“Not if he reads the paper,” said Nique.
“Well, he only knows me as Easel. That was my tag.”
“Why Easel?”
“Good letters for bombing. Plus, whatever you write Easel on becomes one.”
“Nice,” said Andre. The bag of herb was in his hand now. He dropped a bud onto his desk, hunched low, and began breaking it apart. “But just to bring it back to reality like Soul II Soul—”
“Or Intelligent Hoodlum,” interjected Nique.
“Who just sampled the Soul II Soul song.”
“Who just sampled the drums Marley Marl gave Biz for ‘Pickin’ Boogers.’ ”
“Who sampled them from some funk record we don’t know about regardless,” finished Andre, impatient. “Point being, you can’t just mosey on downstairs and hop the train, dude. There’s a mob calling for your blood outside.”
“Hey, I bet there’s already Macon Detornay Web sites up,” said Nique. He reached over and pressed a button, and Andre’s laptop whirred to life.
“Can anybody in this room focus on anything?” asked Andre. He turned to Macon. “I think you should stay here.”
“Suggestion duly noted and rejected. What good is you bailing me out if I’m a prisoner in my room?”
“Well, at least be careful. Here, wear my lid as a disguise.” Andre tossed a wide-brimmed fisherman’s hat across the room.
“Take my Rineharts,” Nique offered. Macon put the glasses on. The room swam green.
“I’m not even gonna look in the mirror,” he said, “because I know this looks ridiculous.”
“We should come with you,” Nique said dully, hands moving over the keyboard like manic spiders.
“Nah,” said Macon. “I wanna be alone for a minute.”
Nique shrugged and his eyes widened. “Damn, five hundred and sixty-three matches. Ain’t that some shit.”
Macon hucklebucked eleven flights rather than risk one elevator stare. His footfalls echoed in the cement quiet, and the cement sounds of jail resurfaced for a second. I’m not going back there, Macon told himself, chest cavity tremoring with the sudden applicability of such a hackneyed line. He flipped his jacket collar up and hunched into it, pulled the hat low and thanked God he had the sunglasses, a filter for the world. He remembered a sci-fi book he’d read dog-eared as a kid. A monster in it was so stupid that it wouldn’t eat you if you closed your eyes, believing that if you couldn’t see it, it couldn’t see you.
The tug of Macon’s desire to walk among the protesters frightened him as he stalked through the lobby and banged a military-sharp left turn onto campus, away from the crowd, refusing himself even an over-the-shoulder glance. He longed to glide unseen through the throng’s ranks and scream with them—to smell their colognes, their breath, the wet wool of their sweaters, anything. Instead he hurried over to Broadway and hailed a cab, arm outstretched at a hitchhiker’s angle. The rain splattered against his hat, fat drops amplified by the soaked cloth and sounding solid, like BBs. He slid across the taxi backseat, the fake leather cracked and patched with duct tape, glanced at the driver’s ID and told himself he was above dwelling on the irony of now-I’m-riding-in-a-cab.
Drum lived up in Washington Heights, fifty blocks north. Macon leaned back and sighed. His chest felt tight and his head still throbbed with metronome consistency, engorging with pain and draining slowly. He stared at the sheets of rain sloshing over the cab windows and studied the unmatched tempos of the windshield wipers compressing the water down into small moisture-hills, the way the left wiper slashed in and then retreated as the right advanced. When he was little, Macon had always imagined that the wipers were boxing, knocking each other down. The timing was cyclical, and without thinking, Macon counted the number of times the wipers moved between their closest synchronicity and their most dissonant point. Every sixteenth wipe, it turned out, the tips almost kissed. Then they grew apart until they were so distant they were close again.
Macon overtipped the driver, sprinted into Drum’s foyer, and pressed his buzzer. No answer. He rang again and sat down on the windowsill, out of ideas. It hadn’t occurred to him that Drum might not be home. The cat was pushing fifty, and as far as Macon knew he only stepped out of the lab to put in appearances at graff events, gallery openings and film screenings and whatnot, sign blackbooks for starstruck new-jacks a third his age. Like many old-school writers, Drum was on some paranoid conspiracy shit, refusing to have his picture taken without shielding his face behind a gas mask, sunglasses, or a camouflage army jacket. Periodically, he disappeared overseas, departing abruptly and making veiled, ominous references to “shit” being “hot.” There was no point in trying to figure him out, Macon thought; Drum was as indecipherable as the wild styles for which he was famous: twisted, polymorphous letter-forms spiraling through white space, glinting fluorescent, illegal as all hell.
While some of his contemporaries, the first generation of New York writers, graffiti’s inventors, had pursued art world acceptance and made the transition from trains to canvases, Drum had stayed underground. Permission walls were not a part of his agenda; artistic terrorism was. To him, graffiti T-shirt and legal piece were oxymorons. Most of the guys who’d gone legit, Drum was quick to point out, had been pimped and dismissed by the fickle art community, treated as ghetto curiosities, and pushed off the cutting edge as suddenly as they’d defined it.
A few writers were still selling canvases, but that shit looked static, dead. Trains moved; that was the genius of graffiti: words flying through the city, jags of color shrieking every which way, the motion of the pieces locked in violent competition or beautiful harmony with the motion of the trains. It had been a city-sponsored, rotating exhibition seen by five million New Yorkers a day, ridiculously competitive and growing ever more involved until only the secret community of writers could read the names sprayed in interlocking, tangled angles and raging, moving color.
Macon loved knowing the codes; he had studied graff history assiduously from afar, read everything he could get his hands on before he’d ever boosted a spray can. His adrenal glands splayed open as the older heads on the subway station benches handed down the folklore: stories of how writers had taken over New York City, juiced by the prospect of outlaw fame and the double impulse to decorate and decimate a place that had pushed people who looked like them to the margins of existence. Middle-class straphangers commuting in from Jersey and Long Island had been horrified by the secret conversations taking place on public property, the thought that insane black/Latino vandals were beating the city, hiding and striking like ninjas, Zorro to their corrupt Spanish colonizing force, mastering the subterrain and sneaking in and out of train yards and eluding cops and dogs and deadly electrified third rails to rock their shit.
The politicians found it a convenient code. The Mayor’s Office declared a War on Graffiti, which sounded nicer than a War on Young People of Color, and beefed up yard security. The city removed perfectly functional trains from the tracks until they could be cleaned, and encouraged the good citizens of the five boroughs to rat out writers and reclaim their neighborhoods and transit lines. They forced captured writers to destroy their own work, jailed and fined them, tried to demoralize them by repainting whole subway lines at once, erasing thousands of pieces.
All of it backfired. Writers met and networked while cleaning cars, formed new alliances and traded information. The clean trains solved the dilemma of artistic overcrowding, and ushered in a golden age as masters competed to cover the new spaces with burners. It took New York City almost twenty years to win the war—from the early seventies to 1988, when the deadly chemical buff finally eradicated all train art with pure robotic precision. And even then, it was a Pyhrric victory, because graffiti had gone worldwide and cats in Copenhagen and Berlin and Johannesburg, not to mention in every town and hamlet of the United Snakes, had picked up on the vibe, studied the New York masters, and started painting burners of their own. Graffiti proved to be the element of hip hop
culture that translated best; kids across the globe could understand graff’s twin cultural pillars of resistance and self-representation. Even on the home front, it was hip hop’s most integrated art form, the only one with a tradition of white innovators: Billy 167 and Smith and Sane and Zephyr.
Hall of Famers like Drum and Blade and Phase 2 and T Kid 170 and Lee and Seen got superstar welcomes from writers worldwide, showed up and vitalized the local scenes. In New York, fresh generations of artists hit up handball courts and walls, and later freight trains, and stubborn, nostalgic old-schoolers kept right on hitting subway cars, knowing full well that their work would never leave the yards and would only be seen by other writers, ghosts, and transit cops. It was sad and elegant and noble, Macon thought, reminded him in some vague way of elephants marching to the graveyard. The dignity and genius of graffiti always made him shiver if he thought about it long enough. The fact that plenty of rank-and-file black and brown people—their neighborhoods doubly bombed by aerosol and urban decay—had hated graff as much as the mayor did only made Macon feel more special, for understanding what they’d failed to.
He stared at Drum’s doorbell and wondered what came next. He could wait, but for all Macon knew, Drum was out rocking a mural in Senegal, or informing a breathless delegation of Australian graff nerds that he, and not Kid Panama, had been the first to paint the flying eyeball character.
Street bombing, Macon mused, clouds drifting through his mind. The medium is the message. . . . Clouds massing, growing darker. Take it to the people. Flash. Thunderclap. Brainstorm.
He flipped open Nique’s cell phone and called home. Andre picked up and Macon told him to get the word out: Nueva York’s favorite alleged criminal slash race theorist slash now-and-again poet will be giving a free public reading tonight on some ol’ grassroots rock-the-boulevard shit.
“He will?” asked Andre.
“Old school, baby. Can y’all find me a soapbox?”
“I don’t think soap comes in boxes anymore, dude. What about snipers?”
“They don’t come in boxes, either.” Macon heard Nique shouting in the background, then a muffled argument. Then Nique was on the phone.
“I’m feeling you, Moves. Some underground messiah shit. We’ll hook it up so only the media and the truly down will be there. I’ll do some real selective publicity, hold it to like a hundred heads. NYU, Columbia, a couple little hip hop activist chat rooms . . . Hell yeah. Have cats standing in the pouring rain to hear you. Where you want to do this?”
“One Two Fifth and Lenox, right where Malcolm used to preach.”
“Perfect.”
Chapter Four
Macon sidled through the early-bird crowd, hat pushed low and got to wear your sunglasses so you can feel cool. But he didn’t. An hour earlier he’d had to corral himself against the bulletproof impulse to walk amongst his teeming enemies, and now weaving through a crowd gathered on his behalf scared Macon numb. He clenched his teeth and prayed for a few more minutes’ anonymity, a chance to gather up his cool before they clamored at him. Eyes downcast and slicing left-right-left as he navigated the umbrellas, Macon recognized his homeboys by their footwear and grabbed Nique’s elbow from behind.
Nique whirled with caffeine reflexes, then smiled. “Damn, Big Time, look at you. Incognegro like a mug.” Macon glanced around, dreading the recognition that might come at any clock-tick. A hundred people? Shiiit. Three times that were huddled underneath umbrellas, rain bouncing syncopated on black, white, and blue vinyl. The whole northern side of the block was crammed solid with folks; the occasional unaffiliated pedestrian had to cross the street just to get by. Television trucks bookended the crowd, parked against either curb. Stage lights threw heavy beams across the area and baked the masses in their raingear. Visibility was fifteen feet, and a strange hush hung weighty; Macon had the bizarre realization that this was the quietest he’d ever seen three hundred folks outside a place of worship or a movie house. Anticipation simmered and mumbled, but the stage lights and the rain, the heat and wetness, had wilted conversation down to nearly nothing.
Andre’s massive black umbrella domed the three of them in privacy. “This is fifteen phone calls and two chat-room postings,” Nique confided with glee. He pushed his sweatshirt sleeves to his elbows, and Macon watched the steam rise from his skin.
Andre rolled his eyes. “Of course, Yolanda Prince was first. She’s Dominique’s new girlfriend.”
“Yolanda’s a hell of a reporter,” said Nique, flicking a sidelong glance at a cluster of NYU girls smoking cigarettes, “with her fine ass.” Macon followed Nique’s gaze, then snapped his head away as he made inadvertent contact with a white girl in a baby-blue jacket, neck open to reveal a gold name-chain that matched her hoop earrings, each one the circumference of a coffee cup. Her eyes jumped and she whispered to her friends.
“I haven’t even told you the best part,” Nique began, then stopped and jabbed his chin as if to say, Look behind you. The Franchise turned to find the baby-blue girl poised to tap him on the shoulder. Before he could speak, she leaned forward and pecked his cheek, leaving a dark red imprint on Macon’s face and blotting the lipstick left on her own grill down to a matte. She rested one hand on her jutting hip and gestured with the other, sending several bangles clattering up her arm.
“I been, like, watching you on the news, man,” she said, pointing a three-inch fingernail at him. A Latina inflection tinged her words and bent her Ls. “And my family is like, ‘Who is this asshole?’ but I feel you. For real. I told all my girls, ‘You need to listen to what he’s saying because he’s telling the truth.’ ” Macon squeezed her hand, half-listening, and wondered if she’d set off a ripple, broken the seal; was a line forming? The combination of his distaste at the thought of interacting with his fans and the false intimacy of the hand squeeze—where had that shit come from?— made Macon feel like a hack politician.
“I appreciate that,” was the best he could do, weak and low-spoken. He knew it wasn’t what he should have said, who he should have been, by the slight dulling of homegirl’s eyes. The refracted failure slapped him in the face and Macon’s spine straightened; his mind perked into new alertness. The shittiness of missing like that, failing to connect, overrode Macon’s reticence and boom: He had his game face on.
The girl was doing her best fade away. “I’m gonna let you do your thing,” she said, twisting to look over her shoulder and locate her crew. “I just wanted to say hello.”
She gave his hand a little good-bye squeeze, and Macon responded with a hold-on-a-second tug and said, “Hey.” She looked up, surprised, and found his eyes sizzling; a smile like sunrise blazed across his face, and she grinned back. She loves me again, Macon found himself thinking, delighted. I’m such an idiot, he rhapsodized. “Listen, thanks for coming,” was his benediction. She beamed at him and slipped away, demure and happy. Macon slid back beneath the safety of the umbrella, reinvigorated.
“Question,” he said to Andre.
“Shoot.”
“Why is it that white b-boys try to act black and white b-girls try to act Puerto Rican?”
Before Andre could posit a theory, a stocky white kid in a matched-set PNB Nation sweatshirt and baseball cap muscled up into the cipher out of nowhere. “Yo, son,” he said, voice straining to function in the octave at which he had submerged it, and gave enthusiastic pounds all round, ignoring the who-is-this-fool browbeats they threw him in return. He hunched in close, as if he were outlining a play, and out of habit Macon, Andre, and Nique pricked up their ears and bowed their heads, eyes trained solemnly on the circle of pavement between their eight shoes as they waited for the jewels of wisdom to drop from the dude’s goatee-encircled mouth.
“You keeping it mad real, na’mean?” His face was taut with earnestness. “Yo, people wanna hate, you know what I’m sayin’, but you just gotta keep ya head up, na’mean? No justice, no peace. Power to the people. You don’t vote, you don’t count. No more Chernobyls. Tawa
na told the truth. Free Mumia. Free the Chicago Seven. Save the whales. It’ll be a great day when our schools have all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber. Rock the vote. Chevrolet: We build excitement. One love, dog.” He tapped his chest with an open palm, then hit Macon’s with the back of his hand. “I got your back, dog. Stay up. Harambe. Peace and blessings. I’m out.”
“A’ight,” said Nique, bobbing his head. The kid bobbed back, gave Nique a forceful, finger-snap-release pound, and stood nodding in rhythm at the ground, showing no signs of being out. Nique decided to ignore him, and turned to Macon.
“So anyway,” he said.
“Hi, Andre!” called Amy Green. They turned to face a Columbia BSU squad rolling twenty deep. Ms. Green stood beneath a two-handled Kinte-striped umbrella held for her by a pair of twin freshman two-guards. She air-kissed Andre three times, left-right-left, squeezing his shoulders with her palms to hold him in place so she could properly execute the Continental maneuver. “Thanks so much for the invite.” She grinned at Macon and offered her hand. “And you,” she said.
Macon waited for her to finish her sentence, then realized she was being fabulous. “Did you tell Macon what we talked about?” she asked Andre, fluttering thick eyelashes over wide Japanimation eyes until Macon swore he could feel a light breeze on his cheeks.
Flustered, Andre looked at the BSU troops massed behind her. “It’s like this,” he said to Macon.
“Well, I’m here now,” snapped Amy, charm-school finish falling to the pavement like a chrysalis. “I can tell him myself.” She cocked her head toward Macon and the smile reappeared. Andre retreated half a pace and wondered what it was about Amy that made him want to impale himself for failing her.
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