I feel a sharp sting through my jeans at the knees, and fear rushes through my body as I begin to stumble.
“Watch your step!” George warns me too late. Someone catches me—a man but not George. He has been silently walking alongside me and keeps me from a bad fall over a sharp wire.
His name, he says, is Chud. It isn’t, really, but a nickname he chose for me to call him after he read one of my newspaper articles on the underground homeless that interviewed some transit workers, as well as some homeless who live on the surface, who call underground homeless CHUDs, short for Cannibalistic Human Underground Dweller. The label is partly humorous, but in part, too, CHUDs are feared as subhuman feral dwellers of the netherworld.
“We don’t eat people,” he tells me immediately, while George laughs. “Those stories are wrong. We don’t eat dogs neither. Sometimes, the ‘runners’ don’t make it down with food, we eat ‘track rabbits’ [rats], but I ain’t never ate no human. I ain’t never sinned like that.”
That’s good to know, I say uncomfortably.
Chud shows me the wire I had tripped over. It stretches directly across the tracks, from one wall to the other, at shin height, and just beyond it shards of broken glass twinkle yellow in the light of George’s lantern. He calls it a “Vietnam trap,” intended to both frighten and impede any strangers and, at the same time, warn the community of the intruders. Small strips of white cloth mark the wire where it is nailed to the walls, alerting regular inhabitants to the trap.
After Chud’s initial outburst, he becomes less talkative. Whenever I ask a question he does not like, he stays silent. So we don’t talk much. George, on the other hand, can’t stop talking, sometimes so fast that I lose the meaning of his words.
We enter a large, tile-walled chamber, with high ceiling, which could have been a waiting room at one time. Water drops sound different here, for some reason. The floor is firmer than in the tunnel, with less cushioning dirt and grime. I scrape an area with my shoe and the underlying surface, perhaps tile, reflects dully the lantern glow.
Against the far wall of the cavern leans a row of cardboard homes. Several dozen men and a few women sit sullenly around two fires in this underground shantytown, watching us enter.
“Hey, what’s she doing here?” a man finally asks. “Why’d you bring her here?” A general disgruntled murmur seconds his disapproval.
“Yo, she found it on her own and came down alone,” George lies. “I just saw her at the hanger. I couldn’t let the CHUD people get her, now could I?” he asks, joking at my expense. After a second, a tinkling laughter breaks the tension.
“Hey, honey,” says a lean, handsome black man, “you didn’t let them scare you bad, did you?” He is called Fay and his wrist literally goes limp as he approaches. “Come have a seat by me and April,” he reaches for my hand. “You look white as a ghost,” he titters.
April looks up, the fire lighting her eyes. She looks as frightened and vulnerable as I feel.
“His name is Fay,” a man named Slim says, “and he’s a bit … you know,” his voice trailing into a giggle.
“Now you better watch what you say, honey buns,” Fay warns Slim, drawing his hands to his hips in an exaggerated pose. To me he says, “I do the cooking around here.”
The community is well defined by duty, and the duties are allotted by the boss, Sam, whose title is mayor. I was introduced to each by name and by job.
Fay, as he said, is the community’s cook. April is the nurse. Chud is in charge of security. He is helped by Beeper, a weasel-like little man, who got his name because he was always first to detect a stranger in the tunnel and alert the community. George is a runner, along with Slim and Rex. They collect food and other necessities from the surface, often running scams in Penn Station that run the gamut from begging to pickpocketing to selling drugs, sometimes “drugs” that are just sugar or another inert substitute.
“Most of these people are too scared to go back up,” explains George. “Somebody’s got to take care of them.”
“And some people just need to be needed,” says Sam, the mayor.
He is a small, white man in his early forties, with round wire-rim John Lennon glasses and a tie-dyed shirt, who likes to talk about the sixties. He was trained as a sociologist. He is also a frightening man, one of the most frightening I have ever met in the tunnels.
The community elected him mayor, and there is no doubt they consider him their leader. He takes care of them as if they are family, even children, young children. Even men older than he are treated as five-year-olds at times.
Sam’s theory is that individuals remain stuck at the mental age at which they drop out of society: A thirty-five-year-old who got hooked on drugs at fifteen thinks that society only expects of him now what they did when he was fifteen. Those homeless people who live on the fringes of society, particularly those who live underground, have failed even to see—let alone experience—the development and socialization that is considered normal in people who live aboveground, he says. Sam also believes that most members of his community were pushed out of society at age five or six, as products of dysfunctional families, even though society may officially make them drop out at a much older age.
Sam’s management style is much like a parent, sometimes shaming members who fail to complete a task by berating them before the group, sometimes threatening to expel them from the underground family. He decides who should do which chores, and when the community is rousted from one tunnel, he decides where they will settle next. One day he sends April for water from a broken pipe in a distant tunnel; another time he has her mend clothes and sew old cloth pieces into blankets. He directs George to run a scam to get medicine. Whatever money is collected aboveground is put into a jar every night. Sam is its custodian. Only Sam dispenses from the collective funds. No one can leave “the camp” without his permission. He discourages members from trying to resume lives aboveground.
When Sam lived aboveground, he was a social worker. In 1982 he began working with the tunnel homeless, and about the same time he divorced his wife—for adultery, he says—and she has custody of their only daughter. Not long afterward, he was fired for what he terms “eccentricities.”
“Tell her about the final hour,” George says with a mischievous laugh.
In the final hour of his working life, Sam stripped down to the nude in his office—to demonstrate, he says, “how vulnerable people are in communicating.” I ask him several times what that means but never understand his explanation.
He refused psychiatric counseling after the incident, dismissing it as “a societal brainwashing ploy where they impose on me their beliefs of who I should be,” he says intensely, “so I would just fit in and not disturb society, just like a robot.” Instead, he decided to come where he could be free, completely himself, he says, to the tunnels that he found while working with their inhabitants.
What drove him underground, he explains, was “red tape. All that fucking red tape,” he begins, with voice rising and face reddening. “How can you help anyone when there’s that red tape? Kids would get abused to death in foster care and you couldn’t get them out without that red tape. Two of them were killed before I got through the red tape. How can you live with that?” he demands, angrily waving his arms.
“How can you live in a society like that?” he asks, more quietly now. “The rules don’t make sense. They’re not based on human needs or caring. The laws and the rules, and what they call morals, are logical and warped. They are based on money, not right or wrong. They might as well have come from a computer. No one really cares up there. Down here this is basic survival. We make our own laws. Our laws are based on what we feel, not preconceived notions of morality. We call it the ‘human morality.’ That’s what we live by.”