He hated school, where he was a slow learner and rebellious. “I liked to keep my hair long and greasy,” he says, peering out from behind the scraggly hanks that he wears over his face. “My school, see, was Catholic. They didn’t go for the hair or the leather jacket. I don’t do well with authority.”
In fact, he got into trouble well before he grew his hair long, he admits. At five, he tried to choke another boy. At seven, he was in reform school for having beaten up several boys. By the time he was eight years old, he had learned how to break and enter. “I was also into arson and petty theft,” he says casually, throwing out the criminal charges precisely. The Catholic school took him in, long hair and all, until a boy called his brother ugly and Frank broke the boy’s jaw with a baseball bat. The baseball coach who tried to interfere was knocked unconscious in the melee.
Back in reform school, Frank learned how to pick locks, rob stores, and make and use various drugs. He was freed at fourteen to attend public school where he was more comfortable, he says, “because everyone carried knives.” He quit at sixteen though, and his father kicked him out as a bad influence on his younger brother and sister. His mother and sister sneaked him into the basement to sleep during the cold months, however.
“She’s a pistol,” he says of his nine-year-old sister, smiling at the recollection. “A real beautiful little girl. Always was. She wanted me to take her wherever I go, but I had to stop going there because she would start crying every time I saw her.” That’s when he took a bus to New York City, but without any experience, the best work he could find was pumping gas.
Teddy
AT A SOUP KITCHEN ONE NIGHT, FRANK MET TEDDY, A SOFT-LOOKing young man of seventeen with glasses and sad eyes, and took him to the hole. Teddy is quiet and articulate, with clean-cut, almost preppy features. His father was killed in a car accident on Christmas Day when he was three years old, and his mother, he says, died “a violent death” two years ago.
“He’s never told us how she died exactly,” Frank says. “But I think it had to do with some boyfriend. I think Teddy saw it all, too.”
During the day, Teddy walks the streets, sometimes selling books and magazines for homeless entrepreneurs who use the operation as a front for dealing drugs. Teddy, himself, is very honest. “The only scam he’ll run is telling a storeowner that the soda machine took his money,” says Frank.
“I usually get something for that,” Teddy admits with a shy smile. “It’s an advantage I have, being white and looking the way I do. People tend to believe me. But I don’t want to abuse that too often, only when I really need some money. Once I went up to a lady on the street and told her I was new to the city and someone had stolen my money, and I was trying to get enough together to get back home. She gave me fifty bucks. She wanted to give me more, but I couldn’t let her. I spent most of the money on myself and felt rotten to the core, so I gave the rest away. I just couldn’t do that again,” he says contritely.
Teddy did well in school. “I was what they called a ‘gifted child,’ which of course means worthless on the streets. What makes you smart in school has nothing to do with the outside. I never realized how dumb I was until I met these guys,” he nods meekly toward the other boys in the hole. “Someday I’d like to go to college, though. I’ve been trying, but I can’t seem to save money. I need someone to keep it for me, not give it to me.”
Most of the community are undisciplined in keeping schedules. After waking with the others, Teddy leaves to buy coffee and, if he has enough money, a piece of pizza as well. He wanders for the rest of the day, looking for odd jobs and each day foraging a bit farther out, but by dusk, at least so far, he’s back in the hole.
“We have to stick together at night,” he says, clearly frightened at the prospect of not returning in time. “Anything can happen when you’re alone.”
The veterans in the hole community are protective of Teddy. “He wouldn’t leave for days when he first got here,” Felicia remembers. “We had to bring him food, but he wouldn’t eat. He’d just sit there,” she points to a corner, “and he’d cry. He’d stare at the wall and the light coming down and just stare and stare. It was the saddest thing I ever saw. Frank finally just carried him out, took him for pizza. I remember he said: ‘You haven’t lived until you’ve had New York pizza.’
“I didn’t think he should do that, pick him up and all. I mean he’s fully grown. After that, Teddy goes out most every day. He’s always back about sunset. But every so often he still stares at the walls for hours, like before.”
Teddy is upstairs in the park, staring vacantly at autumn’s changing leaves. “I dream a lot,” he says. “It’s like thinking for me.”
Jimmy
“TEDDY WILL TOUGHEN UP,” JIMMY ASSURES FRANK. JIMMY’S A TRUE street kid and proud of it. He frequently spends the night in the runaway hole, but will often disappear for weeks.
“I know everything there is to know about this city,” he boasts, hands on hips.
Which is the Empire State Building and which is the Chrysler Building?
“Everything important,” he amends, undeterred. “Everything important about surviving in the city. All the scams, drugs, people. You wouldn’t believe the people I know. I won’t tell you, but they’re big stars,” he smiles as if excited at the thought of really knowing the rich and famous.
Whatever his contacts, he has more energy than any two or three other homeless kids here. He wakes early, buys a cup of coffee and some candy bars, and leaves the area to “visit friends,” as he puts it, on the streets in other areas of the city. When he runs low on cash, he says, he visits tourist spots where he can pick pockets. Times Square was once his favorite. “It’s no good there now,” he says, “too many plain clothes cops.” So he prowls Penn Station.
“I like to steal, too,” he volunteers boldly. “It makes me feel productive.”
Jimmy’s story is a poignant variation of the others. At fourteen, he “took off” from a home where there were six children “and more on the way,” he says. “My father drinks more than he works. Comes home just to lay my mother. I was another mouth to feed, and there wasn’t much money, so I left. I still go home sometimes to visit, you know. I usually bring a turkey home for Thanksgiving.” He gives a bright, lively laugh. “Now that’s hard, stealing a turkey, and one big enough to feed all of us.”
Dolly
DOLLY CAME TO THE COMMUNITY WITH MONICA. MONICA HAD JUST finished work and found Dolly on the streets at 2 A.M., wandering around, a disoriented fourteen-year-old. She still becomes disoriented, and sometimes Monica wishes she’d leave.
“She’s full of herself sometimes,” Monica says. “Always talks about how men can’t stop touching her, and how she hates men. Then you see her on a park bench all over some guy. I told her if she doesn’t talk to them, they won’t come after her. She just says she’s too pretty; they’d come after her anyway.”
Dolly paints her huge, doll-like eyes with heavy black eyeliner and mascara. Her face is round, as if she still has baby fat, but her small body is shapely, and she wears tight jeans and a too-small T-shirt that accentuates her figure. She worries almost as much about her hair and makeup as she does about men.
“I tried to kill myself when I was ten,” she says, showing her scarred wrists. “I fell in love with my stepfather and he raped me. I’ve been drugged, raped, molested, and abused so many times by men at parties that I want a sex change operation so men will leave me alone.” She hates sex, she says. “But men love me for it. That’s what I got.”
Dolly was the only member of the community who agreed to go with me to Covenant House. Others encouraged her, and we set a date and place to meet, but she never showed up. She hasn’t returned to the community.*
EACH UNDERGROUND COMMUNITY IS DIFFERENT, BUT ANGER, SADness, and often hopelessness pervade most of them. The runaway community is unique, with its mutual caring and the atmosphere of hope that the future will be better. Like any family, they fight among
themselves, but they also protect each other. When a regular customer at the Mister Donut began to harass Felicia, Frank and Jimmy showed up for a few words with him.
“I could have lost my job!” Felicia remembers, wide-eyed. “They took him out behind the restaurant and threatened him. They said they didn’t care if I got fired, at least I wouldn’t get hurt.” Carlos or Frank also usually meet Monica on her way back from work late at night so she will avoid trouble on the way to the hole.
Being runaways themselves, the community is particularly sympathetic to younger kids on the run. “The best people to help runaways are those like us,” says Freddy, “and the best way to help is to be yourself. We know the emotions and we know how to make our way. We have the independence we couldn’t have at Covenant House or in a group home, and we’ve got real support from each other, not for just an hour from some social worker, but from people who really care and understand.”
These teenagers, for all their experiences, are frighteningly vulnerable. Hardly ever do I suspect they are exaggerating their histories, and their emotions are always ready to break the surface. Like the children they are, they cry one moment and laugh the next. Their wounds are still raw, and the pain is still fresh. They want more than to just survive. They aren’t living to die, and they don’t want pity. They aren’t looking for understanding, but they aren’t afraid to be understood.
“You ask me if it bothers me to talk about all this,” says Jeff, a seventeen-year-old recent arrival after he described his family and his own route to this place. “I dunno. I don’t think so, because I don’t see how anything you write could hurt me. They’re just words. My parents and I hurt each other pretty bad, far worse than any words. So, no, it doesn’t bother me if you write about me, because maybe it will help someone sometime. I dunno how, though, because we’re all so different. We all left home for different reasons. Me, because of the authority thing. I hate my stepmother. But maybe some kid out there won’t make the same mistake, won’t be so quick to take off, if you write about me. I hope so. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll pick up what you write and understand what’s going on here with me now.”
With encouragement from others, Jeff subsequently returned home after “patching things up” with his father and stepmother, I’m told.
Depression is a malady that hits all of the members of the community at one time or another, and shows up in different ways. Some cry; others are silently despondent. “The best way to deal with it is to help others,” says Felicia over a breakfast of Coca-Cola and last night’s leftover donuts from her job.
“Or to just keep busy,” adds Jimmy through the remnants of two chocolate-covered cream donuts he has just snarfed down.
“It’s my fear of death that pulls me out and keeps me going,” says Teddy, staring at a glazed donut that Felicia has just placed in his hand.
“I don’t know,” Jimmy muses, almost to himself. “I never let myself get that far down. I just gotta laugh when they hit me. I laugh all the time.”
“I still daydream,” replies Teddy, looking a bit embarrassed as Jimmy rolls his eyes. “And that helps. When things don’t look good, I can still dream and I feel good.”
Sometimes the depression can also become anger and take a suicidal or violent turn.
“I don’t know why,” says Frank, “but sometimes I feel like climbing the Brooklyn Bridge and jumping off, or getting a gun and going into a grocery store and blowing everyone away.” He has found himself walking toward the bridge in a melancholy daze, only to wake and go for his gun. “One of these days I’m gonna do something bad. I can feel it. Sometimes I hope they get me before I get them.”
One evening as the sun is setting we climb to a rooftop. Frank passes around a bottle of Johnny Walker Red. Within an hour, as darkness arrives, the group is pensive.
If you had one wish, what would it be? I ask them.
“I wish my mother would come back,” Teddy says immediately.
“I’d change the world so there would be a place for us,” Carlos answers. “A good place where we would have real freedom and not live in a hole.”
“I’d like to blow my head off,” says Frank, looking down between his knees.
Others object, and Frank is persuaded to revise his wish. “I’d change things in myself if I could. You go to prison and you get this ‘fuck you’ attitude, and it stays with you all the time. You resent every fucking thing in the establishment. You forget how it is not to be angry all the time.”
Someone points out that Frank has never been to prison.
“You ever been to reform school?” he demands. “That’s prison.”
Jeff joins the wishers. “I’d want to go back to when I was nine, and know the things I know now, so I wouldn’t make the same mistakes,” he says.
And I remember what Dolly once said: “I wish I’d never been born.”
Rather than leave it there, I ask them what’s the best thing about being on the streets?
“The freedom,” says Jimmy.
“Just being alive,” says Monica.
“Hope,” says Carlos, who after a moment tries to explain. “Sometimes I get on this depression-suicide trip like Frank. But then I think there’s a person I’m gonna miss if I leave now. There’s a place I should see that I wouldn’t see. There’s too much I want to do before I go. There’s someone I want to meet.”
“Sometimes I get on this depression-suicide trip like Frank. But then I think there’s a person I’m gonna miss if I leave now. There’s a place I should see that I wouldn’t see. There’s too much I want to do before I go. There’s someone I want to meet.”
THE RUNAWAY COMMUNITY DISBANDED SOON AFTER THAT. I DON’T know why. I found a handwritten note from Teddy under a rock, but the smudged penciling is illegible. The only other remnant was a tube of forgotten lipstick under an old chair. I went back to the rooftop where we had all watched the sunset, and I dreamed that they were all finding that someone or someplace or something better that they all hoped for.
15
Tunnel Outreach
IN SEPTEMBER 1990, THE METROPOLITAN TRANSIT AUTHORITY authorized funds for a program to provide outreach and referral services to homeless people living in and around subway tunnels and train tunnels. Among other things, the aim was to obtain information about the homeless in the transportation system of New York, and to improve the safety and cleanliness of the system. Preliminary estimates showed that 80 to 85 percent of the homeless were substance abusers, so the Metropolitan Transit Authority hired ADAPT (Association for Drug Abuse Prevention and Treatment), a nonprofit organization partially funded by the New York Health Department, to provide outreach in the tunnels of the Grand Central and Penn stations. After almost a year, ADAPT counted 6,031 homeless in the system, far more than any authority had anticipated, with one-third to one-half of them living directly under the Penn and Grand Central stations.
The following year, however, the Metropolitan Transit Authority went a different route in an effort to cope with the growing tunnel homeless problem. Instead of ADAPT, it contracted with the controversial Homeless Emergency Liaison Project (HELP), a mobile outreach organization that provides crisis psychiatric services to the mentally ill. Some studies have found anywhere between 25 and 60 percent of the aboveground homeless to be mentally impaired, but the ADAPT project reported that only 10 to 15 percent of those they encountered had mental problems. The Metropolitan Transit Authority’s choice of Project HELP (rather than continue with ADAPT) surprised many in the field until it was recognized that Project HELP offers a service no other outreach unit could provide. It has authority to physically incarcerate a mentally ill person if he or she is considered “imminently at risk to himself or others.” Those people can be taken to hospital emergency wards for psychiatric evaluation and held without their permission for as long as a team of psychiatric workers deems necessary.
Put bluntly, only Project HELP can forcibly eject the homeless from the tunnels on grounds of
mental illness and commit them to hospitals. “And that was the MTA’s primary goal,” says Michael Bethea, ADAPT’s outreach director. “Subway and train ridership was down, and the Metropolitan Transit Authority didn’t want commuters to see these homeless people, to smell them, to feel threatened by them. In addition, the Democratic Convention was coming to town in a few months, with all the national press, so the Metropolitan Transit Authority did what it had to do.
“In fairness, MTA also has a responsibility to the homeless people in the tunnels who were getting hit by trains,” he says. Almost a hundred such victims were counted the year before. In addition, more than eighty fires had occurred in the tunnels in connection with homeless living along the tracks, endangering commuters, workers, and firefighters. Sometimes their campfires would get out of control; other times sparks from the third rail would ignite their flimsy clothes and bedding near the tracks.*
However, ADAPT workers complain that the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s strategy of using Project HELP risks lumping all homeless individuals, including those who are not mentally ill, into the same category and permits even those who are not mentally ill to be rounded up. Moreover, it neglects the larger needs of this destitute community.
“Our fear is that they [Project HELP] are going to mistakenly perceive someone strung out from crack or heroin as being mentally sick and commit him or her. Then, that person is lost,” complains Bethea. “We found that they do have difficulties making that distinction.” In addition to the addicts, there are also physically ill people with tuberculosis, HIV, and AIDS in the tunnels, “and there’s just plain people who are homeless. All of these have to be dealt with separately, not approached through mental illness,” he says.
The Mole People Page 15