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 all 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.”
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.”