The Mole People Read online

  “Come forward! Slowly!” he orders. His hand has already unhooked the leather safety strap over his nine-millimeter revolver and is poised tensely above its handle.

  There is hardly a sound in the tunnel, just the regular dripping of water from the streets and the whispered scurrying of rats. The silence is as overwhelming as the tunnel’s blackness.

  “Shit,” he says finally, his voice firmer now as he comes down from the adrenaline rush of preparing for violent action and enters familiar frustration. His flashlight is steadier as it ranges across sections of wall that shield the tunnel’s farther passages from its prying beam.

  “Fuck,” he shouts in exasperation, thrusting the gun more securely back into its holster. “They’re so fucking fast!”

  Henry runs nimbly across four subway tracks, ignoring the third rail in pursuit of the underground homeless. When he was first assigned to tunnel work, he bought shoes with the thickest rubber soles he could find, he says, hoping they would insulate him from the high voltage if he stumbled onto the rail. Now the danger of electrocution is all but ignored as he seeks the elusive human moles.

  Sergeant Henry scdping an area beneath Grand Central Station. Photo by Margaret Morton

  The movement that roused him may have been a ploy, what tunnel people call “running interference,” in which one or more individuals distract an intruder while a larger group escapes. But Henry doesn’t know about that.

  A dozen steps beyond the walls, he finds a thin, rusty ladder climbing a sheer cement wall. Tracing it upward, his beam circles a dark region of the wall that begins to shimmer and stir. Winged, cockroach-size insects excited by the light buzz angrily and scurry about, climbing over one another. Grimacing, Henry shores the flashlight into his belt, pulls on a pair of heavy black leather gloves, and starts cautiously up the ladder, his bulky shoes at severe angles to the shallow rungs.

  On top is a recessed compartment the size of a small square room, perhaps nine feet by ten feet. Henry’s roving flashlight, out again, stops in a far corner, exposing several white plates resting on a small refrigerator. A clothesline with two pairs of jeans and three T-shirts stretches diagonally from one corner to an overhead pipe. On a makeshift table consisting of a crate supported by books stands a toaster oven, open and still warm to the touch. On another such table, this one with flowers, lies a book of poetry open to W. H. Auden’s “On This Island.” Layers of old clothes and paper-filled garbage bags carpet the floor, serve as insulation from the dank, underground cold.

  Henry kicks at the clothes and plastic bags in frustration, and then shatters the silence by striking his nightstick repeatedly against the pipes. He overturns one table and knocks the books and plates from another, savaging the dwelling with his club and feet. He is following orders to roust these homeless, who are a danger to themselves as well as the transit system, but he seems to be acting out a larger anger, and perhaps even enjoying his strength.

  “They were just here,” he says, pointing to a bowl in which a few drops of milk remain.

  A doll with a smudged face has been left behind. Her large eyes seem to stare at me. Books and plates litter the floor. I turn over a paperback, Winnie the Pooh.

  Henry seems to feel the anxious eyes of hating witnesses. “They’re probably still here, watching us,” he says, looking about challengingly, and he attacks the pipes with renewed vigor.

  This is a typical trip into the tunnels for Sergeant Henry and for other officers of the Metropolitan Transit Police, not according to them but to J.C., an underground dweller who has watched their regular forays.

  “Actually, Henry ain’t as bad as most of the others,” says J.C, who describes himself as “spokesman” for a community of two hundred homeless who have settled under Grand Central Station.

  “Some of them will kick people around when they find them sleeping, and break up their stuff,” he explains. “No reason at all. They take out a lot of their aggression down there, I’ll tell you that much, ‘specially when they’re having a bad day.”

  J.C, a small, lithe, and sneakered black man in his middle to late twenties, clearly remembers with lingering bitterness the first time he met Henry. Henry, a large muscular man over six feet tall in his early forties, also recalls the meeting, but he sees it as one of his more amusing tunnel experiences.

  Henry had been after J.C for months, knowing he was living illegally in the tunnels but unable to catch and evict him. He would follow J.C. into a tunnel only to lose him in the dark underground mazes and back out before he got in too deeply. He’d wait at the entrance for J.C. to reemerge, but J.C. knew too many ways in and out of the tunnels for the cop.

  One spring day, however, the sergeant saw his quarry step out of a tunnel and into an alleyway. Henry, shouting and drawing his revolver, began chasing J.C. up the alley at full run. J.C, after an initial sprint, realized that he was in a dead-end trap and, hearing the ominous hammer click on the policeman’s gun, he stopped abruptly. He stopped faster than Henry could pull up, and, before each knew what happened, the big cop had his cocked revolver cold against the skin of J.C.’s face.

  “I had him against the wall,” Henry laughs. “It was so funny. We were both shaking. Neither of us knew what to do. He was so scared he wet his pants.”

  “Yeah, we were both shaking,” J.C. grimly agrees later. “The difference was he had the gun. He’s always been quick to grab his gun.”

  Henry didn’t arrest J.C, he only made “contact” with the tunnel person.

  From the dangerous encounter, the two men developed a wary relationship. They remained merely nodding acquaintances for a long time before Henry persuaded J.C. to enroll in a vocational school and live in an apartment aboveground. J.C. says he appreciates the sergeant’s help but does not trust him enough to guide him to the underground community in which he then lived.

  “He could lock me up for the rest of my life and I wouldn’t tell him where it is,” J.C. insists. “That’s just the way it is, and he knows that, too.”

  J.C. now lives aboveground much of the time, working as a janitor. In his spare time, he is a volunteer in the Parks Department’s youth program. He still visits his community, however, and speaks for them to outsiders. When he lived in the tunnels, he could be contacted only by leaving notes under a certain brick at a certain tunnel entrance. In order to talk to him about the tunnels, he insists on the same system again.

  “I don’t like to confuse the upstairs with the downstairs,” he explains. “And I don’t want any of my people up here to know about my people down there. It’s safer for them that way, and better for me, too,” he says. “Because people don’t believe me, anyway, about my community.”*

  THE BEHAVIOR OF POLICE UNDERGROUND IS AS CONTROVERSIAL AS on the streets. Brutality stories are so common that rarely a conversation occurs among tunnel people without some new incident being brought up, sometimes marginally but often seriously. Violence is part of the way of life in the darkness under the streets, perhaps even more than aboveground.

  Its victim one day was Peppin, an illegal Latino immigrant who lived under Platform 100 in Grand Central Station. He was a familiar figure to the police, and usually ignored. On this day, they began beating him, apparently because he couldn’t stand up and move on as they ordered.

  “I saw it all happen,” says Seville. “Me and others—four of us—was standing down there, a ways back. No one saw us but we saw them.

  “He was a nice guy, Peppin, didn’t bother nobody, kept to himself pretty much,” Seville recalls. “He didn’t do no drugs or nothing, but he was crazy because he wouldn’t take much food. Didn’t speak much English. Sometimes he’d take something to eat when he was desperate, but he was depressed all the time. I think he was embarrassed to eat food from garbage bins. He could barely walk because he was so weak from not eating.

  “And that day he couldn’t even stand up. One of the officers kept yelling, ‘Get up! Get up!’ But he couldn’t.

  “So they p
icked him up and threw him around. His head hit the third rail and sparks flew everywhere. His body just bounced up like you never seen, like a big dummy bouncing up, like he was on strings or rubber bands. There was blood all over the place. We thought they killed him. They thought they killed him, too, cuz they got scared; they talked about what to do with the body and what to say happened, what their story was gonna be.

  “They were gonna say they chased off a gang of punks who were beating him up and when they got there, that the punks threw him on the rail and ran. That’s what they were going to say,” Seville shakes his head incredulously.

  “We wanted to do something, watching all that, but we were afraid to go forward. I don’t know. We should have. But we just stood there.

  “Then the medics came, and they took him to a hospital and he lived. Peppin’s still alive, but he’s not the same. He can’t even take care of himself no more. He just wanders around. I guess those officers were having a real bad day, but they shouldn’t have been doing that shit.”

  Not all police are brutal, of course. Even those who brutalized Peppin are not always nasty, the homeless say. Also, many of the police are repelled by such behavior by fellow officers.

  “It’s no wonder these tunnel people don’t come to us for help,” says one cop. “If I heard those stories, I’d be hiding, too. But they’re not true, or, if they are, they’re exaggerated.

  “I mean, people get scared down there. Policemen, too. And they act in unacceptable ways at times. No one’s perfect. But if anyone has the advantage, they do, those people in the tunnels, not us. The people who live down there, they can see in the dark, and they can hide, and they throw things—steel bars and bottles and chunks of concrete. And they come right up behind us without us knowing. All we got is a gun. It doesn’t do us much good if we can’t see them.”

  Sergeant Henry bleeds, too, in his own way, although it doesn’t always show.

  In 1988 he became the first officer ever assigned to deal exclusively with the tunnel people, and he was told to keep them a secret. His task was described vaguely as “homeless outreach,” without admitting these homeless lived underground. For sometime he told those who asked, including reporters, that no one lived in the tunnels, that the stories of “mole people” were a kind of underground folklore concocted by homeless people for their own amusement. Yet now he admits that he and his officers had cleared about four hundred peoples from the tunnels under Grand Central Station.

  Henry often jokes with the homeless he encounters, in an effort to neutralize their fear and hostility. His large, loose frame conveys an image of comfortable friendliness. Like his body, several homeless people describe his shiny brown eyes as “soft.”

  When he and I come upon a group of homeless in the northeast corner of the station, Henry staggers backward in clowning disbelief, one hand to forehead, when he recognizes a man in a handsome trench coat over worn Reeboks.

  “Man, oh, man, what happened to you?” he asks, grasping the man’s frail hand in a firm, warm handshake.

  “He got himself a job,” explains another of the homeless group happily, still giggling at Henry’s surprise. The cop is pleased—sincerely so, it seems to me—that one of the homeless is getting up and out of the tunnel life.

  Despite his easy way and rapport with most homeless on his beat, some tunnel people do not trust him. Borrowing from psychological jargon, some accuse him of being on an “ego trip.” One claims he likes his gun and black leather gloves “too much” and that he likes the credit and the publicity, including his picture in newspapers. Another broadly hints that Henry has taken part in beatings of homeless people, but he won’t say it outright.

  On the other hand, Henry has helped many homeless like J.C. to escape the tunnels, to get into job training programs, and to find housing aboveground. He asked for the duty. When he found out the great size of the problem, he asked for more officers but was refused. He took pictures of the underground people and their communities to the mayor’s office and to the governor’s office, he says, but he got little additional help. It may be that he shows me his pictures and leads me to some tunnel people because of his frustration with the authorities.

  Henry sometimes makes extra sandwiches at home, which he gives to the homeless he meets in the tunnels. His job is to wean people away from the tunnels, to accept help aboveground. If they refuse to leave voluntarily, he has to evict them, but he prefers not to.

  He takes his work home with him, too. He has experienced more than one episode of profound depression because of his job and has had to take time off to recover. He blames it on the darkness, however, rather than on the sad condition of the people he works with.

  “You don’t get enough light working down here,” he says. “You get depressed. One time I was getting desperate. I used to sit so close to a light bulb that it singed my papers. A doctor told me what I had was depression and that light helps, any kind of light, and I should try to get more of it.”

  Another time, after some diligent work, he found a homeless community deep underground where one tunnel opened into a huge cavern. The scene was peaceful, with shacks and campfires, well protected and virtually hidden behind a thirty-foot-high cliff of rock between it and the tracks. The community called the site “the Condos,” because the living environment was so good. The cliff even drowned out the noise of passing trains, and an electric wire had been diverted to actually allow some of the cardboard and wooden shacks in the Condos to have light. Water was available from a convenient sprinkler system that leaked.

  “It was the only environment where I thought that ‘Hey, once, maybe, these people are better off down here because what they get upstairs is a hell of a lot worse,’” he recalls pensively. “That’s when I knew it was time to take a vacation, so I went to Jamaica and started light therapy,” he smiles.

  The Condos, where more than three hundred people once lived, have now been cleared of the homeless and most of their camps.

  Some social workers also believe that at least some of the police brutality stories are exaggerated, or even fabricated, by the underground homeless. Harold Deamues is one of them. A worker for the outreach program of the Association for Drug Abuse Prevention and Treatment (ADAPT), Deamues contends that the stories primarily reflect the hostility and tension between the tunnel people and the police.

  “The problem is that the police go down there assuming all these people are crazy or bugged [drugged] out. There’s no trust between them at all,” he says.

  “These people don’t have any belief in themselves, and if you don’t believe in them or trust them, they know, they sense it, so how are you going to help them? I always feel like if I can look them in the eye, they’re not going to hurt me,” explains Deamues, who holds ADAPT’s best record for persuading tunnel people to go aboveground. “If they have a gun in their face, that’s not helping.”

  This philosophy is built into ADAPT’s outreach effort, which is funded by the Transit Authority. The program’s director, Michael Bethea, said none of his team takes a weapon or wears protective gear when they work in the tunnels.

  “We got to get through to them, and convince them that they’re not untouchables, not animals. That they’re people just like us, and we’re people like them. I don’t know how you can do that by pulling a gun all the time,” Bethea says.

  SOCIAL WORKERS MUST COPE WITH LEGAL REGULATIONS IN ORDER TO help the tunnel homeless. Families found underground are often split up. The children are usually put in foster homes on the grounds that the parents cannot adequately care for them, which causes families to avoid seeking any welfare help.

  For the past several years, welfare agencies across the country have warned that families—usually mothers with children—account for the fastest growing group among the homeless. This is a particularly severe problem in New York City where housing is very scarce and expensive. During July and August of 1992, a total of 13,994 families asked city officials for shelter, almo
st double the 7,526 families in the same months a year earlier.

  “It’s an explosion,” according to Ken Murphy, deputy commissioner of the city’s Human Resources Administration. “Two or three years ago we had to place maybe seventy-five families each night. Last night we placed 210 families and still had 143 left over in the offices at 8 A.M.,” he told The New York Times.

  The pattern is reflected underground. Shelters for families are usually full, so parents seeking help are sent to an adult shelter, and the children usually go to foster care or are even put up for adoption.

  Sonya and Rodney had their two daughters taken from them when they were found in the tunnels.

  “They’s in foster care,” says Sonya, a slim woman who ties her hair up neatly in a navy blue cotton cloth and away from her high cheekbones, accentuated by sunken cheeks, thin nose, and full lips. Even fatigue and hunger cannot take much away from her attractive face. “They [welfare officials] were supposed to put them together, in the same family. They promised they would,” she complains, “but then they said they couldn’t, so they’s in different houses.

  “We used to go see them a lot, but it hurt too much. The older one, she see I was crying and she says, ‘Mama, don’t come see me no more, because I just make you sad and crying.’”

  She breaks off, weeping, and hides her face in Rodney’s bony chest.

  “We don’t see them no more,” he says, pain lining his face. “Not ‘til we can get them back to ourselves completely.”

  “It’s not easy,” Sonya resumes. “They just don’t give them back to you. The social worker says sometimes they never give them back to you. Maybe we have to start again,” she says, sniffling. Rodney nods.

  “It’s a very hard call,” explains a sympathetic social worker. “On the one hand you don’t want to leave them without hope by telling them the facts—that most families pulled from the tunnels and split up never get back together. But at the same time, you want them to know it won’t be easy; it’s not just going to happen, getting back together. They have to work at it.