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women says she wants to stop? You’d lose twenty thousand dollars a year. Are you sure you won’t try to talk her into sticking it out just a little bit longer? ’Just one more time’? What if Junebug says he’ll leave you if you don’t give him money to buy an amazing script he found?”
    The vodka was making me belligerent. She ducked her head and I continued.
    â€œI
know
this shit, Analise. One night something bad happens in some fucked-up hotel and they come crying to you and you talk them down. You calm them. You may even call the dude and calm
him
because you don’t want him to be a threat and you’re the perfect broker-manager-psychiatrist who thinks of everything and covers all the bases. And you feel great! Because you did it! You came through! They needed you and you got the job done! And you got paid! And maybe you even got the client to pay you extra to keep things out of the press, because, well . . . that’s just how
good
you
are
.”
    By then, Analise was crying. When I noticed, I felt awful. The poor thing just got beat up by her boyfriend and here I was haranguing her. “I’m sorry,” I said. “That was really uncalled-for.”
    â€œYou’re right,” she said. “I’m a pimp.”
    â€œNo! I got carried away. You took me by surprise.”
    â€œBut I
like
this job,” she said. “I like helping these girls. I
am
helping them.”
    Suddenly she lifted her head up and started to laugh. “And okay, no, I am not Mother Teresa. I do like the thrill of it. I do. I like
crime.
”
    The truth was, Analise probably
was
helping them. In the high-paid world of New York prostitution, I had learned, the majority of “brokers” were women who “age out” by moving from selling their bodies to managing or “helping” others who did. And all the ones I had met were, like Analise, white and fairly well educated. They played a variety of roles, from consigliere to confidante. The best helped their women find doctors and lawyers and helped them manage their money—for a fee, of course—by laundering it and setting up legitimate bank accounts. They offered counsel in times of trouble and got them out of jail with a call to a friendly cop. Eventually, some even helped them exit the sex trade for marriage or a comfortable retirement. As much as I could have sat theredescribing this underground sorority, I mostly wanted Analise to see the dark side too.
    But this was a good place to stop. I suggested she get some sleep.
    She looked up at me with a shy expression. “Will you keep on talking to me about this stuff? Not tonight, but sometime. It feels good to talk about it, and nobody else understands.”
    This made me feel very strange. Again, listening to intimate confessions is my job. Trust is an emotion I’ve spent a lifetime learning to encourage. But on this night something was off. In my teaching and writing, I would often repeat with confidence a statement that now strikes me as downright reckless:
The poor live in the same world as you and me, and it’s the job of the sociologist to demonstrate these relationships.
Now Analise was teaching me an uncomfortable truth. In real life, I did seem to feel more comfortable studying people of a lower economic and educational level. I hated admitting it. It hurt to admit it. But it was true. I had been trained to fit people into boxes, to draw lines between drug dealer and sex worker and rich kid and socialite. In fact, the entire premise of academic sociology is that each individual has his own little world and economy that can be studied and charted out, so the smart thing to do, in order to document social roles, is find people who are
not
changing.
    My own background was hobbling me too. Like it or not, as a “Chicago sociologist” I had internalized the idea that the Chicago style of urban living was universal: that