Bernard was happy for John, but sad, too. “He’ll be back. You can’t just leave the tunnel. This is his home now. He doesn’t know how to live in the topside world.” Bernard sounds plaintive, as if he is speaking for all of the underground people, including himself.
John soon rebelled against the discipline of regular work, however, and says that he longed for the privacy and freedom of the tunnels. Within six months he is back in his tunnel bunker.
Tom
TOM IS FROM NORTH CAROLINA, A SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD WHITE MAN who lives with a couple, Butch and Brenda, in a large green tent upon the slope of the Riverside Park tunnel. He came to Manhattan eight months earlier with his girlfriend and their child. His parents had died in a car accident, and his two sisters were taken by godparents, but he was too old to be cared for by relatives. His girlfriend wanted to live in New York, but they broke up soon after they arrived. She took the car and all his money. He lived for a time in the Fort Washington shelter until he caught a man stealing from his locker.
“I asked him what he was doing, and he just said he was taking my stuff,” Tom says evenly, his blond hair shyly tumbling over his trusting eyes. “He had no right.” They fought and the thief was thrown out the window several floors above the street.
“He just lay there on his face, so still,” Tom recalls, his blue eyes soberingly open. “They said 1 killed him, but the police took me aside and told me not to worry about it. I would have done it all over again, though,” Tom says with a shake of his head. “I mean I didn’t want to kill him, but he was taking the only stuff I had left.”
Tom decided he was safer on the streets, where he met Butch and Brenda. Butch is a large black man with an angry attitude and very protective toward both Brenda and Tom. Brenda, whose story will be told later (see chapter 22, “Women”), is completely subservient to him. Butch refuses to talk about himself but he prowls, almost lurches, around Tom as he talks, listening to his words carefully as if ready to heed any order to attack.
The couple took Tom to live in the tunnels with them, but he found a job bartending on Amsterdam Avenue and with his earnings, bought the tent. A temporary measure until he can afford an apartment, he says, where his sisters can also come to live. “They keep asking me if they can come here,” he says, “but I don’t want them until we can live properly. I don’t know that New York is the right place for two girls.”
Tom gets an apartment in a few months, and despite the roaches, one of which he woke to find crawling up his nose, he considers it a step above tunnels and tents. He gives the tent to Butch and Brenda.
THE SURPRISING WONDER OF BERNARD’S TUNNEL IS LESS THAT PEOPLE can survive in such an environment than that they can work together and even care, sometimes intensely, for each other. Many would expect love and care to be the first emotions sacrificed in such a desolate environment, but Bernard would argue that emotions are more sincere underground. Unlike our society, the underground dwellers do not judge each other on their pasts or any element of how they live, except how they treat one another. Respect for privacy and property is critical. They lie to each other at times, usually about their pretunnel existences, but, even when these sound unlikely at best, no one challenges them. They can invent a past with which they can live while they get on with surviving the present.
The most important truth about underground people, Bernard also advises, is that there is no single truth about them. “They tell many stories and there is truth in all their stories. You just have to find it.”
“We had one guy down here who was sometimes an ex—Navy Seal, sometimes a Green Beret, sometimes the king of an island, sometimes a pastry chef,” one homeless man recalls. “All I know he was a decent man who used to share everything. When the police asked if I knew this guy, and showed me his picture and told me a name, I didn’t have to lie. I said no, I don’t know that guy. I don’t care what he done. He’s a good guy and if he wants to start over down here, he can. That’s the beauty of the tunnels.”
12
Tunnel Art
“THESE PIECES, THEY’RE NOT JUST GRAFFITI,” BERNARD EXPLAINS as his arm sweeps toward the mural covering the outside wall of his tunnel bunker. “They’re works of art, and they mean a lot to us. We got food down here, some warmth, and we got art. What more could we ask for?”
“Pieces” to the tunnel homeless and to those who paint them is short for “masterpieces,” works that are sometimes especially done for them by graffiti writers (sometimes called “artists”). Chris Pape, who “tags” or signs his work “Freedom”; Roger Smith, who is known as “Smith”; and David Smith, his brother, whose tag was “Sane”; are all graffiti writers who paint the tunnels.
“David and Roger did some of these for me and for my people down here. Chris was first to start doing them in this tunnel, but he didn’t know he was doing them just for me,” Bernard laughs.
“This piece makes me smile every time I look at it,” says Bernard as he surveys the jagged, zany mural by Sane that decorates his fifteen-by-ten-foot wall. Sane got the idea for it one night sitting by the fire, sharing herbal tea with Bernard who was framed by the huge concrete wall. He returned late that night to spray-paint the piece before Bernard woke the next morning.
In a sharp-edged technique, chaotic lines and bright colors intersect and complement each other to create what Bernard considers to be a mural that best captures life below the ground—a mysterious truth amid complete craziness. The clothes, stone and metal rubble, and rubbish piled before it add to the sense of disorder it conveys.
“It’s for me and it’s all about me,” says Bernard. “It’s about the chaos in the topside world and the peace down here.”
Above the piece are scrawled Bernard’s words the night before; sharing herbal tea by the campfire, Sane scrawled in jaunty black letters: “Freedom, aw. Modern society is guilty of intellectual terrorism.” It was Sane’s last piece, which enhances its meaning and value for Bernard and others. Sane died two years after completing it, either in an accident, which often befalls graffiti artists because of the dangerous places in which they work, or by suicide. He was eighteen years old.
Sane was found drowned in the calm waters of Flushing Bay. Because he was a good swimmer, some believe he took his own life. Others say he fell into the water from a bridge while graffiting on it, perhaps while being chased by cops.
“Sane was the best,” several of his fellow graffiti artists say, and after his death several pieces appeared in the tunnels spray-painted in his honor by mourning colleagues. Some are tribute pieces, with Sane’s name highly stylized by the writers’ own techniques. Others are messages in dark colors among spray-painted tears: “Sane Ruled” and “Sane never forgotten.” Smith keeps his brother’s legacy alive by painting Sane’s tag as well as his own on his works.
“When we started, we always put our tags together: SANE SMITH. The ‘word’ was that we were some big black writer from Brooklyn,” Smith smiles briefly through his neat, short beard under gentle eyes.