I stood up, and I noticed Trey was not much taller than me. I took the roller.
21
BEFORE I BLOTTED out the graffiti with the white noise, I tried to follow how the letters went, the way they linked together, the outline, the shape of it.
“I still don’t see what it says.”
“It’s wild style, child. You don’t want every asshole reading your tag.”
“I’m not every asshole,” I said.
“First letter: R,” he told me.
Stepping back, I saw it—like an Escher etching, the R folded like origami, trying hard to fit in.
“Oh, I see it. And this?”
“O.”
R-O?
“What’s it spell?” I asked.
He ran his fingers over the letters. “ROI 85. My tag.”
“That your code name?”
“That’s what I write in the street. Roi means ‘king’ in French.”
“Like LeRoi Jones? Like Martin Luther King?” I asked.
He whistled. “You up on your black heroes, ain’t you? My pops called me Roi. He was a rude boy from the islands.”
“A rude boy like Bob Marley?”
In a perfect Jamaican accent, Trey said, “Jah Rastafari, he forget me not.”
I said, “I saw Bob Marley play in Central Park once.”
“We’re jammin’,” Trey sang, and danced a reggae move.
“I think I saw you there,” I said with a grin.
He laughed.
I said, “So, what’s the eighty-five?”
“Our street.”
“And this?” I ran my fingers along smaller letters on the outer edge. NOISE INK. “That’s the name of your crew!”
“Very good. Now get to work.”
I opened the gallon with my knife, dipped in the roller and held it up, letting the thick paint drip back into the can. I didn’t want to cover up his painting. He went out of the room and came back carrying a ladder and hung the can off the top. I climbed up and got to work. As I rolled, Trey lit a cigarette and studied the blank whiteness I was creating. As he took colors out of his duffel bag, he named them—cinnamon, alligator, night-sky blue. I watched how he chose the cans, popping the colored tops off, placing them out in preparation. He started messing with the cap of one.
“What’re you doing?” I asked.
“Changing this to a fattie.” He heated a needle with his lighter and stuck it in the hole, twisting it around to make it bigger. “You can use the top off an oven cleaner, too. Just go in Key Food and flick off the caps with your thumb.” He took a handful of caps out of his pocket to show me.
“Can I try?” I asked.
“You got your chance with that can you stole,” he said.
“Will you ever forgive me?” I asked.
He gave me a cryptic smile and pointed to the wall.
The cover layer I rolled out dried quickly, and he started shaking his first can. I sat on the floor and watched as he sprayed his outline, all hard and straight lines, even the O. It looked crummy at first—“It’s just my foundation, gotta get that solid before I start decoratin’”—until he added layers, filling in the lines with colors, putting in a 3-D shadow around it, and flashes of white, like light reflected, sparkles. The room was dense with aerosol fumes, making me cough. I watched the ever-moving arcs of his arm, the way he tested the can, moved it slantwise, or in and out for different effects. I shoved open a window and listened to the sssssst ssssssst of the spray, the rattle rattle every time he shook the can. I saw what could happen if I had some.
“It’s incredible,” I said when he was done.
We stood next to each other and looked at his ROI 85. “It ain’t perfect,” he said.
It was even better than the last one.
He handed me a can of white that was nearly empty. “This is Krylon; it’s the best brand you can get. Go spray something in the other room,” he said. “That’s your fuck-up space.”
I didn’t want to leave him, but I walked into the hall, then into the room where I’d put the can of black. It was gone. I shook the white. As I watched Trey paint, a phrase had repeated in my head. With the Krylon, I started the lettering on the dirty white walls:
I held the can for longer sprays, trying out the hand moves, feeling the power of my gun. I did the short, close-up bursts that left drips, the side spray in a narrow line, the dots, the stars, the far and fat swerves. I stepped back. Pretty bad. I continued on:
The white gave me a hint of what it might be like with colors, like a shadow self. Clean white on dirty white didn’t show so well. White was the opposite of the black I stole. White, all the colors of the rainbow in one.
Bone white.
Trey came in and whistled and shook his head. “You need a lot of practice, shorty.”
I said, “I need a tag.”
“Yeah, you do,” he said.
“So, am I in?” I asked.
He tapped his Camel against his palm, then lit it with his Bic, watching me with those eyes. “It’s gettin’ late,” he said, not answering my question. “Let’s blow this place.”
As we walked back to the hotel, I told him again in case he forgot: “I want in. I want to be part of the crew.” I wanted it more than anything I’d ever wanted.
At my door, he gave me a hand slap, curving his fingers around mine, teaching me to shake by moving his hand around mine. He gave me no promises.
22
NOW THAT I had cracked the code, I was becoming a moth, attracted to the light of graffiti. I took my sketchpad over to Columbus, to the FOR RENT store with its window guard rolled down. Over it, somebody had sprayed TNT. I drew the building, following the jagged rectangles of every brick with my pencil; I drew the metal lines and how the graffiti fit. On Amsterdam, I stopped in front of the poster of a Virginia Slims model holding a cigarette longer than her fingers. I drew her with her black lungs exposed. I drew a half-crushed garbage can, an old woman wheeling a cat in a stroller while singing a little tune. Up on Broadway, I read the tags: BRAZE 1, SKEL, and that ME ONE I saw all over school. I copied them into my book. If Noise Ink took me in, what would be my name?
I didn’t know if I’d ever know. When I walked up to Trey between classes and reached out for his hand, he shook my fingers awkwardly, glancing around like he couldn’t be seen giving me the real shake. In art class, I sat next to him and said, “Hey, did you talk to the crew? It’s been, like, a week.”
“Chill, Ror. We got considerations, deals to work out.”
The rough rejection felt like sandpaper in my stomach. I bit my tongue on a sharp reply. Made patterns in my pad from one corner to the other, just to keep from thinking about it.
On the warm May day of our field trip to the Con-Mod Museum, we gathered outside the school, all twenty-eight of us and Mr. Garci. Somebody’s mother was there to help him. Garci gave us a lecture about not touching anything, and we started to walk east, through the stone walls of Central Park.
Spring had come for good, the grass bloomed out; its fresh-cut scent broke the air. I felt Dado, the heartbeat of nature, the way I used to live so close to the earth. I reached down to pick a sprig of garlic mustard, its green taste filling my mouth. I could live on the greens that grew here.
“What are you, a goat?” Trey said when he saw me eat it. It was the first joke he had made to me in a week.
“Baaaa,” I bleated.
“You gonna kill yourself, eating that stuff.”
“Where do you think food comes from?” I said. I offered him a leaf. “Here, try it.”
He held up his hand. “If it ain’t wrapped in plastic, I ain’t eatin’ it,” he said. “You don’t know what dog took a leak on that!”
I picked a dandelion, sniffing in the musk of its yellow head. I held in the urge to throw my
legs around a tree, to pull Trey up with me and show him what I knew.
As we walked, all the kids gathered around Mr. Garci. “What was the first thing the Dadaists did in Zurich during World War I? Who remembers?”
“They declared themselves anti-artists,” this girl Sarah said.
Dadaists were anti-artists? That had escaped me.
“Right on, Sarah!” Garci said. “They saw art as commerce, they saw markets as the thing that started the war. War killed their families. Greed killed their brothers and sons. They felt the absurdity of being alive.”
“That’s some deep shit,” someone said.
Across the park, back on the street, car exhaust drowned the good smells. “You wanna see absurd?” Trey said to me. “Check that out.” He pointed to a fancy car parked outside a marble building, a doorman in brass buttons letting out a bottle blonde with a poodle. She had more money invested in that dog than I’d ever had in my life. “Imagine it here? Right smack on the wall, ROI 85.” He pointed exactly where he’d put it. “Then I’d be king.”
The rich lady glared at him as if she’d heard.
Up front, Katy said, “I don’t get it, Mr. Garci. Those Dada guys. They’re artists, but they say they’re not artists?”
“That’s right,” Garci replied. “They turn the label inside out to make it mean something again.”
I asked Trey, “You think graffiti is the anti-art?”
He shrugged. “One thing for sure—we all wanna be famous.”
A metal and glass building rose in front of us—a fluttering flag said: THE CON-MOD MUSEUM.
“The Dadaists weren’t thinking about art in this context,” said Mr. Garci, indicating the museum. “They were listening to their souls.”
Trey slapped his hand against his chest and said, “Soul. Now you talkin’ my language, Mr. G, man. Keepin’ it real.”
The kids around him laughed. Real. Revolving through the glass doors, I felt my body weight change, as if I got lighter. Felt like I could see every corner of this sweeping space from somewhere above, like I was standing on an empty stage, waiting for something to happen. As we got on the escalator, I stepped up to Trey. “I could see your painting in here.”
He glanced around, shaking his head. “You want to put paintings where nobody’s gonna see?” he asked. “Come on, Ror—everybody, even those homeless dudes on the corner, can dig graf. Here, you might as well put it inna closet.”
I thought: In this museum, my drawings would never burn.
We followed Mr. Garci into a spacious gallery. “Oh!” I said when I saw what was hanging there. “That’s what it really looks like.”
“What?” Trey said.
“This! I’ve seen this painting a million times in books!” I stood in front of Dalí’s Persistence of Memory that seemed to breathe on the wall. Ants eating a pocket watch. Three floppy clocks. A blob face on the ground, a tongue coming from its nose.
Trey gave a low whistle. “This guy’s trippin’,” he said.
Mr. Garci walked over and said, “This is by a Dadaist who was kicked out of the school because he wasn’t Dada enough. Salvador Dalí invented his own style and called it ‘psycho technique.’ You get it? Just by looking at the painting, you can see what he means.”
“Was he crazy?” Katy asked.
Sometimes, I just hated that word.
“Funny you should say that. He set himself up for deliberate hallucinations, or visions,” Garci said. “I don’t think he was crazy.”
“Sounds like he was smoking angel dust,” somebody joked.
Sounded more like he ate peyote, which they said could make you think you were an angel.
I said to Trey, “I read this theory about angels once. Said they kiss your eyelids when you die, making you forget your whole life before you move into the next body. That’s why we don’t remember who we were before we came here. Wonder if my dado got kissed. Maybe he’s forgotten me already.”
Trey gave me one of those dark looks and said, “Angels watch over you. They don’t forget.”
Mr. Garci walked us to another room where we stood before a Frida Kahlo. “I love her. I never thought I’d get to see one of these,” I said.
“Check the seagull brow,” Trey said.
Frida stared straight into me from the self-portrait doubled in a mirror. Trey got quiet as we looked. Like she reached out and touched us and said Paint.
I asked Mr. Garci: “If these Dada guys were so anti-art, how come they’re hanging here?”
He kind of lit up. “It’s a perfect irony, isn’t it, when you think you’re the revolutionary, and you end up here. But it’s revolution one day, mainstream the next. The Dadaists who lived in 1920 would get sick at the idea of being in this museum almost sixty-five years later. Now look at them. That’s history.”
As we walked into the next room, Trey said to me, “That’s why this place ain’t for us. Not while we alive, at least.”
“How do people get into a museum, anyway?” I wondered.
“You gotta be rich, white, friends with the right people,” he said. “Or you gotta be dead. We ain’t dead yet.”
“I’ve got one out of four,” I said.
“Yeah, but you’re a girl. You may’s well be black like me.”
“Frida Kahlo’s a girl.”
“Married to a famous dude.”
I stopped short. “So that’s what I’ve got to do to get in a museum? Marry a famous dude? I can’t do it on my own?”
“You dream ’bout bein’ in the museum till you dead, Ror. I’ll take bein’ the revolutionary. Let history worry about me,” Trey said.
I didn’t like that answer. Not one bit.
23
ANOTHER WEEK WENT BY, and Trey still wouldn’t talk to me about being in the crew. I’d lose my damn mind, I realized, if I kept thinking about it. Why was it taking so long? Had they decided against me? Why couldn’t they just tell me that? Worse yet, when I got to school after the rainy weekend, I saw that the portrait of me on the door was gone, painted over. Just a black hole where I’d been, even the bricks back to white again. Reuben sat on the steps beneath. He drew in a hardcover book with markers.
“Hey, Reuben, where’d it go?” I tried to see into his book.
He tilted the cover closed, holding his place with his fingers. “What?”
“The painting of me.”
His eyelids lowered. “What painting?” he said. He looked around, like I was dumb for talking about it here, in public, with teachers nearby.
“Did Trey black it out?” I asked.
“Yo, I don’t know what you’re talkin’ ’bout!”
Kevin came over and sat beside Reuben and folded his arms and stared at me. Why was everything such a fucking mystery with these guys?
I left them sitting on the steps and went inside. I had to find someone to talk to. Someone outside of the crew I could show my drawings to, someone I could tell about all the letters and pictures and colors I was seeing on the streets. Treasures of art in the ruin of a city.
After school, I headed over to Jonathan’s store. He was in the studio, making a frame. When he heard the bell and saw it was me, he wiped his hands clean of glue and came over.
“Long time, kiddo. I was beginning to wonder if I pegged you wrong,” he said.
“I was busy.”
I put the pad on the counter, and he turned the pages slowly, not saying anything. My eye kept going to the cans there behind him, beckoning like fingers.
If I could buy my own paint, I wouldn’t have to be in any freaking crew.
Forget it, I didn’t want to be in it anyway.
Jonathan turned the pages harder, like something was getting him mad. Claws of frustration scraped at me. He closed the book, and I met his watery blue eyes.
“Let me ask yo
u something,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“You want to be a real artist?”
Felt like he shoved me. I bristled. “What do you mean?”
“I see this—this crapola—messing up a good pad I gave you. You want to be a real artist, you don’t do this. Not this worthless trash from the street!” He acted as if we’d talked about this a bunch of times before. Who did he think he was, the art police?
My breath tore at my throat in protest. “I think it’s beautiful!”
“It’s not gonna get you anywhere! Kids writing their names over and over. What kind of talent you need for that?”
Nobody talked to me like that, not anymore. What did he know about it, anyway? He was just some old guy. “It’s the space, the color—”
“Look here, you want color, use these.” He walked over to a shelf and slapped a set of watercolors onto the counter—a Winsor & Newton set, not baby stuff—and another pad of thick, expensive paper. I stood there, his words working inside me. I felt around my empty pockets, wishing I hadn’t spent my last cents on a slice of pizza, wishing I could come up with a way to make money, like with my comix. I didn’t want to owe this guy anything. I didn’t want him to tell me what to do.
“You got real talent, kid. Don’t waste it. Go on, get outta here. Go be brilliant,” Jonathan said.
Talent, a waste of talent. Slowly, I reached for the paints.
As I left, I saw it—ROI 85 on the outside wall of the store in a big, angry scribble. Trey’s tag. Different from his pieces, those masterpieces I now recognized on the streets. I thought I knew the distinction: With a tag, you made a claim. With a piece, you showed how great you were. Was it like that?
When I got home, I got a bowl of water, threw myself on the floor with the pad, and accidentally kicked over Ma’s pile of secondhand books, which knocked down the tippy lamp she’d found in the garbage, which spilled a half-cup of grape juice in a darkening blotch on the depression-yellow carpet before I could catch it. I felt trapped by the shitty apartment, the flimsy paint, the size of the paper. But the hell with it, I dipped the brush into the bowl, swirled it into the hard square of red until it got creamy, and got started.
Into the Dangerous World Page 7