Jennifer Toth: The Mole People

In some ways, tunnel life closest to the surface is the worst. “Under the train platforms,” Seville says, “you have to worry about rats. You can light small fires to keep them from jumping on you.” Police once found a body by the smell; he had died of an overdose and been picked at by rats. Seville shivers with the memory. The compartment, stretching the length of the platform and about ten feet deep, was home to about twenty men at the time, all heavily into drugs. They urinated and defecated where they lived. The odor was gagging.

After a year, Seville moved deeper underground to “the Condos,” a kind of natural cavern where over two hundred people lived. He had become friendly with a few men who lived there, and they convinced him to stop taking drugs. When he did, he said that they invited him to join their community, which is accessible from the tracks in Grand Central.

Few “did drugs” in the Condos. “Some were homosexuals, some straight, but mostly it was called the ‘Condos’ because the living environment was so good. It was easy to get water from a sprinkler pipe. You could set up shacks on the ground and find electric wires to screw in light bulbs. You could run clotheslines to dry your clothes. It was quiet and peaceful.”

The cliff was set back from the tracks so that beyond it, train noises could barely be heard, and police seldom had ventured that deep into the tunnels.

“I’d been looking for mole people for years, been patrolling those tracks, and never saw them,” Sergeant Henry once confided to me. “I only found them when I overheard people talk about the Condos in the terminal.”

Sergeant Henry and the Transit Police cleared out the Condos. Seville moved even deeper underground.

“The further down you go, the weirder people get, and I mean real weird,” Seville says. “There are people down there, man, I swear they have webbed feet…. Can’t hardly see them at times, they’re so sneaky. They make strange noises and sounds, like trains, but they aren’t trains; they’re communicating with each other. They said I could stay but that I could only be allowed to go back up with their permission. I ran from that place man, and I ain’t never going back. They’re the mole people .”

SEVILLE NOW FAVORS AN AMTRAK TUNNEL RUNNING UNDER HELL’S Kitchen along the West Side. The area is considered extremely dangerous by graffiti artists who paint flashy mosaics on the walls in tunnels as well as on the surface. For Seville, the most dangerous aspect is getting into the tunnel from the street. He usually slips through a gate in a chain link fence atop a natural rock crevasse. One day the gate was chained shut by police.

Trespassers had made a new entryway by bending up the lower section of the fence at one spot. “We used to crawl in feet first and then slide under, and the rocks on the side of the wall were like steps to get down part way. But you got to hold on. If you fall,” he says of the thirty-foot drop to the tracks, “you might not get killed but you’d be hurt something terrible. You climb down the side part way and then jump the last part. I fell once and broke my wrist. It was hanging like this, only backward,” he laughs, swinging a listless hand as if unjoined. Mechanics who work in the auto repair shop outside the fence saw him fall and climbed the fence to help. “One said, ‘Man, after that fall, I thought you’d be dead.’”

Even when he gets into the tunnels, as experienced as he is, Seville is not safe.

“The biggest danger is crossing tracks. They got tracks that interlock, and if your foot gets stuck, trapped, that train won’t be able to stop. It’s happened, and the people down there won’t risk their necks to help you out. I hate to say it, but I doubt they’d help you out.

“The people down there, I wouldn’t say they’re bad, but most of them are strung out. There is some kind of unity, but it fluctuates. It’s a mood thing. Whatever mood they have, they’ll act on and their mood changes twenty times a day, mostly because of drugs—coke, speed, and now heroin, if they got enough for it.”

After a while he continues, “Those people down there, they’re not used to people helping them—or them helping people. Like this guy who just got hit by a train up here last week.” The man was so drugged that he apparently did not hear the warning whistle of a train behind him. The train was moving too fast to even slow down. “There were people around who could have helped him, gone get him off the tracks but they don’t really care. They’re not going to risk their necks for you. That’s a fact. His girlfriend was there. She’s like most of the girls up here. They’re whores. She only with him cuz she think he can protect her.” He shakes his head and stays quiet for a minute.

“I knew this girl down there,” he resumes with a small smile. “Pretty little one. She’d be so strung out she would almost starve herself to death. I used to make her clean herself up. I used to drag her up top and she’d be crying, ‘Fuck you!’ But I’d get one of the gas station people to let her into their toilet and I wouldn’t let her come out til she was clean. Man, she was so pretty, she didn’t need to be turning tricks. She was in her early twenties maybe,” he remembers. “Maria.”

“She found a man,” he says, vaguely again, “that didn’t want nothing from her but to help her, and she came and surprised me. Came down to my couch in the tunnels and woke me up. ‘Wake up, Daddy, I got something for you,’ she said. Brought me lunch and everything. Looked clean and straight, real nice. Said she wasn’t coming back no more, and I haven’t seen her again,” he says wistfully. “I hope she made it.”

SEVILLE HESITATES BEFORE AGREEING TO TAKE ME DOWN INTO HIS tunnel. Because of his recently crippled foot, he can’t use the regular entrance over the eighteen-foot fence and down the steep, rocky tunnel face to the tracks, and he won’t let me go on my own.

“I don’t want that on my conscience,” he says, shaking his head. “If we see Franko or Shorty, I’ll let you go with them, but not on your own. There are people who are bugged out and people who are real crackheads and they’ll try to rob you, at least. That’s a fact, and you being in the tunnels alone, I don’t think there’s too far they wouldn’t go. No way I want that on my conscience. But I’ll show you where it is.”

He hobbles through Grand Central, and we take the shuttle to Times Square, emerging into a bitterly cold January. Seville’s hands are cracked and bleeding. “It’s that Hudson wind,” he laughs as we walk along 48th Street toward 10th Avenue. Between 10th and 11th avenues is an almost unnoticed bridge over a gully through which run railroad tracks some thirty feet below street level, the spot where Seville fell. Access from either side of the bridge is barred by chain link fences, but these can be climbed or slid under, and the weeds—poison sumac, goldenrod—grow freely to the top of the sheer rock face of the crevasse before it drops to the gravel road bed of the tracks.

“Nothin’ in the world like that old Hudson wind blowing off the river. I should know; I’ve lived with it for four years now.”

At times the wind is so strong it almost knocks Seville over. We find none of his friends so we duck into a restaurant, Lee’s Chinese Food. The sign is short of one e and soon to lose the slipping h . It has two tables, a counter, and a loud kitchen.

“Chicken and fried rice, Mr. Lee, and don’t hold the grease!” Seville calls out on his way to the counter.

Lee laughs. “How’re you doing, man,” he asks. The black patois somehow doesn’t sound odd coming from this middle-aged Asian man; perhaps it is becoming the universal language, the Esperanto of urban slums.