I stare, stunned.
“Some of me is within you,” he says, shielding his eyes with his left forearm as though there is a flood of light that I don’t see. “Not enough for me to hurt you. But enough for me to hurt others close to you. You have a fascination with the darkness of my tunnels. The evil within it. And it is evil,” he says with cool force, a fine layer from fury. “Everything down here is pure evil.”
Unwittingly I step back, shaking. He has appeared suddenly to me out of darkness, and his words chill my spine. He calls himself the Dark Angel. He has mastered the greatest weapon anyone has in the tunnels, the fear and discomfort that the environment inherently provides.
Tunnel homeless, welfare workers, and police officers have all met this devil-like figure. All of them come away scared, not of the supernatural powers he claims, but of the man himself.
He lives under Grand Central, like many other tunnel people, but he is entirely unlike any other. None have set up camps anywhere near his. He hisses, spits, and screams. He is unforgettable, in part, because of his words and his forceful delivery.
He is neither large nor small, about five foot seven, with a slim frame. He is white with slicked-back brown hair. His powerful eyes are always a bloodshot, fiery red, recalls Jamall, a veteran of the tunnels who had given me sketchy directions to “Satan’s den.”
“Madness is the most powerful evil,” Jamall warned. Jamall does not believe the Dark Angel is really the devil, but he does believe that the man is mad, and from his madness he derives evil powers.
He is mad. But most who have met this self-proclaimed Angel of Death, including the police, are at least slightly afraid of him because he believes he is the devil, and, in his black tunnel, he has an edge.
Tunnel people steer clear of his den.
“It’s the vibes he gives off,” another homeless man explains. “The guy can look at you and he knows what will scare you. Maybe it’s the way he stares; maybe it’s what he says. And if he can’t scare you, he threatens voodoo on people you know. Weird-ass guy. Everyone laughs but no one wants to get near him.”
“Satan’s den” is simple: a bed of stacked cardboard on which blankets are neatly laid, scattered books and magazines, and rats the size of cats. The rodents often walk up unafraid to visitors in his den and sniff, but they stay away from Satan.
“Down here,” he declares, “I am the law. I keep the order.”
He refuses to go upstairs for prolonged periods of time because, he says, he belongs underground.
However, he has been seen aboveground. Sergeant Bryan Henry, the first and, for a long time, only officer charged with policing the tunnels, acknowledges the sense of power he projects.
“Upstairs he looked at me as if saying, this is your turf, cool,” recalls Henry, “but I get you on my turf, down below, it’s you and me and you are mine. I’ll take you.” Henry, a hulking cop, rolls his shoulders as if suddenly cold at the memory. “He is a dangerous individual,” he says. “Very dangerous.”
Satan uses the fear he incites to live better. Runners, mostly young homeless men, bring him food—not for reward but for what they believe is their own safety.
“I do it cuz the man scares the shit out of me,” says Rico, who is six foot three and 240 pounds. “It would be unlucky for me to leave him without food. When I run stuff down, he tells me ‘it’s about time’ and that he was going to ‘make things get nasty’ for me.
“One time I thought, ‘This is shit, man. I’m not afraid of this hot dog,’” Rico goes on after a pause. “I didn’t go down with food that day. Next day I broke my leg climbing a fence I climb hundreds of times. Crazy,” he shakes his head.
Even before the cast was dried, Rico made his penance trip to Satan. “I swear I never knew such pain! And he was waiting for me. He knew! He said, ‘That’s what happens when you don’t serve me. Next time it will be worse. Much worse.’ I believe him, man,” Rico said, wide-eyed.
A young transit cop in Penn Station says he doesn’t mind seeing “Satan” in the terminal aboveground, but he makes sure he wears a cross when going into the tunnel where he might encounter the Dark Angel.
“It’s like, up here he knows better than to do anything,” the cop says. “But under there, he thinks the turf is his and he can do anything. And a guy like that, he’s capable of anything.”
Police walkie-talkies don’t extend deep into the tunnels, “so you’re all alone,” the officer says. “You got no back-up. It’s strange but the radios carry right up to his camp, but, as soon as you reach his area, they go dead.”
Harold Deamues of ADAPT had one of the most striking encounters with the Dark Angel.
“We were walking along looking for people and suddenly it felt all weird like, quiet or something. Me and my partner were looking straight ahead and suddenly this guy, arms crossed over his chest, rises out of a coffin-shaped box. I almost started screaming. Me and my partner, we thought this was the real Dracula,” Deamues now roars with laughter at the memory, but adds, “I mean under there, anything is possible, you know what I’m saying?”
Deamues, who has the best rapport with “Satan” of anyone who has encountered him, does not believe the man takes drugs because he always speaks fluently and coherently. Rico has never seen him even light a cigarette.
“But his eyes are red, always red and glowing,” says Rico, wondering why.
I notice this striking redness as the Dark Angel paces about his den, talking on and on. Each of my questions is lost to his monologue. He seems hardly aware of me, but it can only be me to whom he is speaking. I am glad he is not staring at me as he speaks. Instead he focuses on his tirade.
“You have left the world of fairness and good. Goodness can no longer reach you down here. You are no longer safe,” he says, now looking at the ground. Then he hisses. “Leave, little lost angel, before the tunnels swallow you and you are one of mine.”
I do leave, almost as quickly as he has appeared to me. My back feels cold, as though he has changed his mind and his hand will reach my shoulder and stop me. But it doesn’t. I turn to watch him swing a cloth robe across his back, fashioning a cape. Then he vanishes into his own darkness.
Rather than visiting him again, I press others for information about him.
Jamall responds decisively, “All you need to know about that guy is to avoid him.”
17
The Underground in History, Literature, and Culture
“You do not know me if you think I am afraid, or that I build my burrow simply out of fear.”
THE SELF-PROCLAIMED DARK ANGEL PERSONIFIES MANY VISCERAL fears ordinary people have of the underground and the creatures that exist there. Frightening philosophical and psychological notions of the underground, which have been passed from one generation to the next in our culture, color our perception of the region and the people who live there. For centuries, the depths have been depicted in literature and history as a nurturing environment for evil and madness. It is the perfect dark, unknown, and foreboding terrain on which imaginations avidly feed.
From those images, the subterranean environment in Western culture has evolved metaphorically as a mental landscape, a social environment, and an ideological map. The underground has been portrayed as a threatening underside of aboveground society. Although the symbolic significance has changed dramatically over the centuries, recurring metaphors in social and literary history have spawned widespread and enduring connotations, damaging prejudices, and a simple but deep fear of the dark—all resulting in serious obstacles to helping the underground homeless. Fortunately, scholars are recognizing and exposing this cultural inheritance—the first steps toward ridding ourselves of its pernicious effects.