Bernard has to laugh when I tell him the story. He shows me a pair of expensive gloves, a present from Galindez. “They were laying on the dashboard,” Bernard says. “I told him, if you really want to help me, gimme the gloves, keep the sermon, and fuck off! And if you want to do some good deeds, whatever, do your deeds, but leave us alone. God has it on tape. They don’t care about the people,” Bernard continues. “Really, they don’t give a shit. They care about themselves and their jobs. All those flimflam artists, they give me nothing but a big-ass headache!”
Bernard has heated up: “Everybody wants to give you all of this. Man, I have been living here for eight years. I know how to do it. We are not homeless; we got shelter here. And a lot of folks are envious. We don’t have to punch in that time clock every morning.”
10. A RAT CALLED MOUSE
“I was lying on the couch watching TV when I saw this rat walking on this beam against the wall,” Frankie tells me.
“And then I grabbed my big-ass sledgehammer and smashed the small-ass motherfucker,” I think he is going to say. But Frankie has recently developed a tolerant attitude towards the nasty rodents. “This crazy-ass rat, he looked me straight in the eyes, he said peep, and went his own way. You see, if you don’t bother the rats, they won’t bother you.”
I’m having coffee over at Frankie’s place. Kathy has just walked in and she is chain-smoking menthols. The TV is tuned to Oprah Winfrey, but all we see are hazy orange and green streaks. Sometimes we vaguely discern Oprah’s purple head. Now and then, Frankie slams his fist on the TV set, Oprah changes the color of her skin, and general reception remains lousy. It is also impossible to hear what she is saying, so we wind up discussing rats.
The night before, rats visited me for the first time, so I also had something to say about the subject. The rats started to crawl in one corner of my bunker, but soon they were under the bed, and occasionally even ventured across the blankets and my pillow. Chasing them away didn’t do much good, and I was in for a night of horror.
“Take Linda with you one night,” Bernard advised me the next morning when I complained about my sleepless night over breakfast. “She will take care of it. And I don’t wanna say it over and over again,” Bernard chided me as a small child, “never leave food in your room.” Upon inspection, I found the rats had eaten a bag of stale cookies I had thrown under the bed. A tiny piece of plastic wrapping paper was all that was left.
Tony once told me he was having problems with rats in his bunker. Out of necessity, he befriended one of them and started calling his new pet Mouse. The rat slept on Tony’s pillow and soon learned all kinds of tricks. He could jump up on two feet and grab a piece of chicken that Tony would hold in the air. “Boy, Mouse could raise hell if I didn’t feed him on time,” Tony says softly. “When he was hungry at night, he would crawl over my face and start pulling my sideburns. Then I would have to get up and give him a saucer of milk.” Poor sweet Mouse didn’t live to see a happy ending. The ferocious Linda devoured him.
“You gotta keep friends with the rats,” Frankie continues. Once in a while, he puts bowls with bread soaked in scrambled eggs outside. “It’s damn simple,” Frankie explains with his irrefutable logic. “If they can’t find food outside, they will come inside to get it.”
Kathy and Joe are never troubled by rats, because they keep thirty cats in their bunker. But unlike Frankie, Joe sees the rats as an enemy to be annihilated. Every once in a while, he baits the area with rat poison, which he mixes into meatballs. Joe uses extra strong rat poison, not the weak stuff used by the park police up top.
“Most rats have grown resistant to that stuff,” Kathy says. “They eat it just like M&M’s. It only kills the baby rats.” She whispers it, as if she feels really sorry the war on rats is also taking innocent lives. Silently she extinguishes another menthol in the ashtray.
Kathy was an afterthought in a family of six. All her brothers and sisters somehow wound up as decent hardworking citizens all across the nation. With Kathy, things took a different turn. After one year in college, she dropped out and took a job as a secretary in midtown. But she suffered a nervous breakdown, and eventually couldn’t afford her downtown apartment anymore. She moved into a tiny place on the West Side with her disabled mother. While walking her mother in her wheelchair, she met Joe who was selling books at Broadway. The two started meeting every day, and their chats became longer and friendlier. Eventually, they fell in love and got married, and Kathy moved in with Joe. The two of them are hard to talk to. Kathy is shy and suspicious of strangers who approach her; Joe is both reticent and grumpy. It is only here, at Frankie’s place, that Kathy feels at ease and opens up to me.
I’m wondering what happened to Buddy. “As a matter of fact, I kicked him out,” Frankie explains. “Couldn’t stand the sucker no more. No respect for the rules. He’s sleeping now in a cardboard box in the park.”
There are few rules in the tunnel, but those that do exist are simple and self-evident. Nobody can violate them without being excommunicated or worse, being first beaten up and then kicked out. Simple rules. Respect each other’s privacy. Help each other a little bit whenever necessary and/or possible. Do not steal each other’s property. Show at least some form of consideration. “If you don’t live by the rules of the tunnel… It’s simple. You gonna die by the rules of the tunnel,” Frankie had explained to me once in a deep voice. Buddy had indeed violated all the rules. He never went out to get water, never brought money back home, or even food for that matter. He was just gulping down beers, hanging out in front of the TV, and generally being an unreliable person and a rude loudmouth.
“It happened a week ago when we were all down with the flu,” Frankie explains. “I was lying on the bed, feeling weak and sick. I asked him, ‘Buddy, can you take a turn to get water?’ Now, this drunk asshole started to create a scene. I told him to shut the fuck up and get water. Goddamn, the most natural thing to do. When I’m getting water, I always take some jerry cans for Joe along. Joe is getting old. You can’t expect him to carry those ten-gallon containers all the way down.”
“That’s right,” says Kathy and she lights up another cigarette. “Soon Joe will be fifty-four years old. Nineteen years he spent in the tunnel.”
Frankie goes on: “Buddy went ballistic. Started to scream. It was just too much. I grabbed the motherfucker and kicked him outta the door. If it wasn’t for Ment who cooled me down I would have thrown him off the roof. And all his clothes, I just tossed them behind his dirty ass.”
“No good, the idiot. One night, Joe came in to borrow the ball cutter. He had lost his keys and wanted to cut through his lock.” Frankie shows me the ball cutter. It’s a gigantic pair of pliers with a sharp cutting edge of titanium. With this machine, Frankie can always cut through the chains the park police put on the gates.
“They got the locks, we got the cutters,” Frankie proudly smiles. “But all right. This is the deaclass="underline" when I need something and I ain’t got it, and Joe he’s got it, he gives it to me. And of course the other way around. But Buddy freaked out. He started to yell at Joe. And you just don’t do that to Joe.”