The Mole People Read online

  “People have to do what they have to do,” he shrugs. “You can’t blame them for that; you can’t look down at them. They do what they have to do to take care of themselves and their own, no matter what.

  “When the judge locked me up, he asked, ‘Mr. Williams, do you regret doing this?’ I said, ‘No, cuz to take care of mine, I’m going to do it again. Now if you don’t want me to do it, get me a job, and not that minimum wage stuff—you can’t support no family on that.’”

  “I had to tell him straight up what was real. He said he respected that.” Then Seville smiles. “But he still put me away for three years. It would have been less but I had been in [jail] for so many other things so many times, he had to do it. I respect him for that. Since 1975, I’ve been arrested so many times I can’t count. I used to get into trouble cuz there was nothing better to do. I used to be good at stealing cars, even when we didn’t hardly know how to drive. Once me and my friend Bill—he was crazy, Bill—we drove up an exit ramp the wrong way, and a police car looked over and just didn’t believe it. We went fast against traffic on the highway for two exits, with the whole precinct after us. We were having fun, whooping it up. You don’t take it seriously when you’re a kid. You get thirty days, ninety days, they throw the case out, it don’t matter.”

  SEVILLE HAS LIVED FOR TWELVE YEARS IN THE TUNNELS, VIRTUALLY all of his adult life except when he was in jail. He was sleeping on subway platforms at nineteen, and a year later moved to the hollow areas under the passenger platforms of commuter rail lines under Grand Central Station terminal. The homeless had knelt along the tracks and pick-axed holes in the walls, usually high under the overhang so they could not be seen by anyone standing on opposite platforms; he lived in these burrows first alone and then with many “communities,” as Seville calls them.

  Each move took him deeper into the tunnel and underground life. From beneath the platforms, he went along the train tracks as they leave the station into the tunnels that spread like veins on the back of a hand. From there, he moved into the tunnel network of the subway system, and into the tunnels under Penn Station, and then the more distant and peaceful reaches of the Amtrak tunnels along the Hudson River in upper Manhattan. Seville moved deeper, too, downward into the darkest reaches of the underground.

  “Once you’ve lived in one tunnel, you’ve lived in them all,” Seville says half-joking. “They’re all connected. The people are mostly the same, too. Homeless is homeless. The tracks are just another place to live, that’s all. Same people. Attitudes change. Some people will do anything for you, some of them are bad. Most of them don’t care, not about you or about themselves. They are totally unhappy with themselves. They won’t say that, but you can see. They can’t see it, but you can see.

  “The tunnels are old. They look like catacombs. It’s a whole ‘nother world down there, separate from this one. Believe that. The worries you have up here, you don’t have down there. You don’t have rent worries, for one. You don’t have any bills to pay. You have a whole different attitude. Everyone’s on a different wavelength down there, and then every time you join a new group of people and move in, you find the direction they’re going—it’s like a circle. It’s family in a way, but limited, very limited. Like your family to a certain extent. You take on a role, and then you become like them even when you don’t know it’s happening.”

  In some ways, tunnel life closest to the surface is the worst. “Under the train platforms,” Seville says, “you have to worry about rats. You can light small fires to keep them from jumping on you.” Police once found a body by the smell; he had died of an overdose and been picked at by rats. Seville shivers with the memory. The compartment, stretching the length of the platform and about ten feet deep, was home to about twenty men at the time, all heavily into drugs. They urinated and defecated where they lived. The odor was gagging.

  After a year, Seville moved deeper underground to “the Condos,” a kind of natural cavern where over two hundred people lived. He had become friendly with a few men who lived there, and they convinced him to stop taking drugs. When he did, he said that they invited him to join their community, which is accessible from the tracks in Grand Central.

  Few “did drugs” in the Condos. “Some were homosexuals, some straight, but mostly it was called the ‘Condos’ because the living environment was so good. It was easy to get water from a sprinkler pipe. You could set up shacks on the ground and find electric wires to screw in light bulbs. You could run clotheslines to dry your clothes. It was quiet and peaceful.”

  The cliff was set back from the tracks so that beyond it, train noises could barely be heard, and police seldom had ventured that deep into the tunnels.

  “I’d been looking for mole people for years, been patrolling those tracks, and never saw them,” Sergeant Henry once confided to me. “I only found them when I overheard people talk about the Condos in the terminal.”

  Sergeant Henry and the Transit Police cleared out the Condos. Seville moved even deeper underground.

  “The further down you go, the weirder people get, and I mean real weird,” Seville says. “There are people down there, man, I swear they have webbed feet. . . . Can’t hardly see them at times, they’re so sneaky. They make strange noises and sounds, like trains, but they aren’t trains; they’re communicating with each other. They said I could stay but that I could only be allowed to go back up with their permission. I ran from that place man, and I ain’t never going back. They’re the mole people.”

  SEVILLE NOW FAVORS AN AMTRAK TUNNEL RUNNING UNDER HELL’S Kitchen along the West Side. The area is considered extremely dangerous by graffiti artists who paint flashy mosaics on the walls in tunnels as well as on the surface. For Seville, the most dangerous aspect is getting into the tunnel from the street. He usually slips through a gate in a chain link fence atop a natural rock crevasse. One day the gate was chained shut by police.

  Trespassers had made a new entryway by bending up the lower section of the fence at one spot. “We used to crawl in feet first and then slide under, and the rocks on the side of the wall were like steps to get down part way. But you got to hold on. If you fall,” he says of the thirty-foot drop to the tracks, “you might not get killed but you’d be hurt something terrible. You climb down the side part way and then jump the last part. I fell once and broke my wrist. It was hanging like this, only backward,” he laughs, swinging a listless hand as if unjoined. Mechanics who work in the auto repair shop outside the fence saw him fall and climbed the fence to help. “One said, ‘Man, after that fall, I thought you’d be dead.’”

  Even when he gets into the tunnels, as experienced as he is, Seville is not safe.

  “The biggest danger is crossing tracks. They got tracks that interlock, and if your foot gets stuck, trapped, that train won’t be able to stop. It’s happened, and the people down there won’t risk their necks to help you out. I hate to say it, but I doubt they’d help you out.

  “The people down there, I wouldn’t say they’re bad, but most of them are strung out. There is some kind of unity, but it fluctuates. It’s a mood thing. Whatever mood they have, they’ll act on and their mood changes twenty times a day, mostly because of drugs—coke, speed, and now heroin, if they got enough for it.”

  After a while he continues, “Those people down there, they’re not used to people helping them—or them helping people. Like this guy who just got hit by a train up here last week.” The man was so drugged that he apparently did not hear the warning whistle of a train behind him. The train was moving too fast to even slow down. “There were people around who could have helped him, gone get him off the tracks but they don’t really care. They’re not going to risk their necks for you. That’s a fact. His girlfriend was there. She’s like most of the girls up here. They’re whores. She only with him cuz she think he can protect her.” He shakes his head and stays quiet for a minute.

  “I knew this girl down there,” he resumes with a small smile. “Pretty little one. S
he’d be so strung out she would almost starve herself to death. I used to make her clean herself up. I used to drag her up top and she’d be crying, ‘Fuck you!’ But I’d get one of the gas station people to let her into their toilet and I wouldn’t let her come out til she was clean. Man, she was so pretty, she didn’t need to be turning tricks. She was in her early twenties maybe,” he remembers. “Maria.”

  “She found a man,” he says, vaguely again, “that didn’t want nothing from her but to help her, and she came and surprised me. Came down to my couch in the tunnels and woke me up. ‘Wake up, Daddy, I got something for you,’ she said. Brought me lunch and everything. Looked clean and straight, real nice. Said she wasn’t coming back no more, and I haven’t seen her again,” he says wistfully. “I hope she made it.”

  SEVILLE HESITATES BEFORE AGREEING TO TAKE ME DOWN INTO HIS tunnel. Because of his recently crippled foot, he can’t use the regular entrance over the eighteen-foot fence and down the steep, rocky tunnel face to the tracks, and he won’t let me go on my own.

  “I don’t want that on my conscience,” he says, shaking his head. “If we see Franko or Shorty, I’ll let you go with them, but not on your own. There are people who are bugged out and people who are real crackheads and they’ll try to rob you, at least. That’s a fact, and you being in the tunnels alone, I don’t think there’s too far they wouldn’t go. No way I want that on my conscience. But I’ll show you where it is.”

  He hobbles through Grand Central, and we take the shuttle to Times Square, emerging into a bitterly cold January. Seville’s hands are cracked and bleeding. “It’s that Hudson wind,” he laughs as we walk along 48th Street toward 10th Avenue. Between 10th and 11th avenues is an almost unnoticed bridge over a gully through which run railroad tracks some thirty feet below street level, the spot where Seville fell. Access from either side of the bridge is barred by chain link fences, but these can be climbed or slid under, and the weeds—poison sumac, goldenrod—grow freely to the top of the sheer rock face of the crevasse before it drops to the gravel road bed of the tracks.

  “Nothin’ in the world like that old Hudson wind blowing off the river. I should know; I’ve lived with it for four years now.”

  At times the wind is so strong it almost knocks Seville over. We find none of his friends so we duck into a restaurant, Lee’s Chinese Food. The sign is short of one e and soon to lose the slipping h. It has two tables, a counter, and a loud kitchen.

  “Chicken and fried rice, Mr. Lee, and don’t hold the grease!” Seville calls out on his way to the counter.

  Lee laughs. “How’re you doing, man,” he asks. The black patois somehow doesn’t sound odd coming from this middle-aged Asian man; perhaps it is becoming the universal language, the Esperanto of urban slums.

  A huge, white mechanic from a nearby auto repair shop joins Seville at the counter. When Seville asks for a cigarette, the man insists he take several. Seville seems to have friends wherever he goes.

  “Wha’ happen to your foot, man?” asks Lee in a thick Chinese accent. “You fin’ trouble?”

  “No, Mr. Lee,” replies Seville in his courtly manner, “it found me. I never look for it, but it finds me,” he says with a mischievous shake of his head.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” says Lee, looking skeptically at Seville, “you din’ do nothin’.”

  “Nothing but living my own life, Mr. Lee,” agrees Seville, and does not protest when a courtesy bowl of wonton soup is placed before him.

  Seville contemplates his foot which, under a huge blue sock, appears encased in a large plaster cast. In fact, his foot has swollen to twice its normal size.

  Two nights before, he explains, a man demanded money from him and his friend Cindy. “I said, ‘Look, man, I give you what I got, but I don’t got nothing.’ And it was the truth. Look at me. Do I look like I carry money? I just keep myself clean, that’s all,” he shakes his head at the senselessness of the incident that followed.

  “But this guy is all strung out. ‘I’ll take the girl then,’ he says. Now Cindy, she knows her way on the streets. She lives in the tunnels, too, but she does the streets to make some money for drugs and stuff. But this guy got me mad.

  “I used to know a little karate when I was young, so I thought, what the hell, I’ll try it,” Seville smiles like a mischievous child. As he raised his foot to kick, the would-be thief flicked open a knife and split Seville’s foot from ankle to toes. Seville thinks he passed out briefly, and when he came to, Cindy was screaming. The assailant had run away.

  “That Cindy, man, she can scream. Had I known that, I wouldn’t have done nothing, just let her scream. That’s what made him run anyway.” He laughs, but not for long as he recalls the medical treatment.

  Cabs refused to stop for them. When one did, it refused to take Seville. “Man said he didn’t want blood in his cab.” Cindy finally persuaded the driver to take them to the hospital where most homeless go for care.

  “Saint Clemens, man, they are the worst!” Seville flares. “I seen people die in their waiting room.” In his case, he waited six hours for treatment, by which time the foot was too swollen for stitches so the wound was stapled closed. The doctor asked him to return when the swelling disappeared. Seville means to go back, he says, but he just doesn’t have the time to spend commuting and hanging out in the waiting room. “I got to spend all day getting food and ready for the night, and then I got to spend all night staying warm.”

  Seville’s tunnel is one of the city’s more dangerous places because most of the community are heavy drug addicts. Seville once dealt drugs and still knows how to procure them, so he says people respect him, or at least don’t mess with him, against the day when they may want his services. Seville himself does drugs sometimes, but he’s very cautious about getting addicted, he says, having seen how they destroy lives. He refuses all alcohol because he remembers his father and mother were alcoholics.

  “Last time I was dealing [drugs], a girl tried to give me her baby’s food stamps and diapers for a hit,” he remembers, shaking his head. “She was holding the baby, and the baby and her little boy standing next to her, both was crying, and they looked half starved. So I gave her the stuff and then turned around and called HRA [New York’s Human Resources Administration] because that just ain’t right. They needed help. After that I stopped dealing. Nothing’s worth that. I had enough of it.”

  SEVILLE ALSO EXPRESSES DISTASTE AT TIMES TOWARD SERGEANT Henry and his Transit Police, which is surprising because as police go, Seville often says, Henry’s not as bad as others. So as we sit, I ask him directly why he doesn’t like Henry.

  “Because I seen him do things he shouldn’t be doing,” Seville says flatly.

  “He’s like the rest,” Seville continues, growing angry with some memory. “If he has a bad day, he’ll beat up on people who are too weak to stand up. I seen him do things to people that were not necessary, not necessary at all. That’s why I look at him the way I do sometimes. Cuz I seen things he done, seen them when he didn’t know I was there.

  “Yeah, I know he done good stuff, too, for some people, got them jobs or into rehab or apartments and other stuff, but he isn’t a saint by any means. That article in The New York Times about Henry and Grand Central, you see that? Didn’t say anything about the tunnels, but Henry loved it cuz it had a big picture of him and made him out a hero. He sure as hell ain’t no hero.”

  Could you do a better job than Sergeant Henry? I ask.

  “Hell, I wouldn’t want that responsibility,” he leans back comfortably, stretching his hands in the air and laughing. “I do what I can [for others] everyday, which is more than most people. Even when I was smoking and doing it up, I brought people stuff to eat. One thing about being homeless in New York, you can’t starve. There is just too much food around.

  “One time I had this deal with Flacko with a restaurant in Grand Central that has a hot salad bar. When they closed, they packed up all the leftover stuff for us, and it was good—sq
uid, ravioli, meats, sushi, first-class stuff you wouldn’t believe—and we would pass it out in Grand Central to others who were also homeless tunnel people.”

  He pauses, recalling my question. “If I was in charge,” he says, with a mischievous grin starting, “if I was in charge, I’d put up a big sign on the platforms saying, ‘C’mon down! Everyone welcome! Come live free—rent-free, tax-free, independent, free like Mandela!’”

  When he stops smiling, he turns earnest and leans over our table in the Chinese restaurant, spilling his now cold wonton soup, “If you write this book,” he says, “you tell them the tunnels rob you of your life. No one should come down here. There’s lots of reasons they do. They think they can just get out after the police stop looking for them, or when they get off drugs, or when they feel better and can face things again. You can’t go back up. Man, I wish I knew that twelve years ago.

  “I just want you to tell them that. The tunnels take your life. That freedom stuff is bullshit. Everyone down here knows it. They won’t say it, but they know it.”

  But you have left the tunnels several times, I remind him.

  “I never really left them,” he says. “I took vacations from the tunnels,” he smiles lightly, “but I never really left them. I guess they’re my home. Their people are my people. They are what I know best. They are who I know best.

  “Think about it,” his eyes dim. “You gonna just stop living where you live with your friends and your job and your family, learn a whole new way of life with nothing waiting for you there? How you expect me to do it after twelve years of doing what I do?”

  We look at each other for a moment. Then he broke the silence with a smile.

  “Tomorrow will be different,” he rights his Styrofoam soup bowl. “Maybe I’ll win the lottery and turn the tunnels into an underground resort area: ‘Challenge your survival techniques!’ Maybe tomorrow will be different. Don’t you worry about me.”