by Ryan Gattis
I hit two big outsides on the left side of the bus, one letter per tinted-out window. I do some throw-up letters with crisp, right-angle outlines like some high school letterman jacket shit, and on the entrance-and-exit side doors I do some vertical handwriting styles where I loop like fucking crazy and I might as well be twirling spaghetti with my streak. I’m so into it that it’s not until I’m done with the front entrance door that I notice the driver left his fucking RTD jacket, which, trust me, is a huge fucking score in the graffiti community. He must’ve left so quick he forgot it.
I don’t know how long it takes me to kick the bottom glass out of the door, but when it’s all the way broken, I wriggle in and grab the jacket. I shrug it on and it’s one size too small but I don’t even care. I keep it on cuz it’s like wearing the pelt of a bear I killed. That’s how much rep it’s worth. As I’m tripping on that, I realize doing a scribe on the inside would be insane, so I knock another one out on the windshield right next to where the ticket machine is, so everybody will have to see it every time they ride, and then I duck back out.
The right side of the bus I hit fast in a big one-liner, which means I just hit the tip of my spray paint and spray in one long line, not picking up as I transition from letter to letter with my silver Krylon. I kinda cheat though cuz I never done it before, and the whole thing ends a bit before the last wheel well, so I go back and put a few loops and arrows to make it look like it’s flying and everything.
If I had more time, I’d make it a whole piece, but it’s not safe just sitting out here. Every second that’s passing is about to give me a heart attack. I feel like cops could roll up at any time cuz this still stinks like a setup. But I can’t help myself. I saved the best for last.
On the back of the bus, the part that’s facing the street, I get up on the bumper and I lay down a sketch of my letters in silver and fill in like a motherfucker. I keep it real blocky, like it’s a big silver mirror on the black back of the bus that looks like blinds, and you’ve got to shoot up underneath them to make it look solid all around.
On top of my silver fills, I do thick black outlines on the letters, writing E-R-N-I-E. It pops so hard that you can prolly see the black outlined letters with shining silver middles from two football fields away if you’ve got an angle on it. I even spray little cracks and crevices over the top of the letters so it looks like they’re rocks kinda. In the bottom leg of the last E in Ernie’s name, I do an R.I.P. in black. After that, I stash everything back in my bag and grab my disposable camera out.
I start snapping pictures from all angles. Front. Side. Back. Other side. Low. From far away. Up close. And it’s when I’m up close that I feel eyes on me and turn around.
About thirty feet back, there’s a little kid watching me from a bank parking lot.
I take my headphones off and turn his way.
9
He’s twelve, maybe thirteen. He’s got dark eyebrows though, and big, dull-looking eyes. His hair’s all slicked back and he’s dressed like a little gee, but he’s breathing with his mouth open. He’s a mouth breather.
I give him a look that he doesn’t respond to, so I say, “You want to hit this up?”
I mean the bus. But he doesn’t move. He just keeps staring at me so I tell him to come over and he does. The kid’s right next to me when he looks at my ERNIE piece and says, “What is it?”
“It’s a tribute piece,” I say.
“Who for?”
I look at it, and then I look at the kid, and I’m thinking, Is he this stupid? But he’s squinting so I just figure, fuck it, might as well state the obvious.
“A guy I knew named Ernie,” I say. “He passed away a couple days ago.”
The kid nods at that and doesn’t follow up with anything, so I say, “You not interested in graffing at all?”
“Naw, not really,” the kid says. “I seen the gun in your belt while you worked though. I’m interested in that. How much?”
“I dunno,” I say as I measure the kid up and pull a number out that I figure he can’t afford, “a hundred bucks?”
“I got fifty,” he says, and I watch him pull a fifty-dollar bill off a wad that has a few more on it.
“That’s cool,” I say, like, no thanks. “What, are you slanging for somebody or something? Where’d you get that wad anyways?”
He doesn’t say yes and he doesn’t say no. He just holds his hand out with a hundred in it this time.
“Take it before I change my mind,” he says.
I give him a look, like, Who you trying to mess with, little man?
But I figure, you know what? Fuck it. I trade him the gun for the cash and pocket it. The kid looks at the pistol. He turns it over in his hands before taking it with his left, pointing at me, and cocking the hammer back.
My smile drops off my face, not cuz I’m scared, but mainly cuz I can’t believe this little banger just tried to pull that on me.
“Give me the hundred back and everything else you got,” he says. “Now.”
I’m up to $438. If this little dude thinks he’s getting his hundred back, he’s stupider than he looks, and that’s pretty damn stupid.
I say, “You know that shit isn’t loaded, right?”
He eyes me like he thinks I’m trying to trick him.
“Check it,” I say. “I’ll wait.”
I take a step back so he can feel safe to check without me taking it away from him. He pulls the cylinder out, and I see him put it right up to his face. I see his brown eye in all its dullness through one of the empty holes. He blinks.
“Make sure you buy twenty-two-caliber bullets for it,” I say. “That’s the only size it takes. I’d say hit up the Gun Store and go in the quarter bin for the littler ones, but I heard that place burned down.”
“Yeah, it did,” he says. “So twenty-two caliber?”
“Yup,” I say.
“Okay,” he says.
Out in the distance, I hear a helicopter humming.
I say to the kid, “You got named yet or what?”
He looks around. “Maybe,” he says.
I’m guessing that means no, and I’m about to hit him with one to think about when this woman comes stomping around the corner of the little medical center across the street. Wearing a short-ass skirt and heels that have been worn down from too much walking, she’s got black hair and she’s older than me, looking midtwenties and torn up. Even from a distance I can see sores on her mouth and a black eye.
“Hey,” she says to the back of his head and he doesn’t even turn, “we going or what?”
I’m not trying to be rude, but I say the first thing that comes to mind, “That your mom?”
“Fool, you better shut the fuck up,” he says with a snarl. “That’s my fresa, homes. That bitch sucks my dick.”
Jesus, I fucking hope not, not with all them sores. But I got nothing to lose, so I say, “Man, shut the fuck up. You’re so young, you can’t even get a fucking hard-on.”
He grabs his belt and says, “Whatever, homes.”
His fresa says something too. “Yeah, he can. And it’s good too.”
Fresa means strawberry, slang for the type of woman who trades sex for drugs, usually crack or coke. Man, I’m so grossed out by all this I can’t do anything but half smile at this kid, mainly just for the size of his bravado. This little motherfucker is a dealer, and maybe a pimp too. That’s where that money came from, the money in my pocket right now. She earned it the hard way.
“I’m gonna call you Watcher,” I say to him, “cuz you been watching. Keep it if you want. Throw it out if you don’t.”
He looks like he’s about to talk shit, but he just licks his lips, nods his head back, and points his chin at me instead.
“Watcher,” he says, like he’s trying the name on for size.
“Yeah,” I say, “it’s a good one. You take care.”
I turn and head out.
As I’m going I hear his fresa asking his permission to go ge
t a peanut butter shake at Tom’s Burgers. He’s starting a sentence with “Bitch, shut the fuck up . . .” when I’m getting in the car and peeling the fuck out.
The kid watches me go like he’s trying to memorize my face, like he thought I just got over on him with the gun sale and with what I said, and he’s never gonna forget it. I kinda laugh then, cuz, man, I really don’t need this shit.
L.A. has gone fucking crazy. All the way crazy.
When I’m back on the street and going, far enough away that no cop can connect me up to the bus, I breathe and think about my day, how my plan didn’t really go like I thought, how I should prolly just take this here money and run. It has sense to it.
I think every guy that ever did anything on the street, even if he did a lot, there’s always a gap between how much he wanted to do and how much he actually did, and I’m feeling that right now, feeling like a failure, even though I just made a whole bus my own personal graffiti playground. That shit is going to be legend when people see it. And people will ask about Ernie. They’ll wonder who he was. And for a moment, he’ll be alive in their minds. But I’ll be gone.
People will talk about me for a while after this. I’m sure Fat John and Tortuga will see it, but I still decide to make prints and copies of the photographs and mail them back to them. I think about the bus a bit then, how crazy that luck was.
Maybe it’s a good good-bye, but maybe it’s not a big enough ending, not over-the-top enough. People will prolly say I ranked out, but whatever. I never signed up for that other thing, that gangster thing. I always just wanted to be free. I just wanted to go all-city, hitting Hollywood and Downtown and Venice and writing ©’s under my name everywhere I go, like OILER and DCLINE, cuz it’s my golden time with just turning seventeen.
I figured I had a year of hitting it hard, and if I got caught, how much time could I ever do on a graffiti charge? I mean, prolly I’d get a couple hundred hours community service and a few weekends of JAWS, that’s Juvenile Alternative Work Services, and at worst I’d do a little bit of juvie, but no county time, nothing serious, nothing on my permanent record. This was my time to take it all the way and be famous and now it’s gone, just like Ernesto.
Something people don’t understand about graffiti is it’s a way to be somebody, it’s a way to piss people off, and it’s a way to claim your territory, but it’s also a way to remember. And I did that last one for Ernesto and the city that killed him. ERNIE R.I.P. the back of that bus says. It’s letters, sure, but it means something more.
It’s a middle finger and a headstone all rolled into one.
10
After I get my one-way ticket to Phoenix for $49 on special at the Long Beach Greyhound bus station, I call Gloria and tell her where she can pick her car up. Surprise, surprise, she’s not happy at all. She tells me she’s gonna kill me, and I’m cool with that cuz it’s definitely not the killing the monsters in my neighborhood would do if they saw me again and I said I didn’t want to join up.
Gloria says, “You made me call my mother looking for you, Jermy. I swear—”
I got to cut her off.
“I had to, Gloria,” I say. “I’m sorry. Really, I am. I didn’t mean to ruin anything for your date, but someday I’ll tell you why and you’ll totally get it.”
She’s legit mad. I can hear it in her voice when she says, “You better tell me why right now.”
“I’ll call you,” I say, “when I’m safe where I’m going.”
She says, “Where’s that?”
“It’s better you don’t know,” I say, “cuz at some point, someone will ask you if you know, and I don’t want to lie to you, and I don’t want you to have to lie to them.”
I hear a long breath hit the microphone on the other end, sounds like krrrgh.
“Okay,” she finally says.
In the background, I hear tapping and then Gloria gets real quiet as I hear her walk to the door in her slippers and then it gets even quieter so she must be looking out the peephole. Her breath catches up in her throat then and I know something’s wrong.
I say, “What?”
“Uh,” she says, “I gotta go.”
“What is it?”
“It’s not what, it’s who,” she says. “Ernesto’s little sister’s outside my door.”
I hear the knocking again, much closer this time. At first I’m wondering if she’s there for me, but that doesn’t make any kind of sense.
“Hang on, Jermy,” Gloria says, and I hear clothes getting pressed to the microphone like she put the receiver on her stomach or something.
Real faint, I hear door latches undo and then the door opening with a little creak.
“Hey,” Lupe says, “you said you were a nurse, right?”
My cousin must nod, cuz a second later Lupe says, “You know how to make splints for broken bones?”
Again, my cousin must nod, cuz Lupe says, “What stuff do you need for it?”
My mind’s kinda racing and I’m wondering what went down, but my first clear thought is The Goon Squad must’ve been up to some shit.
I don’t get a chance to say anything else though, cuz Gloria says, “I gotta go,” real quick and then it’s a dial tone in my ear.
I say, “Bye,” to it anyways.
I’m a little sad when I put it back up on the cradle. I have to get out of the way though cuz a black dude behind me needs the phone. He looks like how Martin Luther King Junior would look if he got old and fat.
It’s depressing me that there’s nothing in Phoenix. No fun, no people, no nothing. Just my aunt and another restaurant job prolly but then it hits me.
There’s freedom in Arizona, more than I ever dreamed of.
Out there, I bet nobody gets checked just walking down the street, like, Hey, this fool looks like he writes and I don’t see any tattoos, so hit him up. I don’t have to worry about the gangs out there or the turf, or that people think I’m ranking out, that I’m not living up. And I feel that badger in my stomach calm down a little.
Over the loudspeaker, they call my bus and I go out in the parking lot and give the driver my duffel and he puts it underneath in the compartment that folds up like a DeLorean door in all them Back to the Future movies. It even makes that noise when it opens too. Like, shimp. I keep my backpack with me when I get up in the bus and sit in the middle. It smells like stale bread in here and dog hair. I start flipping through my latest black book.
I never been, but as far as graffiti is concerned, Phoenix must be like some little kid shit . . .
Hold up, though.
Maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe that means I got possibilities now, and FREER isn’t so much dying as evolving into something entirely new and strong.
I mean, I could bring a whole new advanced style out there. I could be the first. I’m starting to like that. I mean, like it a lot. I could open up a whole franchise of L.A. style out there. I could be that thing from science class, whatdoyoucallit? A catalyst. Yes. I could be that for the Phoenix scene, pump it up a few notches. And besides, what’s FREER than leaving whenever the fuck I want to?
Nothing, that’s what.
On the bus, it looks like I’m not the only one getting out. There’s lots of Mexicans and Central Americanos on here. They’ve got their kids with them, too. I don’t blame them. Shit, if I had kids, I’d have them on the bus out too. It’s pretty easy not to want to be in L.A. right about now with all the looting and the shooting.
Fuck, I know I won’t miss twelve-year-old little dealer-pimps buying my throwaway from me and then trying to rob me for the money right back.
I won’t miss Big Fate giving me ultimatums.
I won’t miss getting rolled up on the block by the fucking Goon Squad, getting machine guns stuck in my face.
L.A.’s fucking crazy, man. But I will miss her.
Who knows though? Maybe I’m getting out at the right time. Like, before it all goes boom and slides into the ocean.
I push play on my
Walkman, but it doesn’t want to go in. It’s fussy sometimes. The button’s black and as big as my thumb tip. I press it and hold it in a bit before the heads eventually get turning and the music starts up.
Some strings come in as the driver pulls us out, and out the windshield, the sun is setting and it’s magical how we pull onto Pacific Coast Highway from Long Beach Boulevard as Nancy Sinatra’s voice comes in with the orange light of dusk and sings at me, telling me I only live twice. That cools me out pretty good, so I just sit and watch the buildings passing by out the window as we pull through the city, over what there is of the L.A. River, and down onto the 710 North.
After a little bit, we pass Lynwood and I watch it go and I don’t feel bad. I feel like it’s a box for everything bothering me, everything heavy, and it all stays there, stays behind, and leaves me light as a feather, free to float somewhere new.
Free to go wherever.
Free to be whatever I want.
JOSESITO SERRATO,
A.K.A. WATCHER
MAY 3, 1992
8:17 P.M.
1
I got this gun and it makes me real now. Makes me ready to do work. I feel good. Everybody knows how dead Momo is. Everybody heard he was laying up in that truck the pigs found on Wright Road. What was left of him anyways. I say serves that motherfucker right for going at Big Fate. Be big or be dead. I want to go to Big Fate and be down with him and his click. So I walk over to that Mini Vegas nobody ever shuts up about and knock on the door and wait to be let in. They let me in and search me and find the gun and hang on to it. That nurse lady is there. She looks at me funny cuz she recognizes me from that night when the brother of Miss Payasa died up in the alley. Miss Payasa is there too. Next to the nurse lady. Miss Payasa tells her she better go and she thanks her for everything. Miss Payasa puts money in the hands of the nurse lady. Some folded hundreds. I eyeball it for a grand. That nurse lady gives me a look like she wants to take me with her. Like maybe she was fixing to save me or something. But Miss Payasa pushes her outside and the door closes in the face of the nurse lady just as she says that everybody she helped out needs the hospital soon. Big Fate has his arm up in one of them giant sling things across the room. Same with a grip of other fools. That Sherlock Homeboy has a bump on his head like a baseball and he has an ice pack on it. Next to him is some fine Chink bitch with her wrist all wrapped up mummy style. One look and I could tell she was the kind some hypes would pay good money to fuck. I keep that to myself though. Especially cuz I see that Apache motherfucker that scalps people looks fucked up too. He plays a gambling machine with his good hand and it spins and makes noise while he sits in the corner drinking something gold in a big glass bottle. Big Fate sees me looking everywhere at wounds and casts and shit. He calls me over so he can shrug his shoulders and say the beat and release program is still going strong in the city of Los Angeles. He calls me lil homie and says they can knock us down but we always come back and come back stronger. He says la neta. So I say la neta. Cuz it is the truth. Nothing but. They are still here. Every one of them. They took a beating and they keep going. Not like Momo. Not like Trouble. Not like none of them fools. This click is nothing but straight-up killers. Survivors. Tough as fuck. Not even fucking sheriffs can win against them. Out of nowhere Big Fate asks me what I go by cuz he wants to know. I used to have a name I hated that everybody called me. Baby. But I got a new one now. I puff up and tell him I got the name Watcher but I make sure not to tell him where from. He nods at me like I did something good. He says he likes that name. So I say the name of the click then. I say it all proud. Also I say Lynwood controla. Cuz obviously they control Lynwood and nobody else. He looks at me funny after that and says he been asking around about me since I helped out. He heard I was slanging for Momo. And I answer that right away. Like yeah. I was. And he laughs at that. He asks if maybe I might be ready for something new. I tell him hells yeah cuz I got nothing but respect for how he did what he had to do. So you ready to be down or something? Big Fate is asking me. Fuck yes. I say that twice and nod the whole time through it. ¡La clica es mi vida! Till I fucking die. I say that too. He waits for a little bit. The room gets real quiet. So I remind him how I came straight up and told him about the brother of Miss Payasa. He says I did good on that. And right after that he says to jump this little motherfucker in then. Fuck yeah. That shit makes me so happy that I just close my eyes before the first punch comes. Or the first kick. Whatever. I could give a fuck what it is or where from. It will hurt. It will hurt bad. But it will be worth it. All of it is worth it to be down.
