Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin (18 page)

morning already ovened up and muggy. Nine shots left on the roll. Nearly all the photos taken in darkness. Two of them, at least, the flash didn’t work. Four of them were from moving trains. Another one, taken up in the Concourse, was a pure dud, he was sure of it.

He surfs the thin metal platform as the train jags south out of Grand Central. At times he gets dizzy just anticipating the next corner. That speed. That wild noise in his ears. The truth is, it frightens him. The steel thrumming through him. It’s like he has the whole train in his sneakers. Control and oblivion. Sometimes it feels like he’s the one driving. Too far left and the train might smash into the corner and there’ll be a million mangled bodies along the rail. Too far right and the cars will skid sideways and it’ll be good- bye, nice knowing you, see you in the headlines. He’s been on the train since the Bronx, one hand on his camera, the other on the car door. Feet wide for balance. Eyes tight to the tunnel wall, looking for new tags.

He’s on his way to work downtown, but to hell with those combs, those scissors, those shave bottles—he’s hoping for the morning to open up with a tag. It’s the only thing that oils the hinges of his day. Everything else crawls, but the tags climb up into his eyeballs.
PHASE
2.
KIVU
.
SUPER KOOL
223. He loves the way the letters curl, the arcs, the swerves, the flames, their clouds.

He rides the local just to see who’s been there during the night, who came and signed, how deep they got into the dark. He doesn’t have much time for the aboveground anymore, the railway bridges, the platforms, the warehouse walls, even the garbage trucks. Chumpwork that. Any chulo can do a throw- up on a wall: it’s the underground tags he’s grown to love the most. The ones you find in darkness. Way in the sides of the tunnels. The surprise of them. The deeper, the better. Lit up by the moving lights of the train and caught for just an instant so that he’s never quite sure if he’s seen them or not.
JOE
182,
COCO
144,
TOPCAT
126. Some are quick scrawls. Others go from gravel to roof, maybe two or three cans’ worth altogether, letters looping like they want to keep from ending, as if they’ve taken themselves a lungful of air. Others go five feet along the tunnel. The best of all is an eighteen- foot stretch under the Grand Concourse.

For a while they were tagging with just one color, mostly silver so it’d shine in the depths, but this summer they’ve gone up to two, three, four colors: red, blue, yellow, even black. That stumped him when he saw it first—putting a three- color tag where nobody would see it. Someone was high or brilliant or both. He walked around all day, just turning it over in his mind. The size of the flare. The depth. They were even using different- size nozzles on their cans: he could tell by the texture of the spray. He thought of the taggers scooting in and ignoring the third rail, the rats, the moles, the grime, the stink, the steel dust, the hatches, the steps, the signal lights, the wires, the pipes, the split tracks, the John 3:16’s, the litter, the grates, the puddles.

The sheer cojones of it was that they were doing it underneath the city. Like the whole of upstairs had already been painted and the only territory left was here. Like they were hitting a new frontier. This is my house. Read it and weep.

Used to be, he dug the bombings, riding in a swallowed- up train, where he was just another color himself, a paint spot in a hundred other paint spots. Slamming downtown, through the rat alleys. No way out. He’d close his eyes and stand near the doors and roll his shoulders, think of the colors moving around him. Not just anyone could bomb a whole train. You had to be in the heart of things. Scale a yard fence, hop a track, hit a car, run off, send the steel out into the bright morning without a window to see through, the whole train tagged head to toe. He even tried a few times to hang out on the Concourse, where the ’Rican and Dominican taggers were, but they had no time for him, none of them, told him he didn’t jive, called him names again,
Simplón, Cabronazo, Pendejo.
Thing was, he had been a straight- A student all year long. He didn’t want to be, but that’s how it turned out—he was the only one who hadn’t cut classes. So they laughed him off. He slumped away. He even thought of going across to the blacks on the other side of the Concourse, but decided against it. He returned with his camera, the one he got from the barbershop, went to the ’Ricans, and said he’d be able to make them famous. They laughed again and he got bitch- slapped by a twelve- year- old Skull.

But then in the middle of summer, on his way to work, he stepped between the cars; the train had stopped just outside 138th Street, and he was tottering on the steel plate, just as the train started up again, when he caught the quick blur. He had no idea what it was, some enormous silver flying thing. It stayed on his retina, an afterburn, all the way through the barbershop day.

It was there, it was his, he owned it. It would not be scrubbed off. They couldn’t put an underground wall in an acid bath. You can’t buff that. A maximum tag. It was like discovering ice.

On the way home to the projects he rode the middle of the train again, just to check it out, and there it was once more,
STEGS
33, fat and lonely in the middle of the tunnel with no other tags to brother it. It flat- fuck- out amazed him that the tagger had gone down into the tunnel and signed and then must just have walked straight back out, past the third rail, up the grimy steps, out the metal grating, into the light, the streets, the city, his name underneath his feet.

He walked across the Concourse then with a swagger, looked across at the taggers who’d been aboveground all day. Pendejos. He had the secret. He knew the places. He owned the key. He walked past them, shoulders rolling.

He began to ride the subway as often as he could, wondering if the taggers ever brought a flashlight down with them, or if they moved in teams of twos and threes, like the bombers in the train yards, one on the lookout, one with the flashlight, one to tag. He didn’t even mind going downtown to his stepfather’s barbershop anymore. At least the summer job gave him time to ride the rails. At first he pressed his face close to the windows, but then began surfing the cars, kept his gaze on the walls, looking for a sign. He preferred to think of the taggers working alone, blind to the light, except for a match here and there, just to see the outline, or to jazz up a color, or to fill in a blank spot, or to curve out a letter. Guerrilla work. Never more than half an hour between trains, even late at night. What he liked most were the big freestyle wraparounds. When the train went past he froze them tight in his head, and pulled them around in his mind all day long, followed the lines, the curves, the dots.

He has never once tagged a thing himself, but if he ever got a clear chance, no consequences, no stepfathersmack, no lockdown, he’d invent a whole new style, draw a little black in the blackness, a little white on deep white, or stir it up with some red, white, and blue, screw with the color scheme, put in some ’Rican, some black, go wild and stump them, that’s what it was all about—make them scratch their heads, sit up and take notice. He could do that. Genius, they called it. But it was only genius if you thought of it first. A teacher told him that. Genius is lonely. He had an idea once. He wanted to get a slide machine, a projector, and put a photograph of his father inside. He wanted to project the image all around the house, so that at every turn his mother would see her gone husband, the one she kicked out, the one he has not seen in twelve years, the one she’d swapped for Irwin. He’d love to project his father there, like the tags, to make him ghostly and real in the darkness.

It’s a mystery to him if the writers ever get to see their own tags, except for maybe one step back in the tunnel after it’s finished and not even dry. Back over the third rail for a quick glance. Careful, or it’s a couple of thousand volts. And even then there’s the possibility a train will come. Or the cops make it down with a spray of flashlights and billy clubs. Or some long- haired puto will step out of the shadows, white eyes shining, knife blade ready, to empty out their pockets, crush and gut. Slam that shit on quick, and out you go before you get busted.

He braces against the shake of the carriage. Thirty- third Street. Twenty- eighth. Twenty- third. Union Square, where he crosses the platform and switches to the 5 train, slips in between the cars, waits for the shudder of movement. No new tags along the walls this morning. Sometimes he thinks he should just buy some cans, hop off the train, and begin spraying, but deep down he knows he doesn’t have what it takes: it’s easier with the camera in his hands. He can photograph them, bring them out of the darkness, lift them up from the alleys. When the train picks up speed he keeps his camera under the flap of his shirt so it doesn’t bounce around. Fifteen pictures already gone from a roll of twenty- four. He’s not even sure any of them will come out. One of the customers in the barbershop gave him the camera last year, one of the downtown hotshots, showing off. Just handed it to him, case and all. Had no idea what to do with it. He threw it behind his bed at first, but then took it out one afternoon and examined it, started clicking what he saw.

Got to like it. Started carrying it everywhere. After a while his mother even paid for the photos to get developed. She’d never seen him so caught up before. A Minolta SR- T 102. He liked the way it fit in his hands. When he got embarrassed—by Irwin, say, or by his mother, or just coming out into the schoolyard—he could shade his face with the camera, hide behind it.

If only he could stay down here all day, in the dark, in the heat, riding back and forth between the cars, taking shots, getting famous. He heard of a girl, last year, who got the front page of
The Village Voice.
A picture of a bombed- out car heading into the tunnel at the Concourse. She caught it in the right light, half sun, half dark. The spray of headlights came straight at her and all the tags stretched behind. Right place, right time. He heard she made some serious money, fifteen dollars or more. He was sure at first it was a rumor, but he went to the library and found the back issue and there it was, with a double spread on the inside too, and her name in the bottom corner of the photos. And he heard there were two kids from Brooklyn out riding the rails, one of them with a Nikon, another with something called a Leica.

He tried it once himself. Brought a picture to
The New York Times
at the start of summer. A shot of a writer high on the Van Wyck overpass, spraying. A beautiful thing, all caught in shadow, the spray man hanging from ropes, and a couple of puffy clouds in the background. Front- page stuff, he was sure. He took a half- day from the barbershop, even wore a shirt and tie. He walked into the building on Forty- third and said he wanted to see the photo editor, he had a surefire photo, a master shot. He’d learned the lingo from a book. The security guard, a big tall moreno, made a phone call and leaned across the desk and said: “Just drop the envelope there, bro.”
“But I want to see the photo editor.”
“He’s busy right now.”
“Well, when’s he unbusy? Come on, Pepe, please?”
The security guard laughed and turned away, once, then twice, then

stared at him: “Pepe?”
“Sir.”
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
“Come on, kid. How old?”
“Fourteen,” he said, eyes downcast.
“Horatio José Alger!” said the security guard, his face open with

laughter. He made a couple of phone calls but then looked up, eyes hooded, as if he already knew: “Sit right there, man. I’ll tell you when he passes.”

The lobby of the building was all glass and suits and nice smooth calf muscles. He sat for two straight hours until the guard gave him a wink. Up he went to the photo editor and thrust the envelope in his hand. The guy was eating half a Reuben sandwich. Had a piece of lettuce on his teeth. Would have been a photograph himself. Grunted a thanks and walked out of the building, off down Seventh Avenue, past the peep shows and the homeless vets, with the photo tucked under his arm. He followed him for five blocks, then lost him in the crush. And then he never heard a thing about it after that, not a thing at all. Waited for the phone call but it didn’t come. He even went back to the lobby at the end of three shifts, but the security guard said he could do nothing more. “Sorry, my man.” Maybe the editor lost it. Or was going to steal it. Or was going to call him any minute. Or had left a message at the barbershop and Irwin forgot. But nothing happened.

He tried a Bronx circular after that, a shitty little neighborhood rag, and even they flat-out said no: he heard someone chuckling on the other end of the telephone. Someday they’d come crawling up to him. Someday they’d lick his sneakers clean. Someday they’d be clambering over themselves to get at him. Fernando Yunqué Marcano. Imagist. A word he liked, even in Spanish. Made no sense but had a nice ring to it. If he had a card, that’s what he would put on it.
FERNANDO Y
.
MARCANO
.
IMAGIST
.
THE

There was a guy he saw once on television who made his money knocking bricks out of buildings. It was funny, but he understood it in a way. The way the building looked different afterward. The way the light came through. Making people see differently. Making them think twice. You have to look on the world with a shine like no one else has. It’s the sort of thing he thinks about while sweeping the floor, dunking the scissors, stacking the shave bottles. All the hotshot brokers coming in for a short back and sides. Irwin said there was art in a haircut. “Biggest gallery you’re ever going to get. The whole of New York City at your fingertips.” And he would think, Ah, just shut up, Irwin. You ain’t my old man. Shut up and sweep. Clean the comb bottles yourself. But he was never quite able to say it. The disconnect between his mouth and his mind. That’s where the camera came in. It was the unspoken thing between him and the others, the brush- off.