“That’s enough,” says Romero. There used to be over two hundred individuals living in the few blocks of this Bowery tunnel, Romero says. “You can see how we’ve cleaned it out, but we still have to police it twice a day.” Many of the hard-core tunnel dwellers moved farther into the tunnels, especially into the Port Authority and Penn Station tunnels, where they are not yet disturbed by police.
The sound of rain pounding on the street can be heard, and wind whistles through the grates, but neither penetrates into the tunnel, which is noticeably warmer. Romero says that on average, tunnels are twenty-five degrees warmer than the street. I feel somehow more secure despite the danger.
The tracks are cleaner than I expected: a few crack vials with colored tops, as promised, as well as a few bottles of spilled pills, some needles, and an occasional piece of clothing. The air becomes fouler as we go farther. Against the wall, a flashlight beam picks up fresh feces that lie on a glass dish, and wet urine stains a spot on the cement wall nearby.
A mouse, its eyes squeezed shut and its paws curled tightly under its head, lies dead near the tracks.
“That’s good,” says Klambatsen, who normally leads the night patrol. “That means there are no rats. They spray powerful chemicals down here to kill the rats. We don’t come down for three days after that because it’s so strong. We clear the people out before they spray, of course…. Yes, I suppose some do come right back and live in the spray, but, as far as I know, there’ve been no fatalities from that.”
The officers search the tunnel as if for animals, stirring blankets and looking into cardboard boxes. Eight homeless men are roused, shielding their eyes from the flashlights. They are asked repeatedly if they want to go to shelters. They are angry at being awakened and refuse. Two prefer the rainy streets, while the rest agree to be shuttled by a white van to a shelter.
The Bowery tunnels once held some of the largest underground homeless groups, or communities. Now we find a couple of men share the night here and there, some singles, and a woman on her own, but rarely are there more than three people in one space. In the mid-eighties, sevetal communities of forty or fifty people set up camps underground along the Lexington Line, but they remained essentially separate, even aloof, from each other.
“I think that was because there were no women there with them,” says Dale, a formidable and friendly homeless woman who lives aboveground in the Bowery. “They always expect someone to rob from them, even their friends. They didn’t have women to soften them. They didn’t live like a family or nothing. They lived like alcoholic men, sometimes angry, sometimes dangerous, but mostly depressed and asleep,” she says. “They didn’t trust each other, only people like social workers on the outside sometimes.” Few of the Bowery’s tunnel people say they have friends. In referring to someone they drink with or can be found hanging out with, they usually call them “an associate.”
Gary Bass is one of the more established tunnel dwellers of the Bowery. Bass is well known to the officers on the patrol. He is friendly to some; for others, he has bitter distaste. He is evicted almost every night, he says, but always refuses to go to a shelter.
He enters the tunnels through emergency exits to the street, which by law cannot be sealed. One exit hatch that lifts a section of the Broadway sidewalk is part of the roof of his home, a duplex spanning two levels of the subway. The stairs to the lower floor are well swept, and the living quarters neat. His clothes drape neatly on hangars from a pipe. He shows me his working iron plugged into the tunnel’s electrical system, standing atop a full-size ironing board. To read, he detaches the exit sign over a naked bulb to get its strong light. To sleep, he unscrews the bulb for complete darkness. On the top level of his duplex, where he sleeps, a passing subway sounds like the distant rumble of a country train. The entrance off the tunnel is marked by crossed brooms and guarded by a trip wire that can bring down a five-gallon water bucket, which is sometimes full and sometimes empty but always warns of an intrusion. The police have dismantled his home many times, but each time he reconstitutes it the next day, he says.
On our trip this night, eight of the homeless sleeping in the tunnel choose to take their chances in the cold rain rather than a city shelter. Six agree to go to a shelter but only after some cajoling and promises that they will be taken to Bellevue rather than the Fort Washington shelter.
TOM AND HIS FRIEND DENISE (WHO IS ALSO MALE) CONSULT WITH one another about the Bellevue promise.
“That’s cool,” Tom says, “but when you leave us off at Bellevue, they drive us off to Fort Washington cuz Bellevue’s full. We ain’t gonna stay in that Murder House.” Farrell, a kind- and honorable-looking cop, convinces them that they can stay at Bellevue and promises that he will wait with them until they are admitted, so they finally agree to go.
Among the homeless in New York, the Fort Washington shelter shares with the Armory shelter the worst reputation of the city. Stories about the violence at Fort Washington, the “Murder House,” seem too numerous to be fiction.
“I’ll tell you about Fort Washington,” a homeless man later tells me. “First, all those stories about homosexuals there, well, they are all true. The shelter people, they always watch everyone in the showers, but still I know a few guys who got raped there. I only stayed two nights. After the first night I got lice and had to throw all my stuff out. The second night I was in bed and felt something spraying across my face,” he says, making a spurting motion. “I was mad, killin’ mad. I was sure some guy was jerking off on me. I jumped up and was gonna kill him, only I saw it was blood that was all over me. Some guy had come over, then stabbed the guy in the next bunk to steal his shoes, and his blood was spraying on me.”
THE FARTHER INTO THE TUNNELS, THE LESS EASY IT IS TO ROUSE those sleeping. Some are poked and shaken awake and are angry at being disturbed. Few run from police as they do in the Port Authority, Pennsylvania, and Grand Central tunnels. Most in the Bowery tunnel don’t seem surprised by the police officers. Their reflexes are slow and wary, fighting the effects of fatigue or drugs. An officer nudges a sleeping inhabitant who snarls and grunts, clawing at the officer’s hand.
“Sometimes it’s hard to see them as anything but animals,” the police officer confides after the incident, as we near the end of the tour. “They’re trying to survive, and that can be the most dangerous instinct an animal has. But one time I found this man in the tunnel crying over the body of his lover. He wouldn’t leave. The autopsy said the man had died of AIDS two days earlier, and the lover wouldn’t leave the body, even to go eat.”
He paused.
“That changes the way you think a bit. At least until the next one threatens you or your buddy.” He smiles briefly before putting his mask back on to resume combat with the stench.
7
Living with the Law
“STOP! FREEZE!” YELLS SERGEANT BRYAN HENRY, HIS DEEP voice edged with fear.
Henry’s flashlight darts blindly at movement more heard and sensed than seen.
“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.