They apportioned the paint among the cars, donned gloves, and got to work. Lee had studied the train for two nights. He would do the first car—cascade green and faded blue—then Mono would do the next, Slave the third, then another by Mono, then a car with a Mickey Mouse and the Fabulous Five tag, then two holiday-festooned cars that would say “Merry Christmas, New York,” and so on.
“When we started piecing, I did my first car in less than an hour,” Lee recalls. “I was bombing. The colors were coming and it burned.”[3]
About two hundred paint cans were empty, and eight of the ten cars were finished when the cops arrived. “Move, move!” shouted Mono as he waved toward a cluster of big flashlights coming down the tracks. “Cops, man, cops!”
Mono began running, fell, got up, and raced off. Slave had disappeared. Lee failed to see another train arriving on the next track before it sideswiped him, knocking him under the graffitied cars. He saw shiny, black shoes approaching.
“We got you now, c’mon out!” one voice called out loudly, but from a distance, so he bolted for the tunnel’s mouth, stopping just inside for breath. Mono came out of the darkness, and they crouched in near panic near the spot where their evening adventure had begun.
Suddenly, both were caught in a flashlight beam. “Freeze!” the voice ordered.
Again they ran, across tracks and up a flight of stairs, clawing and scrambling toward an exit grate they knew. It was stuck, and they had to jump up in unison and push the grating free before they emerged onto the street. “There were people waiting for a bus. Dunno what they thought when they saw us coming out of the sidewalk, all dirty with our hands bleeding,” Lee laughs now, “and these voices yelling up from the tunnels, and we just ran. Bang! We were out of there.”
They walked around Brooklyn until the adrenaline wore off and Mono persuaded Lee to return to the tunnel to complete the work. To leave it unfinished would tell other graffiti writers that they had run and “lost the game,” as he said. So they went back and painted the final two cars that same night, without any more interruptions.
The next morning at about 7 A.M., Lee went to the Brooklyn Bridge Station. It was the accepted time and place, amid the early morning commuter rush, for graffiti writers to gather and view each other’s work from the previous night before the Transit Authority could pull the trains out of service for an acid bath to erase the paint.
“Oh, man! Oh man!” someone shouted at Lee. “I’ve seen it! A whole train! It’s bad style, Lee,” he yelled approvingly. He had seen it on another line, so Lee had to ride one train after another much of the day until he saw it. Even Lee was stunned. “The first cars came in like a roaring horse,” he remembers. “You could barely see the side of it, all the colors flashing out of the windows we’d blanketed with paint.”
He boarded the train and watched others on the platforms looking in amazement as it passed. “It was like crazy, like you could see the reflection in their eyes.” Some viewers applauded. Even the “Wall Street Journals,” as he calls businessmen with briefcases, were awed. A short, red-haired cop, watching the train unfold back to the fir-treed Merry Christmas cars, shook his head in admiration and smiled.
Inside, “people were looking at each other in confusion, like they were in church with stained glass windows, and talking about it. Some positive, some negative. But I knew they would talk about it at home,” he says proudly, “and that’s what New York is all about. It’s giving to people with nothing in return.”
GRAFFITI COMES FROM THE ITALIAN WORD, GRAFFIO, WHICH MEANS TO scratch. It is used to describe many different kinds of wall writings, and dates back at least to ancient Egypt. In ancient Rome, an inscription on private property asked people not to scribble on the walls. New York graffitists take credit for beginning, in the late sixties, the wave of contemporary graffiti writings not only in the United States but in Europe as well. A New York Times reporter tracked down a Washington Heights teenager named Demetrius, who signed his nickname and his street name, “Taki 183,” on hundreds of walls, stoops, monuments, and subways. “Not for the girls,” he said, “they don’t care. You do it for yourself.” Most of his successors were boys, but a few were girls, like Lady Pink.
Much of the rationale for New York’s graffiti is explained in Lee’s words—the need for self-assertion, particularly among urban youth whose creativity is stifled by an overbearing city; the need to be remembered; the need to define themselves differently than society has; and the need to feel in control, in some small way, of surroundings they deeply fear.
Chris Pape says graffiti writing was “just something to do. If we had Little League where I grew up, I probably would have put my energy into baseball and now I’d be with the Yankees.” He pauses and then smiles, “Well, maybe not the Yankees.”
Whatever the motivation, Lee, whose full name is Jorge Lee Quinones, contends that the public appreciated both the graffiti art and the artists when they were at their peak nearly two decades ago. “The art captured a movement which New Yorkers understood, a message of color on darkness, individuality, continuity, and survival,” he says. They also respected the artists beyond the art, for the danger they ran to paint the subway cars, bringing the trains to life with color and imagination amid the dark and crumbling city.
“I was always scared shitless down there in the tunnels,” Lee recalls, although also always intrigued by the subway system. “We were poor and didn’t travel much, so as a kid I would get excited whenever my mother took me on a subway train. I was almost infatuated with the construction, the speed of the machinery, its power, the darkness and mystery of the tunnels. It was like a big monster: neglected, derelict, desolate, dark, and dreary like the city itself. Each gray car looked like a sad clone.”
Lee began graffiti writing in the subways when he was fourteen and “saw graffiti as an actual thinking and physically challenging process. I saw the meditation and discipline it took. I thought, wow, I can express myself in the same heroic, anonymous way. People could see it and say ‘Yo, that kid was daring; he worked through the night to do that, while I slept.’ I wanted to be respected, whether they liked what I did or not. I could turn out color and change the way people looked at the system. I had control of the subway.
“We dared to put art right out front,” he says. “The media put us down as vandals, but Picasso used spray paint, too. There’s continuity there, man.” He complains that the Transit Authority is committing “artistic genocide by showering off graffiti with acid rains and operating graffiti-proof trains.”
One graffiti writer actually wrote a poetic lament to his fading craft suitably in black ink:
THE FABULOUS FIVE STOPPED PAINTING LONG AGO. “WE GREW UP,” says Lee. Mono became a policeman. Slave is a drag racer down South. Doc is an electrician. Dirty Slug, who went to college, has disappeared.
Lee, now thirty-two years old, is a successful artist on canvas. “My studio is not a subway tunnel anymore, but when I paint, I’m in the tunnel again, where things are clear-cut and dope. And my message is the same. I still capture movement, survival. It has to do with struggling in New York. The tunnels make artists strong within themselves. Behind my stuff is a story; it’s life. I want it to live.” The New Yorker magazine called Lee Quinones “a sort of Jasper Johns figure … stylistically speaking.”
3
Graffiti writers have their own jargon, part of, but different from, other examples of hip-hop culture. “To bomb” is to accomplish a lot in a short time. A “burner” is superior work, so are pieces that are “nasty,” “the death,” “vicious,” “bad,” “dirty,” or “snap.” “Down by law” means having high status.
4
Captured in a photo by Henry Chalfant, who recorded much of New York’s graffiti with his camera.