On Mole Men and Other Inspirations

I’d heard about the mole people living in the tunnels under Manhattan. But I only thought about them a few times a day, tops. Did they all carry flashlights, I wondered, or had their eyes evolved to pierce the perpetual subterranean night? Were rats a delicacy with the right recipe, or more of a utility feed for on-the-go snacking? Did a mole man’s skin become increasingly translucent, like certain shrimp, the deeper you went down?

Some questions will remain forever unanswered. As humans, we’re all piloted by this great mystery inside our heads. That’s something I thought about often while writing my novel Middleman. In an uncertain world, the main character seeks clarity and connection to the real thing, as he struggles to make peace with the never knowing. That sense of the never knowing felt especially vast when I was in my early twenties, twenty years ago, and included countless topics, mole people among them.

And then one night, I was waiting on the A train for a while. Long enough to sit down on a bench, though I had no disinfectant. I occupied myself with my notebook, writing my little things as I do, until I looked up to see if a subway was coming. What I saw instead was the silhouette of a hunched figure in the tunnel moving toward me. The handful of people waiting there all appeared distracted by their iPods and glossy magazines. We’re pretty good as a species at putting the blinders on.

But the woman sitting next to me on the bench did notice. She said, in a horrified whisper, “What is that?”

I had an idea, though I was too spooked to speak. The figure had a slight limp, but then as it entered the dim light of the station, it quickly pulled itself up onto the platform with impressive agility. It was a short man with a tangled gray beard, but most surprising was his attire. He was dressed almost entirely in bright green. Green pointy shoes even and a green felt cap with a little red feather. It sounds too cartoonish to be real, I know, but it’s true. I’d pass a lie detector test telling you that this mole man was dressed like Robin Hood. And not the Kevin Costener version. The original Howard Pyle one, the Disney one, the very green fella.

I was still new to the city then, but I’d learned already what every bumpkin must learn there, which is: you don’t have to engage with everyone, or anyone for that matter. Mind your own business and the person on the street with arrows sticking out of his back will move on, and you can go back to your eggs benedict. There are just too many people all at once, and you have to protect yourself from some of these wildcards, unless you want to suffer a lukewarm breakfast, or worse.

So, I didn’t make eye contact, as the guy got closer. I busied myself counting my shoes—one, and oh, look, there’s another one. This strategy didn’t work. He came right up to me and looked at my notebook. He gave a faint nod. I don’t recall exchanging any pleasantries. I just remember him saying, his voice gravelly, these words exactly: “If you ever run into trouble in the tunnels, tell ‘em you know Hobbit.”

Life is strange. And frightening. And funny. A lot of things can happen out there.

It didn’t occur to me until this very moment that maybe he was supposed to be dressed like a hobbit from L0rd of the Rings, and not Robin Hood, after all. Either way, he was living a cosplay fantasy life in the presumably dangerous underground. And after delivering his message to me and me alone, he turned and went back down the platform, climbed onto the tracks, and vanished again into the subway tunnel. That was it.

The woman next to me on the bench had taken off wisely before he limped up, and so I sat there alone wondering: What kind of unexpected turns would my life have to take to lead me into the tunnels? And who was the them, in Hobbit’s scenario, that might be giving me trouble down there? And how dire and desperate would my situation have to be to have just one card left to play, and it’s: name-dropping a mole man named Hobbit?

Life is strange. And frightening. And funny. A lot of things can happen out there. And this memory of Hobbit returned to me as I was writing the ne’er-do-well character, Eddie, in my book. Eddie doesn’t do any of the things a respectable adult is supposed to do. He doesn’t work, doesn’t have a family, doesn’t properly take care of his sick mother. He’s selfish, unscrupulous, and also, he’s enviably free, in his way.

He doesn’t compromise himself and he has the courage to pursue his own vision, however warped and misguided it may be, into the mausoleums of an old cemetery, a scary place for most people even in daylight. Perhaps almost as scary as the dark tunnels under Manhattan, where Hobbit went to an extreme to turn his fantasy life into his real one.

It feels fitting to me now that someone who lived like that would offer a young aspiring writer his protection, his blessing even maybe. And maybe someday I’ll be brave enough to follow him all the way down.

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