Some were busy with their phones. Was one of them Martin's wife? When Martin started his confession, she would look over at me and know that I already knew the whole story, that I was there to witness her reaction, and she'd be completely justified in hating me. With each woman who passed, I felt a growing sense of doom.

When I turned back to Martin, he was saying how much pain I was in. Not him, me.

In fact, all the guys felt bad for me.

That was it, the proverbial final straw. Sociology has to stop somewhere and what better place than this—the definitive example of too close for comfort, and
way
too close for objective science. I muttered some words of apology under my breath and bolted out of the restaurant, leaving Martin to meet his wife alone.

But on this dash past the glamorous hotel marquees to the safety of the subway that would take me home, new questions nagged at me: In a world of shifting borders and permeable barriers, was my anxiety a symptom or a clue? What did too close for comfort
mean
?

I was about to find out.

BOUNDARY ISSUES

S
hine said he had some news for me, so we met at a bar near my office. He told me the church confrontation didn't work. Juan just denied selling coke right there in front of everybody. Now Shine was moving to plan B.

Before he could say any more, we were interrupted by a very upset young black woman. “They asked me to leave!” she cried.

Shine put down his soda, turned, and looked her up and down. Her wide eyes made it clear she'd been doing coke, and her hands were shaking, so it seemed she was probably coming down off an elephant-strength buzz. She even had the little bluish black blotches hard-drug addicts get on their faces. “Who? Where?” Shine asked.

“The dude at that bar downtown. Said I shouldn't come in anymore.”

“What did he say
exactly
?”

“Said, 'You got to get out of here.' But this dude was in the bathroom and he was about to come back, so I said I had a friend who was still in the bathroom. And he said, 'I don't care. You gotta leave.'”

“Did you get to everyone?” Shine asked.

“I
couldn't
. He told me to leave!”

“Next time, wait outside. Don't leave people hanging like that if they're waiting for shit. They get nervous, shit happens. I got to tell you everything?”

I was surprised Shine was using someone so strung out as a runner. The transition from the street crew really wasn't going well,
apparently. He seemed disgusted. “Wait over there,” he told the woman, pointing to a seat in the corner. “We got to talk when I'm through with the professor.” She started to obey, but he stopped her with a question. “Did you see any East Side niggers there?”

“I don't know . . . It was a pretty big place.”

“Was everyone white?”

“Yeah, I guess. I mean, there were some talking Spanish, Dominicans or something.”

“How many of them?”

“Like two or three?”

Shine looked like steam was going to come out of his ears.
“Was it two or was it three?”
he said.

People looked over. This wasn't normal for him. Something was wrong.

“Three. Just a bunch of young dudes having a beer.”

“I don't think so,” said Shine. He took out his phone from his coat pocket and walked outside to make a call. The girl went off to her appointed space. I sipped my beer.

A few minutes later, Shine walked back in and sat down. He didn't say anything and I could tell he wanted some time to cool off, so I put a few dollars on the table and said good-bye.

Later that evening, he called to explain. Shine's access to the bars depended on the bartenders who received a fee for allowing his runners to come and go. As he suspected, Juan had paid one of them off. This meant that Shine's drug runners would no longer be allowed to come inside—tall black women in Wall Street bars stood out, so it was easy for the bartenders to tell who was a runner. That son of a bitch Juan was taking over his sales spots, Shine said. Which was bad enough on its own, but it was also dangerous, since Shine and his runners were now walking into potential law enforcement traps—what if the bartender called the police the moment one of Shine's employees walked in? Without an agreement, there was nothing to stop them from dropping the dime. The cops
made their bust, Juan walked in, and everyone was happy—except Shine.

This fight with Juan was costing him. How much worse would it get? And how could he raise the heat without scaring the white customers and killing the whole business?

“All it takes is for one of those dudes to let the police know where I'm hanging out,” Shine said. “I'm out there with no protection.”

What it added up to was, Juan could use his relationship with these white customers to hurt the guy who'd given him the idea of forming relationships with white customers in the first place—a bitter twist indeed. And Juan's cousins were high-ranking gang members themselves, which meant that Shine had to work within a very narrow framework of acceptable street justice or risk violent retaliation. “That boy could fuck me over pretty quick,” Shine muttered.

That was another surprise. Street-savvy entrepreneurs like Shine never admit vulnerability. They can't risk a chink in the armor. He knew he could trust me, but still—dealing in bars outside Harlem had clearly put him outside his comfort zone. A small shift in the cocaine market and all that was solid in Shine's life was melting into air. Marx would have been fascinated, Milton Friedman amused. The creative destruction of capitalism—
change or die
—was sending this resourceful and determined man into bars where he didn't know the manager, to hotels filled with security he'd never met, to white customers he didn't trust. And “die” wasn't a metaphor.

The frustration I'd seen on his face at the bar that day spoke volumes. In sociological terms, Shine was coming to the painful realization that he was missing some aspect of cultural capital, that he wasn't quite in line with the tribal codes of this new world. He could pull off the small talk—half the battle and no small accomplishment—but the rules of conflict still eluded him. And conflict was a sine qua non of life underground. People in Harlem's
black market understood physical force. He could threaten a person or even their family members and everybody knew the limits. Nobody would dream of going to the cops, so you solved problems on your own, but self-reliance also increased the likelihood that force would be used. In sociological terms, physical confrontation was a social norm that had to be dealt with off the books.

But the white bartender? Who knew how someone like that would react? Shine kept muttering about the right ways to settle conflicts in the “white world.” If you couldn't beat someone up, he wondered, what worked? Persuasion? Rational informed discussion? The whole thing was giving him a headache. He had tens of thousands in the game, he said, and he'd better figure things out before he lost the money and his reputation along with it. The only thing he knew for sure was that whatever he decided to do, he'd have to do it fast. “I might not be around for a few days,” he said.

I didn't ask what he was planning. For my own safety, it was better not to know.

•   •   •

I
t took a while to find the right time,” Shine said. His voice was very quiet.

We were alone in the kitchen of his mother's house. This was the first time I'd seen him since the day the tall black woman had come into the bar all coked out a few months earlier.

“Juan?” I asked.

He nodded.

My stomach lurched. His original plan, I remembered, had been to face him down at church. I pictured that skinny kid, imagined his dignified working-class parents standing at the church door talking to the priest. I saw them look down at the sidewalk and the expressions of horror and shame as they saw Shine confront their son. In a research study I would have filed this under “informal regulation mechanisms of the underground economy.” Now
the only thing I could think was, How could law-abiding, God-fearing parents stand to watch that? How could they bear it, knowing they couldn't call the police because that would only make things worse? What kind of society had we created?

I guess Shine could see the distress on my face. “I'll tell you about it later,” he said. We sat at the table without saying much, eating his mother's comfort food. I felt very melancholy. This was not a side of him I ever wanted to see.

When we were finished, we went for a walk down the sidewalks of Harlem and Shine told me the story. For five hundred dollars, he'd hired an older man named Tito to help him track Juan's whereabouts. Tito lived in the neighborhood and could move around without being detected. He had spent over a decade in jail for drug trafficking and nobody would pay him a living salary after he got out, so he served as a hired gun for underground traders. He'd do anything from party security to beating up deadbeats to shaking down local business owners.

Tito's report was thorough. Juan had four young women, girls really, who lived with their mothers in Harlem and worked in stores or offices downtown. They found customers and Juan came down to meet them. Tito also learned that Juan was looking for a basement apartment in the Bronx, which was significant because basements were popular places to store drugs and weapons. Juan was even starting to interview young guys to run for him. And though he didn't have security guards, he usually traveled in a group that was bound to be armed.

Tito suggested that Shine grab Juan as the young man was leaving a building on 134th Street, where one of the girlfriends lived. A small alleyway that separated two brownstones would make a splendid spot for a beating.

In the meantime, Shine did make a few more stabs at settling the dispute. He got a female to carry a message. Juan ignored it. Then he approached him on the street. Just find your own bars,
Shine said. Take Brooklyn and give me Soho. But Juan had an attitude. He said he'd developed clients and bartenders and turned them over and now
he
should get a cut. “You owe
me
money. I want my money.” The claim itself was innovative, a revolution against the established pecking order, and the thing that angered Shine even more than a goddamn nineteen-year-old runner asking for an equity stake in his business was the idea that he'd
told
the kid he didn't want him cultivating customers in the first place. Now the little bastard wanted a reward for ambition Shine never wanted him to have. Offer shares to a crewmember? The idea was outrageous. The whole system would
collapse
. He could always find another person willing to accept a day's pay for a day's work.

Under different circumstances, I might have laughed—Shine sounded so much like an archconservative denouncing unions and the minimum wage. But in this world, the loss of market share led to consequences that were immediate, personal, and painful.

Juan was much smaller than Shine, but Tito helped hold him down while Shine applied his form of human resources counseling. He focused on Juan's face, making sure to open some good cuts that would leave a lasting impression on the young man. A “bunch of good shots to the mouth” drove the message home.

Shine shook his wounded hand and smiled. The thing was, right up until the last punch, Juan was muttering about the money he was owed. Shine had left the kid lying on the ground in a pool of his own blood and he still wouldn't give up. He'd be back.

“What if he brings his cousins with him?” I asked.

Shine just sighed and stared ahead. We walked a few blocks in silence. Then he sighed and cursed Juan's name a few times before saying he would probably have to go into business with the little bastard.

“Are you kidding? After what you just did to him?”

“Had to do that, man.”

I didn't know what to say. It was so unemotional, so
Machiavellian—so
professional
. There was something simultaneously frightening and attractive about Shine's ability to dispense force in this dispassionate way, as if he had given a mild rebuke to a subordinate—nothing personal, just business.

The immediate concern was more basic: Shine couldn't just ignore the bar downtown. It would look like he was showing weakness and that would tell Juan and his cousins to move back in, which would open the gates to all kinds of trouble. This wasn't like the regular business world. Burger King could shut down a franchise without worrying about Mickey D coming to whack him. But if Shine fought for the territory the way he would up in Harlem, it would freak out the white boys and the cops who protected them. He was back at the practical problem of crossing this particular border. He still didn't know how to handle the white bartender or the upper-end clients. He couldn't bring Tito to each bar Juan's crew had taken over. What he needed now was the ability to surf through an unsettled period when the context was changing from what had come before—the quality sociologist Ann Swidler has called possessing the right “cultural repertoire.” In a period of flux, when the old way of behaving is not working, a broad set of experiences and references seems to give a person the ability to find new rituals and mechanisms of success. Failing that, the only solution is to find a broker, or “rabbi,” who could support him.

The A train rumbled under our feet and Shine turned to look at me. He held my eyes and smiled with an odd, amused expression, resigned and a bit puzzled.

“I'll give him the bars. I mean, he'll have to pay my cut—I won't just
give
them to him. But I want out of those goddamn bars anyway. That's the kind of thing that gets cops all excited. They don't give a fuck about some street corner in Harlem with grannies and schoolkids walking by, but a bar full of white boys getting shitfaced must be protected at all costs.”

I understood his point. If he stayed in Harlem and sold to the
locals and the few middle-class white tourists, he was considered a nuisance but not a threat. But what would that leave him? I wondered. If he gave up the streets
and
the bars, what was left?

He read my mind. As we paused at the curb, respecting the red light only as long as it took to check the traffic—the code of the New York pedestrian—he smiled and slapped me on the shoulder. “Art,” he said.

“Art?”

“Galleries. Openings. Those people got tons of money, and they like to party. And it's a scene where you can be . . . colorful.”

He grinned.

It sounded like a good plan, I said, but it also sounded like an even harder nut to crack than the bars in Soho. How was a guy like him going to find his way into a world like that?

Shine seemed amused. He knew I'd been hanging out in artsy circles since beginning the documentary work, so maybe he thought I was being proprietary. “You think I never heard of Jackson Pollock? I've been to the goddamn Metropolitan. I went there on
school
trips.”