A week later, a homeless man passes me on the street. He tells me that Don says good-bye. Don’s name is seldom heard again in Bernard’s tunnel.
Tim
TIM IS THE ONLY OTHER MAN THAT HAS BEEN EJECTED FROM BERnard’s camp. A wiry, meek white man, Tim often stops at Bernard’s fire, seeking an invitation to sit, which seldom comes. Occasionally he is offered a cigarette, but is always kept at a distance.
One afternoon I find Bernard shouting at Tim as they stand toe-to-toe on the tracks. Tim has been caught stealing from another one of the tunnel homeless. Bernard is furious and very close to thrashing him, but in the end just orders him to leave the community.
“He didn’t want to get violent because you’re here,” Pape tells me later with a smile. “Part of Bernard’s archaic thinking about women.”
Flip
LIKE TIM, FLIP IS NOT WELCOME AT BERNARD’S CAMPFIRE. FLIP doesn’t care for himself, Bernard explains; he lacks direction and wants to rely on people, trying to make them take care of him. Bernard once showed Flip an empty bunker and told him that if he cleaned it out, Bernard would help him set it up as a place to live. Flip hasn’t done a thing with the bunker, Bernard says dismissively. Lazy, he says.
Now Flip comes to the fire shyly once again. He stands hands buried in his trouser pockets, slouching on the tracks.
“It’s raining,” he says.
“So what?” Bernard answers.
Flip moves away, and later that afternoon, as Bernard walks me out of the tunnel, Flip’s figure stands silhouetted at the entrance, alone and forlorn against a cold, gray winter sky.
Tony
SOME OF THE HOMELESS WHO ARE PART OF BERNARD’S CAMP LIVE removed from his fire, like Tony, who has set up his home alone farther along the tunnel. One of the most gentle and popular men of the group, Tony is a fifty-five-year-old white man with a pepper-streaked beard and dark, arched eyebrows like Sean Connery, all topped by a red knit hat.
I meet Tony on the grate above Bernard’s fire one snowy day in January. Light smoke rises through the steel mesh, toying with powdery snow that the wind has swept up off the ice-covered Hudson. Red-faced New Yorkers walking their dogs in the park try to hurry them through the morning ritual, but a few pull their masters briefly toward the welcoming scent of burning wood mingling in the crisp air. Tony is standing on the grate stomping his boots to make sure the snow falls on the camp scene below.
Faint growls rise with the smoke and Tony, having gotten the response he wants, allows a boyish smile to break his face. He and I start carefully down the steep and icy path toward the tunnel’s entrance. In one hand he clasps a black garbage bag full of empty cans, and in the other, a dull green garbage bag full of plastic bottles. The superintendent of a nearby apartment house has saved them for him to redeem.
At the tunnel entrance, a young man named Joey emerges from between the iron rungs that once barred passage. He has a young, soft face but a skinny, nervous body that is unable to stay still. Tony pulls a wad of wrinkled and crushed dollar bills from the pocket of his corduroy pants and passes one to Joey. They exchange brief winks, and Tony permits himself a small smile that exposes two missing front teeth.
“Hey, man,” a beseeching voice comes through the grating as Flip emerges. “Gimme some, too,” he asks, almost shyly. For a large man, Flip looks as vulnerable as he sounds.
He offers Tony his plastic bag. Tony skims its contents quickly.
“Naw, man,” he says, “I don’t need any of that stuff.”
“C’mon, man, it’s cold,” Flip whines, almost whimpering.
“Naw, I don’t got that much,” Tony says firmly. He pulls out a crumpled pack of cigarettes and offers one to Flip. The younger man takes three and walks off without even nodding thanks.
Tony and I carefully descend the steps into the tunnel, wary of used syringes and fresh ice. We reach the bottom and Tony sighs heavily, as if he is home.
He is less afraid of falling, he says, than of getting struck by the nine-foot-long icicles that now hang from the tunnel’s ceiling. One killed a man two years ago, he claims, in case I should doubt the danger. Small precautions take on greater importance the longer you live in the tunnels, he explains.
I wonder aloud about Joey, to whom Tony has given the money unasked. Tony explains simply that he and Joey live together in an abandoned bunker. Joey is eighteen years old, and Tony refers to him at times as his son, other times as his lover.
As much as the tunnel regulars like Tony, they despise Joey as a useless parasite on the older man. “Joey’s young; he can do anything he wants,” says Bernard. “He doesn’t have to be down here, but Tony does. Tony does everything for that kid, even went to banks trying to borrow money to send him to college. Believe that! What money he did get, Joey spent on drugs, but he told Tony he was going to college.”
Tony prides himself on his two “mouses,” which are king-size rats that he trains to perform. Ralph and George, the “mouses,” can leap from the ground to a food bag hung five feet overhead. Tony claims they also guard his bunker from other rats, even that they have chased away stray cats, which from their size is credible. They are huge creatures, Ralph perching on Tony’s shoulder, George on the back of his wrinkled hand.
“I taught my niece to read,” Tony tells me with a happy smile as we sit around the fire. “Now she’s going to be a doctor and has to read the big words to me.” However, he hasn’t seen any of his family for seventeen years, not since he murdered a man and went to prison for fifteen years. The last two years he has lived in Bernard’s tunnel with Joey.
South End
John
THE TUNNEL’S SOUTHERN END HOSTS A LOOSER AFFILIATION OF THE homeless. Individuals barely interact with each other. They behave more like silent, hostile neighbors who both envy and fear the person in the next bunker.
“We don’t talk much, but we won’t let anyone steal from anyone else’s stuff in the tunnel either,” says John, who was seriously injured four years ago by a roving gang of homeless. He rarely answers knocks on his door, which he keeps padlocked, and he keeps a bayonet and hatchet handy for protection.
At fifty years old, John is a four-year tunnel veteran. Small and thin, he says he was abandoned as a child and grew up in institutions. He has had menial, low-paying jobs, many working with animals. His small monthly welfare check goes for food for himself, his fifteen cats, and his dog, Mama. All of them were strays that he found while he and they vied for food in garbage bins. His bunker walls are decorated with posters of animals, and on the table and boxes stand small statues and artificial flowers from the trash. The room is lit with red candles. During the day he reads the Bible and drinks coffee and whiskey. He spends most of the time listening to the radio and talking to himself, he says.
He has no friends in the world, he volunteers. “I’m a little high-class for some of these people down here,” he explains. “That’s why I don’t get along too well with everybody.”
New York Times reporter John Tierney wrote two articles about John. As a result, he briefly had a woman pen pal and enrolled in a new program for the homeless consisting of work on an upstate farm for free board and meals and a modest wage. John was apprehensive about leaving the tunnel. He was particularly torn when he had to give away his cats and kittens, but he was allowed to take Mama and also eager to begin life again aboveground.