A Little Trouble with the Facts (17 page)

Wicked Rick’s can hissed and hissed, joining the sound of Clu’s hissing above, like two instruments in duet. He continued on with the
T,
making long strokes up and down, then side to side. The red paint dripped where it went on thickest, as if the wall were sweating blood.

“You want to try it?” he said.

“What?”

“You want to write a letter of Stain’s name?”

I took a step back. “Oh, no, I can’t draw a line. I’d…I’d mess it up.”

He handed me the can. “You can do it,” he said. “It’s not tough. You just need to keep your hand steady. You can do that, right?”

“Sure, I can, but I…”

Clu looked down from the scaffolding to watch, slightly bemused.

“Shake it,” said Rick. I did, just as fast as he had before. Clink clink clink clink. The can was cold and heavier than I’d anticipated. I felt the marble somewhere in the bottle knocking back and forth. “Aim the mouth at the wall and stay within the lines. Ever paint your bicycle? Just keep a steady hand.”

I positioned the can over the outlined
A
and pressed down on the paint cap. I heard the satisfying hiss and the tip of my index finger went cold and wet and even a little numb. I did as Rick said and kept within the lines. I finished the letter and stepped back from the wall. I hadn’t made a perfect letter
A,
but it wasn’t a disaster. I gave the paint can back to Rick and he cleaned up the edges.

“You ever seen someone paint a memorial wall before?” Rick asked.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

“We’ve done them all over the city. We get all kinds of commissions for them, mostly when a body dies young, someone gets shot, gets AIDS. We make a wall and it stays there so people can come by and pay their respects. It’s like an epitaph of this person’s life. It’s for the community.”

I was reminded of what Cabeza had said about all the graffiti writers he’d known, how few of them were still alive, how many were in jail or dead. Clu and Wicked Rick were in their forties and still alive, and working, maybe some of the last survivors of
the early years of subway art. They’d done it by painting legal murals on sanctioned walls with commissions from corporations. I glanced around, wondering if there were snipers on the elevated subway platform, if any of the passing low-riders could be drive-bys. Did these guys have targets on their backs?

Rick continued painting the
I
and the
N,
using up a can of paint and tossing it to the base of the wall with the other empties. Then he picked up a can of pink paint, accenting the edges of the letters. And after that, he used a can of white, miraculously making the letters pop out into three-dimensional space. I saw now that the
T
was painted as a crucifix.

“This right here,” he said, pointing to the words
Graffiti is a crime; the crime is insubordination
. “It was one of Stain’s slogans. He didn’t want his students to be co-opted by galleries like he’d been. He wanted them to keep graff on the streets, to use it as a tool. ‘A tactic to overthrow the ruling class,’ he said. He wanted that to be his legacy, but he saw what was coming down those tracks at him. He knew about that fire, the one you’re talking about. He told me he thought someone would try to pin it on him.”

Rick stopped and looked up at Clu for confirmation of something. Clu was like his silent conscience. “At the time, when he was talking about it, I didn’t take it serious. Malcolm talked a lot of shit sometimes and some of it was just jaw flapping. I’ll tell you what; now I wish I’d taken it more serious.”

Rick picked up Krylon Slate Gray and started painting the width of the tombstone subway train. It sounded like a lot of people didn’t listen when Wallace talked. How come? Boy who cried wolf? Or maybe he saw too many wolves. “He thought he was in danger?”

Rick backed away from the wall, assessing the work he’d done on the tombstones. “You know what’s messed up?” he said. “He asked us to do his wall. We’d been out of touch for a while because
he was pissed we’d taken a commission from Glenfiddich; he always gave us grief about liquor ads. But last week, we were down on 138th Street working on the wall and he came by to watch. I thought he was joking around, maybe to show all was forgiven, and he was like ‘Yo, when I die, I want you to do my wall.’”

“Hand me that Tuscan Sunset, will you, man?” Clu called down from the scaffolding.

Wicked Rick rummaged through a duffel bag. “Don’t see it. How about Saddle Tan?”

“No, man. The Tuscan Sunset. I know we brought it. I put it in there myself.”

He searched around some more. “Oh, here it is. Here you go,” Wicked Rick said, passing the brown-topped can up to Clu. “You remember that?” he said, looking up to Clu. “A couple of weeks ago? We’re all hanging out joking around, ‘blah, blah, blah,’ and he was talking something about the new space, how he hoped some of the kids would take it over, now that the mortgage was done. I said, ‘Don’t get all morose, now, man.’ But he kept asking me about his wall; he wanted me to say it out loud, that we’d promise. I kidded him on it for a while then finally I said, ‘Right, yo. Who else would do your wall? Nobody else around here can even
stand
you.’”

Rick laughed a few notes before his chin dropped to his chest. He seemed to be watching something invisible snake its way through the pavement. He scratched his neck and the Tasmanian devil squirmed.

He and Clu made eye contact. “Two weeks,” Clu said.

“He was expecting something to happen to him?” I asked.

“Maybe not. Maybe it’s just a coincidence. I don’t know what people know,” Wicked Rick said. “We once knew a guy named Tommy Buffo from the neighborhood. You remember him, Clu? He went and shut down his whole T-shirt factory one day and asked us if we’d do his wall. Then a week later, heart attack.
Boom. Gone. Couldn’t have known it was coming, could he? Not possible, right? But then, he’s dead. Just like that. Got everything squared away. How do you make sense of that?”

“It’s no good to try,” said Clu, softly. “Some people just know shit.”

“Maybe Stain knew something,” Rick said to me. “Maybe he thought he was being set up. Maybe it had nothing to do with that Chelsea gallery or anything. I had a dream once that Ruff came after me—another graffiti kid, thought I was buffing him, but I wasn’t. After that dream, I was pretty sure for a week there was going to be a memorial wall for me.”

We stood around in silence for a while. It was hard to look at Wallace’s face, up so close, so large, without feeling sad that I’d never gotten to meet the man in person. I asked Clu if I could look at the portrait he was using to paint the face. He handed it down, wordlessly.

“What did Wallace have against what you do?” I asked Rick, looking at the color photo of Wallace in a gold frame.

Rick laughed. “Ha. Everything. He used to say, ‘You’re complicit with our oppressors, man.’ But we go way back. We had real love.”

Though I’d looked at a lot of pictures of Stain, I still wanted to keep looking. There was something behind those heavy-lidded eyes that seemed to have the answer to something. In the new picture, I saw a mature man, one who had lived through disappointments, and who now knew how to take them. He had the eyes of a father with sons that are getting into the same kind of trouble he used to get into. This Wallace, just before he died, looked to me like a responsible man, a trustworthy type. Not at all the rabble-rouser Rick described.

“So, what are you going to be able to do for us?” Rick said. “You going to be able to get this into your paper? You have enough to go on?”

I told Rick the outlines of my plan: I didn’t have answers yet. But I had enough good questions to warrant investigation and usually that was good enough for an editor to give the go-ahead. Then I could really start sniffing around, even on company time. I could ask some cop-shop reporters for backup. My working title: “The Bronx Burns All Over Again”; the story would be about the fire at the Darla Deitrick warehouse wiping out eighties art by Bronx artists, how that incensed Stain, and how maybe he’d been pestering Darla about the pictures, just before he got dead. “If I’m right about my hunches,” I told Rick, “I could probably report it out all the way to the murder. I’m not saying I know who was responsible, but this at least gives me a chance to try and find out.”

There it was, the word
murder.
It was the first time I’d said it with the conviction that I could make it stick. Rick didn’t flinch. It seemed to confirm to him that I could be trusted. “Here,” he said, dumping the spray cans out of two milk crates and dragging the crates to the curb. “Let’s sit a minute and talk this through. You want me to get you a Coke from Diaz or something? How about a slice?”

I
was looking at Buzz Phipps’s BMW face. It was parked next to a gleaming SUV known as Molly Blossom, the chatelaine of Style, or what she still called the Ladies’ Desk. She managed the house, kept the books, did the matchmaking, and saw to it that the wedding page included at least one Smith College graduate each month. Women all over Manhattan would’ve handed over their firstborn to get into her nuptials column.

I’d followed Buzz up the central staircase, through a narrow hallway just past the fourth-floor elevator bank. I wanted to get him alone to have a chance to lay out the whole pitch, just as I’d worked it up with Wicked Rick, something with a big sweep, a long timeline. Buzz had always liked stories that reached.

Molly departed and I figured I’d pounce. I took a deep breath and went over my pitch once again: If graffiti is passé, why is one of New York’s hottest dealers moving so many pieces of it around behind the scenes? Someone’s buying. It would be a who’s who of the Bronx’s artistic culture past and present. That’s right. I’d just about screwed up my courage when I got to Buzz’s desk and saw that he was occupied with Tracy Newton.

“Now, right here, you’ll want to get a quote from Chef Le Touffé,” he was telling her. “And I want you to put in his real name too. What is it again? Leonard Schwartz? Got to love it! And see if you can get him to say which investment bankers were
drinking the Bordeaux. Was this one of those twenty-eight-thousand-dollar wine tabs? Get the figures. Someone’s got receipts.”

“Well, look who it is. Valerie Vane!” said Tracy, in a tinny screech that the entire Style room couldn’t fail to hear. “What a surprise!” She was reclined in Buzz’s swivel chair at his desk, a nail file balanced between her two index fingers. Buzz didn’t give me a double-cheeked kiss. He didn’t usher Tracy out of his seat and offer it to me. Instead, he looked nervous as the room erupted in twittering. A line of stilettoed legs uncrossed and then crossed again all at once, like Rockettes.

The fashionistas in Style weren’t on par with the girls at
Vogue, Glamour,
and
Vanity Fair,
our doppelgangers at the Condé Nast magazine empire just across the street. The Conde Nasties. The Paper’s Style reporters made half as much, worked twice as hard, and weren’t quite as pretty—hips a little too hippy, forearms a little too hairy, noses a little too nosey. As a result, they were all a little grim and a little mean.

“Hi, Tracy,” I said. “Nice to see you again.”

“I’ve been meaning to come downstairs and say hello,” she said, cheerfully, in the manner of an overscheduled homemaker. “You’re one of the
serious
reporters now,” she said without a hint of irony. “I think that’s really so wonderful.”

It was her amiability that I found offensive.

“It’s a great challenge,” I said, and looked back at Buzz. He’d once told me confidentially that Tracy was a “decent writer without any oomph!” and she was “too eager to make the scene, and not eager enough to dig for news.” Now he was beaming at her. She was seated in his chair, eating his natural cheese curls, working, no doubt, on the next Sunday cover piece. And, damn her, she wasn’t even lording it over me.

“What are you working on?” I asked Tracy.

“Oh, nothing important,” she bleated. “A sidebar to my ‘Ex
pense Account, New York’ story, about all the hanky-panky that goes on the corporate tab. It’s fun, actually.”

The fashionista kick line uncrossed and crossed its legs again, with twittering enough for Buzz to get especially antsy. He stood up straight and moved a step away from Tracy.

“So, Valerie,” he said. “What brings you up here?”

“I came up to pitch you a story,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “Of course. Any time! What is it?” Buzz was glad to get to the business at hand. He folded his arms and placed his right pointer on his cheek, as if he’d been summoned to hear someone declaim a poem. “Go ahead,” he said. “I’m listening.”

“Okay, well, lately I’ve been spending some time uptown and in the Bronx,” I started. I hadn’t prepared myself for a standing presentation. I thought I’d be able to warm up a little with some catch-up chitchat, ease into the pitch, maybe even with a little L’Occitane.

“The Bronx?” Buzz’s brow did a little dance before he settled on an expression. “Okay. That’s interesting.”

“There’s a group of artists.” I was still hesitant. “Graffiti artists…”

The word
graffiti
didn’t reverberate well in Style, as if Rx had suddenly settled himself in Molly Blossom’s lap. Maybe I should’ve used the words
public art
or
conceptual art,
even just plain old
art.
But now that I’d begun the pitch, it would’ve been fatal to cut out. A lot of faces were peeking up over the walls of cubicles, like cats on a backyard fence where there’s raw herring.

“These artists may not have gotten a lot of attention in the past, but they’ve come together around the death of this one graffiti artist. Actually, they called Curtis Wright about it too, and he was saying it might be a good story for me, a little, I don’t know…something worth pursuing. His name is…
was…Stain and they’re working on memorials for him all over the city.” Every word that came out of my mouth felt like a spade full of fresh dirt. I was shoveling myself a little hole.

“Curtis liked this?” said Buzz, waiting for the punch line. “So they’re making graffiti murals? We’ve done some pieces on muralists before.”

“The thing is, a number of them are connected to a single gallery in Chelsea, the Darla Deitrick gallery, or they were at one time. And it looks like she might have gotten rid of some of their work under false pretenses.”

“So the graffiti artists say?”

“Yes. But I’ve got sources who would go on the record with it.”

“Graffiti artists?” Clearly not the kind of sources Buzz would trust.

“No, well, some of them. These graffiti artists made works about twenty years ago and gave them to Deitrick to sell on consignment. She never sold them—not then, anyway—and these guys think she’s really taken them for a ride. Well, see, it’s important because this fellow who died, this Stain, he used to run a crew of, well, guerrilla art activists. This was back in the eighties. And I suppose in a way…”

The more the words came out of my mouth, the more I wanted to lie down in that hole and bury myself. At least the dirt would be warm, unlike my Style room reception.

Buzz was thinking it over. “Darla has been big news lately. I’m intrigued, but we can’t exactly go after her because a few graffiti vandals are upset about something. What kind of substantiation do you have?”

As soon as he asked, I considered taking my shovel and running. My primary source for the story so far was Blondie, the club kid on Ecstasy, who surely wouldn’t go on the record against Darla. My backup sources were graffiti writers, some of whom I’d never met and who probably didn’t much like the light of day.
With no way to answer his question, I shifted my pitch from the specific to the general.

“Okay, so maybe we don’t focus directly on Darla. But I’ve got a lot on these graffiti writers. Just think, Buzz. Style
does
the outer boroughs.” I used both my hands to outline the panoramic lens of it all. “We get graffiti done right, big colorful characters, big splashy shots of art. Half the page is old school, and half is new school. We get a timeline of graffiti art highlights from the seventies to the present, starting with Tonka 184. We could print a map of the city’s graffiti landmarks. And we could print a glossary of graffiti terms, like
throw-up
and
burner
. We could show people exactly how to read the complicated lettering. It would be graffiti soup to nuts.”

It was a horrendous pitch, ethnic tourism at its most banal—Rudyard Kipling on
Beat Street
. I felt exactly the way he did when he finally said, “Graffiti now?” His BMW face looked crumpled after a crash. He squinted so tight his wrinkles miraculously reappeared. “Valerie, you came all the way upstairs for the first time in months to pitch me
this
story?”

It did sound utterly absurd, even to me. “Well, I—”

“
Style,
sweetheart. That means
fashionable
. I really wish we had more space for the underclass, but our mandate here is strictly
high
culture,
high
society. You get the gist. Gosh, it sure has been a long time since we’ve worked together. I know it’s easy to forget all this stuff when you’re in the hard news sections of the paper. Your idea has some merit and the glossary sounds cute—really cute—but it’s a bit too, er, down-market for us, don’t you think?” The beautiful polish and finesse of his voice took off some of the edge, but it was clear that he thought I’d lost my mind.

The room was a cold bathtub of silence.

Then, suddenly, he laughed. “Oh, Val, I forgot how funny you are! Oh! That
is
funny! I mean, next you’re going to suggest I do a story about
bell-bottoms,
right? Ha!”

I hesitated. “Yeah,” I said. “Got ya!”

Buzz threw his head back and laughed heartily, as if he’d just been relieved of some terrible burden. He sang, “Gotcha, gotcha,” as he tried to poke me in the stomach. “What a relief,” he sighed. “For a minute, I really thought you
meant
that!” Heavy sigh. “So, what really brings you up?”

“Oh, you know,” I said. “Just missed you! Wanted to see your face!” I’d tried to play along with him, but I wasn’t convincing. An awkward silence passed between us like a freight train as he realized anew that I’d been earnest all along.

“Aw.” Buzz pursed his face. “You know how much I detest sincerity. Of course, the door here is always open to you, when you’ve got the okay from Jaime and Battinger. We
love
your ideas!”

Then I swallowed hard and walked out of Style, back down the corridor to the elevators. Ever solicitous, Buzz was behind me. “Val, listen.” He waited with me at the elevator. “You know how it is, though. We really need something
fresh
.”

I paused in front of the open elevator door and gazed at him. The old Valerie would have said that she didn’t really care about graffiti. That all she wanted in life was to write about trophy wives and toy poodles, multimillion-dollar second homes and celebrity divorces, to anoint the next It girl and condemn the city’s worst cad. She didn’t care about outer boroughs or disenfranchised teenagers or
black
people, for God’s sake.
Please
don’t make me walk out of Style again, she would have shouted.
I’ll do anything!

But I looked at Buzz’s face, shaped and buffed with all the care a mortician gives a cadaver, and I thought, Did he just say
fresh
? What does Buzz know from
fresh
? Fresh like a flower? Pluck it and put it in a vase and it’s only a matter of days before it’s withered. Before its leaves drop all over the table and its stem smells rank.

“Fresh, huh?” I stepped onto the elevator and pushed the button for Obits. “Buzz, fresh is just rotten waiting to happen.”

The door slid shut on Buzz’s wide eyes and gaping mouth, and on my ride down that single floor in the elevator it became clear as a sunny-day vista from the Statue of Liberty’s crown that I wasn’t going to write for Style ever again.

Cabeza called around noon and said he was in the neighborhood. I was so happy to hear from him I almost jumped through the phone. He gave me the address of Manganaro, an Italian deli on Ninth Avenue near Thirty-seventh Street. “I’m taking you to lunch.”

The sign outside said
GROSSERIA ITALIANA
and there was a skip in time over the threshold to the turn of the last century. Salamis hung from the ceiling; the display cases were packed with Italian cookies, cheeses, homemade foccaccia, giardiniera salads, and hunks of proscuitto de Parma. It would’ve made Michael Corleone feel right at home.

The deli was in the way back, and that’s where I found Cabeza, tucked under a café table, playing with his camera. Before he looked up, I kissed him so hard I almost knocked him over.

“I bought us a foot-long sub,
especialidad de la casa,
with soprasetta, mozzarella, and peppers,” he said, smiling. “I’ll bet a hardy girl like you could handle one on your own, but it was too much for me, so I had them cut it in half.”

“Good,” I said. “I’m famished.” I sat down and took my half, ripping off an edge of the sandwich with my teeth. I felt like a laborer, just finished with a day cutting stones. I gulped down some of the fancy Italian lemon soda he’d also bought me, and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “Well, I did it. I ruined my chances of getting a story in Style.”

Cabeza looked at me quizzically. “Oh?”

“Yep,” I said. “It feels great. I wish I’d done it earlier.”

I took another bite of the sandwich and put it down. It was so large—even half of it—that I could be eating it for weeks. Maybe I’d do just that. Sit here in the quiet hole-in-the-wall genuine Italian deli and eat a sandwich for a few weeks. Forget about everything else. “But you know what? I don’t care. I never saw it before so clearly. That room! Those women! They’re horrifying. The way that everything has to be served up to them with ribbons on a Tiffany silver platter before they’ll even take a whiff—and even so, it’s got to be as bland as Tibetan food before they’ll be willing to taste it. Buzz Phipps has no idea what New York is all about. He cabs it down from his Upper West Side apartment every morning, without even looking out the window, then he cabs from hotspot to hotspot in the evenings so he doesn’t get his spats dirty. And he thinks he’s writing about style. Well, I have news for him: style is not just what the Montauk set is wearing this year. What about skateboard punks? Are you going to tell me that’s not style? Even Bowery junkies have style. How come that’s not in our section?”

I picked up my sandwich and started chewing again. The savory blend hit the spot. I chugged a little more Italian soda and looked up at Cabeza, who had his hands folded, watching me.