Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,83

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