“That’s why I say, ‘Fuck them!’” Frankie says angrily. When they finally came and knocked on his door, he told them to come back another time, because he had to go out canning. In Little Havana, they have given up all hope.
Hugo tells me that Poncho had called Dov to ask how things were proceeding. Dov had told him that indeed there might be some problems, because the vouchers were originally meant for subway tunnel people. Disappointed, Poncho had thrown the receiver down on the hook. “Getulio and Poncho are devastated,” Hugo says.
“You see that they are just liars,” a drunk Julio is screaming. He had visited the alcohol clinic. By the reception, he had already turned around and left. “You should have seen the light inside,” he says. “They had these lights at the ceiling that emitted some kind of weird light. To make you crazy.”
Hugo has problems with his welfare that had become workfare. He had to pick up garbage in the park during the burning heat. After two days, he stopped showing up. Now he has a job as a delivery boy for a laundry. He makes twice as much money, but that doesn’t help get the vouchers. You need to prove a legal income, but his new income is off the books.
“Yeah,” Julio yells, waving a can of beer. “We don’t like to be told what to do. That’s why we’re down here.”
Later I call Dov. He is nervous. At the moment he is busy talking to DC, so the vouchers will also be valid for the Amtrak tunnels. “Please, tell the people they need to be patient. We are doing our best.”
28. THE ADVENTURES OF FRANKIE, PART 7: STUPID PLANS
“The girls are pissed off,” Frankie says when Maria and Fatima walk away angrily with the baby stroller. We are in Riverside Park on a Friday night. Tonight is boys’ night. Frankie and Ment will hang out with their crew in the city. The girls are angry because they can’t join them. “Fuck it,” Ment hisses and puts his roller-blades on. “Damn right you are, ‘cuz,” Frankie adds. He is leaning on Maria’s bike, a tandem, and lights a cigarette.
There are more things wrong. Fatima is pregnant again. Ment is the father. It is not the right time for a baby. They are considering an abortion. But that costs a lot of money, Ment explains. “We want to go to a good clinic. Not to some kind of butcher.” They need six hundred bucks. By any means necessary. Frankie already has a plan.
We go looking for their friends. Ment leads on his rollerblades; Frankie follows him on the tandem. I am on my racing bike. Frankie rides like a maniac. Like a wild bull, he charges with his bike in between two rows of cabs on Broadway, preferably against traffic. Screaming pedestrians jump away. “Watch it, suckers!” Frankie screams at them. With his fists, he hits cabs on the roof when they are blocking his way and yells, “Fuck you, asshole!” Every five minutes, Frankie and Ment stop to make some phone calls. They leave messages on beepers and answering machines. The crew has to be hanging out somewhere, where exactly they don’t know. That’s why we have to check out all possible meeting places.
At a park basketball court, somewhere in Midtown, we take a break. “We call this The Yard,” Frankie says. “Here we always hang out with the crew. We play ball, smoke buddha, you know, all those magical things us young people like to do.” Frankie has to grin at his own words. “And sometimes we just walk around. Cruising up and down the Avenues, drinking forty ounces. All night long. We get two, we pay one.” They can secretly slide the second huge beer bottle down into their baggy pants. “Yeah, two-for-one, that’s our stylo.”
The crew doesn’t show up at the Yard. We ride back to Riverside Park on 72nd Street, back to Rockefeller Center on 48th. Ment places a few other calls. Finally, we find the crew hanging out drinking beer in front of a grocery in Hell’s Kitchen. Ment and Frankie shake hands and get a couple of 40s. Their friends are white guys in their twenties, looking like grungy skinheads.
Frankie presents his master plan. They will rob Vanessa’s mother. Hit two birds with one stone. They need money for the abortion, and on top of that, it will be the perfect punishment for Vanessa. Because not only has Vanessa tried to break up Frankie and Ment, she’s not exactly a saint either. Frankie takes me apart for a moment. “She has laid the whole crew already,” he whispers. “And I tell you, Ant, that’s no good.”
The plan is to take a shower at Vanessa’s place. When she is not watching, Frankie will sneak into her mom’s bedroom. He has already been nosing around there, and knows there is a little safe with money under her bed. “With a big-ass wad of bills. All tens and twenties,” he stresses. It simply can’t go wrong. Because he is under the shower, he has a watertight alibi. He just hasn’t realized that he will leave a trail of water drops from the shower to the broken safe. The crew is shaking their heads. “You are crazy,” the oldest one says. “You guys are the only homeless among Vanessa’s friends. First thing Five-O’s gonna check out is the Freedom Tunnel.”[73]
29. ADVANCED CANNING I: BIG SHOT TONY
“Happy to see you. Finally someone I can trust,” Tony says, relieved when I show up. He pulls out a ten-dollar bill and sends me to get coffee and cigarettes. He’s already lost twenty dollars by asking the same of two other homeless buddies who just took off and never came back. Tony is two-for-oneing at Sloan’s supermarket on 96th Street, and I help him so I can witness the miraculous multiplication of his dollars. “You see,” Tony says when I return and give him back all his change, “here I am every night a winner.” Tony says he’s given up horse betting. For the past week, he has been every evening in front of the supermarket doing business.
He not only buys up cans, but also the bonus points on Marlboro packs that he can sell for double the price to some other guy on the Upper East Side. In fact, he buys everything offered by the sad parade of crack-addicted homeless people who hang out in the neighborhood and stop by at Tony’s. One has a plastic bag holding twenty crushed cans. Tony is strict.
“Straighten those cans out,” he barks at the client. He points at a Ballantine Ale can. “Yo, man. This is a dead can.” Even the two-for-oners in Harlem refuse those. Other clients offer cuckoo clocks, sneakers, and decaying porn mags—with beaver shots in washed-out magenta colors—that they might sell for twenty cents.
Tony is playing the successful businessman, waving a big wad of singles and handing out quarters and dimes to his clients. With the eye of a connoisseur, he looks at a disposable camera, tries in vain to sell it to me, and finally offers the client a dollar fifty—half a hit of crack.
Tony has even employed an assistant, who is just arriving. He’s a young white guy with a big beard who doesn’t looks like he has any serious drug or drinking problems. The man is not homeless but lives on welfare in a cheap SRO hotel.
He helps Tony for ten bucks a night. His task is sorting out the cans and putting them in different bags: two bags with cans that have to go to WeCan—one for beer cans, one for soda cans—a third bag for plastics, and the last bag with cans that the assistant will put in the machine tonight at Sloane’s. This is a time-consuming job; the machine processes only three cans a minute and Tony can’t be bothered with that. “You see,” he says, “I have to watch everybody constantly. They try to rip me off, I have to make sure the cans are sorted correctly and I have to keep the sidewalk clean.”
In fact, Tony does not touch a single can. He doesn’t want to soil his hands, because he has to count his wad of crispy dollar bills all the time. I watch Tony until he also puts me to work. “When you have nothing to do, sort this bag out,” he commands. Tony is obviously very pleased that he can show all his black clients that he has two white guys working for him, who obey all his commands without questioning his authority. Unlike the clean cans I collect with Frankie and Bernard in the early morning, the cans offered to Tony are collected by the scum of can men who don’t mind digging deep in every public waste basket in their nightly quest in search of a hit. Some cans smell of puke, others have traces of dog shit or moldy Chinese food.
73
“The Freedom Tunnel” is the street name given by people from the graffiti scene to the Amtrak Tunnel. It might be a reference to Chris Pape AKA “Freedom,” who used the tunnel walls as his canvases; it might be a reference to the sense of freedom from conforming to society and freedom from paying rent, according to a Wikipedia entry.