Jennifer Toth - The Mole People

It’s early on a rainy November morning when I hurry to the Rotunda to meet Gwen and her current man, Rick, whose full name is Roderick van Hollar, she says. Everything is a shade of gray, including the calm, slate-hued Hudson. A mist across the river blurs the tops of some buildings. Most of the homeless have left or are packing up for a day of trudging the city, before returning at night, but a number still remain. Papa, so named because he is the community’s eldest, is still asleep, snug within cardboard walls and surrounded by garbage bags full of clothes and other possessions. His coat hangs on an outside hook in the stone wall as I pass quietly.

Gwen calls out a welcome from a balcony overlooking the river, which stops the hostile looks and clicking teeth of a group of men. Her man is still in bed, watching me skeptically as I approach, and she pulls her house robe together more tightly. A gray Yankee baseball cap, its peak turned backward, holds her hair until she exchanges it for a black turban. She pulls on hefty hiking boots and proudly shows me a Ziplock bag of Elizabeth Arden jewelry that Rick found in a trash can.

She is on the street because of alcohol and drugs, she says. She is trying to change, but she has been to most of the city-run detoxification centers. Her last detox visit was six months ago, which was where she met Rick. Detox only works for seven days, she explains, and you are out on the street. Not enough time to kick the habit. She and Rick have applied for admission to another center, one that would keep them from drugs for six to eight weeks, but the waiting list is long. Meanwhile they live in the Rotunda community where no overt use of drugs or alcohol is permitted. In part this is because the Parks Department would close the camp if it saw such abuse, but in part, too, because most of the homeless here are trying to stay straight, says Gwen.

Accotding to her, breaking the drug habit is more difficult underground. “You get afraid to go up and be seen by people,” she says, “but then you get more depressed and lonely in the tunnels, so you do drugs again.”

Both she and Rick want to work. She has had many jobs, including home care for elderly couples, which she wants to do again. Rick has just passed the sanitation workers exam and is waiting to be called at a drop-in center. Until something comes up, the two visit museums and libraries, Gwen says, to stay away from temptation. The Egyptian room at the Museum of Natural History is their favorite.

“I’m just a rookie,” Rick says, out of bed now and willing to talk as Gwen feeds some regular pigeon visitors. “I’ve only been without housing for two and a half years, but Gwen, she’s a veteran. Right, hon?” he calls out.

She laughs. “Yeah, veteran of the homeless life. Seen it all and lived just about everywhere, and the worst is the tunnels. They trick you. You think you’re safe because no one can see you and you can’t see yourself in the darkness. But you can’t see beyond yourself, either,” she says.

Dericka

DERICKA IS THE OPPOSITE OF GWEN. RATHER THAN STRONG AND self-possessed, she is so shy that she often hides her face in her hands, sitting for hours at a time, rocking back and forth. She doesn’t cry; she withdraws and seeks to erase her memories.

She was physically abused by her boyfriend of four years, who whipped her with a belt. The relationship was born of sorrow after her brother died of a drug overdose. She had cared for her brother, six years her junior, as if he were her son, and she feels overwhelming guilt that she did not insist that he get help to end his addiction.

Another underground homeless woman, Sheila, found Dericka sleeping on a park bench and brought her into the tunnels. Now the tunnels are an effort to mask the shame she has built around herself.

“I live down here because there are no mirrors,” she says. “I can’t look at myself anymore.” She believes she deserves the dirt and darkness. “I hope my children never know me. I hope they never know the scars I carry inside my heart.”

The fear of seeing their reflections, perhaps when passing a store window aboveground or in some other way, runs through the comments of many homeless women who live or have lived underground. Men often admit they hide in the tunnels in shame that they cannot provide for their families, but none of the men ever told me they wanted to avoid seeing their physical image. Women, aside from being more aware of appearances, sometimes hint that they can even see their inner selves in the reflections that strike them unaware when they are on the streets.

Sheila and Willie

SHEILA HELPS HERSELF BY HELPING DERICKA. SHE IS A MOTHER FIGure, in her early thirties, who thrives on responsibility for weaker sisters and brothers, children and parents. In Bernard’s tunnel, she is the den mother, making rounds on colder winter days with blankets and coaxing food down men who are barely conscious after exhausting their drugs and whiskey. She has a natural energy that is paced, not frenetic.

Sheila seldom uses drugs, but sometimes drinks herself into oblivion. She is only sober and clean when I visit, a blue bandanna tying back her hair and a generous smile of welcome. Her smile warms the entire tunnel, one man says.

She came into the tunnel with Willie, her common-law husband fifteen years her senior. They met in the Douglas Housing Project, which rises tens of stories between 100th and 105th streets, between Amsterdam and Manhattan avenues on the Upper West Side. Sheila had moved into the project with her family. At the time, Willie worked for the city, but he is a drug addict who recognizes that he will die soon.

Willie does not blame society. He accepts responsibility for his own fate. He does not delude himself, as many addicts do, by insisting he is not addicted and that come next month, he’ll be clean. He only regrets Sheila, that she came into the tunnels with him but deserves better; he promises that one day he will get her out.

She moved in with him at Douglas, but he missed a few days of work, as she tells it, and got fired. One day they found their apartment padlocked against them, with their belongings on the roof. So they lived on the roof of the twenty-story apartment house for months before moving into the public bath and toilet facility at 104th Street in Riverside Park. When they were locked out of the bathroom, they moved into the tunnels.

As Willie’s health worsens, Sheila seems to get stronger, as if responding to the increasing responsibility toward him. She has never held a job, and the idea of looking for work makes no sense to her. Willie spends any of the money she makes on drugs, she explains simply. Their dilemma is obvious: Willie does not want to give up drugs, and Sheila does not want to give up Willie. To the extent that an outsider can judge, they love each other.

One day in early spring Willie disappeared. Talk among the tunnel dwellers had it that he had been killed by a drug dealer he owed. Others believed he had been arrested. Sheila checked the hospitals and police stations and found out nothing. Sheila never gave up believing that Willie would come back, though other tunnel dwellers tried to convince her that he was gone for good.

Fran and Shorty

SHEILA AND WILLIE’S RELATIONSHIP WAS COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FROM their tunnel neighbors, Fran and Shorty. Fran is a plump white woman in her mid-twenties, blond and small-boned, looking more a teenager than a woman. She is a Nebraska farm girl with blue eyes sometimes wide with innocence. Shorty is about forty, short, and black. He is barely able to walk because of all the needles that have been stuck behind his knees and into his knee caps to inject drugs.

Both live for drugs. Shorty sends Fran into Broadway to turn tricks to support their addiction while he does crossword puzzles in the park. She is afraid to refuse, even to talk much. He often beats her, mostly if he sees her speaking to another person in the tunnel. Twice he has fractured her jaw.