Two Stories

Brooklyn, NY - Peter - Wednesday, April 10th, 2002 : goo

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I.
Yesterday, I was riding the train. Due to ongoing weekend track-repairs, my trip was detoured across a variety of lines: the G, L, R, 3, and 1 trains; as such, I came into contact with several different people, a new group on each train. I'm discovering that people on the NYC subways are much more talkative during the weekend; this is not always a good thing.

Strapped to my bag was a large blue hard-hat. On the hard-hat is a label that says "Liam", as if it were my name, and a large sticker that says "Safety first in 2001!". I had been wearing the hat this past weekend at a party. I stepped on to the R train, a line that crosses much of midtown en route to my connection at Times Square, and as such, generally sees a good selection of passengers, mostly mid-towners, tourists, and people returning from shopping in Chinatown.

A painfully-hip looking girl sat down next to me, immediately glancing at the hat on which my fingers were rhythmically tapping, in time to my headphone music. She was saying something. I quickly pressed pause on the disc player, catching the last half of her sentence, which went something like "...construction, huh?"

I said, in an unintentionally dead-pan monotone, "I'm not a construction worker", and turned the music back on. She spoke again, I paused again, and caught "...Liam?" as the music faded. Abruptly, I said, "and my name's not Liam, believe it or not" before stepping off that train and across the platform to catch the 3, leaving her utterly confused.

II.
Back in the days of the pre-Guiliani-era fiscal crisis, graffiti was rather rampant on the IRT lines. I remember making trips into the city as a child, in the 80's, and marveling at the breathtakingly large, day-glow tag murals covering the inside and outside of the train cars. The stations were not immune, and several saw their share of immense graffiti bombs. At the time, I wasn't at all interested in any of the possible aesthetic qualities of graffiti, just transfixed by the look of a city that couldn't afford to clean itself up.

That era of the City has long since passed, and only now and then do echos of it make it through the constant day to day hum of development, rebuilding, and general modernity now blanketing the City. Often are the days I look through the train windows while in tunnels, covering the edges of my face with my hand to block the glare and light, staring out at the huge old murals that pass, in the dark depths of the tunnels, in the crevices that no one bothered to buff.

This weekend I saw something rare, indeed. As my train pulled into the station, I saw before me a large graffiti mural on the tile wall. I dashed from the train to snap a photo of this Sunday afternoon marvel, before Monday morning's pending cleaners could wash it down the drain.

People loitered around its base, gazing up at its larger-than-life height, crazy spray-art workmanship that edged into the brink of illegible. The photo-op was irresistible. Unfortunately, my digicam was battery-drained and my lomo was out of film.

With no photo to show, I knew I'd end up writing about it in place of showing it. So, I stared long and hard at the mural, realizing that I had stepped off the train, forced to wait for the next on a slow weekend schedule, just to look at a modern jumble of aerosol art, taking home no photo to preserve what would surely quickly be buffed off.

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