Hugo looks like a mess. He missed his weekly shower at a friend’s SRO hotel—he can only go on Sundays when there is no one at the desk. Now he has a small prickly beard, grayish skin, and smelly clothes. “I hardly dare to walk the streets.”
He also lost his job as delivery boy for the laundry. The boss lost his patience when Hugo not only wanted to get paid daily, but even started to ask for advances. Slowly, Hugo is sliding down into his old drug habits. He will never admit he uses crack, but it is easy to see. More and more often, he starts asking to borrow just five dollars. After he returns from canning, I watch him go into his little house, then reappear ten minutes later to sit in front of the TV with glassy eyes.
Julio, in the meantime, has really started to hit the bottle. The only sober moments he has are the few minutes in the morning when he staggers hung over to the icebox to get his first beer. “He expects to find Debby at the bottom of the bottle,” Frankie had told me pointedly.
Today wasn’t Julio’s day. He rubs his painful jaw: yesterday he got hit by a bookseller on Broadway. Later on he will take revenge. He gets up to get another beer. Little Havana’s only light fixture, a strong bare bulb on the ground, projects giant shadows of him onto the tunnel walls.
“Fuck it,” Julio says. He was busy all day trying to get on welfare. Together with Poncho he went to the Social Security office. “Dirty fucked up mother fucking assholes. Spent half a day in the waiting room. And then they gave me two pounds of forms to fill in,” Julio blusters. “Goddammit. Old forms that are no longer valid.” Julio gets up to show me the paperwork. He can’t find it, and only after fifteen minutes of stumbling around with a flashlight does he locate the papers between a pile of moldy books on the ground. Angrily, he points me at the small letters. Form 2-b model 1993 it says.
“You see, they are just deceiving us,” he accuses. “Just shut the fuck up for a moment,” Poncho calls out. “There is nothing wrong with these papers.” Poncho is getting tired of Julio; all he wants after a hard day’s work collecting cans is just to watch the O.J. Simpson case on TV.
Julio is getting ready to have some serious talk with the bookseller up top. He puts a big knife in the inside pocket of his leather coat. I join him and suggest he put the knife in my backpack. He might stumble and hurt himself. Grumbling, he hands over the knife and pulls an even bigger one from his back pocket. Luckily the case with the bookseller is resolved very quickly. It is a huge guy who apologizes for hurting Julio. “But you were pretty shit-faced and annoying,” he adds. “OK, let’s forget it,” Julio says and shakes his hand. After all, he is an important customer who buys many of his books. Julio hasn’t eaten anything, so we have a burger and fries at a bar.
“Wow, thanks man,” he says smiling when the waitress brings him a juicy burger and a pint of beer. “Goddamn long time ago I was in a pub.” Julio gets sentimental and talks about his daughter. It’s the first time he’s talked about her. By now she must be six. Julio hasn’t seen her in five years.
“Boy, she is a cute girl! Damn, I would have loved to be a good father.” Tears are filling his eyes. The kid dates from the time that Julio was living upstate. He lived with his girlfriend and her family in a trailer park. One fatal night there was a party. Booze, snacks, and coke. His mother in law entered just as Julio was snorting a line. “Finish the party and tomorrow you’re gone,” was the only thing she said.
Julio looks sadly down at his glass of beer. It must be difficult trying to get back into the system and reorganize his life. About the same time, Julio continues, there was another party. It was a pretty wild, somewhere in the woods, with whiskey, beer, speed, acid and guns. It got out of hand. Two guys started to fight and they shot a third one. Everybody was arrested. The white killers blamed Julio. He was allowed out on bail; his father paid. Julio ran away and disappeared. Still, he is a wanted man. “I swear to god, I am innocent. But it was their word against mine. Two white boys against a Puerto Rican. Who will ever believe me?”
“Oh, Dov, my man, it’s crazy,” Bernard complains like an old woman to Dov at Project Renewal. “It is a mad house here. Yesterday the BBC came, Margaret left another six messages and tomorrow National Joe will be here for a few days.” Bernard means National Geographic, but Joe sounds cooler. “And this morning I still had to collect my cans,” he continues. Bernard interrupts his litany, “Duke, you have an extra quarter?” and puts it in the pay phone.
“Yeah, Dov, I am still here. Next week three Japanese, then Channel Four, Duke is finishing his book and maybe later someone from the Deutsche Rundfunk.”
“Duke, quickly, another dime.” I pull one out of my pockets.
“Yes, Dov, I still hear you. In short, my peace and quiet has gone up in smoke.”
Bernard is quiet for a moment. Dov has finally found the opportunity to say something back. “Okay, understood. Yes, thanks so much for all your efforts. See you tomorrow morning.” He turns to me smiling. “It’s all done. Tomorrow the last paperwork and then I will get my voucher. I never thought they were serious.”
“Bernard, you are the vanguard of the tunnel people,” Dov says solemnly the next morning. With a firm handshake, he gives Bernard the form with which he can obtain his Section 8 voucher at the New York Department of Housing. “Man,” Bernard says, “This is between us, but I will be surprised if other people finish the process. Watch my words.” Dov nods, concerned.
We take off to the Coalition, ignore the upset receptionist, and walk straight to the office of Mike Harris. Proudly, Bernard shows him the form. Mike’s office looks like a crisis center. He is on a cordless phone, doing business with City Hall and DC while he orders assistants walking in and out to fax proof of incomes and birth certificates, restart suspended welfare procedures, and print out lost Social Security cards.
“It looks like they don’t care down there,” Mike sighs in a quiet moment. “They expect us to bring the keys of their new apartments on a silver platter.” An assistant whispers something in Mike’s ear.
Bad news. While waiting for the voucher that could come in any moment, José was temporarily staying at the YMCA. The next day, he moved back to his tunnel shack because he could not conform to the house rules. “Damn it,” Mike curses. “And when they finally are settled in their apartments, they expect us to come over to change a broken light bulb.” Mike’s initial optimism in the housing project has gone. The red tape is bad enough, but the uncooperative attitude of the tunnel people is highly discouraging. “Mike,” Bernard says resigned, “you can lead a horse to the water, but you can’t make it drink.”
“Bunch of ungrateful dogs,” Bernard says as we walk back. “They don’t realize this is the first and last time they’ll get such an exceptional chance.” Bernard has in the meantime tipped off a homeless friend. It is a man who has been sleeping in the park for years. Bernard has told Mike the man lived all that time as a recluse in the tunnel.
“He will be worth it,” Bernard says. “But the others, they will eventually choose chaos.”
Joe and Kathy are cooking dinner. Plastic bottles burn in an empty oil drum that serves as a makeshift stove. Joe throws a chunk of margarine into a dented frying pan sitting on top of the drum. Sooty flames shoot up into the air. Joe is bitter about the Coalition and Project Renewal. “Hey man, they came down here to offer us help. Why should I go to them? The assholes still haven’t brought my birth certificate.”