Speaking of Sane, one sixteen-year-old graffiti writer tells me, “Everything he touched burned. He was the greatest. Why would he want to kill himself?”
An older writer suggests Sane “burned out.”
“He had reached the top and he knew it,” he suggests. “He couldn’t go any further. I think he felt that and didn’t know what to do next. Maybe he felt empty like I did when I realized how many years of my life I’ve lost to graffiti, to the tunnels.” He pauses for a minute, remembering Sane. “He was a pest back then when he was twelve and starting. He would run up to me all the time to ask for my autograph and I’d tell him to go away. I didn’t associate with ‘toys.’ He was just a toy back then. But there was always something different about him, a real nice kid, eyes always friendly and laughing.”
Sane and Smith were being sued for $3 million by the City of New York for graffiting the top level of the Brooklyn Bridge—the largest suit ever brought against graffiti writers anywhere. The city pressed the suit as a lesson to writers, to punish them for what many consider vandalizing public property and to discourage younger writers from the particularly dangerous locales like the heights of bridges. The police also wanted help in identifying other graffiti writers, which Sane and Smith refused to provide. The city dropped the case after Sane’s death, but no one believes the suit could have caused Sane’s suicide.
He did suffer from depression occasionally. If there was a flaw in Sane, it was that he cared too much, as another writer says. Just a week before his death, he did a piece in the tunnel to commemorate a four-year-old boy who had been struck and killed by a subway train. “He used to bring things to the homeless kids in tunnels and sit by the fires and have coffee and when he’d talk about them later to me, he’d sometimes get real sad about them. I mean real sad,” the man recalls.
Sane did not go to college but his older brother, Smith, received a computer science degree from Fordham University. After Sane’s death, Smith quit his job and spends most of his time in the tunnels now. Older writers encourage him to get out and find a job, but Smith refuses to consider becoming a conventional artist. That, to him, would be “selling out,” he says. He recently spoke of training to become a subway train conductor.
“I’ve always liked the tunnels,” Smith says. He particularly likes a huge, open underground cavern called the “playground” that is carved out of Manhattan’s rock foundations about a half-hour walk from Grand Central Station along narrow tunnel ledges that parallel the tracks. Graffiti writers often congregate there, running about on catwalks and pipes, scribbling messages, and even, on occasion, playing baseball. “It’s a nice open space,” Smith says. “You don’t get space like this up here, miles of space with no people.”
While Sane and Smith retain the tragic mystique of tunnel graffiti writers, Freedom—Chris Pape—made the tunnels into his own personal studio. Now thirty years old, Chris has virtually left the underground graffiti scene but not before he almost made it to the Museum of Modern Art. He still ventures into the tunnels to do murals for Bernard and other tunnel dwellers.
My favorite image of Chris is his huge self-portrait sprayed on a tunnel wall, standing with the head of a spray-paint can tilted down inquiringly at a white rabbit sitting near Chris’s Reeboked feet. His shoulders slouch inside a leather bomber jacket, Holden Caulfield-like; his hands are shoved deep into the front pockets of his well-worn jeans. His stance is typical of many street kids who want to proclaim that nothing can surprise or frighten them, and that any attack will be absorbed rather than avoided, shrugged off rather than replied to in kind. The autumn’s dusty sunlight falls into the tunnel through overhead grates and with it comes a leaf about to alight near the rabbit, who prepares to scamper off as the spray-can head watches. The scene remains frozen on the soot-blackened wall; the only movement in the mural is Chris’s sharp, scrawling tag, Freedom, beside his untied shoelace.
Chris’s larger-than-life portrait suspended on the tunnel wall invites curiosity, but a specific blend of it very much like his own—subtle, unaggressive, and always accepting. Like the portrait, Chris invites curiosity. He was a runaway teenager, he says, a high school dropout from the West Side of Manhattan who lived for a time in a pool hall on the Upper West Side, eating poorly and occasionally. He is both intrigued by the tunnels and frightened of them.
“I used to look into subway tunnels on my way home from school and imagine dragons,” he says. “Sometimes I’d see faces in them, wizards and monsters. I had to explore them, but I had this horror of them. I still hate the tunnels.
“When I go down there, I can’t wait to come back up. I keep promising myself that the next mural will be my last. I hate the danger, I hate risking my life each time for something so stupid. But I get an idea in my head for a piece and I can’t get rid of it, and I have to do it because, if I don’t, no one else will.”
More than a decade ago, when trains wore graffiti, Chris gave designs to graffiti gangs eager to prove their daring by executing them. He was far less interested in braving the dangers than in seeing his concept completed and appreciated.
One spring day, as he and I are watching a group of boys play baseball in Riverside Park, a long ball comes our way and stops next to a grating. The fielder rushes after it, and as he bends down to retrieve it, something through the grate catches his eye.
“Whoa, look at this!” he shouts to the other players, and they, ignoring the runners, come to see.
“Wow, it’s Ted Williams,” says a teammate, crouching down.
Chris smiles. They are viewing his tunnel portrait of the onetime baseball star painted much like he appears on the baseball cards that occupy much of Chris’s aboveground life.
“That’s what it’s all about,” Chris says quietly, wearing a broad, proud grin as he watches the discovery of his work.
Chris in his early years often spent his few dollars on paints rather than dinner. One winter he came down with bronchitis, which became pneumonia and mononucleosis, but he continued to crawl down into the tunnels to satisfy what he now regards as his obsession. He was in the Riverside Park tunnel before Bernard arrived, and when Bernard appeared, Chris ignored him, preferring to stay as anonymous as possible. He was also doing graffiti on subway cars at the time—“a chameleon,” as he says. Bernard finally persuaded Chris to have a cup of tea at his fire and frightened him badly, much as he once did me.
Bernard had been talking about the discoveries that can be made in trash and refuse, then abruptly turned his tall frame from the fire to reach into his shirt and bring out a long, glistening butcher’s knife. “Like this,” he said, fingering the sharp edges. Chris reached for his spray can, ready to fire it into Bernard’s face, but Bernard put the weapon away and the two resumed talking about art. They laugh about the incident now.
Bernard claims he did not know Chris was afraid of him. “I only thought you were very quiet, a little weird.”
Sometimes, Bernard recalls, the homeless found Chris lying by a mural because he was very weak, or breathing heavily. He tried to convince Chris to give up graffiti writing in the tunnels, at least until he recovered his health. Often he brought blankets to throw over Chris’s shoulders. Once Chris passed out and Bernard carried him to the fire.
While Sane and Smith created sporadically on the tunnel walls, Chris used most of the available wall space along thirty underground blocks of the Riverside Park tunnel walls as his personal gallery. As with the portrait of Ted Williams, he cleverly capitalizes on whatever sunlight penetrates to the underground and incorporates it into his works along with the natural breaks and textures of the walls themselves. Much of his work is derivative— Dali-esque melting watches that ooze down from catwalks and rafters and through grates in the ceiling, for example—although he believes it also asserts that time is running out on the lives of underground homeless. In another mural, a bizarre cherub with an automatic rifle floats above a green man with a ragged scar across his face. Another, titled History of Graffiti, chronicles graffiti on a sweeping train, each car a tribute to great “writers” and their styles. Yet another portrays a silver-black Madonna, face aglow with golden light, peacefully regarding the denizens of the tunnel who pass. The most romantic of his murals portrays an exotic woman with dark hair swept back to reveal features more blunt than flattering and mysterious but solicitous eyes. The treatment suggests he once loved her.