A Little Trouble with the Facts (14 page)

“Sorry about that,” Curtis said again. “My buddy at Irving Plaza. Screw the Beasties. You want to see Bad Brains tonight? They’ll comp me plus one.”

“I can’t tonight.” The moment to offer an excuse came and went, but I didn’t know how to tell him I was meeting another man. We rolled around a little on our swivel chairs until the awkwardness went away. “Now, Val, I know you didn’t come up to hear me yak on the phone. How can I make myself of use to you today?”

“I was thinking about our conversation yesterday, about the artist you mentioned, the graffiti guy.”

“Wallace? The Golden Gadfly. Are you thinking we should’ve done more on him?” he said. “You know, it wouldn’t be bad. The trouble is I really don’t have the time. But if you were interested, I’d back you up with Battinger to work on something on spec.”

“I guess I’m a little interested, but only because you mentioned it. I mean, if people are complaining…”

Curtis thought it over some more. “You know what? This could be a good story to help you get back into The Paper again. If I don’t interfere too much, you could get a byline. I’d be really happy to help with that. Maybe even pitch it to Moore and Lessey, or Buzz. Would be nice to get back in Style, huh?” He laughed again, realizing the pun—the same one he’d made the day before. “Sorry.”

Curtis’s office wall was covered with clips from his two decades as a culture reporter, first at the
Voice,
later at
The New York Observer,
and then ten years at The Paper. He’d been a witness to punk at CBGB’s, park jams in the Bronx, and even break-dancers before they were in Gap ads. “Maybe if you could tell me a little bit more about why you think he’d be worthy of a larger treatment, I could start to follow a few angles, you know, just to see where they lead? Do you think Wallace was something?”

Curtis killed the phone again. “I’m actually not a big art buff—you know, music’s my thing—and graffiti never did it for me, personally. I was really a young kid when Stain was Stain, so I missed the real fireworks. But Tyler gave him serious props as an artist, I know that.”

“It sounded yesterday like you thought he was just sort of a pain in the ass.”

“Later, when he was in his prime, he was cool as hell.”

“Genuinely?”

Curtis sat up in his chair and lost the dreamy look. “Oh, absolutely. Wallace was a very vivid character. I remember the first time I met him. It must’ve been about 1985, 1986, somewhere in there. I was still enrolled at NYU and I was trying to break into the
Voice,
and Mike Andatte, this great photographer, was going to shoot some graffiti kids in the East Village and I asked him if I could tag along.”

The phone rang again; this time he tapped a button on the receiver to send it to voice mail, which was either out of respect for me or for the memory of Wallace. “It turned out we walked into a great little moment in history. You see, like a week before, Kenny Scharf, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat were supposed to be part of a group photo of East Village artists for the cover of some magazine, but the three of them had all bagged it. They’d just never shown. Major betrayal. So the other East
Village artists thought they had gotten too big for their britches, and now they’re part of the SoHo scene. All these writers are pissed off. So, when Andatte and I got to this apartment, we find this whole crew of writers all dressed in zip-up white suits like exterminators—like Devo.”

Curtis’s phone rang again, and again he sent it to voice mail and kept talking. “Wallace was the leader of this little extermination crew. They were going to SoHo to tar and feather Haring at his opening. They called themselves the Art Crime Posse—I guess Wallace was obsessed with
The Wild Bunch
—and this was, he said, ‘guerilla resistance.’ It was cool. I wrote it up. My first enterprise story for the
Voice
.”

“But that doesn’t make sense. Malcolm’s dealer was a SoHo dealer.”

“No, no, she’d burned him already; told him to get lost,” said Curtis. “That’s why he was so intense about it. It was personal.”

The phone rang again, and this time he lifted the receiver and put it back in the cradle, fast. “Couldn’t really blame him. What she did to him was harsh. She’d made him sever his ties to other galleries, to his European dealer, to his folks in the Bronx, and then she’d dumped him, flat on his ass. Told him he wasn’t selling anymore. I don’t even think that was true. He couldn’t go back to any other galleries. He was working as a bike messenger. So it was pretty sad for him.”

Curtis could probably read the confusion on my face; I still didn’t see the story in all this information. “The thing was, Valerie, Stain made a whole new life for himself after he left SoHo; he did become this kind of powerful force in his own community, in the Bronx. There were a lot of people who didn’t like him, and it was hard for him to get the kind of play in the media he had before he severed contact with high culture. But there’s a fascinating story somewhere in there, about his second act, if you know what I mean. No one’s written that, and if you could nail it I
think the editors might go for it. You know at least one thing: no one else is going to beat you to the punch.”

I acted as if I were thinking it over, as if I were dubious, but in fact this was the best thing Curtis could’ve said, under the circumstances.

“You’ll need a decent rabbi,” Curtis added. “Someone who really knows the graffiti world inside and out. I could give you a few names if you need them.”

“I think I might have someone already,” I said. I thought of Cabeza, and I had a yen to be near him again.

The phone rang, and then two lines lit up on Curtis’s receiver, and then three. “I better…,” he said, pointing plaintively to the phone.

I closed the door quietly behind me and waited to hear the click of the latch. When I got back to Obits, I shifted on my swivel chair, listening to the resounding silence of my phone. I went to the printer, stole a few blank sheets of paper, and drew a new map. I put dots on the Queensboro Bridge, in the Bronx, in SoHo, in Chelsea, in the East Village. I couldn’t imagine, yet, how they could all possibly connect.

S
ummer nights in July, the on-ramp to the Queensboro Bridge is an angry furnace of overworked and overheated nine-to-fivers, fuming as their cars inch toward the bridge. To get to the entrance of the bike path, I had to brave the metallic spew of commuter traffic and the lines of cars its jaws engulfed into the crocodile belly of Long Island.

And the walk up the bike path, entered by way of a tunnel in the bridge’s stone pilings, isn’t a sunset stroll either. Gray concrete, chicken wire fencing, cracked rusted paint, the sky as yellowish gray as a weathered tombstone, the river that muddy green you get when you go wrong mixing paints. The landmarks: black-windowed corporate towers, the Roosevelt Island tram swaying on its cable, the island they used to call Welfare, where an old castle, once a lunatic asylum, has fallen to rubble. If desolate had a destination, this was it.

I wasn’t completely alone as I trekked toward the Queens side. But I didn’t know what kind of help I’d get—in an emergency—from the old man walking his yapping Maltese, or the two bikers in orange Lycra speeding past, or the Chinese lady absorbed in silent tai chi. A few workmen high in the cantilevers waved charmlessly. I wondered how Wallace had found himself here at two in the morning when he was supposed to be out buying ice cream. I wondered whether the night air strangled his
screams if he was chased, if he was caught, if he was thrown off the bridge. The wind creaked mournfully up through the metal girders and I quickened my pace. I tried to imagine walking up this bridge, climbing up on that high, shaky railing, at night, in the pitch-dark, with just the sounds of cars roaring behind, and that ugly river below, deciding it was time to jump.

In about a quarter of an hour I spotted Cabeza. His look was 1950s Havana chic. Pale yellow short-sleeved guayabera, brown slacks, white boating sneakers, a pair of sunglasses hanging from the V of his shirt. He gave the impression of a man on vacation from his own life. He had a video camera in his right hand, and he seemed to be filming the brown river below.

“What’s that for?” I asked, about the camera, when I was a few yards away. He saw me and turned, still filming. He said something but I couldn’t make out the words. It was deafening up there. The hum of the steel, the clank and groan of every truck, the wind in the girders, all ate our words. I put up a hand to signal that I didn’t want to be in his movie. He let the camera drop to his side. I got closer and screamed, “Why do you have that?”

“The movie version,” he shouted back. “Once the story comes out, we make a short doc.”

“You really do have big ambitions for this investigation,” I said and, realizing he couldn’t hear, repeated, simply, “Big ambitions!”

“For you,” he said. “For me.” Cabeza’s full lips curved into a smile. He was cheerful in a place not too many people would’ve been cheerful. Maybe he felt refreshed and rested; maybe he just liked the feel of all this wind on his face.

There was too much noise to talk, so I leaned with him against the railing and looked out over the river as he filmed the white caps. A pair of speedboats were cutting up the river, each one trailed by a frothy white wake. I watched them until they separated far up ahead.

“What happens if I can’t get what you need?” I shouted. “If I can’t establish that Wallace was murdered. Do you rat me out?”

“You’ll get it,” he said. “You will.”

Looking down at the water again, I felt the queasy sting of vertigo. I put both hands on the railing and felt the bridge’s cold steel rattle. I turned around and put my back to the view. I looked at the latticework of cables above us. I remembered Cabeza’s first phone call, the way the wind had howled through the phone and I’d thought it was singing. Maybe he’d been calling from here.

“Were you here when Wallace was discovered?” I shouted.

A convoy of trucks hurtled by and the bridge groaned under us like a body turning in its sleep. He answered but I couldn’t hear him; he moved closer and repeated, “Mrs. Wallace and Amenia called me that night. I live over there,” he said, his mouth close to my ear, pointing toward Queens. “Not too far. They needed someone to identify the body.” He shifted so that he could look into my eyes and gauge my reaction.

“That must’ve been rough,” I said.

“Never had anything harder to do in my life,” he said softly, close to my ear.

“Did you see something?” I asked, but he shook his head—couldn’t hear. I moved closer. “Did you see something that made you think it wasn’t suicide? That he’d been killed?”

A strange smile alighted on Cabeza’s lips and creases formed at the edges of his eyes, and then disappeared. Was it a smile of discomfort or something else? “His tongue was black,” Cabeza said, and waited to let that sink in, moving back to watch my face. “His teeth were purple. It was like someone had sprayed into his mouth with plum spray paint.”

I imagined what Cabeza was suggesting. Somewhere in the Bronx, a man tells his family he’s going out for ice cream. He doesn’t take much with him—his wallet, maybe, and his keys—
because he’s coming right back. Out on the mean streets, someone attracts his attention, maybe puts a hard object to his back, or his neck, maybe hits him over the head, maybe covers his mouth with a chloroformed rag—that’s how it was always done on-screen—and prods him, pushes him, drags him, to an unmarked van. Inside the van, he’s brought to consciousness, or to awareness, and he sees his captors. Just long enough to know who they are, to understand where he is, to feel the terror of his own imminent demise, maybe even long enough to imagine escape. And then he’s given an explanation, if it were the movies, a sermon of some kind about the higher order of criminality or the failures of his own life, or about how he shouldn’t have gone stirring up trouble this way or that. And then they make it clear that he will be killed. He hears the familiar rattle—a spray can, this time his death rattle—and next thing he’s being held down by someone, some secondary thug, and his mouth is being filled with toxic paint. He tastes it, he swallows. His life’s final flavor. Within the hour, his poisoned, slackened body is falling over the railing.

The waning sun was trickling through the cantilevers. I watched the cars drive by on the inner deck of the bridge. A tiny blue Lamborghini zigzagged among a crowd of lumbering SUVs, as if skipping around that way would get him somewhere faster. A blonde in a teal blazer fixed her hair in the rearview mirror of her Toyota as if she could get younger that way. A boy driving a beat-up Mustang convertible leaned forward and changed the radio station; a middle-aged man in wrap-around sunglasses struggled to close the sunroof on his Mercedes while his car idled. I felt sad for them. I felt sad for all of us.

“How was Darla?” Cabeza asked.

“Real down to earth.”

Cabeza laughed softly. I didn’t hear him, but I could see. “She seem surprised by the news?”

I tried to connect the image of Wallace’s death with Darla.
They didn’t mesh. “Enough,” I said. “You don’t really think she was responsible?”

“Someone was. She has friends on the police force.”

“Meaning?”

“The police don’t take too well to graffiti writers,” he shouted. “A graff writer I knew in the early eighties was killed by the police just for doodling on the wall of the L train station. Darla was upset with Wallace because he was snooping around her office for those paintings, getting in her hair. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d asked her cop friends to make sure he stepped off. Maybe they took it a little too seriously.” He said it without emotion. “I’m not saying it’s what I believe. It’s just what people are talking about it in the neighborhood.”

I thought of
Sweet Smell of Success
. J. J. Hunsecker has a crooked cop on his payroll, a round Irishman that Sidney Falco calls Hunsecker’s “fat friend.” The fat friend takes care of things Hunsecker wants taken care of, like his sister’s suitor. And at the end of the movie, when Hunsecker turns on Falco, it’s Falco who faces the fat friend in a deserted Times Square.

Maybe it wasn’t an unmarked van or a hard object against his back. Maybe Wallace was out on Simpson Avenue, on his way to buy ice cream, and he stopped in an alley to paint his tag, like he always did. But this time he hears a voice behind him—it’s the cops, saying,
Hold it right there, young man. Put down that can
. So Wallace—no longer a young man—turns slowly and tries to make a joke of it all. But the cops aren’t in a joking mood. Maybe they’ve followed him here; maybe, because of Darla’s request, they’ve been tailing him, waiting for exactly this kind of false move, so they can pick him up. And so they put him in the squad car, and they take him back to the precinct and a few hours later, Diallo-style, they’ve got him brutalized and they don’t want the public to get wind of this new scandal, so they put him back in the squad car, go up to the Queensboro, throw him off the bridge.

“What about graffiti kids?” I said. “Weren’t there other writers who hated him, who wanted to get back at him somehow?” If there was another plot in there, maybe it would be simpler. I switched out the cops for a bunch of young graffiti kids who see Wallace at the wall and get pissed.
Hey, motherfucker!
They take the can from him and they try to spray him, instead. Maybe they’d meant to scare him—didn’t realize it would be toxic—and he’d just died. So they’d freaked out and tried to cover their tracks. They find some kid with an old beater and they take the body out to the Queensboro and, nervous, terrified, toss it over the side.

“Graffiti beef? Where’d you get that idea?” asked Cabeza.

“Darla alluded to ‘long-standing beefs.’ And a lot of kids who hung around him, some of them deep into drugs?”

“Darla.” Cabeza seemed to think her name was funny. He lifted his camera and aimed it at me.

I flinched. “Hey, let’s stop with that, huh?”

“This is good stuff. We’re talking through the questions; we’re touching on all the possible angles.”

He was trying to be playful, I think, but I felt overexposed. “Stop. I’m not kidding.”

“Why?”

I pulled away from the railing and started to walk back toward Manhattan. Cabeza grabbed hold of my wrist, tugging. “Come on. I’ll stop. I swear.”

His hand was on me again. It didn’t hurt, and I wasn’t scared. He was smiling a rogue’s smile and his eyes were playful, bright green dragonflies.

He shouted to me over the traffic’s roar, “You’re quite beautiful when you aren’t trying to look any particular way. I just wanted to capture you exactly as you were just then, with that expression.”

He let go of my arm.

I was free to leave now. But I didn’t. I needed to know which
plot he meant me to follow, which version of the script. “No camera,” I said.

“No camera,” he said, and put it away. “Look, the truth is, I need you,” he said. “This needs a proper investigation and a proper exposé. And frankly, you’re the best chance I’ve got.”

I pictured Bogart rolling out of San Quentin in a barrel in
Dark Passage
. What if Lauren Bacall had never driven by in her Packard to save him? I had the strong urge to move closer and put my arms around Cabeza’s broad back and tell him everything was going to be fine. Relenting, I took a few steps closer. “Do you know what a rabbi is?” I asked. Before he answered, I added, “For a reporter?”

“Sure I do,” he said. “The reporter’s guide. Someone who shows you the ropes.”

“I’m going to be lost with all this graffiti stuff. These taggers and buffers, or whatever they’re called. The high-art stuff I can manage, somewhat, but I need your help in the demimonde.”

His eyes flashed gratitude, just like in
Dark Passage
when Bogart realizes Bacall is on his side. “Shalom,” he said. “Will I need a yarmulke for this?”

The next few nights, my chair in Obits was spinning empty at exactly six o’clock. I was meeting Cabeza wherever he told me to find him, so I could get schooled in “the art of getting up, getting over,” as he called it.

On the first night, he rode with me uptown to a brick schoolyard on East 106th Street and Park Avenue in El Barrio: the Graffiti Hall of Fame. “This is your primer,” he said, pointing to the various graffiti murals painted by some of what he called the “old school” writers. “None of these guys are real writers now,” he said, with some disdain, “since this is what we call a ‘legal wall,’ it doesn’t take anything to paint here. But I’m showing you
the basics of style,” he said. He explained who’d invented certain arrows and stars, who’d created three-dimensional techniques, who’d gotten messy and who’d gone figurative or abstract. Some of the “kings of the trains” were there, so he explained old-time train graffiti culture, what it meant to go “all city”—to get your tag on a train that ran in all five boroughs—how writers ranked themselves, and why it wasn’t necessarily bad to buff, or write over someone else’s tag.

Before we headed back downtown, he showed me where he lived when he first moved to New York. His first tenement on East 103rd Street and Lexington wasn’t so different from my first tenement on East Fifth, so I told him a little—just a little—about moving to the city from the farm. What the hell, I thought, this guy had nothing to do with anyone I’d ever know. It was safe to tell him my true history. He didn’t laugh about any of it; he didn’t think it quaint that I had grassroots roots. “Everybody here comes from somewhere else,” he said, and he told me about watching his grandfather kill chickens by hand on his family’s farm in PR. I told him that my job on the Eugene farm was to milk the goats in the morning, and not a single titter escaped his lips. So I told him a little more.

On the second night, Cabeza took me on a subway tour of all of Stain’s “wild-style pieces”—big mural-style paintings with interlocking letters and symbols, Cabeza explained—on the backs of billboards high above the elevated lines in the outer boroughs. He showed me others that were painted inside the subway tunnels and they flickered past us in the darkness as we rode the trains. Some—the hard to reach ones—might’ve been around for more than twenty years, but others looked like they’d been finished that month. “Wallace believed in ‘keeping it real’ as the kids say,” explained Cabeza. “He was writing up to the day he died.”