The Graffiti Wall
Spray paint. The toxic fumes drift through the air, others' messages leaving my white t-shirt multicolored: a blast of red here, a gust of blue there. I'm a walking, talking rainbow. And the jagged scrawling coating the brick wall, insignias and tags galore.
I look at the can of spray paint in my hand. Steely silver and heavy. Full. We've been here for ten minutes and my can is still chock-full of paint. It's a good thing the guys are so wrapped up in what they're doing that they don't see me standing here like a mute idiot. My can of paint is labeled white. A pure color. Innocence. I don't think I deserve such a clean hue. Maybe I would have been entitled to it before, a couple months ago, but not now. Never now. I don't deserve anything but a good kick, my mother says, or a night in the joint, the police threaten.
I start to shake the can in my hand. Listen. The little ball inside weaves in and out of the thick paint. I take off the cap and hesitate. Now what do I do? Draw out our gang's title? Erect some crude image? It was all so much easier before. No worries. The adrenaline rush and the possibility of getting caught. The next day, walking by and seeing my art, huge. Blown up to an enormous size in the sunlight. And the feeling of actually belonging to something. A group that accepts me.
"What're you doing just standing there, Angel?"
I cringe. I hate that name. As if Angelo weren't bad enough, let's take it to the next level of femininity. Because by God, I'm not a girl, and I in no way resemble a hallo-clad being from high above. Ironic, isn't it, that the only people who call me that nickname, Angel, are my mother and my gang, the two opposite forces in my life? Everyone knows you don't truly belong to any gang until you have your own moniker. And I suppose, what other options did they have? Brown Eyes? Trucker Hat? I have no distinguishing characteristics to transform into a nickname. So I'm Angel.
"I don't know what to write," I admit.
Screwball looks at me incredulously. "You? The ultimate graffiti fiend?"
"Yeah, right."
He comes over next to me. "Write your tag," he says. Tag. Turf Art Graffiti.
"I don't like my name. It's sissy."
Screwball whisks the can of paint from my hand. "Well here's your problem. There's nothing wrong with your name, it's this color that's a pansy. Who tags in white, anyway?" He goes back to his spot on the wall and exchanges my can for one sitting there on the ground. Then he comes back and hands it to me. "You're more of a black person, anyway," he says. Yes. Black. The color of shadows. The anonymity of being in a gang clashing with the feeling that you are famous because of whom you're associated with.
I spray "Angel" in sharp, curving letters, all uppercase. Then embellish it with a pair of spiky black wings, one next to the "a" and the other next to the "l". Screwball brings me back the white paint and I add highlights to the black, adding a whole other layer. Not everything is black and white, but my name certainly appears to be. I make this street art better than anything they have at the school art show.
Icepick comes up behind me as I'm adding the finishing touches. My hand starts to shake slightly. Out of fear. Intimidation. My hand veers off to the side beyond my control and leaves a giant white streak across one wing of my creation.
"Looked good until you ruined it," Icepick says. His voice always has a rough edge, condescending and degrading. He is a wolf, and the hairs on the back of his neck are permanently standing straight up. But perhaps that was in the job description of head of our posse; I wouldn't know, I've never asked. I'm not even sure if Icepick is the original founder of our gang, but I bet if he got the chance he'd say he was.
"Time to head out, boys," he says. "You done good." Ah. The flawless grammar of high school dropouts.
I pull the brim of my hat low over my eyes and scuff my combat boots along the sidewalk. Nothing feels the same as it once did. When I was first initiated into the gang and the thirst to prove myself was digging at my very flesh until I literary tingled all over. But now, nothing. No feeling. No high. Just the hard ground swimming up to meet me and my hands unresponsive to the command to break my fall as I stumble. Scuff the heels of my hands on the sidewalk just like my boots. Tiny ruby pinpricks on my skin, sunk deep into the lines and crisscrosses unique to each person's own handprint. A child's artwork consisting of a glob of paint smoothed over a hand, leaving an imprint on the wall. My handprints would be red now. Blood.
"Man, what's the matter with you?" Screwball. If it weren't for him I wouldn't be here in the first place.
"I feel sick," I lie, when it's really just the opposite. I feel nothing. Numb to the world and everything in it.
"Of course he feels sick," Hot Flash spits, sounding fed up. He never thought I should get into the gang. He complained that everyone else had done something bigger, like stolen something or started a fire to get into the gang, but I had slithered out by being a friend of Screwball's. "He's too scared to do anything else but paint some pretty graffiti, afraid of what we've got planned next. Go on, Icepick. Show him what a true gangbanger-"
"Shut up and leave the kid be," snaps Icepick. He has no tolerance for people who tell him what to do. "He's all ready proven himself before-"
"By what, being jumped in? Because we know he's loyal if he can take a beating for seven minutes," Hot Flash sneers.
"So what, we should kick you out too?" Screwball says. "You got rolled in the same way he did."
Hot Flash glares but doesn't say anything. He'd like to beat Icepick's and Screwball's faces in, either one would do, but he knows he can't. Got to keep his temper in check. The effort is killing him.
I wipe my hands on my jeans and shake my head slowly. Don't look at Hot Flash. "I'm gonna go back home. My old lady's expecting me anyway."
"The Angelic Momma's Boy has to go help make an apple pie for the Fourth of July."
Screwball takes a swing at Hot Flash, but the latter ducks out of the way just in time.
"Hey, it's cool, man. Just don't go and faint on your way there. We can't follow behind you and clean you up."
I nod at Screwball and head back in the direction we came from. I close my eyes and I'm back on my graffiti wall, staring down the messages. Pride. Anger. But how can I belong to this if I don't feel any of these, never have? Pride. Proud of what? Proud of being a permanent fixture in a group of people that goes around killing, stealing, getting killed themselves? Anger. Sure, there's stuff to be angry at. But angry enough to do a drive-by shooting and kill random, nameless people you've never met in your life?
I bump into something hard. Look up. An old man's face swims down at me, lined like the palms of my hands. Life has made its own imprint on his face, like that child finger-painting. He gives me a toothy grin and walks away before I can even start to mutter an apology. Sorry. And then, as I reach the steps to the apartment building, I realize. I'll never grow old like that man. Never live long enough to be transformed into something that heavily wrinkled. I probably won't live past twenty-one, when I finally won't need my fake ID.
I go up the creaking stairs one at a time. The dim light flutters with flies racing towards their deaths. I reach the door with the plastic number seventeen fastened to it. Knock softly with my knuckles. I hear footsteps almost immediately and a dark shadow moves across the peep whole. There's a pause. An intake of breath on the other side of the door. Hesitation.
"Mom?" I say. And it's all the reassurance she needs. I hear the clicking of locks unlocking. The door swings open.
My mother. I hardly recognize her. I search for a word to describe her. Bedraggled. Unkempt. Disheveled. There's a whole slew of adjectives to stick to her. From the way she's squinting, I take it she doesn't recognize me either. I watch her eyes scan me. Checking for tattoos, no doubt. I cross my arms so she won't see where I carved the name of my gang into the flesh on my inner arm. I'm afraid. If she sees that she might not let me in.
But she does let me in. She steps aside and lets me pass, looking down at my heavily graffitied jeans, my boots. She shuts and locks the door behind me. She's scared too, but of something different. She's afraid that more street kids will come looking for her, more sons that she couldn't raise the right way, like a great procession. I'm afraid of her and she's afraid of me.
I sit down at the rickety little kitchen table. I feel it's going to fall apart any second as it quakes beneath me. I watch my mother start toward the refrigerator, then toward the sink. She finally decides to sit down across from me, making sure to put the table between us.
"How are you?" she asks with a drippy, sad sort of smile. I'm afraid it may slide right of her face, like soap.
"Fine," I say stiffly. Her eyes sadden at my response, and I wish I hadn't been so curt. She is letting me come back here. After months. And I never left any note. But I don't want her to get all sappy, so I don't show her any of the emotion that I don't have.
"You have a place to live?"
"Oh yeah. Me and Screwball are splitting the rent. It's a nice place. Indoor plumbing and everything." A big fat lie. Screwball and I could never afford an apartment in this city, no matter how many part time jobs we worked.
My mother stirs a cold mug of coffee sitting on the table slowly. "Screwball?" she says.
"I brought him home once. You met him. He's tall and thin, with brown hair?"
"Oh, right." She doesn't remember.
"He had the jeans you didn't like. The baggy ones."
"The pants with the writing all over them?"
I shift awkwardly. Yes. Those jeans. The kind I'm wearing now.
"Yeah," I say. My mother remembers the boy who walked in here with baggy jeans and a can of spray paint. She recalls how, after he left, the fumes in my room were enough to make anyone feel a little drugged up.
I remember three days after that, leaving. No one was home. No one was ever home. But it hurt anyway. I longed for someone to be there, begging me to stay, but there was no one. So I left unnoticed.
My mother remembers too. Coming home and finding her son gone. Waiting, drinking six cups of coffee so she'd be awake when I got home. But I didn't come home, not for four whole months.
Until now.
"Screwball introduced you to your friends, right?" my mother asks. She's looking for someone to blame. Besides me. She doesn't want to have to blame me.
"Well I had always wanted to be..." I find I can't finish. Funny how you can go around bragging about it to others but are too ashamed to tell it to your mother's face.
"In a gang?" she offers an ending to my statement.
My mouth gapes soundlessly, then swirls into high gear. "It's not a gang, mom, they're just my friends. We just-we hang out together and do, you know, friend stuff."
"Do you know your friends' names?" she says.
Her question confuses me. Of course I know their names. "Yeah. There's Icepick and Screwball, Bandit, High Tops, 8-Track-"
"I mean their real names. Their legal names."
"Oh." She's caught me off guard. I hesitate, then lunge right in. "Well what does it matter anyway, Mom, I mean, who cares what their real names are? Wasn't it like Poe or somebody who said that thing about roses and names...?"
"Shakespeare," she corrects me.
I can't think of anything to say. There's nothing to reassure her with. She's hit the nail on the head.
I sigh. "I'm not doing anything illegal, Mom."
She nods. She doesn't believe me.
"Do you want something to eat?"
"No thanks," I say. I'll slip something from the O'Hara's corner grocery store in my pocket on the way by. The old geezer will never notice.
I stand up and push in my chair out of habit. Take a few steps to the door before my mother's voice stops me.
"You can stay the night, if you want to. That's why you came here, right? Not to have a nice little chat."
"I don't want to intrude-"
"You can't intrude in your own house. Besides, it gets pretty lonely here." she casts a glance around the kitchen. Dirt. Despair.
"Okay," I say. "I'll just sleep on the couch." Then when I get up before she does tomorrow morning and leave, she won't wake.
I grab a blanket from a closet and put my hat and boots on the stained coffee table. My mother looks at the boots sitting there, wants to say something, but decides against it.
"Couldn't you just, you know, quit the gang?"
I stare at her. "What, say 'Hey, this was fun but I'm done now'? You think they'd just let me skip away merrily?"
She laughs good-humouredly, but she's not really amused. Just sad and scared. "I don't know," she says. "It'd be nice if it worked that way, huh?"
But her words have struck a chord with me. Who's to say it doesn't work that way? I can walk away if I want to. For all Hot Flash's talk, I'm fairly sure he's never killed anyone. And Icepick doesn't hate me that much.
"I'll do it," I say as my mother turns to go into her bedroom.
She turns around, searches my face. "What?"
"Tomorrow," I stand up. "I'll go and tell them I'm done. That I don't want to be part of it. I will, if you want me to."
She puts a hand over her mouth and stands very still for a moment. Then she comes over to me, squeezes past the coffee table and throws her arms around me.
"Oh, Angel," she breathes in my ear. My God. I think she's crying.
And I realize, this is what I want. To be home. Here. Making my mother proud. And that empty feeling lately when I'm with the gang...there's nothing wrong with me. My need for something better than graffiti-filled days and guys who're all talk and no walk was establishing itself. And do I really want to grow up to be a hardcore gangbanger? Does anybody?
But after Mom goes to bed, despite my revelation, I can't sleep. Now I've broken rule number one: don't make promises. Who's to say Icepick won't pull out his namesake and stab me to death? And Screwball worked so hard to get me in there with him.
My internal clock, always ticking a little bit faster than everybody else's. Grow up faster. Die sooner. Wake up earlier.
My mother is asleep when I wake up. According to the digital clock on the microwave, square green numbers, it's four thirty-two. I put my boots and hat back on and tip toe out of the apartment, down the creaking stairs, out into the early sun. The summer day has not heated up to its full potential yet. I try and decide where the gang is and reach two conclusions: either asleep somewhere or out by the graffiti wall and the train tracks where we were at last night.
I make my way down the sidewalk, weaving my way through my fellow early birds. I can hardly believe what I'm doing. Surreal, the feeling that you are in control of your life. You determine what goes on and what happens.
The bleak sun tries to push its way through the clouds overhead. It succeeds for a few seconds or so, until new clouds roll past and smother its rays. And the pigeons. I've always hated those birds. They make such a racket when you least want it. When you're trying to not to attract attention like a goddamn magnet. But today they are a symbol. Things live and die. Life goes on.
I walk at just the right speed to carry me through numerous crosswalks without having to stop. It used to be a game when I was younger. See how many crosswalks you could get through in a row without having to wait for cars to stream past and the little white man on the sign to say it's okay to cross now.
The railroad tracks look different during the day hours, as they always do. I can see the graffiti wall up ahead out of the corner of my eye. The red of the bricks obscured by the volume of messages sprayed on the clay. I don't want to look at the wall and last night's creation just yet, though. I want my first glimpse of it shining in the sunlight to be when I'm up close.
The sound of gravel crunching under booted feet. A train whistle, and the distant sounds of the approaching cargo. I want this moment to never end. Walk. On top of the small stones guising as a road. On top of the dirt and brave, singled-out little pieces of grass poking up, soon to be crushed. I'm in front of the wall. Right before it. Ready to see the record of what I did last night, my last tag, my last graffiti.
A clicking, and then a loud bang. Ear shattering. Splitting my head in two figuratively, but in reality, the bullet goes in between my ribs.
Sharp pain. I don't know if that's why I fall over, or because of the impact. Or maybe because I'm still sick, and I'm dreaming. Yes. This is one of those dreams brought on by illness. I can tell, because everything's moving in slow motion. The boots on the gravel approaching. Leering faces. Laughs. Something about crossed out graffiti. And pain. Sharp, searing. On the right side of my body. And then the faces are gone, and I'm left alone with the wall.
I am close to the structure when it comes into focus, just like I wished. The cool bricks, not yet baking in the sun, are so close I can run my hand along them. Smooth, and then rough where the mortar is slipped between to keep the next piece attached.
And I can see my art from the previous night just like I wanted. And it is indeed different the next day, though not in the way I would have imagined. I did not expect to be at this odd angle, or on the ground, or bleeding my life's worth of blood. I did not anticipate that I wouldn't see my mother again after that last hug. Or Screwball and his last time he has to stick up for me. And Hot Flash's last jab at me about my unworthiness to be in the gang. I guess I am unworthy. I would never live long enough to be a hardcore gangbanger anyway, because I wouldn't survive my first shoot-out.
I put a hand to the spot the bullet entered. On my right side, in with my ribs. I can't breathe. So hard to breathe. Draw my hand back and there's blood, slick over my entire hand, a ruby glove fit for a king. The shiny red is especially dark where it has seeped into the lines of my hand.
Yes. I want to make my last mark. Impression. My last imprint on this city. I want to be remembered, but at the same time forgotten by all. The anonymity of the graffiti wall. So many messages but each one unique. I press my hand to the wall with my last remaining strength, layered over an ancient message scrawled in white. My handprint glistens like the child's on the wall, glistens with a radiance I never grew old enough to achieve.
The life I have lived as an Angel. I leave it at the foot of my graffiti wall.
Umm...taa daa? I wrote this for a writing class I went to this summer...we basically had to write a short story in a week. And this is mine. So...yeah.
Comments&suggestions=love. Really, any ideas you have for improving this.
And did you understand who killed him at the end? Because when I had my parents read it, one understood and one didn't. So if you think I need to clarify this part, tell me so.
Thanks for taking the time to read!
