ADAPT headquarters is an old synagogue on 111th Street in Harlem, the only intact building in a drug-zoned block. Drive-by shootings are commonplace in the neighborhood. Riders at the nearest subway station are hard-pressed to explain the safest route to the building, ending by telling the visitor to be “very careful however you go.” ADAPT staffers are unfazed by dangers near their office, but even they say the dangers underground are of a whole different proportion.
“You know that down there, besides the trains and the third rail, you have people who are afraid. Afraid of being attacked by others, scared crazy by coke. When we’re scared and they’re scared, it’s really dangerous for everyone. But there is one area down there that is particularly scary for me: an abandoned tunnel that was once used to store or transport coal, for the old trains, I guess. Very, very scary, like if someone wants to do something to you there, you lost without knowing something started,” Deamues says.
“There you can feel the eyes. That’s the eeriest feeling, sensing eyes but seeing no body. I have confidence in myself that once I make contact with them, I’ll be OK, able to do something for them, whatever. But, man, you feel their eyes and you start to wonder about the stories about cannibalism,” he laughs self-consciously. “They seem to live in the asbestos insulation around steam pipes, and they got rats so big they look like they lift weights. You think they want your clothes because they are cold, or your boots, and there’s all them glass vials and needles and shit on the floor. And you can’t call for help, the police walkie-talkie radios don’t carry upstairs. If something happens down there and you call upstairs, you get nothing.
“I used to tell the others, ‘Don’t get fat because, if you get hurt, I’m gonna have to carry your ass out of there.’ You couldn’t leave anyone alone in those tunnels.”
On top of the various diseases, filth, mental illness, and addiction, homeless living underground also have gotten mauled by subway track workers, according to ADAPT. Sometimes a homeless person steals tools from the workers, and the workers take it out on the next homeless person they find. Hangman’s nooses have been left dangling from overhead pipes to intimidate the homeless.
Subway workers have also reported being “piped”—struck over the head with a steel pipe—by homeless who want their clothes, shoes, and tools. “Workers get piped down here all the time,” says Daniel Crump, a steward for the Transit Workers and Mechanics Union who was one of the first knowledgeable people to talk openly to me about the underground homeless and has been frustrated by the Metropolitan Transit Authority and city inaction. “I get calls all the time from workers afraid to go into the tunnels because they say, ‘mole people are all around.’“
Most mole stories come up from the very bowels of Grand Central, seven levels down. “Down there,” says Deamues, “there are no trains. It’s quiet. There are old tracks, and electricity in some parts. Big areas. I’m waiting for someone to swing down like Tarzan. The deeper and deeper you go, the quieter it gets. But there’s still those eyes. It’s always like, ‘Where are they?’“
The homeless feel safer the deeper down they go, ADAPT workers believe. “They get that sense of security down there,” Deamues says. “To go further back in the tunnels, or deeper, says ‘I don’t want to bother nobody. I don’t want nobody bothering me. I’m where nothing should go wrong. I don’t want to deal with nobody. I won’t cause problems; just let me stay here; I’ll keep this place in order. Outside it’s crazy, but at least down here I can close my eyes.’
“When I come up and I smell of those places, people think they need to take antibiotics just to come near me. In tunnels closer to the surface, the homeless mainly need a place to stay. The shelter system is too dangerous. They feel they can’t close their eyes in the shelters, fearing rape or beating or getting killed. People yelling and stealing their clothes. And they’re treated like they’re subhuman there, like dogs,” he says.
The irony is that, as Deamues sees it, “they feel much more human underground, safer, freer to move around. Tranquil, even serene to some of them, despite the trains running by.
“But worst, most heartbreaking, is when you find people who say, ‘Hey, I don’t want to be here, but I have no choice. I can’t take another shelter and I can’t go home.’“
One of the greatest difficulties that underground people have in trying to “go home”—back to the surface—is believing in themselves again. ADAPT found in its report that the tunnel dwellers “exhibit a paradoxical mix of self-sufficiency and dependency—they survive under the most difficult of circumstances, but they have lost faith in their ability to change their lives.”
Outreach workers claim that tunnel dwellers never lose the basic tools they need to succeed aboveground and they even develop greater incentives to succeed in general. “It’s like their instinct for caring and love is as basic as their instinct for survival,” Deamues says. “Like making a bad situation seem less bad. I see this guy down under Grand Central laughing, sitting there reading books. You put yourself down there and you’d probably drive yourself crazy, but they create an environment, build up a core inside and say, ‘This is happening, but this ain’t the worstest thing in life.’“
Aren’t some of them beyond repair? I ask.
He looks confused and angry, shaking his head. “No. That’s something a normal person might think, but once you know a little about them, you can’t give up on them. Some of us, like me, are living proof that no matter what you’ve been through, you can be someone again in the future. You can’t give up on them. That’s all they got. They’re still human. They can still have a life.”
Director Michael Bethea is just as persistent as Deamues but in a more objective, less personal way.
“If they can make it down there as well as they do, they can make it up here,” Bethea says earnestly. “You go down there and see how they take care of each other, and not just that, but how they rig things like water and electricity. Some of these are very bright individuals who could have been engineers or something. We just got to find the one thing, or things, that are stopping them. Like drug addiction—it’s just a problem that they can overcome. If they can deal with the underground, they can certainly make it up here. That’s what we’ve got to convince them. We know it. We’ve seen it. We just got to make them see it in themselves, and that comes with consistent outreach and trust.”
Whatever one might think about the optimism of Bethea, Deamues, and the other outreach workers in the tunnels, there is something heroic in their efforts. As Dr. Tsemberis put it, “They were touching and handling people that no one else would go near. You see really awful things down there: infected legs, faces half eaten away by cancer sores. There is a whole aura around the people who worked there … like they were doing God’s work.”
16
Dark Angel
“I CAN’T HURT YOU, LOST ANGEL.”
The words come out of the tunnel’s blackness without warning when I stumble into a cavelike recess.
“But I can hurt those you care about,” he says silkily. In the dusty tunnel light, I feel eyes to my left and turn to find him facing me, hands on his hips in a bold and graceful stance. He is barely four feet from me.