“MTA wants quick fixes,” adds ADAPT’s executive director Yolanda Serrano. “What underground homeless need is time to develop relationships with outreach workers down there, so, when the homeless come up from the tunnels, they come up for good, not just for a few days in a hospital, after which they run back down to a new tunnel.” ADAPT’s tracking statistics find that almost all tunnel dwellers who go through detoxification programs, which usually last five to seven days, go back down underground afterward.
“The attitudes and behavior that took them into the tunnels don’t change overnight,” she continues. “Sometimes they don’t change even after residential treatment programs that last two years. It takes time and acceptance. Even a ‘normal’ person has to quit smoking five or six or more times before it sticks. And here we’re talking about some people who have used mind-altering substances for five to ten years.”
Project HELP is well aware of its strong-arm image. “We’ve got the nasty reputation on the homeless grapevine,” admits Dr. Sam Tsemberis, a young but seasoned psychologist and the new director of Project HELP. Tsemberis has a more liberal tinge and announces to me early on that, when he came to interview for the job, he told his interviewers up front that he was not sure he believed in the very premise of Project HELP. He looks forward to changing its image, though it has existed since Project HELP’s founding. However, as he sees the homeless situation in light of his new position, he better understands where Project HELP comes from and is not so quick to make changes.
“We’re always the last people they want to see, the bad guys who come and take people away. People see our van and run. Other units that can’t handle certain homeless persons call us to do their dirty work. I didn’t like that at first, but, after seeing some of the things I’ve seen out there with Project HELP, I recognize that there is a need for this type of organization,” Tsemberis says, looking concerned.
Project HELP was created about a decade earlier after the celebrated case in January 1982, when Joyce (aka Billy) Boggs, a sixty-one-year-old homeless woman living in a cardboard box on the street died of hypothermia after refusing help several times. She had been a psychiatric patient who was on the street for eight months, since her public assistance benefits were revoked for “failure to appear for recertification.” She died, despite last-minute efforts by medical personnel, just a few hours before authorities secured a court order to permit authorities to take her to a hospital against her will.
Only the so-called “STIPSO” statute applied at the time. An acronym for short-term involuntary protective services order, it required that a physician must certify that the person would die within seventy-two hours if not hospitalized, find a judge to declare the person incompetent, and then return to locate the homeless person, who usually had moved on.
The Boggs case, coming amid signs of a rising homeless population on the streets that seemed made up overwhelmingly of mentally ill people, pushed New York to establish Project HELP under New York State’s Mental Hygiene law. The statute states that Project HELP may provide services that are voluntary or involuntary for the patient. The criteria for involuntary provision of services is that the person be mentally ill and a danger to himself or others.
“At first I didn’t believe in Project HELP,” says Tsemberis. “I thought it was a fascistic, Koch [former Mayor Ed Koch] program to get people off the street involuntarily, using psychiatry for social control, but I’ve concluded there is a need to take people off the streets when they are really in a bad way.” He admits that homeless people who are not mentally ill may be taken to Bellevue Hospital. He contends that, even when an error is made, the homeless are helped by the basic care they get at the hospital.
Mental illness deals with idiosyncratic behaviors that may or may not be indigenous to the individual, he says, but there is a great difficulty separating what is innate to that individual and what comes from the underground life they have been living.
“These people we take to the hospital, you wouldn’t believe what they look like,” Tsemberis says. “Some have toilet paper wrapped around their heads because they don’t want their ideas flying out or new ideas flying in. And after a week in Bellevue, eating and sleeping four or five nights, they go before a judge and they say, ‘I don’t know why I was brought here, your honor. I just want to get out and get a job.’”
Tsemberis is also frustrated, like others who work with the homeless, by lack of resources. He believes that the most effective outreach program would include three types of medical specialists—one for physical health, one for mental health, and one for addiction. More crucial is the lack of programs to keep homeless off the streets and out of the tunnels after treatment. This would primarily require housing—after detoxification, rehabilitation, and psychiatric counseling—to allow time for attacking the root causes that drove the homeless individuals underground in the first place.
As it is now, says ADAPT’s Bethea, fewer than 15 percent of the underground homeless make it back aboveground to a relatively normal life.
Bureaucratic provisions, particularly those requiring children to be taken from addicted parents, keep many of the homeless from seeking help. Bethea recalls a woman who lived in the tunnels with her daughter and wanted drug counseling but feared the authorities would take the child. ADAPT encouraged her to enter a rehabilitation program and promised to do their best to help her keep her daughter. “But the child is in a foster home,” says Bethea, shaking his head. “The mother has finished rehab and is doing fine, but they still won’t give the child back to her.”
ADAPT has sought to cut other red tape that hinders aid to the homeless. “Many people we deal with have no identification,” Bethea says. “But in order to access a treatment program or apply for social services or welfare, they need at least two forms of ID, plus a place of residence. We had to learn where we could get a quick, temporary form of ID that is valid, or at least accepted by the social services.” ADAPT workers often shelled out $10 or $15 from their own pockets to get the less-than-legal IDs when the project lacked funds.
ADAPT complains that not only did the Metropolitan Transit Authority shift to the mental health focus of Project HELP, it also rejected ADAPT’s statistics on the homeless population. “They didn’t want to scare the public, while we didn’t worry about that aspect of it,” says Bethea. The Metropolitan Transit Authority authorities changed the definition of homeless to reduce the population figures, says Bethea. “They decided that a person is not homeless if he or she is not lying down or sitting outside of a designated sitting area. If a person is standing, even with garbage bags, they are not in violation (by that definition) and so not counted, overlooked. Our numbers were always higher than the Long Island Rail Road police would have liked, for example, although we have very good relations with the police. It was just that once they sat in a board room, things started to look different. The homeless population just became a political game of numbers.”
From their very first trips into the tunnels, ADAPT’s workers were shocked not only by the number of homeless they found, but also by the sometimes elaborate living quarters and “conveniences” underground. There were dwellings with wallpaper, pictures, and posters hanging from walls. Running water, showers, heat, electricity, and even a microwave oven helped make life in the tunnels a bit more bearable.
“Seven stories under Grand Central,” says Bethea, eyes still widening at the memory, “we found families. Mother, child, and a male. We brought up two pregnant women our first month. One had her baby and went back down without the baby. The baby’s in foster care now.”
Tunnel people always amaze outsiders at how well they hide. “We walked the tunnels along tracks, trains coming back and forth, 600 volts in the third rail, and we would walk right past people no more than four feet away and sometimes never see them ‘til they called out,” recalls Bethea. “We found people living above the tracks, on gratings, who we’d never see if we didn’t happen to look up.
On the upper levels of the underground are mostly crack users who distrust everyone, Bethea says, and who essentially want to be alone. “Crack is a selfish type of drug, as opposed to heroin, which is a little more communal. Its users want to be with others.
“But there were lots of people who weren’t doing drugs, who weren’t crazy. We ran across working people, people who could not afford an apartment but were making too much money for social service supplements. So they chose to live in the tunnels and work rather than take public assistance,” he says.
ADAPT’s final report, never published but made available to me, states that “a significant proportion of the homeless (in the subway system) work for pay at least occasionally. Most homeless men have substantial work histories.”
Bethea and his group found that many of the homeless, rather than preferring to stay in the depths, want to get back to life aboveground.
“Despite the perceived notion that they are suicidal because they live along the tracks and do drugs,” he says, “those people don’t want to die. They still know they’re human beings. One woman refused to see a doctor for no obvious reason until we found out why: she was embarrassed because she hadn’t washed for several weeks. They know that they didn’t come from that environment originally, that problems brought them down. And you can get them to believe, because they already do, that they can get back to their ‘normal’ lives aboveground.
“They don’t want to die. You can see it in the way they live. They haven’t given up living. They may not have much self-esteem. We have to give them empowerment counseling, but like those guys under the Waldorf-Astoria, the homosexual community, we found condoms all around that place. They practice safe sex. They don’t want to die of AIDS.”
ADAPT was very successful in finding homeless in large part because of the diligence and dedication of the staff. At least two workers had to be ordered out of the tunnels when Bethea feared they were overworked. “They were down there everyday for four months,” he says. “I was afraid they would burn out, that they were going to get hurt. They were so involved they didn’t worry about their own safety and it’s very dangerous down there.”
One of those men is Harold Deamues, a smiling, good-humored, dark-skinned man in his mid-thirties. He wears a short, well-groomed beard and closely trimmed hair. He believes he can help because he once used drugs himself.
“I know what’s out there. I know what I’ve been through. I know what it’s like for people to give up on you, and you lose your spirit. I knew I could break out, with help,” Deamues says, and he wants to repay those who helped him by helping others. “You can’t help everyone; you got to accept that not everyone wants help. But there are some you can help.”
Deamues grew up in East Harlem and thought he knew just about every way a person could be down and out in New York, but he didn’t know about tunnel people. “I thought talk about people living underground was just handing out a story; I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “Who would go down there? Why? What’s down there? When I saw it with my own eyes, I was amazed, truly amazed.
“They call them the mole people, and you can catch them sleeping, having sex, eating. But strange. One older gentleman, fifty-something, with this ashen look, his feet were matted together at the toes like they were all one part. All you could see was the shape of the top of his toes. He was barefooted, and he lived way down there, three levels. Said he hasn’t been up in three years. I asked him if he ate rats and stuff down there. He smiled. Didn’t want to give me no definite answer. But he smiled like, you know, what else is there for me to eat sometimes.
“His eyes had that dullish gray, you know, like he might have drank a lot for years. But it’s hard to say he was crazy. He was able to speak fluently, answer any questions without any problem. Sometimes when we saw him he was buck-naked and running around, quick. He was alone, but I imagine there were other people down there, that area called Burma’s Road in the lowest tunnel levels under Grand Central.
“I found a gentleman on pipes one time, steam pipes. They got big steam pipes down there. I said, ‘Peace, I’m coming up,’ because the worst thing you can do is scare someone down there. That’s when it’s dangerous, when you surprise someone. But he was cool. He had his food heating up on the pipes and he lay on them, reading a newspaper.”
Deamues says he’s even found people singing in their shower underground, using water from fire extinguisher sprinklers. Some homeless use the bathrooms that the Metropolitan Transit Authority workers leave open for them.
A social network of sorts has been developed among the homeless, according to Tsemberis. Food, drugs, and medicine are often shared, as is gossip and stories of the underground.
Within this network, he says, “the mole people have taken on mythological proportions. They are supposed to be somehow different, unique. They’ve lived underground for years. They may even look different, like they are from a different planet. I run a men’s group in the drop-in center on 44th Street and these guys talk about how scary the mole people are, about faces showing up and skinny heads, and since they smoke crack, I don’t know if they are high or out of their minds.” The stories, he says, demonize the mole people.
ADAPT headquarters is an old synagogue on 111th Street in Harlem, the only intact building in a drug-zoned block. Drive-by shootings are commonplace in the neighborhood. Riders at the nearest subway station are hard-pressed to explain the safest route to the building, ending by telling the visitor to be “very careful however you go.” ADAPT staffers are unfazed by dangers near their office, but even they say the dangers underground are of a whole different proportion.
“You know that down there, besides the trains and the third rail, you have people who are afraid. Afraid of being attacked by others, scared crazy by coke. When we’re scared and they’re scared, it’s really dangerous for everyone. But there is one area down there that is particularly scary for me: an abandoned tunnel that was once used to store or transport coal, for the old trains, I guess. Very, very scary, like if someone wants to do something to you there, you lost without knowing something started,” Deamues says.
“There you can feel the eyes. That’s the eeriest feeling, sensing eyes but seeing no body. I have confidence in myself that once I make contact with them, I’ll be OK, able to do something for them, whatever. But, man, you feel their eyes and you start to wonder about the stories about cannibalism,” he laughs self-consciously. “They seem to live in the asbestos insulation around steam pipes, and they got rats so big they look like they lift weights. You think they want your clothes because they are cold, or your boots, and there’s all them glass vials and needles and shit on the floor. And you can’t call for help, the police walkie-talkie radios don’t carry upstairs. If something happens down there and you call upstairs, you get nothing.
“I used to tell the others, ‘Don’t get fat because, if you get hurt, I’m gonna have to carry your ass out of there.’ You couldn’t leave anyone alone in those tunnels.”
On top of the various diseases, filth, mental illness, and addiction, homeless living underground also have gotten mauled by subway track workers, according to ADAPT. Sometimes a homeless person steals tools from the workers, and the workers take it out on the next homeless person they find. Hangman’s nooses have been left dangling from overhead pipes to intimidate the homeless.
Subway workers have also reported being “piped”—struck over the head with a steel pipe—by homeless who want their clothes, shoes, and tools. “Workers get piped down here all the time,” says Daniel Crump, a stew
ard for the Transit Workers and Mechanics Union who was one of the first knowledgeable people to talk openly to me about the underground homeless and has been frustrated by the Metropolitan Transit Authority and city inaction. “I get calls all the time from workers afraid to go into the tunnels because they say, ‘mole people are all around.’“
Most mole stories come up from the very bowels of Grand Central, seven levels down. “Down there,” says Deamues, “there are no trains. It’s quiet. There are old tracks, and electricity in some parts. Big areas. I’m waiting for someone to swing down like Tarzan. The deeper and deeper you go, the quieter it gets. But there’s still those eyes. It’s always like, ‘Where are they?’“
The homeless feel safer the deeper down they go, ADAPT workers believe. “They get that sense of security down there,” Deamues says. “To go further back in the tunnels, or deeper, says ‘I don’t want to bother nobody. I don’t want nobody bothering me. I’m where nothing should go wrong. I don’t want to deal with nobody. I won’t cause problems; just let me stay here; I’ll keep this place in order. Outside it’s crazy, but at least down here I can close my eyes.’
“When I come up and I smell of those places, people think they need to take antibiotics just to come near me. In tunnels closer to the surface, the homeless mainly need a place to stay. The shelter system is too dangerous. They feel they can’t close their eyes in the shelters, fearing rape or beating or getting killed. People yelling and stealing their clothes. And they’re treated like they’re subhuman there, like dogs,” he says.
The irony is that, as Deamues sees it, “they feel much more human underground, safer, freer to move around. Tranquil, even serene to some of them, despite the trains running by.
“But worst, most heartbreaking, is when you find people who say, ‘Hey, I don’t want to be here, but I have no choice. I can’t take another shelter and I can’t go home.’“
The Mole People Page 16