Williams calls his name out loud. Through a grate in the ceiling, filtered daylight illuminates what is Bernard’s camp. Boxes with empty bottles and cans are scattered all around. Four identical metal folding chairs are placed against two giant pillars that support the ceiling of the tunnel. A pile of magazines is on one of the chairs: Sports Illustrated, Newsweek, The New Yorker. It looks like a doctor’s waiting room.
Behind the pillars lies a huge open space with old cupboards filled with coffee cans, boxes of cereal, and bags of spaghetti. In the middle of the open space, I see some chairs placed around a fire that glows between two large stones. On top of it sits a blackened grill. On the dark wall behind the fireplace I can discern a giant mural. A firing squad is executing several people; one of the victims spreads his arms desperately toward the sky. It is a reproduction of Goya’s Third of May, Williams explains, made by graffiti artists from the neighborhood.
Williams calls Bernard a second time. Finally, a tall dark man appears from one of the bunkers. “Sorry to keep you waiting, Terry. I just had to finish up something.” The two shake hands cordially. “So this is Bernard,” says Williams, “New York’s most famous homeless man.” Bernard smiles and gives me a firm handshake. Rasta curls emerge from under his white baseball cap. He wears a white sweatshirt that has Goofy on a skateboard printed on it. Due to the darkness and his cap, I can hardly see Bernard’s features. I only see a row of white teeth shining in a black face.
Williams and Bernard start talking about the latest events. A man was killed yesterday in the park. Bernard knew the victim. It was Walter, a homeless man who slept in a cardboard box under a bridge.
“Slashed by some crazy twenty-one-year-old Dominican kid. Right above us, here on 95th Street.” Bernard points up to the gray sky visible through the grate.
“The kid was freaked out. He cut out Walter’s eyeball, pulled off his pants,” Bernard continues. He seems upset by the murder. “Walter was a good guy. Damn, he never bothered anyone. Can you believe it, Terry? The cops arrested the kid on Broadway while he was waving the knife and the bloodstained pants around.” Bernard sighs. “What a world. It can happen to fucking anybody.”
He shakes his head and stares at the ground. Williams breaks the silence and introduces me as a Dutch photographer who wants to do an article on the tunnel. Bernard cheers up. In a few minutes, we have worked things out. Bernard will be my guide. We will start after tomorrow. “Just call my name through the intercom,” he says. “Then I’ll get you up top.” He points at the grate. “My mailbox and intercom, it’s on the exit of the West Side Highway on 95th Street. You can’t miss it.”
Bernard apologizes and says he has work obligations. He walks us half a mile farther up north through the darkness. Then there is an opening in the tunnel wall with a stairwell that leads to another gate. We are suddenly bathed in broad daylight again, the gate exits onto a playground in the park. This is the Northern Gate, Bernard explains, another emergency exit from the tunnel.
“Before, we had to crawl through a hole in the ground,” he says as he unlocks the chain at the gate. “This way, it’s a lot easier.” A friendly Amtrak worker gave him the key for the lock. Bernard leaves us at the playground and disappears back into the darkness.
The light and fresh air feel good as we walk back to Broadway. “You can’t find a better guide than Bernard,” Williams says. Over the years, Bernard had become more than just an object of study; the two became good friends.
“Bernard gets nothing from all these interviews,” Williams says. “He knows it too, but he just loves all the attention.”
2. THE SIMPLICITY OF BEING
On my way to my meeting with Bernard, I walk down 95th Street towards River Side Park and the Hudson. Under the bridge where Walter must have been killed, yellow police ribbons lie strewn on the ground around the mud and broken bottles. POLICE LINE. DO NOT CROSS they say in big bold capitals. A man in the corner sleeps under a blanket. He peeps out from underneath, throws me an ugly glance, then he turns around and crawls back under his covers.
Further down is the entry and exit for the West Side Highway. Dodging speeding cars, I manage to reach a traffic island and see the grates, the tunnel intercom. Bending over, I peer into the darkness below and recognize some of the graffiti and the boxes with empty bottles. As loudly as possible, I scream Bernard’s name a few times. Only a few feet behind me, cars are hurling by. I call out a few more times, but no answer.
Sitting on a wall in the park, a black man is waving at me. I had seen him earlier, but somehow he did not register. Now I recognize the Rasta hairdo as Bernard’s. “I’m sorry, I had not recognized you without your Goofy shirt,” I apologize.
He laughs. “Once in a while, I put on clean clothes.”
Bernard wears a Yankees baseball cap and an Adidas sports jacket, clean jeans and fresh white sneakers. Now in broad daylight, I can clearly see him for the first time. Williams had told me that Bernard used to be a photo model. It is believable: Bernard is a handsome man, tall and trim with a straight nose, thin lips and a high forehead. I guess him to be in his mid-thirties. When he smiles, his lips curl in a beautiful curve and reveal impeccable teeth. His lively eyes are scrutinizing me.
We walk through the park to the entry of the tunnel at the playground, the North Gate. Bernard opens up the padlock with his private key. On the stairwell inside, there is hardly room to walk. We squeeze past three supermarket carts that cram the space. Rusty beams above us function as bookshelves. Next to popular magazines and flashy bestsellers there are books with titles like Handbook Of Dermatology and Mathematics Made Easy. A stone replica of the Acropolis doubles as a bookstand. A plastic pumpkin smiles at me with a stupid, toothless grin.
“All this mess is from Tony,” Bernard explains. “The idiot is creating fire hazards. If he goes on like this, we will all be kicked out.” He points at the shopping cart. Tony has tied a woman’s hat with flowers to it, as well as a Barbie doll, some Christmas decorations and aluminum photo frames. An umbrella and a TV antenna stick out from under a pile of wood. On top, a few empty cans and some porn mags. Tony finds all the junk on the streets and sells it to whoever wants it. Bernard pulls on a few sheets of Formica-covered particle board. “Totally useless as firewood,” he grumbles. “The guy doesn’t have a clue.”
We descend the stairs. Today, it is a sunny, clear day, and the grates allow more daylight in than a few days ago, when the tunnel was dipped in darkness and the surroundings were hard to discern. Bernard points out some graffiti pieces on the tunnel walls. Diffuse light filtering through the grates illuminates the work softly from above, like in a museum. The works are giant portraits, five feet high, which look like photographs because they are spray painted in black and white. I recognize John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and the Mona Lisa. Farther down is a painting of a street kid in a macho leather jacket, striking a cool pose with his hands in his pockets. His head and neck are a phallus-shaped object.
I ask Bernard about the sharply dressed penis. He laughs. “You are the fourth guy asking the same question. You journalists think everything looks like a dick. Don’t you see it is a spray can?”
On closer inspection, it does look like a spray can. The pieces are by artist Chris Pape, aka Freedom. The spray can with his hands in his pockets is Pape’s self-portrait. When the graffiti rage started, the tunnel became a favorite playground for the graffiti scene. The spray painters entered through emergency exits or the tunnel mouth at 72nd Street. Bernard ran into them and became good friends with many, especially Chris Pape.