Did Michael Jackson get “King of Pop” from Andy Warhol?
I looked over at Trey in his Sherlock Holmes hat, a little smile dangling on his face.
Garci went through Andy’s history—his illustrations, his films, his silkscreens of famous movie stars and car crashes, his collaborations, his Factory. He suddenly seemed to me like a man who strapped drums to his chest, cymbals between his knees, a harmonica at his mouth, an accordion in his hands. A one-man band who played everything, or at least tried it out.
“Warhol is all about selling himself,” Mr. Garci went on, “and I say that with no criticism intended.” That’s why Dado hated him, I realized. “He’s an artist who knows how to use the attention on himself; he doesn’t let it use him. That’s something all artists could learn.”
“Yo, I know how to sell myself, Mr. G,” Trey said, with a wink to me.
“That’s good, Mr. T, because right now, I want you all to think of an advertisement for yourself. Before we get into making our silkscreen stencils, take this chance to let the world know who you are. What would you say?”
Kids called out:
“Best sex on the Upper West Side.”
“Eats ten hot dogs an hour.”
“Hottest—no—smartest chick in the projects.”
“Just Say Yes!”
I glanced over at Trey, who hung his fingers in his armpits, watching everybody. He mouthed to me, “King of the Underground.”
He knew who he was.
Garci put up his hands and laughed. “Okay, now, take your commercial—”
“Hey, Mr. Garci, isn’t this like the opposite of those anti-artists who were, like, anti-commerce?” Sarah asked.
“Yes—very good, excellent, Sarah! Warhol is the opposing force of Dada, yes. Now, try to boil your commercial down to one symbol. Like yin-yang, or the hammer and sickle. What would your symbol be? That’s your stencil.”
He passed out cardstock and I fingered it, thinking of my Bad Barbies, my Fire Pop, my AURA under the reaching, suctioning tentacles of an octopus. In a flash, I saw it: If I made a stencil, I could use it over and over—a stencil was like a print, a stamp, a brand. Like Levi’s, like Coke, like Tampax, like Band-Aids. Now I drew out the octopus and put Ronald Reagan’s head coming from underneath, saying his lies about people like me, people with no homes and no jobs. I busted them open like shelling peanuts. I was a lie-busting octopus. I’d make him eat his words. I was Octora.
Trey was drawing a crown made from a top hat. Roi.
“Hey,” I said to him, “why don’t we do this stencil thing with spray? We could just cut the outline of anything we want, then go out real quick, and zip, zip, paint on the street!” I’d seen that; people did that; I liked the way it looked.
He pressed his lips and squinted, shaking his head. “That won’t fly.”
“Says who?”
“Man, if Frankie gets the word out—‘Trey don’t do his own paintings, he uses a stencil’—I’m shit. That lardbucket’s just lookin’ for any way to fuck up my rep.”
“Why are you so obsessed with Frankie, Trey?” I asked.
He glanced at Garci nearby. “Not here. After school, outside, I’ll tell you.”
I knew he didn’t like it, but I couldn’t let go of the stencil idea. It made a whole lot of sense to me—you could take all the time you wanted with the drawing at home, cut it out, and when you went into the world to spray, it would be fast and clean. I didn’t really care much what some lardbucket named Frankie thought of that.
39
SITTING IN THE SUNSHINE outside school waiting for Trey, I watched kids flirt by hitting each other or howling like wolves and yanking at backpacks. I could feel it rising, what this early June promised, the coming summer freedom like a hot, honey liquid that threatened to spill from me. I took off my pack, rolled my cap up on my forehead and the sleeves of my T-shirt over my shoulders.
Trey hopped down the steps toward me and held out his hand for a slap. He said, “How do you get rid of an asshole?”
I knew he was talking about Frankie. “I don’t know. Steal his shit?”
“We got a plan of action,” Trey said.
“What is it?”
“Can you dance?” he asked.
I thought of concerts, of nights in front of the fires. “Damn straight. I dance like an animal spirit. Like a gypsy queen.” I did a few moves with my hands and shoulders.
Trey pushed his hat back and eyed me up and down. He nodded and smiled. “Yeah, boyee, I bet you go buck wild. Listen, next Friday, our crew and Poison Crew, we’re gonna have a dance, like B-boys breakin’ it on the street—only wild style, a cypher with all-city crews jammin’ it. End this shit once and for all. Best man standing wins. The others walk away. We don’t bother each other again.”
“You ever going to tell me what happened with you and Frankie, how all this got started?”
Trey wouldn’t meet my eyes. “He thinks he’s hot shit on a silver platter because he goes to Art and Design, but he’s just cold diarrhea on a paper plate—Oh, fuck!”
“What?”
“There he is.”
I followed the line of Trey’s eyes down the street to a tall flame-haired guy as built as a football player, dressed in a camo T-shirt with fatigues and combat boots, flanked by a bruiser on either side. I felt Trey pull himself up to his full height. I couldn’t stop looking at Frankie, the way he walked up the block like he owned it. He was at least a head taller than Trey. Kids scootched away from him. He really didn’t give a shit what anyone thought. My stomach dipped; I kept my distance from guys like him, and here he was coming right for us.
He went up in Trey’s face and said in a quiet, hoarse voice, “What’s with the hat, fool? You some kind of Sherlock Homey?”
“Don’t make me go off on you, Frankie,” Trey said, his voice steady. “This ain’t the time or the place. We got the cypher next week, and the whole fuckin’ city will decide who’s better, you or us, once ’n’ for all, so shut the fuck up.”
Frankie turned his head slowly to look at me. It felt like his brown eyes knew me in a way that scared me down deep. “This your hot new Octopussy here?” He reached out and plucked off my cap and threw it down, screaming, “You stealing my shit, Octopussy?”
I covered my head with my hands.
“Back off, Frankie, you on my ground!” Trey warned.
Frankie pushed him. “You got another ho doing all your dirty work now?”
“The cypher gonna end this—”
“Stay outta my shit!” Frankie cried. He hauled off and punched Trey in the chest, but Trey jumped away before the fist hit him too hard. People started to watch. Trey whacked Frankie, who lumbered at him, tried to catch him. Trey was too fast. Kids made a circle around us, jostling closer to see. One of his boys shoved me, and I stumbled back and fell through the crowd, hard on my ass, the sidewalk scraping my palms. Outrage boiled in me. I felt for my knife; no knife.
Trey shouted, “Goddamn, Frankie, you asshole, yo mama so fuckin’ ugly, she make an onion cry!”
Everyone jeered and howled. I heard flesh hitting flesh, grunts.
“Fuck you, you fuck! Don’t talk about my mother like that!”
Hoots went up from the circle. I found my way to my feet.
Frankie got in a punch. Trey shrieked, “Yo mama so stank, her teeth duck when she yawns!”
Screams of laughter.
“I’ma kill you!” Frankie went after him harder. In a flash, out of nowhere, Nessa charged in, her nails scratching Frankie’s face. Reuben and Kevin rushed behind her. I got in and threw myself at the guy on Trey, pulling him backward, off balance. The guy elbowed me so hard in the stomach I couldn’t breathe. I felt fists on my back and someone yanked at my T-shirt and knocked me in the face, and my ears started ringing.
Trey whooped, “We gonna make this battle real! You better watch your ass!”
Metallic blood filled my mouth. I heard voices: “Break it up, kids, break it up. Let’s get moving.” Hands on my arms separated me from the fight. I tried to catch my breath as teachers waded into the middle of the brouhaha, braying at people to step off.
Mr. Garci went for Kevin and Reuben, and I never saw him so mad, his face beet red with fury.
The principal grabbed Trey and forced his elbows behind him like a cop would.
Two gym teachers started hustling Frankie and his boys on down the street.
“You ain’t gonna win this war,” Kevin yelled. “We ain’t done yet!”
One of theirs yelled back, “We’ll kick your asses!”
“Come on, come on.” The principal took Trey and Nessa inside by the scruffs of their necks. Garci disappeared with Kevin and Reuben. The crowd, hyped by adrenaline, their sap risen to the top, laughed like they just saw gladiators. I stood dazed, my ears buzzing, sucking the blood back into my mouth, feeling like I got hit by a truck.
I heard a familiar voice behind me.
“Hey, little sister. Hey, what happened? You okay?” I turned to see Marilyn holding up my cap. She took out a tissue and gave it to me. I pressed the red into it. She put my cap back on my head and brushed off my face, pushing aside my bangs and looking into my eyes, her skin gone ghostly. “What the hell was that all about?” she asked.
How could I explain to her about the crews, Trey, the paint? Especially when I couldn’t explain it to myself.
“I don’t know,” I said.
She narrowed her eyes like she didn’t believe me. “All right, fine, I care about you, okay? So just tell me, I won’t judge you, promise.”
I looked down at myself: dirty, my T-shirt torn at the neck.
“Don’t you have finals to study for or something?” I asked. She usually stayed after school with some group or other before she had to go to work.
She flicked something off my shoulder. “No, no. Let’s go home and clean you up.” I wiped sweat away, and we started walking. She said, “You think I’m going to rat you out to Ma, is that it? Listen, Ror, I tell her things because I’m afraid for you. What if you saw me, I don’t know, shooting up or something? Wouldn’t you tell her?”
I glanced at my sister’s glam makeup, at her big-sprayed hair. Is that what she thought, graffiti was like shooting up heroin? I shook my head. “What I do is nothing like that,” I said.
“It’s just, when you act crazy, I worry about you.”
Crazy. The word she always used for Dado. “I’m not crazy. I know what I’m doing.” My voice was ice.
“You’re going to destroy yourself, Rora.”
I stopped walking. “Do I get this hassle all the way home?”
She looked at me hard. Sometimes, I wished I had her brain, the way she cut through all the self-questioning and doubt and got right to normal. She did well in school, she worked, she had friends. But it wasn’t like that for me. She sighed and shook her head and made a zip across her lips, like No more mention of graffiti.
40
MARILYN WAS HOLDING ice to my lip when Ma came in with her selling suitcase and leaned it carefully against the wall, all the while watching us.
For once, Marilyn didn’t speak for me.
After a moment, I said, “I got mixed up in something.” It hurt to talk.
“I see that,” Ma said, fear simmering beneath her anger. “And what am I supposed to think?”
In my head, I heard Dado’s burr-edged voice singing his Blake poetry:
“It was art, wasn’t it?” I realized as I spoke. “That’s what happened to Dado.”
She came closer, sat at the table with us. She said, “It’s not so black-and-white.”
“They didn’t accept him. He never found his place.”
“He didn’t fit in anywhere, Ror, but he thought you would.” Ma said.
My ears started ringing again, my face got warm. “He did?”
She spoke in a rush, like she’d been thinking about it, just waiting for me to ask. “There was like a—a special room inside him where only you could go, a kind of magical aurora borealis with colored lights in a night sky. He named you, he saw it in you from the moment you were born, Ror. The way he talked about you—he thought you could be what he wasn’t. He believed in you.”
Marilyn took a sharp breath, as if Dado’s belief in me annoyed her.
But that belief weighed a thousand pounds, pressure like a vise grip squeezing me in a direction I couldn’t go. I thought of movements—Pop, Surrealism, Dada, how Dado moved me backward in time, to the classic, to what came before. But I was trying to go forward.
“The manifesto,” I said. “He was trying to make rules. Rules that fit him.”
Ma tapped on the table and sighed. “The manifesto was a map so he wouldn’t get lost. Only the rules got all confused in his head. They took on a life of their own.”
“That manifesto didn’t make any sense,” Marilyn said. We both looked at her. “It was full of contradictions. ‘We will not let ambition cloud our love. We must fight for what we want and win. We won’t trust anyone. We won’t need anyone. Nothing is free, including love. Love is our connection to earth, the reason why we’re here.’ Bullshit, all of it. I wanted to scream at him—‘How can you love without trust, Daddy? How can you fight for what you want and win—without ambition?’ It just doesn’t make sense.”
At the center of my life was the last thing he said to me—I’m going to save you, girl. What he did destroyed everything we knew and came close to destroying us. That was the biggest contradiction of all.
Yet I understood it.
I understood him.
He knew we’d get out, and we did. If he hadn’t burned the whole thing to the ground—burned himself to the ground—I would’ve been stuck inside that four-acre madness on Staten Island with him forever. Marilyn would have escaped, but not me. Since we came here, I felt my world open up. I was in the middle of a city full of art. I’d met Trey, Jonathan, Mr. Garci, the boys, even Nessa. Somehow, this was the only way Dado had known to save me from his own fate.
Was that it?
In the silence, Ma got up and put some water in a pot to boil. It would be rice or pasta for dinner again. “Girls,” she finally said, turning to us, “it’s been hard, but we have to move on. We have to pull ourselves together. Next week is the meeting about the property.” Marilyn and I looked at each other. “Mr. Jones—he’s a tough lawyer who thinks he can build a solid case—he thinks the three of us have a good chance of proving we homesteaded with your father for fifteen years and can claim possession. If we do prove it, we can sell the land and pay him off and get out of here. He’s already tracked down Randy, who got him in touch with Krishna. He’s looking for everyone else. He’s taking statements, and he needs ours, too. He says he needs both of you there to give your history.”
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Marilyn said, looking at me to make sure I wouldn’t, either.
My life was so far from the King Kennedys, Dado, Kean and Djefa, Hawk—what we had been. I didn’t know where I was going. But this was a step on the way. “I’ll be there, Ma. Of course I will,” I told her.
41
NEXT MORNING, I went upstairs and knocked on Trey’s door. He leaned against the jamb, his eyes puffy from the fight, his hair in nervous twists all around his head.
“What are we doing, Trey?” I said.
He walked back into his apartment, leaving the door open. I went in after him. He sat at the edge of the ratty plaid couch. Nobody home but him.
I closed the door behind me. “Where does this end?”
“This is the life, R,” he grumbled. “Take it or leave it.”
“Why does it have to be this way?”
> He got up and went to the window and flipped the curtain aside, looking into the street. “You punkin’ out on me?”
“I’m not scared to fight, Trey. Or dance. Or whatever. I just want to know what I’m fighting for. At least tell me that.”
He whirled around, arms hugging himself. “You wanna know what happened between me and Frankie? Motherfucker hates me ’cause I stole his girl. There, now you know.”
Felt like a punch to my chest. He walked closer.
“Yeah, that’s right, Ror. I stole Nessa from him three years ago, and he ain’t never forgot it.”
He said it like he wanted to hurt me, and it worked. I stared at his messed-up eyes, seeing their whole history—years of this battle, just over some girl.
“You’re a waste, Trey Winthrop,” I said. “You’re really a fucking waste.”
“Yeah?” He took another step toward me, threatening. “Then why you here if I’m such a waste?”
Why was I there? “You could be a great artist, but you’re too fucking scared. You want to stay in the streets ’cause that’s where the man put you. You’re too scared to bust out of the mold. I guess I made a mistake about you,” I said.
“Fuck that shit, white girl. You don’t know nothing.”
I put my hands on my hips. “Don’t pull that ‘white girl’ shit on me. I know what I see. You got what it takes, but you ain’t taking it.” Was I talking to myself, too?
He stood there hugging himself, his bloodshot eyes never leaving my face.
“Fuck,” I said. “Do you love her?”
He walked up to me quick, his face so close to mine I could feel his breath. “You think I ain’t takin’ it?” he said.
“That’s right.”
The moment his warm lips touched mine, I understood how cold I had been. The heat of his mouth opened up inside me, and I felt as if I was falling down, covered with sweetness, his warmth echoing in me like a drawing I used to love, a sun with rays inside rays, tripping out on ten different yellows to the solid orange center. I ran my hands over the landscape of his back, the bumps of his ribs, his skin under my palms. He held my face with both hands, then pulled off my cap, his fingers in my hair, on my torn ear, down my neck, touching me everywhere, lighting up inside me with the quiet power of a sudden flame.
Into the Dangerous World Page 12