All Involved (34 page)

Still though, a virgin bus all to myself? A virgin GMC bus with the tinted side windows I'm about to hit with a streak I just cut last night?

My God, dude.

I feel like I died, went to heaven, strolled through them pearly gates and Marilyn Monroe just begged me to sex her.

My heart's still going crazy wild fast in my chest, smacking on my ribs, as I hit a destination on the front windshield. Fucking brand-new streak, dude. I uncap it and it smells like Windex, perfectly like Windex.

Tagging the windshield's called a destination cuz that's where the name of the destination is on the bus, at the top, above the driver's head. But that's blacked out right now cuz the bus isn't on. But right then I decide to scribe first instead.

I pull out my scriber and catch a big one right where the driver's face would be, going F.R.E.E.R! with all kinds of punctuation and everything as I dig the glass out, but here's the crazy shit: I do it
backward
. That way, everybody in the bus will see it as they're going, and people in front of the bus looking in their rearviews will see it too!

I wait for a sec when I'm done hitting it. If there's gonna be sirens, if cops are gonna swoop up, it's gonna be right now. I wait ten seconds, and I wait ten more, and then it's shopping spree time. Time to go crazy.

I take my mean streak I did up with white, yellow, and blue, then stand on the front bumper and go as fucking big as I can. I go top to bottom, taking the whole glass, going F-R-E on the left side, and then skipping the little black bar that splits the windshield in two, and then I go E-R.

I spend an extra few seconds making sure every one of my angles is tight. I fix up the last
R
and make it so sharp the legs could cut somebody. After that, I put
x
's on the right legs of my
R
's, like in a pharmacy, cuz my style is like medicine.

Under all that, I tag my crew name.

I never had this much time before.
Ever
.

Anytime before this when I hit a destination, it was just a little one on the left outside, and I hit those when Fat John's running interference, arguing with the driver about transfers and I'm leaning and scribbling it all unperfect. But this? This is a masterpiece, dammit! This is what FREER's all about.

I hit two big outsides on the left side of the bus, one letter per tinted-out window. I do some throw-up letters with crisp, right-angle outlines like some high school letterman jacket shit, and on the entrance-and-exit side doors I do some vertical handwriting styles where I loop like fucking crazy and I might as well be twirling spaghetti with my streak. I'm so into it that it's not until I'm done with the front entrance door that I notice the driver left his fucking RTD jacket, which, trust me, is a huge fucking score in the graffiti community. He must've left so quick he forgot it.

I don't know how long it takes me to kick the bottom glass out of the door, but when it's all the way broken, I wriggle in and grab the jacket. I shrug it on and it's one size too small but I don't even care. I keep it on cuz it's like wearing the pelt of a bear I killed. That's how much rep it's worth. As I'm tripping on that, I realize doing a scribe on the inside would be insane, so I knock
another
one out on the windshield right next to where the ticket machine is, so everybody will have to see it every time they ride, and then I duck back out.

The right side of the bus I hit fast in a big one-liner, which means I just hit the tip of my spray paint and spray in one long line, not picking up as I transition from letter to letter with my silver Krylon. I kinda cheat though cuz I never done it before, and the whole thing ends a bit before the last wheel well, so I go back and put a few loops and arrows to make it look like it's flying and everything.

If I had more time, I'd make it a whole piece, but it's not safe just sitting out here. Every second that's passing is about to give me a heart attack. I feel like cops could roll up at any time cuz this still stinks like a setup. But I can't help myself. I saved the best for last.

On the back of the bus, the part that's facing the street, I get up on the bumper and I lay down a sketch of my letters in silver and fill in like a motherfucker. I keep it real blocky, like it's a big silver mirror on the black back of the bus that looks like blinds, and you've got to shoot up underneath them to make it look solid all around.

On top of my silver fills, I do thick black outlines on the letters, writing E-R-N-I-E. It pops so hard that you can prolly see the black outlined letters with shining silver middles from two football fields away if you've got an angle on it. I even spray little cracks and crevices over the top of the letters so it looks like they're rocks kinda. In the bottom leg of the last
E
in Ernie's name, I do an R.I.P. in black. After that, I stash everything back in my bag and grab my disposable camera out.

I start snapping pictures from all angles. Front. Side. Back. Other side. Low. From far away. Up close. And it's when I'm up close that I feel eyes on me and turn around.

About thirty feet back, there's a little kid watching me from a bank parking lot.

I take my headphones off and turn his way.

He's twelve, maybe thirteen. He's got dark eyebrows though, and big, dull-looking eyes. His hair's all slicked back and he's dressed like a little gee, but he's breathing with his mouth open. He's a mouth breather.

I give him a look that he doesn't respond to, so I say, “You want to hit this up?”

I mean the bus. But he doesn't move. He just keeps staring at me
so I tell him to come over and he does. The kid's right next to me when he looks at my ERNIE piece and says, “What is it?”

“It's a tribute piece,” I say.

“Who for?”

I look at it, and then I look at the kid, and I'm thinking,
Is he this stupid?
But he's squinting so I just figure, fuck it, might as well state the obvious.

“A guy I knew named Ernie,” I say. “He passed away a couple days ago.”

The kid nods at that and doesn't follow up with anything, so I say, “You not interested in graffing at all?”

“Naw, not really,” the kid says. “I seen the gun in your belt while you worked though. I'm interested in that. How much?”

“I dunno,” I say as I measure the kid up and pull a number out that I figure he can't afford, “a hundred bucks?”

“I got fifty,” he says, and I watch him pull a fifty-dollar bill off a wad that has a few more on it.

“That's cool,” I say, like,
no thanks
. “What, are you slanging for somebody or something? Where'd you get that wad anyways?”

He doesn't say yes and he doesn't say no. He just holds his hand out with a hundred in it this time.

“Take it before I change my mind,” he says.

I give him a look, like,
Who you trying to mess with, little man?

But I figure, you know what? Fuck it. I trade him the gun for the cash and pocket it. The kid looks at the pistol. He turns it over in his hands before taking it with his left, pointing at me, and cocking the hammer back.

My smile drops off my face, not cuz I'm scared, but mainly cuz I can't believe this little banger just tried to pull that on me.

“Give me the hundred back and everything else you got,” he says. “Now.”

I'm up to $438. If this little dude thinks he's getting his hundred back, he's stupider than he looks, and that's pretty damn stupid.

I say, “You know that shit isn't loaded, right?”

He eyes me like he thinks I'm trying to trick him.

“Check it,” I say. “I'll wait.”

I take a step back so he can feel safe to check without me taking it away from him. He pulls the cylinder out, and I see him put it right up to his face. I see his brown eye in all its dullness through one of the empty holes. He blinks.

“Make sure you buy twenty-two-caliber bullets for it,” I say. “That's the only size it takes. I'd say hit up the Gun Store and go in the quarter bin for the littler ones, but I heard that place burned down.”

“Yeah, it did,” he says. “So twenty-two caliber?”

“Yup,” I say.

“Okay,” he says.

Out in the distance, I hear a helicopter humming.

I say to the kid, “You got named yet or what?”

He looks around. “Maybe,” he says.

I'm guessing that means no, and I'm about to hit him with one to think about when this woman comes stomping around the corner of the little medical center across the street. Wearing a short-ass skirt and heels that have been worn down from too much walking, she's got black hair and she's older than me, looking midtwenties and torn up. Even from a distance I can see sores on her mouth and a black eye.

“Hey,” she says to the back of his head and he doesn't even turn, “we going or what?”

I'm not trying to be rude, but I say the first thing that comes to mind, “That your mom?”

“Fool, you better shut the fuck up,” he says with a snarl. “That's my
fresa,
homes. That bitch sucks my dick.”

Jesus, I fucking hope not, not with all them sores. But I got nothing to lose, so I say, “Man, shut the fuck up. You're so young, you can't even get a fucking hard-on.”

He grabs his belt and says, “
Whatever,
homes.”

His
fresa
says something too. “Yeah, he can. And it's
good
too.”

Fresa
means strawberry, slang for the type of woman who trades sex for drugs, usually crack or coke. Man, I'm so grossed out by all this I can't do anything but half smile at this kid, mainly just for the size of his bravado. This little motherfucker
is
a dealer, and maybe a pimp too. That's where that money came from, the money in my pocket right now. She earned it the hard way.

“I'm gonna call you Watcher,” I say to him, “cuz you been watching. Keep it if you want. Throw it out if you don't.”

He looks like he's about to talk shit, but he just licks his lips, nods his head back, and points his chin at me instead.

“Watcher,” he says, like he's trying the name on for size.

“Yeah,” I say, “it's a good one. You take care.”

I turn and head out.

As I'm going I hear his
fresa
asking his permission to go get a peanut butter shake at Tom's Burgers. He's starting a sentence with “Bitch, shut the fuck up . . .” when I'm getting in the car and peeling the fuck out.

The kid watches me go like he's trying to memorize my face, like he thought I just got over on him with the gun sale and with what I said, and he's never gonna forget it. I kinda laugh then, cuz, man, I really don't need this shit.

L.A. has gone fucking crazy. All the way crazy.

When I'm back on the street and going, far enough away that no cop can connect me up to the bus, I breathe and think about my day, how my plan didn't really go like I thought, how I should prolly just take this here money and run. It has sense to it.

I think every guy that ever did anything on the street, even if he did a lot, there's always a gap between how much he wanted to do and how much he actually
did,
and I'm feeling that right now, feeling like a failure, even though I just made a whole bus my own personal graffiti playground. That shit is going to be legend when people see it. And people will ask about Ernie. They'll wonder who he was. And for a moment, he'll be alive in their minds. But I'll be gone.

People will talk about me for a while after this. I'm sure Fat John
and Tortuga will see it, but I still decide to make prints and copies of the photographs and mail them back to them. I think about the bus a bit then, how crazy that luck was.

Maybe it's a good good-bye, but maybe it's not a big enough ending, not over-the-top enough. People will prolly say I ranked out, but whatever. I never signed up for that other thing, that gangster thing. I always just wanted to be free. I just wanted to go all-city, hitting Hollywood and Downtown and Venice and writing ©'s under my name everywhere I go, like OILER and DCLINE, cuz it's my golden time with just turning seventeen.

I figured I had a year of hitting it hard, and if I got caught, how much time could I ever do on a graffiti charge? I mean, prolly I'd get a couple hundred hours community service and a few weekends of JAWS, that's Juvenile Alternative Work Services, and at worst I'd do a little bit of juvie, but no county time, nothing serious, nothing on my permanent record. This was my time to take it all the way and be famous and now it's gone, just like Ernesto.

Something people don't understand about graffiti is it's a way to be somebody, it's a way to piss people off, and it's a way to claim your territory, but it's
also
a way to remember. And I did that last one for Ernesto and the city that killed him. ERNIE R.I.P. the back of that bus says. It's letters, sure, but it means something more.

It's a middle finger and a headstone all rolled into one.

After I get my one-way ticket to Phoenix for $49 on special at the Long Beach Greyhound bus station, I call Gloria and tell her where she can pick her car up. Surprise, surprise, she's not happy
at all
. She tells me she's gonna kill me, and I'm cool with that cuz it's definitely not the killing the monsters in my neighborhood would do if they saw me again and I said I didn't want to join up.

Gloria says, “You made me call my
mother
looking for you, Jermy. I swear—”

I got to cut her off.

“I had to, Gloria,” I say. “I'm sorry. Really, I am. I didn't mean to ruin anything for your date, but someday I'll tell you why and you'll totally get it.”

She's legit mad. I can hear it in her voice when she says, “You better tell me why right now.”

“I'll call you,” I say, “when I'm safe where I'm going.”