“Train!” Reuben shouted, and we hid behind the columns. This one came slower, and I could see the people on it. Night workers. They knew where they were headed—I wished I did. I wished I could control the sweat soaking my upper lip and my pits.
When the train had passed, Kevin darted across the tracks and headed down a different tunnel along a curve. The tunnel led zigzag, this way and that; I could hear trains going by far away, even above me. I got the feeling I could walk along these tracks for weeks and never surface. Lost and never found. Trains went into boroughs like worms through a dead man’s eyes. There must be hundreds of miles of track.
Just ahead, I saw lights. Dim lights at the end of the tunnel, not bright enough for a station. A way out; I started breathing again. Kevin and Reuben broke and ran ahead. Nessa kept walking steady, taking the lead. We came to what looked like a secret station—train after train parked along the platforms, all numbers 1 and 2 and 3. I jumped up onto the platform after Nessa, and resisted the urge to lay myself down and kiss the ground.
Just then, Kevin and Reuben came back carrying shopping bags they dumped down. All of them were full of spray cans.
Reuben said, “Jackpot!”
Kevin explained, “They left the stash right where you said, Trey.”
“That fuckin’ Frankie gets dumber every day,” Trey said.
35
NESSA KNELT AND took cans out of the bags, standing them up and twirling them around to read their labels. “Check this. None of it’s Rusto or Krylon. It’s the wack Red Devil shit you get at Woolworth’s.”
Woolworth’s? They sold spray paint at the nickel-and-dime store?
Reuben took off his backpack, looking down at the cans. “Some of these colors are good.”
Kevin said, “At least we don’t have to use our own shit.”
They got down with Nessa, picking out cans. Reuben carefully gathered eight in his arms and headed down to the last car. Kevin took almost as many and went after him. Nessa and Trey picked theirs. Six cans were left. I sat next to them.
Train doors opened between cars, somebody lit a cigarette, someone else passed a joint, the sssssst of beer tops popped. The rattle rattle of cans, the sounds of laughing and joking.
Baby blue. Hot pink.
Terra-cotta. Indian spice.
Turtle. Yellowburst.
I lined the cans up, feeling their weight. I held one in each hand, then switched them. I kept thinking someone was going to take them away from me.
I didn’t know what to paint. I didn’t want to just spray. It was one thing to sell comix to kids, or paint in an abandoned building or on an out-of-the-way park wall, but this was the subway. Millions of people would see. Like the Fire Pops Trey did in the station. My audience would be the city. My sister. Ma. And whenever I learned a new tool, I had to use it over and over until I got it in my system, until it became part of my muscles and I could use it without thinking. I had only sprayed a few times, not enough to be any good. Here, in this sublevel of the soul, I couldn’t make any mistakes. My first shot had to be perfect.
I opened my pad, flipping through drawings to find just the right one for the train. My dream haunted me, those destroyed faces with words floating from their lips. The words. They were lines of TV bullshit that had gotten stuck in my system and ate at the edges of my consciousness. I could spray them across this train, give them back to the world my way.
Trey called out to me, “Yo, Ror, what you doin’, man?”
I looked up; he had already outlined half his name. He was painting a whole car! I couldn’t find the place in me that would get up and spray. I could only sit and draw.
“We ain’t got all night,” he said. “Get your ass movin’.”
“I don’t know what to do,” I said.
He came over and took a look. “What’s all that?”
“I don’t know.”
He said, “Come on. Pick a car, pick a car. Get to it, baby. You ain’t writing a fuckin’ jingle.”
I felt Nessa over there, watching.
Trey grabbed my can of pink and threw it at me. I caught it. “Get up. Paint a fuckin’ octopus, don’t matter, just do it.”
I got up and went to the train behind me, shaking the can. An octopus.
“Not there.” He came over and ran his finger down the bumpy side. “This is a ridgie. It’s hard to paint. Do it here.” He pointed to the train everyone else was painting, a smooth one. “You thinkin’ too much. Just do your tag.” He walked away, back to his own painting.
I went to the big spot between Reuben and Kevin, and froze. Tag. Octopus. It’s the real thing.
“Just fuckin’ paint already, home skillet!” Trey shouted over to me.
As high as I could reach, I started. The first spray seemed to go inside me, like a shot of pink electricity, waking me from my stupor. I’m spraying on a train. Like a hallucination that was so real, it was true. The bitter smell stirred me, the splatter force close to the car as I outlined a letter A. I’m doing it! I tried to keep up with the speed of the spray, the size of my metal canvas. I stepped back, replaced pink for green and sprayed out U, then got stuck, not sure how to space the letters, how much room to take. I watched the crew. They all had their own ways of doing things.
Kevin was like this:
Trey was like this:
Nessa was like this:
Reuben was like this:
Me, I think I looked like this:
I tried to control it, to measure it, the dimensions of the letters, but it all seemed to go out of control so fast, to get sloppy in my hands. I needed more practice; I didn’t know how to do this, to handle these cans and colors. I stepped back after each letter. Compared to what the crew was doing, my AURA didn’t stand out. Even though it was four colors, it looked gray dull to me. Bad. One note.
I called out to Kevin next to me, “Hey, why we doin’ this?”
He took a swig of beer. “I don’t know ’bout you, but I wanna be king.” He raised the can in a toast to his painting. “That’s me. Top Dawg. You get up in every train line in the city, you’re famous. Everybody’ll look at NIL and say, ‘Man, I just saw him inna Bronx, in Brooklyn. Up and down and all over town. He’s the shit.’”
I was stunned. “Every train line in the city?”
He nodded. “Ride the rails and hit up all the train lines, and everybody’ll know your name. Get it?”
“So you have to go through these tunnels all the time?”
He nodded. As he got back to work, he seemed to transform into the Ninja of Spray, his every move a confident chop of the can carving out his name on the train. “The more you get up, the more crews see you and know your name. Them’s the rules.”
Suddenly, all I wanted to do was paint an amazing fucking octopus sucking up New York City on the side of this one train car, spitting words out the ends of its suction cups. “What if I don’t follow the rules, exactly?”
He sprayed a long line of red. “If you can’t even do the rules, then you just a toy.” I stared at my disappointing AURA. He said, “Yo, Ror, think of all the stuffed shirts commuting home, looking at the boring ads on the platform, and here you come on the side of the train, Pow!”
I looked at my word. Pow.
“You’ll open up their sleepy eyes. Give them some dream to chew on. You’ll make their fuckin’ day!”
Now I really wanted to paint my octopus with every detail I could muster. Disrupt their shitty reality.
“You got any caps that’ll spray skinny lines?” I asked him.
He dug through his pockets and handed me a few.
Surrounding my AURA, starting from the end of Reuben’s outlined O to the beginning of Kevin’s N, I sprayed up over the windows a drawing that came easier to me than the letters—a living breathing swirling screaming hot pink terra-cot
ta baby blue yellowburst octopus that took over the city and everyone in it, even the roaches that didn’t want to be my friends.
When it was done, I stepped back and said, “POW!”
36
TREY’S PIECE TOOK up an entire car and would blow anybody’s mind, even the blue boys’, even Jonathan’s, even the Pope’s. Looking at it, I saw why he was Roi. King. I suddenly got his joke on my Fire Pops now—Kings. The King of Pop, Michael Jackson; the King of Comedy, Richard Pryor; their heads on fire with the genius of their work, burning the candle at both ends, close to a flame that almost killed them.
Trey was King of the Underground. He was on fire.
I saw him staring at my piece, blinking kind of fast. Did he think it was any good? The way the giant octopus ate the AURA, it wasn’t exactly like the other tags. The guys started joking about it:
“That’s cold, Ror—you be watching too many late-night movies.”
“You got a baaaaad aura, making that squid barf like that.”
Trey took a camera out of his bag and turned it on me in front of my painting. Flash. Nessa glared like she wanted to spray over me, like they did with that Frankie guy. Trey snapped a few more pics, then walked over to TNT (gonna take you out) with her big-haired girl and flashed one of her. He took one of NIL (God is dead) and ME ONE (me too). He took some of his own piece, then he said, “Let’s blow this joint.”
We threw the empty spray cans under the platform and went back through the tunnel, holding our ears and stopping to let trains go by. I didn’t want to leave my painting down there after working on it for so long. The farther I got from it, the more I felt I was losing it all over again. Like in the fire. As we walked, I asked Trey, “Ever feel like you want to do something you can take with you?”
He shook his head. “Can’t take nothin’ with you anyways, in the end. Tomorrow, we’ll go after school, then you’ll see. Eyes checking out your piece.” He pointed to his eyes with two fingers, then to mine.
“The eyes, right,” I said. Millions of eyes looking at my aura.
We left the crew and went to the hotel. Upstairs, he held his hand out, and I slipped my fingers inside his. He added a hug at the end, our hands still between us. I held him to me and breathed him in—spray, smoke, beer. He whispered in my ear, “I know you were scared tonight.” He kissed the side of my head, said, “Still think you better than me?” and laughed and ran up his stairs by twos.
I smiled big as hell and took a few deep breaths and unlocked the door as quietly as I could. The TV was off, Ma on the couch, Marilyn in bed. I listened for Ma’s sleeping breath as I slipped out of my pants, and climbed to the top bunk. The whole world screamed in my head, the night spray, the wild colors, the sounds of cans rattling, the smell of paint, Trey.
I couldn’t wait until tomorrow.
37
I BUMPED INTO Nessa in the school bathroom. I watched her put on her bubble-gum lipstick. She held it up and caught my eye in the mirror. “You want some?” she asked. I fixed my cap and looked at my face and saw Trey’s painting of me—lips full and plain. Bangs down over one dark-circled green eye.
I shook my head. “No thanks.”
“You could be pretty, Ror. I think Reuben likes you,” she said.
“Hmm,” I said. When I closed my eyes and wished for a boy, it wasn’t Reuben.
She rolled down the lipstick, covered it, threw it back in her bag. She was just trying to distract me from Trey. I thought of how Reuben had finally warmed to me, joked with me, slapped my hand in the hall that morning. Was it possible? Could I feel anything for him?
In art, Trey sat down and said, “Check it, five o’clock, we meet, go down the station right at the start of rush hour. Then you’ll see what I’m talkin’ ’bout. People hooked on our cars.” He rubbed his hands together. “They won’t be able to stop lookin’!”
“How do we know our train will pull in then?”
“Reuben’s uncle works for the TA. That’s where he lifted the keys to open the train doors and got the schedules and shit.”
“How will—I mean, will people know it’s us?”
“Crews will. You’ll see, R, just chill.”
But I couldn’t think about anything else for the rest of the day except those millions of eyes on my brain-sucking octopus. All New York would look at my painting and come alive. Their lives would stop for that moment, and the picture would flash before them, and it would burn a hole in their minds forever. Wake them up.
After school, I ran home, told the drunk to get lost, and locked myself in the bathroom for a lukewarm shower. I got into my black jeans and my Hendrix T-shirt, laced up my boots, put on the new red cap Ma made me.
I waited outside for Trey. Reuben walked up the street with Nessa, Kevin bumped onto the curb with his board. Finally, Trey came out in his fishing hat.
Heat rose from the evening sidewalks; clammy people with suit jackets slung over their shoulders jumbled out of the subway entrance. We pushed our way down the funk-smelling stairs, pulled back the turnstiles and slipped through, and jockeyed to the rear of the station against the flow of traffic. Trey slid into the one open space on the bench; Nessa plopped onto his lap and started kissing him, and he let her. I looked away. Reuben pulled stickers out of his pocket and slapped them onto the wall behind me, making a pattern of small green aliens. I asked him for a sticker, and he gave me one. I looked into his smooth face for scars, something I could latch on to, something that would tell me how deep he went. Something else to think about instead of the smooching beside me.
“Where do you get these?” I asked.
“The post office over on Broadway and Eighty-Ninth.”
Loud wet kisses. I tried to focus on Reuben, ignoring the churning in my stomach.
“Come with me next time, we’ll pick up a bunch,” he said. “We can hang out at my place and draw them in.”
“Uh, yeah, sure, right,” I mumbled.
Trey extracted himself from Nessa, saying, “You’re gonna make me miss it.” We turned to each other at the same time, then he cast his eyes on the tracks. He pushed Nessa off his lap and stood up. A train came into the station, dumped people, took them on and left. It wasn’t ours.
I went over and stood next to him on the edge of the platform, gazing down the tunnel I’d walked through last night, willing the train to come. Another pulled into the station. Not ours.
“Shit, man, when’s it gonna be here?” I asked Trey, leaning against the column beside him.
“Patience, Grasshopper.” He took out a marker and tagged his name quick as breathing.
Two headlights wiggled toward us—on the front, I saw it—NOISE INK. I cried, “That’s it!”
In the crowd, Trey slipped his hand in mine and gave it a squeeze before he let go. People crammed their way to the edge, impatient for the train to stop. At the other column, Reuben and Kevin hung on, their heads turned, waiting. Nessa stood on her tiptoes behind us, her breath on my neck.
The train pulled in layered with tags, and I saw ours—first Trey’s, then Nessa’s, then the car with mine and Kevin’s and Reuben’s—and I gasped. In the fluorescents of the station, it stood out in neon-bright colors like Times Fucking Square. It was dazzling, like fireworks in a night sky; no one could deny the hard metal solidness of it. Jubilant, I peered at the waiting crowd on the platform, eager to see the recognition, those alive eyes Trey and Kevin talked so much about.
But.
Everyone just wanted to get home. Their annoyed eyes didn’t give a shit. They didn’t see the colors shining in their brainwashed faces.
They had no clue we had worked so hard for them. I looked over at Trey, who stared like he’d hoped for something different. Like this wasn’t the way it usually went.
The train doors opened. People bulldozed their way off. Others crammed on. The doors closed. The train r
umbled out, taking my painting with it. The station drained of people. I stood there feeling like somebody punched the wind out of me. The crew clung to the columns, no one saying anything. I swallowed the pride dust stuck in my throat.
“Looking good, man. The boys inna Bronx are gonna shit when they see it,” Reuben finally said.
I could tell he was waiting for me to say something, too. Did I care about the boys in the Bronx? They seemed to.
“That was a fuckin’ burner, Trey,” Kevin said.
“Yeah,” Reuben agreed.
Trey nodded, half looking at me.
People started filling the platform again.
“Well, I gotta go,” Reuben said. He peeled off and walked away.
“Yeah, me too.”
“See ya.”
We drifted down the station like directionless clouds on a windless day.
38
MR. GARCI WHEELED a giant TV-video hookup into art class to play us an episode of Andy Warhol’s cable show, but he couldn’t get the equipment to work. A geek tried to plug the red to the red, the black to the black, or whatever, but there was no picture. Kids started getting restless, drawing on desks, their hands, each other, until Garci said, “Okay, folks, let’s put that aside,” and I couldn’t tell you how disappointed I was.
My Warhol had burned in the fire, but here in the city he showed up like a new penny in the Village Voice, the Arts Weekly, the gossip columns about clubs and parties, everywhere someone needed a reminder of the outer limits. Doing graf, I felt far from him. Under my pillow, I kept an Interview magazine I found in the trash. I still loved to look at what he did.
“I’m sure you all know the artist Andy Warhol—considered the King of Pop Art,” Mr. Garci said, “though there are those who would disagree.”
Into the Dangerous World Page 11