He still cringes, not because of the pain, but because he had urinated in his pants and because he needed the woman’s scream to help him, and because she had seen his weakness.
As bad as the streets are for a homeless man with a clean face, they are far more hostile for one with still-weeping scabs and eyes swollen into slits from the beating. People cleared a path for him, and their eyes, when not indifferent, showed anger that he would expose them to his misery. Worse still was that his slowed movements and visible wounds made him easy prey for other vicious youths looking for violent ways to express their frustration and hatred.
So how can this tunnel, even if it were that tunnel, be more dangerous for him than the streets this night?
He walks deeper, quietly, like a ghost, he thinks, and his heart gradually stops fluttering like a netted butterfly. It belongs to him again, his own. He stops and then he hears what he will remember as “echoing darkness.” It’s the only way to describe what he hears, a velvety blackness that rebounds from side to side, and then wraps around him gently as he sinks to the floor at the wall, a spot that now feels safe and his own. With his back comforted by the wall, he draws his knees up to his ribs and lingers with his thoughts as he drifts toward sleep. The quiet is broken only by the patient fall of dripping water in the distance, a soft and pleasant sound that he knows would be lost to the noise of New York’s busy streets. He is soothed despite the dampness that seeps through his frayed jacket and torn trousers. All the way down, he muses, are layers upon layers upon layers of tunnels, with no bottom. This layer is safer than the street above, the one below even safer, and the one below it is even safer, and so on, beyond thought, all the way down. A soothing numbness takes him. Nothing really matters. It could suddenly start snowing up above, or raining, or there could be warm sun. Nothing matters because all of that would change, it would pass. He feels his breath condensing, but he is content with simply being, and being without being seen, secretly in a new world, sensing he could see out to watch those who could not see him. He was living a life that others were afraid even to imagine.
In such a life, he thinks, there is a truth. You can be so cold that you can’t get colder, so wet you can’t become wetter. You can feel so deeply that you are saturated, numb but still intensely alert—beyond fear—as if living a memory. Beyond living, he thinks. Surviving.
The morning brings a splinter of light through a hole high in the wall opposite. He stirs and moves into the mote-filled beam. He persuades himself that it warms him. He feels he never slept so well since he became one of the homeless. So what if this is that tunnel, he thinks. He has found a home.
2
Seville’s Story
SEVILLE WILLIAMS IS AS UNIQUE AS ALL TUNNEL AND TOPSIDE people, but his personal history mirrors those of many others in the tunnels. The path he took from the streets to the underground, and his struggles to climb back up are common to many tunnel dwellers.
At thirty-one years old, Seville’s story is far from over. Although the life expectancy of a man on the streets isn’t much beyond forty-five, he believes with his unending optimism that his life is just beginning. He refuses to let his past define him or limit his hopes for the future. He talks about getting a full-time job as a welder, a trade he learned during two years in prison for dealing drugs, with the same enthusiasm and conviction of a high school senior who talks about becoming a doctor after failing chemistry. At times an inward shadow dims his bright eyes, as if he recognizes that his past still influences his life like an old habit. Then, with the marvelous resilience that allows him to care for others, his smile is suddenly brilliant again. Every day is new to Seville, and anything can happen as he struggles to survive and climb out of the underground.
“I gotta believe there’s a purpose for me still being here when I’ve come so close to death so many times you wouldn’t believe,” he says with his broad smile and light shake of his head. “You just wouldn’t believe it. Most of my friends—Shorty, Teather, Flacko, Big D—they’re all dead now. Some of them, it was their own doing. Some of them, it weren’t, but they be dead anyway,” he says and then sucks air through his teeth. “Don’t know why I’m here, really don’t. I done everything they done and worse. Times I tried to kill myself, I mean, not suicide or like that, but put myself in situations I was sure to be killed. It didn’t work,” he smiles happily, lifting his hands in mock disbelief. “I’m still here. Don’t know why, but there’s gotta be a reason.”
Like many tunnel people, Seville comes from a dysfunctional family, torn by drugs and violence. He has emotional and physical scars from the years, but they have not callused his humor, which is open and without bitterness. He remains generous to others on the fringe, especially those in the tunnels. When he passes an underground homeless person in need, he usually stops to help.
“We got to take care of ourselves down there cuz ain’t nobody else gonna do it,” he shrugs again. “Know what I’m saying? You just got to accept it or reject it,” he says of the homeless condition. “Take it the way you can. Know what I’m saying?”
I met Seville on the concourse in Grand Central. He was one of a group of homeless whom Sergeant Bryan Henry of the Metropolitan Transit Police approached with me in tow, but he stood apart from the group, a bit aloof, in an old Harris tweed coat with the middle button missing. He leaned with two crutches against a small constructional work truck, suspicious and defiant, with half-closed eyelids. He sucked his breath in slowly and evenly in a reverse hiss, but with barely a sound. His short beard is well kept, and if he could stand without crutches, he would look tall and healthy.
If being articulate is not Seville’s strong suit, humor is. Finding the humor in underground situations is not only a gift but a necessity in order to remain sane in the tunnels, a survival technique, Seville says.
“You have to keep laughing. If you don’t you fall apart. Sometimes you gotta smile when you don’t want to, you laugh at terrible things that nobody should laugh at, but it’s like your mind has to find something funny or you’ll go crazy.” Then, tired of speaking seriously, he smiles broadly again. “I know that too. I know it all; I been through it all.” He stretches his arms wide and high with self-satisfaction and pride at being alive.
Seville keeps the tunnels lively with his humor. Once while he was panhandling in Grand Central Station a commuter gave him a bag containing a loaf of bread and a pound of baloney. He thanked the man and then, after looking into the bag, shouted out after him, “Pardon me, sir, would you happen to have some Grey Poupon?”
Commuters cracked up with laughter, not least the donor. “He fell out,” Seville remembers. “The man had a ball all the way out of the station. I loved doing it. That’s what it’s all about.”
With the same sense of humor, Seville goes on to tell about doing drugs and living under Track 100 in Grand Central Station. He was once so exhausted from the drugs and his feet so swollen and sore from injecting into the veins in his feet, that he could barely get himself across the street for a free meal. One time he collapsed while running toward a Meals-on-Wheels van.