“I just lay there and yelled, ‘I’m hungry, but I’m too tired to move.’ And the lady she come up to me laughing and she say, ‘We’ll bring it to you. But just don’t try to run; you look so funny when you run.’” He grins briefly at the image in his mind of himself as a disjointed, uncoordinated scarecrow. “Boy, I was really messed up bad then.”
“I don’t mind making people laugh, makes them more generous sometimes,” he goes on. But some of his black friends dislike some of his enterprising, humorous acts and see them as demeaning to his race.
“We don’t need no handouts from no white people looking to stay out of trouble,” says Malcolm, who hangs around Port Authority Station. “They the ones who put us here. We don’t need to be cleaning their shit pots.”
Seville explains his enterprising scheme differently.
“We have this thing called Volunteers of the Bathroom where we clean up the toilets in Grand Central or Penn Station or Port Authority, and then we tell the people in a little speech.” He begins, sweeping his hand gracefully after tipping an imaginary hat, “‘Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I’m a Volunteer of the Bathroom, keeping the bathroom safe, clean, and organized. As you know, most of the volunteers are homeless, like myself and this gentleman with me. Your donations help us eat and stay out of trouble. We do not get paid for our services, but we do it in the hopes that you good people can use the bathroom most effectively and appreciate it. Any donations, large or small—cuz I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t ask—are appreciated.’
“Some people get a kick out of it [the routine] and give us something with a smile, but my own kind rarely ever gives me anything. Once in a blue moon maybe. They won’t even look into my face…. I’d rather they tell me they don’t have it, or don’t ask them than not look at me, you know?” He resumes earnestly, “Phoey! People like that think I’m like them and they got no respect for themselves so they don’t look at me—maybe that’s it. I don’t understand it. Seems to me that if you make people laugh, they treat you normal. They’re not afraid to look at you. That’s what it’s all about, ain’t it, a way to get some respect, to be treated like a regular person?”
Seville calls the eighties the “decade of the tunnels, because that’s when we all found them. There were people in the late seventies who used the tunnels occasionally to get high or whatever, but it wasn’t until the eighties that people started settling in, living down here.
“It’s the decade of crack and homelessness. It’s the decade of the tunnels,” he repeated. “People’ve been down and out since the beginning of time, but we’s the first to actually live in tunnels. There’s been nowhere else to go,” he laughs. “There was too many of us. We got no families that can help us or want to, whatever, and no place to go, so we come to the tunnels. Even people who don’t like the tunnels come down here to be with their own. And I don’t mean color. I mean people who grew up like me.”
How Seville grew up came out piecemeal, over time and many conversations, amid laughter and jokes with which he conspired to ward off pity and “break up the blues.”
“Well, just say it wasn’t no ‘Father Knows Best’ situation or ‘Leave It to Beaver,” he says with a little laugh. “Man, I used to love those shows. It was like sci-fi to me; they were on a different planet from me.”
Seville tried to run away from home several times before, but at the age of nine, he succeeded. By then he had been deserted by his mother, attempted to shoot his father, and seen more violence between parents than most children see on television. He also fathered his first child when he was barely a teenager.
When he was seven years old, his mother left him in West Hampton, Virginia. His parents separated and reconciled often, and were separated at this time when his mother decided to take a bus to New York. His father was apparently also in New York, Seville recalls, and maybe she went searching for him, but probably not. Whatever her reason, she left Seville in the house alone.
“I just stayed in the house,” he remembers. “I knew how to cook; my grandmother had taught me. Then the guy next door—he was a priest—came over and asked where my parents were. We called my father and he came down immediately to get me and brought me to New York. He was mad, boy,” Seville laughs. “He wanted to kill her for leaving me, and he probably would have if she’d been there.”
His father, an Air Force enlisted man, was large and his mother was small, but when they argued, “she’d chase him around like a little bird pecking on him, her head bopping like a pigeon. It was funny, boy. She’d nag him to death. He’d try to run away, and he was big and she was tiny but he’d be the one running. But once in Brooklyn, he turned on her and I had to hold the door closed to keep him from getting at her while she got away.
“My mother threw acid on my father’s head one day, and he almost strangled her. They almost killed each other so many times, it was pathetic. That’s why I had to leave; too much fighting for me and I got caught up in it. I almost shot my father with a sawed-off shotgun my grandfather gave to me. It’s called a loophole, an Italian gun. He was lucky, my father. I was too small to hold the gun, and he ducked. That’s when I left. I couldn’t take it no more.”
Seville slept on rooftops, in doorways, halls, and basements throughout New York—in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. “I lived everywhere you could live. It wasn’t too bad. You got used to it. … It’s bad when you get too used to it though, cuz then you don’t try to get out of it. That was my problem. After a while I couldn’t get used to sleeping in a room. I felt closed in with no escape.”
He stole to support himself. “Sometimes I stayed with an uncle of mine, Uncle Louis, but he kept trying to take me back to my mother’s house, and each time I’d leave again. I got so tired of family court.”
Seville claims he went to school regularly even when he lived on the streets because, he says, there was nothing else to do. His parents tried to catch him there. Once his father did corner him on the second floor of a school, but he jumped out a bathroom window and onto a car hood to escape. Somehow his father ran down the steps faster than Seville could get away. “I remember I couldn’t believe a fat dude like him could run so fast. When he caught me, he said, ‘I’m not gonna hit you, just come on home.’
“But I got out again. I got tired of being around them. They were just too busy fighting to pay attention to me. My father be there, my mother would move out. My mother be there, my father move out. It was like a revolving door.”
Without brothers or sisters, he learned early to be alone. He didn’t miss company; in fact, he almost sought to escape people “because people disappoint you. I had some friends here and there, but most times my best friend was myself,” Seville says. “You don’t need too many people around you, cuz when you got too many people, you don’t know who’s for you and who’s against you. When you’re alone, you don’t have to worry about that cuz people will flip on you like at the International House of Pancakes. They’ll be your friend and the next minute they’ll try to kill you for money. If they’re thirsty enough, and if they think they can get away with it, they’ll try to kill you. That’s a fact.”
He lived well in his early teens by stealing cars, which is how he met Iris, whose father had a white Cadillac.
A friend was auditioning with a ventriloquist act, and Seville, while waiting for him outside the club, was sitting on the hood of the Cadillac when Iris and her father came out. Her father spoke gruffly to Seville in a foreign language—Dutch, it turned out.
“He had these thunderclouds in his face,” Seville says, “Very unhappy. Didn’t like me. He thought I was a hoodlum or something. I guess I am, but I know how to put it aside. I said to Iris: ‘Yo, what’s up with this? Is he cursing at me?’ She laughed and said, ‘He just wants you to get off his car.’”