With a flashlight we take a closer look at the wound. It is slowly healing, and shows no sign of an infection. “Stubborn asshole,” Julio says. “This time you are lucky, but you should have seen a doctor.” Estoban grins sheepishly and goes back to his shack.
Marc tells the latest about Amtrak. He was at Penn Station to have a frank talk with Captain Combs. It was not a nice talk. “Combs thought I wanted to screw her,” Marc says. “The bitch is paranoid. She had me body-searched because she thought I was secretly carrying a tape recorder.”
Marc understands why Combs hates him. When the captain wanted to film, she got zero cooperation. Bernard had told her to fuck off and Julio told her they only worked with Marc. Combs had hastily concluded that Marc had set all tunnel people against her.
“Honestly, I don’t know anything,” Marc says. We all laugh at the story.
Marc leaves and Julio opens his fourth can of beer. He is starting to become sentimental and talks about Roxy, the dog he used to have.
“She was a cool puppy,” mourns Julio. “But they poisoned her.” He has no clue who did it, or what could be the reason behind such a low act. Maybe the poor dog accidentally ate Joe’s poisoned meatballs.
“I also had two cats. Rusty and Roger. Also gone. Debby took them when she left me.” Debby was Julio’s girlfriend. They lived together in his house. “You wanna see it?” Julio asks? “It’s behind the wall.”
A few hundred meters deeper in the tunnel, is a five foot high wall next to some unused tracks. Behind the wall, there are spaces where more people have built their houses. In front of the wall is an old couch with a few blankets. A rat crawls on the seat, next to a hand that is sticking out from under the blanket.
“Lee, my man, what’s up?” Julio calls. Slowly a person rises. It’s a skinny white guy, with a long dirty beard and a wild expression in his gaunt eyes. He mumbles something unintelligible and crawls back under the blanket.
“Poor Lee. He is not 100 percent okay,” Julio explains. “Makes me sad. We invite him once in a while for a drink or some food. We like to watch over our people. But he always declines. Prefers to be alone on his couch talking to the rats.”
I have never been behind the wall because it looked so dirty and dangerous over there. Between the sloppily constructed shacks the ground is strewn with broken TVs, fridges, bikes, and shopping carts. A few rats jump out of a loudspeaker box. All the way at the end of the wall is Julio’s house, a wooden cubicle of eight by eight feet. On one side is a small door, only three feet high.
Julio lights a few candles. I have to bend over because the ceiling is low; on top Julio has another story where he sleeps on an old mattress. “I built that story especially for Debby. She wanted more space. And all for fucking nothing.” Julio takes another sip and stares sadly at the floor.
The floor is covered with moldy Persian carpets and a few plastic crates to sit on. Except for a little cupboard, the space is empty. Julio takes a small photo album out of the cupboard, the corners eaten away by rats. Some photos are of Julio’s cats and dogs, other photos show Debby, a fat girl who smiles in each photo. “She was hanging out with other men,” Julio says. “We had a fight. And… um… Yes, there was violence. She is living now with a friend in the Bronx.”
“Debby took most of the stuff,” Julio explains his frugal interior. “The rest I broke down myself. Pulled out the electricity lines and smashed the alarm and the toaster. I did not want any memories of her.”
Julio has now nearly finished the six-pack of malt liquor and his speech starts to slur. His eyes become angry and mean and his words nearly unintelligible. He is now talking about the halfhearted efforts of the homeless organizations to help them. “They just let us rot down here. If they want to help us, then they have to help all the people living in tunnels. And I tell you, they will never do that. Goddamn never,” he screams through the tunnel, waving and threatening with his can of beer. “They only do it for the money. They don’t give a shit what happens to us.”
14. THE ADVENTURES OF FRANKIE, PART 1: FRANKIE IS IN LOVE
“Oh, man, I am so in love.” It is evening. I am walking with Frankie on our way out to get water in the park. Our flashlights shine on the tunnel floor so we don’t stumble over the tracks and miscellaneous garbage.
Frankie’s love is named Vanessa, a girl of seventeen he met last winter round the neighborhood. The poor thing had already had her first abortion, Bernard and Kathy tell me later. Somehow they are very well informed about these things. According to Bernard, the girl is actually only fourteen, but Bernard has a tendency to exaggerate for dramatic effect.
“Three dozen, I repeat, three dozen red roses I sent her for Valentine’s Day,” says Frankie. “With a note attached: ‘I Love You.’ Without my name.”
I nearly slip on a piece of smooth paper. A centerfold of a porn magazine, showing a black woman with her legs spread. A rat jumps away. Frankie babbles on. “I picked her up after work. She was blushing. I said: Honey, those roses were mine. She kissed me…” Frankie leaves out the details, but reassures me it was a romantic night.
Vanessa has given up her job at a pharmacy and currently works as a counselor at a summer camp in Upstate New York. In six weeks, after the summer, she will be back in the city. “It’s true love, cuz. We gonna marry. Of course we will send you and your wife an invitation.”
The day before yesterday the two young lovers bid their farewells. Frankie cried for two days. “Look at my eyes,” Frankie says and he points the flashlight towards his face. “They are still red from crying.” Frankie is not exaggerating. His penetrating and steely blue eyes are now watery and bloodshot.
Frankie is making preparations to offer Vanessa a future. He is getting his birth certificate, so he can request a new social security card, so he can find a regular job. He would like to work as a bike messenger or a delivery boy for a supermarket.
Frankie looks good. The ugly, white, bald face of last autumn has become lean and tanned. He eats healthier now and works out a bit, so he’s lost some weight. His puffed up fat cheeks and chin have gone. He also has new clothes: before Vanessa left, she dragged him into a shop. He now looks like an all-American jock, with a baseball cap, red football sweater, sneakers, and bleached jeans.
“Oh, I wish the summer would fly by,” Frankie muses as we fill the jerry cans with water at a fountain in the park. Boats decorated with Chinese lanterns sail on the Hudson. Music and laughter echo across the water. “And I hate to say that. ‘Cause I love summer.”
15. THE HOMELESS DEBATE OF THE ’90S
THE PRETTIFICATION OF OUR HOMELESS FELLOW CITIZEN
The slapdash folder of the Coalition mentions that:
• One out of five homeless people has a job but cannot afford housing.[5]
• One out of three homeless is a veteran.[6]
• Women and children are the fastest growing segment of the homeless population.[7]
From my own experience and from what the tunnel people have told me about their fellows, combined with data from sociological research and literature, I reach different conclusions:
• More than fifty percent of all homeless have some kind of criminal past, are on parole or are fugitives.[8]
• Most homeless who say they are veterans have hardly seen a battlefield, or have been discharged from the service for all kind of reasons.[9]
5
Employment, work and jobs are relative concepts. One could argue that all the hustles in the informal economy also constitute a form of (self) employment. While in the tunnel, no one I spoke to had a steady nine-to-five job, but nearly everyone worked in the informal book or can sectors. Some people received welfare, and collected cans on top of that. Others had irregular part-time jobs such as courier, messenger, delivery boy, sandwich man, or flier distributor.
A table on page 18 of
6
Statistics from Burt show a sudden growth in the number of homeless women and children between 1984 and 1988. By 1990, homeless woman and children made up 9 percent and 1 percent of the total homeless population respectively. It looks like the number of homeless families is steadily increasing. In a recent report from 2009, the Coalition for the Homeless says that 25 percent of the current shelter population now consists of families. In the most recent HUD survey, the Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress of 2008, the number of persons living in families of the total homeless population is said to be 37 percent.
7
The Coalition obtained this number from a study carried out by Rosenheck for the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Connecticut. “The Proportion of Veterans among Homeless Men” was published in the
This study found the percentage of veterans among homeless males to be 41 percent, not much higher than the percentage of veterans among the total male population at that time at 34 percent. Rosenheck explains the difference is caused by a relatively large group of white males aged between twenty and thirty-four. Veterans in this age group are five times more likely to be homeless than their peers who have not been in the army. In comparison with other veterans, this age group saw very little war and/or combat. This group also had a significantly lower social economic status, given that people from lower social economic strata more often choose a career in the army. Rosenheck argued that homelessness within this group was inherent to belonging to a vulnerable social stratum, instead of caused by their status as veterans.
A recent study by HUD, the 2008 Annual Homeless Assessment Report, says that 11.6 percent of the homeless population are veterans, slightly higher than the percentage of veterans in the general population, which is 10.5 percent. The report, however, warns that these numbers should be closely watched as there will be a great influx of veterans from the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
8
Burt,
9
My own observation in the tunnels. One man, Henry, had joined the army, but was discharged even before graduating boot camp because of drug use. He does not call himself a veteran, although technically he could. Nurses and administrators who have been working in the army are also called veterans after they have left the service.
In the ′90s, most people were tempted to think of veterans as the men who fought in Vietnam. Most of these “Viet vets,” however, received good benefits and were rarely homeless. The principal exception in the tunnel was Joe, who refused all government support. Photographer Margaret Morton told me that some homeless people copied war stories from real veterans. “He stole my Vietnam story,” she once heard a homeless man complain.
Rosenheck’s 1994 study for the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center gives interesting numbers. Only 7 percent of those between the ages of twenty and thirty-four saw actual combat; 79 percent served after Vietnam. Of the veterans between ages forty-five and fifty-four (of an age to serve after the Korean war but before Vietnam) only 17 percent saw combat. Of the two age groups thirty-five to forty-four and fifty-five years and older, 40 percent saw combat in Vietnam, Korea or the Second World War. Rosenheck’s study is based on numbers of 1987. When I published Tunnel