Hypogeous Tractatus 9
New school, high school, starting at the bottom again. Talking to a kid I knew from the Street in the lobby before dismissal just getting the lay of the land. Right outside the window proudly sat a young B boy in his first day of school gear, when like a sudden storm a group of Brooklyn kids mobbed on him and within a moment left him torn apart, stumbling drunkenly spitting out teeth. Maybe it wasn’t me that day but I recognized that we all needed to stay mindful not to end up in a cloud of dust like homeboy. Nonetheless I kept firm in my commitment.
That day in the lunch room, I had won a peewee position in the premier graffiti crew at school. Both jealous toys and streetwise kids who actually cared about me suggested that my father opening a graffiti Art gallery had something to do with my election. But if this affiliation was going to gain me access to the One yards I could care less if it was hook or crook. Besides my man from the Bronx was the only other freshman who made the cut that day, and he wasn’t much better than me, and got his position because his big brother was an influential Zulu king, so just another kind of nepotism. Again, it wasn’t until the fifth grade that I learned to write my name in a way that anybody could read it so there was no realistic hope that I would ever attain a mastery of style. Now I had a circle of highly gifted big brothers to learn the angles from. And when they tried to jump one of my classmates for taking my seat in the cafeteria I made it clear that I didn’t want a damn body guard. I simply wanted to paint the trains, and wanted this feverishly, for reasons I still can’t properly explain.
Gil, Jon One, Little Arson, Kano, Jessie D at ROXY 1984
Maybe my memory is speeding along the sequence, or it may have been that very first night I joined the maneuvers to 145th St tunnel, every nerve in my being fired up- this was the front line. Every train car that sat looming in the shadows was caked up with burners worthy of framing and hanging in a museum, but may well have been on the way to the acid baths of Ghost Yard. s, never to be seen again. And the insides adorned with a brocade of signatures, one more legendary than the next, names kids spoke of with religious zeal. And my crew used the latest art supply store innovation, wide tip magic markers with opaque metallic ink. I wouldn’t have been more surprised to find myself walking on the clouds than storming through the parked one trains, one after the next in a creative madness, slapping my name over the murky ink soup of old black, and purple tags, as if with streaks of solid gold.