“My domain,” Frankie says proudly. “Of this whole goddamn planet, I decided to call this small space, this spot of ten by fourteen feet, mine. Nobody will take it away from me. You can’t take it over. If you enter the space of me and my man…. You see that big-ass hammer over there? It is not hanging there so I will bump my head into it. It is over there for other people to bump their head into. It’s simple,” threatens Frankie. “You trespass against the rules of the tunnels? You will die by the rules of the tunnels.”
While Frankie talks, he pumps up his chest. He barks simple sentences as if they were orders and commands. He puts a focus on every word and spits them out like machine gun fire. His steely blue eyes are staring at me, but not making contact. His eyes are focused on a spot behind me.
In the meantime, Ment is busy leafing through the High Times magazine I brought with me as my credentials. The magazine contains an eyewitness report I wrote about the Rwanda genocide, but Ment is more interested in the centerfold, a close-up of the bud of a marijuana plant with shiny droplets of resin.
The coffee is ready and Frankie fills up the mugs. “I’m sorry,” he says. “We are out of sugar and it’s too late to borrow some from Joe and Kathy.”
Frankie gulps down his coffee. “They call us homeless,” he starts. “But what is this?” He makes a wide gesture with his arms. “Okay, I admit, it’s not totally luxurious. But here comes the catch: no rent. See that TV? Thirty channels. Free. Electricity? We got two lines. Never saw a bill. Piece of pie with your coffee?” Frankie gets an apple pie out of the fridge and cuts big slices with a Rambo survival knife.
“If the people up top lost their fucking jobs, I swear to God, 95 percent wouldn’t know how to survive. Summers are okay, but in the winter, I tell you, it is a lotta hard work to carry big-ass jerry cans of water at ten degrees.”
Frankie looks at the floor. “Sometimes it is not easy. In the summer, when the mothers let their children play in the park. You walk past them with your shopping cart and they look at you like you are some filthy animal. It looks like they are ashamed of us. While in fact, they should be ashamed of themselves for being embarrassed with us.”
Buddy hardly opens his mouth but nods with every word Frankie says. His breath smells of cheap beer. “My man Buddy,” Frankie says and hits him on the shoulder. “He used to live in a hotel around the corner. We always went there to take a shower. Didn’t even have to knock on his door, we just came in and walked into the shower. Then Buddy got problems. Last week I saw him sleeping in a cardboard box in the park. I said: ‘Buddy, this is no good. Come live with us.’ Buddy helped us, now we help him. It’s simple. On the other hand, if someone fucks me over, I get back to him. Always. Even if I have to wait for fifteen years around the corner. Vendetta, that’s what life is all about.”
Frankie is originally from North Carolina. That’s where he got his heavy Southern accent. At sixteen, he was kicked out of high school and started a wandering existence all over the East Coast. Sometimes he had a job, other times he robbed truck drivers or broke into restaurants. He saw the inside of half a dozen penal institutions and youth correction centers.
In the end, he wound up in New York. With a few friends—“me and my crew”—they rented a small apartment on the Lower East Side. They discovered the tunnels on graffiti expeditions. When the crew broke up and lost their apartment, they hit the streets. Frankie went into the tunnels and put up a tent close to the entrance at the South End. Later on he moved half a mile deeper in the tunnel and build his shack on top of Joe’s roof.
Frankie also makes his money canning. Like Bernard, he has a steady route with supers he has befriended. In a good month, he makes a thousand dollars. “Not bad, considering that for that money I don’t have to rob anyone nor do I have to steal. Enough food for me and the dogs, some beer and smokies and once in a while a puff of Buddha.”
Ment shows Frankie the High Times. They get sentimental. Back then, in the correctional facilities and jails, they had to read the magazine in secret, and sold it to each other. They take the centerfold carefully out of the magazine and glue it to the wall with toothpaste. An old trick learned in jail, Ment says. They never had adhesive tape there.
“They should legalize that stuff,” Frankie says. “Would really make a big difference with all that bullshit we have now with crackheads. Never heard of a pot smoker who sold his shoes to score some weed in the middle of winter with two feet of snow.”
Frankie works three, four days a week. “The best is, you are self-employed. No boss telling you what, where, how, and when to do. Some people don’t see it as work. Hell, I swear to you, we are not going through the garbage for fun.”
“Especially not if you hit a diaper full of shit,” Ment adds dryly. He is playing tricks with a razor blade in his mouth. Sometimes he sticks his tongue out with the blade, then he closes his mouth and blows up his cheeks. After a few chewing movements, he sticks out an empty tongue. Then he winks and takes the blade, now sticking to his palate, out of his mouth.
“This is to give someone the one buck fifty,” Ment says swankily. I look at them puzzled. Frankie and Ment snigger over my ignorance. “They also call it the Kool-Aid Smile,” clarifies Frankie, referring to Kool-Aid’s logo of a carafe with an enormously wide grin. “You just go slash! From one ear to the other.” Frankie makes a gesture of cutting someone’s throat. “You say, here’s one fifty. Keep the change. The guy needs at least a hundred and fifty stitches.”
Frankie fills up the mugs and talks about his work. “I don’t beg from nobody. Actually, a beggar says: ‘Please, feel sorry for me.’ Not me. I’m a man, I got my pride. I never begged. It was never even necessary. Back then, before the tunnel, I had my spot in an emergency exit of the subway at Columbus Circle. Me and Lady Bug, we were sleeping in a card-board box. Lady Bug was always on my feet. And I can tell you, New Yorkers have a heart for dogs. Every evening a lady came to bring us a big-ass fucking sandwich and a can of dog food. And a twenty-dollar bill. Each evening. I tell you. Had I been there without a dog, nobody be givin’ me no shit.”
Frankie strokes Lady Bug. “Yeah, me and my dog…Always together. Sometimes we walked twenty miles in a day. When we were still living on the streets, Lady Bug never slept. She was laying flat, but kept one ear open. If she heard a strange noise, she put up that ear. And was there really something wrong? Snap! There she went. One guy once threw a rotten egg at us. Snap! Lady Bug chased that guy for twenty blocks.”
Buddy is dozing off at the couch, but when we talk about dogs, he wakes up. He used to have a dog himself. It was a purple-tongued chow-chow. The dog was run over by a car and left for dead. Buddy fixed up the dog and called her Samantha. Street name, Mookie.
“Boy, everybody on the West Side loved Mookie,” tells Buddy. “When I was living in the Hotel, Mookie was always laying in the sun on the fire escape. Her own private balcony. And when Frankie and Ment stopped by, she recognized their footsteps from far away. Scratched on the door to welcome them. Boy, Mookie could really talk to you.”
One day Mookie disappeared. Buddy thinks she was kidnapped. “She is still walking around on the West Side. A few people have spotted her. And last week a cop told me he had seen Mookie.”
When Buddy is finished talking, he falls back asleep. Frankie starts to talk again. “Me and my man Ment, we are as close as brothers. If I make a mess, Ment’s mother comes here to raise hell.” Ment nods and smiles mysteriously. He pulls a book from the shelf. It is a tag book, filled with tags—the signatures—of friend and colleague graffiti artists. Some of Ment’s old friends are no more. Killed in accidents, shot dead, died from AIDS. Others are behind bars. “Me and my crew, there are not many left anymore,” he says in a soft voice.