Bernard spends more time at the fire than the others. His main source of income is collecting discarded cans and bottles from the trash. He prefers to do most of the cooking for the community, waking early to prepare breakfasts for those tunnel dwellers who have jobs to go to.
“People think food’s the greatest problem down here,” he says one morning over the grill with the flames snapping warmly in the dank air. “It’s not. It’s pride. They throw away the cream of the cream in New York, which makes scavenging relatively productive. I expect to find the Hope Diamond out there in the street some day. It’s dignity that’s hard to get.”
Most members of this Riverside Park community are tunnel veterans. They have established communication networks that quickly pass around new information on where and when hot meals are being handed out. They know when a grocery store is throwing out slightly wilted produce or damaged cartons of macaroni. They know which restaurants and delicatessens give the days’ leftovers to the homeless. They also know which restaurants throw ammonia on their garbage to keep the homeless away.
“Sometimes they do worse than that,” says a tunnel dweller named Jesus. “Sometimes they put poison on it that you can’t smell, can’t taste, but you get sick after you eat it. My buddy, he died from rat poison they put in garbage. The doctor said it was rat poison, and he was so mad, he went to the manager of the restaurant to complain.” Jesus just shrugs when I ask what effect it had.
Bernard complains about his loss of privacy, but he takes some pride in his particular community. “Everyone down here is settled. We have a base, and we function together. We don’t have to deal with all the despair that goes on in the topside world,” he says, sitting back on a discarded, purple recliner near his warm fire.
Near 79th Street off the West Side Highway, he says, is a homeless campsite aboveground composed of cardboard and other boxes covered with plastic sheets. “People are sleeping in there,” Bernard says, wide-eyed. “I look at that and I say, ‘Wow! That’s incredible!’ I mean, the weather so far this year has been unbelievably bad and I said to myself ‘Man, you don’t know how blessed you are.’ I really think that’s roughing it. My body has gone through a lot of changes; I’m beginning to feel my age based on the environment I’m living in. I wonder about some of these people. Down here, man, I’m lucky.”
Still, he admits, his body has suffered physically from living underground, and he hints that his attitude has also changed. “Down here, man becomes an animal. Down here, the true animal in man comes out, evolves. His first instinct is to survive, and although he values his independence, he forms a community for support.” He feels more sense of community now than he ever felt aboveground.
“I never voted in my life,” he says, “never even registered to vote. I feel sure that everything up there is designed to work for those who have money. The politicians can talk about reforms, how they’ll do this or that, but it’s all bull.” While he distrusts politicians in general, he distrusts homeless advocacy groups in particular.
“This Coalition for the Homeless is just bullshit,” he says. “Red tape and litigation. They are procrastinators. They thrive on the homeless. Without us, they wouldn’t have jobs, and they know it.” Bernard is particularly affronted by the suspicious and condescending attitude of many employees of the Coalition and other such groups.
“A while ago, we were sitting up topside having some beers when this van from Project Reachout comes by,” he recalls. “They ask if we want sandwiches and stuff. We weren’t hungry, but we said, sure, why not? Then they said, Hey, you guys don’t look homeless.’ I said, ‘What does a homeless person look like? We have to be in a certain attire and look dirty?’ I said, ‘Oh, man, keep your sandwiches.’
“Sure enough, two days later, same crew comes out giving out thermals [warm underwear]. Sure, I could use some thermals, but some guy sneaks around the back of the van with his camera to snap my picture taking the handout. They wanted pictures for their ads saying, ‘Here are the poor homeless, aid the homeless.’”
A homeless agency offered Bernard an apartment, but after visiting it, he declined. “They lied about it. No one could have lived in that rat hole, not even a rat,” he says, looking deeply into the fire as if revisiting the scene.
“It’s all bullshit! These people can’t play straight with God. And the way they talk about how the homeless problem should be solved, hell, they got it all wrong. A lot of work has to be done, sure—counseling, schooling, but most of all, treating us like the equals we are. I don’t pity us and they shouldn’t either. Everyone is responsible for his own life.”
Bernard prefers the railroad tunnels to subway tunnels because they are safer. “The whole subway scene is dangerous now because all these gangs of hoodlums marauding around and preying on the homeless.” Otherwise he doesn’t fear the underground. “You draw vibrations to you by being afraid. Down here people are more afraid of the dark than anything else. I’ve seen real tough men freak out over rats they hear in the darkness, these big men carrying big pieces [guns] and knives and they shit, they freak over rats and ghosts.”
If you aren’t scared, he points out, you notice that it is never totally black in his tunnel during daylight hours. Grates allow light through, always enough to see something, as I now realize.
“And there’s peace in the dark,” he says. “I sit here at night at the fire with a pot of tea and just the solitude of the tunnel. I think what I’ve discovered down here is that what one really seeks in life is peace of mind.”
You’re happy down here, then? I ask.
“Sure,” he says. “Whatever happy is. I understand that I can’t change anything from the way it is, except for my mind. I accept things as they are and hey, that means I got to cover my necessities like food and shelter and that’s it. And I have to keep some sort of sanity down here.”
Bob
BERNARD AND OTHER MEMBERS OF THE COMMUNITY HAVE MADE IT clear that overt drug users are unwelcome in their tunnel, but they appear to make an exception for Bob. A fifty-one-year-old white man from Chicago, Bob brags that he was once New York’s fastest short-order cook.
“I could handle eight pans and not burn an egg,” he says. “But it cost me $100 a day to work, because I was paying $50 for a gram of coke and $50 for my amphetamines.”
Bob is Bernard’s best friend. He is also, according to underground artist Chris Pape, “the only one down here who has no illusions about himself. He knows he’s a drug fiend and doesn’t apologize or say he wants to change.”
Bob is a burly man with a mountain man’s gray beard and almost detached, cool blue eyes. He says matter-of-factly that he has chosen the life of an addict, wants no help to overcome it, and works only to support his habit. Bob is proud that he has never taken money from the government. He rises early to hunt for cans to redeem, and he picks up odd jobs on the street, such as helping unload produce from delivery trucks into grocery stores and fruit stands.
He is well known for his skill at working scams. He can con even his best friends, who are alert and wary. Once he scammed Pape, who he considers a friend, out of $20 on a VCR deal, and disappeared for a week on a speed binge. Bernard made Bob apologize, but of course the money was gone. “Sorry,” Bob said with a shrug, “but, hey, that’s the way it is. I just had to do it.” Bernard offered the little money he had to Pape on Bob’s behalf, but Chris refused Bernard’s money.
Pape shrugs, too, about his loss. It’s impossible to stay angry with Bob, he says. He is childlike, totally passive most of the time. Raised in a middle-class Chicago neighborhood and trained as an engineer, his eyes are flat and unfocused, although they can be frightening because they are so expressionless and because, under the calm veneer, Bob has shown sudden anger and violence. He blames the chemicals in his system, or the lack of them. “It’s the drugs,” he says a day after exploding angrily because he had no place to sit. “Nothing I can do about it,” Bob says unapologetically. People avoid him on rainy days when he gets particularly depressed. Like most homeless, Bob’s moods are very much affected by the weather.