“People think of me as homeless,” said Tony Butler, who made his home in the tunnels of the New York subway. “Hell, the whole world is my home. That’s the way I look at it. And the beautiful thing about the whole world being my home is that I ain’t gotta worry about no freakin’ landlord evicting me anytime he gets ready. The only time I get evicted from this world is when I die. And that’s a good feeling. Yeah, I dig what I’m doing—the only thing I complain about is the weather. A few times I had to refuse to freeze to death.”
Someone once described Tony, as an “African American subway Buddha.” The description is apt: he’d take off his heavy shoes and make himself at home, sprawling on the subway benches with his butt firmly planted on two cushions that he carried with him at all times for comfort. He wore a gauzy, funky-looking veil, held on by a headband that covered more or less of his face, depending on his mood.
I first met Tony back in 1996 at the Broadway-Lafayette subway station in New York, where he sat with a newspaper spread out on his lap, playing cards dealt onto a wooden bench. “I’m breaking in a new deck,” he told me. He was playing out bridge hands in the Daily News. Looking up at me he said, “See all those people getting on the train this morning? The working poor. The working poor. That says it all, doesn’t it? That’s why I don’t work.”
Tony was not your ordinary homeless man—or, in fact, your ordinary man. He lived entirely off the grid. Once he told me, “I got arrested taking a pee from the platform onto the tracks. They confiscated my possessions and all my money. When they let me out they told me I could reclaim my stuff in Brooklyn. I show up there and they tell me I need an ID. How’s a guy like me to get an ID? To get an ID, you need an ID. I’m outside the system. I don’t pay taxes; I don’t vote; I never had a social security card—I don’t want any part of it.”
Tony’s “office,” I discovered, was the last seat in the row of wooden benches on the east side of the platform. He’d commandeered an adjoining bench as his gaming table, where he dealt cards or moved chess pieces to pass the time—that is, when he wasn’t busy with his real job of monitoring the trains on behalf of the greater New York City public. He made announcements whenever the trains were running late. “I consider myself a ‘volunteer New York City Transit associate,’” he told me. “That word, volunteer, is important—that’s where the humanitarianism comes into it. I help people who are lost on the platform. It really offends me, it really sickens me, to see customers down here not knowing where they’re going. It sickens me to see people here at the Broadway-Lafayette stop who think they’re at the East Broadway stop.” His ongoing announcements set them straight.
Another time I ran into Tony, he was playing a game of solitaire. “The problem with this game,” he told me, “is that there’s an overabundance of losing combinations.” In the weeks and years that followed, I realized that his observation applied not just to solitaire: this was his philosophy—and he said it poetically:
Too many things go wrong, and not enough things go right.
Wrong is what makes the world go round.
Wrong is king.
Wrong rules.
Wrong dominates.
The world is actually geared to go wrong.
There’s too many ways for things to go wrong,
and it’s impossible for everything to go right.
Tony also had his own view of time: “Time is there and it’s not there. If they stopped all the clocks and watches in the world, it wouldn’t matter. It doesn’t mean anything. Time exists for people like you, who live by the clock. I’ve got from now on.”
After I had known him for a few months, Tony said to me, “Hey, Steve, I wouldn’t mind if you laid some cans on me.” I brought him some cans of Campbell’s soup a few days later. “Tony,” I said, “living down here in the subways, how do you heat the soup up?”
“Steve, you know what I’ve discovered? The only difference between hot food and cold food is the taste.” Tony steered clear of the Thanksgiving dinners given for the homeless about town. “Why don’t you go to get your free meal?” I asked him.
“Too many undesirables,” he said. “The one thing you don’t want to mix is food and undesirables.”
Tony and I struck up a friendship that lasted about five years, until 2004, when he died, at age fifty-three, from infections incurred in the tunnels. I took him on his last journey to St. Vincent’s Hospital—when he finally admitted he was sick enough to go. As we rode there in an ambulance, I asked him, “Tony, what are you thinking about?”
“At times like this,” he said, “you don’t really think about anything.”
He lost consciousness soon after and died about a week later. He was buried on Hart Island, the potter’s field for New York City.
I remember a day when Tony reached into one of his many pockets and pulled out a scrap of newspaper. “Look at this,” he said. “This is a little tiny obit. This woman, it says, was born in eighteen ninety-eight and died in two thousand and two. Can you believe that? She lived in three centuries. I want to do that.” Tony made it for a little more than half of one century. He did not consider himself a homeless man; he was an “alternative lifestyler,” as one his friends, Torin Reid, a subway motorman, suggested. Although we walked divergent paths, we both saw some of ourselves in each other.
~ Steve Zeitlin
