Free Floating City by Sudhir Venkatesh Page A

trading, and surely these communities were as precarious and fickle as any of the bonds formed in the black market. Floating may have signaled some kind of fluidity, but it certainly didn’t mean floating free. I’d seen people get kicked out of the bar or lose the trust necessary to be a commercial partner. Typically, someone will try to profit from their relationships, conflicts will ensue, people will take sides, and the little world splinters. How long would Mortimer’s network survive?
    But I had seen enough to want more. If I could find the right places—if I could follow the right people—I might see something that was invisible to most of the world.
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    T onight Shine was behind the wheel of his black German sedan, cruising south down Malcolm X Boulevard on a mission he would not reveal. Shine’s way of hiding his life from me behind the calm demeanor of a power player was frustrating, especially since I told him I wasn’t studying him. Maybe part of it was as simple as learning to trust me, but his style reminded me of the gang leaders I knew in Chicago: they loved to boast and give the impression of success. Most who said they were high earners couldn’t even afford to live on their own, as Steven Levitt and I documented in the study made famous by
Freakonomics.
I was dying to ask Shine to talk straight about these subjects, but it didn’t seem to be the best time to bring this up.
    With one hand on the wheel, Shine steered an arc from 110th Street onto the country road that cut right down through Central Park. We skimmed past joggers and bicyclists, close enough that I could have touched them with an extended hand. A few shouted at us to slow down. But Shine was intent on the same old sermon—I had to bounce, I had to float, I had to jump and hop and bob and weave. He made it sound exhausting and mandatory, like a vast and endless gym class.
    Now he was physically dragging me along. The cold night air swept over the convertible’s windshield and into our faces. My eyes wouldn’t stop tearing and everyone seemed to be staring at us,wondering why the hell we were driving with the top down on such a chilly night.
    â€œThis is New York!” Shine continued. “We’re like hummingbirds, man. We go flower to flower. Didn’t they teach you that in Chicago?”
    â€œNo,” I said. “They taught me to sit your ass down and don’t ask no questions.”
    He laughed like that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “Shit! You really did get schooled by black folk!”
    Perhaps to emphasize his point, he started running through red lights. You’d think that a drug dealer would be careful in public, but apparently prudence clashes with the manly virtues required by the drug trade.
    This was the first time Shine and I had been together outside Harlem, I realized. I sure hoped he knew what he was doing.
    Up ahead, the road emerged from the park into the brownstone rows of the West Side. I felt the impulse to escape, to get in a cab and go somewhere quiet and safe.
    He made a quick turn on Fifty-seventh Street and headed west into Hell’s Kitchen. Once dominated by the tough Irish street gangs memorialized in the Sean Penn movie
State of Grace
,
it had joined the vast number of New York neighborhoods that couldn’t seem to make up their minds about what they wanted to be. Gentrification was slowly blooming along Ninth Avenue in the form of frat guy nightclubs and endless ethnic restaurants, but these bits of trendiness were sandwiched in between mini red-light districts, where porn shops and seedy bars seemed to fill entire blocks. Along Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, where factories and warehouses were interspersed with turn-of-the-century brick apartment buildings, the signature sound was the steady beeping of trucks as they backed into loading docks. Yuppie couples with expensive strollers