Deeper in the tunnel, we stumble upon the place where the bunkers of Joe, Kathy, and Ozzy once stood. They are now torn down. Piles of reinforced concrete are all that is left. Marc, Ment and I look at the heaps of debris. Bernard wanders off and disappears around the large, slow bend in the tunnel. Probably to check out his former camp.
41. TRACKING DOWN THE TUNNEL PEOPLE 1: BOB, MENT, BERNARD, FRANKIE, JOE AND KATHY, JULIO, TONY, MARCUS
Bob is the easiest to track down. Project Renewal managed to place him in the Holland House, a run-down hotel on 42nd Street, now turned into a shiny SRO hotel for low income and homeless people. After leaving the tunnel, I stayed in touch with Bob for the first few years and took him out for lunch whenever I was in New York. But over the last decade, I neglected my social duties. It is therefore with a little apprehension that I dial his number in the Holland house that I still have written down in my old note-books. I am afraid Bob has passed away; he must be approaching seventy now and has not exactly led a healthy life. A man with a tired voice picks up the phone. It is Bob. He still remembers me. We set up a lunch meeting a week later.
Bob has become an old man. He’d always had grayish hair and a wrinkled face, but now his movements and speech also have become slow and sluggish. A pair of enormous, horn rimmed glasses are new. Thanks to miracles and medical science, he is still alive. Doctors have performed two quadruple bypass operations. “God must be smiling on me,” Bob says. “I have the best cardiac surgeon and vascular doctor in town.”
Since Bob left the tunnel, he has been in the Holland House. He says he is off drugs and has cut down on smoking. In the Holland House, he even had a small job, organizing the monthly tag sale. I invite Bob out for lunch, and he takes me to a corner deli and orders fried egg sandwiches. We sit down at some park benches surrounded by the mid-town lunch crowd while homeless people scavenge around us. Bob’s life is not that exciting any more. He had to give up his job at the thrift store because he cannot lift weights of more than five pounds. Some days he spends the whole day just watching TV in his room. “After the operation, I got depressed,” Bob tells me. “Had trouble breathing and panic attacks. At that point, I thought, just dig a hole and throw me in it. The breathing problems were temporary, the doctors told me. Now I am okay.”
Bob has never seen his family again. His brothers and parents must be dead now. “No family, no kids. When I am dead, it’s finished,” Bob shrugs. Occasionally Bernard stops by. Margaret shows up at least every few months and always takes him out for lunch around Christmas. “I don’t have many friends,” Bob admits. “But I like it that way.”
Ment sends me a text message: “Sorry, ten minutes late.” He shows up at the corner of 7th Avenue and 50th Street a few moments later, a few blocks from the small basement room he rents. He is now forty years old, with a rugged, red face from outdoor work. For years, Ment worked on construction sites in Manhattan and the fishing boats off the coast of Alaska. They were hard but good paying jobs.
Getting a hold of Ment was easy. Marc has been in touch with him all these years and gave me phone numbers and emails for both Ment and Frankie. Frankie now lives in North Carolina and is married to a girl—according to Marc an “awful woman.” According to Ment a “psycho bitch.”
“We are no longer friends,” Ment says. “I went down to Carolina and spent thousands renovating his house. He treated me like shit. We had a fallout. I told him ‘bye bye and gimme a call when you divorce the bitch.’ Yeah,” Ment sneers, “I think he will stay with her. Sometimes it’s cheaper to keep’r.”
Ment has two kids with Fatima; she lives in Yonkers with Jazzy who is now fourteen. They are divorced, but he still sees his kids regularly and pays whatever he can for child support. At the moment, Ment is romantically involved with a twenty-seven-year-old student. The girl is married, but trying to divorce her husband. A very messy situation. In two weeks, Ment’s going off again to Alaska on a two-month fishing trip. Other that that, he says he is still involved in shady business. He doesn’t want to talk too much about it, and it is hard to figure out how much is bravado, how much is truth.
Kathy opens the door. Ment and I have been knocking on it for several minutes. We’re standing in front of her railroad apartment in East Harlem, in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood. Kathy is taken by surprise when she sees me and we set up a lunch meeting for later in the week. I am relieved when she opens the door a few days later; I still remember the dozens of times I knocked in vain on their bunker door in the tunnel.
Kathy has gained considerable weight and her skins looks unhealthy. She still smokes; her teeth are grayish and she has a nasty cough. Joe can’t join us because he’s lying sick in bed. “He is sixty-five now, but he still looks pretty young for his age,” Kathy assures me. In a Dominican restaurant around the corner, we have a nice chat over chicken with rice and beans. Kathy is very friendly, inquires about my family and has to laugh every time I give her some details on the more dramatic and stupid episodes in my life.
Her life has become nice and quiet, she says. They are happy they left the tunnel behind. But sometimes she misses her old, uncomplicated life. Currently she is fighting the landlord to have her bathroom fixed. All the hassle makes her sometimes long for the simplicity of the tunnel. Kathy is pretty well updated about the former tunnel people. Her sister has children and they live on the Upper West Side and Kathy works taking care of her kids. That not only keeps her busy all day, but on the streets near Riverside she hears all the latest news. She knows that Greg is holding down a job and doing fine. She does not know Ozzy’s whereabouts. The sad news is that Tony recently died of a heart attack. He’d moved into an apartment, but “he started to hang out with the wrong people,” she says. “Doing drugs and all sort of other bad things.”
Kathy is proud of their drug free existence. “We were the only ones in the tunnel that didn’t drink or do drugs,” she smiles. “Even now. We still pay our bills on time, we don’t bother anybody.” In their building a lot of people are doing drugs, she says. “They get into trouble, then they go into rehab and the government pays everything for them.”
Kathy and Joe are still in regular contact with Ment. In fact, when they were kicked out of their first apartment, Ment, Fatima and the kids moved in with Kathy and Joe. They stayed for three months. “It was a zoo. They never paid one cent to the household.” Kathy complains. The cable bill was running sky high. “I am disappointed,” mourns Kathy. “Whenever Ment needs us, he shows up. When he has money, suddenly you don’t see him any more.” Still, she has a weak spot for him. “He is always running into problems. I don’t like what’s going on now with that twenty-seven-year-old girl. Tell him to stay away from her. It smells like trouble…”
At the exit of the Broadway 96th Street subway exit, I am waiting for Bernard. Suddenly, my arm is gripped by a big, strong guy who booms in a heavy voice: “Could you please come with us for a few moments!” For a flash I think I am being kidnapped, then I realize I am not in a war zone and I look into Bernard’s laughing face. Still the same old joker. He no longer has his Rasta hair, but he still has his big smile and shining eyes. It was easy to reach him; Bob gave me the number of Bernard’s cell phone—a heavy old school Nokia—and within a few days we meet up for lunch. We walk down Broadway, and in no time, just like in the good old days, we wind up discussing women and the trouble they cause. Bernard laughs. “The most powerful men were brought down by women. Empires and kingdoms crumbled because of pussy.” At a nice place with white tablecloths, we sit down and have lunch and a Stella Artois. “Next time bring some Chimay from Belgium,” requests Bernard, sipping his Stella.