The Mole People Read online

  “The parents don’t want to let go by putting the kids up for adoption,” she continues, “so while the parents float around trying to pull themselves together, the child grows up in foster homes, pushed from one house to another. The parents don’t want to let go, to cut the cord. So it’s the worst of all worlds for the kids, who would be best off with loving parents who can provide for them. Or second best, adopted into a family that could provide for them.

  “But this way they are worse off. And as they get older, by the time the parents realize they won’t get them back, the kids are too old to get adopted. If they’re black, it’s even harder to get adopted,” she sighs.

  Overworked social workers—in New York City, the average caseload is almost ten times the size recommended by the National Association of Social Workers—are taxed with decisions that determine the fate of such underground families. Sometimes they see the choice as cut-and-dry where tunnel dwellers are concerned.

  “No child can live a normal, healthy life in a tunnel,” says one flatly. “If that’s the best the parent can do, well, that’s just not good enough.”

  Underground couples without children are also encouraged to separate sometimes.

  Trey, a tall, slim man with a powerful frame, works in a soup kitchen with his girlfriend Lajoy, whom he calls his wife. The two live in a box shack at the mouth of a tunnel with several other people, mostly men.

  He is a large, gentle man who speaks softly and smiles often, but he is usually too busy watching Lajoy to join in any laughter with the kitchen staff. Lajoy, who is twenty-five but looks forty, is an obvious addict. Her eyes are darkly ringed above heavy bags, and her dark skin looks chalky. Her movements are quick and jittery. Even to the untrained eye, she seems dangerously thin and fragile. Trey tries never to let her out of his sight.

  Even while talking and peeling potatoes, he watches her. She speaks loudly without warning, and his hand slips over the potato into the sharp peeler. Blood gushes from a deep gouge in his middle finger, but he ties a napkin around his fist and rinses his red blood from the potato, almost without noticing it, eyes still locked on Lajoy.

  “I try not to let her do it [both shoot up and smoke crack]” he said as he resumes talking, hardly letting his eyes fall from Lajoy. “But I can’t watch her all the time. Sometimes she does drugs right when I’m there, and I don’t even know it, don’t know how she did it.” He tries to explain.

  “They say people can be like cancer. When it’s in your arm or leg, you amputate it to get well. It hurts like hell, but you got to do it to live. But you see, it don’t work for me with Lajoy. My wife is my life. What’s the point of living if she ain’t around. I don’t want to live without her. She can’t stop doing drugs, even for me. So I got to be with her while I can.”

  Trey has his problems, too. Alcohol. Most times, he gets drunk every night, which he feels is an improvement from the past when he was oblivious all day long. He tries not to drink, at least not too much, he says, so he can take care of Lajoy.

  Some of his friends believe Lajoy encourages Trey to drink, maybe because she has more freedom to take drugs when he is drunk. She insists they live in the box where drugs and drink are very common. The pattern reinforces their addiction. Some couples overcome their addiction together, but usually one brings the other down with her or him.

  “When it comes to choosing between a person whom they love, or their own health and life, they pick the person,” according to Yolanda Serrano, the executive director of ADAPT. “So how do you help people like that? When it comes to aiding the addict, our system says they got to do it alone. There are no provisions for family and loved ones to do it together.

  “What it comes down to is we don’t see them as persons with feelings. We may lack the experience. The police see them as threats. The system pulls them apart, their family, their friends. It’s all sink or swim, and a lot aren’t strong enough to swim. A lot of them don’t understand that we’re trying to help. For that matter, a lot on our side, our people, don’t seem to know they’re supposed to help.

  “When it comes down to it,” she says sadly, “you can’t really blame either side. Neither side really understands the other. We need to have that understanding. But we don’t have the time or the compassion to see where they’re coming from. And they don’t have the trust.”

  8

  Hell’s Kitchen

  SMITH, A GRAFFITI WRITER WHO OFTEN PAINTS UNDERGROUND, takes me into Seville’s tunnel, which begins on West 48th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, near an almost unnoticed bridge over two railroad tracks thirty feet below street level. It is the spot where Seville fell and broke his wrist.

  We climb a chain link fence from the top of a dumpster, slide halfway down a rock-faced wall, and then drop about eight feet onto the gravel roadbed of the tracks where they run briefly in the open before disappearing underground. There are several such places on the West Side where the tracks are in a gully, not a tunnel, and can be seen by those who know what to look for. The path for the tracks was blasted out of the Manhattan rock perhaps a century ago and the tracks were abandoned for some years because of declining rail traffic through New York City. Trains now run through them again, largely carrying freight.

  Clothes, mostly women’s miniskirts, litter the tracks, along with glass bottles and aluminum drink cans. We pass a pair of corduroy pants, one leg crumbled and the other almost straight, that has been soaked with blood and is stiffening and turning brown in the sun.

  Then comes the first underground passageway. Once inside, as the light is disappearing behind the last turn, a woman’s voice calls out shrilly: “Who’s there? Who’s in the tunnel?”

  Smith ignores the voice, stepping like a cat over the rubble despite the blinding darkness. Searching for a body to go with the questions, I seem to turn an ankle with each footfall.

  “Answer me!” the woman’s voice demands. Almost at the same moment, a bottle flies past Smith, crashing against the far wall. We pick up our pace until well away. We’ve been lucky, Smith says. Often as many as fifteen bottles have been hurled at him from different directions in that same short passage of tunnel.

  These people just don’t like visitors, he observes unnecessarily. “Trains are a lot safer,” he says dryly.

  The tracks seemed particularly dark in contrast to several places where bright shafts of sunlight splash down through gratings to create stark, disorienting shadows. After the last warming bright beam from above, we come upon a huge boulder on which is scrawled a warning sign in the orange spray paint of track workers: “CHUDS.”

  Track maintenance crews call tunnel homeless “CHUD people,” for “Cannibalistic Human Underground Dwellers.”

  “It’s not all a joke,” one railroad engineer insists. “We know they are there. We can see their eyes. And when you aren’t looking, they’ll steal your tools, your food. I had a pair of pliers right next to me once, and a few seconds after I put them down, they were gone right from my side. I swear it happens all the time down here. The boss doesn’t even question when you put in a request for more tools because he knows they got stolen down here.

  “And sometimes they’ll even pipe’ you,” he complains, indicating a club smashing into his head, “usually to steal from you but sometimes just cuz they’re wacked out or scared.

  “I usually bring an extra sandwich or two when I work on the tracks here, and I leave them around so they can take them and not get nervous and bother me. When I leave, all the sandwiches are gone, but I never see them being taken.

  “So I wouldn’t laugh at the CHUD thing,” he cautioned. “They eat dogs, I know, and I’d bet my life they’d eat people.”

  Out in full daylight again, farther up the West Side along the Hudson River, Smith and I walk along tracks cut in the side of cliffs of layered rocks that are stepped back as they rise. On these terraced ledges are the homeless version of the sweet life—recliners, beach chairs, mattresses, and discarded housewares of a
ll types on which the tunnel people sit. Some say hello as we pass, others turn their backs and walk toward the rock face where they disappear from our view.

  “We have twelve cubbies in this rock here,” one woman explains helpfully as she looks down from her ledge. “You can come with me up into this one if you want,” she offers, “but don’t you go exploring on your own. People don’t take kindly to that. These are our homes you know.” Her cubby is a small cave in the rock, large enough for a mattress, a couple of framed pictures of her family, and a candle atop a plastic milk crate, but not high enough for her to stand erect.

  We walk on along the tracks, going underground again. People sit on similar terraced ledges, but now in the dark.

  “We could have light,” Seville had told me, “but sometimes we’re too lazy to screw in the light bulb. There is an emergency exit door from the tunnel there, and you can turn out the bulb in the sign if you want, or turn it on if you wanted light, and when people were too lazy to screw in the bulb, we sit there in the dark,” he laughed.

  “Track workers would come past every day, say ‘how you doing?’ but they didn’t come over. I think they were scared. I know I’d be scared, looking into the dark and knowing people were there watching you. I remember one time a worker stopped and just stared at me from the tracks. He just kept staring until I said, ‘Damn it, you all right man?’ And he jumped a mile!

  “‘I just wanted to make sure you was somebody,’ he said, ‘cuz all I could see was this pair of eyeballs. I was about to break and run because I didn’t know what it was.’ I got up and turned on the light so he could see me. He didn’t know what was growing down here. He thought I was some kind of animal or something,” Seville guffawed, slapping his knee.

  Farther north along this road is Bernard’s tunnel—a world apart from this one—but I will enter it another way at another time.

  9

  Children

  “And I’ll grow up beautiful.” —Julie, age eight

  ON A FREEZING DECEMBER NIGHT, A WOMAN’S SHARP screams fill every recess in the abandoned train tunnel that more than a dozen people call home. The air is still, amplifying the shrieks as they echo through the dark cavern.

  One by one and sometimes in twos, the nervous inhabitants come to its mouth, where the screams tumble out into the night air and are quickly lost.

  “This ain’t right, this jus’ ain’t right,” says Shorty, a recent member of the tunnel community, a newcomer to its kind of suffering. His words create vapors that linger briefly before they disappear without effect. The half-dozen men with him study the rubble at their feet in silence.

  Shorty is a soft-faced man with watery eyes so brown that their whites have yellowed. Now they are intense and demanding. “We should be gettin’ help. This ain’t right!” he insists.

  His clenched fists chop the air in short strokes when a sharp beam of white light from a passing river barge catches him, suddenly illuminating the scene. He shrinks from the exposure and his fists seem to abandon their determination, opening into stubby fingers, cracked by the cold and ingrained with dirt. He shoves them into the pockets of his browned and oversized jeans whose frayed bottoms, cuffed several times, fold heavily over torn sneakers. Despite the cold, his clothes reek of the familiar smells of homelessness—spoiled and soured food from scavenged dumpsters, stale sweat, and the excrement and urine of the streets.

  The beam sweeps past, and New Jersey’s flickering lights reappear across the river. The men are poorly protected from the Hudson’s cold winds. Butch, the beefiest among them and regarded as the leader of the community, shifts his weight to keep warm. His eyes are rimmed with tears from the cold as he hunches his shoulders against a new gust. He draws a switchblade from his jacket and fingers its edge gingerly. As everyone watches, he draws it several times across the face of a smooth rock, as if to sharpen it further, then closes and pockets it. His face resumes its vacant, distant look.

  “Maybe we should pray,” says Juan tentatively. A slim Latino man whose eyes never leave the ground, he is the most clean and neatly dressed of the gathered tunnel dwellers. By day he works a minimum-wage job at McDonald’s. No one there suspects he lives underground.

  Razor, a black man with face and neck scars, snickers at the mention of prayer. His midshoulder-length hair, matted reggae-style and knotted with dirt, looks especially wild in the darkness.

  The rest of the men nod and grunt approval of Juan’s idea, and, in a low monotone, he begins to speak of the coming child:

  “Dear Lord, please deliver us this baby safely. His parents are good people. He’s done nothin’ bad, Lord. He’s jus’ a baby. He don’t mean no disrespect being born underground. We’ll take care of him when he’s with us. Just deliver him and his mama safely, Lord, and we’ll take care of the rest. Amen.”

  “Amen,” several of the men repeat in whispers that overlap each other like the small waves slapping the river edge.

  Above New York, white stars pierce the sky. Everything appears too sharp and dramatic in the sparkling cold, including the quiet when the screams abruptly stop. A small animal, probably a rat, shuffles through the dried leaves at the corner of the tunnel’s mouth, but the world seems less hostile in the quiet.

  Then the baby cries a strong, demanding bleat. The men look at the ground or at nothing, seemingly unmoved. They were familiar with death in the tunnels. Birth was something new.

  “Should we go in?” asks Fred. His heavy-lidded eyes make him look dimly criminal and threatening, an effect he deliberately enhances on the street. Now, even while standing innocently outside a manger scene, he looks as guilty as a thief.

  “Naw,” Butch says. “Wait for Ronda.”

  A woman’s figure walks almost bouncing out of the tunnel’s mouth.

  “It’s a boy!” Ronda announces, her eyes tired but lively. “Sally’s fine.”

  The group moves from the December night toward the underground home of Sally and Tim, their blank expressions thawing into avuncular pride.

  “Man, our first tunnel baby! Man!” exults Butch, shaking his head and smiling brightly. He leans over and smacks Shorty on the top of his head. “Shorty, man, you was a mess, brother,” he says, smiling more broadly.

  “You weren’t no calm chicken neither,” says Fred, elbowing Butch as tension releases into exaggerated bonhomie.

  The men gather wood as they walk deeper into the tunnel, adding it to the campfire they had left when Sally’s screams became too near and personal. The flames leap and warmth returns with swigs from a bottle of Thunderbird that is passed around, and the men spend the last of the night expressing wonder and even awe at the idea that a baby has joined their community.

  Sally and Tim live in the tunnel for a week after the birth, but when I return a couple of weeks later, Ronda says that Sally, a white woman in her late twenties, and Tim, a black man in his early forties, have gone back to Brooklyn. Sally is living with her sister, Ronda says, while Tim looks for work.

  The baby was fine, but the tunnel community is glad they have gone.

  “We’ll miss them and all that,” says Shorty, “but this ain’t no place for a baby. A tunnel ain’t no place for a baby.”

  Butch is most pleased that the couple left.

  “It’s too much responsibility having a baby,” he says. “We always had to think about getting things for it, and making sure it was warm. I told Tim he had no business keeping his wife and baby underground. He was risking all of us. People up top were gonna start hearing the baby cry, and you know, if the cops came down and found it, they’d find a reason to arrest us all and shut down the tunnel.”

  Tim was reluctant to leave. “He liked it here,” Butch says. “He didn’t like to ask no one for help.” Tim apparently wanted to raise the child in the tunnels, but the community threatened to alert the authorities.

  “We would’ve told someone sooner or later,” says Juan. “No baby could live down here with us.”

  Most of the home
less who attended the baby’s birth have no intention of visiting Tim and Sally. Other underground communities are close-knit, but this one is more akin to being homeless on the streets, accepting the passing, fragile nature of relationships, willing to allow people to float in and out of their lives. Some also deliberately insulate themselves against disappointment in others by staying aloof.

  Shorty, not yet callused in this way, hopes to keep in touch with the tunnel baby. “Sure, I’ll see Little Shorty,” he beams at the thought of his namesake. “They’ll bring him down to visit his uncles.” He entertains an idea fleetingly. “Maybe I’ll pass him on the street one day.”

  “Naw,” says Butch. “Little Butch is better off staying away. He wouldn’t want to see your ugly face, anyway,” he grins.

  Everyone seems to name the baby after himself except for Ronda, who refers to the child as Joey—”because he looks like a little kangaroo,” she explains. Eventually they accept that he is Little Tim.

  A BIRTH UNDERGROUND IS A RARITY. PREGNANT WOMEN ARE USUally urged by the tunnel homeless to get proper care. If they refuse to go, authorities are usually informed where to find them, particularly if the women are addicts unable to care for themselves.

  Nell, who is thirty-one years old, has been wandering in the tunnels for days, stoned and asking for money for food. Her body is emaciated, but she is hugely pregnant. She doesn’t know it.

  “I don’t know why I’m hungry all the time,” she says, looking vacantly to the side. “It ain’t drugs. I don’t do no drugs no more. I’ve gone straight,” she says unconvincingly.

  I ask if she is pregnant, and she looks at me, confused.

  “You mean a baby?” she asks, muddled. “Naw, it ain’t that. My belly’s always been big. Maybe though,” she adds as the thought sinks in. “Ain’t bled for a while.”