“Frankie, still the same little prick. Big mouth, small heart.” Frankie came a few weeks ago knocking on Bernard’s door. After too much drinking, Joe got his flashbacks again and thought Frankie was Vietcong. He had threatened Frankie with a baseball bat. “Our macho comes running here for twenty blocks and cries and begs me for help, Bernard says sarcastically. Bernard and Kathy managed to calm Joe down.
Frankie’s buddy Ment was hauled back to jail. On a nice sunny day, he was hanging out in the park with some friends and having a beer. Some cops in a patrol car drove by, they rolled down their window, just to ask about a fugitive who had been spotted in the park. Ment panicked and ran away. In a few minutes, the cops got him and found out he was on the run as well.
How about Marcus? “Still as crazy as the Mad Hatter,” Bernard replies. “The idiot gets five hundred bucks of welfare every month, but never got the idea to get a new lock for the gate. That’s up to me to take care of. And every month the same thing. When he gets his money, he is gone for three, four days. Partying.”
Bernard also has had to deal with vandalism, a new plague from up top. During school holidays, adventurous school kids venture into the tunnel with spray cans. Among graffiti artists, it is a code of honor not to spray on someone else’s work, but a few pieces by Chris Pape have been defaced with sloppy tags. “The kids of today,” he grumbles. “No respect for anything.” Bernard plays the bogeyman now and tells the kids that the tunnel is inhabited by murderous crackheads and sadistic pedophiles. “You should see them run,” he laughs.
The coffee is ready and he pours me a steaming cup. Dramatically he raises his hands above him towards the grate. “Oh my God. Why are you sending me all these morons who only disturb my peace of mind?” Then he turns around and tells me: “I am completely fed up being the only responsible guy between a bunch of infantile imbeciles. And this time I am goddamn fucking serious.”
Bernard tells me his plans to leave the tunnel are becoming concrete. The first step is to get all his papers together and get onto welfare. Maybe he can go to a cheap hotel, maybe the coalition can arrange something.
Bernard is already participating in the newest coalition experiment: a few hundred homeless people have been given voicemail numbers. The experiment has been successfuclass="underline" homeless people can escape from their isolation; some of them have even found jobs.
We take a look at Bob’s bunker and assess the damage. We have to board up the windows again. No big deal, Bernard has a hammer and plenty of nails. Inside, not much has changed: the piss bottles are still there, only their contents have thickened a bit. A new layer of ashes and dust, fallen from the ceiling, has formed on my worktable. The small whiskey bottles I used as candleholders have not moved a millimeter. Bob has been back a few times, but he only sits on the couch using the little coffee table that is again filled with drug paraphernalia. And I see to my surprise that Bob has taken over my habit of folding the blanket neatly in a square. I say goodbye to Bernard. A few days later I will return to repair the bunker and settle in again.
I am trying to reach Mary from the Coalition. I start to understand their phone system and manage to reach an operator. Mary just stepped out, I am told, Mary is in a meeting, Mary will be back in a moment. Mary this, Mary that. After half a dozen calls, I start to count. I have already written her a polite letter explaining that I have spent some months living in the tunnel, and that I am now doing research on organizations that help the homeless.
After calling for the forty-seventh time, I am fed up. I show up at the office. The operator is now doing crossword puzzles. She has the same bored look on her face; it turns a bit dirty when I explain to her that it seemed easier to stop by in person after making forty-seven phone calls in vain.
When I tell her I am from Brussels, she gives me a puzzled look. I have to explain to her that Denmark is not the capital of Brussels, but that I am from the Kingdom of Belgium, which happens to be in Europe. “You know,” I add. “That continent on the other side of the ocean.”
Behind the annoyed operator is the employee schedule, a big whiteboard with the initials of all staff members. White magnetic disks provide the reason for absenteeism. I see four discs with “sick,” two “holiday” discs, one “to the bank” disc, two “in a meeting” discs, one “jury duty” disc, three “lunch” discs, two “out in the field” discs. Mary B. is not absent. Actually, in a few minutes she will be up front, I am told.
The few minutes have turned into an hour before Mary Brosnahan appears. She has decided to give me only ninety seconds. She doesn’t have a press kit, just a carelessly designed flier about the Coalition. She confirms that there is a program to find alternative housing for the tunnel people. The program has been initiated by some secretary for housing. The secretary has appointed ten organizations to execute the pilot program. Which organizations, Mary doesn’t know. Someone in the HPD, the New York City Department of Housing, Preservation, and Development has the list. Who exactly, she can’t tell me. She does know the name of the secretary, but just like Margaret, she has the annoying habit of pronouncing the name too fast to be intelligible. She sloppily jots it down with manifest reluctance.
“Do you want to go down?” Mary asks. She has not understood that I have already lived “down” there for a few months, and that I don’t need an introduction. Her face brightens up when I explain this to her. She tells me she is getting tired of journalists who approach the coalition to be introduced to the mole people.
“We are having a lot of problems,” she confides. “It takes us a long time to gain the confidence of a tunnel dweller, and suddenly a slick journalist enters the tunnel and pretends he works for us or has spoken to me. ‘I’m cool, I spoke with Mary.’ And there goes the confidence that we worked so carefully on.”
A New York Times article explains a lot. It is November 1994, and Henry Cisneros, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, descends into the dark caves of the subway tunnels. He steps on used needles and human excrement. A rat nearly crawls up his pants. The secretary shivers, and nearly falls on the third rail with its lethal six hundred volts.
Secretary Cisneros is not on his own. Charles King and Keith Cylar, directors of Housing Works, an organization that caters to HIV-positive homeless, are guiding him around. A lot of their clients originate from down in the tunnels.
Cisneros is shocked. He asks a tunnel person how he could help him. He gets a simple answer: “Do you have a room for me?”
“We all ought to be ashamed that there are Americans that have no better place to live than with filth and 100-year-old dust,” Cisneros declares the next day in the Times.
Cisneros throws in nine million dollars and 250 Section 8 vouchers. Section 8 is a federal program that provides subsidized or free housing for a very small percentage of the poor, as well as for emergency cases, helping victims of natural disasters or wounded war veterans.
Of the few dozen organizations in New York that cater to the homeless, the Secretary has chosen seven that will distribute the vouchers. They have been selected on the basis of their experience with the underground homeless. Among those appointed to take care of the Amtrak tunnel are Housing Works, the Bowery Residents Committee, whose outspoken director Eric Roth I would meet later, and Project Renewal.
The Coalition is not among them; they specialize in lobbying for the legal interests of the homeless. They have a tough reputation on this: in 1993, the Coalition sued the city when they wanted to make it illegal to panhandle in the subway. The Coalition said the prohibition went against the Fifth Amendment. The city won the case. In a new case, the coalition is suing the Amtrak police for using excessive force to kick homeless people out of Penn Station.[4]
4
Center for Constitutional Rights,