The Mole People Read online

  Reactions to danger can be unpredictable. Faced with a man with a knife, Don fell to his knees and begged not to be hurt, even though the knife-wielder was four inches shorter and much skinnier than Don. When confronted by a taller man who pulled a gun, Don just threw up his hands in exasperation and walked away. “It was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done,” he laughs now. “I just didn’t care. I was sick of that shit and decided to walk away and forget it and if I got shot, well, I would be walking and not just waiting for it.”

  One morning at around 7:30, I arrive at Bernard’s camp to find him pacing angrily. Don is in the hospital with an overdose. Bernard found him the night before, sprawled across the tracks, unable to be roused. Trains are running through the tunnels again and Amtrak is looking for excuses to evict the homeless from the tunnels, Bernard says. He wasn’t going to let Don be that excuse, so he called the Amtrak police to take Don to a hospital.

  “If you’re going to get bugged out, do it on top,” Bernard repeats to himself as he paces, convincing himself that he acted correctly. Bob stays strictly in his bunker when doing drugs underground. Don was irresponsible with drugs in general, Bernard says, working himself up. He often failed to bring wood for the fire despite repeated warnings. “He knows the rules: no drugging down here. They didn’t build this camp; they don’t deserve this. Fuck them. I built it. They think I own this tunnel. I do. I built it.”

  Bernard pokes at the fire, quiet now. He will evict Don, with force if necessary. “He gets a week to get his shit out of here,” says Bernard. He leans back in his recliner and wonders if he can really force Don out because Don is also large and strong. “It’s been a long time since I had my ass kicked. Who knows, maybe I’ll like it,” he smiles broadly.

  A week later, a homeless man passes me on the street. He tells me that Don says good-bye. Don’s name is seldom heard again in Bernard’s tunnel.

  Tim

  TIM IS THE ONLY OTHER MAN THAT HAS BEEN EJECTED FROM BERnard’s camp. A wiry, meek white man, Tim often stops at Bernard’s fire, seeking an invitation to sit, which seldom comes. Occasionally he is offered a cigarette, but is always kept at a distance.

  One afternoon I find Bernard shouting at Tim as they stand toe-to-toe on the tracks. Tim has been caught stealing from another one of the tunnel homeless. Bernard is furious and very close to thrashing him, but in the end just orders him to leave the community.

  “He didn’t want to get violent because you’re here,” Pape tells me later with a smile. “Part of Bernard’s archaic thinking about women.”

  Flip

  LIKE TIM, FLIP IS NOT WELCOME AT BERNARD’S CAMPFIRE. FLIP doesn’t care for himself, Bernard explains; he lacks direction and wants to rely on people, trying to make them take care of him. Bernard once showed Flip an empty bunker and told him that if he cleaned it out, Bernard would help him set it up as a place to live. Flip hasn’t done a thing with the bunker, Bernard says dismissively. Lazy, he says.

  Now Flip comes to the fire shyly once again. He stands hands buried in his trouser pockets, slouching on the tracks.

  “It’s raining,” he says.

  “So what?” Bernard answers.

  Flip moves away, and later that afternoon, as Bernard walks me out of the tunnel, Flip’s figure stands silhouetted at the entrance, alone and forlorn against a cold, gray winter sky.

  Tony

  SOME OF THE HOMELESS WHO ARE PART OF BERNARD’S CAMP LIVE removed from his fire, like Tony, who has set up his home alone farther along the tunnel. One of the most gentle and popular men of the group, Tony is a fifty-five-year-old white man with a pepper-streaked beard and dark, arched eyebrows like Sean Connery, all topped by a red knit hat.

  I meet Tony on the grate above Bernard’s fire one snowy day in January. Light smoke rises through the steel mesh, toying with powdery snow that the wind has swept up off the ice-covered Hudson. Red-faced New Yorkers walking their dogs in the park try to hurry them through the morning ritual, but a few pull their masters briefly toward the welcoming scent of burning wood mingling in the crisp air. Tony is standing on the grate stomping his boots to make sure the snow falls on the camp scene below.

  Faint growls rise with the smoke and Tony, having gotten the response he wants, allows a boyish smile to break his face. He and I start carefully down the steep and icy path toward the tunnel’s entrance. In one hand he clasps a black garbage bag full of empty cans, and in the other, a dull green garbage bag full of plastic bottles. The superintendent of a nearby apartment house has saved them for him to redeem.

  At the tunnel entrance, a young man named Joey emerges from between the iron rungs that once barred passage. He has a young, soft face but a skinny, nervous body that is unable to stay still. Tony pulls a wad of wrinkled and crushed dollar bills from the pocket of his corduroy pants and passes one to Joey. They exchange brief winks, and Tony permits himself a small smile that exposes two missing front teeth.

  “Hey, man,” a beseeching voice comes through the grating as Flip emerges. “Gimme some, too,” he asks, almost shyly. For a large man, Flip looks as vulnerable as he sounds.

  He offers Tony his plastic bag. Tony skims its contents quickly.

  “Naw, man,” he says, “I don’t need any of that stuff.”

  “C’mon, man, it’s cold,” Flip whines, almost whimpering.

  “Naw, I don’t got that much,” Tony says firmly. He pulls out a crumpled pack of cigarettes and offers one to Flip. The younger man takes three and walks off without even nodding thanks.

  Tony and I carefully descend the steps into the tunnel, wary of used syringes and fresh ice. We reach the bottom and Tony sighs heavily, as if he is home.

  He is less afraid of falling, he says, than of getting struck by the nine-foot-long icicles that now hang from the tunnel’s ceiling. One killed a man two years ago, he claims, in case I should doubt the danger. Small precautions take on greater importance the longer you live in the tunnels, he explains.

  I wonder aloud about Joey, to whom Tony has given the money unasked. Tony explains simply that he and Joey live together in an abandoned bunker. Joey is eighteen years old, and Tony refers to him at times as his son, other times as his lover.

  As much as the tunnel regulars like Tony, they despise Joey as a useless parasite on the older man. “Joey’s young; he can do anything he wants,” says Bernard. “He doesn’t have to be down here, but Tony does. Tony does everything for that kid, even went to banks trying to borrow money to send him to college. Believe that! What money he did get, Joey spent on drugs, but he told Tony he was going to college.”

  Tony prides himself on his two “mouses,” which are king-size rats that he trains to perform. Ralph and George, the “mouses,” can leap from the ground to a food bag hung five feet overhead. Tony claims they also guard his bunker from other rats, even that they have chased away stray cats, which from their size is credible. They are huge creatures, Ralph perching on Tony’s shoulder, George on the back of his wrinkled hand.

  “I taught my niece to read,” Tony tells me with a happy smile as we sit around the fire. “Now she’s going to be a doctor and has to read the big words to me.” However, he hasn’t seen any of his family for seventeen years, not since he murdered a man and went to prison for fifteen years. The last two years he has lived in Bernard’s tunnel with Joey.

  South End

  John

  THE TUNNEL’S SOUTHERN END HOSTS A LOOSER AFFILIATION OF THE homeless. Individuals barely interact with each other. They behave more like silent, hostile neighbors who both envy and fear the person in the next bunker.

  “We don’t talk much, but we won’t let anyone steal from anyone else’s stuff in the tunnel either,” says John, who was seriously injured four years ago by a roving gang of homeless. He rarely answers knocks on his door, which he keeps padlocked, and he keeps a bayonet and hatchet handy for protection.

  John and Mama in a tunnel bunker. Photo by Margaret Morton

  John’s home. Photo
by Margaret Morton

  At fifty years old, John is a four-year tunnel veteran. Small and thin, he says he was abandoned as a child and grew up in institutions. He has had menial, low-paying jobs, many working with animals. His small monthly welfare check goes for food for himself, his fifteen cats, and his dog, Mama. All of them were strays that he found while he and they vied for food in garbage bins. His bunker walls are decorated with posters of animals, and on the table and boxes stand small statues and artificial flowers from the trash. The room is lit with red candles. During the day he reads the Bible and drinks coffee and whiskey. He spends most of the time listening to the radio and talking to himself, he says.

  He has no friends in the world, he volunteers. “I’m a little high-class for some of these people down here,” he explains. “That’s why I don’t get along too well with everybody.”

  New York Times reporter John Tierney wrote two articles about John. As a result, he briefly had a woman pen pal and enrolled in a new program for the homeless consisting of work on an upstate farm for free board and meals and a modest wage. John was apprehensive about leaving the tunnel. He was particularly torn when he had to give away his cats and kittens, but he was allowed to take Mama and also eager to begin life again aboveground.

  Bernard was happy for John, but sad, too. “He’ll be back. You can’t just leave the tunnel. This is his home now. He doesn’t know how to live in the topside world.” Bernard sounds plaintive, as if he is speaking for all of the underground people, including himself.

  John soon rebelled against the discipline of regular work, however, and says that he longed for the privacy and freedom of the tunnels. Within six months he is back in his tunnel bunker.

  Tom

  TOM IS FROM NORTH CAROLINA, A SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD WHITE MAN who lives with a couple, Butch and Brenda, in a large green tent upon the slope of the Riverside Park tunnel. He came to Manhattan eight months earlier with his girlfriend and their child. His parents had died in a car accident, and his two sisters were taken by godparents, but he was too old to be cared for by relatives. His girlfriend wanted to live in New York, but they broke up soon after they arrived. She took the car and all his money. He lived for a time in the Fort Washington shelter until he caught a man stealing from his locker.

  “I asked him what he was doing, and he just said he was taking my stuff,” Tom says evenly, his blond hair shyly tumbling over his trusting eyes. “He had no right.” They fought and the thief was thrown out the window several floors above the street.

  “He just lay there on his face, so still,” Tom recalls, his blue eyes soberingly open. “They said 1 killed him, but the police took me aside and told me not to worry about it. I would have done it all over again, though,” Tom says with a shake of his head. “I mean I didn’t want to kill him, but he was taking the only stuff I had left.”

  Tom decided he was safer on the streets, where he met Butch and Brenda. Butch is a large black man with an angry attitude and very protective toward both Brenda and Tom. Brenda, whose story will be told later (see chapter 22, “Women”), is completely subservient to him. Butch refuses to talk about himself but he prowls, almost lurches, around Tom as he talks, listening to his words carefully as if ready to heed any order to attack.

  The couple took Tom to live in the tunnels with them, but he found a job bartending on Amsterdam Avenue and with his earnings, bought the tent. A temporary measure until he can afford an apartment, he says, where his sisters can also come to live. “They keep asking me if they can come here,” he says, “but I don’t want them until we can live properly. I don’t know that New York is the right place for two girls.”

  Tom gets an apartment in a few months, and despite the roaches, one of which he woke to find crawling up his nose, he considers it a step above tunnels and tents. He gives the tent to Butch and Brenda.

  THE SURPRISING WONDER OF BERNARD’S TUNNEL IS LESS THAT PEOPLE can survive in such an environment than that they can work together and even care, sometimes intensely, for each other. Many would expect love and care to be the first emotions sacrificed in such a desolate environment, but Bernard would argue that emotions are more sincere underground. Unlike our society, the underground dwellers do not judge each other on their pasts or any element of how they live, except how they treat one another. Respect for privacy and property is critical. They lie to each other at times, usually about their pretunnel existences, but, even when these sound unlikely at best, no one challenges them. They can invent a past with which they can live while they get on with surviving the present.

  The most important truth about underground people, Bernard also advises, is that there is no single truth about them. “They tell many stories and there is truth in all their stories. You just have to find it.”

  “We had one guy down here who was sometimes an ex—Navy Seal, sometimes a Green Beret, sometimes the king of an island, sometimes a pastry chef,” one homeless man recalls. “All I know he was a decent man who used to share everything. When the police asked if I knew this guy, and showed me his picture and told me a name, I didn’t have to lie. I said no, I don’t know that guy. I don’t care what he done. He’s a good guy and if he wants to start over down here, he can. That’s the beauty of the tunnels.”

  Bernard. Photo by Margaret Morton

  12

  Tunnel Art

  “THESE PIECES, THEY’RE NOT JUST GRAFFITI,” BERNARD EXPLAINS as his arm sweeps toward the mural covering the outside wall of his tunnel bunker. “They’re works of art, and they mean a lot to us. We got food down here, some warmth, and we got art. What more could we ask for?”

  “Pieces” to the tunnel homeless and to those who paint them is short for “masterpieces,” works that are sometimes especially done for them by graffiti writers (sometimes called “artists”). Chris Pape, who “tags” or signs his work “Freedom”; Roger Smith, who is known as “Smith”; and David Smith, his brother, whose tag was “Sane”; are all graffiti writers who paint the tunnels.

  “David and Roger did some of these for me and for my people down here. Chris was first to start doing them in this tunnel, but he didn’t know he was doing them just for me,” Bernard laughs.

  “This piece makes me smile every time I look at it,” says Bernard as he surveys the jagged, zany mural by Sane that decorates his fifteen-by-ten-foot wall. Sane got the idea for it one night sitting by the fire, sharing herbal tea with Bernard who was framed by the huge concrete wall. He returned late that night to spray-paint the piece before Bernard woke the next morning.

  In a sharp-edged technique, chaotic lines and bright colors intersect and complement each other to create what Bernard considers to be a mural that best captures life below the ground—a mysterious truth amid complete craziness. The clothes, stone and metal rubble, and rubbish piled before it add to the sense of disorder it conveys.

  Self-portrait by Chris Pape (Freedom). Photo by Margaret Morton

  “It’s for me and it’s all about me,” says Bernard. “It’s about the chaos in the topside world and the peace down here.”

  Above the piece are scrawled Bernard’s words the night before; sharing herbal tea by the campfire, Sane scrawled in jaunty black letters: “Freedom, aw. Modern society is guilty of intellectual terrorism.” It was Sane’s last piece, which enhances its meaning and value for Bernard and others. Sane died two years after completing it, either in an accident, which often befalls graffiti artists because of the dangerous places in which they work, or by suicide. He was eighteen years old.

  Sane was found drowned in the calm waters of Flushing Bay. Because he was a good swimmer, some believe he took his own life. Others say he fell into the water from a bridge while graffiting on it, perhaps while being chased by cops.

  “Sane was the best,” several of his fellow graffiti artists say, and after his death several pieces appeared in the tunnels spray-painted in his honor by mourning colleagues. Some are tribute pieces, with Sane’s name highly stylized by the writers’
own techniques. Others are messages in dark colors among spray-painted tears: “Sane Ruled” and “Sane never forgotten.” Smith keeps his brother’s legacy alive by painting Sane’s tag as well as his own on his works.

  “When we started, we always put our tags together: SANE SMITH. The ‘word’ was that we were some big black writer from Brooklyn,” Smith smiles briefly through his neat, short beard under gentle eyes.

  Speaking of Sane, one sixteen-year-old graffiti writer tells me, “Everything he touched burned. He was the greatest. Why would he want to kill himself?”

  An older writer suggests Sane “burned out.”

  “He had reached the top and he knew it,” he suggests. “He couldn’t go any further. I think he felt that and didn’t know what to do next. Maybe he felt empty like I did when I realized how many years of my life I’ve lost to graffiti, to the tunnels.” He pauses for a minute, remembering Sane. “He was a pest back then when he was twelve and starting. He would run up to me all the time to ask for my autograph and I’d tell him to go away. I didn’t associate with ‘toys.’ He was just a toy back then. But there was always something different about him, a real nice kid, eyes always friendly and laughing.”

  Sane and Smith were being sued for $3 million by the City of New York for graffiting the top level of the Brooklyn Bridge—the largest suit ever brought against graffiti writers anywhere. The city pressed the suit as a lesson to writers, to punish them for what many consider vandalizing public property and to discourage younger writers from the particularly dangerous locales like the heights of bridges. The police also wanted help in identifying other graffiti writers, which Sane and Smith refused to provide. The city dropped the case after Sane’s death, but no one believes the suit could have caused Sane’s suicide.