“Maybe you are right,” I say.
“You bet,” he says. “I have to go now. Gotta bust some cans.”
Frankie is not home, and I continue towards the South End. At the entrance, José, a big Puerto Rican man, is lounging in a garden chair. A refreshing breeze is blowing through the tunnel; outside it is over a hundred degrees. I wave to José, but he gives me the finger and takes a sip of vodka from the bottle resting within arms length. José is still angry because I took his photo once without asking. I tried several times to make up, but with no success. Too bad. Can’t be friends with everybody.
A little bit deeper in the tunnels is Little Havana. I am curious to see how Ramon, the former Marxist-Leninist professor, is doing. Maybe he is still in rehab, maybe he’s back in the tunnel. A light is burning in his old house, and I knock on the door.
“Ramon no está aquí,” someone says. After a few noises, a nervous man with a bat in his hands opens the door. It is Estoban, the unwashed Cuban with the big beard, looking just as bad as before. He still remembers me and we chat a little, but he is clearly not at ease. Looks like I interrupted him in something.
From out of nowhere, a small guy suddenly pops up.
He has a crew cut, a mustache and an aggressive expression in his brown, glassy eyes. “Who the fuck are you?” he says with hostility. I explain who I am. It’s only when I tell him that I stay in Bernard’s camp, that he starts to become friendly and introduces himself as Julio.
“We just finished working and are taking a break,” he says. “We still have to clean ourselves up. Come back in an hour, then we have all the time to talk.”
Estoban is sitting on a stretcher, Julio on an icebox when I return later. They offer me a plastic garden chair. Little Havana consists of five wooden shacks around a small open space, like a village square. Two kittens play on a table piled with groceries. “Our new kitties,” Julio says proudly. “They are called Peluza and Sin Nombre.” The cat without a name jumps on his lap. Bernard gave the kittens to Estoban and Julio. They are Linda’s babies.
Little Havana is built on top of, and nearly swamped by, garbage. Rats crawl around in the filth. Julio is questioning me, and I tell him about my travels and show him a High Times magazine with an article I wrote about the genocide in Rwanda. He slowly reads it aloud and I have to explain what genocide means. He shakes his head when I tell him about the mass killings. “Wow…That sucks…”
After a lot more questions, I pass the test. Julio has approved of me. Now we have to talk about compensation. Moviemaker Marc Singer also pays him to help to carry lights and heavy batteries. Soon, we have reached an agreement of fifteen bucks a day. Then I can take photos of him and question him about tunnel life. If it is easier, I can also pay in beer and cigarettes. Julio immediately asks for an advance, and sends Estoban out to get “a couple of brewskies.”
“I want to know who I am dealing with,” Julio explains. “Most reporters here have no respect for our privacy. They think they can just come here, walk over and take a few pictures. Then they go and we never see them back again. And they leave us in our shit.”
Estoban returns with a six-pack of Country Club, a cheap but strong beer full off all kinds of artificial additives. Officially, it is not even called beer, but malt liquor. Estoban gives me back exact change. Julio puts a can to his lips and gulps down nearly an entire pint.
“It’s fucked up. We are dumped as garbage. We live from garbage and we are treated as garbage. Forgotten and ignored by the world.” He takes a second gulp of beer and throws the empty can over his shoulder. “Nobody is accepting empty Country Club cans,” he explains. Only the two-for-oners uptown in Harlem will take them.
Julio is twenty-six and has already been homeless for five years. He was born in a Puerto Rican family in the Bronx, but as a kid he grew up on the island. At high school age, he moved back with his father to the U.S., to a town in upstate New York. “And there my life started to fall apart. Crack and coke. The same old story.”
Julio opens another brewsky. “When they came out with the slogan ‘Crack Kills!’…I tell you, that’s not exaggerated. Selling your fucking underwear for a hit…Some people could control their use. I couldn’t.” Julio says he hasn’t used for a year. “I had to stop ‘cause I got heart problems. Woke up one morning and my heart was booming crazy. Thought my chest would explode.”
The sun is setting and the pillars at the South End bake in a warm, orange glow. Somewhere in the tunnel, a blackbird starts to sing. “There she is,” Julio says, and points me at the bird that sits high on top of a T-beam. Julio whistles a few tones and the bird responds. “Same thing every day at this hour. And each morning she awakes me with the same song.”
Julio opens his third pint of Country Club. A thundering train rolls by and shakes the houses. Little Havana is only ten meters from an active track.
“Assholes from Amtrak,” says Julio when he is audible again above the noise. “They can’t just kick us out and bulldoze our homes?” Then he stares at the ground and shakes his head. “Rats, dust, dirt, diesel fumes, what a fucking place to live.”
Behind us we hear the rustling of a plastic bag. “Filthy animals!” screams Julio and kicks a big, square bag. Two rats jump out. He takes the bag and inspects the contents. Records of Beethoven, Mozart and Tchaikovsky. Luckily, the rats have not nibbled on the covers. “We deal in records, books, and cans,” Julio explains. They find the books and records in the garbage; a lot of literary critics and book reviewers live on the liberal Upper West Side and they get swamped in review copies. Some supers set the books apart to help the homeless. Depending on the quality, a book or record can make anywhere from ten cents to a dollar at the booksellers who have their stands at Broadway.
An old man with a gray hat joins us. Julio introduces him as Getulio, “our kitchen chef.” The man gives me a weak handshake. He has dark bags under his sad eyes. Getulio is also from Cuba. He speaks better English than Estoban, but he is the silent type. He withdraws into the kitchen, a shack behind us with an electric stove and a cupboard full of pans.
“Most of the time we cook here. Sometimes we get Chinese take out,” Julio tells me. “Only when we’re really down and out, we go to a soup kitchen in the neighborhood. We are like a small family here. We take care of each other; we share our food and money. Sometimes we have our quarrels. About stupid things, beer or water. Frankie came over last week to harass us. He told us that we are a bunch of dirty crackheads and that it is because of us that we are all getting kicked out. Fuck him.”
A young white man is walking towards us. “Marcy boy!” Julio yells out loudly. “Join us for a beer, man.” It is Marc Singer, the British documentary maker. Politely he refuses the beer that Julio is offering him. Marc has finished shooting, but still comes now and then to see how everybody is doing. Especially after the new developments with Amtrak. Marc absolutely wants to film in case there is an eviction.
He asks Estoban about his leg. Estoban rolls up his pants and shows a few dark spots on his red, inflamed leg. It was a pit bull, says Julio. “The monster. We walked by with our cans. First he bit, then he barked. Not even a warning. Maybe he did not like the sound of rattling cans.”