“I swear to God, I lost you guys,” Buddy cowers.
“Cheap bullshit excuses! You goddammit could have waited at the car,” Frankie thunders.
“How should I have known?” Buddy answers desperately. And then, in a slimy voice: “Can I still help?”
“Fuck off,” Frankie screams. “It’s too late. Just stay inside.”
Buddy must have snuck in through the park police’s parking garage. Halfway to the South End, a small door gives access to the garage. “The last time he pulls something like that,” Frankie says in a threatening voice while we pile up all the stolen wood. When we are ready and come back inside, Buddy is smoking nervously and shaking like a leaf.
“Stop shaking!” Frankie barks. “I still have a bottle of Jack Daniels, but you get nothing. Goddammit, if our man the journalist would not have been here,” Frankie slaps me on the back, “he has been carrying big-ass fucking beams all night.” Frankie slouches down on the couch and opens a can of beer.
Ment pulls off his dirty T-shirt to show me the scars from his stab wound. In sloppy capitals, CRIMINAL MIND is tattooed on his back. The scar must be right below the L, but I can’t distinguish anything. He is disappointed and pulls down his sock to show me a scar on his ankle. “Some guy freaked out in jail and stabbed me with a screwdriver,” he says coolly. Frankie in the meantime has come up with a good punishment for Buddy “You make sure there is money on the table tomorrow, goddammit,” he yells. “Five, six dollars, some food, and dog food as well. Just walk my route and do all the plastics and cans. And don’t even try to come back without money. Or your clothes will be packed up in a box outside on the dog cage.”
Buddy is whining like a small kid. Frankie and Ment walk me out when I leave. They thank me again for my help. “No problem,” I say modestly.
At breakfast I tell Bernard about the evening. He gets angry. “That Frankie! The guy is not even twenty-five, but he’s already seen every prison from the inside. Crooks and thieves, that’s what they are. They got criminal minds.” Bernard probably never saw Ment’s tattoo and doesn’t realize how right he is.
“One time they came walking up the tunnel and I asked them what they were doing here. ‘Oh, just taking a stroll to Harlem,’ they told me. Bullshit! No way two white boys can hang out there safely. Later it turned out that Tony was missing a pile of books and a TV. I tell you, Dune, this guy Ment is gonna bring trouble in the tunnel.”
Chris Pape also made the connection between Ment, Frankie and problems. “The two of them together…” he once sighed. “Looks like they have an irresistible attraction for problems. Trouble magnets, that’s what they are.” Kathy also shared her concerns about Ment. “Seems like his middle name is trouble,” she once told me.
Bernard’s scolding of Frankie and Ment merges seamlessly into a sermon about the Kool-Aid Kid. “This idiot. A whole dozen eggs disappeared. Had not one myself. And then this fool Tony trying to calm me down: ‘C’mon B., can’t be that bad…’ Why in hell does Tony play public defender for the Kid? This has never happened before! The other day I told the Kid that he was driving me to a point where I was gonna crash his skull with a crowbar and bury him right behind the garbage pile. Fuck it! I’m gonna poison him. Goddammit, this time I’m gonna do it for real.”
This is the third time that Bernard has said he’s going to kill the Kid. Still, when the Kid sits with us at the fireplace, Bernard is always very friendly and hospitable. Bernard pours tea and farts loudly. “Hey, a good sign. That fruit basket is working. I feel my guts turning again.” Yesterday I’d given him a few pounds of grapes, oranges, and bananas because he’d been feeling weak for a few days. It was the flu season, and a night of crack smoking with Manny did not help.
Joe and Kathy also felt unwell, and cancelled their appointment for the umpteenth time. I’d been to their door a few dozen times, but every time they had a different excuse. Joe has to go out and work, or Kathy has to see a doctor. Other times they just don’t answer, even though I know they are inside. Bernard can’t mediate, because it is clear that the folks at the South End don’t like him too much.
Bernard withdraws to discharge himself, and comes back clearly feeling relieved. He continues cursing Frankie. “I told Frankie last time: ‘Man, I don’t have a problem with you, just got too much burial space.’” Bernard lights a cigarette.
“And then there is something else with that guy.” He is silent for a moment. “I don’t know if I should tell you…” he pours another cup of tea and looks at the fire…I am overwhelmed by curiosity. Finally Bernard tells the story.
“It is about Donny and Ricky. They were lovers and lived together in a wooden shack at the Southern End. Donny died last year of AIDS. Frankie visited Ricky once and they had a fight. Thing went out of control…” Tony has joined us at the fire and listens attentively. “Ricky is buried somewhere here in the tunnel,” Bernard concludes. Tony nods and confirms the story. “The point is, they’re not mean, but stupid,” he says.
Bernard gets up and leaves. “If someone is asking for me, tell them I moved to fucking Sarajevo!”
Later that evening I knock at Bernard’s door. Amicably, he invites me to enter. The crack pipes are finished and put away, and he pours me a cup of orange juice.
Agitated, Bernard tells me he was approached by a social worker. He was parked with a big four-wheel-drive at the playground by the Northern Gate. “The guy was giving me this sweet-talk like ‘We are here to help you, we can get you an apartment’ and all that bullshit. Fuck it, an apartment! Some rat hole, he meant. And then he dares to tell me: ‘You got a problem? We can put you in rehab.’ Really, Duke, what a fucking insult! You should have seen his eyes. This guy was obviously high himself!”
The social worker didn’t know that drugs and addiction are sensitive subjects for Bernard. “I was just going to the store to cash three bags of cans,” Bernard continues, “Do I look like I got a problem? If I was a real junkie, I would have shaken him of that fancy leather coat he was wearing. And then he said he was from Brooklyn. The fact that he is from there tells you the whole thing is bullshit. Don’t they have any problems down there?”
I recognize Do-Gooder Galindez from Bernard’s description, a social worker working for the community center a few blocks down the road. I had bumped into Galindez a few weeks ago while I was trying to enter the Northern Gate. “Poor souls,” he spoke softly while pulling out a baloney sandwich from his coat pocket. “It’s no life down there. Are you hungry?”
I told him I did not like baloney, but Galindez had already jumped out of his car. He had a small hunchback; his two frog eyes stared at me through heavy glasses. He asked me about life down in the tunnels. I broke out laughing and had to confess I was just a reporter living there. Suddenly his attitude changed. His well-meaning but condescending demeanor changed into something conspiratorial. From victim I had turned into partner. Four times he had tried to approach the tunnel people without much luck. He did not dare to go down himself. I suspected access to the tunnel people had become an object of prestige at his work. A few days later, I visited Galindez at his office.
I wanted to know more about his work, and thought maybe I could give him some good advice on what the tunnel people really needed. I had been living for three days in the tunnel, and I was dirty and smelly. In the waiting room, I bummed a cigarette from a homeless person. When Galindez took me to his office, he complimented me on how perfectly undercover and discreet I was. I did not get it. But a week later I made the mistake of calling the center and telling the operator that I was the tunnel reporter that had stopped by earlier. Galindez came raging onto the line: I had spoiled everything by exposing my real identity. Since then I’d left the do-gooder to his secret agenda.