“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.
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.”[2]
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.