Hypogeous Tractatus 4
When that Five-Percenter kid had asked my tag I thought fast to shoot back CYX100, the brand-name of the imaginary space-ships I doodled during class. He was underwhelmed by this uninspired name and I knew it wouldn’t stick. But then one day I tossed a smoke bomb, which rolled through the park fence igniting some fallen leaves, starting a miniature forest fire by the train tracks. I absconded and was in hiding for some days sure the firemen and police were out looking for me. But when some teenagers saw me on the run, at the video game arcade, they remarked, “there goes the little arsonist!” I didn’t know what that word meant but they said it with some reverence. Instead of going in search of a name it had come to find me, Little Arson, and when I gained my stripes, “Arson”, and for years this was the only name people would call me. Vinny was a drummer- I think he grew up to be a professional musician- and in the fifth grade he was already a ladies man. He was great at passing notes to cut the boredom with crazy jokes and funny pictures, and he had a passing interest in graffiti. I was closer with some other classmates who took graffiti more seriously as an artform, but none of them had any intention of actually writing graffiti on the walls or trains, containing their self expression to sketchbooks with a broad spectrum of Designer markers.
As no sixth grade boys would condescend to tagging up with an inexperienced underclass-man, I goaded Vinny into a late night escapade. My pops had all kinds of spray paint in the basement. Different sizes and colors, mostly used, without caps or lids, some rusted like relics from the Great Depression era. My mom had split by then so it was fairly easy to sneak out at night once he was asleep. So Vinny slept over my house one night, and we filled our backpacks with the paint, shaking them up just to hear the melodic jingle of the mixing marble, then headed out into the still night on a paramilitary mission.
We made our way over to the schoolyard. Our drawings weren’t the sort the Art teacher might tack to the hallway bulletin boards, but we meant to make our mark in a way the students would nonetheless recognize as cool and even bad-ass. Besides some old guy out walking his big white dog, we took our position without drawing any attention, reviewing our pencil and magic marker sketches and at last faced the challenge of representing these creative ideas on a wall, with almost zero experience actually using spray paint. Maybe every sprayed stroke dripped carelessly, some clotting and sputtering out of control splashing more bright paint on our hands than the wall, and when the dregs of a fuchsia can hissed aerosol emptiness we may have concluded that shape with a forest green in a panic, creating a shameful, illegible mess I’m still proud of today, though it disappeared the very next morning beneath a coat of institutional grey house paint without anyone laying eyes on it, besides ourselves that essential night, and the angry principal and janitor at sunrise.