by Ryan Gattis
We went to continuation school at Vista together, me and Clever. Well, until I dropped out anyways.
“Hey,” I say, to him and to everybody, and swipe off my headphones even though they’re not on anymore cuz it’s rude, and I can’t be looking rude around here. Never.
When Clever calls me tagger, he says it like talking down to me, like taggers ain’t about shit, like I’m a little kid playing grown-up.
But I write FREER now. I used to write DOPE. But then I heard someone around Hollywood was writing it too, so I said fuck that and quit. After that I went for ZOOM, which I used for like two weeks and gave up, but not cuz someone else was writing it, cuz I hated how my Z’s looked and a double O was boring to write. They always just looked like giant cartoon eyes to me. Garfield eyes.
I like FREER way better than either of them anyways, cuz there’s tons of kicks and loops possible with double R’s and double E’s but also cuz it means something. When I first thought of it, I got obsessed with it, cuz I meant it, like, look at me, motherfucker, I can do this crazy shit because I’m way freer than you ever thought you could be. It’s like a statement. If I wasn’t freer than you, then how could I get up and write my name wherever I wanted?
On the streets people know FREER cuz he gives the least amount of fucks out of anybody. Except for maybe CHAKA or SLEEZ. Those guys put in work on another level. But to be honest though, I do give a fuck, especially in this neighborhood.
“I just wanted to pay my respects for Ernie,” I say, and just in case people might know him as something different, I also say, “for Ernesto.”
A big guy, I think it’s the one called Apache, says, “Oh, you just wanted to pay respects, huh?”
The FREER inside me wants to tell him that I just said that, but I only nod.
Big Fate’s on the grill, sticking thermometers in stuff, moving sausages around, slapping burgers into buns on plates and looking to hand them off. There’s a loose line of people kinda hovering around him, waiting to scoop some . . .
For a sec I stop and think, They’re like his solar system, these people. He’s the sun and they revolve. I should prolly grab my notebook out and write that down cuz I like it, but my hands are still shaking a little and it feels like I got a badger rummaging around in my stomach like it’s cabinets, like he’s hungry and looking for stuff to eat and coming up disappointed.
FREER never has badgers in his stomach. FREER writes his thoughts down whenever the hell he feels like it, dammit. And you know, FREER’s even the kinda guy to tell people to wait so he can write shit down. That’s who FREER is. But me, I keep my hands in my pockets when I say, “Is Lupe here?”
Fate weighs me up for a sec and then says, “Nope.”
“Um,” I say, “do you mind if I ask where she’s at? Maybe I could wait if she’s coming back.”
“She’s at her mother’s place,” Apache says.
“Where’s that at?” I’m not trying to pry, just trying to pay respects, you know?
“Can’t say,” Apache says.
I nod and say, “Okay, um, is Ray here then? I just wanted to, uh, give my condolences to the family, for Ernesto.”
I might still be fuzzy. But, man, some weird vibes pass between people in their looks when I say Ray’s name. Heavy stuff. Apache looks at Clever and Clever looks at his hamburger like it needs to be studied, and Big Fate mashes a patty down on the grill where it spits and sizzles.
Eventually, Fate says, “So you know this merger’s going down, right?”
Of course, he has to change the subject on me and bring up the one thing I’ve been dreading more than anything. More than needles under fingernails. More than eating grasshoppers dipped in rat guts. I’m not trying to be a gangster just cuz my tagbanging crew’s getting absorbed into Big Fate’s click. I’m really not trying to do that.
“Yeah,” I say, “I heard.”
“So you made your choice or what?”
When he says choice, he means quit tagging and disappear or keep tagging and join up. But the way he says it, it’s not a choice to him. He wants me to join up is what he wants. I’m trying not to panic here, trying not to sweat this more than I already am, so I think I have to talk up school again. It’s bought me time with Big Fate before.
“You know, I been going to continuation school again—”
Clever cuts me off. “No, you haven’t,” he says.
Man. He burnt me good on that one. I look at him, and he looks at me and shrugs. This fine Chinese chick he has behind him kinda looks at me cold too, like she thinks it was a dumb play for me to say that and for a sec, I don’t even care, cuz I would totally bone her.
Big Fate doesn’t look up from the grill. He says to me, “You haven’t?”
That sharpens me up. Brings my attention right back.
“I’m enrolled for next semester,” I say, “just starting back up. I had a little problem I had to take care of. But I’m trying to do the right thing. Get my GED.”
Big Fate doesn’t care. He says, “Everybody knows shit’s changing, and you’ve had a pass up till now cuz of your dad, but that expires next time I see you.”
My dad’s been in San Quentin since I was like eleven, so six years ago. My mom says he was a big man, had the juice card around here and everything. He put Big Fate on, kinda trained him up for what he’s doing. People used to say he was real smart. But I guess Big Fate’s smarter, huh? Cuz he’s not doing life in prison.
But I’m not my dad and I’m not trying to be him, or Big Fate, or anything to do with this click. I don’t care if my name came from my dad saying I could eat through anything when I was a kid, that I was just a little Termite. That name’s not really me now. I grew out of it. I’m FREER.
And anybody that’s actually got some art to them, that cares about their letters and inventing new styles, not just some hard-core vandal for the absolute punk rock fuck-off-itude of it, they’re all nerds and rejects. All of them. Me too, man. I love me some fucking Bode Cheech Wizards. I love Star Wars and I still got them faded x-wing fighter sheets. I’m a thrift-shop-raiding, four-for-a-dollar LP junkie. Don’t matter if the vinyl’s scratched up, fucked up, whatever. At that price, they’re worth it for the covers. I put those up in my room with tacks. Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, man. Martin Denny. Henry Mancini. All the sound tracks I got came from there. I record them from my dad’s old turntable to cassette cuz he sure isn’t using it. And that’s just me. Every other writer is weird in his own special ways. All of us are just some fucked-up little smart kids born in the wrong places.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I mean, we’re not all smart. Some of us are just fucked up or drugged out, but we do get fixated on shit. That’s tough news too when there’s no outlets for us but to write on the world. No avenues except actual avenues to getting your name out in the one city where all that matters is if you’re fucking famous, where all that matters is if you’re white and on a billboard twenty feet tall, or in the movies, or on TV. But I don’t got those routes. I’m Mexican, raza, the hidden race.
Well, hidden unless you’re Cheech Marin, or fucking L.A. Law Jimmy Smits. And I’m not. Nobody cares about me that way. I’ll never have a face that’s known. But I got letters. I got those. Five little letters that when people see them, they see my soul somehow, and they know that the guy that did that doesn’t fuck around. That guy puts in work. My letters say something more too. They say I’m here, you know? They say I did that. They say I exist.
Somebody opens a back screen door from the kitchen and yells out to Big Fate that he has a phone call and he tells whoever picked up to take a message, but then the person says it’s from up the street and he stops.
“String that out here then,” he says to the guy and then to me he’s like, “You can go. Next time I see you, though, it’s time to fucking choose. It don’t matter who your dad is. Sure would be good to have you in though. Keep it family business.”
“Thanks,” I say, and I’m not really
sure what I’m thanking him for but he’s got the phone in his hand now so I’m backing out, nodding at Clever, avoiding Apache’s look and skirting around the house to the driveway and then to the sidewalk as fast as I can.
Cuz if I didn’t know it before I walked into the middle of Gangsterland today, I need to get out, like, all the way out. Out of L.A. even. Go to Arizona or something. My mom’s sister out there owns part of a dry cleaners in Phoenix. She’s always writing me to come out, to leave this life behind, and that sounds pretty damn good right now.
I need money to do that though.
I make a quick little list in my head of who owes me. It starts and ends with Listo. I can sell some stuff to Fat John and Tortuga too, and I can maybe hit up Gloria. That should be something.
First comes the legit stuff. I worked three days last week on the Tacos El Unico truck before this whole thing started and it got shut down. But the stand has been open all the way through the riots, 24/7, and my boss hasn’t been putting me on. I know something about him though, and he’s about to know I know.
It’s what FREER would do.
2
I press play and I’m back to the mix tape and it’s back to John Williams, the end of it anyways. I’m just starting to calm down as I walk, taking deep breaths and everything, when I notice how much of a ghost town this is right now. There’s nobody out. None. Windows closed up. No lawns getting watered or mowed. And I guess it’s not for me to wonder, but why were Fate and them having a BBQ anyway?
Couldn’t be because they’re strategizing how to absorb tagbangers. That’d be too scary. I walk in silence for a bit, feeling heavy. It’s tripping me out what graffiti evolved into in L.A. It started in the riverbed back when it was being built in the 1930s, straight-up hobo carvings and tar pieces and shit. There’s placas from zoot suiters back then too. And all respect to the East Coast, but they didn’t invent shit. CHAZ was doing Señor Suerte back when New York fools were just learning how to write their names on walls like some little fucking babies. In L.A., we’ve always been more advanced. But then things got crazy. When my generation came up, it wasn’t just about tagging no more. It was about tagbanging.
It used to be you put your name up and that was it. There were beefs if somebody was crossing your name out or going over it, but it grew up into something else, a whole new beast. Right now this graff scene is basically the Wild West cuz now my generation’s running the streets. It’s not just pioneers and piecers anymore, guys who want to do big, filled-in letter pieces that don’t bother nobody. Kids my age, most of us come from bad places and we don’t like being disrespected. That’s how graffiti got violent. And when it got dangerous to tag, people started going together to paint in groups, and eventually those groups got bigger and got tighter and formed crews, and if the crew got big enough, it became a click with multiple crews all over the place.
That’s how tagbanging became like a new spike on the fork of L.A. graffiti. It mutated into something completely new cuz it’s this weird mix between graffiti and the gangster life, where the line between the two just gets fuzzier and fuzzier now. Tagbangers carrying guns to protect themselves or shoot somebody that’s disrespecting by crossing them out? Shit, that’s real as hell. I got one, a little .22 throwaway that’s easy to hide. I just didn’t bring it with me cuz the last thing I needed was Big Fate deciding I needed to be searched and then what? Have to explain that? No thanks.
I got a feeling in the pit of my stomach like my life’s never gonna be the same. It feels like I swallowed up a bunch of nails and they’re just rolling around in me. I mean, you know it’s bad, you know it’s gotten way out of hand if a fucking nerd like me is packing. And I’m not the only one. It’s so far out of control that everybody took notice. There’s green lights out on taggers now. Pressure from big dogs way above Big Fate to get these renegade tagbanging crews in line cuz some of them are basically doing gangster shit anyways, shooting people over tagging territory and whatnot.
It’s really not so crazy to think about legislating them cuz some tagbanging crews are so big they’re gangs in their own rights. I’m talking like four hundred people big. You just can’t have that many people running around unchecked. It fucks up business. I’m sure that’s Big Fate’s take. Anyways, it’s prolly safer for everyone for it to be a little more regulated in the gangster system, and if you’re down with that, and some are, okay, but I’m not. Hell no. I’m not about to lose freedom that way. I’m not about to be forced into doing gangster shit just cuz I want to paint.
There’s this pause on my headphones as I hear the heads turning with a soft little whisk-whisk sound before the theme from A Fistful of Dollars rolls in. That’s my strolling music right there, man. I can’t lie. It’s on there cuz it’s more trumpet. I’m down with trumpets lately. I don’t know why. They just speak to me, just spark something in me. Like puppies nuzzling on my ribs. Warm-good. That’s what it feels like when a really clean trumpet hits me.
But that feeling drains right down my body and out of my toes when I look up and see some sort of tank-truck-things coming up the street. Big, armored trucks they look like. Two of them. And, man, are they ever coming fast! I pretty much freeze right then, cuz what the fuck else am I supposed to do? I’m praying they just go right by me, just right on by without even looking at me. But they don’t.
They fucking stop in the street alongside me!
I swipe my headphones off my head as brakes squeal and some sort of back hatch must open cuz I hear metal bang and then there’s four guys out and . . .
Holy shit! Dudes in helmets and serious gear point their guns at me. I never been so scared in my life. I just kinda fall forward onto my knees and put my hands up, you know? All the way up, because you can’t expect to run and get away from that. The badger’s back and he’s going to town on my stomach with his claws so good that my heart freaks out and runs into my throat to get away from him, and it just sits there, right on my Adam’s apple, pounding.
“On the ground,” one of them says from behind a whatdoyoucallit? A giant gun I know the name of, but I forget what it is when it’s inches from my face. A military gun though. A long gun with a handle on top of it.
And it’s so calm and quiet the way he says what he says that it freaks me out more. I get on the ground, right flat on somebody’s lawn. There’s a dandelion clump near my face with white fuzzy tops and next to it is an old piece of dog shit so I turn my head the other way so I don’t have to see it or smell it.
“Spread-eagle,” the same voice says, and I must not do it fast enough, cuz real quick there’s hard cold metal forcing my legs open wider and my arms further apart and that’s when it hits me that they’re using the barrels of the guns to do it, to move my arms and legs and I want to throw up on the grass right then, cuz what if one of their fingers slips and I get shot?
My throat’s dry, but I manage to say, “Please don’t shoot me.”
“You got a weapon on you?” the voice wants to know.
I shake my head no. They pat me down anyways.
I say they cuz it feels like four hands.
When they don’t find anything, the same voice says, “I’m going to need you to stay down until you count two hundred. Begin.”
I nod before I say, “One, two, three, four . . .”
On my neck I hear the song “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” from the Real Genius sound track starting up. I can tell from the guitar and synthesizers. And that’s all I can hear. This low little rhythm in the grass. For just a sec, I’m blown away by the fucking crazy strange timing of it, but then I’m focused on something else.
I don’t even look up, but I hear boots run away from me, and then I hear the two truck-things in the street rolling again. They pass into my vision as I see them head up the street. The first one, oh fuck, the first one turns up into the driveway I just walked out of. They’re hitting Big Fate! Oh, Jesus fuck. That’s bad. That’s really, really bad.
“Nineteen,
twenty, twenty-one . . .”
The other truck-thing stops in the street, and four more guys with machine guns roll out and rush the house. Two put their shoulders into the front door and it gives with this awful groan and a loud-ass crash before they go in with their guns raised.
“Thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two.”
I stop counting there. I look around and see nobody near me. No army dudes, nothing. My cuff’s in the dog shit though. Ugh. I get up slow and easy, and nobody says anything, so I run cuz nobody’s stopping me.
Fuck, man. My headphones are up and bouncing around my neck as I get hold of them and jam them down on my ears as I book it down the block cuz I’m in the shit now. I’m actually in the shit.
I’m getting it on all sides, man! Everybody’s fucking with me. I got my aunt telling me every two minutes how I’m gonna end up dead like Ernie if I don’t stop tagging and she won’t listen when I say Ernie wasn’t painting, he never did tagging or nothing. But that’s not something she gets or will ever get.
And on the other hand, I got Big Fate hassling me about joining up and time ticking down on that. And now, on the other-other hand, there’s this? Soldiers jumping out on me, throwing me on the ground? Soldiers rolling up on Big Fate and giving a perfect advertisement for why the fuck not to be a gangster, cuz there’s always somebody bigger and badder around the corner, somebody who can fuck you up quicker than you ever thought?
Shit. I feel more than ever like I got to get the fuck outta L.A.
3
You don’t really think what a nice day it is until you think you’re gonna die. But now I look up after several smoky days and find that I can see the sky again through partial clouds and it’s blue. Well, it’s like a gray blue. But it’s warm. Over 70 degrees prolly. And under that sky on Atlantic and Rosecrans, on the roof of the building where the Tacos El Unico stand is in a little strip mall, is a guy with sunglasses on, an automatic rifle, and a bulletproof vest.
That’s Rudy. He’s Guatemalan. But he’s cool. He does security for us. I never seen him with that kinda gear before though, and I don’t know where he got it. It’s a little unnerving if you want to know the truth. I wave at him and he doesn’t wave back. He nods. I wonder how long he’s been up there. I mean, El Unico’s always open, even through curfew it’s been like that. He must be switching with somebody, I think.