Bernard updates me on his life. He has become a family man, moved in with his father in Harlem to take care of him now that the latter is legally blind. On the weekends, he goes down to Baltimore to see one of his sons, who now has a daughter. In fact, Bernard has become a grandfather twice over. For the future, he foresees that he also will have to take care of his ailing mother in Florida. His family is obviously glad that he finally left the tunnel. “I knew I could leave any moment,” Bernard boasts. “It was a good period of my life. But I still miss the solitude. Now I am confronted with so much bullshit up top.” Once he got back into the system, an old student loan emerged. “Once you pop up on the screen, they got you.” Now he works at the Parks Department maintaining Central Park. He works the ‘grave yard shift’ as he calls it, from 10 PM until 6 AM in the morning. “At least I don’t have to put up with all the chatter of these dingbats,” he says of his female colleagues. “At night I am alone with the raccoons and the squirrels.”
Bernard stopped doing drugs. “Once in a while a beer and a little reefer, that’s it. People always made such a big deal about us doing drugs down there. But hey man, for us, it was just a way of socializing. The guys on Wall Street snorting coke, they are the ones that really get high. What we got was just some aggravation.”
For a while, Bernard worked in a soup kitchen on the Upper West Side where he heard all the news about the former tunnel people. He knows that Julio is dead. He started to drink really heavily, at one point he was even drinking rubbing alcohol. “A few months ago they found him here, unconscious on a traffic island in the middle of Broadway,” Bernard explains. “They brought him to the hospital where he was declared dead. His liver was gone.”
Contrary to what Kathy says, Tony is still alive and kicking. We meet him on the corner of 73rd Street and Broadway, where he is selling books on a cold winter morning. Tony still looks good for his old age—he should be over sixty-five by now. He is living in a small room in East New York, a seedy area far out in Brooklyn. It is a long train ride to Manhattan, but Tony is not complaining—the rent is only three hundred dollars a month.
However, José, the old Porto Rican, died. “As soon as they put him in an apartment, he put on weight. He had nothing to do. At the end he was 230 pounds,” according to Bernard. Margaret, who still visited José once in a while, managed to organize a decent funeral.
Marcus has also passed away. Some of the hippies that always hang out at the Strawberry Fields Memorial in the Park told Bernard. “Marcus had an infection in his leg but he did not get treatment,” Bernard says knowingly. “It got ugly and eventually developed into gangrene.”
Regarding Bob, Bernard is frankly surprised that he is still alive. “Bob told me once ‘When I die, throw a pack of Pall Malls, no filter, in my casket. And don’t forget the lighter.’ After two open-heart operations, that idiot is still smoking. He told me he did not want to live beyond sixty-five,” Bernard laughs. “He is now sixty-seven years. God won’t let him cheat. Bob won’t go easy.”
42. TRACKING DOWN THE TUNNEL PEOPLE 2: PONCHO, GETULIO, HUGO, LEE, DEE, HENRY, RALPH, GREG, TITO, ESTOBAN, JOSÉ
Poncho wound up getting a nice place in the Bronx. The last time I saw him was two years after he had left the tunnels. At that time, he was smiling and happy as usual and had found a good paying job in construction work. He told me that Getulio was also picking up the pieces and doing fine.
It is unknown what happened to Estoban and Hugo. Hugo most probably is roaming the streets. Marc saw him once. He looked awful and was still heavily using crack. Marc stayed in touch with most of the people in the South End that were featured in Dark Days. I hardly covered “his” people in the South End, although I knew them by name.
Lee killed himself. “He sat down on the tracks in a Buddah pose,” Marc explains. “I pulled him off. He told me he just wanted to die. The next day he did it again. And he succeeded.”
Dee, a tough-talking black woman who lived in a remote shack near little Havana, wound up in jail for selling drugs. Henry, her neighbor, migrated to Utah and was reportedly united with his family. Ralph—the white man with a drooping moustache who became Marc’s de facto production assistant—turned into a success story. So did Greg, the man who lived in the tent. Ralph is currently working as a hotel manager in upstate New York. He also owns a cleaning company. Greg became a superintendent in the Bronx, and did such a good job that he ended up taking care of five buildings: a super super, you could say. Tito, a Hispanic man I once briefly met, currently works for a rehab center and tours the country showing Marc’s documentary and lecturing high school kids about the dangers of drugs, as illustrated by his life as a former crack-addicted, homeless person.
Estoban was last seen by Bernard in 2008, as unwashed and dirty as ever. He must have been close to seventy years old. He has probably died by now.
“It was sad,” Margaret tells me over coffee in Union Square Park. Margaret’s book The Tunnel was very successful, and somehow she became Godmother to all the tunnel people. “Estoban was the most difficult case because he had lost all his identity papers. Dov put an incredible amount of time into him, but the red tape drove Estoban mad,” Margaret recounts. “They went together to all these places, to the social security office, to the immigration office, to the welfare office. Every time there was something wrong. Once they said his photo did not look like him, another time he needed yet another piece of paper. It got to the point that Estoban lost all hope.” At the end, Dov and Estoban thought they had everything together and they went together to the immigration bureau. There they heard the application was still not complete. “Something snapped in Estoban,” Margaret tells. “He tore up all his paperwork in front of the officer and stormed out. Of course, Dov could not start the procedure again.”
José was found dead in his apartment in the Bronx. “It was all the way up in Grand Concourse,” Margaret explains. “He hardly knew anybody there. All he had left was eating.” José had no known relatives so nobody could officially identify his body—he had lost touch with his children from a marriage twenty years earlier. José had nearly met the same fate as all the other unidentified dead—an unceremonious burial in an unmarked grave in Potter’s Field. City detective Floyd Coore put extra energy in the case. He found Margaret’s phone number in José’s notebook and alerted her. With financial support from the Coalition, Margaret tried to organize a decent funeral for José. After the New York Times devoted an article to the quest for a final resting place for the former tunnel dweller, readers donated generously to the Coalition.[75] A funeral parlor in Queens offered its services free of charge and a pastor donated a plot at the exclusive Kensico cemetery. Now José rests in Valhalla, NY, on a quiet hillside among illustrious names such as Tommy Dorsey, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Ayn Rand.
75
Nina Bernstein, “Waiting for a Final Resting Place; Friends Seek Proper Burial for a Former Tunnel Dweller” and “In Death, Pauper Finds Generosity,”