With a metal scraper, he cleans the glass pipes and mixes these remains with a few crumbs of fresh crack. The last hit for today. “A master blaster,” he explains. Bernard inhales deep and puts his hand in front of his eyes. “Wow, un-fucking-real…” he screeches in a weird, high pitch. “Wow, check this out…” With his arm stretched out he flashes his lighter above the piles of clothes behind him. “Un-fucking-real. Really…” he whispers a few more times. After a few minutes, he returns to speaking in his normal voice.
“Government sabotage… Everything that has to do with expanding consciousness is discouraged. Chemical sabotage. They try to conform you to the Dollar Game. If they don’t succeed, they dispose of you like a piece of trash. That is the true evil of this society. Who refuses to conform himself becomes a dropout.”
5. SOUTHERN NEIGHBORS
I am feeling a bit bored and am playing with candle wax in Bob’s bunker. The radio broke down, and I am looking at the bottles of piss that are standing between the bed and the bookshelves. Obviously, Bob never went outside to take a leak and developed the habit of urinating in bottles. I can understand that; maybe Bob didn’t have night slippers and he did not want to walk out in the tunnel in the middle of the night in his bare feet on ground littered with broken glass and other junk. Or maybe he was just lazy. But the problem is that Bob never emptied his bottles, and now I am stuck with about ten gallons of his urine. How long have they already been here? Dirty foam floats on the dark yellow fluid. Sooner or later I will have to clean it, before they tumble over. I decide to postpone that operation until the following week.
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason stands out among all the books. They are from Larry, a former roommate of Bob’s, Bernard has told me. “Larry is too semantic,” he had added. I am not in a semantic mood tonight and leave Kant where he is. Outside there are sounds of dogs barking, and voices coming closer.
A few blocks south, a lighter is flashing. A fat, dirty dog appears and starts to sniff me. “Lady Bug, come back, damn it!” booms a deep voice from the darkness. Using my flashlight, I see two people approaching. Intermittently, I shine the light at myself and at the ground in front of the two guys. In the tunnel, you never blind people with a flashlight. That can cause unpredictable reactions. Better to light yourself, signaling you are decent person who has nothing to hide.
When they get closer, I see they are two skinheads, one short and stocky, the other thin and tall. They carry a baseball bat and a big hammer. I introduce myself politely and ask who they are and what they are doing in the tunnel. “We live a bit farther down the tunnel,” the fat one says. “We came to pay Bernard a visit.”
Bernard is not home, and I invite the two into my place and offer them chairs. “Frankie is my name,” the fat one says. “And this here is my buddy Ment. And Lady Bug, my dog.” Bob’s bunker is being penetrated by the filthy smell of the dog. Lady Bug sniffs at the piss bottles and wags her tail.
“We live on top of Joe,” Frankie says. He brings his Marlboro carefully to the ashtray, an empty beer can, but the ashes fall on the carpet. Frankie apologizes and picks up the ashes with wetted fingers. “I’m sorry. I tried to keep it clean as well at my place.”
It is only now that I realize these are the kids from the South End. I had seen the fat one a few times on the roof of Joe’s place, amongst a pack of mean-looking dogs who barked ferociously at every passer-by. But since it was so dark over there and he’d had the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up, his face had been invisible.
Ment is an old friend of Frankie’s. In fact he is the son of Joe and Kathy, he tells me. He is a graffiti artist by profession. Ment is his artist name; his real name is not important. He had left the tunnel for a year and a half. Today, he came back from a big journey upstate.
I try to imagine it. Trekking and hiking and sleeping at youth hostels? Ment answers vaguely and changes the subject to electricity. It’s a nice space, he says, but I would really need to have electricity. It’s easy: just get a cable down from the park. All that hassle with candles doesn’t make sense. And what will I do later, when it gets really cold? I really need an electric heater they suggest. Frankie has two cables at his home. Electricity all around the clock. “Come over later for a coffee, and then you will see.”
Later on that evening, I jump on my bike and ride down to Joe’s place. After fifteen blocks, the tunnel gets very wide, and in that expansion is a row of bunkers. The first is inhabited by Joe and Kathy and their thirty cats.
In the next bunkers live Leon and Ozzy. Leon was once saved by Bernard from freezing to death. On a cold winter night, Leon had drunk too much and had passed out on a bench in the park close to the North Gate. Bernard dragged the nearly-frozen Leon back into the tunnel and brought him back to life at the fire. Ozzy is a shy, reclusive man. According to Bernard, he used to work with computers.
The last bunker in the row is empty. This used to be the place belonging to John Kovacs and his dog Mama. Kovacs had transformed his bunker with Christmas decorations into what looked like a temple. After the New York Times wrote an article about him, he was offered a place in a live-and-work community upstate. A movie producer offered him big money to make a film about his life. With some trial and error, Kovacs left the tunnel. The movie deal fell through and he could only stand it a few weeks in the upstate community, but Kovacs was at least left with a pretty woman. After reading the Times article, a woman wrote Kovacs a letter and the two began a correspondence. She fell in love with him, and they are now living together in her apartment.
Frankie has constructed his home on top of Joe and Kathy’s. It is a wooden shack, wrapped with ropes around white plastic sheets like an installation of the artist Christo. A hundred meters before I arrive at Frankie’s, the dogs are already barking.
A light outside goes on and Ment shows up. “Fuck off,” he yells at the dogs. After screaming a few more curses, the dogs finally become silent. Ment jumps down from the roof and opens the gate, a plywood sheet that closes off the narrow way between Joe’s bunker and the tunnel wall. A suffocating stench of dog shit and ammonia nearly knocks me down. “Around the corner is a ladder,” says Ment, while he himself climbs up a rope in three quick movements. Trying to be tough, I also try to climb up using the wet and moldy rope. My shoes slip on the slimy outer wall and I have to work my way up with my elbows.
Ment drags me onto the roof. My clothes are soiled with a smelly muck. “Next time, just take the ladder,” Ment says. “This is in fact the emergency exit.” He lets me in and closes the door with a chain. A Persian carpet keeps out the draft.
Inside, it is like a student dorm—a bit messy and frugal, but overall nice and comfy. The only things lacking are windows and plants. Lady Bug is snoring in front of an electrical heater. Frankie is sitting on the couch watching TV. A mustached man sitting next to him introduces himself as Buddy.
While Buddy keeps on watching TV, Frankie makes coffee in the small kitchen corner. A six-piece pan set hangs on the wall next to the baseball bat and the claw hammer kept within arms-reach. The interior of their home has been neatly painted in a pastel blue color. The construction of the corners and the attachment of the plywood to the supporting beams show the craftsmanship of an experienced carpenter.