Mateo stops and watches him work, up on an eight-foot ladder, spray-painting through a handful of different stencils. Obviously the tagger’s got to be working legally; no way he could undertake such a long, complex project otherwise. How old is this compact little dude? Mateo can’t tell. He’s never seen his face.
Mateo knows he should walk on, but he keeps watching the tagger work — so methodically, so unself-consciously. This has to be his seventh or eighth morning out here by now. An ache opens up inside Mateo and grows, overwhelming him, filling his glands and then his eyes with tears. What have I done? What have I done? What have I done? he frantically asks himself. Then, just as frantically, he collects himself, blinks and brushes away the tears, and walks forward. On one hand, he doesn’t want to disturb the tagger, but—
“Excuse me,” Mateo calls up to him, his voice still full of burrs, “I don’t wanna disturb you, but I just wanted to say your work is really beautiful.”
“Thank you,” the tagger calls down, not turning away from the wall. But wait — something about the voice catches Mateo. Finally, the tagger turns to look at Mateo, then leaves his sprays and stencils at the top and climbs down. “Hold on a second,” he says.
Once he gets down to Mateo’s level, rubbing sweat from his dark brown forehead with the sleeve of his massive, old, pilly Wu-Tang T-shirt, Mateo realizes — he is a she. He is actually a little black baby dyke with a nose ring and a bandanna tied up under her flat-brimmed baseball cap.
“Hey, brother.” She offers a sweaty palm, which he takes.
“Hey,” he says, processing.
“I know.” She smiles. “You thought I was a guy, right? I know that look. It’s all good; I don’t care.”
Mateo hadn’t expected being called out like that. “Well, no,” he says. “I mean, I don’t care — I mean, I came over to tell you your wall is dope. It’s—” He struggles for the words. “It’s really beautiful. It’s like a dreamscape.”
“Thank you, brother. Yeah, a dream. I want it to be a place where the eye catches it, where the eye and the mind can rest and fly away for a few seconds. Just walking or driving by.”
“It’s all done with stencils?” Mateo asks.
“All done with stencils,” she says. “That and about, fuck, twenty different shades of blue and green and yellow. Some I had to mix myself.”
“It’s really dope,” Mateo says again. Then he just stands there. What the fuck is your problem? he asks himself.
She looks at him funny. “You one of the new guys at Triumph House?” she finally asks.
He can feel himself blushing in embarrassment. “How’d you know?” he asks.
She shrugs. “I just figured ’cause you’re a new face on the block. I love those guys. They put up half the money for me to do this wall.”
Mateo nods. There’s something he desperately has to tell her. “I’m an artist, too,” he says.
Her face brightens. “Oh, yeah? What kind?”
“Painter. I go to Pratt in Brooklyn.”
“Shit, man! You’re for reals,” she says. “I go to CalArts.”
He nods. “I mean, I used to go to Pratt.” He kicks the dirt with his sneaker. “I kind of fucked that up.”
She smiles again. She’s got the most adorable smile. “Aw, brother, come on, we all make mistakes. You’ll get back there.”
“Maybe.”
She picks up a bottle of water and swigs from it.
“I’ll let you get back,” Mateo says.
She offers her hand again. “I’m Charlice.”
“Mateo. See you around here later.” He starts to walk off the lot.
“Hey,” she calls back to him. “You got spare time to come by and help me out?”
He smiles. “I might.”
“Come back when you can.” Then Charlice climbs back up the ladder.
Mateo picks up a bus heading toward Silver Lake. He feels light and sparkly after staring at the paint for so long; when he closes his eyes, he can see the maritime-hued flurry of paper shreds exploding on the wall. He tries to take the colors in with him to Intelligentsia, where he works up the gumption to go up to his old manager, a pretty blonde yoga-type girl named Kayla, and see if she can give him some hours.
“Mateo, you just didn’t show up for work one day and never came back,” Kayla reminds him flatly.
He’s steeled himself for this. He and the guys in the house have had a lot of group sessions about how to face people they’ve let down and hurt.
“I know,” he says. “And I’m sorry. But now I’m in a rehab house, I’ve got four months clean and sober, and I have to have a part-time job to stay in the house. I can take any shift except the last one because there’s a curfew.”
“Oh, Mateo.” Kayla laughs lightly and a bit sadly; he’s not quite sure why. Then she sighs, peering at the schedule on the wall. “Can you come in and help Kevyon open Mondays through Thursdays? Can you really be here at six thirty in the morning?”
“Yep,” he says before he can talk himself out of it. Do the buses even run that early? He’ll figure it out, he decides. The good thing, it occurs to him, is that he’ll be done by noon. He can catch an NA meeting and then go back and help — who’s the baby dyke? Charlice.
“You can start on Monday,” Kayla says.
“Thanks, Kayla.”
“Mateo, please don’t fuck me over again, okay?”
Kayla’s words ring in his head all the way to the meeting he catches on the other side of the reservoir, then all the way back to West Adams on the bus. He starts getting that bad feeling, starts rubbing his arms. The house doesn’t allow him to have a cell phone until he’s a month out of house confinement — under the theory that it’s too easy to use it to find drugs when someone’s in early sobriety — so he can’t call his sponsor. The feeling is the hot rush that convulses his whole body and makes his brain go scalding white with senselessness when he thinks about that moment — that nano-moment — when the needle slips under his skin and he pulls back blood in the syringe. That final moment before he free falls off the top of a building, going “Whooooaaaaaa!” Funny thing is, first time around getting sober out here, before the Carrie incident, he used to love nursing that memory — it was his private balm, his secret treat. Now when the thought slips into his head, it fills him with terror and panic, a new raw horror at what total physiological control it has over him. He starts taking deep breaths, saying the Serenity Prayer in rhythm to his breaths.
He does this all the way back to West Adams, more or less, by which time the episode has subsided. It had come on because Kayla’s parting remark had pushed him down another psychic wormhole: the wormhole of everyone he’s fucked over. Deep in that wormhole, he’d ask himself why he even thought he deserved to go on with a good, happy life. How could he even show his face to anyone? A fucking needle in his arm was all he deserved. The wormhole was a very bad and scary place to be.
When he gets back to the hood, Charlice is still working. He walks on over to her. “Hey,” he calls up.
“Hey,” she calls right back down without looking. She’s made considerable progress in the past few hours, advancing about three feet to the right of where she was before Mateo left. Her work is so dense, Mateo marvels; she moves across the wall so slowly, and the layers of shredded paper, or leaves, or whatever her forms are just keep getting thicker and more interlocked.
“How’d your day go?” she asks.
“I got my old job back.”
“That’s sweet,” she says. “You wanna help me with something? Hand me that can down there with the greens called Satin Italian Olive.”
He finds the can of Krylon and passes it up to Charlice. “Satin Italian Olive,” he says. “Sweet.”