A Little Trouble with the Facts (21 page)

“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in
this pretty face
from day to day.” He reaches out his free hand and cups my chin. “To the last syllable of
The Paper of Record
, and all our yesterdays were
fit to print
our way to a dusty death.” He puts down his glass and twirls me into the crook of his arm. His nose touches mine. “Out, out, brief candle.”

Day two: “Interesting factoid,” Curtis says by way of greeting at 7:00 a.m. “I asked Tracy to put together a list of Wallace’s biggest collectors. And who should appear at the top of it, but your old fiancé, Jeremiah Sinclair Golden Jr.”

“He wasn’t my fiancé,” I say, putting down my purse.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Your booooyfriend.” The sides of his lips suppress a smile.

“That’s low,” I say.

“Still a little bruised, huh?”

“A little.” I move to Smarte’s chair and sit, hoping to punctuate the conversation with a full stop.

“Aw. Tell me where it hurts.” He pokes me with his pencil eraser. “Here?” He pokes me again. “Here?”

“Okay,” I say. “I graduated preschool twenty years ago.”

Curtis mock-pouts. “It’s a potential issue, though, don’t you think?”

“What?”

“Jeremiah’s collection of Stains.”

“He was always pretty tainted. It was a little bit of a game for him, trying to find the jewel in the rough. It seems he wasted a lot of money on nobodies. He had one Warhol that was worth something and I understand he sold it to Gagosian to pay his legal bills.”

Curtis tosses a back issue of
Art News
onto my lap. There’s Jeremiah, in all his preppy splendor, hair greased back, cheekbones airbrushed, standing in front of a twelve-foot Schnabel.
“He had good luck early on,” says Curtis. “Seems he started collecting before he was even legal to drink. Bought Schnabel and Kenny Scharf, a few small Basquiat drawings. This story says he probably owns a dozen Stains,” Curtis says. “He sure knew how to pick them in the eighties.”

The art in the attic. “I never saw Schnabel or Scharf, though I didn’t get a very good look at his collection. Maybe he’d already sold them by that time.”

“He still owns some, at least. They’re going to be exhibited in a hip-hop retrospective in Germany. A place called the Ludwig Museum. I’m telling you, it’s only beginning. The eighties retro wave is going to hit us like a tsunami. This doesn’t present a conflict, does it, Valerie?”

“What conflict? I don’t talk to the guy. He doesn’t talk to me.”

“Do you know if they ever met each other—your fiancé and Wallace?”

“I can’t imagine it.”

Curtis stands up. “Well, as far as I’m concerned, that qualifies Mr. Golden for your map.” He picks up a Sharpie. His hand hovers over the Upper East Side of Manhattan on the wall map. He writes “JSG2” at the intersection of Sixty-third Street and Lexington, then he pauses. “That puts you on here too, Valerie. And where did you say you were from, again? Park Avenue?”

I pull myself in under Smarte’s desk, fastening on my phone headset. I punch numbers for the DA’s office, largely for effect. The call goes through to Betty Schlachter, the flack, and I make my official request one more time: “Anything new on the gallery vandalism case? Anything on Wallace?”

“We’re well aware of your interest in both cases, Miss Vane,” Schlachter says. “Both are still under investigation. We’ll call you when there’s any news.”

“I’ll call you first.”

Tyler Prattle sticks his head through the door. “Anyone got
a moment to let this old codger vent on an idea for Week in Review?”

Prattle is seven feet tall, mostly freckles—a giant pointillist masterpiece. If he moves too fast, he might scatter. I look at Curtis. Moore and Lessey have obviously asked him to check in with us. No way Prattle cares what a newbie like me thinks about his op-eds. Curtis nods, to say, “You go.” He’s making up for harassing me about Jeremiah.

I follow Prattle into his office next door. Before I’ve taken a seat, he launches in: “Minimalist art and graffiti are at opposite poles of an aesthetic spectrum, right? Right? One is the ultimate expression of the art world’s elitism and the other its most populist, right? Am I right?”

I nod.

“No, I am not right,” says Prattle, gleefully clapping his hands. “That’s too simplistic. One doesn’t have to look very hard to see that these two movements have a tremendous amount in common, a tremendous amount. For one, each genre has an act of aggression at its core. It forces the viewer to overcome an initial resistance, even, perhaps, hatred, toward the artist, toward the piece. Neither provides the viewer with something that’s easy to look at. Both require the viewer to be uneasy, or to overcome that unease, to overcome the hatred of the act of painting. But that’s not all, is it, not all, right?”

“I’m going to guess it’s not.”

“No, not all,” he says, clapping again soundlessly. His hands are dot clusters, held together by sheer serendipity—sort of like his argument. “There’s also the corresponding meta-function. Graffiti asks: Who owns art if art is everywhere, if art is public? Minimalism asks: Who owns art if art is light? If art is the way shadows play against a flat surface? Both say—you own art, you, the viewer.
What you see is what you see,
as Frank Stella said. Brilliant, yes?”

“Brilliant,” I agree. It is my place to agree, but I’m also thinking it over. If I’m understanding him correctly, he’s breaking down the high-low duality, and saying there’s no difference between what Wallace produced on the streets and what Johns produced for the Met. It’s heady stuff, but I can’t imagine too many grannies who read the Sunday paper would swallow it. He’s maybe fishing for letters to the editor. In any case, Stain would’ve been pleased. I tell Prattle that much.

He giggles and claps his hands. “This is a good one. One for the anthology!”

Back out into the streets for more interviews. This time, Curtis and I tag-team. I query kids in Life Drawing class at the Wallace painting school. He questions art dealers in Chelsea and SoHo; I chat with pencil-tapping art profs who want to plug their books. He rounds up Bronx activists promoting local causes. I interview East Village eighties nostalgics who wish they were back in the good old days when no one but hard-core art lovers and drug dealers went downtown. He tracks down tony art-market reporters who regale him with stories about the exhilarating sales during the last art market boom. Back at the office, feet up on chairs, transcribing our notes, Curtis says, “At least if we don’t get the story, we can always compile an Encyclopedia of New York Poseurs.”

What we don’t get—what it’s obvious we need—is legit graff writers, the ones still scrawling, the ones on the street. How do we get to them? They’re not at Bomb the System, obviously. They’re not at galleries. They don’t have union spokesmen or high-paid flacks. They don’t attend Life Drawing, and they don’t do legal walls. They keep odd hours. They fly by night. They climb scaffolding and rusted fire escapes. They hide. Finding them is like finding prowlers. Like finding Batman in his cave.

Curtis goes in search of his old sources from his days at the
Voice
. I track down our subway reporter, Lou Gaines, and ask him to tell me the best-painted tunnels. He tells me a handful of stations. He suggests I wait at the edge of a subway platform, near the
NO TRESPASSING
signs. He says the kids jump onto the rails once the trains pull out. He suggests I watch and wait.

I do as he says. I start at 6:00 p.m. at the Jay Street–Borough Hall stop in Brooklyn and I wait. And I keep waiting. I see nothing for a long, long while. I hear Gaines in my head: “It’s sort of like waiting for rats in an alley. They’re there. But they might not be smiling at you. Just keep an eye out.” At 10:00 p.m., I finally spot one: the train pulls out, and I look right, and a kid is slipping past the signs. I follow, like a mugger, a thief. I see him sidestep down the narrow edge of the platform, then get to the end and jump onto the empty tracks. I think, “Third rail.” I’m afraid. “I’m about to get fried.”

But then I hear Battinger’s final caveat:
This is your last shot
. Page one or the exit. I don’t have a choice. It’s onto the rails or out the door.

I jump. I find the kid a few yards up, his spray can hoisted and hissing, the black wall of the tunnel sprayed wetly with the letters
TNL
. He hears my step and he bolts. I chase. I shout, “Reporter! Not cops! Not MTA! I need help! A reporter!” Maybe because my voice is female, maybe because he’s just a little kid, he stops. I give him my name. I tell him what I’m doing. I say all I want is an idea how to find another writer.

“Could you take a look at these flix?” I say, holding out the snaps from Darla’s vandalism job. He blinks at me through his facemask. Maybe he’s amused that I’ve got the lingo. He looks back at the flix, lit by a safety light in the tunnel.

Finally, in a squeaky voice, he says, “I can’t recognize these others. But I’d know those curlicues anywhere. That’s RIF’s hand for sure.”

My notebook is out of my pocket fast. At long last, a genuine
lead. “Where do I find him?” I ask my kid. He tells me. I nearly kiss him. “How do we get out of here?” I ask. He leads me through the tunnel down the line. We cross onto an idle track until we’re deep under the grid. There’s a doorway there that leads to a staircase. We climb up a ladder on the wall to get to the door. We hear something move behind us.

“Come quick,” he whispers and he grabs my arm. My heart jolts, I race behind him up a narrow stairwell, circling, heading up. Next thing I know he’s pushing a metal grate above him, and we’re up and out, a fresh night breeze on my face. He pulls me out and slams down the grate. We’re back on the city streets, in the middle of nowhere.

I follow him until he finds me a new subway entrance. My heart slows. “That was pretty awesome,” I say. “You’re just great.”

He chuckles through his facemask. “You’re a funny lady. Just don’t tell RIF it was me.”

I don’t need to look at a map now to know how to get to the South Bronx. I find the door for RIF’s apartment in the James Monroe Houses, the one I got from TNL. I do the walk-up and knock. An Italian grandma gives me the one up, one down, saying, “Oh, you’re looking for our little Picasso.” Then she turns and yells,
“Carrrlo,”
as she leads me through the railroad flat. “
Carlo!
You’re finally famous just like you wanted. Come explain yourself to your adoring press.”

It turns out Carlo and I have a friend in common—a young man named Kamal Prince Tatum. It’s been a long trip just to get back to where I started. Before I leave the Bronx, I make one more stop.

No one is home at Amenia’s. So I slide my business card under the door with a note: “If I figured it out, the cops won’t be too far behind. With me, you have a chance to tell your side.”

Back in Queens after midnight, I prop myself up on Cabeza’s pillow and I loop my index finger through one of his curls. “Given the circumstances, this could be perceived as a conflict of interest,” I say.

“This? You mean the fact that you’re in bed with a source?” he says, dragging his pinky finger slowly up my thigh. “But you tracked Kamal all by your lonesome.”

His pinky continues up, making a circle around my navel. “I’m feeling less conflicted every minute.”

His pinky takes a tour of my breasts. “That’s good, because I haven’t lost any interest.”

We don’t talk for a while. Not with our voices. We drift out, and the faces and names and details and concerns of the day dissipate with a cool fan-blown breeze. I feel the sweat lift off my back. I roll with him like a stone at water’s edge,
From Here to Eternity
. I roll again, the water washing over me, back and forth, until all I’m aware of is Cabeza’s warm weight and his low, dry moan.

Afterward, I find myself another loose curl and twirl it. “Where would Wallace would be now if he were still alive?”

Cabeza is smoking; his head drops to the side. “Why, here, in bed with us, of course.”

I push another pillow under my head and turn onto my back. “I’d love to know what Wallace was like as a teacher. I bet the students adored him. I bet he had some compelling riff about the spirituality of the burner or the transcendence of the fill-in. What it means to ‘get up.’”

Cabeza strokes my belly. “You’re a quick study, baby.”

“When I was in that tunnel with that kid today, I got a taste of what it’s like. The adrenaline rush. The feeling of being chased, wanted. It was thrilling. It was the kind of feeling you’d want to have again and again. I can see why people do it. It’s not just about getting your name up. It’s not just about the fame or the props. You’re getting off the grid, all the way off.”

“You make it all sound very romantic.”

“It was romantic,” I say. “I hadn’t expected that. I wish I’d had half the chutzpah Stain did, to just keep going for it, even when nobody’s watching.” I turn to face Cabeza. “I got Wallace all wrong. When I wrote that Obit on him, I thought he was nobody. I didn’t even realize how big he was in the eighties. No wonder all these kids thought he was a hero.”

Cabeza reaches for a strand of my hair and presses it behind my ear. “Methinks my
linda
is in love with a ghost.”

He could be right. “Wallace was like us,” I say. “He tried to get inside the machine, and he realized he didn’t fit there. But he didn’t stick around and just sink into the abyss. He found another way to make his mark. I admire that.”

“Maybe that makes sense.”

“What do you think, Cabeza? Would you go with me? If I left it all behind? I’m thinking Woodstock. I’m thinking of planting a garden.”

“You see? What did I say? Sunburst is shining back through.”

“So?”

“I say finish your story,” says Cabeza. “I say, once it’s done, we can talk about the next step.”

The next morning, Amenia Wallace Tatum is waiting in The Paper’s marble foyer with Kamal Prince. He’s just as I left him: a six-foot mound of uncooked dough. Maybe a little worse for the wear: his mother seems to have dragged him by his ear two hundred blocks south. He jabs the toe of his Puma into the floor. Amenia says, “We got your note late last night. My son has something to say to you.”