ADAPT has sought to cut other red tape that hinders aid to the homeless. “Many people we deal with have no identification,” Bethea says. “But in order to access a treatment program or apply for social services or welfare, they need at least two forms of ID, plus a place of residence. We had to learn where we could get a quick, temporary form of ID that is valid, or at least accepted by the social services.” ADAPT workers often shelled out $10 or $15 from their own pockets to get the less-than-legal IDs when the project lacked funds.
ADAPT complains that not only did the Metropolitan Transit Authority shift to the mental health focus of Project HELP, it also rejected ADAPT’s statistics on the homeless population. “They didn’t want to scare the public, while we didn’t worry about that aspect of it,” says Bethea. The Metropolitan Transit Authority authorities changed the definition of homeless to reduce the population figures, says Bethea. “They decided that a person is not homeless if he or she is not lying down or sitting outside of a designated sitting area. If a person is standing, even with garbage bags, they are not in violation (by that definition) and so not counted, overlooked. Our numbers were always higher than the Long Island Rail Road police would have liked, for example, although we have very good relations with the police. It was just that once they sat in a board room, things started to look different. The homeless population just became a political game of numbers.”
From their very first trips into the tunnels, ADAPT’s workers were shocked not only by the number of homeless they found, but also by the sometimes elaborate living quarters and “conveniences” underground. There were dwellings with wallpaper, pictures, and posters hanging from walls. Running water, showers, heat, electricity, and even a microwave oven helped make life in the tunnels a bit more bearable.
“Seven stories under Grand Central,” says Bethea, eyes still widening at the memory, “we found families. Mother, child, and a male. We brought up two pregnant women our first month. One had her baby and went back down without the baby. The baby’s in foster care now.”
Tunnel people always amaze outsiders at how well they hide. “We walked the tunnels along tracks, trains coming back and forth, 600 volts in the third rail, and we would walk right past people no more than four feet away and sometimes never see them ‘til they called out,” recalls Bethea. “We found people living above the tracks, on gratings, who we’d never see if we didn’t happen to look up.
“I remember climbing a ladder, going into a little crawl space, and my eyes caught the eyes of someone watching me. I could feel his eyes at first, then I could see his eyes, and I thought, ‘I’m outta here!’ And I kept going. I don’t know if I scared him, but he surely scared me. Then I said, ‘Oh, shit. I gotta go see this guy.’ And I did. We kept contact with him and eventually got him out of the tunnel, for a while.”
On the upper levels of the underground are mostly crack users who distrust everyone, Bethea says, and who essentially want to be alone. “Crack is a selfish type of drug, as opposed to heroin, which is a little more communal. Its users want to be with others.
“But there were lots of people who weren’t doing drugs, who weren’t crazy. We ran across working people, people who could not afford an apartment but were making too much money for social service supplements. So they chose to live in the tunnels and work rather than take public assistance,” he says.
ADAPT’s final report, never published but made available to me, states that “a significant proportion of the homeless (in the subway system) work for pay at least occasionally. Most homeless men have substantial work histories.”
Bethea and his group found that many of the homeless, rather than preferring to stay in the depths, want to get back to life aboveground.
“Despite the perceived notion that they are suicidal because they live along the tracks and do drugs,” he says, “those people don’t want to die. They still know they’re human beings. One woman refused to see a doctor for no obvious reason until we found out why: she was embarrassed because she hadn’t washed for several weeks. They know that they didn’t come from that environment originally, that problems brought them down. And you can get them to believe, because they already do, that they can get back to their ‘normal’ lives aboveground.
“They don’t want to die. You can see it in the way they live. They haven’t given up living. They may not have much self-esteem. We have to give them empowerment counseling, but like those guys under the Waldorf-Astoria, the homosexual community, we found condoms all around that place. They practice safe sex. They don’t want to die of AIDS.”
ADAPT was very successful in finding homeless in large part because of the diligence and dedication of the staff. At least two workers had to be ordered out of the tunnels when Bethea feared they were overworked. “They were down there everyday for four months,” he says. “I was afraid they would burn out, that they were going to get hurt. They were so involved they didn’t worry about their own safety and it’s very dangerous down there.”
One of those men is Harold Deamues, a smiling, good-humored, dark-skinned man in his mid-thirties. He wears a short, well-groomed beard and closely trimmed hair. He believes he can help because he once used drugs himself.
“I know what’s out there. I know what I’ve been through. I know what it’s like for people to give up on you, and you lose your spirit. I knew I could break out, with help,” Deamues says, and he wants to repay those who helped him by helping others. “You can’t help everyone; you got to accept that not everyone wants help. But there are some you can help.”
Deamues grew up in East Harlem and thought he knew just about every way a person could be down and out in New York, but he didn’t know about tunnel people. “I thought talk about people living underground was just handing out a story; I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “Who would go down there? Why? What’s down there? When I saw it with my own eyes, I was amazed, truly amazed.
“They call them the mole people, and you can catch them sleeping, having sex, eating. But strange. One older gentleman, fifty-something, with this ashen look, his feet were matted together at the toes like they were all one part. All you could see was the shape of the top of his toes. He was barefooted, and he lived way down there, three levels. Said he hasn’t been up in three years. I asked him if he ate rats and stuff down there. He smiled. Didn’t want to give me no definite answer. But he smiled like, you know, what else is there for me to eat sometimes.
“His eyes had that dullish gray, you know, like he might have drank a lot for years. But it’s hard to say he was crazy. He was able to speak fluently, answer any questions without any problem. Sometimes when we saw him he was buck-naked and running around, quick. He was alone, but I imagine there were other people down there, that area called Burma’s Road in the lowest tunnel levels under Grand Central.
“I found a gentleman on pipes one time, steam pipes. They got big steam pipes down there. I said, ‘Peace, I’m coming up,’ because the worst thing you can do is scare someone down there. That’s when it’s dangerous, when you surprise someone. But he was cool. He had his food heating up on the pipes and he lay on them, reading a newspaper.”
Deamues says he’s even found people singing in their shower underground, using water from fire extinguisher sprinklers. Some homeless use the bathrooms that the Metropolitan Transit Authority workers leave open for them.
A social network of sorts has been developed among the homeless, according to Tsemberis. Food, drugs, and medicine are often shared, as is gossip and stories of the underground.
Within this network, he says, “the mole people have taken on mythological proportions. They are supposed to be somehow different, unique. They’ve lived underground for years. They may even look different, like they are from a different planet. I run a men’s group in the drop-in center on 44th Street and these guys talk about how scary the mole people are, about faces showing up and skinny heads, and since they smoke crack, I don’t know if they are high or out of their minds.” The stories, he says, demonize the mole people.