Jennifer Toth - The Mole People

Why don’t you leave the tunnels? You’re smarter and could be more attractive than most women and could do very well, I say.

“Because I don’t want that life, I don’t want that pressure,” she says. “I don’t want to be fighting all the time, struggling to be someone. I’m sick of pretending I’m white, or that I’m a man. I hate pretending to be an insider in an insider’s world when everything about me says ‘outsider.’” Angry now, she pauses for a long minute, and I think she is moving to another subject when she turns toward me in almost slow motion.

“Furthermore,” she declares firmly to emphasize an important point about herself, “I can’t see past my next hit. That’s all that matters to me. There’s no greater pleasure or need. I can’t imagine anything up here that can compete with my next high. I don’t even want it to be different.”

I peer at her, wondering if her revelation was only to prevent me from pitying her, but she meets my eyes without wavering. The moment has been too emotional, and we stand up.

“Now you can write anything you want about me,” she says as we leave the park, “but I told you the truth. I don’t want you to feel sorry for me, and you should not think you should have done something to help me. You can’t. If I wind up face down one of these days, you should know you couldn’t have done anything to prevent it. Don’t think you’re God.”

Our mood lightens as she walks me to a subway. She wants me to take a cab home.

“You’re such a kid,” she laughs. “It’s late, and it’s dangerous for you.”

She comes down onto the subway platform with me, easing her thin hips past a turnstile, and she hugs me and urges me to be careful as I enter the last car of the train. Out of the back window I watch as she first waves, then looks both ways before slipping off the platform and into the darkness along the tracks.

I see Brenda several times more, but we never talk again. Each time she is with a large man, never the same one. Usually she does not even say hello, although we always manage to share a small smile. Every one of her men makes it clear they distrust me, and she defers to them, even to asking permission with a glance before speaking.

This behavior is common among homeless women, particularly younger ones. Despite what Brenda said about herself, the women usually seek the man for protection, and in exchange, they allow the man to be totally dominant. The bargain is somewhat paradoxical because the women sacrifice the same autonomy and independence in the tunnels that they would relinquish in a homeless shelter, yet they refuse to enter a shelter program, they often say, in order to keep their freedom.

Homeless women also often allow themselves to be physically abused by their men. Again they compare the treatment in tunnels to what occurs in shelters. Brenda said the risks are the same, that women are as dangerous as men in this respect.

Still, Brenda may well have been addicted not only to crack but also to such men. “Maybe it’s my punishment,” she said halfseriously one time. “Maybe I’m meant to be with men like this because they’re as bad as I am.”

Brenda disappeared abruptly from the West Side tunnels. No one has seen her for a while. Many stories are offered: A boyfriend killed her when he suspected she was cheating on him. Her father found her and took her home. She killed herself. She just decided on her own to go aboveground and try to make it there after all. Or, one person told me, she has gone deeper underground, to live with a community that will not allow her to return.

FEW TUNNEL WOMEN ARE LIKE BRENDA. DEMOGRAPHICALLY, THE tunnels reflect the homeless population aboveground, except for fewer elderly people underground. An estimated 40 percent of the underground homeless are females, with the number having risen rapidly in recent years. An increasing number are white.

Most women go underground initially with a man and occasionally, with a woman. Many are addicted, or were at one time. Many have families who would care for them, they say, but they refuse to give up their drugs or their autonomy.

Michelle

MICHELLE HAD LIVED WITH TWO MEN ON A CATWALK IN THE TUNNELS under Grand Central, “but that was when I was pretty messed up,” she explains. Now she lives in a rehabilitation center for women. She is one of Sergeant Henry’s success stories. He persuaded her to enter the rehabilitation center where she is waiting for an apartment whose rent, she says, her father will provide.

She is more than petite, she is tiny, barely four foot four inches and fine as a bird. She could pass as a teenager with her Walkman wired into her ears, bobbed hair, jeans, a soft brown leather coat, and white sneakers. She defines her brown Italian eyes with thick, steady lines of an eye pencil. But when she speaks, her mouth sinks without teeth, and suddenly she looks far older than her thirty-five years. She has been clean of drugs for almost a year, she says.

Michelle is eager to tell her story, though she rambles, frequently repeating herself, and trails off into silence in mid-sentence at times.

“I was stupid,” she says. Through a numb smile, she tells how she gave birth to a baby in the tunnels, when she first settled there. That was five years ago she thinks, or longer—she’s not sure; the drugs have thinned her memory. She went into the tunnels with a man she no longer remembers to escape confessing to her family that she was pregnant, she says.

She believes the baby was born alive, a boy, but she doesn’t know what happened to him.

“I’d like to know what I did with him,” she says matter-of-factly, without a hint of emotion. “Who took him?”

Some tunnel homeless found Michelle underground, severely overdosing, and carried her up to Sergeant Henry. In rehab, she had to learn everything again, including her name and how to tie her shoes.

“I thank God every day I wake up and I’m alive,” she says dimly, as if in a dream.

Then she wanders off, talking to herself and saying hello to every passerby. Some men raise their eyebrows speculatively, but after a few words, they pass on. She meanders down the broad marble halls of the station waving her hands at strangers. It’s difficult to see how she, who remembers very little of her past and seems to have virtually no future, is a success story. But then, she once roamed the tunnels in bare feet, eating roaches and garbage to survive and turning tricks for the drugs that have almost destroyed her.

Gwen

UNLIKE MICHELLE, GWEN HAS CONTROL. SHE VISITS HER MOTHER at an Amsterdam Avenue apartment on the Upper West Side twice a week and stays overnight there. She chooses not to live there, however, because of “the stress” in relations between the women. Her mother does not know Gwen lives on the streets and below them most of the week.

Gwen, who says her full name is Gwendolyn Scott, is twenty-nine years old, a healthy-looking black woman with a ready smile. She has lived on the streets or in tunnels for five years, at first in the 72nd Street tunnel with two men, Jess and Stone, who kept her safe. There is less hassle underground than on park benches, she says, and no one robs you. As more and more people came into that underground area, garbage and makeshift sleeping quarters accumulated and police moved in regularly to clear out the homeless. Gwen gave up on tunnel life, she says, when she realized she did not want to go aboveground anymore. “I didn’t want to become like the mole people,” she says.

Now she is part of the Rotunda Gang of about forty homeless who sleep in the Rotunda in the park at 79th Street. They are docile, but park workers have orders to disperse any cluster of homeless people that might frighten citizens using the park in the daytime. Several public toilets stand near the stone structure, their gagging smells of urine and feces at times drifting up into the vault areas.