Burk is still wandering around the tunnels in a dazed state of mind. Margaret, who knows him from back when you could still have a reasonable talk with him, tried to take him to the Coalition and talk him into a voucher.
“Margaret is crazy,” Bernard tells me. “Burk is a ticking time bomb. You can’t put him in front of Mary Brosnahan in an office. He will pull out a knife and scream ‘you white bitch!’”
Burk is not exactly a choirboy, Bernard knows. He spent twelve years behind bars for an extremely violent rape. A while ago, he gave Bernard a pile of porn magazines. With a razor blade, he had made deep cuts in all the faces and breasts.
“He’s a sick-ass motherfucker,” Bernard says, shaking his head.
Bernard and Bob have invited me for a farewell dinner, and I make my last tour through the tunnel. At the South End, I bump into Poncho and Getulio. Poncho, who is already a pretty upbeat character, is now even more radiant and cheerful. “We got that place, man!” he yells and hugs me. Even the melancholic and sad Getulio now has a faint smile on his face. With clean clothes, washed face, nice fur hat and an umbrella under his arm, he looks like a distinguished gentleman. Together they went to Brooklyn and found a spacious apartment. They will move in a few days. They’re now on their way to arrange a van to move their belongings.
It is impossible to talk to Julio. He has been on his monthly booze binge, drinking vodka for two days straight and he screams insults at me. He wants to eat a hamburger with me up top; I tell him I don’t go out with drunken people. “Asshole,” he yells, while he is trying to put on a shoe. He bumps his head against the wall and falls back in bed. He has a wild and scary expression in his eyes and looks like he has aged ten years. He reminds me of the old, wrinkled alcoholic bums you find on every street corner of big Latin American cities. “In the summer we gonna watch the bands in Central Park,” he shouts, slurring from under his blankets when I leave.
Bernard is busy cooking when I arrive. Bob is washing the dishes and setting up the camping table next to the tracks. He proudly shows me the groceries he’s just bought: batteries, coffee, spaghetti sauce, candles and a pack of herbal tea for Bernard. “First we cover our asses,” Bob explains. “Then we see if we have the extra money for a hit.”
Bob and Bernard say they don’t use crack anymore. They prefer to smoke base, a bit more expensive, but less diluted. It produces a longer-lasting high without the pathetic thirst for another hit. Most of the time, they get some after dinner and smoke it, each in their own place, before going to bed. “Tune, by now you know the whole tunnel,” Bernard says while Bob is pouring him a cup of tea, “But tell me, nobody does it like us.”
“Yeah,” Bob says. “We stuck it out till the end.” Tomorrow they’ll go to Project Renewal. Dov is planning to move tunnel dwellers who haven’t found an apartment yet into the Holland House, a newly renovated Hotel on 42nd Street with large rooms that even boast a small kitchenette. Bernard won’t even mind that he’ll still be among the tunnel dwellers. “As long as I don’t have to sleep in the same bed as them,” he says. This is the twentieth time Bernard says he is definitively moving out of the tunnel. It is also the twentieth time I believe him.
Bernard stirs in the pasta sauce and tells me about his plans. They are very vague. He hasn’t heard back from the Hollywood people. But sooner or later they will get back in touch with him. Now he is in business with the shabby moviemaker. Bernard visited him at home, and he had opened the door wearing only boxer shorts. After Bernard requested him to get dressed properly, they watched his footage.
According to Bernard, it was good stuff. Not just the footage of himself, but also of other canning people, newspaper thieves, booksellers and all kinds of other hustlers from all over Manhattan. Bernard offered to help remix the footage at his brother’s studio, the documentary maker from Atlanta.
After that, Bernard doesn’t know. First he wants to do a computer course, Margaret has offered him the chance to do this at her university. Or maybe he will put his memoirs onto paper. Or maybe not. He doesn’t know, but he is not worried. “I am at my best when everything is against me,” he says. “Something will come up.” One thing is sure: Bernard now feels it’s time to close this period in his life as a tunnel dweller.
“In my time it was still feasible. But America ain’t seen nothing yet,” he says prophetically. “This will be the lifestyle of the future. There’s gonna be murder for the garbage…”
When Bernard has drained the pasta onto the rails, he serves dinner. Cannelloni with tomato sauce and grilled hot dogs is on the menu. In another pan, he has toasted pieces of French bread and covered them with creamy butter. Bob pulls out a grater and a chunk of Gruyère cheese. The three of us pray quietly before dinner. In the distance a train is approaching. The conductor hoots in friendship. We wave back.
Part 4
EPILOGUE
September 2009
40. THIRTEEN YEARS LATER
Luxurious apartment buildings with tacky names such as Trump Place and Heritage Tower look down on the South End. A new bike path lines the park and the Hudson, leading all the way down to Lower Manhattan. The tunnel entrance has been hermetically sealed off. On a grass field where tunnel people once parked their shopping carts, young urban professionals now flirt with each other at the dog run.
Ment still knows how to get into the tunnel. A few blocks up, hidden under the brush, is a rabbit hole that gives direct access. Marc, Bernard, Ment, and I go down and enter the darkness. We slide down a steep slope of sand and debris and come down at the place where Greg once pitched his tent, not far from Julio’s former house. Light falls through the grate and soon our eyes get used to the dimness.
The tunnel is eerily empty and smells mushy. Old tracks have been removed and a strong fence has been erected along the tracks that remain. All livable constructions have been demolished and most garbage and filth has been dragged away. To judge by the fresh graffiti, the tunnel is still the stomping ground for taggers in the hood.
Bernard looks around in amazement. “Wow, I wouldn’t have missed this. Thanks for inviting me to come along.”
Marc muses about time going by, “Like stepping back in a time capsule.” Neither have been back in the tunnel for thirteen years. Ment still goes down on a regular basis and shows us his latest tag, a few meters wide.
The tunnel is supposed to be deserted, but within a few minutes we have our first encounter with some of the remaining inhabitants. A bare-chested, dark skinned man slowly appears from a dark cavern in the wall. He looks like a ghost and I hold my breath. Bernard recognizes him. “Hey, Burk, it’s me,” Bernard tries to put him at ease. Vaguely, Burk stammers a few words and returns into the dark like a lost soul. According to Bernard, Burk was hospitalized for a few months in a mental institution, but as soon as he got out, he went back into the tunnel. “Coo coo for cocoa puffs,” Ment says and proceeds to explain the expression to me.
The other remaining tunnel habitant[74] we meet is JR, who now lives in an alcove that can only be reached with a ladder. JR used to live in the loading dock on the Hudson, where Ment and I once climbed. We call his name a few times, and after a while a bald head appears around the corner. Ment manages to persuade the man to climb down. JR is an old man, with a bloody crust on his head and a nasty tumor swelling in his neck. “The Amtrak police leaves us alone,” he explains and allows me to climb up and peak into his bedroom. It is stuffed with an incredible collection of junk from the street, too much for the eye to even register. It reminds me of a wild conceptual installation made by some freak artist I once saw in a hip museum. “I like the quietness here,” JR says, and he climbs back in his den.
74
In January 2010, Bernard worked as a tunnel guide for two journalists from