To anger her father, Iris invited Seville to go into the club with her. She was a stunning redhead with green eyes, according to Seville. “She was real tall and thin; her dad was short, fat, bald, and ugly.”
“We hit it off pretty well, and she asked me to show her New York while they were visiting. We stuck around each other for two weeks. Then I got locked up for selling reefer in Queens. I didn’t call her—didn’t want her to know—and when I got out, she was gone. I didn’t know she was pregnant with Naga.
“When she got back to the Netherlands, she had to do something fast, so she married this guy Earl [an American serviceman] to bring her back over here. He kept beating on her—real nasty attitude—and she got him arrested. I had told her where I sold reefer and she moved there, to 163rd Street between 89th and Jamaica Avenue in Queens. She was looking for me, and I was there but I didn’t see her or recognize her and I guess she didn’t see me.
“Would you believe, I was giving my own daughter a dollar every day for three months, and I didn’t know she was my daughter! She was so cute. I used to deal across the street from where they lived, and I used to call Naga over when she was going to school cuz she was so cute. I love kids and I wanted to mess with her.
“Naga’d say: ‘What them people give you money for? What you giving them?’ I’d say, ‘None of your business. Here, take a dollar and go to school.’
“Every day I used to give her a dollar. I didn’t find out she was my daughter until one day I thought, man, she’s so cute her mama’s got to be nice. So I followed her upstairs one day so I could get a look at her. When she came out of the apartment, I just stood there. Tris?’ I said.”
He nods his head now in a pleasant memory. I wonder how fanciful it is but keep silent.
“Boy, we had a good time after that. I was fourteen years old when Naga was born. Iris was twenty-four. Count it up, Naga is seventeen now, and I’m thirty-one.”
Seville sent Iris and Naga back to Holland in 1981 when the police shut down his reefer operation. The tickets cost him $842, he remembers, and he gave them $5,000 more. “I asked her father to take care of them until I got things back together again,” he says. “Sure I want them back. But I just haven’t gotten it together again yet.”
Seville is inconsistent with some pieces of his biography and omits key facts while traveling down one avenue of his life, disclosing them later when they serve to embellish another tale.
He fathered three more children by two other women: two other girls and a boy named after him. The boy, whom he called “Little Seville,” was born to Candy in March 1981, the same year Iris went home to Holland.
He was not present for the birth of his son, now seven years old. “I was in jail,” he says, looking down as if ashamed. “I had to tell on myself to get Candy off the hook because I didn’t want my son born in jail. I sent him to live with her relatives in Saint Croix. He’s my only son and I want him to grow up. You know what I’m saying? I don’t want him dying on one of these streets. Most kids do.”
The boy’s mother, Candy, was eight months pregnant when Seville and a friend burglarized a jewelry store ostensibly to help support Candy and their coming child. “We got $25,000 in cash and $40,000 in jewelry, and I got caught because of a jealous girl who saw all of Candy’s rings and stuff and she called the police,” he explains. It was then, apparently, that Seville admitted to the crime to keep Candy from going to jail. Iris and Naga are not mentioned again.
“People have to do what they have to do,” he shrugs. “You can’t blame them for that; you can’t look down at them. They do what they have to do to take care of themselves and their own, no matter what.
“When the judge locked me up, he asked, ‘Mr. Williams, do you regret doing this?’ I said, ‘No, cuz to take care of mine, I’m going to do it again. Now if you don’t want me to do it, get me a job, and not that minimum wage stuff—you can’t support no family on that.’”
“I had to tell him straight up what was real. He said he respected that.” Then Seville smiles. “But he still put me away for three years. It would have been less but I had been in [jail] for so many other things so many times, he had to do it. I respect him for that. Since 1975, I’ve been arrested so many times I can’t count. I used to get into trouble cuz there was nothing better to do. I used to be good at stealing cars, even when we didn’t hardly know how to drive. Once me and my friend Bill—he was crazy, Bill—we drove up an exit ramp the wrong way, and a police car looked over and just didn’t believe it. We went fast against traffic on the highway for two exits, with the whole precinct after us. We were having fun, whooping it up. You don’t take it seriously when you’re a kid. You get thirty days, ninety days, they throw the case out, it don’t matter.”
SEVILLE HAS LIVED FOR TWELVE YEARS IN THE TUNNELS, VIRTUALLY all of his adult life except when he was in jail. He was sleeping on subway platforms at nineteen, and a year later moved to the hollow areas under the passenger platforms of commuter rail lines under Grand Central Station terminal. The homeless had knelt along the tracks and pick-axed holes in the walls, usually high under the overhang so they could not be seen by anyone standing on opposite platforms; he lived in these burrows first alone and then with many “communities,” as Seville calls them.
Each move took him deeper into the tunnel and underground life. From beneath the platforms, he went along the train tracks as they leave the station into the tunnels that spread like veins on the back of a hand. From there, he moved into the tunnel network of the subway system, and into the tunnels under Penn Station, and then the more distant and peaceful reaches of the Amtrak tunnels along the Hudson River in upper Manhattan. Seville moved deeper, too, downward into the darkest reaches of the underground.
“Once you’ve lived in one tunnel, you’ve lived in them all,” Seville says half-joking. “They’re all connected. The people are mostly the same, too. Homeless is homeless. The tracks are just another place to live, that’s all. Same people. Attitudes change. Some people will do anything for you, some of them are bad. Most of them don’t care, not about you or about themselves. They are totally unhappy with themselves. They won’t say that, but you can see. They can’t see it, but you can see.
“The tunnels are old. They look like catacombs. It’s a whole ‘nother world down there, separate from this one. Believe that. The worries you have up here, you don’t have down there. You don’t have rent worries, for one. You don’t have any bills to pay. You have a whole different attitude. Everyone’s on a different wavelength down there, and then every time you join a new group of people and move in, you find the direction they’re going—it’s like a circle. It’s family in a way, but limited, very limited. Like your family to a certain extent. You take on a role, and then you become like them even when you don’t know it’s happening.”
In some ways, tunnel life closest to the surface is the worst. “Under the train platforms,” Seville says, “you have to worry about rats. You can light small fires to keep them from jumping on you.” Police once found a body by the smell; he had died of an overdose and been picked at by rats. Seville shivers with the memory. The compartment, stretching the length of the platform and about ten feet deep, was home to about twenty men at the time, all heavily into drugs. They urinated and defecated where they lived. The odor was gagging.