The Mole People, page 27
*In 1991, seventy-nine homeless persons died on or near the tracks, according to New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority. Most were struck by trains or electrocuted when they rolled in their sleep onto the third rail. That same year, forty-nine fires were reported in tunnels, most of them set for cooking or for warmth, but some lit by a spark from the third rail falling on the cardboard houses or other flammable debris that the homeless bring to tunnel camps.
*While many of his attributes and qualities are centuries old, their synthesis into the underground man is a modern development. He is essentially a reaction to forces of the past century. Hemingway’s Jake Barnes, Kafka’s clerks, Hesse’s Steppenwolf were underground men, as were Sartre’s lonely existentialist, Camus’s absurd man, Ellison’s invisible man, and Koestler’s Rubashove, betrayed by the communist gods of his own creation. Despite their radical differences, all of them possessed pronounced features of the underground man.
*The Guardian Angels patrol the streets and subways in red berets and tough attitudes. Most members are between twenty and twenty-three years old and volunteer ten to fifteen hours a week to help protect commuters in the more dangerous areas of New York. They were organized in 1979 by Curtis Silwa, one of a group of young men picking up trash in the Bronx and recycling it and, in the process, intervening to help people from being mugged. After some heroic responses to crime, Silwa organized the thirteen-member Guardian Angels. Though commuters seemed to appreciate their help, the city government was skeptical of their intentions. Some city politicians went so far as to dismiss them as thugs. Today, they are a nonprofit volunteer organization with five thousand members around the world with branches in forty-five U.S. and ten foreign cities, including London, Liverpool, Sydney, Berlin, and Milan. They are still strong and generally respected despite a few scandals in which Silwa himself came forth and admitted that the Angels staged some rescues.
Jennifer Toth, The Mole People
