There was a reason for the spray paint. Sugar Baby was one of the better artists at Martin Luther King. He had painted the ceiling of the gymnasium by hanging suspended by ropes one night with Antwan holding a flashlight from the floor below. And there it was for the big game against DeWitt Clinton. A masterpiece laid on a $30,000 acoustical ceiling. In red and green spray paint: SUGAR BABY.
"Beautiful," Antwan had said.
"Oh, no," the principal had said.
"Ah'm king lord over all de planet," Sugar Baby had said then, and now, running down a side street in the Bronx, he was going to do his masterwork. Instead of painting "Sugar Baby" on a ceiling or just one car of a subway train, he was going to invade the yards and put an entire train to his spray paint-if the cans lasted.
The yard stretched beside an elevated track, and in the darkness he could tell he would have his pick. He needed the right train, one which was without other's works, but it seemed impossible to find one free of "Chico," "RAM I," "WW," and "Joey 172."
Sugar Baby finally made the hard decision. He would paint over. To make the cans last, he decided to omit the usual border and substitute one long thin line in script. He was good at handwriting, making the best B's in the school, and a guidance counselor had told him his handwriting was good enough to make him the president of a college or at least of a corporation.
He was on the first loop of the S, a bright fluorescent green crescent, when a face popped out from between two cars. It was a white face. It was a man. Sugar Baby and Antwan started to run. Then they saw the man was alone. And he wasn't that big. Thin, in fact.
"Hi," said Remo.
"Who you, mother?" said Antwan.
"I'm looking for somebody," said Remo, and he hopped down off the car onto the cinders of the yard.
Neither Antwan nor Sugar Baby noticed that this man landed on the crunchy cinders with the silence of a balloon touching felt.
"You looking for a bruisin'," said Sugar Baby.
"You grin, you in, mother," said Antwan.
"I really don't have time to rap," said Remo, "and I don't think coaxing will work."
Antwan and Sugar Baby giggled. They spread apart so Antwan could come at the front and Sugar Baby at the back. The white man stood quietly. Sugar Baby tried his karate chop. The hand came down perfect on the white man's head. He imagined himself splitting a brick. He imagined the head opening. He imagined how he would tell how he killed a honkey with one blow. His imaginings were interrupted by a decided pain in his right wrist. The skin was there but the fingers would not move, as if the hand were connected to the forearm by a bag of jelly. Sugar Baby dropped the spray paint. Antwan saw this and put his feet to action, heading out of the yards. He got four steps. On the fifth, his hip failed to cooperate. He went skin-splitting burning across the gravel, crying for his mother, professing innocence, vowing cooperation, and generally expressing fond feelings for the world and a desire to live in peace with all mankind.
"Who is Joey 172?" Remo asked.
"Ah don' know, man. Hey, ah square wif you, baby. Ah love you, baby," moaned Antwan.
"Try again," said Remo.
And Antwan felt a sharp stabbing pain in his neck but he saw no knife in the white man's hands.
"Don" know, man. Ah knows a Chico and a Ramad 85. They south city men."
"Joey 172, ever hear of him?"
"No, man. He nothing."
"Then you know him?"
"Ah say he nothing. Hey, Sugar Baby, tell mah man hyeah whuffo Joey 172."
"He nuffin'," said Sugar Baby, holding his painful right arm as vertical as possible. If he held it straight down and breathed very gently he could make the wrist pain almost bearable, if the elbow were cradled just right. When Sugar Baby said "nuffin'," he said it very softly.
"Where's he from?" Remo asked.
"Nowhere, man. He's nothing."
"Try," said Remo.
"Ah'm tryn, man. He ain' big enough to be from somewheres."
"Where's nowhere?" asked Remo.
"Lotsa places nowhere, man. You dumb or something?" said Sugar Baby.
"Name some," said Remo and gave Sugar Baby's dangling right arm a gentle touch.
Sugar Baby screamed. He suddenly remembered someone saying once that Joey was from the Stuyvesant High School.
"All right, we'll all go there," said Remo.
"Bronx High School of Science," Sugar Baby corrected quickly. "He one of them Toms. Bronx High School of Science. Ah seen a Joey 172 there. They say that where he from."
"Are you sure?" asked Remo.
And even in the next great pain, Sugar Baby allowed as how nobody could be sure, and Antwan too allowed as how it was probably Bronx High School of Science. Now, if the man wanted Chico, they could get him Chico for sure. Everybody knew Chico. For Chico they could give him the address.
"Thank you," said Remo.
As an afterthought he took the can of green glow spray paint and, ripping off their shirts, made a neat artistic "Remo" on each of their chests.
"I'm an artist myself," said Remo and went whistling off to find the Bronx High School of Science building, which as it turned out was nearby. On all the walls, there was no Joey 172. It was a big city and finding one graffiti artist in a plague of them was like singling out a locust in a swarm. And then he had an idea. He bought a can of white spray paint from a hardware store open late and convinced a cab driver to take him to Harlem. This required a fist full of twenty-dollar bills and a gentle stroking of the cab driver's neck. When Remo told the driver to let him off in front of an empty lot, the driver tried to nod but his neck hurt too much.
Remo skipped into the lot from the silent street. If night crime had thinned the street population of the rest of New York City, it had made Harlem into a desperately quiet enclave of citizens bunkered precariously for the night. Almost nothing moved except occasional packs of youngsters or convoys of grownups.
Stores were shuttered with metal shields, occasionally working streetlights illuminated empty littered sidewalks, a rat scurried soundlessly along a wall. And it was the wall Remo wanted.
Even in the dim half-light, he could make out the strong lines of powerful colors blending into a mosaic of fine black faces, set like a monument of a new generation against the decaying brick of a preceding one. It was a "wall of respect," and it hurt Remo a bit to deface it.
With the white paint, he sprayed a neat and glaring "Joey 172" across the wall and then faded back across the street to wait. The first person to spot the desecration of the wall that was, by custom and mutual consent, not to be touched was a youngster with a key around his neck. He stopped as if hit in the stomach with a pail of water. Remo lounged on a stoop. The gray dawn was succumbing to light. The youngster ran off. Remo smelled the ripe aroma of day-old greasy ribs, combined with week-old oranges and rotting chicken bones.
The street lights went off. The youngster came back with three others. By the time the sun was high, Remo had what he wanted. A large crowd formed in front of the wall spilling out into the street. Young men in gang jackets, older ones in rainbows of reds and yellows and platform shoes, a few winos careening precariously in place, a fat woman with layers of clothes like tenting over haystacks.
And down the street, his arms pinned by two burly men with raging Afroes, was a young man, his eyeglasses askew, his eyes wide with terror, his sneakers kicking helplessly in the air.
"That him," yelled a woman. "That Joey 172."
"Burn the mother," yelled a man.
"Cut him," shrieked a kid. "Cut him. Cut him good."
Remo eased himself from the stoop and cut into the mob, some of whom had been loudly discussing what to do about the white man across the street.