Timmo considered himself one of the last great writers.
Way he put up his tag it was TMO, wrote it in one quick motion, index finger on the spray can button, paint jetting out, so it looked like:
Everybody knew this was Timmo writing.
Back in the old days, when he was doing maybe two, three trains a week—not a whole car , man, that took time—but doing a piece with the three letters TMO or sometimes a top-to-bottom with the same tag, writing in a style that was instantly recognizable by other experienced writers and also by the newer writers coming along, what you called toys. People biting his style was kind of flattering, Timmo guessed, but it always pissed him off, made him want to go find the guy stealing from him, look in his face, tell him you want to bite my style, man, come bite this . I see anything you throw up, I go over it, man, I cross it out, you dig? You get a background payback, man, each and every time.
That was in the old days.
That was when you went in a train yard with four, five other writers, you did a whole car that night, brought along a suitcase full of paint and something to eat and drink, some pot, gloves because it could get messy. You looked for a coalminer, one of the older cars that were harder to clean afterward, instead of the stainless-steel dingdongs. You looked for a yard that wasn’t hot, it became a communal kind of thing, three, four writers working on the same car, you each threw up your tag when the car was finished, you sometimes waited till the sun came up so you could see what you’d done during the night, it was satisfying. It was making a thing of beauty out of a rusting piece of shit.
There was one yard they all stayed away from back then, this was the yard they called the Screamer because there was supposed to be the ghost of a writer there who stepped on the third rail and died screaming in the night. Nobody wanted to go anywhere near that yard even though there were coalminers laid up all over the place there and all you had to do to get in was climb over this cyclone fence had no razor wire on it. His style back then was a combo of Bubble and Calm’s Point, what he called Bubble Point, and what a lot of writers bit from him cause it was an easy style to imitate, he guessed, though it had taken him a while to evolve. The style was easily adaptable to two-tone pieces, color-blended burners, 3-D pieces, you threw up your marker in the corner afterward, everybody knew your name.
His style nowadays was more a wild style, he wasn’t interested in anything but getting the name up, TMO, spray it all over the city so they’d know he was still out here, man. He’d racked up the paints he was carrying tonight, some of the old traditions were still alive, any writer didn’t steal his paints wasn’t a writer worth shit. Your experienced writer was an experienced racker, too. That didn’t make him one of these gang assholes whose main occupation was dealing dope and beating up people and spraying walls to mark their territory. Like, man, you are now enteringDEADLY SAVAGE turf! OrKiller Psyche Tribe territory, whatever dumb names they called themselves. You saw MM21 sprayed on a wall or markered on a train, no style at all, you knew it stood for the Macho Men from Twenty-first Street, they were telling you beware, man, this is the land of the super assholes! Cross out a gang tag, you were in serious trouble. Dealers, too. Dealers used their tags to mark drug territory. Don’t come sellin’ your shit on this corner, it belongs to Taco, you see the tag, man? No place left for a genuine writer to go anymore, no place at all.
Except that in the night…
Night like tonight…
You could still feel free and easy in the night.
Find yourself a wall wasn’t too crowded, take your time doing a two-tone burner in Bubble Point. Be like old times. Free and easy in the empty hours of the night, smoke a little, drink a little, look over the piece, define it, refine it, and sign it TMO. For Timmo. Yeah.
The wall he had in mind was one he’d passed by late yesterday afternoon, almost virgin. Three or four bubble tags on it, no gang markers. He’d racked up a can of blue and a can of yellow, which when you put them close together you got a greenish look he favored. He had two rolled joints in the bag with the paint, and a ham sandwich he’d bought in the deli on Culver and Tenth, and a can of Coke, he was like set, man.
Five minutes later, he was like dead, man.
5.
HER ALARM CLOCK had a two-position switch. The first position caused the bedside lamp to flash when the alarm went off. The second position flashed the lamp and simultaneously turned on a vibrator under her pillow. Normally, the flashing lamp was enough to awaken her, but this morning she was taking no chances; the switch was set to the second position. The combination of flashing lamp and vibrating pillow woke her up in five seconds flat. She hit the OFF button before all that shaking and blinking woke up Carella, who grunted, muttered something unintelligible, and rolled away from the light an instant before it quit.
The LED display on the clock read 3:01A .M.
It was still dark an hour later, when she left the house and began walking to the elevated subway station four blocks away. She was thinking that this section of Riverhead was still relatively safe, but she wasn’t used to being abroad alone—or even a broad alone, she thought, and smiled—at this hour of the night. She walked as fast as she could, somehow comforted by the lights burning in the surrounding apartment buildings, even at this ungodly hour. People were awake. People were preparing to start the day. I’m not alone, she thought, even though she hadn’t been out of the house at this hour since her high school prom, which she’d attended with the former Salvatore Di Napoli.
She expected the platform to be empty, but there were several other men and women standing on it waiting for the next train to come in, some of them wearing what she had been advised to wear, blue jeans and sneakers, and—at least in the case of one woman whose coat was hanging open—a blue T-shirt like the one the clinic had given Teddy yesterday, and which she was also wearing today. Lettered onto the front of the shirt were the words:PRO -CHOICE. She unbuttoned her coat now, revealing the shirt, and smiled at the woman in greeting. The woman smiled back. Both of them looked up the track for any sign of an incoming train. Nothing yet. Teddy figured the ride downtown would take about forty-five minutes, most of it on elevated tracks before the train plunged underground at the Grady Street station in lower Riverhead. She was due at the clinic at five sharp.
There was a scene in the movie Viva Zapata! that Teddy never tired of seeing, even though the musical accompaniment that was an integral part of it was lost on her. It was the long passage where Zapata and his brother are marching to the capital, or wherever they’re going, this was Marlon Brando when he was young and handsome and Anthony Quinn when he was young and possibly even more handsome. And as they march along with a straggling little band of followers, both of them looking fiercely determined, peasants keep coming out of the hills to join them, and all of the peasants are wearing white trousers and shirts and big sombreros, and they keep pouring down out of the hills with machetes in their hands, joining this straggling little band of maybe ten, twenty people until finally there’s an army of ten thousand behind them, all of them in those identifying white trousers and shirts.
It was like that on the subway this morning.
As the train rattled its way through the dark on the overhead tracks, the cars began filling with people on their way to work, yes, but they also began filling with people wearing the clinic’s blue shirt with thePRO-CHOICE lettering on its front. Men and women alike, all of them wearing the shirt, until the little band of stragglers who had boarded the train at Teddy’s stop became an army in uniform by the time the train reached the College Street station on Isola’s Upper South Side. Well, not an army the size of Zapata’s , not that overwhelming mass of white flowing down out of the hills to join him, no, nothing quite that grand or impressive, but impressive enough to Teddy’s eyes; at least a hundred people came up out of the College Street kiosk that morning, emerging from the dimness of the underground tunnel into the pale promising light of morngloam.