Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,84
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