The Mole People

by Jennifer Toth

  “Hold it!” the gunman orders confidently. “Ain’t through with you yet.”

  “Look, man,” says Blade, angrily now. “I tol’ you I don’t mean nothin’. Let it be, man. I leavin’.”

  Blade turns his back on the light and walks past me.

  “I’m going to tell him that I’m behind him when he passes,” I whisper, “and that I’ll shoot him if he shoots you.” My voice sounds like thunder in my ears. I fear I’ve spoken too loudly.

  “You say somethin’?” the gunman asks Blade.

  “Jus’ that I’m goin’,” Blade recovers. In his throaty whisper aside, he tells me, “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard!” He shakes his head. “Don’t you know he can hear where your voice come from? Fool!”

  “You got someone down there with you?” demands the gunman.”

  “Yeah,” I answer, trembling. “I’m a reporter.”

  Blade shakes his head again, exasperated. He twists his hands at his thighs as though wishing he had snapped my neck like a chicken. The two of us move back toward the light.

  We must look cowed and helpless because the gunman laughs in relief. I introduce myself, explaining that I’m collecting material on tunnel people.

  “Good thing,” he says importantly. “Don’ want to waste no lead. Don’ have lead to waste.”

  His fear and hostility have largely disappeared. “How about me interviewing you?” I ask.

  “Don’ see it as no problem,” he replies, “long as we know where to find you.”

  You won’t know, I tell him, but soften it by offering to withhold names and descriptions. “I’m writing a book, and in a book you’ll live forever,” I say.

  That seems persuasive. “I’ll have to clear it with Doc,” he says.

  I can see him more clearly now as we move forward—a tall, slim man, perhaps in his twenties, but looking much older. We turn a sharp corner that seems flooded with grate light to find Doc, their leader, a short, heavyset man with dark glasses.

  He likes the idea of being part of a book. He also trusts my guide.

  “She’s with Blade,” he says, “it’s cool.”

  Surprised, I look questioningly at Blade. He just nods to Doc and ignores me.

  New arrivals entering the tunnel also appear to know Blade. I ask him directly where he met them. “Can’t remember,” he shrugs, brushing me off.

  The new arrivals have slipped down through a manhole on one of Harlem’s less trafficked streets, I’m told. Children playing there have grown accustomed to men struggling to remove the heavy manhole cover and disappearing.

  “Yeah,” says Bingo, young and eager to talk about his exploits, “sometimes kids see us. But the kids don’t count. No one watches cuz they know it ain’t good for them. The young ones think we’re workers, I guess, and the bigger ones know not to follow.

  “We got it good down here; we know the place. Anyone who comes down here be lost and bingo.” His face lights up. “We get them before they see what’s coming at them.”

  Doc leans back on a wobbly metal chair, eyes drooping coolly, while Bingo talks. Like the others, I’m invited to call him Doc but perhaps for a different reason. “You call me Doc for doctor, because I’m gonna teach you,” he says.

  “The group, it ain’t like those gangs like Bloods and Crips or the kid gangs out here,” he begins. “We’s small, mostly just brothers. We hang together. If we see someone doing something we don’t like, if someone ‘disses’ [shows disrespect to] us, we take him out. That’s how we operate. Either we do it, or someone asks us to do it.”

  The gang hires itself out for money, threatening and assaulting in the pay and at the direction of others, usually adult criminals. They will kill for a price, Doc says, sometimes for as little as $20. “It depends on how much they got on them, and how much we want cash.”

  The last man to slip into the tunnel is smaller than the others, and quieter. He leans against a wall, arms folded, distrustful.

  “What are you gonna call him?” Doc asks, pointing the silver tip of his switchblade at the newcomer.

  “Depend on what he says,” Blade answers for me with a touch of pride. The book seems almost as much his project as mine.

  “He don’t say much,” Doc laughs. “Do you X?” he asks. “Don’t say much at all.”

  “Don’t like talk,” the man replies, mouth curling importantly with the attention. “I like action.”

  “Small Talk,” I say, “that will be your name.”

  Everyone waited in an uneasy pause to learn the response.

  “That’s cool,” he says in a low voice and comes forward with a pleased smile. Doc breaks into loud laughter. Others join in.

  “We’s all like action,” says Dart, another new arrival. “That’s why we’re with these brothers. It ain’t that we got nothin’ better to do. We talk mostly about who to take out next. It’s our work.

  “We’s respected for our work,” he continues hurriedly. “We’s not afraid of nothin’ and up there, see,” he points to the surface, “they know it. Look at this, see.” He pulls his shirt open to expose a well-muscled shoulder. An almost circular scar shines smoothly. “That’s from a bullet these punks . . .”

  Dart explains the knife scar that runs the width of his forehead, which came from a fight with a Chinatown gang, and he is starting on a scar on his calf when Blade turns to me.

  “You better call this one Diarrhea Mouth,” Blade says in an aside, “cuz he’s got it bad.” I smile.

  Dart stops, sensing the unkind interruption.

  “You say somethin’, man?” he asks.

  “Naw, ain’t nothin’. Jus’ sort of a joke,” Blade says.

  “What was it? We want to hear it,” Dart stands provocatively, shaking down the leg of his jeans where the scar was exposed.

  “It was nothin’,” Blade says, raising his voice to meet the anger in Dart’s move. “Nothin’ you want to hear.”

  The two men gravitate slowly toward each other until they are face-to-face, Blade towering over the younger man. A fight seems just one word away, but Doc intervenes.

  “He was talkin’ to the girl, Dart,” Doc says, barely looking up. “Sit down.” He adds politely to me, “Excuse me, Jennifer.”

  Blade raises his hands to his shoulders, palms forward, to indicate an end to the confrontation, but Dart remains poised to strike, his chest inflated and tense.

  Doc glares at Dart. “Blade would remove your ass,” he says sharply. “Give it up, man.”

  “You’ll have to excuse Dart, Jennifer,” Doc continues, more easily now. “He don’ know how to turn it off.”

  Dart sits down, pouting. However, within seconds, he is showing me more scars.

  When he finishes, he shouts to another man. “Slim, show her the one on your neck,” he says. Slim complies, and then exposes a fresh welt, red and raised, just above his ankle.

  “Fucking Chinks,” he says, “they use chains to fight.”

  “Naw,” laughs Dart, “that’s from that pussy you took.”

  “The bitch in leather,” Bingo throws in. Slim just shakes his head.

  Before the gang completes showing me their battle scars, Small Talk begins cleaning a gun with a cloth.

  I ignore him, but Bingo plays along. “Whatcha got?” he asks.

  “A mac,” Small Talk replies, not looking up.

  “Lemme see,” Bingo says. “Nice piece.”

  “It got lead,” Small Talk warns.

  Bingo handles the weapon roughly to show disdain for the danger. “How much did you give for it?” he asks.

  “It was a present,” Small Talk says, head tilted to look up, slowly chewing gum. He tongues the gum into his front teeth as Bingo smiles, knowingly.

  “Nice,” Bingo says. He points the gun at Dart and various other targets. “Nice,” he says again.

  Slim pulls out some crack.

  “Ah man,” says Jamaica, a skinny little newcomer with dreadlocks and a strong lilting accent
, “I thought you were going to bring ecstasy [a hallucinogenic].”

  “We gotta do the Frog first,” Slim says, passing the crack.

  “I gonna do it, man, you be backup,” Jamaica says.

  “Naw, I’m gonna do it,” Dart interrupts. “I was backup last time. I wanna be the trigger man,” he pleads.

  “I done nine,” boasts Slim. “You only done four.”

  “Yeah, but mine were clean [kills],” Dart says. Slim seems not to care.

  “Aw, man,” whines Dart, sucking air through his teeth.

  “Yeah, but we only seen the three,” says Jamaica, exhaling thin blue smoke.

  “I tol’ you, they took him away before the police got there,” Dart insists to defend his claim. Status is evidently based on the number of murders.

  “It’s our thing,” Doc explains when he sees me puzzling it out. “That’s what we do. We do it to survive, to live, to succeed. It’s what we know how to do. We know how to do it well,” he emphasizes, leaning forward with hard eyes.

  He is boasting, I know, but only a little. He is trying to frighten me, I know, and he succeeds.

  “We gonna talk about Frog?” Doc is asked.

  “Not until she leaves,” Doc nods at me. “You understand,” he says, again politely. “We don’t want your involvement.”

  I don’t understand his words precisely, but I do get the meaning.

  “Time to leave,” I say brightly to Blade.

  “It was time to leave ten minutes ago,” he hisses at me when we are safely out of earshot. “Those are fucking bad men. You don’t want them saying hi to you on the street. You don’t want them to remember ever seeing you. They ain’t messin’ with you. They kill for fun.”

  And so do you, Blade, as I later discover.

  20

  J.C.’s Community

  J.C. HAS AN UNIMPOSING BUILD. HE STANDS FIVE foot seven or eight and is slim. He usually wears. jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers, and carries a boom box. He is neater than most of the station’s homeless and blends easily into the Grand Central scene, except for his very angry eyes. He is a paradox, living now aboveground and working as a janitor and as a volunteer with the Parks Department’s street kids program, but passionately defending those who choose to live where he once did, underground. He defends underground life fiercely, sometimes belligerently, in part as a vehicle for attacking society that lives on the surface, but in part also because of his strong attachment and protectiveness toward his “multicultural community” of about two hundred men, women, and children who live under Grand Central Station. He is, he says, their “spokesman.”

  He initially refuses to take me down to visit the community unless I promise to remain underground for a week and wear my hair in braids. All women in the community have braids, he says, to keep their hair clean. I refuse. A month later, he offers a visit on the condition that I not write about it. Again I refuse. Later still, he tells me that against his advice, the leader of the community—its elected “mayor,” he says—has ordered him to bring me down.

  “I wanted someone from the outside to see us,” the mayor explains to me later. “I want you to write that we’re better off down here without the perversions of the world upstairs. I need no man to validate me or my existence. I did this only to let you know how sick the upstairs is.”

  J.C. wants to impose a final condition, that I wear a blindfold. I refuse, but agree to use no description that will precisely locate the community. So we finally set off.

  We descend through Grand Central Station, which is spread over forty-eight acres, making it the largest train station in the world. It also goes down six levels beneath the subway tracks. There is no complete blueprint of the tunnels and tracks under the station. Many tunnels were begun but abandoned. Some were built but forgotten. Some were sealed off, but underground homeless people have broken through, either directly by hacking a hole through the wall or by circuitous routes, to inhabit them now.

  One of the largest disused tunnels starts out in a northwest direction, taking it under Central Park, before turning southwest toward Penn Station across town. This tunnel can be entered from either station, as well as at various places in the park itself. “There are hundreds, maybe even a thousand people living in that tunnel,” I was told by Zack, a member of J.C.’s community. “The utilities are still working there and everything.”

  The homeless in the station distinguish between “track people” and “mole people” by the level at which they live. Track people usually live under the train and subway platforms, a first stop for many who later move deeper into the tunnels. Mole people live at least a level deeper. At each deeper level, the communities are said to be more established and cohesive, and members go to the surface less frequently, living as well as sleeping underground. In the deeper tunnels, it is not uncommon to find homeless who have gone a week or more without seeing sunlight.

  We enter the tunnels through the subway in Grand Central, passing first along a platform with a scattering of commuters and onto the subway tracks. We carry no flashlights and wear no reflective clothing. I wear black, as J.C. advised me, but I doubt than any color would be discernible in the darkness.

  We snake along various tracks for what seems a frightening eternity as subway trains thunder out of the dark. As they approach with blazing white lights, J.C. moves agilely to the side and I quickly follow. We bow our heads to avoid the glare of the headlights and the motorman’s eyes and stand totally still. When the train has passed, we move on. Soon we leave the main track to pass through cavernous rooms, one after another, each with grated doors that are locked but easily circumvented.

  Sleeping bags and a few mattresses, evidence of “track people,” remain from the night before and prepare for the night to come. Each room is slightly different and yet the same, but the signs of the “camps” at each level increase as we go farther.

  Now we begin to go deeper, down a set of rusty stairs, to another level, still an operating subway tunnel, and move along tracks until finally J.C. stops and points to a wall of slate gray cement. “That’s the main entrance,” he announces. “Find it or I won’t take you down further.” I know he is teasing, but I touch the wall, which looks solid and impregnable, as if nothing could get through it.

  I bend over to search more carefully, and find below waist level a hole, about as large as the entrance to a good-sized dog house. Nervous and unsteady, I stick my head through and see a light on the other side and about thirty feet below us. We crawl inside a broad ridge. A cable hangs close enough to reach. A train passes, and we turn our backs, waiting for darkness to return before J.C. clambers down the cable, hand over hand, feet against the rock wall. Once down, he scavenges for a long wooden plank, which he props against the side for me. Using the cable and the plank, I back down the steep incline and feel level ground once again.

  The floor is covered with black garbage bags taken from Sanitation Department workers. Each is filled with clothes or balled up newspapers to disguise the place and hide various items, including the plank, stolen tool boxes, and other implements, from any intruder who might look through the entrance hole above.

  On this level, at least three down from the subway platform, J.C. is more comfortable and relaxed. At higher levels, he is always on guard, eyes darting, movements quick. Now he walks more loosely, freer. He laughs more often. He still speaks in a hushed whisper, a lower register, and he never shouts to compete with tunnel noise. Yet his words carry distinctly over intrusive tunnel sounds, even those of distant trains.

  Now, as we pick our way on planks and catwalks, worrying more about our footing than transit cops, he becomes almost talkative.

  “You can see now why no one wanders onto our community,” he says. “You have to be invited down.”

  In fact, he admits that two homeless once did stumble into the area. “One of them never left,” he says. “The other we blindfolded and walked around all day so he couldn’t find his way back. We left him near
the IRT subway track so a [maintenance] crew would find him. Or a train.”

  We follow a narrow tunnel with steep steps down one more level, where it is much warmer. The hiss of escaping steam explains why. J.C. stops and taps on a thick pipe with a heavy stick lying nearby, and we wait for a moment until answering taps arrive before moving forward again.

  The pipes begin to clatter with new tapping, and more tapping, until it sounds like a tin cavalry. “That’s Junior,” J.C. laughs. “He thinks he can bang out real messages on the pipes.”

  The din stops before we arrive at the camp where a dozen people sit around a bright gas lantern. They watch silently as we approach. Two women interrupt hanging laundry to stare, while a boy and a girl who had been playing on the overhead pipes quiet their dangling feet to peer down on us.

  J.C. touches my arm. “Wait here,” he says, and keeps walking into the camp. “If they try to eat you, run,” he calls back with a smile, and for a change, I welcome his sarcasm and even begin to feel less awkward. My watch says it has been an hour since we started out.

  The boy of about seven climbs down from the pipes and walks curiously toward me before a man comes out of the darkness to pull him back. I smile but get no answering smiles. I wait.

  A black man in his early forties comes from the tent J.C. had entered. An unkempt curly beard streaked with professorial gray surrounds his huge welcoming smile, which is full of large white teeth.

  “Jennifer,” he says, extending his hand and whispering in the manner of the tunnel people, “I’m Ali M. I’m the elected mayor of this community. You can just call me Mayor. Everyone else does,” he adds confidently.

  “I hope you enjoy visiting us. I’m sure you’ll find it interesting. You probably won’t be able to see things the way we see them because of your conditioning, but we’ll work on that. Take care to open your mind as much as possible and recognize that your eyes physically can’t see what we see. It takes weeks for eyes to adjust to the darkness.

  “My eyes won’t take the light upstairs anymore. Most people’s down here won’t. Even the weakest light can be blinding when you’ve lived down here. A few months ago I went up just to see what things were like. Someone said a man needed help just inside the tunnel near the tracks, so I went to get him. I couldn’t stand the light there. I take it as a sign,” he says and winks, as if to ease his words, “a sign that I’m meant to be right here for the rest of my life.”