Ozzy has tried to go back to work, but his skills are hopelessly outdated. “I sometimes read a computer magazine. It is all gibberish to me.” Twice a year he drives with his brother to visit his mother in North Carolina. She just turned ninety-two. “My brother and me have decided that she is getting too old live on her own. Maybe I’ll go back to take care of her.” Ozzy tells me the labor market is good, some new companies have settled in his old home town. The wages might be lower, but the cost of living is dirt cheap. And his brother can maybe get him a car, so he can look for work.
He smiles. “It is difficult to leave the city behind. New York is addictive. On the other hand, I would not mind going back. Life is more easy-going in the south. People still have manners. We greet each other in the street. That was, for me, the most difficult here in New York. You enter an elevator and say a friendly good morning. New Yorkers look at you as if you are a freak.”
26. THE ADVENTURES OF FRANKIE, PART 6: FRANKIE IS MAD WITH HIS FIANCÉE
“Yo, cuz. It’s deep,” Frankie grumbles in an ominous baritone to Ment. “If a woman comes between two friends, I tell you. That’s no good…”
I stopped by at Frankie’s to see about the lingerie photo shoot. Vanessa is back in town from her summer camp, but the reunion of the two lovers was not a big success.
Frankie doesn’t like to talk about it, but it comes down to the fact that Vanessa thinks that Ment is a bad influence on her boyfriend. Slowly, Frankie was turning in a decent citizen who loved to hang out in front of the TV with a bag of potato chips and a bottle of beer. He was even looking for a steady job, like that of a bike messenger. Ment has awakened Frankie’s dormant criminal instincts, and the two of them hang out with a lot of bad friends from back in the day, brooding and scheming evil and stupid plans.
Frankie is now pondering how to find a fitting punishment for Vanessa. Until further notice, the photo session has been temporarily suspended. Fatima is sitting on the couch, nervously chain smoking.
“It is goddamn completely fucked up,” Frankie says. The Amtrak cops made another round through the tunnel. They have been doing that quite often lately. They drive around with their blue flashlights and yell “Okay, folks, time to move” through their loud speakers. Most of the time, their efforts to intimidate stop there. Once in a while, they stop and chat a bit with the tunnel dwellers; sometimes they are friendly, sometimes they are nasty. This time, they had driven past Little Havana. They had shone a flashlight on Julio and Poncho who were just watching TV, but left them alone.
They had stopped at Kathy’s and talked a bit with her and inquired about Joe’s health. Frankie talked to the cops from his roof. “Why all these pampers in the tunnel, do you guys have a baby?” they barked at him.
Indeed, the diapers on the garbage piles around their bunker look quite conspicuous. Inside, Fatima was trembling with fear. Frankie kept talking to them. He knew they could not enter his place without a warrant. After only fifteen minutes, the cops left.
“Somebody must have snitched on us,” Frankie says. I reassure them that I did not say a word to anybody. I didn’t even tell the gossipy Bernard, to whom I mostly tell everything. But a lot of people on the South End know about the baby, someone might have slipped a word to the police. Or maybe a jogger saw Maria and Fatima trying to carry the baby stroller secretly into the tunnel. Something needs to happen, Frankie says concerned. “We don’t want no heat in the tunnel.”
27. THE CASE OF BOB
Bernard is in the best of moods when I move back into the tunnel a week later. “Welcome back, Tut,” he says while making a fire. “Finally a normal person to talk to.” I put my luggage back in Bob’s bunker and assess the damage after a few weeks of Bob. It isn’t too bad. A few more piss bottles have been added to the collection, while my stock of clean underwear has disappeared. For the rest, Bob has only sat on his favorite couch at the coffee table.
Bernard serves coffee and is in a chatty mood. The radio plays “Let It Be.” “Fuck this Yoko. The bitch broke up the band,” sneers Bernard. “And when a man allows a woman to come between him and his friends, he ain’t nothing but a faggot! Hah, that John Lennon,” Bernard shakes his head. “He needed to proclaim that they were more popular than Jesus. And look what happened to him. Five, six years in rehab, trying to get his act together. And finally he is ready to go back in the studio, and he is gunned down by some idiot on his doorstep. Yes, yes, Mister Lennon…” Bernard says with derision.
“Sitting in the Dakotas in a nine-room apartment. One room was totally white, the piano, the carpet, the walls, everything completely white. Fuck it. What has he done for the poor people in New York? Nothing. Once he gave a lousy hundred-thousand dollars at a charity ball of the police club. They bought bulletproof vests with it. The rest of the time he was jetting up and down to India. He could have helped a lot of the poor people over here with that money. And Paul fucking McCartney, the same shit,” he continues contemptuously. “Together with Tina Turner and Michael Jackson ‘We Are The World’ singing with their choir-boy faces. Five hundred million worth of income on stage, trying to be cute. It’s gonna be a big party in Hell…”
The God of Bernard is stern, but righteous. Sometimes he punishes immediately, sometimes only after a few years, sometime only in the afterlife, but in the end, nobody can escape his wrath. Bernard is deeply religious. I noticed lately that he always prays before dinner, very discreetly, his hands on his lap under the table, his eyes cast down for a moment.
Bernard has received a religious education in the South. Additional inspiration he got from one of his favorite books, The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, an obscure new-age work filled with mystical and obscure references. Bernard is helped by promptings from God on a regular basis. For example, it’s thanks to God Bernard now has a huge pile of beautiful firewood. The wood was finished, Bernard explains. He walked up top and said: “Okay God, where’s the wood?”
“Two streets to the south, then turn left for another block and a half,” a voice said. And there were two hundred pounds of first grade pinewood waiting for him in a trash container.
In the same way, Bernard found the bunkers. When he had first become homeless, he was sleeping under a bridge in the park. During a desperate night, he prayed to God. The next morning, he found a big survival knife. “It was the first sign of God,” he says. “Then I knew all would be all right.” The knife was near an entrance in the tunnels, used by gay men to have secret sex in the dark. Out of curiosity, Bernard crept through the opening and entered the tunnel. Then he heard a voice; “Go half a mile north.” And there, Bernard found what is now his camp.
“He will never leave me alone,” he says. “All I need comes to me automatically.”
Bernard tells about the Purgatory. “On a cold winter night we were all sitting here around the grill fantasizing about Judgment Day. God is sitting on a throne and the sky is one gigantic video screen. And everybody knocking on heaven’s gate has a video clip with all his sins. ‘Play the tape!’ God tells them. Everybody has to do it. Nobody is exempt. Also the guys that beat to death baby seals.”
Bernard had just seen a documentary about it. “Two of these sweet, cute eyes are looking innocently at you, and then Bang! Splash! Blood all over the fucking place. At least they throw the bodies in the sea, so the sharks can enjoy a good meal; if not, it would be even more scandalous. Low-ass motherfuckers. Their clips will be shown five hundred times and they will be forced to watch it all over again time after time. And Bob,” Bernard laughs. “God doesn’t even want to judge him. A special eternal flame will be prepared for him.” Then Bernard gets serious. “What a miserable human, that Bob,” he says shaking his head. “Whatever it was that broke him, he should get over it and get on with his life.”