Buckley says he sometimes gets frustrated and dejected watching a familiar pattern among homeless of recovery and falling out. “Sometimes it’s hard to understand,” he says.
“It’s like leaving home,” explains Sam, raising a cup of bitter coffee to his overgrown mustache. His leathery skin proves his claim to living on the streets and underground for fifteen years. “You leave your space, all your friends. Your family really.” He has left several times because he wanted to get clean and warm, but each time has returned.
“I want a better life, but I don’t want to give up the friends here. There’s no one up there for me anymore.”
Tripper is an addict who personifies those underground homeless no longer striving for a better life. “Why should I go dry? What for?” he asks. “There’s nothing up there for me. This is what I want. If it means I die early, then I die early. Who cares? What’s the point of cleaning up to fit the myth that everything’s better up top? You’re only miserable a little longer up there.”
MANY OF THE STRONGER ONES NOT ONLY WANT TO CLIMB BACK OUT but they also want to succeed.
Virginia is a slight, homeless woman with big, earnest eyes and hair that is pulled back smoothly. She was a secretary before losing her job, and then her husband, because of her drug use. She was expecting a child when she met Frank, once a featherweight boxer, who was just out of jail. They met at All Saints’ Soup Kitchen, became lovers, and decided to go through drug rehabilitation together. They have slowly been rebuilding lives within society, falling back a few times, they admit, but making progress through persistence and mutual support. They now have an apartment and are seeking jobs. They come to All Saints’ rarely now, only when welfare money has run out before the end of the month.
“It’s hard to come back around people I was out drugging with on the streets,” Frank says. Virginia, shy and mousy in a smart, fitted blue dress, nods agreement.
“They’re good people,” she adds sadly. “They’re real happy we got our lives straight and all. A lot of them say “I wish I could do that,’ and I tell them they can but they don’t believe me.”
“It’s hard for Frank and Virginia,” Buckley says later. “They’ve had to cut themselves off from a whole group of people who were their support. Their struggle has hit a new niche, a transition. They aren’t really here and they aren’t yet there. They constantly try to take in old friends and help them to get straight, but they are constantly disappointed when the friends go back on the streets again after a month.”
Virginia wants to speak to me more at All Saints’, but I am preoccupied with the underground people in the room, rather than those who obviously do not live in tunnels. She looked as though she had no connection to the tunnel world. She follows me, even tugging at my sleeve to get attention. As I leave, I give her my business card.
She phones me several times before we get together again. “I just wanted you to tell them,” she says of the homeless people I meet, “that they can do it. I didn’t believe I could get straight. Nobody ever told me I could, so it’s important that you tell them they can get themselves cleaned up and respectable,” she says in a soft but insistent voice.
I’m taken aback by her, persisting with such a simple message, and I remember Tripper’s chilling certainty that those living aboveground are only miserable longer in a world where they do not belong.
Is it worth cleaning up? I ask Virginia. Are you happier?
“Oh, yes,” she replies with equal certainty. “I miss my people down there, my friends, and I want better for them. They were more my family than I ever had. My family gave up on me. They were the only people who cared whether I was alive. But then I was pregnant with Vicky and I knew I had to do right by her. She’s what made me get out. I couldn’t give her up. I miss them, but there’ll be new friends someday, a full new life. We’re halfway there. Please tell them they can do it, too. There are people for them up here, too. Not many, but we’re here.”
11
Bernard’s Tunnel
“Behold! Human beings living in an underground den…. Like ourselves, they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave.”
AFTER FIVE MINUTES THAT SEEM FOREVER, THE TUNNEL IS STILL impenetrably dark. It feels expansive in its own darkness. I have slipped through the grated emergency exit from the tunnel that stands flush in the steep hill overlooking the Hudson, then picked my way down a score of steep slate steps—some jagged, some broken and wobbly, and two missing—while holding tightly to the rusted pipe that serves as a banister. My flashlight helps, but its beam seems to fall short of the far wall and only dimly finds the single-track rail line. I switch it off and wait for my eyes to accustom themselves to the shadowless world. Subtle movements stir in the dirt.
I feel the chill of strange eyes on me before I become aware of the red glow of a fire in the distance. As I near, a thin figure separates itself slowly from the wall, and its shadow, the stretched form of an already tall and thin man with wild hair, glides toward me over the tracks and the weeping walls of the tunnel.
He crouches when he reaches me, like a wrestler preparing to lash out, and begins to circle me.
Bernard? I ask, extending my hand.
He continues to prowl, silently, until halfway around, my back to the fire, he stops and leans forward. The fire lights his face but I can barely discern its features. I think I have found a mole person and, panicked, I begin to look around for an escape.
Suddenly he takes my outstretched hand in a warm, firm shake.
“Don’t be afraid,” he says, standing erect now. “I just wanted to check you out, see who you are. Forgive me for being so rude. Please come in.”
His welcoming words are in such contrast to his frightening pose a few seconds earlier that I am even more disoriented, but I follow him toward his home, one of a half-dozen cement-walled cubicles in this tunnel that once sheltered track maintenance crews. About forty-five men and women call this area home.
He offers me coffee or tea and soon, he says, some spaghetti that he dumps into water boiling on the campfire. I begin to relax as I listen to this intelligent and articulate black man. I’m embarrassed at how wrong I was in my first impression.
Bernard Isaacs is thirty-eight years old, has a slim six-foot-three-frame, and wears his hair reggae-style. He was once a model, he says, which is easy to believe. His high cheekbones and well-defined nose and lips were inherited, he says, from his Cherokee mother; his lithe frame came from his East African father.
“I’m pretty much what you see,” he smiles expansively by the fire after I tell him of my terrified first impression. “The way I approached you back there, well, let me tell you, Jennifer, ‘hello’ is the most expensive word in the human language. Down here it can cost you your life. Or worse, your sanity.”
“The only thing misleading about me is my name,” he continues after stirring the spaghetti. “I’m no part Jewish. My father’s family took the name of our family’s slaveowners after they freed us.”
Isaacs graduated from the University of Maryland in 1975, he says, with a major in journalism and a minor in philosophy. He initially worked as an editorial assistant at CBS in New York for a short time, then went into modeling, and then into dealing drugs. He claims to be drug- and alcohol-free now, at least most of the time. Periodically, he admits, he slips back.
He stumbled into the tunnel one night after he broke up with a girl and has lived here for six years. “Found this place and never left, except to go back to my old place for a few things. But I never turned back. I don’t blame her that I’m down here. She’s a lawyer, beautiful girl, really beautiful. I definitely don’t want her feeling responsible. I’m down here for me. People don’t understand that.”