The Mole People

by Jennifer Toth

  The camp begins to move and make small sounds. I hear sweeping with a broom but beyond six feet I can barely see shadows, fleeting and evasive figures like those I sometimes glimpsed in the higher tunnels but dismissed as imaginary. I struggle to focus on the shapes but it is a strain to see, and I begin to develop a sharp headache. I give up trying to take notes in the dark, particularly after the mayor threatens to confiscate my notebook.

  “We don’t want you giving any names or too many details that might lead them to us,” he says. “What you remember will have to be enough.”

  The boy and girl, each about five years old, come closer and I give them the fresh notebook and pen. They shriek and giggle over the gifts, and we play a variety of tag as I’m led around. They crawl into a hole and emerge on the pipes, waving at me. They get ahead unseen and surprise me from crevices and small tunnels.

  “You see,” the mayor tells me, “this is a child’s dream. They run free and are not hindered by people who would hurt them.”

  Who are they? I ask. Who are their parents?

  “They are all of ours,” he replies. “We take all the children here as our own.”

  How many children live here?

  He refused to answer. “If I told you,” he says finally, “there’d be a witch hunt for us. Better leave that unanswered. We don’t lie down here.”

  The mayor introduces me to a woman who he describes as the community’s school teacher. She says she is certified by the City of New York. Along with math, science, English, and some social sciences, she says, she teaches ethics, morals, and philosophy to children underground.

  “That’s our greatest gift down here,” she claims, eyes wide in an effort to convey her convictions, “that I can teach what’s important. The best teachers do that, teach what’s important in their particular environment. Here it is ethics, the basis of our ‘human religion.’“

  I look puzzled at the phrase, which other tunnel dwellers have used but never explained. “It’s based on caring and protecting our brothers and sisters, on communication and love,” she says, much as the others did. “It’s what sets this race above all others.” By race, she explains, she means all the homeless who live in underground communities like this, not black, brown, or white.

  “Color?” she asks. “God, no! We have no color down here. Look, can you tell if I’m black or Hispanic?”

  I guess a mixture of the two. She laughs. “I’m as white as you are. I think it’s the lack of sunlight and the soot in the tunnel that turns us all a shade of gray.”

  Don’t the children need sunlight?

  “We go to a little room two levels up, where there is bright warm sunlight coming through grates,” she says. “That’s where I do most of my teaching. One of the runners [who bring food and other necessities to the community from aboveground] brought us a blackboard to use. We hide it when we come back down so no one who might get into that room can break it.”

  Next I meet the community’s nurse, who says she is registered in the State of New York. She is a large, older woman with thick black hair locked in a firm braid that hangs well down her back. A gray streak runs along each side of her head. She has a gentle smile. When the mayor leaves us for a moment, she admits that she often thinks of “going back up.”

  “I have a daughter who maybe I could stay with. I write her often and she writes back. She sends my mail to an apartment complex and one of the runners is able to get into the mail room through a tunnel and look through the mail before they are distributed. Many of us have our mail and government checks sent to that address. Different communities use other addresses,” she says, “but they get mail the same way.”

  “I’ve thought about leaving,” she continues after a while. “But then someone gets hurt, or I think someone might get hurt. These people need me. And frankly, that’s what I want most, to be needed.”

  Her medical kit includes bandages, neck braces, codeine as well as aspirin, an antiseptic, needles and threads (which she calls sutures) for stitching cuts, and even a set of crutches. She insists that community members be taken to hospitals on the surface if they are too ill or injured for her to treat. “Often they refuse because they’re hiding from the law,” she says, “but I won’t be responsible for killing someone by letting him stay if he’s badly hurt. I just won’t!” she insists as if the issue has arisen often in the past.

  Chairs and a few tables are spotted around the chamber. Milk and other perishables are stored in a small refrigerator. The mayor directs me to put my hand inside to prove that it is cold but I can see no electric wire attachment. To cook food, the community uses a tunnel with the hottest steam pipes. Pans of water are rested on the pipes. In them are cooked rice, oatmeal, and Cream of Wheat, he says.

  “You’ll notice how none of us smell,” the mayor says proudly and leads me to the “steam room.” Clothes are spread out on the hot pipes outside to dry. Inside, men’s voices, off-key and punctuated with laughter, are trying to sing. I see several figures showering with soap in the spray of hot water and steam from a leaking pipe.

  “Shit, man!” yells a man inside, “you brought a woman here?” The singing stops.

  “Brothers,” says the mayor, “we are all human.”

  The figures recede deeper into the mist.

  “Sorry, mayor,” the complaining voice says, “I didn’t know it was you.”

  The mayor smiles paternally. “This is men’s time in the room,” he explains. “Women have it earlier, in the morning with the children.”

  “We even have an exercise room,” he says as we resume walking. We enter an area with many barlike pipes. A man is doing pull-ups from one, chinning himself at the top. Over another pipe hangs a wire, one end attached to weights and the other to an old set of bicycle handlebars.

  Beyond is a laundry room where three women kneel over a basin of wet clothes, rubbing and chatting and laughing. Warm water sloshes from a pipe into the basin and out, running along a channel against the wall before it disappears.

  We return to the mayor’s tent, three walls of wood and cardboard and an overhead canopy made of a once-white sheet. Inside is a small round table, draped with a cloth. The mayor lights a fat blue candle sitting on it. I see two bookcases, filled mostly with sociology, psychology, and philosophy texts and a sprinkling of classics. A tightly made bed stands against one wall.

  “It took me a long time to bring down everything I had,” he says, indicating the room. “I did it over several months, but as you see, I set up a home. I built these bookshelves. I didn’t expect any people to come with me to live here, but when I saw them suffering, up above, I invited them down.”

  J.C. had told me two hundred people live here, but I’ve seen only about fifty. I ask about the rest.

  “Many of them are runners, either passing through or spending the day or even a week upstairs. Some are visiting other communities. It’s hard to say,” he offers vaguely.

  He pours red wine into two tin cups.

  “You see we are a clean and healthy community,” he says expansively. “We don’t allow drugs or hard liquor here. We’re not crazy or insane. We’re healthy individuals who have chose an alternative. We don’t need their help.”

  Since my time with his people is so limited, the mayor “guides” me to members who will be the most helpful he says. He chooses the people to whom I speak. When I wonder if anyone in his community would prefer to return aboveground, he snaps, “No, of course not.”

  “That is another of those myths and undeserved rumors about us. Anyone is free to come and go as they please. If someone has his doubts, I don’t encourage him to go because I firmly believe life is better here.”

  It is now mealtime and we watch the community eat. The staple is a bowl filled with oatmeal-like porridge. Several sandwiches are distributed. They resemble the sandwiches from Meals-on-Wheels, perhaps the leftovers.

  “Sometimes they send dogs to find us,” the mayor observes as we watch. “They don
’t go back.”

  You eat them? I ask, taken aback.

  “Sometimes they’re good meat,” he answers with a little smile. I don’t know if he is just trying to shock me. Either way, I’m upset as we return into his compartment where he tries to explain who he is and why he is so totally alienated from society.

  THE MAYOR SAYS HE HAS STUDIED LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY, AND writing. He has been a member of the working class, and he has experienced poverty.

  His anger comes from being “left out of society.” He has not rejected society, but it has rejected him, he says, cast him out because of his black skin. The black world on the surface has cast him out when he tried to fit into the white society. They both cast him out when he fought against both. He still suffers from the “conditioning” he received aboveground, conditioning that still causes him to doubt his self-worth and question his own “validity,” he says.

  All of the members of his community feel the same, he claims, as do all members of all the communities of underground homeless—the “Federation,” as he calls it, which stretches along the East Side of Manhattan from Astor Place to 110th Street. All have been cast out and forced to find an alternative way of living.

  The mayor left the surface five years ago, he says, but still feels insecure. “It’s not enough to leave, they won’t let you. Your past life above haunts you like a nightmare. That’s why you sense anger here. Because they won’t let us leave them completely. You always remember. You always hear those loud, ugly voices telling you you’re doing something wrong because you’re not doing it up there.”

  Often he wakes from sleep in a panic. “I only see darkness and I wonder, ‘am I alive? What am I doing? How do I know that I exist?’ I can’t breathe, and I think that if I could take one breath into my lungs and fill my soul with air, I would be alive. If I could see some sort of light, I would be alive. If I was able to do something real, I’d be living.

  “Yes, I’ve thought that if I go upstairs, I wouldn’t always wake up in darkness. And I’ve thought about breathing real air and getting back into things up there . . .

  “Maybe it is in the back of my mind that I’m not doing anything if it’s not part of your society up there,” he resumes. “But then I ask, ‘Who am I up there? No one.’ At least down here I can’t be passed by or ignored. Here I am here. My job is to take care of these people.”

  He begins to rave. “Fuck the people on top! They want to exterminate us. We’ll do anything to survive. Sure, we’d sacrifice them sons of bitches!” He quiets down directly after the outburst.

  “This is home,” he says more easily now. “This is where my conscious self meets reality. This is where my mind has been all my adult life. Underground.”

  As a child, he recalls, he thought he was from another planet. As an adult, he believed it. “All black men are looking in from the outside up there topside. But me, I was looking in at the black community from the outside, too. I was outside of outside. I was way, way out.”

  He grew up in a place like Harlem, which he wouldn’t identify for fear his family would recognize him. “They would think this is a crazy life when, in reality, it’s the only sane life for me and for everyone else down here.”

  In fact, it is better than just sane. “We may not have the comforts of living aboveground. But we are a superior people. We’ve purified ourselves. We don’t allow just anyone to come and live with us. We allow only those who we can save, those who can believe in the human spirit above all else.”

  His favorite book is Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land. “I read that book when it came out in the late sixties and I thought, ‘That’s me. How the hell did he know me? What is the message to me?’ I also got shot that year, when I was thirteen. I even liked a girl with buckteeth. That’s the first time I says to myself, ‘Man, something just ain’t right with you in this world.’“

  He says he tried many routes to fit into society. He attended the City College of New York on a scholarship for a year. He joined a socialist group, then became part of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which was founded by one of the Black Panthers. He says he worked as a reporter, a youth counselor, a garbage collector, and even attempted to go to the police academy.

  His passion throughout has been writing. “But I never want anyone on the outside to see my work, because they can’t understand.” He tries to explain, with metaphysical imagery. “When I tried to write before, no one cared what I went through, who I was. And writing, no matter what you’re writing about, you’re coming from the perspective of who you are. If you’re invisible, your work means nothing. It has no soul to those who can’t see you. It’s transparent. I write from my soul, which is deeper than any man’s out there. That’s why it’s invisible to them. It’s beyond their simple understanding, their simple ways.”

  It was to explain all this, he says, that he invited me to visit his community despite the opposition of his advisers like J.C. He wanted someone “from the outside” to tell the world that he and his community are “better off” than those aboveground, those who are sick.

  The mayor may see himself as Brown’s “Manchild,” but he is much more the “underground man” in Irving Howe’s “Celine.”

  “A creature of the city, he has no fixed place among the social classes; he lives in holes and crevices, burrowing beneath the visible structure of society. . . . Even while tormenting himself with reflections upon his own insignificance, the underground man hates still more—hates more than his own hateful self—the world aboveground.”

  21

  “City of Friends”

  IN BROAD DAYLIGHT I SLIP BEHIND A GRAFFITIED BILLBOARD AND onto a rubble-strewn lot that hides from hurrying pedestrians along 34th Street, a block from Penn Station. I walk across the lot and into a small alleyway to a wooden door with a brass-colored handle, just as I’ve been told. The door opens smoothly into a very small room, almost an entryway, of a deserted building. In one corner, amid dusty brooms and discarded clothes, opens a jagged-edged hole that has been chopped through the concrete floor, and projecting up through the hole are two rungs of a rusted metal ladder. Another invitation to visit the underground.

  As the door to the outside world closes, I pause and allow my eyes to adjust to the stagnant blackness that I sense at the bottom of the ladder. I am expecting a guide, who last night on a warm grate reluctantly promised to lead me to what he called “the camp” of about forty people in a disused tunnel here. He was supposed to meet me half an hour ago. He has given me some directions and I follow them now, thinking of how foolish I am to be doing this alone.

  Down in the tunnel, the air is oppressive and it’s even darker. I should be comforted by the absence of trains, but the dank emptiness increases my anxiety and sense of isolation. I wait motionless, hoping my mind will settle when my eyes adjust. Rhythmic water drops fall like deep drumbeats, and then the sound of tapping on pipes begins, slow and dull at first, but then more erratic. Warnings of a trespasser.

  My ankles twist and I struggle to keep my footing on the gravel of the track bed. Sunlight occasionally filters down through grates on the surface two or three stories above me. The light never seems to reach the floor of the tunnel, yet suffuses the scene. My senses are sharp, but my body seems to move in slow motion, smoothly, almost automaton-like without conscious thought. It is as if I’ve passed into a new dimension, but inwardly, into myself rather than into the tunnel, and I am self-assured, impregnable. Rats will not make me jump, or taps on pipes, or even as now, the sudden blast of steam being released from a not-too-distant valve.

  Eyes behind me, watching my back. I turn slowly, somehow not surprised to see a man, about six feet tall, in a flannel shirt and jeans, with long light-colored hair, beard, and mustache. He slowly raises his arms as if holding a rifle, and soundlessly, he aims at me. He squeezes the imaginary trigger once, then again, and again, his thin body rippling with each evenly timed recoil. He looks directly at me, coldly.

&nb
sp; “It’s OK,” I hear myself saying soothingly. My heart seems to have stopped. “It’s OK,” I repeat, “I’m just passing through.”

  The rifle follows me, firing again and again into my back, as I move farther into the tunnel in search of the camp.

  Again eyes seem to watch me. “Hello?” I finally ask, with a shiver in my voice that sounds so foreign I think someone else is speaking.

  A laugh answers. “I see you met Rambo,” it says. “His mind’s still stuck in ‘Nam. Likes the tunnels cuz they remind him of the jungle and he knows where he is,” explains George, my late-arriving guide, as he steps from the shadows. “He just can’t figure out who to fight.”

  “Brave girl,” he says, trying to calm me. “I didn’t think you’d come.”

  I feel like he is breathing life back into me, and I’m so thankful that I want to hug him.

  George holds a lantern, an old kerosene lamp, and leads me to a side tunnel off the main tracks. Its shape is different from those I had visited before—smaller, with a low ceiling, more confining than subway tunnels and far more confining than spacious railroad tunnels. It is cool and damp, almost misty at parts, and lined with brick walls that are coated in soot.

  I feel a sharp sting through my jeans at the knees, and fear rushes through my body as I begin to stumble.

  “Watch your step!” George warns me too late. Someone catches me—a man but not George. He has been silently walking alongside me and keeps me from a bad fall over a sharp wire.

  His name, he says, is Chud. It isn’t, really, but a nickname he chose for me to call him after he read one of my newspaper articles on the underground homeless that interviewed some transit workers, as well as some homeless who live on the surface, who call underground homeless CHUDs, short for Cannibalistic Human Underground Dweller. The label is partly humorous, but in part, too, CHUDs are feared as subhuman feral dwellers of the netherworld.