The Mole People

by Jennifer Toth

  “We don’t eat people,” he tells me immediately, while George laughs. “Those stories are wrong. We don’t eat dogs neither. Sometimes, the ‘runners’ don’t make it down with food, we eat ‘track rabbits’ [rats], but I ain’t never ate no human. I ain’t never sinned like that.”

  That’s good to know, I say uncomfortably.

  Chud shows me the wire I had tripped over. It stretches directly across the tracks, from one wall to the other, at shin height, and just beyond it shards of broken glass twinkle yellow in the light of George’s lantern. He calls it a “Vietnam trap,” intended to both frighten and impede any strangers and, at the same time, warn the community of the intruders. Small strips of white cloth mark the wire where it is nailed to the walls, alerting regular inhabitants to the trap.

  After Chud’s initial outburst, he becomes less talkative. Whenever I ask a question he does not like, he stays silent. So we don’t talk much. George, on the other hand, can’t stop talking, sometimes so fast that I lose the meaning of his words.

  We enter a large, tile-walled chamber, with high ceiling, which could have been a waiting room at one time. Water drops sound different here, for some reason. The floor is firmer than in the tunnel, with less cushioning dirt and grime. I scrape an area with my shoe and the underlying surface, perhaps tile, reflects dully the lantern glow.

  Against the far wall of the cavern leans a row of cardboard homes. Several dozen men and a few women sit sullenly around two fires in this underground shantytown, watching us enter.

  “Hey, what’s she doing here?” a man finally asks. “Why’d you bring her here?” A general disgruntled murmur seconds his disapproval.

  “Yo, she found it on her own and came down alone,” George lies. “I just saw her at the hanger. I couldn’t let the CHUD people get her, now could I?” he asks, joking at my expense. After a second, a tinkling laughter breaks the tension.

  “Hey, honey,” says a lean, handsome black man, “you didn’t let them scare you bad, did you?” He is called Fay and his wrist literally goes limp as he approaches. “Come have a seat by me and April,” he reaches for my hand. “You look white as a ghost,” he titters.

  April looks up, the fire lighting her eyes. She looks as frightened and vulnerable as I feel.

  “His name is Fay,” a man named Slim says, “and he’s a bit . . . you know,” his voice trailing into a giggle.

  “Now you better watch what you say, honey buns,” Fay warns Slim, drawing his hands to his hips in an exaggerated pose. To me he says, “I do the cooking around here.”

  The community is well defined by duty, and the duties are allotted by the boss, Sam, whose title is mayor. I was introduced to each by name and by job.

  Fay, as he said, is the community’s cook. April is the nurse. Chud is in charge of security. He is helped by Beeper, a weasel-like little man, who got his name because he was always first to detect a stranger in the tunnel and alert the community. George is a runner, along with Slim and Rex. They collect food and other necessities from the surface, often running scams in Penn Station that run the gamut from begging to pickpocketing to selling drugs, sometimes “drugs” that are just sugar or another inert substitute.

  “Most of these people are too scared to go back up,” explains George. “Somebody’s got to take care of them.”

  “And some people just need to be needed,” says Sam, the mayor.

  He is a small, white man in his early forties, with round wire-rim John Lennon glasses and a tie-dyed shirt, who likes to talk about the sixties. He was trained as a sociologist. He is also a frightening man, one of the most frightening I have ever met in the tunnels.

  The community elected him mayor, and there is no doubt they consider him their leader. He takes care of them as if they are family, even children, young children. Even men older than he are treated as five-year-olds at times.

  Sam’s theory is that individuals remain stuck at the mental age at which they drop out of society: A thirty-five-year-old who got hooked on drugs at fifteen thinks that society only expects of him now what they did when he was fifteen. Those homeless people who live on the fringes of society, particularly those who live underground, have failed even to see—let alone experience—the development and socialization that is considered normal in people who live aboveground, he says. Sam also believes that most members of his community were pushed out of society at age five or six, as products of dysfunctional families, even though society may officially make them drop out at a much older age.

  Sam’s management style is much like a parent, sometimes shaming members who fail to complete a task by berating them before the group, sometimes threatening to expel them from the underground family. He decides who should do which chores, and when the community is rousted from one tunnel, he decides where they will settle next. One day he sends April for water from a broken pipe in a distant tunnel; another time he has her mend clothes and sew old cloth pieces into blankets. He directs George to run a scam to get medicine. Whatever money is collected aboveground is put into a jar every night. Sam is its custodian. Only Sam dispenses from the collective funds. No one can leave “the camp” without his permission. He discourages members from trying to resume lives aboveground.

  When Sam lived aboveground, he was a social worker. In 1982 he began working with the tunnel homeless, and about the same time he divorced his wife—for adultery, he says—and she has custody of their only daughter. Not long afterward, he was fired for what he terms “eccentricities.”

  “Tell her about the final hour,” George says with a mischievous laugh.

  In the final hour of his working life, Sam stripped down to the nude in his office—to demonstrate, he says, “how vulnerable people are in communicating.” I ask him several times what that means but never understand his explanation.

  He refused psychiatric counseling after the incident, dismissing it as “a societal brainwashing ploy where they impose on me their beliefs of who I should be,” he says intensely, “so I would just fit in and not disturb society, just like a robot.” Instead, he decided to come where he could be free, completely himself, he says, to the tunnels that he found while working with their inhabitants.

  What drove him underground, he explains, was “red tape. All that fucking red tape,” he begins, with voice rising and face reddening. “How can you help anyone when there’s that red tape? Kids would get abused to death in foster care and you couldn’t get them out without that red tape. Two of them were killed before I got through the red tape. How can you live with that?” he demands, angrily waving his arms.

  “How can you live in a society like that?” he asks, more quietly now. “The rules don’t make sense. They’re not based on human needs or caring. The laws and the rules, and what they call morals, are logical and warped. They are based on money, not right or wrong. They might as well have come from a computer. No one really cares up there. Down here this is basic survival. We make our own laws. Our laws are based on what we feel, not preconceived notions of morality. We call it the ‘human morality.’ That’s what we live by.”

  “Human morality” is similar to the phrase “human religion,” which I have heard from the members of other underground communities. Neither has specific rules or ethics so far as I can learn. Adherents appear to equate the concept to honesty and caring.

  I suppose, because he is white, I think I can understand Sam better, but he scares me with swings of mood that are extreme and change rapidly. At one moment we are discussing Woodstock, and suddenly he flares off on a tirade about where society is going wrong, so furious he seems close to violence. Beeper seems to be the only member of the community who attempts to calm Sam during these outbursts, and he pays for it. More than once Sam shows the strength of a man twice his size and actually throws the weaker man out of his way.

  Why do you put up with it? I ask Beeper. Why does the community accept such behavior?

  “He loves and he cares,” says Beeper. “More than anyone els
e here in this world, he cares. It’s not him who gets mad; it’s them drugs he used to take.”

  Sam tells Dopey—so named because he is lazy and acts dumb—to get wood and water. Dopey refuses to get up from the floor. Sam pulls a knife and stands over him, threatening to throw him out and never let him back into the community. Beeper offers to do the chores in place of Dopey, but the mayor won’t hear of it. The community stands back, watching. Sam won’t back down. Eventually Dopey limps down the tunnel, disappearing from sight.

  “Why’d you do that?” April asks. “Dopey wasn’t feeling well.”

  “Because he’s depressed, April,” the mayor calmly explains. “Someone had to make him get up.”

  The following day I half expect to find out that Dopey has returned and killed Sam in the night. Instead, the two are talking cheerfully, Dopey clean and smiling brightly.

  Rex is another remarkable figure here. He says he is rarely underground and is not a member of the community, but they consider him part of the family.

  He prefers to remain in Penn Station, begging, hustling, or running scams, including taking money from other homeless and promising to return with a radio or coat. He claims he makes a “good living” and that he recently was assigned an apartment by one of the homeless advocacy organizations.

  “But other people need it more than me, so I gave it up,” he says. “Don’t regret it at all. I felt boxed in that place. No one around but me. I could hear myself thinking,” he laughs almost shyly. “I guess it was good. Didn’t have to worry about people sneaking up behind me when I was asleep. But it was weird, man. I couldn’t sleep in the bed. Had to sleep on the floor. And then I just felt like I was crazy. I brought people [from the station] up to stay with me, but that felt even lonelier. It just wasn’t natural, not like the tunnels where people come together.”

  Yet he insists he isn’t a member of the tunnel community. He often comes down to meals, according to other members, although he says he rarely does. Whenever they need something from “up top,” as they say, “Rex will find a way to get it.” Sometimes it is medicine, sometimes blankets and coats, sometimes money.

  “They took care of me once,” he explains. “This guy knifed me in the station once because I sold him fake drugs. I couldn’t go to the hospital because I was on probation and I would go back to jail.” Somehow he found the tunnel’s entrance, where he passed out. The next thing he remembered was Fay standing over him, laughing. The community nursed him back to health, and he repays them by helping when they need him.

  Rex is not alone among the community for having had trouble with the law. Most of the members of the camp have been in jail. Beeper was in for hustling drugs, for example. “But I ain’t dealt since joining the community,” he says, “‘cept of course the occasional vie.” A “vie” is a person who is easily taken advantage of or victimized. The camp boasts it is drug- and alcohol-free.

  After a while I stop visiting the camp. Sam is uncomfortable with me. He complains I’m too busy taking notes to listen.

  “Truth isn’t in words; it’s in listening,” he says. “If you listen to us, you can make the rest up and tell more of the truth than if you write down the cold facts.

  “I’m doing what’s best for each and every one of these people,” he contends. “I know what these people need. I treat each of them differently, as I assume you’ve noticed. I treat April according to her needs, Rex according to his, Beeper for his, and so on. I am a trained counselor and I know each and every member of our community distinctly. Our little community down here is immune from the cruelty and horror of the topside world. We are growing into a city down here, and we are all friends, the definition of which you cannot learn without living with us, under my wing.”

  They tell me not to come down alone again, warning me that there are more Vietnam traps. If I wish to come again, I am to leave a note under a brick by the door and someone will come up for me. Several times I do this, but, after a month, I stop asking to visit. A couple of times I bring supplies and leave them at the brick.

  I meet George on the street and when he asks why I haven’t visited, I’m embarrassed. I say that my last conversation with Sam was very disturbing, but George believes I’m repelled by the physical environment.

  “It got too much for you, didn’t it?” he asks gently. “I know. It’s OK though, kid. I wish you could understand how it is. I would be easier for you. See, no matter how ugly the camp seems to you, it don’t matter to us, we don’t see it that way because we’re friends, and that matters more. For most of us, it’s the first time we ever had a real friend.”

  He smiles brightly at the thought. “We’re a city of friends. That’s what Sam says.” He winks at me and walks away without saying good-bye.

  The phrase sounds familiar and I find it in Walt Whitman:

  “I dream’d in a dream, I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole rest of the earth;

  I dream’d that was the new City of Friends.”

  22

  Women

  “I LOVE THE LONELINESS OF THE TUNNELS,” BRENDA SAYS SOFTLY. “It seeps through your ears and your skin. It’s like a hug with nothing to hold you. It’s an understanding.”

  Her mouth does not smile, but the frown lines in her young face smooth away.

  “I guess it comforts me,” she says, looking up from Central Park into the January sky. “Do you understand? It’s like when the stars fill your eyes with their light, and they fill your emptiness. It’s the same understanding, in a way. The same connection. That’s what matters.”

  She speaks so softly that her words are almost lost to the night. She is mesmerized by the secure image of herself she has created with her words, living that idealization, almost forgetting that I am listening.

  I have to strain to hear, and strain, too, to understand. I have questions, but I don’t want to interrupt her. For the few hours we are together here, we could be old college roommates who have lost touch, and she is telling me about the few years since graduation.

  Brenda is my age, twenty-four. She is a slight, light-complexioned black woman. She went to Dartmouth and majored in English literature, but she never finished. She stumbled into the tunnels four years ago with a man who was supplying her with drugs, and now she doesn’t want to leave, because the tunnels comfort her.

  What else comforts you? I ask.

  “I’ll tell you what doesn’t comfort me,” she says. She pulls her knees to her chest for warmth and then gives a rueful smile, exposing a missing tooth, which one of her boyfriends recently knocked out. “Touch doesn’t comfort me. Men’s touches don’t comfort me anymore; they repulse me. When a man gets on top of me, I go completely numb, like I’m water miles away from shore.

  “Talk doesn’t comfort me, either. The tunnels comfort me, I guess, because they’te mine. They know what’s inside me and they feel the way I do. Always. Like, you know, when you bomb a test but it’s sunny outside? Well, that doesn’t happen in the tunnels,” she laughs. “They’re always dark inside, like me, but inside, I’m like the tunnel—dark, winding, and twisting.”

  Tonight Brenda has come back aboveground to the world she left almost four years ago. For several hours she is lucid and talkative, completely different from the evasive, almost shrunken young woman who, while not hostile, moved away whenever I approached her in the tunnels.

  I FIRST SAW HER IN A TUNNEL ON THE UPPER WEST SIDE OF MANhattan. She was sitting on a small stool, wearing black stretch pants, as she scraped carrots and cut them into a large blackened iron pot on the grate over a campfire. An opened bag of potatoes waited their turn to go in with the pasta and tomato sauce and melting cheese. The odor, carried with the smoke from the fire toward the entrance of the tunnel, was sharp but pleasant, more appetizing than the sight. She smiled but when I neared, she looked down at her work. She said, please to excuse her, because she had to get lunch ready.

  As she spoke, a large black man came to her side and scowled at
me, hands on hips.

  “She’s a reporter doing a book,” Brenda told him. “She wants to ask me some questions.”

  He looked me up and down scowling.

  “She paying you?” he demanded, as if I weren’t there, though he looked straight at me. Had she not been there, I would have felt in danger.

  I waited for Brenda’s reply. Instead, she looked nervously up at me from bowed head.

  “No,” I answered for her.

  “Then you ain’t gonna talk,” he said flatly, still watching me.

  She shrugged and bent back for another potato.

  I began to speak to him, but he waved away my words. “Ain’t gonna talk without money,” he said. Brenda busied herself even more, as if increasingly uneasy at what could become a confrontation. So I said good-bye and turned to leave.

  “Bring some money and I’ll tell you stories you won’t believe,” he called to my back.

  When I looked back, Brenda seemed embarrassed. “Hey,” she said, “bring me some cigarettes next time.”

  “You get out of here now!” her man yelled at me. “And you shut up, bitch!” he shouted at Brenda.

  She did, and I left quickly.

  I bought cigarettes the next time I was near her tunnel, and was talking to a group of homeless in the Rotunda at West 79th Street in Riverside Park when she appeared. Most of the people greeted her, and one woman gave her a hug.

  “Hey,” she asked me loudly, “did you get my cigarettes?”

  I tossed the pack to her over the heads of the group.

  She seemed surprised as she caught it. “Thanks,” she said as people rushed to share her gift. She gave all of the cigarettes away except for one, which she lit. Then she walked off.