Paper Sons: A Memoir

by Dickson Lam

  Strolling by that night was 4-Tay. His hair, set in finger waves, cascaded down to his shoulders. I recognized him from his album cover. He stopped to give a pound to a couple of us, though I doubted they knew him personally. It felt too hit-and-run for that. Probably just a Fillmore show of love.

  The smell of weed lingered in the air. Night had snuck up on us. The neon sign of a pizza shop had lit up. Headlights cruised by. None of the guys had said anything about me showing up unexpectedly with Hollywood to this meeting for 3F, Fresh Fillmoe Funk. If anybody was Fillmoe it was Hollywood. He tagged “Fillmoe” almost as often as his graffiti name, which actually wasn’t Hollywood. That was his nickname. How he got that, or what his real name was, I didn’t know. We’d only begun hanging out that summer. His graffiti name was SYMER, but no one called him by that. What the hell was a symer? Granted, plenty of guys chose tags for themselves that ended in “-er,” many of which sounded nonsensical—SIZER, KRYMER, VESTER, but at least these were based on actual words. It was hard to take Wood seriously as a writer. His style was unrefined, the loop in his R always too low. But he was down to fight, and I don’t mean if he was backed in a corner. The dude hunted for fools from rival turfs, though he was no bigger than me. He flaunted his set by wearing a custom-designed baseball hat, the kind hardcore cats from the Moe were rocking at the time—name and your turf airbrushed in bubble letters dotted with rhinestones.

  My pager vibrated in my jean pocket. It was my mom. Probably wanted to complain about how I’d missed dinner. Or maybe she wanted to tell me she was staying at Willie’s for the weekend and had left some pasta in the fridge. Staying at his house was a new thing, a compromise, her response to his cheating. His defense had been that he’d left his wife years ago for her, but she had yet to divorce my father. He needed more of a commitment. I told my mom not to fall for his crap. “Shifting the blame is the oldest trick in the book,” I’d said. “I use it all the time.”

  I thought she’d really leave him. She’d tell us to pick up the phone for her, and if it was Willie, to say she was out. I was used to doing that with my father, so I had no problem lying to another guy who had hurt my mom. But eventually, my mother gave in, and it was back to only lying to one man for her.

  A bus approached. I stuffed my pager back in my pocket. All of us rushed to the curb, pushing each other aside for a better view. Wood’s tag sailed by on the window of the bus. Black smoke belched from the exhaust. “I stay running,” Wood shouted, as though he scored a goal. He had beady eyes and a rough-looking face, wrinkles you wouldn’t think a sixteen-year-old would have.

  “Why you here?” TYMER, the co-leader of 3F, said to me. His annoyance was so exaggerated I assumed he was playing around. I hadn’t noticed when he arrived, though he was one of the tallest in our bunch. He wore a Rasta beanie and army fatigues.

  “It’s about time my boy RANK get in 3F,” Hollywood said and slapped my chest. I rocked back, the blow harder than was probably intended.

  “That right?” TYMER said to me.

  “Sure, why not?” I said.

  “Motherfucker, do you want in or not?” TYMER said.

  “Yeah, I’ll hit up 3F.”

  TYMER pulled aside the other leader, SIKE, who twisted his short dreads and nodded along. I thought I was in. Joining a crew had always been this easy. No hoops or hurdles. We weren’t gangs on some blood-in-blood-out shit. If you were cool with the leader, you were a shoo-in. And I didn’t just know the leaders of 3F, I knew all the members gathered this night.

  LC, Lil’ Cut, was like a little cousin. He was the youngest, a scrawny twelve-year-old who was all business. He’d plan out the buses he’d hit at the start of a day: the 43 to the 6 to the 7 to the 71 to the N to the K back to the 43 for another lap. ROME would show me his sketch book during history class. I studied his tags. His letters had depth, vigor. The legs of his M slanted inward, and sprouting upward from the foot of his E was a curved line, a whip in motion. There was CLUE. We called him Black-C. The first time I met him we were supposed to fight. He’d been crossing my name out, so when I saw him at a bus stop, I stepped to him, though if it weren’t for all the damn people watching, I would’ve ducked away. He was six foot and wore a puffy trench coat. Luckily, he offered a truce. Said he’d just wanted to test me. See what I would do. From then on we were cool as shit.

  These were the guys in my tagging circle. We’d bus-hop around the city, take a break at a hilly park, trudge up to a bench with a view of the city, and puff puff pass on a honey-coated blunt. We’d coordinate what we stole at Safeway. One person would get the bread, another the meat, another the cheese, another the sodas. We’d have a picnic at the bus stop. We were always in the same crews: PE, TFB, KSF, but 3F had seemed off-limits.

  I didn’t reside in the Fillmore, so how could I claim Fresh Fillmoe Funk? I couldn’t even pronounce the neighborhood correctly, which is to say the way they did: Fillmoe. When I would try to say it, it came out “Fillmore,” as if I had an English teacher stuck in my head. I’d resort to the monosyllabic version, the Moe. But more than living in the wrong neighborhood—I lived in North Beach, the housing project near our high school, which had to count for something—what made me most uncomfortable with asking to join 3F and simultaneously what made me most want to join, was that everyone I knew in it was Black.

  I had a confusing relationship with Blackness. It nurtured me, and to a degree, raised me. The parents of my homies in North Beach were my second mothers and fathers. It wasn’t uncommon for friends to say, “Dickson’s Black.” I’d hear this enough that at times I’d forget it wasn’t true.

  I’d refuse watermelon because I didn’t want to play out a stereotype.

  I existed in-between. A homeboy, in reference to other Chinese, would use the word “Chinamen” but immediately afterwards, say to me, “No offense, my nigga.”

  I’d never heard anyone state that 3F was intentionally or exclusively a Black tagging crew, but it sure seemed like it in a city where the majority of writers were white or Latino. If there was one thing I wanted to respect, it was Black unity. It was a year after the Rodney King verdict, and in the aftermath of the riots, I sought answers. I tuned in to daytime talk shows. An audience member on Oprah called for revolution. Said we shouldn’t fear the word. All it meant was change. Others clapped in support.

  Flipping channels, I stopped on a Black-owned public access channel when I heard the word revolution again. It was Malcolm X giving a speech, a reenactment. Malcolm argued that Black folks were using the word revolution too loosely, that if they understood what it really meant, they’d think twice about using the word. Revolutions, he said, are bloody, based on land, not loving your enemy. He cited an article in Life magazine that he had read in prison. A nine-year-old girl in China is pictured aiming a gun at a man on his hands and knees, an Uncle Tom to the revolution—her father.

  I became a Malcolm groupie, but I was an undercover groupie. I didn’t wear an X hat or a shirt with an image of Malcolm. The only Malcolm X paraphernalia I had was a book cover. On the front of it was a quote from Malcolm arguing that history was the most important subject to study. I’d skip class after lunch to plow through history books at the main library, books that illuminated a neglected past, George G. M. James’s Stolen Legacy.

  Malcolm simplified my life. He gave me dos and don’ts. When a white girl showed interest, I’d ask myself, WWMD? I told my mother no more Spam. No more cans of Vienna sausage. No more steamed spare ribs. The pig was part rat, part cat, part dog. Chi seen, she decried. What kind of Chinese person doesn’t eat pork? Who’s telling you this garbage?

  What Malcolm said that stuck with me the most was that my father was not my father. “Just ’cause you made them, that don’t mean you’re a father,” he said. “Anybody can make a baby, but anybody can’t take care of them.”

  Malcolm believed Black folks needed their own space, and I agreed. I had
never pushed to join 3F. More than anything, I didn’t want to come off like a wannabe or worse, be rejected as one. Honorary status was bestowed, not begged for.

  In 1966, a year after Malcolm was assassinated, the Black Panthers were formed. One of the original members was Asian, a Japanese American, Richard Aoki, who supplied them with their first guns. You can find black-and-white photos of him from that era, dressed in shades and a beret. In one picture, a cop wearing a riot helmet has a baton in one hand and grips Richard’s arm with the other, the guy much larger than Richard, who stood only five-six, but Richard isn’t scared. He doesn’t even look mad. He looks tough, seasoned. Though he’s facing the cop, Richard’s eyes are off to the side, perhaps focused on the other officer closing in or maybe something else at the protest. The cop is tugging him, and as a result Richard’s legs are crossed, but somehow Richard maintains his balance and appears graceful, as though dancing with the cop. Perhaps the most striking image of Richard is him strutting around Sproul Plaza, hair slicked back, shades and a leather jacket, and in his hand, at his side, a two-by-four.

  I was in college when I discovered Richard Aoki, thirty years after he joined the Panthers. An Asian American magazine featured a story on him. On the cover of that issue, one of the headlines read: “Black Panthers and Yellow Power.” I tracked him down for an interview. I told Richard I was writing a research paper about him, and I was, but the paper was just an excuse to meet a Yellow Panther. He chose a donut shop for the interview. He wore cowboy boots and pronounced police “PO-lice.” He said he was down with the Panthers from the jump. He’d grown up in West Oakland with Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, and they grew closer at Merritt College. They’d chop it up about politics over drinks. The year after Malcolm was assassinated, the three of them “sat down one night with a fifth of Scotch and hammered out the Ten-Point Program,” the Panther manifesto.

  In an interview on public radio, Richard recalls it was at the Panthers’ first formal meeting that Huey asked him to join, to which Richard replied, “I know you two guys are crazy’cause you got this program together, but are you blind as well? I’m not Black.”

  “That’s not the issue, Richard,” Huey says. “The struggle for freedom, justice, and equality transcends racial and ethnic barriers. As far as I’m concerned, you Black.”

  “Grab your .357,” Bobby says, “we got work to do.”

  “To the park,” TYMER announced. He lighted up a beedi and crossed in the middle of the block with SIKE.

  “Come on, RANK.” Hollywood nudged me.

  SHIM flicked CLUE’s ear and ran across the street, unconcerned that we hadn’t received an answer.

  Flattened cigarette butts were strewn about the sidewalk. A girl and two boys, all of them wearing spiked collars and leather jackets with an inordinate number of zippers, were smoking on the stoop of a house. We passed a bar, a tattoo parlor, and a small boutique. I called these Places for White People. That’s probably why Lower Haight became our stomping grounds—neutral territory bordering Fillmore. Though Fillmore was one neighborhood, it was more accurate to call it a coalition. Members of 3F repped different turfs, usually tied to a housing complex: Banneker Homes, Thomas Paine, Freedom West. Claiming one Fillmore turf didn’t gr ant you a pass to hang on the block of another Fillmore turf; the bond was tenuous.

  We rounded the corner toward a cul-de-sac of Victorian homes. The entrance to Duboce Park sat at the end, wide steps breaking up a stone retaining wall. Past the steps an open patch of grass met us under a blue-black sky. The park was empty, as though it had been reserved for us.

  “Time to slap box,” SIKE said, ambling around the grass.

  “If y’all want to get in the Tray,” TYMER said, “you gotta know how to chucks ’em.”

  For 3F, writing took a backseat to throwing down. In an article about graffiti in San Francisco, dated the year of that summer, the author, a freelance journalist, who would later become an editor with Wired magazine, concludes, “3F is one of the most notorious tagging crews in the city, known by almost every graffiti writer as disrespectful of the art and violent.” The article begins with an anecdote about four graffiti artists painting a mural inside a tunnel. They’re confronted by three teenagers, who they believe might be from 3F. “How about you give us your paint,” one of the teenagers demands. No fight ensues, but the graffiti artists leave, their mural incomplete. The anecdote sets up the main subject of the article—the tension between taggers and graffiti artists. The graff artists interviewed don’t deride us for our lack of artistic talent. They don’t call our tags scribbles. They saw us as part of their graffiti family, one with an established hierarchy based on artistic skill. Their beef: we didn’t respect them. They’d spend hours, sometimes days, painting on a wall intricately designed figures, words with three dimensions, only to discover when they’d return that their work had been defaced by tags. “These kids have lost their roots,” an OG graff artist says. Maybe we had. Not because we sullied their fresh murals. That was a minority of taggers. The rest of us were in awe of them. Graff artists were the better-looking sibling, the one with more talent. They made their way into galleries, books, forever photographed. The darlings of the family. We were the runaways. Several hundred strong. Duking it out for supremacy on the city bus, our home—a mobile battlefield. Most of us had never heard of the older graffiti artists mentioned in the article. We didn’t write to connect to a past. We wrote to break from it.

  “Let’s get this shit over with,” SIKE said, as though slap boxing would be a formality.

  SHIM was up first. He and his opponent feinted and dodged each other’s swipes, their match resembling the first round of a boxing fight. Though SHIM was silly, he played on the school basketball team, was athletic—rare for a tagger—but he wasn’t landing any of his strikes. We booed, and I knew the same boos awaited me. The last time I slap boxed, I’d gotten smacked left and right. Wood had to call time-out to remind me to guard my face. In the distance, overlooking us on a hill was a three-prong antenna tower, layered red and white, its aircraft warning lights blinking, as if communicating with some celestial entity.

  “Next!” TYMER said.

  “Me and you, RANK,” Hollywood said. He took off his rhinestone-encrusted hat, which he had on sideways, and set it gently on a nearby bench.

  I took off my hoodie and threw it across the same bench. I rubbed my hands for warmth. I emptied my pockets: keys, pager, and bus pass. On the back of the pass, I’d scribbled a bunch of numbers. Half belonged to 3F members. One belonged to a girl I’d spent hours talking to but had yet to meet. I also had Willie’s number on there, unlabeled, the only number written in blue ink. I used it as little as possible.

  I pulled out my marker from the waistband of my drawers. It was the size of a small remote control. I’d wrapped it in black electrical tape for a better grip. It was comforting how it pressed against my belly throughout the day, a constant reminder of who I was. At the bottom of its base, there was a recess exactly the length of two pennies. I’d fitted two snugly side by side, one minted in my birth year, the other, the current year.

  Someone slapped me lightly on the crown of my head. “Keep your hands up, boy,” Hollywood said. He stood in a southpaw stance and bobbed and weaved. The rest converged around us.

  I went on the offensive, swinging away. I imagined his head was a basketball. I had quick hands on the court. Blocking shots and stripping the ball came easily. I landed a blow across Wood’s cheek. He smiled, surprised, and backpedaled. I pressed forward, throwing jabs and crosses, scared he’d get closer.

  CLUE jumped in front of Wood, handed someone his coat and pulled up his pants, but CLUE had no belt. His jeans dropped below his waist. He had a slim frame. His fists were up, elbows out.

  I couldn’t connect. He used his longer reach to keep me at bay, circling around me and snapping out jabs, but then he stumbled on the grass, and I was all over
him.

  “Oooh! Fucked him up,” someone said.

  “Let’s see you do that shit against me,” SIKE said.

  “You gonna tae kwon do my ass,” I said. I’d heard he won a martial arts tournament. I wanted to quit while I was ahead. I folded my hands on top of my head and tried to catch my breath.

  TYMER and SIKE conferred again together. TYMER counted to three with his fingers, slow, as though to accentuate each number.

  “We’ve been letting too many motherfuckers in,” TYMER addressed the group, pacing back and forth with deliberate strides. “From now on, this is how you get in 3F: Pull a lick. Pull a runner. Fade on a blunt.”

  “Start with pulling a lick,” SIKE said to me and SHIM.

  The dramatic tension was reversed, the toughest task first. The other two would be easy. Pulling a runner was amateurish. Any idiot could grab something and bolt out of a store, and forking over cash to buy weed was no test, but the first challenge, robbing someone, wasn’t my kind of thing. I didn’t aspire to bully. I’d been on the receiving end enough to know better. That’s what I told myself when I wanted to feel self-righteous, but this masked my fear of fighting. It wasn’t the physical pain I feared the most. Bruises heal. It was the public nature of it, the potential of being humiliated, branded as a joke.

  “All right,” I said, “but me and SHIM get to pick the mark.”

  “This ain’t a negotiation,” TYMER said.

  “Bus!” someone shouted. A streetcar had emerged from the

  Duboce Tunnel.

  We raced across the park to the bus stop. SHIM broke ahead of the pack, and I hustled to catch up. The streetcar pulled alongside us and slowed to a stop. Its back door glided open. We jumped on and held the door, waving in the rest of the crew. They had one hand at the waistband of their jeans, holding up their sagging pants, as graceful as competitors in a three-legged race.