Just Kids From the Bronx (30 page)

“Yeah, I grew up in the Bronx.”

“Oh, the Bronx is dangerous.”

You hear all this stuff. Oh, get out of here. And we move to this so-called fancy neighborhood and we get robbed.

In all that traveling on the subway from Queens to the Bronx on weekends to be with our family, and back again from the Bronx to Queens, I started realizing that a lot of stuff was being painted on the trains. My curiosity was piqued. As a kid, I was always interested in art. I was always sketching and drawing and tracing. So all those train rides really opened me up to a lot of stuff that was going on, which started me asking around: “Who’s doing that? How do you do that? Who does this?”

Bio
: We all met in art classes when we were in high school. As a kid, I would always try to re-create the
Beetle Bailey
comics, the Sunday comics. And I was, like, playing with letters. In the fourth grade, a teacher gives us an assignment to do a project with our initials, to create a logo with our initials. I did it and kind of enjoyed that exercise with my letters. From then on, I always had a notebook where I would sketch my name and sketch comics.

BG 183
: When I fell into art, I was really young, like four years old. I remember seeing my sister drawing, so I went to my room and started sketching. When she noticed me, I tried to hide it. She saw what I was doing. “It looks good. I like it. Keep it up.” When she said that to me, from then on I just kept drawing. For Christmas, instead of getting a toy, my mom would bring like a painting set or crayon books. So that was my introduction to art. And I just kept on from there. I learned what I could: drawing, finger painting, charcoal, anything that was related to art I got into. The one thing I was never taught in school was graffiti. That was something you had to learn from the outside.

Bio
: Once when I was coming from downtown and getting off the subway car, when the doors closed, I saw these huge top-to-bottom cartoon characters on the outside of the train. So I was like, “Whoa! I like this. I want to do that.” I went back to my neighborhood and started asking questions: “I saw this stuff on the train. What was it? Oh, that’s graffiti?” You got to learn. You got to get up. I didn’t know about any of that. When you first start out, you are considered a “toy.” So nobody really deals with a toy. So you hang out with other toys who are maybe a little more than you, or maybe nothing at all. Then you continue, you start learning how to go to the trains, where they laid up at night, the schedules. And then you realize, “All right, I don’t have paint.” So then you got to go stealing paint. And it’s been thirty-one years since.

We would travel to get our paint because in our neighborhoods we were already coming in late in the game. Writers from the seventies, they had already “killed”—what they called “burnt”—all the spots where you could steal paint. “Burnt” means you couldn’t go in and steal. The stuff was either in cages or locked up. So you’d have to travel far. You’d have to go to Queens or Jersey or different areas that weren’t as hip to the graffiti game where they would still leave the spray paint out right on the shelf.

Nicer
: Most of that was done in the winter, when we had these huge down jackets. You’d get the bubble jackets from Alexander’s department store. Then you’d set up a system. You’d learn it from other graffiti artists. Asking around.

Bio
: Wear a long shirt tucked into your pants and leave an opening so you could then push the cans in.

Nicer
: There were so many different ways. But you start getting creative here. Remember, we didn’t come from families that kind of embraced this art form. Or any art form, or had any extra money to buy you supplies. We believed in it and wanted to participate in it so much that we would risk even being incarcerated.

BG 183
: And for us, we didn’t even see it as being like shoplifters. It was just part of that culture.

Nicer
: That’s what you had to do.

Bio
: Obviously paint is expensive. We needed hundreds of cans. So you’d spend the whole day doing that. And hopefully by the end of the day you’d have twenty, thirty cans. Same thing with markers, to draw. We would go to Pearl Paint, which was like one of the biggest contributors to graffiti art.

Nicer
: You’d go in and steal the markers, the designer markers.

BG 183
: It was like getting out. You had drugs going on. You had the gangs during that time. Everyone was doing their thing. So you became a graffiti artist. People were going to clubs, like hanging out on a Friday, dressing up, going to jams, but we dressed all dirty on Fridays going into the subway. That was our mission. Our thing was subways. We didn’t notice that people didn’t like it. It got our name out there for other people to see it.

Nicer
: When you got your name out there you became a ghetto superstar. It’s a very competitive art form, so you’re always trying to outdo what someone else did. We basically did it for the attention of each other. But the way a person takes a tag, it’s a form of calligraphy, but brought into modern times, two or three hundred times forward. It’s a stylized writing and it has a certain movement and certain flow that someone that’s into the art of calligraphy can appreciate. Like even the name we painted and the colors we used, they gave birth to a lot of the culture of design nowadays. It’s kind of like the guideline or introduction to a lot of designs.

The best part since we’re from the Bronx? So the thing was, we would paint this train, a number 6 train in Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx. And our paintings would roll through the Bronx into Manhattan, all the way through Manhattan and end up in Brooklyn. And then all through Brooklyn graffiti artists there would see it. And all through Manhattan graffiti writers would see it. So, in a way, it was our communication to other graffiti artists, throughout the city. It was like how Indians used to use smoke signals to kind of send a signal to say they were existing. It was our way of having this rolling gallery of our work go to the other boroughs. Then we’d also see what others were doing on their end. It was competitive.

BG 183
: That’s why I think that people born and raised in the Bronx come out, you know, being good. Because there’s always a competition going on. That’s why I think we became real good artists after a while. Because of the competition, we wanted to be good.

Nicer
: Those creative juices we have are like the eight-year-olds running around playing street games and being creative. That carried into our teenage years where still, though you didn’t have much, the energy came out in music, in fashion, and in what we were painting.

A lot of people see graffiti as a crime, but considering where we come from and what we were around? A lot of friends are sitting in jail right now, doing thirty years, life. A lot of them went on to become armed robbers, murderers, contract killers, stuff like that.

Bio
: We were doing graffiti and although it was a crime we didn’t see it as a crime, and it kind of kept us away from what was going on. Like, this guy’s going to rob a bank. I’m going to go steal spray paint to go paint a train.

MAJORA CARTER

Urban environmentalist, strategist, MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient

(1966– )

My parents were both from down South. Neither of them finished high school, or even went, to tell you the truth. There was always this understanding, though, mostly from my mother, that I would get a good education. I was the youngest of ten kids, and I think she saw something in me. It’s not clear to me what that was, but I had a level of creativity that she nurtured as best she could.

When I was little, there weren’t that many educational TV shows, but there were some. They would repeat them during the day. It didn’t matter what time of day it was. If Majora wanted to watch, if it was
Sesame Street
or
Mr. Rogers’
or
ZOOM
or any of those shows, everything stopped and Channel 13 was turned on for me. My siblings hated me for it. It was like maybe there was a lesson I didn’t get so I had to watch again. My mother’s like,
Majora’s got to watch
Sesame Street
—sorry!
To this day, my brothers and sisters talk about it and this was nearly forty years ago.
So you’re going to watch
Sesame Street
? You know how much we hated you?

At the age of seven, I knew that I wanted to get out of the neighborhood and school was the way out. I was reading on a twelfth-grade level when I was in the third or fourth grade. I knew I was smart.
Well, I’m smart enough to get out of here. I know I can go to a good high school and I’m gonna go to a good college and I’m never gonna look back.
And my goal at that time was to be a neurosurgeon.

My parents had each been married twice before. There were six kids at home, including me. That’s a lot of kids! In junior high school, I knew that I wanted to go to Bronx High School of Science. My teachers at Intermediate School 74 worked with a bunch of us, tutoring us. We weren’t at all prepared otherwise. Our school was definitely not up to par, so there were about ten or twelve of us who got tutored. Two of us got in. Eric Nuñoz and I.

There were drugs in the neighborhood. I didn’t do drugs because my mother would’ve killed me. Actually, this is what people don’t quite understand. I didn’t really try pot until I had gone out with white people. They were like, “Really?” I mean, I totally faked it. We pretended, but we didn’t really inhale. It also didn’t occur to me to have sex early. Again, that was something that more of my white friends were doing than almost any of my black and Latino friends in high school. And the drinking? It never occurred to me to drink like that before high school.

So I’m in Bronx High School of Science, and I’ve never seen so many white people in my life.
Wow, they’re everywhere!
We had only one white kid in my junior high. All the rest were either Hispanics or African Americans. So there I was in a school with about three thousand kids, and everything about it was miserable for me. At the time there were three kids from the neighborhood in addition to me who were going there. It was hard because it was really intimidating. I was smart, but I was in with kids—not even kids who went to private school—but kids who went to decent public schools in the city, and I was so far behind in my first year that I almost failed everything. Like, I was really bad at grammar. I actually said “aks,” A-K-S, instead of “ask.” I was shocked when finally someone told me that’s not how you say it. I was like,
Really
? Am I saying everything else completely backward too? I made it clear to my teachers that I didn’t want to fail. I was like,
Okay—let’s make it happen.
I got back on track.

I also found out about a program run by this amazing, very wealthy woman named Alice Miller. She lived on Park Avenue and she basically paid for this program for inner-city kids interested in science to learn about medicine, by spending Saturdays at either Albert Einstein or Mount Sinai Hospitals.

I took a bunch of classes. That’s how I spent Saturdays for the first two years of Bronx Science. I got a chance to examine babies’ hearts for different kinds of heart disease. We dissected everything on the planet and we literally got to sit in on autopsies with cadavers. I am so grateful for that experience in a big way. And then something happened. I don’t know exactly when it switched, but I realized that I didn’t want to do that anymore. I actually wanted to be an actress. Which was really bizarre, considering I was shy.

I just fell in love with movies and I said,
I can do that
, and I
want
to do that. So I went to see Alice Miller at her Park Avenue apartment. We sat and had a wonderful lunch, or maybe it was tea. I told her that I didn’t want to be part of the program anymore. She asked, “So what do you want to do?” “I want to act.” She said, “Okay. Do you still want to go to college?” Of course I still wanted to go to college. She asked me which one. I didn’t know, although I was thinking about Carnegie Mellon and Purchase. She said, “How about Wesleyan? I know the financial aid officer. Maybe you should think about Wesleyan. You’d love it and it’s not too far away.”

So I applied early decision. I got a call from the financial officer at Wesleyan, saying that they got my application, my essays, but that they didn’t have any of the records from my school. I’m like, “What do you mean you don’t have anything from my school? They knew I was applying.” “We don’t have it.” They had nothing from Bronx High School of Science. I had this guidance counselor who was a hateful woman. I would hand her all my stuff and she would kinda sneer. So my father and my sister went to school to see her.
What’s goin’ on?
She basically said that of course she had submitted everything. “We’ve spoken to the financial officer. He said that Wesleyan had everything except what you were responsible for.” The counselor looked around, the papers appeared, and then my father and sister got them to Wesleyan. That’s where I ended up going.