“Yes,” he says proudly as Charlotte strokes a cat that is purring on her lap. “Whatever you might think of tunnel life, it sure is different.” He serves coffee and it gets cozy. “People ask me if I ever get bored, if I sometimes go watch a movie. No way, Charlotte. Down here, it’s the movies. We had the Frankie and Ment show, the Willy and Sheila show, and last but not least, the Mad, Mad Bob show.” Bernard claps his hands with joy. “I only have to sit down at the grill and Yo! pop the corn and let the show begin!”
Bernard is all geared up now, and with his inimitable mixture of slang and eloquent phrases he tells her all about the highs and lows of tunnel life and his former adventures as a coke smuggler and runway model. The dirtiest and sleaziest stories are intertwined with biblical quotes and ontological one-liners: he is obviously doing his best to entertain my wife and succeeding in it. I have already heard most of the stories dozens of times, but Bernard’s oratory talents make it a pleasure to hear them again.
As usual, he concludes his discourse with a diatribe about the media. He is now planning to write a short, but powerful and critical essay, about his experiences with journalists. The day before there had been another painful incident with Margaret. She had brought a German film crew to his canning spot. Bernard had told everybody to leave because he wanted to work undisturbed. Margaret had burst into tears. “Why are you doing this to me?” she had sobbed.
“Because your book is finished and I just want peace and this winter I don’t want to see no more goddamn press folks,” Bernard had bluntly answered. “And why does he get all these special privileges?” she had nastily commented, referring to my long and already extended stay in the tunnels.
“Fuck it,” Bernard says. “I told her I was sick of playing mediator. If journalists have problems with each other, they should fight it out themselves. I mean, what do I get out of it?” he rhetorically asks Charlotte. “If she would lower a bag full of dollars through the gate or put a beautiful virgin at the gate…” He shakes his head. “Excuse me, I’m a man, you know. She don’ gimme no pussy, she don’ gimme no head…In fact, I get nothing out of it.”
Bernard gets himself ready to go. He enters his bunker and reappears in his best clothes. He presents Charlotte with two pairs of khaki shorts from Banana Republic. “For you, Charlotte. Margaret didn’t want them. I told her she should stop dressing like a scarecrow. The silly thing. She wears, as a matter of principle, only black.”
One of the many jobs Bernard has had is as a guide in the Bronx Zoo, so he knows the place like the back of his hand. But that was eight years ago, so we get off at the wrong subway stop and have to walk two miles over the emergency lane of the Bronx-Expressway to finally reach the entrance. Inside, we need a plan, because a lot of things have changed since Bernard worked there. Bernard was a driver on one of the mini trains that take visitors around. He was fired because the animals loved him so much. In fact, the albino Father David’s deer was to blame.
Thanks to the visionary missionary called Pere David, explains Bernard, the deer, originally from China, has not disappeared from the face of the earth. There are exactly three-dozen deer left, and while extinct in the wild, they remain in the zoos of London, Beijing, Washington, and New York. And in the whole world there exists only one albino deer. It is in the Bronx. And it was actually this animal that always spontaneously approached Bernard when he had finished working and was daydreaming in front of the deer-park. He didn’t know better than to stroke the sweet animal’s nose. It is, however, strictly prohibited to touch the animals. “What else was I supposed to do?” he asks Charlotte. She doesn’t know. “Should I have kicked his ass?”
We watch the gorilla twins that are attracting crowds; we observe the baboons in their camp and watch them steal each other’s bananas with dirty tricks and proudly parade with erect penises. We have to laugh at the dumb and predictable sea lions and take a look at the predator bird show. Specially trained buzzards, falcons, and eagles fall like comets out of the sky and catch the pieces of meat the trainer holds up. “Unbelievable,” Bernard mumbles, tidying up his hair after a condor has flown only a few inches over his head. “And people think they are quite something. I tell you, Charlotte, human beings ain’t no more than repetitive dickheads.”
Ozzy hasn’t shown up at his appointment with Dov, and is skeptical regarding the vouchers. “I don’t believe it,” he says. “First I want to see what happens with Bernard.” Ozzy, the neighbor of Joe and Kathy, is a quiet and modest man. With his fashionable chrome glass frames and well-groomed appearance, he has the demeanor of an introspective and respectable schoolteacher. I often meet him in the park when he is doing his daily rounds of jogging. He’d rather not talk with journalists. “I have the impression they make us ridiculous with the term mole people,” he says. “And do I get any better from giving interviews? They have a juicy reportage; we are still down here with our problems.”
Once, he talked to a journalist. Against his strict request for anonymity, he was mentioned by name in the paper. He was then stopped on the street by former colleagues who had thought that he had just changed jobs and moved away. “Some old friends suspected something when they saw me out on the streets selling books,” Ozzy says. Even his brother, who lives in New Jersey and whom he sees once in a while, doesn’t know he is homeless. “It is a matter of pride that I don’t ask them for help.”
Ozzy thinks and counts the years on his fingers. He is fifty-seven years old now. I had estimated him ten years younger, and he is among the oldest of the tunnel dwellers.
“Yes, it has been four, five years that I’ve lived here.” He smiles softly while watching two rats playing tag. “I didn’t plan to stay here that long. But life is easy down here. No rent, no bills. You get lazy and complacent.”
Ozzy used to sleep in the Rotunda. When the park police swept it clean, Joe invited him to come in the tunnel. The two knew each other from selling books on Broadway. Seven years ago, he was a successful computer programmer. However, Ozzy had a gambling problem. “I could hardly wait till five o’clock. Then I rushed off to the OTB. And for nights, I was playing poker with friends.”
To make matters worse, Ozzy had a girlfriend who was addicted to crack. “Once I came back from work and she was lying high on crack somewhere in the corner.” Ozzy tells me. “The money that I had set aside for the rent was gone. I told her she had to choose between drugs and me. ‘I need crack more than I need you,’ she said.” Ozzy sighs and rethinks the past. “I was devastated, I went crazy. For three days I walked around dazed, didn’t sleep. Then I picked up all my stuff from work and checked into a hotel. Never went back to my office.”
In five years, Ozzy can live off of his social security and the pension he built up over the years. Now he is on welfare and can take care of himself without too much trouble.
When he had just become homeless, he tried to get back to a normal life. He was allowed to participate in a housing program, but only under the condition that he spend three, four months in a shelter. “No way I stay in a shelter. Out on the streets it is safer. And where should I have left my suits? They steal like crazy over there.” Ozzy shows me the suits from his period as a programmer. They hang on clothes hangers from a beam in his bunker, covered in sleeves to protect them against dirt, humidity, and rats.