Hypogeous Tractatus 7
Arson tags on far right edge
Times at home or school were merely those in-between moments interrupting graffiti missions. And how I’d wasted moments of my life practicing on paper or writing walls! -when the only thing that ever mattered was painting trains. It didn’t make any difference whether I was any good at it, or if I gained recognition, but the essential thing was to do it. After my mom split life had lost a lot of purpose, and if Pops attempted single-handedly to be my family, he was mostly in his own world, so along with thousands of lost youths, this mass dialogue of self expression imbued life with all the meaning it could fit. I’d undergone a baptism by fire into a vital cultural movement without guessing what even the lowliest rank in this order would afford. The entire city was our neighborhood.
The summer before starting high school Gil and I planned to paint our first car. We sketched out plans for our pieces and I created cartoon characters of our faces next to our names. We even figured out what colors we would need in advance, so we brought enough paint, and worked out as many details in advance so we weren’t stumbling around like a couple of hoboes. Painting in the darkness of the “Bridge” lay-up and up on ladders seemed far from ideal so we opted to take our chances at a new spot, where we faced none of those problems.
City Hall station has an abandoned “ghost” station on the lower level where trains are parked weekends and late nights. We took a moment to allow the station to empty of passengers after we stepped off the train, and case out the conditions as well as we might. We were approached by a veteran writer Ren KGB who guessed at once what we were about. He warned us that two mega-legends had just been arrested in this yard a day or two prior, so that we should consider the place “hot” and reconsider our approach.
Maybe we had more balls than brains then, and our enthusiasm outweighed our reason, but when Renard disappeared Gil and I decided that Min and King Rich’s arrest rather seemed to make the place safe from police activity, as everyone was talking about the high-profile arrest by the infamous vandal squad agents, and nobody would be crazy enough to try their luck… except us.
What made City Hall such a sweet set-up was that the downstairs platform was fairly well lit, and plus the trains were parked in the former station, so the painting surface began at our feet, not our shoulders. We picked a spot and got to work feverishly, mindful that even a vaguely curious police man could smell our paint fumes from upstairs. But every stroke of spray took us one step closer to achieving that lifelong dream, and so far we were only joined by the company of rats who stumbled over our feet periodically. There were some issues in scaling up our notebook paper sketches to fit the train panels, but we hacked away at it gun crazy, and in a few hours stood back to admire the clumsy work of our hands shimmering through the aerosol haze.