“Frederick was always looking out for me.” Carlos continues as he explains his debt to the older boy. “He took all the bad ones [men] who came down to the hole and refused to pay for it. They scared me. They’d hurt you.
“One time I told Frederick that I didn’t know if I was really gay, and he told me to stop doing tricks, that I didn’t need to; he’d take care of me. So I did stop, and I felt better. After he died, I was walking the park, all sad and stuff, and it was like Frederick entered my head. I decided never to get screwed by any guy again. I didn’t need to, and I decided to stand up for myself and take care of the others like Frederick did.”
Carlos, who is seventeen, decided that the community would move deeper into the tunnel, away from the entrance that was so well known, but more accessible to the surface at a different spot. “It’s a good place because the girls can just walk out and sneak into the back door of a welfare hotel and take showers and stuff,” he says proudly. “They’ve never been bothered.”
“We let other kids, real young ones, live with us and we sort of set up camp for them. We think of Frederick a lot and the things he used to say to us. Sometimes I miss him, but I’m not sad for him. Because he can’t be anywhere worse than where he was here.
“Sometimes I wish he could see all we done. We made it much better than it was, and I think he’d be proud,” he says sheepishly. “We’ve changed everything but the name. We can’t call it home. We still call it the hole.”
However, the rules have changed. “No sex in the hole,” Carlos says flatly. “No drugs, either. We do that for the girls,” he confides, “because they don’t do no drugs, usually.”
No dating among those who live in the hole either?
“Hadn’t thought about that.” After a pause he says, “We’re like brothers and sisters. Who’d wanna date?”
A FAIRLY SIMPLE TAPPING CODE ON THE TRAPDOOR GAINS ENTRY TO the runaways’ hole. The faces are all young. Some are open and trusting, others tough and closed. Their short personal histories vary, but most come from foster homes, group homes, or orphanages. A few left close families to ease the strain on their impoverished parents. Their anger and depression are understandable. The surprise is the amount of hope and caring among them.
Monica and Felicia
“I SEE PEOPLE IN SOUP KITCHENS SOMETIMES WHO HAVE LOST HOPE,” says Felicia, a bright-eyed, fifteen-year-old white girl. “Like a man the other day who just stared at his plate. I couldn’t get him to eat. I saw a teardrop fall into it, but he didn’t move the whole time. I cried all day after that. That’s the only thing we got, is hope. All of us are gonna make it someday. That’s what keeps us going.”
Felicia’s sister Monica is two years older. They ran away from their Iowa home a year earlier, after their stepfather molested Felicia. Monica called the police, but they did not arrest the man. Their mother seemed to believe the girls, but, says Monica plaintively, “she wanted him more.” So they packed up and headed for New York City.
“I figured it was far enough away from them,” Monica says, “and we can make it here, we can.” The two never considered entering Covenant House or another shelter for fear they’d be separated or sent back to the parents.
Monica lied about her age to get a job as a waitress in a seedy bar. “If I get really good at it, I can go work as a hostess at a really nice place and meet a really rich man and marry him, and we’ll be set for life,” she smiles, hope still alive in her rich brown eyes.
Felicia, who looks so young she couldn’t lie about her age, works at a Mister Donut on after-school hours. “Soon enough we’ll be able to get an apartment and I’ll be able to go back to school,” she says brightly. “We love the kids down here. They’ve helped us tons. But we’ve got plans.”
“Whatever happens,” Felicia smiles at her sister, “we’ll always be together.”
Carlos
CARLOS, THE ELDEST OF NINE CHILDREN, HAS HAD “A DRINKING problem,” as he puts it, since he was thirteen. “There was a lot of violence in our family,” he says matter-of-factly as he picks the bark off a twig. “My parents were always fighting each other and beating us up. They did lots of drugs and drank a lot. My father went to jail and we had no money for the apartment, so we had to sleep outside. My mother went to jail, too, for dealing [drugs]. When they came for her, the government took the little ones into foster care or something. They were all crying, but I was hiding behind boxes.”
He found odd jobs like sweeping storefronts, cleaning windows, and sorting fruit for grocers, and when his mother returned from prison, she and Carlos lived with another family. “One night I come back with some wine for her and our room was empty. There was a note that says she went back to Puerto Rico and I should come as soon as I make enough money. But I’m going to find the little ones first and bring them with me,” he says. “I hope she’s OK,” he adds quietly, looking up with gentle, brown eyes.
Carlos continues to work at the margins, sometimes at jobs that are illegal. He’s had enough money at times to find a cheap apartment, but he says he can’t leave “until the rest of the kids here are OK.”
“Shit, man,” interjects Frank, who has been listening. “You gotta do things for yourself, not for nobody else. We don’t want you around here anyway,” he says, trying to push Carlos up out of the hole.
“Carlos is the greatest guy in the world,” Frank says. “He’d give you every cent in his pocket. That’s the way he is. But he isn’t gonna make it long, because he don’t look out for himself over all the others, like the rest of us.”
Carlos doesn’t answer, but as he walks me out of the park, he admits that moving back aboveground would be difficult. “I’m afraid of being lonely, not having somewhere to go, scared to find no one there. I know I’m living down there partly because I’m afraid of going to an empty room and being by myself.”
Frank
CARLOS AND FRANK MET IN A POOL HALL WHERE FRANK, WHO IS A large eighteen-year-old from New Jersey, was hustling. He lost more money than he had, and Carlos helped him escape out the bathroom window. Since he had no place to sleep, Carlos took him to the hole. Frank has lived there three weeks, and each day announces that he does not intend to “live in this shit hole for another fucking day.”
He is filled with violent anger and prone to fits of rage. Once he broke his hand when he slammed his fist into a concrete wall. He refuses to speak much about his family except that as often as the subject comes up, he declares with bravado that “I couldn’t give a damn whether they all die and go to hell.” His father had a nasty temper and knocked the children around. “That toughened me up for the real world,” he says. His bottom line is “Everything has always been bad for me.”
He hated school, where he was a slow learner and rebellious. “I liked to keep my hair long and greasy,” he says, peering out from behind the scraggly hanks that he wears over his face. “My school, see, was Catholic. They didn’t go for the hair or the leather jacket. I don’t do well with authority.”
In fact, he got into trouble well before he grew his hair long, he admits. At five, he tried to choke another boy. At seven, he was in reform school for having beaten up several boys. By the time he was eight years old, he had learned how to break and enter. “I was also into arson and petty theft,” he says casually, throwing out the criminal charges precisely. The Catholic school took him in, long hair and all, until a boy called his brother ugly and Frank broke the boy’s jaw with a baseball bat. The baseball coach who tried to interfere was knocked unconscious in the melee.