He laid his warm hand over my heart and spread his fingers. He whispered in my ear, “Are you still numb?”
I would feel it now, if I stabbed myself. I would feel it if I bled.
I shook my head.
“You think I love her?”
I couldn’t find words; I shook my head no.
“Ror.” He took a step away. “Shit, Ror.” The way he said my name scared me, like he was grasping at a tree root while falling off a cliff.
“What is it, Trey?”
He rubbed his hand over his mouth. “Nessa was there the whole time my pops was sick,” he finally said.
Surprise slipped like a knife between my ribs. I didn’t want to know about Nessa, but she stood between me and him.
He punched his fist into his hand and ground it in like I wouldn’t understand. “Shit.”
“You feel like you owe her something?” I tried slowly.
He shook his head. “No, it’s like she owns me,” he said, “’cause she’s always there. Even in my fight with fuckin’ Frankie, she’s gotta be there.”
“Can’t you just break off with her?”
“I don’t wanna hurt her.” He stared at his feet.
Somebody was going to get hurt. Maybe all of us.
“What about you?” I asked. “Don’t you matter? Don’t I?”
He looked at me as if he’d never thought of that. He touched my face like he was feeling for the true me behind it. “Nessa reminds me of my pops, that whole time he was dying. Even her smell,” Trey said softly. “But you, you’re so fresh, even the way you paint.”
I felt my mouth opening—“Dying? Trey, you never said he died.”
He stared at me, his nostrils flaring like he was trying to hold it in—I knew that scream—Don’t leave me.
“We’re still here,” I said. “You and me.”
“Yeah,” he said. Then he turned away. “She’ll never let me go, Ror.”
Warning bells jangled inside me. “A triangle won’t work, Trey. I’ve seen enough to know that.”
He looked out the window.
I said, “Listen, let me know when you find your balls.”
He choked. “What the fuck you mean?”
“You know what I mean.” I ran out of his apartment before he could stop me.
42
I HAD TO SEE the old man again to get my paintings back, even though he hated me.
When I got to Jonathan’s store, I went straight in, the smell of sawdust hitting me like a tired old memory. Customers wandered the aisles. His daughter sat on a stool behind the counter, her long hair streaked purple, her lips painted black. I met her eyes and swallowed hard. She knew me—she knew I’d taken the can—Nessa had told her, little birdie Nessa set up that whole damn thing to make the old man hate me. Jonathan banged something in back, and I forced myself to go up to the counter.
“Daaaaa!” she called. Heads went up; customers glanced, then looked away.
Jonathan came out, nodding when he saw me. He didn’t say anything about my bruised lip. “Didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”
I shook my head. “You wanted to?”
“You make it to any galleries lately?” he asked.
I thought of his lecture. Heat crawled up my neck. “Nah.”
He sifted around on the counter and came up with a postcard. On the front was a black-and-white photo of a crowd; across it, in a red box, white letters said, Don’t be a jerk.
“Go to this place,” he said.
I took the card. “Why?”
“You know them watercolors you left here?”
“That’s why I came back,” I said.
“Well, Bettina Dillinger was here for her framing. She picked them up.”
Did I know this name? “Who? What?”
“Bettina Dillinger, of the Dillinger Gallery, famous place down in SoHo?” Jon tapped the postcard. “She came in, and she liked your paintings. So, I let her take them.”
“You let her take my watercolors?” I asked. My head was doing loop-the-loops.
“That’s why you should go over there.”
“She wanted them? What for?”
Jonathan shook his head. “Christ, I told you, Ror, you’re a good artist.”
I just looked at him.
He sighed. “I told her I’d send you over if you ever showed up here again. Talk to her, she’ll explain it.”
Even after I stole from him, Jonathan was still rooting for me. “Did you tell her what a jerk I am?”
His face softened. “I told her that you’re probably about seventeen, that you probably use spray paint now, not watercolors.”
I looked down, not answering.
“Am I right?” he asked.
I shrugged.
“Listen”—he unhooked a gas mask from the wall and tossed it on the counter—“you gonna keep going around painting on walls with them toxic fumes, at least use a respirator.”
I picked it up, tried it on my face. “How much?”
“Get outta here,” he said. “Just don’t blow it with Bettina.”
43
THEY WERE ALL sitting on the steps in front of school, too early for teachers to start harassing—Nessa and Trey, Kevin with some girl, Reuben, all waiting for the bell to ring, drawing and laughing and hanging out. I walked past Trey and went right up to Reuben and held out my hand for a slap. His jaw was black-and-blue. They were telling stories about the fight, Kevin bragging to the girl: “There’s gonna be this mad dance battle in a classified spot, though I can’t tell you where ’cause that info is only available to select crews. . . .”
The four of them knew where; and clearly they weren’t telling me. I wondered how many more tests it would take before they trusted me with secrets.
Trey wouldn’t meet my eyes. Nessa glanced at each of us, then put her arm over his shoulder, and he let her. I stepped around them and went inside.
In art class, he took his seat, but turned his baseball cap sideways to block me. I took out the card from Jonathan’s, and placed it so Trey could read it. We got started cutting out our stencils with X-Acto blades. I loved the sharpness, the way the blade sliced through the paper like a knife through warm beeswax, going how I directed it, smoothly outlining each letter and tentacle.
Mr. Garci opened the ink box, and we chose our colors: one color per print, a monoprint. I picked wet plum purple. We each had a simple screen in a frame. I put my stencil on the old white T-shirt I’d brought in and put the screen on top. Squeezed ink along the top of the frame, squeegeed the ink through the screen to run it over the stencil, and then lifted the screen and stencil away.
There was my delicious violet Octora. It popped like crazy; I couldn’t stop looking at it. I’d only brought in one T-shirt. I hung it to dry.
I wanted more. I got some blank paper and printed five sheets, the ink smelling like an early morning newspaper. I clipped them up next to the shirt.
I felt Sarah from the next table staring at me—no, over at my prints. She tapped my desk and said, “Hey, Ror, can I have one of those? They’re really neat.” I glanced at her straw-blonde hair, her dried-out lips—on her shirt, she’d printed a simple black cat.
A light went on. Pinkie Parmigiana, the comix we used to sell. Kids like Sarah, the especially plain kids, had the most warped hearts. They loved the strangest drawings and bought them by the armful. I smiled. “Sure, Sarah. I’ll give it to you for a dollar,” I said. “I’ll let you have the T-shirt for five.”
She thought about it for a second, then nodded and took out some money. “I’ll take two prints and the shirt.”
I stared at the seven dollars in my hand. My luck was changing—first the gallery and my watercolors, and now someone buying my stuff. I put the cash in my pocket, knowing exactly what I
was going to do with it.
After Sarah walked away, Trey grunted. “Sellout.”
“Fuck you.”
“You wish.”
“That’s right. I do. But I ain’t sharing.”
He turned the bill of his cap around and looked at me with those punched-up eyes. “Meet me tonight,” he said.
“Yeah? What for?”
“You wanted to go to a gallery—I’m gonna take you. But it shows real shit, not this bullshit.” He pointed to the postcard.
“That ‘bullshit gallery’ has my watercolors.”
He shook his head. “Watercolors? You don’t even do watercolors.”
“Maybe you don’t know shit about me,” I said.
He sent another layer of ink through his screen, hard. When he held up his T-shirt—a yellow crown—for a second, I saw into him. King of the Underground. That was all he had. I knew I wanted more than that.
After school, I went to Woolworth’s and took my time selecting colors—Trey’s school-bus yellow, and cosmic orange, electric blue. Then, in the abandoned building where I first saw Trey’s piece, I picked a downstairs wall. I took out cosmic orange and popped the top. Shook it good, the ball bearing inside tap-tapping like it had a direct line to the blood in my veins. I placed the stencil in the center of the wall and sprayed onto the dingy surface in one long blast. I pulled the cardboard away—out jumped Octora. I shot another, above. Another, below. One on each side. Wild orange swimming in gray chaos. The stink of spray made my head spin; I laughed, feeling dizzy. I put on the mask and popped open yellow. Yellow was Trey. Letting my hand go free, I sprayed him over the wall, letting my heart go like it wasn’t tied to anything.
I sprayed an Octora on the back of my jean jacket. I opened my sketchbook and stenciled a blue one offset slightly to the side of an orange, which made it move like a cartoon.
I could paint the world this way.
That evening, I met Trey outside, in the warm yolky light of our stoop. Inside my bag, I carried my cans and my stencil. He wore his yellow-crowned top hat with the T-shirt he’d printed. “Let’s jet,” he said.
We went right to the subway without talking. Being with him was like walking with a feather in my open palm.
Forcing myself not to think about being underground, on the train, I asked, “What kind of gallery is it? What’s it called?”
“Yo, you’ll see. Zed’s got mad skills.”
We changed trains twice and finally got off at a stop in the East Village. A short, dense street full of record stores, cheap jewelry sellers, fishnet-and-black-leather boutiques, Tibetan handwoven hats, incense, funny T-shirts, punked-out junkies. After that, streets of abandoned buildings—“Squats,” Trey said, where kids stole electricity from Con Ed. I didn’t tell him I was an expert at that. On walls and light poles, stickers overlaid glued-on flyers. Graffiti cut through all the visual noise—a ZED mural on the side of a bodega, Trey’s bold ROI 85 tag on a roof ledge, a billboard overtaken by BILROCK.
I got the sense you’d never see a cop here.
We reached a park inhabited by homeless in tents and makeshift shacks. “These bros really got nowhere to live,” Trey said. He slipped his hand into mine; I held on tight, we walked straight through. Reggae pumped from somewhere.
On the other side of the park, he let me go.
Along a wall of a black building, old glued-up flyers made me laugh out loud—Reagan’s sunglasses-movie-star picture with fake headlines: RONALD REAGAN ACCUSED OF TV-STAR SEX DEATH: KILLED AND ATE LOVER.
Trey took one look and said, “Keith.”
Something inside me whispered, Like that. This felt real.
I wanted to break out and put up what I thought, all the million different things I saw inside my head.
Underneath all the city’s decay budded protest. Protest meant life. It meant struggle. It meant I should keep going until I got somewhere I wanted to be.
44
BEHIND THE GLASS storefront was a huge spray painting that said ZED 1492. Only it wasn’t straight graf. From the back of a spaceship the letters shot up, then clear across the sky. A handpainted sign outside said GLAD GALLERY.
A group of guys, black, white, Rican, stood around smoking, blasting music, joking. Trading pages in their black books, markers out. Tagging every surface around them—the black-painted columns of the storefront, the metal steps, even the sidewalk itself. They ignored the two girls standing there hoping to be noticed. The girls wore white pants and slinky shirts, and turned and stared at me and Trey as we walked up. The guys side-eyed me as they slapped hands with Trey. No one held out a palm for me.
“—that was a mad piece you did on the One train, Roi. Dope.”
“Yo, vandal mofo, you shoulda seen when I showed up with fifty cans of spray—”
“—hit the whole A line end to end.”
Trey didn’t introduce me. He made a move to go inside; I followed.
I wondered which of the guys here was Zed. On the walls hung his rectangles and squares, perfectly executed spray paintings that played with his tag.
As I looked, a bell went off in my head: canvas made the graf sellable. These pieces could hang in a museum—like Garci said, it’s all about where you put something. And the prices next to them would make even Marilyn proud: three hundred, five hundred each! With that kind of money, I could move us out of our roach motel in no time.
Trey waved to the DJ by the turntables, and went over without me. Felt like he was dropping me, getting back at me, and that sandpaper started rubbing at the bottom of my stomach again.
Guys pushed past me as if I wasn’t there. I planted myself in front of a canvas and looked, really looked. The mix of lettering and background started a swirl of ideas—what I could do with spray. I took off my pack and lost myself in the painting until I felt a hand on my back and thought it was Trey. When I turned around, there stood a lady with cotton candy hair and a fire-engine-red smile. Glamorous from teased chignon to high heels.
“Now where did you get that jacket?” she asked. “I love it!”
“Salvation Army,” I said.
She turned around. On the back of her swank black leather jacket was a cool white-line painting of a guy with a television-set head. She swung back to me with a big smile. “Keith did it for me.” It was clear I was supposed to know who Keith was.
“Wow!” I said, to say something.
“One of these boys paint yours for you?”
Boys. They were everywhere, puffing on smokes and showing off their work to each other. I shook my head with disgust. “I did it myself.”
Something lit up behind her eyes. “You did that?”
“Sure!” I started to explain my process. I was about to take out the Octora stencil when she looked to the side of me and wiggled her fingers at someone.
“Hey, I was just talking about you!” she cried.
A tall, wiry guy came over. He wore glasses painted with the same line figures he’d put on her back. I’d never seen anyone else like me who drew all over their stuff. “Trixie, baby!” he said, and threw his arms around her and walked her away without acknowledging me.
I wanted to say—Wait a minute!—but they were gone. He didn’t see me, he wasn’t interested, I wasn’t worth it.
A horrible emptiness bugged me. It bugged me good. Bugged me that everyone knew each other and I didn’t know anybody. Bugged me their loud talk, their laughter, their music mix blamming in my ears. Bugged me that I couldn’t be seen with Trey.
I threw on my backpack and went out on the trashy sidewalk. Night had fallen, the streetlights settling a blue wash over the seedy bars and garbage-can stoops. On the corner, I saw a wall, virgin brown without windows, the whole side of a building, untouched by graf. I looked around at the guys—How come no one’s hit it, a pure, clean wall like that? I wanted to ask the
m, but I felt too damn bugged.
I crossed the street.
I got my paints out of my backpack and lined them up. I took out my stencil—it was tiny compared to the size of the wall. Then I had the idea: I’d stencil dozens of Octoras that would shape one large one—a Reagan roach busting out lies. I thought of putting on my gas mask, but I didn’t. Took a quick look around for cops and got started. Popped the tops off my cans. Down where the wall met the sidewalk, I began to spray, moving the stencil up and shaping with each color, rotating through them in a pattern, making it look like Reagan was crawling from a hole in the ground. I laughed—it moved like a Monty Python cartoon, little pieces all up the wall, legs coming from the side. My fingers were getting tired, holding the cap down, the spray coming out as fast and hard as water from a hose. All I could hear was my own breath; sweat burned my eyes. The mouth of the beetle opened over the senile head like an umbrella, popping so hard it looked like 3-D. Bright colors on the dark background burned.
“Who the hell are you, and why the fuck you paintin’ my wall?” snapped someone behind me.
I sighed and looked over my shoulder—a bunch of guys from across the street were standing there, arms folded, glaring at me. Guys, all guys; I was getting tired of their bully games. I stood up slowly. “Who’s asking?”
“Who you think you are?” one of them said. His short hair stood out in spikes from his head.
I was still too bugged to be scared. “I’m from Noise Ink.”
They blinked at me and looked at each other, putting things together.
“Noise Ink? You in Roi’s crew?”
I nodded, even though it wasn’t true, not yet.
“Since when?”
A punk in a hood said, “Wait a minute. You that girl slapped Frankie’s face?”
Into the Dangerous World Page 13