Early in the evening I return to the tunnel. I put a couple of branches I found in the park near the fireplace. The pans are empty; the grill is cold. No stew in sight. Bernard is scraping crack pipes in his shack. That was the money for the groceries.
“Tomorrow we will cook that stew,” Bernard says bluntly. “Today I didn’t feel like it. Are you hungry? I will make something else.”
I have already made a fire when Bernard joins me. He is in a foul mood and looks haughtily at the branches under the grill. “How often do I have to say it? The wood from the park is worthless. Way too damp. We are not camping out.”
He looks disapprovingly at the huge crackling fire. “You will never make boy scouts. Look, this is the way to do it.” Bernard grabs a few plastic bags and bottles from behind him and pushes them with a poker onto the burning wood. First an enormous acrid plume of smoke develops, then five-foot flames light up the tunnel.
He gets a can from behind him, and throws its contents along with some water into a pot. Once it boils, he adds some salt and pepper. “We need a new grill,” he says. In the middle, the bars are burnt through and the coffee pot nearly falls through the opening.
Bernard serves dinner on orange plastic plates. With my flashlight I can see a gray, crumby substance. “Dehydrated potato slices, Marcus gave me a huge can this afternoon.” I take a bite. It tastes like wet cardboard. “You want ketchup?” Bernard grabs a few small, dirty plastic bags. I wipe off the dust and ashes with my napkin and see it’s indeed little bags of McDonald’s tomato ketchup. Drenched in ketchup, the food is just eatable.
“Marcus played some flute for the crew,” Bernard tells me. “He performed a special composition that he called the ‘Carrot Juice Symphony.’” Bernard takes another serving; I kindly refuse, and go up top to eat a Cheese Burger Deluxe.
Later in the evening I come back. The streetlights in the park are off, so the tunnel is now completely dark. I will never feel at ease in the tunnel. Walking the five blocks underground to Bernard’s camp is just scary. Especially since tonight I am not on my rattling bike, so I can hear all the strange sounds that resonate through the darkness. Car lights shine now and then through the emergency exits, creating weird patterns and shades of light on the tunnel walls. It even looks like the Mona Lisa opposite Marcus’ place smiles differently at me. I once asked Bernard if he was ever afraid of the tunnels. “Why?” he had asked surprised. “It is safer here than up top.”
But I always feel like a very muggable person with all my expensive cameras under my coat. On the other hand, no tunnel dweller I know will harass me. I trust everybody, except Jeff who is actually pretty harmless. Still, I always expect some bogeyman with a big bat to jump out of the darkness behind the row of pillars halfway to Bernard’s camp.
My flashlight is shining on the ground. My heart jumps a beat when I nearly step on a rat. I look closer, it is dead, nearly mummified, and with its tail in an elegant curl. The flat rat must have been here for some time, but I never noticed him.
At the camp there is a big fire. It is the Kool-Aid Kid, burning up all the wood I brought today from the park. It was not that damp after all. The kid has three pans on the fire. Pretty gutsy to cook a three-course meal with our wood.
I try to talk with him. No results in English, a combination of French and Spanish works better. I gather from incoherent sentences that he works in a clothing store in Harlem. Strange story.
“Yummy, yummy, good food,” I say, rubbing my stomach and pointing at the pans. The Kool-Aid Kid smiles and lifts the lids. Franks are frying in one pan, in another pot the Kid is cooking bananas. He offers me a cup of the hot chocolate that is simmering in the third pot. I kindly decline and go to bed. Tomorrow is the big day, when I will interview Tony. He has finally agreed, and we only have to negotiate a price.
The next day, Tony is having trouble getting up and I bring a cup of coffee and cigarettes to him in bed. His bunker is right between mine and Bernard’s, but a little behind us in a small alley, between piles of garbage and boxes that I can hardly squeeze myself through.
Inside, I nearly get lost in the enormous quantity of sweaters, coats and shirts hanging on coat hangers from the ceiling. On the floor are clean-picked chicken bones and saucers with milk and cat food. When my eyes get adjusted to the darkness, I see Tony lying on a mattress on the floor, two cats snoring next to him on the pillow.
A little late, when we all have breakfast at the grill, we discuss the cats. Blacky, Tony’s favorite cat, disappeared a few days ago. “He is hanging a block down against the wall,” Bernard says with a mouth full of oatmeal. “Splashed and flattened. Must have been hit by a train.”
Tony pours himself some more coffee. “Jezus, how the fuck could that happen?” he mumbles. “I mean, the cats are fucking scared of the trains.” Bernard shrugs his shoulders. “Who knows? Maybe it was chasing a rat.”
On our way out, Tony and I negotiate over the price of the interview. I carefully explain to him that unfortunately I don’t have the time to write a bestseller about him. My story is about the tunnel in general, where he is not the main character, but still a very prominent one. A hundred-thousand-dollar advance is too much, I tell him. How about I treat him to a big breakfast up top? And, of course, a pack of Marlboros and ten dollars as compensation for his valuable time.
Tony is disappointed, but as we leave the Northern Gate, he agrees. “Okay, I am making an exception for you because you are also living down here.”
It is a beautiful December day. In the park, squirrels are jumping all around and people are jogging with chests bare. Mothers with strollers send frightened looks at Tony as he pushes his rattling shopping cart full of junk over the park tracks. They hold extra tight to their children.
Tony nods amicably at them, and tells me that he is on probation for life. One misdemeanor, however small, and he goes straight back to jail. That’s why, for years, he hasn’t even jumped a turnstile and always gets a token for the subway. His probation officer is not supposed to know he lives in a tunnel. From a legal point of view, all tunnel people are breaking the law while they are trespassing on Amtrak’s private property.
Officially, Tony lives with his sister on the Lower East Side. That is also why I can’t photograph him recognizably. Once he got in trouble when they saw him in a TV documentary on the tunnels; he managed to talk his way out of it by telling the probation officer that the man in the movie was just one of the many body doubles he has in New York.
I want to take Tony to a fancy place on Broadway where they serve a big brunch. But Tony takes me to his favorite spot, a no-smoking fast food joint with Formica tables where they serve breakfast at the counter on plastic plates.
He parks his cart in the middle of the sidewalk in front of the big windows. “Chain your bike to my cart,” he says. “Safer is not possible.” Tony enters the place and orders two breakfasts in Spanish with grand gestures.
We take a table at the window and Tony points at his cart blocking the sidewalk. Pedestrians nearly bump into it, and their coats get caught in the aluminum picture frames that are sticking out. “Nobody dares to touch my cart,” Tony says proudly. “They all know me here on Broadway.”
Tony starts to tell me how he wound up in the tunnels. As an ex-convict who served his time, he has the right to get housing through a program called Section 8. But Tony has been on the waiting list for a few years. “I wound up in the shelter. Crazy dangerous. You get killed there faster than on the streets. You can’t sleep in peace, there are always some guys sneaking around you. They steal your pants from your ass. I heard about the tunnel and built a little shack on the South End. But when the trains started to run, I had to leave there. Bernard offered me a spot in his camp. It is okay there. But a real house would be nice. Just returning home at the eve and putting your key in the door…”