Free Floating City by Sudhir Venkatesh

casharound, so the bar manager kept a running tab for each of the women he slept with and Mortimer paid once at the end of the week. There was always a gypsy cab to drive him home, a service that included a personal escort upstairs to his apartment. Several of the sex workers made sure his fridge was filled with sandwiches and his bathroom had toilet paper. And to save him from exhausting trips home, the porn shop next door made up a little room in the back where Mortimer could enjoy his ladies of the night.
    This fascinated me. This underground world had adapted to protect its own, creating an impromptu community of sorts. Gradually I realized this was the same thing I had seen among drug dealers and prostitutes, often in response to an outside threat. These types of communities weren’t locally based or geographically segregated, like the ones in Chicago, but were latent everywhere in an intricate web of social relations and ready to emerge in response to specific events and situations. Put more simply, had there been no Mortimer who needed help, the “Mortimer community” would never have surfaced.
    Not only that, but further questioning revealed that most of the ladies hadn’t had sex with Mortimer in years. Usually they would just take their clothes off and let him fondle them while he told tales of past loves. I would find out later that this turns out to be surprisingly common, which suggests that many prostitutes may deserve their claim to being lay therapists. As one sardonic Russian prostitute would tell me about a rich client, “Most of the time, I tell him why he shouldn’t leave his wife.”
    Even as I saw a group of people coalesce around Mortimer, I was hesitant to call it a community. It wasn’t a community in the sense of some suburban cul-de-sacs or a church group in which people have placed a label on their common bond. Mortimer’s friends were helpful to one another, but their ties were not rooted in religion, ethnicity, neighborhood, or even a common stigma likerace or sexual identity. When asked, Mortimer’s supporters said they were simply doing what you’d do for a friend who needs help. “There’s another guy like this down the street,” they would say, or “You should see this guy across town who’s doing so much worse.” And this was not the only bar where the prostitutes and johns passed their time together. There seemed to be many such informal networks, ad hoc communities built upon mutual interest and affection. And these people came together by crossing all sorts of boundaries, like race and class, that sociologists usually think of as keeping people apart. Mortimer was a white man living off retirement income; the women helping him were lower-income Latinos and blacks. In the same way, the bar was filled with Irish cops and corporate white-collar workers, but there were always a dozen or so North African immigrants who congregated each evening in the corner. In this little bar, this little world, they were all tied together for better and worse. Half the patrons owed money to the other half—mostly for sex—but they also lent money to each other and fixed each other’s cars, bet on sports events and sold each other electronic equipment. As people spent more time in the bar, in fact, they were almost expected to take part in these ventures. Reciprocity became a means of signaling that one was local, to be trusted, and such trust would become the basis for receiving the kind of treatment that Mortimer was now getting.
    For me, this could pose problems. There were only so many times I could say, “I’m just here as Mortimer’s friend. I have no interest in lending you five hundred dollars for your surefire illegal moneymaking scheme.” But Shine’s words kept returning to me. These were
floating
communities. I knew from earlier research that you could always count on things to go wrong in underground