“It will always be an impressive sight,” Bernard says we watch the red taillights disappear around a curve in the distance. Clouds of dust and diesel fumes engulf us. “You get used to it, but it remains dangerous,” he warns me. Especially when you’re walking under the grates, the noise from outside can drown out the sound of an approaching train.
A few years ago, Amtrak started to use the tunnel again. It looked as though all the tunnel dwellers would be evicted, but after dramatic media coverage, the eviction plans were shelved. Bernard became the nolens volens spokesman of the tunnel people and even appeared on CNN with important dignitaries from Amtrak who assured them that everybody could stay as long as they respected some basic rules. The most important were to keep the emergency exits free and clear, and to not make fires. That is why Bernard has a problem with Tony, who makes such a mess.
Ten people used to live in Bernard’s camp. Most of them met a sad end. Some developed AIDS and went above ground to die there from tuberculosis, pneumonia, or other diseases. Some perished because of drug abuse. Some were involved in crimes and wound up behind bars. Some are even now roaming the city’s mean streets, crazed and high on drugs. Only a few managed to start a new life with the help of welfare, rehab, a shelter or support from family and friends.
The last one to leave was Bob, a speed freak who also had a crack problem. Bob is now in rehab. Tony is the only neighbor left.
“He is a sick pedophile and a rapist,” Bernard says. “He spent fifteen years in jail. He tells everybody it was for murder, because it sounds tough. But a cop up top told me that Tony had once raped a minor. And still that pervert is bringing boys down here for blowjobs and dirty tricks. And all the time he drags more junk down here. I would have kicked him out a long time ago, were it not for the fact that sometimes he manages to supply us with water, wood, and food.”
Bernard gazes up towards the grate. “Here it was a Heaven of Harmony. It became a Heaven of Headaches,” he says dramatically. The sunlight falls down and lightens up his silhouette against the dark tunnel walls. With his high forehead and bald patch, his straight nose, and his powerful chin he looks like a stern prophet from the Old Testament. “But who am I to complain about chaos? Even God has to accept the existence of chaos.”
After a turbulent life that took him all over the Americas, Bernard wound up in the tunnels eight years ago. As a young man, he studied journalism and minored in philosophy at the University of Maryland. There he met his first wife. They had a son, but Bernard was not made to settle down as a house-father. After getting his BA, he went to New York where he studied for another six months at the Tisch Film School. In the meantime, he moonlighted as a model for prestigious brands such as Van Gils and Pierre Cardin. Behind the scenes, he met his second wife, a stunning dancer who worked on Broadway when she was not touring with Stevie Wonder.
Later, when I got to know Bernard better, he told me some of steamy details of their first encounter. “After a show, she took me to her apartment. She was dressed in a tiny, tight, red velvet dress. ‘Oh Bernie, I think a mosquito has bitten me on my back,’ she whispered. ‘Could you please take a look?’” Bernard clapped his hands in joy. “Yo! It was a ball …At eleven in the morning we finally went to sleep.”
After film school, he started to work as a gaffer for a TV crew from CBS. It was a humiliating job, according to Bernard. The whole time he had to drag floodlights around and tape down cables on the floor, crawling on his hands and knees. If something went wrong—and a lot of things generally went wrong, as Bernard rarely got a good night’s sleep because of the hot Broadway dancer—he was scolded and yelled at like some slave boy. It became too much for the proud Bernard, and he quit his job.
“I had to put on a mask all the time, kissing ass and saying yes and please to get my paycheck every week. But when I look in the mirror, I want to see an honest man.”
In the meantime, Bernard had a second child with the dancer. Still, he was not ready to settle down. He got a gob as a travel guide in the Caribbean and jetted around between the Bermudas, Venezuela and Jamaica.
Always, Bernard perfected his skills as a ladies’ man. He was messing around with an airhostess from Los Angeles and a photographer from Caracas among others. The Broadway dancer got fed up and kicked him out. No big deal for Bernard: he had girlfriends galore and thanks to his hostess girl, he could fly for free wherever he wanted. Whenever it all became too much for him, he’d take the first flight to LA to relax at her place.
At the same time, he had started a lucrative business with some of the other tour guides. They smuggled cocaine from Venezuela and the Bermudas to the States, pounds at a time. It was an easy job. “In the Caribbean, they wanted to stimulate tourism and never bothered us,” Bernard says. “In the States, nobody had really heard of cocaine. We could walk right by customs with our suitcases full.”
Those were decadent days for Bernard. He became a steady supplier in the amusement business and popped up whenever he wanted at the homes of celebrities like John Belushi, Rick James, and David Geffen. Some weeks, he would spend thousands of dollars without even thinking about it. He threw wild parties at his penthouse on the Upper West Side, ironically not far from his current tunnel dwelling. Bernard loved to flirt with this contrast: “I descended all the way from the top to the lowest point possible,” is one of his favorite quotes. And always he adds: “But then again, the question remains: what is High and what is Low? In essence, everything is the same.”
During this period, Bernard started to flip out. The flashy lifestyle became too much. “I never met so many lonely and sad people as in that coke scene,” he sighs. The crisis with his second wife, the dancer, and trouble with all his other girlfriends, combined with steady coke abuse made things turn bad quickly. American capitalist society might already be greedy, hypocritical, and money-oriented; in the intense microcosm of the coke dealer and his sycophants, things are even more extreme. The fall of a coke dealer is always fast and deep. Friends turn out to be parasites who are only interested in getting a white nose. No more powder, no more friends. Instead the bill collectors appear on the horizon.
Bernard got his taste of the nasty reality after subletting his penthouse to a friend for a few months while he was cooling down in LA. When he returned, his penthouse was robbed clean. All that his friend had left him was a huge pile of bills on the doormat.
Bernard was broke and could not even return to his ex-wife, who had found a new lover. He moved to a cheap hotel on Times Square and got a job as a cleaner at the Port Authority Bus Station. There, he confronted daily the world of runaway kids and homeless people.
“It was a new world for me,” Bernard said. “I was completely broke. I had landed at point zero. But zero is a magical number. Life starts and ends with nothing, with zero. Suddenly, it seemed like my eyes finally opened. It felt like an invisible hand was slowly guiding me to the down side of life. And I knew had to let myself be taken down there without resistance.”
Bernard wound up sleeping at Riverside Park where he eventually discovered the tunnel. “And that’s when the true challenge of my life began. It was an ordeal, but I endured it.”
Bernard never feels any regret that his former luxurious life came to an end. He even feels reinforced by the fact that he had his fair share of limos, champagne, beautiful women, and coke. For only those who have witnessed wealth and richness firsthand can give a true judgment and unmask it in the end as no more than just vanity, according to Bernard. And that is why he is so saddened by people who obsessively chase money but never will be happy.