by Nina Siegal
Right, that wasn’t funny.
I put the materials back in the folder and closed it. Underneath was the envelope marked, V. Vane—my invitation to his wake.
8
The Last Borough
The Bronx, a sultry summer night: a dance with a two-three rhythm and I didn’t know the steps. It wasn’t my kind of dancing anyway. Too close and all hands. Its breath was hot on my neck, its palm wet on my spine. Hot pavement, cold calm. Men leaning on cars. Girls in tight skirts, toppling breasts. Boys in cutoffs airing their shorts. Hungry eyes graze exposed thighs, sweaty belly flesh. The air clashes with the sound of ice cream bells and storefront speakers blaring, “hot hot hot.” Kids’ sticky fingers on push-up pops. Broken hydrants, squealing cries, a cruising van’s deep bass, hearty laughs. Car alarms sound, sirens wail.
Up the pitted sidewalk. Past unknown words, unknown streets. Intervale Avenue, cuchifritos, botanica, potencias. No up-and downtown. No familiar grid. Every block a cha-cha-cha deeper into chaos.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” I asked a woman with a carriage. “I’m looking for this address on Spofford.” I showed her my invite.
“You’re almost there,” she said, looking up from her infant, a bundle of white ruffles. “You just have to cross Bruckner Boulevard.” Bruckner Boulevard: eight lanes of speeding traffic under a ramshackle highway, deserted and littered and dark. As I waited for the light to change, I nervously hugged my dress. It was fear plain and simple; this was the kind of place where a girl could easily fall into a shadow and drown.
I could turn around right now. Sure, I could. And maybe I should. I’d wobble on these heels all the way back down Southern Boulevard and hoof back up the rickety subway stairs and take the 2/5 elevated back to Manhattan. I could find myself in the safety of the humdrum Upper West Side and climb to my empty little apartment, watch my standing fan whir. I could pretend it was all pretty, just an endless ride on the colorful carousel.
But what would I do then? Bite my nails awaiting Cabeza’s next call? Sink a VHS and imagine myself Audrey Hepburn all over again? Rattle up a weak martini until Battinger rang up to say, “You’re through.” No. If I went back I’d have to go farther than that. Much farther, past the Upper West Side, past The Paper, past my TriBeCa loft and my fancy friends, past Buzz and Zip and “Inside and Out.” I’d have to go all the way back to where I went wrong. But where was that?
The invite said apartment eleven, so I climbed four flights of stairs and came to a pair of snake eyes. I paused and listened to the swell of voices behind the steel door. For a moment I imagined stepping right back into that same old cocktail party I’d left six months earlier, the one with all the people I knew, their flushed faces ripe with fine wine, their repartee senseless. That cocktail party was still taking place somewhere in Manhattan. It always was. It only changed locations so the guests could badmouth someone else’s decor.
I pushed through the door without knocking. This was a different kind of party all together. There was no music, no clinking of glasses, no blustery cheer, no giddy boasting with fifteen-dollar words. There was a hush, a downbeat, a murmur. People moved slowly, as if they were weightless. They dawdled in pools of respectful silence. Death was a visitor in this room and he’d turned the treble down low.
But where the soundtrack was muted, the visuals were deafening. The whole space, about two thousand square feet, was covered floor to ceiling with graffiti. There were murals on the walls and tags on the ceiling, drips and splatters on the hardwood floor, on the pillars, on exposed snaking pipes. I couldn’t make out what they said, mostly, but the bright colors were as garrulous as publicists.
It was obviously a painting studio of some sort, but not furnished. No tables or sinks or workbenches, just about two dozen folding chairs, a couple of beat-up sofas probably dragged in for the occasion, and a wooden podium standing empty up front. He just put a down payment on the painting school, I remembered Cabeza saying on the phone. A man doesn’t secure a mortgage…
So, this was Wallace’s big last investment. This place was going to be a school for aspiring painters. It didn’t look like much, but a painting studio didn’t need much. The question was, how would I find the owner of that voice in my head? There were about a hundred guests and any of the men could’ve been Cabeza. I didn’t want to dawdle; I wanted to get in and get out, find Cabeza and make whatever deal he wanted to get him off my back.
Then something large stepped in front of me. It was about six feet tall and three feet wide and blocked out the light. I stepped back, but the shadow overtook me again. I was going to plead for mercy, but the voice stopped me. It was high-pitched and cracking. “May I help you?” he asked. I looked up into the face of a mere child, a boy of maybe sixteen, with curly eyelashes circling big brown eyes. His skin was the color of molasses. His face was soft and supple as a ripe plum.
“Hello.” I offered him my envelope. “I was invited.”
“That’s all right.” He waved it away. “Everyone’s welcome here. I just thought maybe you were lost.”
“I came for the Malcolm Wallace memorial.”
“You’re in the right place. I’m Kamal Prince Tatum.” He offered me his hand. “Stain’s nephew.” His eyes shone the same way Malcolm’s had in the Sunday Magazine. It was a straight line from the kid in the eighties to this one here, give or take about a hundred pounds. “Some people call me Prince. Some people call me Kamal. You choose what you like.”
“I’ll take Kamal,” I said. “You look a lot like your uncle. I’m very sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I’m sorry if I don’t remember meeting you.”
I looked down at my feet. “I didn’t know him personally. I actually came here to, to, support a friend.” I felt my throat constrict. “Listen, I think I’d better…” I was about to make an excuse about something I’d left in my car.
“You look a little pale, Miss. You’d better come over near the fan. We’ve already had a couple of faintings. Must be the heat and the paint fumes.”
“It is very hot in here.” I wiped my brow and found it surprisingly wet. “But I think I…”
“I’ll get you something to drink,” he said. “It’s much cooler over by the window. It’s too hot to be standing in this doorway.”
I couldn’t protest. The teenager was already ushering me in. He was right. The closer I got to the windows, the better I felt. They were only cracked open, but they emitted a languid breeze. The space would’ve cost a cool million or two in Manhattan with its pressed-tin ceiling and high iron windows with a clear view of the dusky sky.
I didn’t know what I was looking for as I scanned the crowd for Cabeza, probably someone ugly, too short or too wide, with a humpback or a missing limb. There were about a hundred people not sure what to do with their hands. Everyone looked either overdressed or underdressed. One man wore a bandanna around his head, tied at the back, and a T-shirt with holes in the shoulders. Someone else with a pencil-thin mustache and long narrow sideburns sweated in a three-piece suit. There were jeans and hoodies. Do-rags and spiffy fedoras. Scarf tops and Sunday church hats and a few tie-dyes. Children shifted from foot to foot, tugging uncomfortably at their bow ties and hair ribbons.
“Here you go,” said Kamal, handing me a plastic cup and asking me what I wanted to drink. The table had a variety of options, including a bottle of scotch, which looked tempting, and a pitcher of a clear drink full of mint leaves and lime slices that Kamal said was caipirinha. I opted for the Pathmark Orangeade and swallowed a cup in one slug. He refilled it. “Who’d you say your friend was?”
I looked up from my drink back into his brown eyes. His eyelashes curled like angel’s wings. I didn’t want to have to start lying again. “Cabeza,” I said, hoping that would cover it. I didn’t have a last name. Or maybe I didn’t have a first. I didn’t know if Cabeza was a real name or some sort of hip-hop alias.
“Oh, yeah. He’s somewhere around here,” Kamal said.
“I saw him earlier. He was talking to some of my friends.”
I was about to ask Kamal to describe Cabeza. Did he have pockmarks or acne scars? A forehead dead-ended in a thicket of greased gray hair? “You think you could help me find him?” As if the kid didn’t have anything better to do than waltz me around the room. He looked at my face as if he were trying to piece together a puzzle.
“What did you say you do?”
“I’m a writer,” I said, and realized that this could be taken two ways. “A journalist.” Of course, Kamal wouldn’t have taken me for a graffiti artist anyway.
“Oh, that makes sense. Cabeza knows a lot of writers. You know Henry Chalfant? He’s here, somewhere, too. He made a movie about graff. Wrote a book. There’s some reporter up here from New York Press and some writer from Spin.” Then a sour expression crossed his face. “You pretty tight with that guy?”
Nobody likes lying to kids. I adjusted my skirt and pulled at my neckline. “We know each other through work.” I swallowed it down with another gulp of Orangeade.
An elderly man in a pinstriped suit stepped to the podium and started adjusting the mike. “Everyone, everyone,” he said. “Okay, now. Everyone come up to the front of the room, because Amenia Wallace Tatum, Stain’s sister, would like to say a few words. Please everyone, give her your attention for a few moments.”
The crowd assembled and Amenia Wallace Tatum walked slowly to the front of the room. She was a tall, lithe woman in a fitted sundress made of hand-dyed African cloth with a headdress to match. The yellow wrap and her calm, elegant gait gave the impression of a giraffe. Her arms were bare and sinewy. As she moved through the crowd, people shook her hands.
As soon as she’d gotten comfortable with the mike, she started speaking. At first, her voice was soft and tentative, but as she got further into her speech, I could tell that she was a trained speaker, someone who felt natural in front of crowds. “Thank you, everyone. Thank you for your attention, and thank you, Clarence, for that introduction. Most of you heard my eulogy at the burial, and I hope many of you could attend. But I had a few other words I wanted to offer in this context, because I’ve been thinking so much about my brother in the last few days, and there’s so much more I feel I need to say, to express, before I don’t have the chance to be with you all in this way.”
Her voice was gaining clarity. “First of all, I want to thank everyone for coming up tonight from all over the neighborhood, the city, the country,” she said. “We have a few people who came in from California to be here, and at least three writers from Germany, who came to pay their respects. And I particularly want to thank all of the artists who took time in the last few days to cover these walls of the studio with such beautiful testaments of love.” She opened her palm and gestured in a wide arc to all the paintings in the room. “Bigs Cru, Mosco, Spkye, N/R, Crash, Revs, and RIF.” Some people murmured approval, other people clapped softly.
Amenia cleared her throat and looked down at the floor; she slowly unfolded a piece of paper and cleared her throat again. “A lot of you who’ve known me through the years will remember that, for a long time, I didn’t understand my brother. I didn’t understand why, ever since we were kids, he seemed to have this need to go around marking up the world. I was always in the books, studying the word of Elijah Muhammad, and here was my kid brother running around with a spray can, making a mess of things.”
She smiled and paused for a moment. “That’s all right,” said someone up front.
“By the time I got to high school, I thought, Well, at least he isn’t selling dope or stripping cars, like some of his classmates. But I still didn’t understand it. To tell you the truth, I’m still not sure I understand it. When I’m riding around on trains and looking at all those scratched-up windows and doors, all those ugly tags, all that destruction, sometimes I still think, what’s all that for? How does that help our cause? I thought maybe with Stain it was just a way of getting back at the world because we didn’t have a father, because he was frustrated that my mom had to struggle through everything with us alone. You know, I didn’t even understand it when he got his first gallery show. I just thought, Those stupid rich folks, they’ll buy anything.”
People laughed softly.
“That’s because they don’t know any better, I thought. Because they don’t understand it’s all just his rage.” She stressed that last word, sighed, and shook her head. She paused for a long time. “I didn’t go to his first solo exhibition in SoHo, the one that got him on the covers of all those magazines. I didn’t attend the fancy openings or the award ceremonies. When Momma showed me his name in print, I wouldn’t look at the stories. Can you imagine? I didn’t want to know about my own brother. I was that arrogant. I have to live with that. But Malcolm didn’t need my approval; he didn’t bother himself with my disdain. He just kept inviting me. He offered to fly me to Austria and Brussels, to Paris. But I didn’t go.”
Her face struggled with tears. The room held its breath. But Amenia lifted her chin and raised her chest, and it passed.
“I’m telling you this now because I know I was wrong. I was wrong about my brother. I didn’t give him credit for who he was at that time. But luckily, I saw the error of my ways before it was too late. I only wish it’d been earlier. As all of you know too well, the art establishment, those society folks downtown, got tired of the graffiti trend after a while. They used Malcolm and abandoned him once they’d had their fill. It was then that I finally went to see him. To my everlasting shame, only then, when he was broken down and alone. That’s when I realized how important he was to me.”
She clenched her jaw and took a moment to look around the room. Her eyes brightened as she saw the paintings on the walls. “I knew he’d gotten messed up by everything, and I was angry at myself that I hadn’t been there to protect him. I went to see him when he was living on Thompson Street. He could barely lift his eyes to meet mine.”
There were people nodding their heads in agreement. This, I guessed, had been Wallace’s breaking point. Something had happened and he’d left the art world. I tried to remember what it had been.
“But I looked around me and I saw that it hadn’t just been all about that. His room was full of canvases, beautiful canvases, art like nothing I’d ever seen in my life. It was music in paint, our music. I sat down with him on the floor and I put my arms around my brother and I held him. It was then I saw it: my brother is a real artist. An artist. He isn’t doing this just to express his anger or to get someone else’s approval. His art said, ‘I’m here. I exist.’”
That stopped her short. She dropped her chin and cried for a while, dabbing her eyes with a crumpled Kleenex. The audience waited with heads bent.
Amenia started again. “Malcolm said, ‘I exist,’ and I said it right back to him. ‘You exist, my brother, and you exist for much more than this.’ He cleaned up and he left that other life behind and made a new life. A lot of people forgot about Malcolm when he left the art world. But that was, in many ways, when he really became the man you all knew and loved. He went on to teach other young people that they could also say ‘I exist.’ That’s why today we’re standing in one of three art studios that my brother, Malcolm Wallace, brought to life here in the Bronx. And why there are aspiring painters here from all over the city who knew him as an artist, as a teacher, as a poet on our city trains and walls. And that’s why no one in this room believes you killed yourself, no matter what the papers print, and no matter how they try to destroy your reputation, even in the afterlife. We’re all here, Malcolm, saying we loved you. We still love you, and you have our respect. You have our love.”
The room filled with murmurs of assent.
“And that’s why we honor you today and why I pledge to continue on with your work here,” Amenia continued, looking up beyond the ceiling. “Everyone in this room is going to honor your legacy and see to it that these three art studios get the support and the students they deserve. We are going to see that
your goals are achieved and that there are generations upon generations of young Malcolm Wallaces springing from the Bronx each year.”
Amens all around. “That’s right,” said someone. “That’s our pledge,” said someone else.
“Thank you everyone,” said Amenia. “Thank you, Malcolm.”
Amenia turned from the podium and everyone who wasn’t already standing got up. The elderly man in the pinstriped suit went back up to the mike and thanked everyone and mopped his brow with a handkerchief. “Please feel free to stay and have something to drink. There’s soda, juice, and snacks on the table. A few more people will talk in a bit.”
Kamal was still by my side, watching the crowd form around his mother. He asked me if I was feeling better and I nodded and he left me to join her. I poured myself more orangeade and tried to play the fly on the wall, thinking I’d spot Cabeza if I just stayed put. A man doesn’t secure a mortgage… I felt something climbing up my spine again, and this time it had pincers. I was beginning to think maybe Cabeza was right. Maybe I had made a bad mistake, and maybe I’d better pay for it. I moved my hand through the bowl of chips and packed a few into my mouth, out of nervousness.
Kamal returned to the table to grab a bottle of water for someone else. “You find Cabeza yet?” He was a polite kid. “I saw him over there with Bigs Cru. You know them?”
I shook my head.
“Aw, they’re pretty famous,” Kamal said. “They do murals for Tommy Hilfiger and Coca-Cola. They did that piece over there,” he said, tipping the bottle toward the far wall. I could see that the wall had lettering on it, big bulky letters in green and blue, painted three dimensionally, thrusting into space. I couldn’t make it out. I cocked my head to one side, thinking that might help.
“What does it say?” I asked Kamal.