Frankie shows me graffiti high on the pillars and metal beams of the ceiling. Ment and his crew made them. They must have performed neck-breaking acrobatics to get there, but that is exactly how graffiti artists earn respect.
Ment has suddenly disappeared. Using an emergency ladder, he has climbed onto the viaduct that’s under construction, and is walking around looking for the loot he will throw down. After fifteen minutes, giant sheets come falling down from the five-story-high overpass.
“Stay clear,” Frankie warns, “this will cut you right in two.” Then a few sheets of plastic and insulation float down. We wait for more stuff, and Frankie points at the apartment buildings on the other side. One of them is the hotel where Buddy used to live. Top floor, all the way to the right was his room. “God, I wish I was back there….” Buddy sighs, shivering from the cold.
Buddy used to be a night watchman, but he lost his job due to drinking in particular, and being unreliable in general. He couldn’t afford the hotel anymore and wound up on the streets.
Ment has come down and reports his findings. Too bad: the stack of sheets is gone. Maybe the construction workers used them to make casings.
We walk around the building site hoping to find other useful material. It is a poor harvest, just some beams and a few small plywood sheets.
Ment looks temptedly at a bulldozer. He wants to climb in and start it up. “So I can push out all the garbage in front of our house,” he says. “It has become a lot dirtier since I left.” Compared with Bernard’s, it is indeed a filthy mess at Frankie’s. In front of their home is a big stinking pile of household garbage mixed with dog shit. Rats rummage through it. Their toilet is only ten meters from the bunkers, but contrary to Bernard’s hole that he keeps covered with sand like a cat, they leave their shit outside and the ground is strewn with soiled toilet paper.
Ment decides to leave the bulldozer; in the distance we see the lighted shack of the night watch. We carry the wood to Joe’s cart and make a last round. On the bank of the Hudson is a strange metal construction between decaying and sinking piers. It is a high bridge, to load and unload barges. Like a tourist guide, Frankie shows me around the old desolate harbor that must be a paradise for industrial archeologists.
“This was the biggest commodity terminal of New York State,” he says solemnly. “Warehouses, railways, cranes, it was a coming and going of trucks, barges and trains. We’re talking the 1900s now,” he adds, to complete the picture of the turn of the century. I can imagine the chaotic and busy ant heap of carriers, porters, and dock-workers, of horse carts, sailing boats, and big black smoking locomotives.
Ment invites me to climb the loading dock and together we scale the narrow staircase with its rusting and rotting steps, holding onto a shaky banister.
“Hello, anybody home?” Ment screams a few times when we are nearly to the top. Sometimes a homeless man sleeps in the engine room, and we don’t want to startle him. He might kick us off the stairs. Nobody answers and we enter the engine room. It has a leaking tin roof, the floor consists of rusting beams and a heavy pulley. In the middle there is nothing, just a gaping black hole. On a couple of planks balancing on the rusty beams is a mattress and a few bags of clothes, a little saucer with milk—for a cat maybe—and a pair of rollerblades.
As on a tight rope, we carefully walk over the rusty beams. If the man gets out on the wrong side of bed, he will tumble down three stories of rusty beams, protruding nails, and pieces of wire mesh into the cold river. Maybe that has already happened. In the corner there is a bucket used as a toilet. Not really necessary, since there is not even a floor.
Ment takes me across some narrow beams and shows me the outside, where he has sprayed his tag. To make the piece, Ment had to balance on a one-inch ridge while another crewmember held onto his other hand.
We watch the skyline of the city. The Empire State Building towers majestically above all the others, and is bathed in green and red, the traditional Christmas lighting. Huge new apartment buildings are slowly popping up along the West Side Highway. It is a new project of Trump to revitalize the downtrodden West Side. The loading bridge we are in now will probably be demolished sooner or later to make room for a building with a generic name like “Hudson View.”
Ment stares dreamily at the skyline and admits he told me some little white lies. In fact, he was in jail for a year and a half. But because they moved him to different institutions, in a way his story of a long trip in upstate New York was true. And don’t tell anybody, but he’s actually a wanted man now. He was allowed a weekend out of jail for good behavior, but he never went back. And by the way, Kathy and Joe are not his real parents. That was meant purely as a metaphor. His real father died a long time ago. His mother, who works on the West Side as a secretary, kicked him out because he was such a nuisance. Sometimes they still meet.
Back down on the ground, we drag the collected wood to the car. Buddy says he has to take a piss and he disappears behind some trees. He doesn’t come back. “The asshole,” Frankie swears while dragging the heavy beams. “Gone again.” Ment in the meantime has found a huge wooden box that would make a great dining table.
Together, we put the box on Ment’s shoulders, who staggers like an Atlas inside the tunnel. He groans under the heavy weight and finally throws the box on the cart. He bends over from the backache, an old stab wound starts hurting again
Frankie also suffers: “Fucking big-ass splinter. I’ll kill that Buddy!” With a flashlight, we remove an inch-long splinter from Frankie’s thumb.
A black man walks towards us. It’s Clarence, who lives near the tunnel entrance behind a few sheets of plywood. Clarence is nearly crying and hugs Frankie. “Just heard I got the Monster…” he sobs. “I can kiss my black ass goodbye… Must have happened with that blood transfusion a few years ago…”
“We call it The Monster,” explains Frankie, “because we are all scared as hell of it. And fuckin’ easy to catch…Like the bogey man or Dracula when we were kids. But AIDS is real. My God, I’ve lost so many friends to The Monster…” Clarence introduces himself and gives me a firm handshake.
“Don’t worry. You can’t get it from shaking hands,” he says, spreading a heavy smell of alcohol. After hearing the bad news, he must have seriously hit the bottle. Frankie gives the wobbling man advice. “Better get welfare and get the hell outta here before the winter starts. If it gets really cold, you won’t survive here. One bout of pneumonia and you are gone.” Clarence mumbles something incomprehensible and pulls two giant bullets out of his coat pocket, anti-aircraft caliber.
“They are live,” he says shaking the bullets. We can hear the gun powder move inside the cartridge. Clarence wants to throw one against the wall.
“Don’t play with this shit, man!” Ment says, frightened. “It’s a felony carrying one of those,” Frankie adds. Clarence says that he threw one yesterday against a metal pillar. “It went BAM!” he laughs. “The bullet ricocheted to all sides.” It is impossible to have a reasonable talk with Clarence, and we take off.
It is difficult to push the car back over the tracks, since now it is loaded with a few hundred pounds of wood, plastic sheeting and insulation piled on top. Every time we push the car forward, something falls off or the little wheels derail. Instead of making a lighter load and doing two trips, Frankie and Ment stubbornly try to pile up the wood different ways. When the handle breaks, Frankie swears at Buddy.
“The filthy asshole always pulls these kinda tricks. Dirty-ass snitch. That’s what we say in prison. Snitches get stitches. There is a reason he’s missing his front teeth. Someone kicked them out because he talks too much.” We unload Joe’s big car and drag the wood a few blocks up to Frankie’s small carts. Sweating and cursing, we manage finally to get everything home. Upstairs, the light is on. “You are disgusting!” screams Frankie even before he enters. Inside is Buddy in his dirty socks, watching TV.