For some time, tunnel dwellers have thought Cathy is pregnant, partly because of her appearance but also because of the way she has been behaving. Bernard doubts it, however. “I think she is just acting that way to try to get Joe to move them out of the tunnels,” he says.
LIFE TURNS OUT UNPREDICTABLY AT TIMES. FRAN AND SHORTY, against high odds, have returned to her Nebraska farm. They leave a mess of syringes and human waste, but the community cleans it up almost without complaint, pleased they have gone away. Everyone hopes they make it, but doubts they will.
Life also turns out totally predictably, too.
Sheila never doubted that Willie would come back, although everyone else suspected he had been killed or just died elsewhere. Few believed he had left for another woman. “I love him,” she would say. “I still do. I know he’s gonna come back, so I’m just waiting. He used to tell me this was no place for me, that I deserve to be a queen somewhere.”
Willie did return, and took Sheila to live in a Single Rent Occupancy (SRO) hotel near Riverside Park. He was drug-free and had a job. He refused to let her bring any old belongings from the tunnel. They were to build a new life, with fresh things. He bought her new clothes, and told her she should never go into tunnels again.
“They were doing great,” Bernard remembers. “They were like new people. Sheila was really pretty,” he says, surprised by the effect of the new environment.
Soon after, Willie collapsed and a few weeks later died of AIDS. The day after he died, which was shortly after her thirty-first birthday, the hotel threw Sheila out for nonpayment of rent. The rent had been overdue for months, it turned out.
Willie’s family refused to allow Sheila to attend the funeral. They believe she gave Willie AIDS. The strength she had before seems gone. She panhandles now, usually drunk. Bernard has sought her out several times, but she refuses to return to the tunnels.
“As bad as it is down here,” says Bob, “it’s a hell of a lot worse out there. She can’t take care of herself. Down here at least she has somewhere to belong.”
She refuses. “I promised Willie I’d never go back,” she says while devouring a hamburger. She puts it back on the plate carefully and dabs her trembling mouth with a flimsy paper napkin. “He said I was better than the tunnel, that he was sorry he brought me down.”
“But he took me higher than anyone ever did,” she says after a pause.
Even in the tunnel? I ask.
“Even in the tunnel, or on the roof, or in the park. Everywhere,” she says, picking at her glistening french fries. “He loved me, and that doesn’t happen much in this world. I would never have known what it’s like to be happy without Willie.”
23
Jamall’s Story
WHEN CHER DIED, THE SKY CRIED ALL DAY. IT CRIED DUSTY tears, sometimes full and heavy, other times as light as mist coming from the clouds. She said she was glad the sky wasn’t bright and laughing at her, sparkling at her with its freshness. That always made her feel like she was missing out on some great wonder that was right before her but beyond her reach. But the day she died, the sky was sad for her. She told Jamall that she felt like just another tear from the sky, and that when the sun came up, it would pick her way up into the sky. That was her funeral, Jamall says. She delivered her own eulogy as he held her hand. He watched her smile when she took her last breath. That night her cat howled something fierce. It upset Jamall so much that he had to leave. He wandered through the night, trying to decide which authority to tell of her death and what to do with her body. He believed he was having a nightmare. He couldn’t feel the rain or the cold, so he was sure it was only a nightmare. He hoped he would awaken in the decayed and decrepit but cozy house in the Bronx where he and Cher and about a dozen others had been squatters, diverting a bit of electricity from other lines until a spark lit a fire, which caved in part of the roof. City workers boarded up the house for good and they were back on the street.
When morning came, Jamall turned his back to the sun and returned to the tunnel. He half-expected Cher’s body to have been picked up by the sun, but it was still there, like a shell with a strong shaft of sunlight falling a few feet away. He thought it was giggling. It had taken her to the sky.
Jamall left that tunnel and never went back.
“At first I wanted to jump that sunbeam and kill it for taking her. Then I begged it to take me too. Then, now you ain’t gonna believe this, I know, but I’ll tell you anyway because it’s the only thing in this whole fucking world that makes sense. There was something in that sunbeam smiling at me and saying ‘Man, it’s gonna be alright now. Just ride life the rest of the way, you’re halfway there, ride all the way through. Cher’s OK now. You got no more responsibility.’ and I thought, yeah, you got nothin’ more to lose; it’s gone already. Just ride life through. I got my ticket right here,” he says, slapping the bottle sandwiched precariously between his shaking thighs.
Jamall is thirty-nine but looks about fifty. “I’m just watching now. I done my living. I’m just watching and it’s a funny shit scene. All these people, shit. They do dumb-ass things. It’s hilarious, it really is.”
Jamall talks louder and more aggressively as he gets midway through the bottle. Toward the last few sips he looks straight and forward, strangely sober.
“Sure I’ll tell you my story,” he said. “But let me tell you one thing first: If that sunbeam come by, I’m jumping on that ride, girl. I’ve been waiting for it to take me for a long time now. So just so’s you understand me, I make no commitments,” not even for a couple of hours to tell his story.
“If that beam comes for me, I’m gone lickety-split,” he repeats. He leans back for a moment and takes a long drag out of a tired cigarette crusting with gray ash. Within a few minutes his thoughts glaze into a mumbling sleep. Pulling an old blanket over him, he smiles a childlike smile, dreaming, I think, of the sunbeam and Cher. He’s saving his story for another day.
BUT JAMALL IS NOT EASY TO TRACK DOWN ANOTHER DAY. HE WANders the tunnels searching for his sunbeam, but refuses to settle into one of them again.
“He’s a man who tried to make it up there,” says Sam, the former social worker turned underground mayor. “He went through rehab several times, and he beat it all until Cher died. Then he reached for the bottle and never let go.
“You’ll think he’s over the edge, and up there, most people would say he is. He talks to himself, to the sunbeam like it’s Cher. But you gotta remember that sanity down here is different from sanity up there. If someone doesn’t cry and scream down here, they’re insane. If they do it up there, they’re insane.
“But he knows the tunnels better than most, and he’ll tell you stories. I doubt you’ll be able to verify many of them, but I vouch for him because I know people down here, those who lie and those who don’t,” Sam says.
I find Jamall sitting on a crate watching the scene in Times Square with a couple of drinking “associates.” He stands out in the signature green knit cap he wears even on hot days. It’s well before noon and his friends are well on their way to being drunk.
“You ain’t going to rob us are you?” one of them asks. “You white girls are dangerous in this neighborhood,” he laughs, a gold tooth flashing.