dontravis.com
blog post #361
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| Courtesy of Prexels |
The
posting this week is my adaptation of Mark Wildyr’s original story published
several years ago in a STARbooks anthology called Homo Thugs. Yes, Mr.
Wildyr gave me permission to fiddle with his writing. Hope you enjoy it.
*****
Adapted from a Story by Mark Wildyr
I seen Dooper down
at the old railroad roundhouse this morning. He ain’t been around much since
Mayor Dude declared war on graffiti. I don’t mind Slick Feathers bashing
tagbanger gangs or toys or even throw-up guys, so long as he leaves me alone.
I’m a piece artist, and I ain’t in no gang. Hell, I’m my own gang. I live for
the art, man. The art! I got skill. Damned near half that big mural on
the concrete arroyo Mayor Dude promoted a few years back as a place for paint
artists is my work. Earned me some fame; local papers run flicks of my stuff.
But that ain’t the
point. Art’s what I do; who I am. I’m Up! I’m All City! Go anywhere in
Albuquerque and you’ll see my tag. Even if Mayor Dude gets out a army of
uptight volunteers to scrub ever neighborhood ever frigging week, you’ll catch
my work if you look for it. Dangle’s my sign, but I do it wildstyle so nobody
who don’t read graffiti’s got a clue. The handle comes from the way I write
with lots of drips. Not the wack, accidental dribbles a toy makes, but bold drips
I draw on purpose.
Dooper’s a black
kid my own age, but he hangs with a crowd that calls themselves the Highsiders.
APD calls them gangsters, but really they’s just dudes that like to sling
paint. Might be into boosting their spray cans, but who don’t? Dooper’s a fair
writer, hisself, but he ain’t as good as me. His real handle’s Sooper Dooper,
but it got shortened to Dooper real quick ‘cause he ain’t as fly as he claims.
Before Slick Feathers got reelected Mayor Dude by declaring war on graffiti, I
used to trip over Dooper’s raggedy ass all the time. We battled more’n once in
hard get-up duels with some of the crews acting like judges. Coupla times they
screwed up and said his work was better, but mostly they done it right and give
me the burn. Got so intense there was some bad blood. We scrapped once, and I
give him a mouse, but it looked more like a purple prune on his chocolate skin.
Fucker split my lip and wrenched my arm so I couldn’t bomb for a week. I didn’t
mind that so much, but it put me wrong with the Highsiders, and some of them
dudes is dangerous. Had to watch my back after that.
This morning, he
was hitting up a piece on a inside wall of the roundhouse. The big abandoned
railroad engine turnaround is a cool place for taggers. Dooper’s mural was
pretty wild, if you go for old fashioned bubble letters and 3-D styles. Me, I
like blockbuster with a little computer mixed in. I do fades and clouds and fly
colors when I bomb. Still, old Dooper had technique, sort of.
He slunk out the
door when I showed up, so I examined his piece real hard ‘cause a couple of
colors caught my eye. Like I said, the Highsiders usually racked their paint,
but Dooper sure as shit didn’t steal Icy Grape and Jungle Green ‘cause Krylon
don’t make them no more. Blended them, likely. Done a good job, too.
I may be all about
art, but a guy’s got other needs, too… know what I mean? I ain’t no fag, but
Dooper’s long legs and bubble butt sorta get to me. I can’t just come out and
tell him that, so I laid a piece back-to-back with the work he done a few
minutes ago. Right in the middle I painted a picture message he couldn’t miss.
Wasn’t pornographic or nothing… at least not to nobody but another tagger. Just
so there wasn’t no mistake about it, I signed my tag, drips and all!
I’d come out of
there peddling my bike funny, my prick riding high and getting in the way.
Maybe I’d look up Juanito before heading home. I got in this young Mexican’s
pants a couple of years back, and him and me still get together ever few weeks.
First time I seen him, I thought he was a girl… or a boy. But he was a small,
whip-thin, full-growed man that just looked like a pretty girl.
Sorta felt sorry
for Juanito. His culture’s got all that machismo bullshit, but that
don’t mean his buddies don’t get to him, they just mess him up some after they
do. He come over a year back beat up so bad I asked why he didn’t call the
cops. He just grinned the best he could through split lips and told me he got
the whole gang… all eight of them.
Guess I’m a
rainbow sort of guy. Handsomest, buffest, manliest dude I ever seen was a
Indian. Met him five years back when I was barely eighteen. Showed up one night
when me’n some guys was setting around a campfire down by the yards swigging
beer and swapping lies. Just walked out of the night and plopped his ass down
beside us. When the beer played out, we pooled our change and AmerInd—that’s
what I called him ‘cause that’s how them anthropologists, or whatever they is,
labeled his people—donated his last quarter. Before the night was out, everbody
flaked out and headed home or to his spider-hole except me’n him. I hung around
because I was in love; he probably stayed put because he didn’t have nowhere to
go.
When AmerInd got
drunk enough, I talked him out of his britches, but he was was a mean drunk. I
never seen him again, likely went back to wherever he come from. He wasn’t no
New Mexico tribesman. Come from Montana or Wyoming or Oklahoma where they grow
them big, tall, good-looking Plains Indians.
And now, I was
hankering after old Dooper. Brown, red, black. Not bad for a white boy. Course,
I hadn’t landed the black guy yet, but I wanted him, and that’s what counted.
I got me the
sweetest setup in the State of New Mexico. A year back, I found this old,
abandoned adobe sitting right in the middle of a fallow field in the South
Valley and squatted in the dark for a couple of weeks before I fixed up the
shack and moved in permanently. Now I had a safe place to stow my piecebook and
plan out my patterns without nobody bothering me or looking over my shoulder to
bite my work before I hit it up someplace.
I slept like a
baby that night after seeing Dooper, dreaming about how he was gonna react when
he spotted his my piece beside his on the roundhouse wall. Woke up bright and
early, found enough scraps to make a breakfast, and then washed up in the old
bathtub. I decided against shaving; hell, my beard was only three days old.
When I wheeled
into the roundhouse that morning, Dooper was already there, looking up at my
piece with balled fists planted on his hips. That butt I admired was sorta
trembling, and I don’t think it was from getting hot over my art; hot under the
collar maybe. Some glass crunched beneath my boots, and he whirled like he was
ready to get it on. I tried to make it casual.
“Lo, Dooper. Wha’
cha doing?”
“Reading your
filthy work,” he snarled, white teeth gleaming. “You’re a motherfucker, Dangle!
A motherfucking motherfucker!”
“You know what
they call that? Redundancy. I remember that from—”
“Screw you’n your
fancy words! What you mean putting that up there like that?”
I’m an artist and
all that, but I never seen so many shades of black. One minute he was standing
there, a black man with sort of a mahogany hue, and then he went shoe-polish
black. Finally, he aped one a them East Indians that look like they dusted
themselves with soot. He wasn’t taking this too good.
Don’t know what
woulda happened if we didn’t hear tires scrunching on rocks right then. Cops
and Mayor Dude’s men make the rounds now and then in a losing battle to keep
bums outa the old roundhouse. I still had my bike in my hands, so I hightailed
it out a far door. I don’t know what the hell Dooper done, but I didn’t really
give a rat’s ass, neither.
*****
Well,
well, well. Competitors. Perhaps in more ways than one. If you can put up with
all the tagger talk, tune in next week to see what happens between the two.
The advance buy link for
The Voxlightner Scandal follows: http://www.dsppublications.com/books/upcoming-releases-c
Now
my mantra: Keep on reading and keep on
writing. You have something to say, so say it!
My
personal links: (Note the change in the Email address because I’m still getting
remarks on the old dontravis21@gmail.com. PLEASE DON’T USE
THAT ONE.)
Facebook:
www.facebook.com/donald.travis.982
Twitter:
@dontravis3
Buy
links to Abaddon’s Locusts:
See
you next week.
Don
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