Some homeless moved on to other places, others went to rehab, hospitals and shelters and got more or less back on track. Sometimes I meet a former homeless from the tunnels and the station, now well dressed and clean. They thank me for keeping them from going under,” Henry says. “That’s why I do this work. It gives me intense satisfaction to save a life.”
An excursion with Bryan Henry is no problem and he takes me on his daily search for the few remaining mole people. At the end of a platform, we take an elevator down three stories. Then Henry leads me through dark passages and rusty stairwells, along hissing and leaking steam pipes even deeper down into the station. Finally we reach our final destination, ‘Burma Road,’ a popular spot for the homeless. It is a long passageway seven stories below ground, named for its unbearable heat and humidity. The construction of the Burma Railroad by Allied POW’s in the extreme climatic conditions took thousands of lives.
“Be quiet for a moment,” Henry says. “He has to be up here.” Henry points at the ceiling. Maintenance workers have recently spotted a mole man. Henry has also seen the man a few times, but he always slips away. “Sometimes it’s like playing cat and mouse,” he says.
Henry opens a metal door with a demolished lock, and climbs a metal ladder. We enter a small crevice. There, a black man sleeps on a bed of blankets and cardboard. “Good morning,” Henry calls out. Disturbed, the man turns himself over. They know each other.
“Damn it, Bryan,” he mumbles. “Why do you have to bring all these journalists here?”
“You tell him,” Henry says to me. I try to convince the homeless man of the social relevance of journalism. He is not impressed, turns over another time and pulls the blanket over his head.
“Shall we get up?” Henry says, still friendly. “This is not a place for the homeless.”
“Fuck it,” we hear from under the blanket. “I am not homeless, I’m just a struggling man. I am only taking a nap here because I am depressed.”
“Come on, guy, you are homeless and we can bring you to a place where they can help you.”
“Goddammit. Leave me alone, Bryan. I don’t need help.”
“Be serious, man.”
“Okay, okay, go ahead and arrest me. That’s what you like to do, eh? You represent the establishment. It’s a cultural thing, you know. You don’t understand.”
“Stop bullshitting around,” Henry tells him, now impatient. “Just get up.” The man rises and makes a threatening movement towards Sergeant Henry. He is naked except for a pair of loose, red briefs.
“Stop it right there!” Henry barks, while putting his hand on his Glock. “I’m the one who’s in control here! Get dressed and follow me. Slowly.”
Henry calls a few colleagues on his radio, and grumbling, the man follows him down the stairs. While we are waiting on Burma Road for the reinforcements, the man is still protesting, now calling on traditional tribal structures in Africa to defend himself. Henry listens to the confused discourse with a smile.
“Hey, that’s the phone guy,” the two cops say when they arrive. They handcuff the man. “We’ve been after him for some time.”
The man is a con artist who watches and memorizes the secret credit card codes people punch in on pay phones. He then sells these codes to other people. The unsuspecting owner has to foot a hefty bill at the end of the month. It’s a popular scam in New York.
Henry sighs as we descend another level. “He will be held a few days at a police station, then he is free and will come down here again. With that bullshit about African culture he tries to put up a façade of dignity. Obviously he is mentally ill, but not crazy enough for involuntary confinement. A Catch-22 situation. He refuses help, and I cannot force him to accept help. Just letting him stay is also not possible, because next week he will be joined by ten others.”
Deeper under Grand Central, we enter deserted tunnels barely illuminated by a few fluorescent lights. It used to be pitch black, Henry tells me. He points me to the places where groups used to live. One spot was known as “The Condos.” It is a platform on top of a subterranean cliff about thirty feet high with trains passing under it. They were pretty organized in the Condos, Henry says. They washed their clothes with water that leaked from the pipes, and dried it on the hot steam pipes. They tapped electricity from the emergency lights. The Condo inhabitants stole heavy copper wiring from signals and switches to sell as scrap metal. Once in a while a train derailed.
“Too bad they had to go,” Henry says. “But they couldn’t stay. This environment is unfit for human dwellings. Rats, high-voltage wires, asbestos, fine metal dust. If you break a leg and nobody finds you, no doubt you will die like an animal.”
Once, Henry found a woman unconscious and naked. She had been raped and robbed of all her clothes. “If we hadn’t found her, she would have died there. I got blankets for her and brought her to the hospital. It turns out she was four months pregnant. Addicted to crack and mentally ill. She had already had two kids that had been taken away from her by Child Protective Services.”
One night, his work almost killed him. He had crawled through a small hole under a platform. The people living there lit some newspapers and garbage to stop him. If he hadn’t found the exit as fast as he had, he would have suffocated in the smoke.
Henry shows me the deserted platform. The hole is now bricked up. In total, Metro North has spent a few million on metal fencing, strong locks and chains, the closing up of empty spaces, and installing lights. Henry has actually made his own job obsolete. “I rarely meet people here. You were lucky we met the phone guy.”
A maintenance worker repairing a steam pipe confirms it. “Long time ago we saw someone. It has become a lot safer since Henry cleaned it up down here.” The worker was once chased by a furious mole man with a knife because he had accidentally stepped on his feet.
Upstairs in Henry’s office I see medals, decorations, awards and group portraits with high level politicians. “They think it is cool to pose with a negro in a uniform for the photo,” Henry says with a wink. Everyone, not just fellow policemen and politicians but aid workers and the homeless as well respects the Sergeant, who only a year ago was still a lieutenant.
Bernard has a different opinion. “Since Bryan was promoted to Sergeant, he thinks he’s a big shot,” he said. “I tell you, Tune, he doesn’t understand a damn thing.” The two had met just once. A TV crew had arranged the meeting under Grand Central. “Why is someone with your abilities living in the tunnels?” Henry had asked. Bernard had been deeply offended.
“I balance between a social worker and a police officer,” Henry says. “My primary task is to make Grand Central safe for everybody. But I try to do that as humanely as possible. The homeless associate a uniform only with cruelty and repression. After they meet me, they know it also can be different.”
Henry talks about a girl who sometimes slept in the tunnels, other times slept in the waiting room of the station. “She was a sad case, but you could really laugh with her. She always performed crazy imitations of me. Everybody at the station mourned when she was killed.”
The girl was a prostitute with a boyfriend who dealt crack in the Bronx. When he found out she was HIV-positive, he stabbed her, cut her body up into pieces and put the remains in suitcases on the street.
“We couldn’t just dump her like a piece of garbage in Potter’s Field,” Henry says. He organized a small memorial and gave the eulogy. “I told them that the girl had been a free spirit who had chosen her lifestyle. Even if her life represented everything that is completely rejected by society, we could at least learn one thing from her: no matter what you do, what people want you to do, you’re born alone and you die alone. And in between these moments everybody makes his own choices.”