The Mole People Read online

  Bernard heard Sheila’s screams even though he was outside of the tunnels at the time. He found her bleeding and nearly unconscious. Furious, he rallied about twenty-five homeless men and bats, pipes, and burning planks, and descended on Hector and his gang, surrounding them while one man went to get the police.

  “It was a wild scene down there,” says Chris Pape, a graffiti artist who happened to be watching through a grate. “All these people running around underground, yelling and waving these torches underground in the dark. It was surreal. That’s about the only word for it.” The organized strike against Hector was particularly surprising because the homeless in the Riverside Park tunnel are a passive group who go out of their way to avoid attention. They usually hide from visitors, says Pape, who paints murals in tunnels.

  The police were reluctant to come with Bernard’s messenger, Stash. The first patrolmen he found didn’t believe him, he says, and the second pair went with him to the tunnel’s entrance but refused to enter, fearing some kind of trap. Sheila finally went out to them, told her story and persuaded them to enter and arrest Hector and some of his men. Many of the tunnel dwellers went every day to Hector’s trial, panhandling money for the subway fare, to testify against him. Hector went back to jail.

  “After that,” Bernard complains, “my haven of harmony became a haven of headaches.” More people began to settle in the tunnel and look to Bernard for protection as well as food and advice. Although he professes “disdain for humanity,” including other homeless, he is always willing to share what he has. “Who am I to deny someone in need?” he asks.

  Several tunnel dwellers credit Bernard with saving their lives. One is Leon who came to the tunnel “stone drunk,” in his words, on a bitter February night. “Bernard saw me laying up there in the street and wakes me up. ‘Man,’ he says, ‘you can’t stay here. You’ll freeze to death.’ ‘Okay,’ I says, ‘then just let me die.’ He says, ‘Fuck,’ and dragged me out of the draft, carried me two blocks over his shoulder, cursing all the way. Turns out I got frostbite bad that night. If Bernard hadn’t helped me—and he gave me a blanket, too—I’d be dead and that ain’t no lie.”

  Bernard pines for the days when he was alone, but he also remembers how dangerous such a life could be. One icy day, he slipped while carrying firewood down the steep stairs at the tunnel’s entrance and fell about twenty feet to the tunnel’s floor, breaking his hip. He crawled to his camp and attempted to heal himself by resting, but he ran out of wood for his fire and food for himself, and he caught a bad cold. “I couldn’t even make my way out of the bunker, let alone the tunnel for help. I thought my time had come,” he says now, “and I thought, well, if this is it, it’s no big deal.”

  Another homeless man who lived farther up the tunnel came to his aid. The two had passed often but never spoken. Even now Bernard doesn’t know his name. The man was aware that he hadn’t seen Bernard for days, suspecting he had left, and came in hopes of scavenging anything useful that might be left behind. Rather than stealing, which he could easily have done in view of Bernard’s weakness, he nursed Bernard back to health. Bernard never saw him again, but he tries to repay that care to others.

  TODAY AMTRAK USES THE RAILROAD TRACKS AGAIN, BUT THE HOME-less continue to squat here. Most of them live in two areas: One consists of the bunkerlike concrete workstations like Bernard’s, which occupants furnish and even decorate with carpeting and artwork, either graffitied murals or posters. The other campsite is at the southern end of the tunnel and less secure, where homeless like Seville live in more fragile quarters, usually makeshift tents and packing-crate homes. Between the two camps, and in fact along the entire length of the tunnel, are the most reclusive of the homeless, usually mentally ill, who sleep individually in small cubbyholes that have been hollowed out naturally or by man high up on the sheer walls of the tunnels. Some can be reached only by climbing metal rungs embedded in the walls.

  Bernard’s camp is the hub for these tunnel dwellers. His campfire lies directly under a grate that opens to the surface and carries out most of the smoke. Six chairs surround the fire. Food is shared, but many people also have their own private cache. Chores such as cooking and collecting firewood are also shared. One of the most burdensome chores, which came when the “Tears of Allah” dried up, is carrying five-gallon buckets of water to camp from a gas station more than a mile away. Most of the group eat at the same time, and there is always coffee on the grill for anyone stopping by. Anyone can use the grill anytime, but they are responsible for making sure the fire is out and the ashes completely gray when they leave.

  Bernard spends more time at the fire than the others. His main source of income is collecting discarded cans and bottles from the trash. He prefers to do most of the cooking for the community, waking early to prepare breakfasts for those tunnel dwellers who have jobs to go to.

  “People think food’s the greatest problem down here,” he says one morning over the grill with the flames snapping warmly in the dank air. “It’s not. It’s pride. They throw away the cream of the cream in New York, which makes scavenging relatively productive. I expect to find the Hope Diamond out there in the street some day. It’s dignity that’s hard to get.”

  Most members of this Riverside Park community are tunnel veterans. They have established communication networks that quickly pass around new information on where and when hot meals are being handed out. They know when a grocery store is throwing out slightly wilted produce or damaged cartons of macaroni. They know which restaurants and delicatessens give the days’ leftovers to the homeless. They also know which restaurants throw ammonia on their garbage to keep the homeless away.

  “Sometimes they do worse than that,” says a tunnel dweller named Jesus. “Sometimes they put poison on it that you can’t smell, can’t taste, but you get sick after you eat it. My buddy, he died from rat poison they put in garbage. The doctor said it was rat poison, and he was so mad, he went to the manager of the restaurant to complain.” Jesus just shrugs when I ask what effect it had.

  Bernard complains about his loss of privacy, but he takes some pride in his particular community. “Everyone down here is settled. We have a base, and we function together. We don’t have to deal with all the despair that goes on in the topside world,” he says, sitting back on a discarded, purple recliner near his warm fire.

  Near 79th Street off the West Side Highway, he says, is a homeless campsite aboveground composed of cardboard and other boxes covered with plastic sheets. “People are sleeping in there,” Bernard says, wide-eyed. “I look at that and I say, ‘Wow! That’s incredible!’ I mean, the weather so far this year has been unbelievably bad and I said to myself ‘Man, you don’t know how blessed you are.’ I really think that’s roughing it. My body has gone through a lot of changes; I’m beginning to feel my age based on the environment I’m living in. I wonder about some of these people. Down here, man, I’m lucky.”

  Still, he admits, his body has suffered physically from living underground, and he hints that his attitude has also changed. “Down here, man becomes an animal. Down here, the true animal in man comes out, evolves. His first instinct is to survive, and although he values his independence, he forms a community for support.” He feels more sense of community now than he ever felt aboveground.

  “I never voted in my life,” he says, “never even registered to vote. I feel sure that everything up there is designed to work for those who have money. The politicians can talk about reforms, how they’ll do this or that, but it’s all bull.” While he distrusts politicians in general, he distrusts homeless advocacy groups in particular.

  “This Coalition for the Homeless is just bullshit,” he says. “Red tape and litigation. They are procrastinators. They thrive on the homeless. Without us, they wouldn’t have jobs, and they know it.” Bernard is particularly affronted by the suspicious and condescending attitude of many employees of the Coalition and other such groups.

  “A while ago, we were sitting up tops
ide having some beers when this van from Project Reachout comes by,” he recalls. “They ask if we want sandwiches and stuff. We weren’t hungry, but we said, sure, why not? Then they said, Hey, you guys don’t look homeless.’ I said, ‘What does a homeless person look like? We have to be in a certain attire and look dirty?’ I said, ‘Oh, man, keep your sandwiches.’

  “Sure enough, two days later, same crew comes out giving out thermals [warm underwear]. Sure, I could use some thermals, but some guy sneaks around the back of the van with his camera to snap my picture taking the handout. They wanted pictures for their ads saying, ‘Here are the poor homeless, aid the homeless.’”

  A homeless agency offered Bernard an apartment, but after visiting it, he declined. “They lied about it. No one could have lived in that rat hole, not even a rat,” he says, looking deeply into the fire as if revisiting the scene.

  “It’s all bullshit! These people can’t play straight with God. And the way they talk about how the homeless problem should be solved, hell, they got it all wrong. A lot of work has to be done, sure—counseling, schooling, but most of all, treating us like the equals we are. I don’t pity us and they shouldn’t either. Everyone is responsible for his own life.”

  Bernard prefers the railroad tunnels to subway tunnels because they are safer. “The whole subway scene is dangerous now because all these gangs of hoodlums marauding around and preying on the homeless.” Otherwise he doesn’t fear the underground. “You draw vibrations to you by being afraid. Down here people are more afraid of the dark than anything else. I’ve seen real tough men freak out over rats they hear in the darkness, these big men carrying big pieces [guns] and knives and they shit, they freak over rats and ghosts.”

  If you aren’t scared, he points out, you notice that it is never totally black in his tunnel during daylight hours. Grates allow light through, always enough to see something, as I now realize.

  “And there’s peace in the dark,” he says. “I sit here at night at the fire with a pot of tea and just the solitude of the tunnel. I think what I’ve discovered down here is that what one really seeks in life is peace of mind.”

  You’re happy down here, then? I ask.

  “Sure,” he says. “Whatever happy is. I understand that I can’t change anything from the way it is, except for my mind. I accept things as they are and hey, that means I got to cover my necessities like food and shelter and that’s it. And I have to keep some sort of sanity down here.”

  Bob

  BERNARD AND OTHER MEMBERS OF THE COMMUNITY HAVE MADE IT clear that overt drug users are unwelcome in their tunnel, but they appear to make an exception for Bob. A fifty-one-year-old white man from Chicago, Bob brags that he was once New York’s fastest short-order cook.

  “I could handle eight pans and not burn an egg,” he says. “But it cost me $100 a day to work, because I was paying $50 for a gram of coke and $50 for my amphetamines.”

  Bob is Bernard’s best friend. He is also, according to underground artist Chris Pape, “the only one down here who has no illusions about himself. He knows he’s a drug fiend and doesn’t apologize or say he wants to change.”

  Bob is a burly man with a mountain man’s gray beard and almost detached, cool blue eyes. He says matter-of-factly that he has chosen the life of an addict, wants no help to overcome it, and works only to support his habit. Bob is proud that he has never taken money from the government. He rises early to hunt for cans to redeem, and he picks up odd jobs on the street, such as helping unload produce from delivery trucks into grocery stores and fruit stands.

  He is well known for his skill at working scams. He can con even his best friends, who are alert and wary. Once he scammed Pape, who he considers a friend, out of $20 on a VCR deal, and disappeared for a week on a speed binge. Bernard made Bob apologize, but of course the money was gone. “Sorry,” Bob said with a shrug, “but, hey, that’s the way it is. I just had to do it.” Bernard offered the little money he had to Pape on Bob’s behalf, but Chris refused Bernard’s money.

  Pape shrugs, too, about his loss. It’s impossible to stay angry with Bob, he says. He is childlike, totally passive most of the time. Raised in a middle-class Chicago neighborhood and trained as an engineer, his eyes are flat and unfocused, although they can be frightening because they are so expressionless and because, under the calm veneer, Bob has shown sudden anger and violence. He blames the chemicals in his system, or the lack of them. “It’s the drugs,” he says a day after exploding angrily because he had no place to sit. “Nothing I can do about it,” Bob says unapologetically. People avoid him on rainy days when he gets particularly depressed. Like most homeless, Bob’s moods are very much affected by the weather.

  Bob is as unashamed of his scamming habits as well as his addiction. He talks freely about both. “Listen, kid,” he tells me out of earshot of the others, “don’t trust anyone down here. No one. Never!” His eyes are intense now as we walk out of the tunnel. I expect he is setting me up for a touch, but in the months I knew him, Bob never asked me for money. Instead, he always acted protectively—he’d scold me for even coming into the tunnels alone—and then offer advice on how to behave during my journeys underground.

  Like Bernard, Bob earns what little money he needs by “busting,” or returning discarded cans and bottles to redemption centers. For 600 empties, they can receive $30, or a nickel each. A major problem is finding groceries to redeem the trash, however. Despite the law requiring stores to take up to 250 empties from any one person, storekeepers often refuse in an effort to discourage the homeless from entering their premises. A few nonprofit redemption centers exist, notably “We Can” at 12th Avenue and 52nd Street, which was begun by Guy Polhemus when he overheard homeless at a soup kitchen complain about their difficulty. However, these centers tend to be inconvenient and very crowded, with long lines and long waits.

  This has led to the rise of middlemen, also called two-for-oners although they should be one-for-twoers. They buy two empties for a nickel, half the price at regular redemption centers, but offer “no waiting, no sorting, no hassle,” as Bob says. Some middlemen have become full-blown entrepreneurs, like Chris Jeffers, a twenty-year-old who was sleeping in Riverside Park just two years earlier but now makes $70,000 a year. He rents an empty theater at Eighth Avenue and 50th Street and keeps it open around the clock for the homeless to bring their cans and bottles; it pays half the price, but it’s convenient. Jeffers, who says he took some college courses in finance in Tampa, Florida, resells the empties to “We Can” for the full redemption price, earning thousands of dollars a day.

  Most of the collectors go through the trash at night when they are less visible to the public. Many are addicts of one kind or another, Jeffers says, and often want to redeem their cans after hours to feed their night needs. “I know some people will say I’m exploiting those with alcohol and drug problems,” Jeffers admitted to a New York Times reporter. “But tell me, how is what I’m doing any different from what commodity traders do when they buy crops at low prices from farmers in distress?”

  Scavenging, panhandling, and scams provide some income for the homeless, but surviving underground is a full-time job. “Living here takes a lot of planning,” Bob says as he contemplates the fire outside his bunker. “You have to prepare yourself in the summer for the winter, get your stuff washed and collect food.” His bunker is one of the most elaborate. Last year, he says, he spent $200 to insulate his underground room, put in wall-to-wall carpeting, a queen-size mattress, a kerosene lamp, a table, and two chairs.

  He takes his privacy seriously. “People like to inject chaos into their lives,” he says. “I don’t need that; that’s why I live here. In all the time I’ve been down here, I’ve never had company in my room. When I go into my room, don’t bother me,” he warns. “Don’t call me, and don’t come in,” he warns emphatically. “Bernard’s the only one allowed in my room.”

  Bob has bad days when the weather is sour. He becomes irritable, edgy, and dep
ressed because, he says, he can’t get out to gather cans or do volunteer work at soup kitchens. “I hate doing nothing; I always have to be doing something,” he explains, but ever since he left his wife and daughter—his wife always nagged him, he says, which is why he set off in his car one day for the grocery store and ended up in New York—he has never considered keeping a steady job.

  “I like the way my life is now. I’m independent and do what I want. It’s not that I’m lazy or don’t want to work. I walk all the way around the city most days to collect cans. This is the life I want. I don’t take government handouts because I don’t pay taxes.” Sometimes Bob will be gone for weeks, but Bernard keeps his bunker safe from scavengers and Bob has always returned. He lives by what he calls the Homeless Credo: “Do what you have to do today. Tomorrow will come. And if it doesn’t, you won’t have to deal with it.”

  Don

  SOME OF THE HOMELESS IN BERNARD’S TUNNEL ARE LESS ATTACHED to the community, like Don, a large, clean-cut, smiling black man in his early thirties. He left his wife and children to go underground and straighten out his life, he says. He misses his family, but he promised his mother he would not return until he was free of drugs. He maintains ties with his mother, and even takes Bernard to Thanksgiving dinner at her house in Brooklyn. Although he has gone through detoxification centers several times, he is back on drugs.

  He works regularly and hard. He wakes around 5:30 A.M. to get to a construction job at 7 A.M., and on weekends he usually has an odd job painting. He says he sends most of his money to his family. He is more frightened of underground life than most tunnel dwellers.

  “The most dangerous animal on earth is man,” he says often. “I like to think about things when it doesn’t interfere with my safety, which isn’t often. Thinking too much is dangerous, because it gets in the way of the basic instinct of survival. You think too much, you find yourself caring too much about other people, or you feel sorry for yourself, and both are dangerous. When you live down here, you have always got to be on the edge. If you think too much, you are dead. No matter how well you think you know someone, you never do. And down here, you don’t want to.”