Radiant Days (7 page)

Another hand seemed to move beside his own; the tramp’s eyes flickered into those of the girl at the Green Tavern, now a man, now a woman, now a carp that wriggled into a boy as Arthur cried out in his sleep and vainly sought to clasp it to his chest.

Washington, D.C.

APRIL-OCTOBER 1978

EVERYTHING PRETTY MUCH
went to hell after the trip to New York. Clea was pissed I’d screwed things up with Anna’s gallery. I was pissed she’d shown my pictures without asking me first. Three months later, we were still fighting over it.

“What’d you think, you were going to take your trained redneck to the big city and make a million dollars?”

“Don’t be an idiot. That could have been your ticket out, Merle.”

“Out of where? I like it here.”

“You would.”

I ignored her and squatted on the floor of my room, cleaning the nozzle of a can of yellow spray paint with a safety pin. I’d stopped drawing much, stopped going to classes, the end result being I got bounced from the Corcoran even before the semester ended. I still hadn’t told my father, not that I’d spoken to him since Christmas. Clea looked tight-lipped when I broke the news to her.

“Maybe you’re next,” I said, staring at the dismissal notice I’d received from the Dean of Students.

“You think that’s funny? You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“No. I just thought, you know, probably they’re gunning for you and maybe you should be careful.”

“God, I hope not. Marc would kill me. What a mess.”

Still, she wouldn’t stop seeing me. Less often now, as the summer passed, and we didn’t go out to eat as much. I still didn’t have a job; fortunately, by now I’d paid off my share of the Perry Street rent. To get by I scrounged change from D.C.’s myriad fountains, wading in after dark and pocketing handfuls of wet quarters and dimes. I quit smoking. Most of my meals came from the roach coaches outside the National Gallery, hot dogs with sauerkraut and a Snickers bar. Painting supplies I stole from hardware stores or auto-supply shops, though after a while I got paranoid. People were starting to recognize me. Once I had to dump a bunch of brushes and leave when I noticed a guy following me through the aisles. I started taking the 80 Metrobus over the District line to Maryland, and hit places in Mount Rainier and Hyattsville. Sometimes I’d bomb the Dumpsters behind Giant Food or Peoples Drug, and once I bombed the wall of a seedy apartment building in Queenstown frequented by biker drug dealers and students from the University of Maryland.

But most of my time I spent in Northeast D.C., where I’d paint my tag along the plywood barriers that surrounded the construction sites for new Metro stops. I tried to hit places that could be seen from a moving train, or near the bus routes shuttling people to and from work in parts of the city where the subway didn’t
run yet—Anacostia, Shaw, Georgia Avenue. These were sketchy parts of town back then, just as Perry Street was. The gentrification that would overtake the city was just beginning to creep toward the old riot corridor along H Street, and even Capitol Hill could be a dicey place after dark.

That’s what I loved about the city, though, and that’s what I loved about tagging: not just the rush of danger and hide-and-seek with the cops, but people living their lives where you could see them, the way you could back in Norville, sitting on their front stoops smoking and talking, the tropical explosion of pink and orange geraniums in window boxes in Anacostia; old men drinking on the street corners, and kids dancing to the boom and talk-back of go-go at the Washington Coliseum. I wasn’t stupid; I knew I was a skinny white girl in parts of the city where white girls didn’t go, especially if they had a Greene County accent; but I knew when to keep my head down and when to meet a gaze head-on, nod, and keep on going. I wore my baggy painter’s pants with the deep, saggy pockets, where I hid cans of spray paint and fistfuls of change. After I bombed a place I’d hightail it to the nearest Metro station and hop on the first train back downtown, so I could stare out the window and see my tag rising from rusted sheet metal or broken brick, a rayed sunburst and goldenrod letters:
RADIANT DAYS
.

It’s impossible to imagine now, but back then almost no one was doing graffiti in D.C. You’d see half-assed scrawls under bridges and around the projects, but they were mostly locker room stuff. So when
RADIANT DAYS
started showing up everywhere in OSHA yellow and orange and gold, it was like the way
the desert blooms after a year without rain: improbable, garish, miraculous. The
Georgetown Voice
even did a feature, called “Radiant Daze,” wondering about the guy who left his mark throughout the city. People wrote letters after that, some of them complaining about the rampant vandalism, others defending the work because it was “raw” and “primitive” and “vital.” Nearly everyone offered suggestions as to who the artist/vandal was—someone recently sprung from prison, or a group of streets artists from New York, or a disgruntled federal employee from the Department of Transportation.

No one thought it might be a skinny white girl from Greene County, Virginia.

Still, after a while I had company. I started to see other tags—
COOL “DISCO” DAN
;
SNOOP
, whose double
O
s became eyes in a Kilroy-type face;
GAGC
, the Georgia Avenue Go-Go Crew.

I never ran into any of them, and I was always respectful of their work. I never again bombed over another artist’s tag the way I had SAMO’s, though sometimes I’d see a big black
V
painted over a tag, the mark of vandal squads from the DCPD or Amtrak. This meant the cops knew who you were, and a later
Voice
story talked about raids on people’s homes, cops busting in to confront parents over their kids’ hooliganism.

But it was too late by then to stop the flow of words and images on the streets and buildings. You might as easily try to recapture all the tiny seeds from a windblown dandelion, before they fell into cracks in the asphalt and gave birth to a thousand miniature suns.

I’d just started cleaning another can of spray paint when
Jasper, one of my roommates, stuck his head in the door.

“Oops, sorry,” he said when he saw Clea. No one knew what to make of her, with her expensive clothes and gold hoop earrings. Everyone had heard about the husband. “Just wanted you to know that Kosowski came by and said the place got sold. So we’re now officially evicted.”

“Shit.” Kosowski was our landlord. He’d warned us that a developer was interested in buying the Perry Street house; they wanted to tear it down to make way for condos. “So now what happens?”

“Nothing.” Jasper lit a cigarette. “We can pretty much squat here as long as we want without paying rent.”

“Until they turn the electricity off,” said Clea.

Jasper shrugged. “We can use candles.”

“And the water.”

“That would be tough,” Jasper said.

Sure enough, at the end of August the electricity was shut off. Jasper and his girlfriend moved out, and over the next few weeks so did everyone else, as they found new apartments and headed back to school. Those last weeks were a long, drawn-out party, with people smashing empty bottles in the living room fireplace and doing lines off the kitchen counter. I didn’t indulge much in either. I’d seen what drinking did to my father back home, and while I’d liked being up for forty-eight hours in New York City, the notion of being sleepless in an increasingly disintegrating D.C. frame house with no running water wasn’t as appealing.

After the fall semester began, Clea rarely came by Perry Street anymore. Instead we’d meet at the east wing of the National Gallery, beneath its huge Calder mobile. I loved it there. Even on rainy days, the east wing was filled with light: with its vast windows, angled walls, and glass ceiling, it was like being inside an enormous prism, a kaleidoscope filled with people rather than colored glass. I wanted to look at this painting by Jackson Pollock called
Number 7
. It reminded me of the graffiti I’d seen in the New York subway, seemingly random loops and whorls of spattered black.

I stuck my face as close to the canvas as I could and caught a whiff of the pigment he’d used, more than twenty-five years before.

“Why do you think he called it
Number Seven
? Was there a
Number Six
?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” Clea glanced around impatiently. “Look, do you want to get something to eat? I need to talk to you, and I have to meet Marc at one.”

We went downstairs to the cafeteria and got lunch, sitting at a table in the corner.

“Look. This is really hard for me, but…” Clea sucked the last of her cheesecake from a fork and sighed. “I have to end this.”

“The cheesecake?”

“Don’t be obtuse, Merle. It’s not funny. I can’t see you anymore. I have to—Marc’s been offered a job out in Chicago, and we’re moving. Not till December, but I’ve got to start getting things organized to go, plus I have my class and …”

She stared at her plate; gave me an odd, almost furtive look; and smiled. “I’m pregnant.”

“What?”

“I’m pregnant. We’ve been trying for a long time, and to be honest, maybe the timing isn’t perfect with the move, but, well, I’m really happy.”

I stared at her, too stunned to say anything. The furtive smile grew smug. She tucked a curling strand of hair behind one of her feathered combs, and added, “I know—I don’t look it, but I’m eating like a pig. I’ve gained seven pounds.”

“I don’t get it. You’re—you said you hated him. And now you’re—”

I shoved my chair back. People turned to stare at us.

“Stop,” hissed Clea. “Don’t make a scene, okay?”

“A scene? You don’t want a scene?” I grabbed a plate, saw a security guard observing me from the other side of the room. I set the plate down. “I want my pictures. All of them, whatever you hid away. Get them.”

Clea laughed. “What, you think they’re in my bag?”

“I don’t care where they are. I know you kept some hidden away someplace. I want them.”

“I really don’t think I have anything, Merle, but if they turn up while I’m packing, I’ll mail them to you.” Her voice sounded prim and high-pitched. “I mean, if I can even find you. I guess I can always send them to your father back in Dogpatch.”

From the corner of my eye I could see the security guard heading toward us. For a moment I stood there, trying to summon a
devastating comeback that would make Clea swallow that simpering smile and tell me it was all a joke.

I knew it wasn’t. Clea had used me, just as I’d used her. The last year had been like some prolonged game of chicken. Somewhere in the back of my head, I always thought that I’d pull away first, and that would somehow make me the winner.

Instead I’d lost my scholarship, my squat, most of my work, and now Clea. And at that moment I realized what had mattered most.

“You should get a job, Merle. Get a decent haircut and some clothes, go home to Norville. There must be an art store or someplace like that. Maybe in a year you could enroll in community college.”

“I have a job.”

“Vandalizing vacant lots isn’t a job, Merle. Drawing on walls isn’t a job. Teaching is a job. Washing dishes is a job. You don’t need a BFA for that.”

“Bring my drawings to the house.” I was so angry my voice shook; it was an effort to keep from throwing my coffee in her face. “They’re mine and I want them back.”

I turned and walked out of the cafeteria. Janis, the last of my roommates, had taken off that morning, having finally convinced her boyfriend to let her live with him in Adams Morgan. I’d left my bag back at Perry Street; the drawings I’d done most recently were in it, some sketches of Clea along with a few detailed, mandala-like images, eerily beautiful refinements of the rayed eye I used as my graffiti tag.

But I was too upset to return there right away and face an abandoned house. I could admit that most of my passion for Clea had been fueled by my obsessive desire to paint her. What was harder to accept was that I had cared for her, too: her knowledge of painting and sculpture, the way she’d laugh and gently correct my mispronunciation of words I’d only ever seen on the page; her generosity in sharing the cultured world she’d had access to for her entire life, with its foreign films and exotic food, the sinuous music I had no name for but learned was Miles Davis.

Most of all, the fact that she alone in the entire world had seen my work and understood it in a flash, without needing any explanation or excuse for what was on the page before her. She thought my paintings and drawings were not just beautiful but important, enough so that she was still trying to keep them.