“Lee was the best, king of the lines,” says Ace, a thirteen-year-old “toy” who aspires to Lee’s fame, but a “toy” like him has a “wacky style,” which in graffiti jargon means he has no talent yet. He “bites” or steals other styles, and he fails to “get up,” which means leave his mark, or to “tag” around town widely enough to be noticed. “Taggers” must leave their calling cards hundreds of times, often on the pieces of established graffiti writers, to win recognition. Worst of all, Ace’s tags drip, which is the most obvious sign that a writer has not yet mastered his paint can.
With subway train graffiti a vanished art form, some of its would-be practitioners have moved into the tunnels themselves, but the dangers are terrifying—a third rail pulsing with electricity, criminals, drug addicts, rats, and rushing trains that often leave insufficient clearance with walls for a standing man.
Many, particularly the young taggers, do it just for thrills. “Like jumping gorges,” explained one recently arrived young boy from upper New York City, “or jumping off bridges.” Another likened it to mountain climbing and leaving a flag at the peak.
Tracy 168, an established writer, made it sound naturaclass="underline" “We were like moles [as kids],” he told Craig Castleman, author of Getting Up: Subway Graffiti in New York. “If anyone chased us, we ran into the nearest subway station and we’d be gone [into the tunnels]. No one would follow us down there.”
14
Runaways
“We’re not like the other people down here. We have the future.”
IN 1988, TWO HOMELESS BOYS FOUND A LOOSE GRATE AT THE northern end of Riverside Park on Manhattan’s West Side. They lifted the metal grid and slipped into the underground for a safe night’s rest. They called it their hole. Over the next few years, other homeless boys and some girls, most of them runaways also looking for a place to rest, joined to create a community of about twenty teenagers in the hole.
One of the two founders was Frederick, a light-complexioned black youth with curly hair and a wide-eyed look. Born in New York, he had been on the streets since his mother became too addicted to alcohol and heroin to care for him or maintain an apartment. When he was twelve, one of his mother’s boyfriends raped him. After that he felt more comfortable away from their flat. He mostly hung around Penn Station, asking for handouts. He came to know the homeless men who lived there, and when his mother lost their apartment and moved in with her supplier, Frederick began to live with various homeless men in the cardboard shacks that lined the outsides of the station. He was thirteen years old.
“They took care of me,” Frederick says. “Sometimes I’d be laying next to them and I’d feel them getting hard but they didn’t make me do nothing,” he shrugs.
A social worker persuaded him to enter a foster home. “One night I was in bed and I hear my foster dad come up to my room. ‘Whatcha want?’ I say. I knew it would be bad cuz he didn’t turn on the lights. He just wanted to say good night, he says, but then he starts kissing me and put his hand over my mouth and raped me. I left after that bullshit!” he spits out with unusual anger.
“I think I became gay after that,” he adds, reverting to his passive manner.
After a few more months on the street, he registered himself at the Covenant House, a shelter in Manhattan for runaway and homeless youths.
“Too many rules there,” he complains. “When to eat, when to sleep, what you had to do if you wanted to stay.”
By age fourteen, Frederick was profoundly cynical toward anyone who wasn’t living on the streets. “On the streets you know what people want,” he explains. “Sex, drugs, food, warm clothes. You know what they’re after. People who got homes, I don’t know what they want. I never been like them. They say they just want to help you for nothing, but no one wants to do anything for nothing. Everyone wants something. I can’t figure what they want but a good fuck.”
Back at Penn Station, he lived with several different men. “They started giving me money and I figure I could keep getting fucked for nothing or I could get money for getting fucked. It stopped bothering me. I took money.”
On a cold spring day, he remembers, he met David at the station. A runaway from a foster home in Illinois, David is a skinny, red-haired boy. He was “just sittin’ there on his hot dog [duffel bag] like this,” Frederick hunches over with his head hung miserably in his hands, “and he doesn’t move so I go up to him because he was my age and I thought I could help him. I said ‘you want a donut or something?’ He was like a puppy. I had to take care of him. Turns out he was gay, too, molested and all by his stepfather when he was only seven.”
If David resembles a puppy, he looks like an incorrigible one—playful, soft, and vulnerable. He is also annoying, unable to stay with a conversation for more than a few minutes, and a habitual liar.
“He’s a congenital liar,” Chris Pape says. “One day he’ll tell you he’s dying of cancer and the next day it’s tuberculosis. He even lies about things that aren’t important, like what he had for dinner.”
Tunnel people become irate at his stories at times. He was one of a group of underground homeless who appeared on Sally Jesse Raphael’s talk show about mole people. The story of his life that he related there was totally different from the one he told me just two months earlier. Bernard was part of the audience and became so furious during the show that he rose and challenged David.
“I don’t know where he was coming from with all those stories about how horrible we got it in our tunnel,” Bernard says. “He always said he loved our tunnel. All those stories about how bad it is in our tunnel were made up. It’s pitiful,” he says disgustedly.
David often goes into a bookstore with young boys for whom he buys comics. Pape often sees him there and, because David is so unscrupulous, he suspected David intended to take the boys into the tunnels for sex. But he didn’t. “I’ve followed him several times, and I’ve never seen him touch any of the boys,” says Pape. “I think he just likes their company. He relates to them better than adults or even teenagers. Mentally, he is very young.”
Frederick and David began turning tricks in their hole on the Upper West Side with homeless men in the tunnels as well as working men from the streets. They were joined by Carlos and Dameon, teenagers whom they found homeless in the park.
“I don’t usually like it,” Frederick said of the sex when I last saw him. “But I don’t care much. I know I’m gay.” That summer he had huge dark rings under his sad eyes and was frighteningly thin. He swore he was well, “just stomach flu I can’t get rid of,” he insisted in a hollow voice.
“Anyway, it can’t be AIDS cause you can’t get it until you’re at least twenty. A doctor who came down here for a quick one told me that.”
Frederick died of AIDS-related pneumonia the fall of 1991. Dameon died a few months later.
David now wanders the tunnels and has withdrawn even further from truth. “After Frederick died, David turned to all lies,” says Carlos. “He don’t even admit he’s gay anymore.”
Frederick had brought into the hole two young runaway girls from Iowa, Monica and Felicia, “to shelter them from the men up top,” says Carlos, who has accepted the responsibility for them. “Frederick told me I was gonna hafta take care of the girls until they found their way. I don’t know how to, but I’ll try.” He worries about leaving them in the hole while he is away because homeless men still go there seeking the boys and might rape the girls.