I would follow my own manifesto; my own rules. Not Dado’s, or Tristan Tzara’s, or the constitution of the United Untied States. Not Noise Ink’s. This one would have laws I could break and still stay free.
I looked up to see a squirrel watching me. I remembered a day back at the end of the King Kennedys: No one else was there. Even our animals were gone. I sat just like now with a notebook, talking to myself, when a squirrel came over and shook its bushy tail, staring at me. I had talked to it aloud, I was so lonely, until even it scurried away.
I didn’t know what it would be like to go back to school, to face everyone again. The boys had left me. What Trey had said wasn’t true—they didn’t back me up. When it came down to it, it seemed like all anyone cared about was themselves.
53
THE SIDEWALK WAS choked with more than the usual suspects. As I walked up to school with Marilyn, I expected, as always, that appreciative eyes would admire her outfit of the day, acting as if I wasn’t there until I drifted off. But people came up and started talking, yapping over each other in some kind of mumbo jumbo, all of them looking at me.
“Frankie’s an ass, yo!”
“Is it true you’re Octora?”
“And you hit that wall with Keith downtown!”
“And the AURA piece on the train! It’s yours!”
“What about the one on the bridge? You see that shit!”
“See it! Man, I was there!”
They touched me, pulling me by the shoulders to face them. I shook my head. How did they know? What did they want me to say?
Over their voices, Marilyn turned to me, eyes worried. “Rora, what’s going on?”
Kevin came over, put his skateboard up as if to block me from them, told them to back off. “Take a chill pill now, y’all, just chill.” I didn’t want to show Kev how glad I was to see he had escaped the cops. And how angry I was that they’d left me.
Marilyn said, “Hey, kid, I’m her sister, what’s going on?”
This was my deal. “Marilyn,” I said. “I got this.” She met my eyes over the crowd with curiosity, maybe even a little awe. I saw her stare as Kevin pushed me toward the door.
He handed me something.
It was my backpack. I zipped it open quickly; my pads, stencil, pens, even a can of spray was still inside. The paint opened up a rush in me; I missed the weight in my hand, the way it went on the wall. I missed it like a person. I closed the bag and clutched it to me.
When we got inside, I asked him, “What’s this all about?”
“After the blue boys split, me and Reuben went on a recon mission and picked up all our paints and shit. Weren’t gonna let those fuckers win.”
We back you up. Trey came for me. He saved me. And the boys went back for our stuff.
Kevin went on, all lit up. “Ror, man, you hear what happened to Frankie?”
I shook my head. “No, what?”
“He got busted! They sent him to Rikers yesterday. Now everybody’s freaking out. Saying he got his face slapped by another girl. First it was Nessa in front of school, then—you.”
“Me?”
“That ASS you painted with Frankie’s name, man, everybody seen it. That’s what all those fiends outside are talkin’ ’bout.”
“Wow. Shit. I thought, when the cops came—”
He clapped his hands. “Man, I took off,” he said. I could see he hadn’t thought anything about leaving me that night.
“Where’d you guys go?”
“We ran down the tunnel and hid till they left. Yesterday, Trey told us about you, said you got sprayed in the face.” He wiped my forehead with one finger, like I still had some there. “You okay?” he asked softly.
“Yeah, I guess.” So Trey hadn’t said I wanted to quit the crew.
The bell rang, and we went to class.
After, I walked through the halls, aware of eyes staring at me. For the first time in that school, I felt seen by those strangers, like I’d been hiding and somebody had pulled away my mask, and there I was. Revealed.
Before English, Reuben came up and traded handshakes with me. He even gave me a hug. He said it was all over the city, what I did. “But the Five-O took Frankie away, so you lucky he ain’t comin’ after you, Ror. Otherwise, we’d have to put you into the witness fuckin’ protection program.” He laughed.
Just then, Nessa came around the corner, running into us, then stopping short and staring. She blew out a laugh at me. “You one pitiful bitch,” she said.
“Least my boyfriend ain’t in jail,” I shot back.
Her fists came up, and Reuben stepped between us.
Nessa put her open hand in Reuben’s face, then walked around him, away. She didn’t look back.
“I don’t think she’ll bother you, Ror,” he said, watching her go. “Everybody knows what went down. That you beat her at the cypher. That she went back to Frankie. She just feels stupid she’s on the losing team.”
“I didn’t think I beat her.”
“That’s the word on the street.”
We went into class, and he actually sat next to me.
Kids looked at me all day. Sarah with the straw hair was wearing my Octora T-shirt. I gave her a thumbs-up when I passed her in the hall. She came over with two girls trailing behind her.
“Hey, Ror,” she said like we knew each other real well. “My friends here want to know if they can get a shirt off you.”
One of the girls had square metal glasses, the other a spray of freckles. I shrugged. “Um, yeah—sure, five bucks each. I can make them for you tomorrow, I guess.”
The girls handed me the money and the three gave each other a giggle like I was some kind of famous person, and they walked away.
Another girl came up, a nervous-looking brown girl with straight black hair. “’Scuse me, you’re Octora, right?”
I glanced around. “Who wants to know?”
“You the one beat Frankie, right?” she said.
“That’s what I heard.”
“Can I get one of those T-shirts from you?” the girl asked.
“For five bucks you can.”
She handed me the money, and I said she’d get it when I had art class. Art class. The only person I hadn’t seen all day, I realized, was Trey.
54
I WAITED FOR Trey before going into art. When he didn’t show up, I went to Mr. Garci and asked if I could screen-print the old T-shirts I brought in.
“Ror, you need to start taking yourself seriously.”
Jonathan said the same thing. You need to work seriously.
“I work hard!”
“Is that right? When you draw, do you think about who’s going to see it? Is it something we can put in a portfolio for college?”
A portfolio for college? I sighed. More school? Like Marilyn? It hadn’t done much for Dado, for anyone at the King Kennedys. I wanted to break out. Bust the mold.
“I’ll make you a deal, Ror,” Garci said. “You promise me you’ll work on a portfolio—actually work—and I’ll let you print those shirts.”
Then I remembered the Dillinger Gallery. Bettina Dillinger. Like Trixie. How many women ran galleries? How many women were in them? “I think I have a few pieces already, Mr. Garci. These watercolors I did.” I’d have to get them back. If I wanted to be serious, I’d have to go there and face her, find out why she took them in the first place.
He grinned big. “That’s the spirit! The ink is in the box.”
At the end of the period, when I came out of the classroom, Trey was standing there. He handed me a photograph and walked away. I took one look—it was the first octopus I’d painted underground, the AURA, me with a lopsided smile on my face.
“Hey, wait up!” I ran and called after him just as he pushed the door open and went out of the building, into the blind
ing sun. “Wait, dammit!”
Outside, he leaned against the dirty white brick, stringy tags swirling up the wall behind him, arms folded, that cool stare under the brim of his baseball cap.
Kids sat fanning themselves with comic books, throwing bologna at each other, watching us out of the edges of their eyes.
“I’m not yellow,” I said to Trey.
He pushed himself off the wall and started walking away.
I followed. “I mean, I just, you know, I don’t like the idea of getting killed.”
At the corner, he turned real quick and said, “You throwin’ away a perfect opportunity.”
“What do you mean?”
“Since the cypher, your name’s got around. Now you can build on your fame. On our fame, Noise Ink crew.”
“Oh.” I saw how he saw it. What Garci said about Warhol, about using the attention on you, not letting it use you. Or not letting anyone else use you. “I mean, I’m still with the crew. But like, I also, I want to go off on my own sometimes, too.” I was trying hard not to hurt him. “I mean, when I’m not doing something with the crew in a park or somewhere in the city where we—where we won’t get—where the cops won’t see us. I’d like to, you know, try things out.”
He nodded slowly. Like he saw right through me but I should keep talking.
“I mean,” I went on, “of course I’m with Noise Ink, right? I’m family. I’m in the crew.”
His brows relaxed a little.
“Just—I want to paint where I can take my time. I need to figure some stuff out on my own, man,” I said. The words stuttered and trickled out of me, like an almost-empty can. “I mean, yeah, I’m scared of the cops. I don’t know if I can paint where I might get caught without being scared. But that may take me some time to—to feel out where I’m not scared. Give me some time?”
“What kind of time?”
“I don’t know.”
We stood there together on the corner, people pushing past us, traffic going by as the light changed and we didn’t cross.
I went on. “Trey? Just—don’t cut me off. Let me figure it out.”
He kicked at the lamppost.
Finally, he held out his hand. I gave him a slap, and he hung on to my fingers. “Aight. I dig,” he said.
We walked together to McDonald’s. On the way, I told him about the T-shirts and the money, and when we got there, I bought him a burger.
“Maybe I’ll go with you sometime,” he said. “To where you’re not scared.”
We looked at each other for a moment.
Then we shared a sack of fries.
55
MY RIDE DOWN to SoHo on the M5 bus took twice as long as the number 1 train—plus an extra hike from the bus stop—but it was worth it to avoid going underground. I’d discovered buses were better for sketching, anyway. I sat in the back, the window open wide, my feet up on the ledge, drawing a mother with cornrows sitting across from me. She was trying to read a book, and her daughter kept pulling at her hair, her ears; occasionally, like a lioness, she would bat her cub away, and the kid just wanted some love. They got off near Penn Station, and an old couple threw their tokens in and sat down, the two of them like a set of dolls you could neatly fit into each other, they had become so similar.
I got off at Broadway and Houston and found my way going west on a wide street with cars traveling both ways. I didn’t know what I was expecting when I thought of SoHo, but it wasn’t traffic like an expressway. I cut off the main block to a narrow cobblestone street. Buildings hunched together squat and giant, architecture old and ornate like from the last century. I felt myself looking up at the columns and scrolls and fancy arches that made up the construction and wondering how they built it.
Here, there were no tags, no pieces like across town, but on a creamy outside wall, someone had plastered an abstract figure painting and signed it AVANT. I stopped. I resisted the urge to take out a marker and add an S to make it SAVANT. I stuck my fingernail under it, but it was thick cardboard glued down good. I ran my finger over the paint—a latex, or acrylic. I looked around at a clump of girls in skin-tight dresses and red lipstick, a woman in a peach power suit hurrying behind them, two couples in bleach-splattered jeans talking too loud. Inside me, a smile opened up like sun-ray fingers reaching to the sky.
I wanted to see more. I walked ahead.
In a corner parking lot, posters announced Bands! Clubs! Nights of Music and Drawing! I took out my pad and wrote the addresses down. On the next block, on a gray building, someone had stenciled a white angel with a long devil’s tail. Down another side street, a life-sized painting of a man in silhouette dripped down a wall, an arrow shot through his head. Above, it said: NO NUKES, THIS IS YOU. I laughed and walked on.
Hidden between two brick buildings, I spied painted fingers taping over a painted crack in a painted brick wall. I stepped out of the human traffic to look, inside me the lightness opening into disbelief. I had that feeling like at Glad Gallery watching Keith paint, like he got it, got me, and I wanted to know more where his ideas came from. Glad. I hadn’t gone back; did I belong there?
In this place, I felt like I didn’t have to ask that question. In this place, I saw it all around, in a whisper, in a notion, in a phrase. In an image.
This was where I wanted to be.
When I got to West Broadway, the street widened with glass storefront galleries. The first had an enormous black-and-white photo of a kitchen sink in the window. Something about it drew me inside. The smell hit me—these were not photos but oil paintings. I had tried oils, a gooey medium that took forever to dry, that demanded layers and patience I definitely didn’t have. This artist did. People in black jeans and T-shirts drifted past as I studied the flat surface of each painting. I could not figure out how the artist made it look so shiny.
Back on the street, I wove in and out of other galleries to look at paintings and photos and sculptures, collecting postcards, feeling the beams of light that made the smile open in me. I sketched ideas and revelations, hearing Dado’s voice singing Blake—
He must’ve felt destroyed by the galleries that dismissed him.
How would they see me?
I found myself standing in front of the Dillinger Gallery. The name was elegantly gold-painted right onto the dark brown exterior. You couldn’t see inside, like they were protecting some great secret. A long-haired man in leather pants and a pirate shirt burst from the door, a girl in a catsuit behind him. They laughed as they passed me. She held the door open until I went in.
The show I was expecting, the artist Kruger with her red-and-white Don’t be a jerk pasted across crowds, was no longer there. Instead there hung abstract paintings big as me, wide as my arms outstretched, colors quivering straight across the room like a mambo. Lemon streaks tried to sneak out from under the weight of a red, blues oozed into Bahama greens. Definitely oil. Or acrylic. Putty? When I went close to read the tag, I saw these were called “drawings.” They were inked!
Was this how a person could draw with ink?
At the desk in the back sat a clean-shaven man in a short-sleeved button-up shirt and well-designed hair. I found my nerve and asked him if I could talk to Bettina Dillinger.
He tilted his head and said, not nicely, “Who’s asking?”
“Ror.”
“Ror who? And what is this about?” He wouldn’t meet my eyes but looked beyond me, at the swank people in the hushed space.
“Just Ror. Jonathan sent me.”
“Jonathan who?” he asked, his voice like he had work to do.
“Go ahead, tell her,” I said. “Tell her Jonathan sent me.”
He glanced at his desk, the log book there. “What is this Jonathan’s last name?”
“From the frame shop, Jonathan. I don’t know. Jonathan, you know.”
He pursed his lips at me and
lifted the phone and tapped in some numbers. It rang in the back. He whispered into the receiver, and I turned away, my face flushing so hard I could feel my heartbeat in my eyes.
“Go.” He hung up and waved to a doorway behind him.
I went back into a white room, a long black desk with chrome legs taking up the length of it. Three Warhol prints of Marilyn Monroe hung on the wall. A short, plump woman about Ma’s age, her brown hair in a tight bun, stood at the desk, leaned over a lit-up box. She seemed to be looking at rows of tiny pictures through the light.
“It’s over there,” the woman said, gesturing to a painting in a corner without even glancing my way. She wore a coffee-brown dress and bottle-cap earrings. When I didn’t answer, she stood straight and finally looked at me.
“What are you waiting for?” she said. “I need that back by tomorrow.”
I looked at her. “My name is Ror. You have my watercolors.”
“Chip said you were from Jonathan’s, for the frame. Make sure you wrap it well and sign it out with him. Where’s your truck parked?”
“I’m Ror. You have my paintings. The watercolors?” I hoped I wasn’t as red as I felt.
She looked up at the ceiling, “Ror, Ror, Ror,” she said, as if trying to remember.
“I left some watercolors in Jonathan’s shop, and you took them.”
Her eyes swung to me, acknowledging me coolly. “Oh, yes,” she said slowly. She went to a large filing cabinet, pulled out a drawer, and started digging through. “Jonathan’s a good man, well-meaning, of course. He’s always helping younger artists to get a leg up, though his taste isn’t always as good as his heart.”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
She found the watercolors and stared at them. “Actually, you’re one of the better ones I’ve seen come out of that shop.”
“Is that why you took my paintings?”
She shuffled through them, then said, “You’re untrained and immature, but you definitely have a facility with watercolors. They’re not so easy to use like this.”
Into the Dangerous World Page 17