splat chapter eight

Driving home, Suzie decided to go down Piedmont. Then she decided to cut down Ponce, and lo and behold the red 'Hot Now' light was on at the Krispy Kreme, so she swung into the parking lot and around into the line at the drive through. 'Two Krispy Kremes, please.' She left them in the bag to cool a little, and decided to take the long way home. So she got in the right lane to turn down Boulevard and sat at the light, checking out three hookers flouncing and prancing around the corner gas station. They all seemed to be eighteen-year-old white girls, but Suzie had seen them up close before, and it was like looking at grandmas.

The light changed and she turned onto Boulevard. Suzie cruised slowly down the street. Which was just hitting its stride in the warm spring days. People clustered on the sidewalks late into the evening, wearing their party-best t-shirts. From spring to fall the street and its curbside were the preferred chilling place for blocks of eighty year old apartment buildings with no air conditioning.

There was always someone with nonreflective dark skin dressed in nonreflective black clothes crossing the street, away from the street lights, going slow, not much minding the traffic, expecting the drivers to be looking out for their sauntering asses. So Suzie looked out. And every time she looked at one of the guys standing on the corner in a huge t-shirt and a baseball hat, he stared back, started forward from his post, and said, 'Hey Baby, yo. What you want?'

Suzie had her hand in the Krispy Kreme bag and was gingerly grasping a hot doughnut, its still-molten frosting burning the prints off her fingertips, pulling it valiantly apart despite the pain, willing half the doughnut to surrender. It came away, tearing moistly, ragged at the edges. She held it in front of the steering wheel. Steaming, fluffy inside, the slight crunch of the fried surface, sweet sugar frosting. A taste like no other. Not cake doughnuts. Not crullers, not honey dipped, not anything sold at Dunkin' Donuts. Not like beignets, either. The Krispy Kreme taste sweet and sinful but positively angelic in its lightness. What an addiction; better than heroin. Better than sex.

Licking her fingers and reaching for the other half, she found that she'd already inhaled it without noticing. So she grabbed half of the second doughnut and promised herself to take her time. 200 calories of fat and sugar apiece. But worth it. And besides, Suzie was a little thing, and burned off whatever she ate. Maybe when she hit middle age she'd blow out like a fat little doughnut with sugar icing. But for now, her attitude was - let's just do full-fat and never mind the silly lo-carb fad.

She decided to cut down Auburn Avenue and go past Martin Luther King's boyhood home, the most popular Park Service site in the country, a national shrine. Nobody out this time of night, of course. Nice street of houses. Built as the homes of Jewish merchants after Reconstruction. Then after the 1906 race riot, they fled to the suburbs and it became the homes of middle-class black businessmen, of which there were plenty in Atlanta a hundred years ago. These were big houses, with back staircases for the servants of the former slaves who'd made good.

All up and down the street you could point to things and say Martin Luther King hung out here. He climbed the old oak tree over on the crest of the hill as a child. He ran errands for his mom over there to this used-to-be store. It was kind of cool to be driving past a shrine late at night. She felt holy as she cruised slowly through the neighborhood eating the last of the Krispy Kremes like the sacrament it was.

She drove down the hill into an industrial section. The original developers of Atlanta laid out the city according to stature. The rich white people got the high ground, and the bottoms were left for the blacks and industries. She drove thru the industrial section, past abandoned factories and factories turned into lofts, and down to the railroad tracks at Krog Street.

These were the same tracks that went by her house, to Decatur and points east, one of the main lines through the city. There was a major train yard above Krog Street, running from the back of Oakland Cemetery to the back of Seaboard Avenue, a mile and a half. The CSX Intermodal terminal. Hulsey Yard.

The rails rule in this part of Atlanta. The train was here first, and the roads have always had to go around. If you want to cross to the south of the railroad lines in this part of Atlanta, you've got Hill Street, or Boulevard, or Krog Street, or Moreland Avenue. And that's it in two miles of city streets. If you live nearby you put up with clanking and wrenching and chugging and whistling all through the night. It gets to be comforting. Especially the rippling thunder of a hundred trains being knocked back a few feet by the engine, car by car.

The Krog Street tunnel was unoccupied by pedestrians but had plenty of traffic going through it. Suzie had hoped to find her roommate and his crew skulking around bravely tagging their selected spot in the tunnel. It didn't look like anyone had put up a fresh piece, but it was hard to tell, because the tunnel was randomly lit rows of pylons, painted with graduated phases of the moon by some long gone tagger, with pedestrian walkways on both sides.

The walls of the walkways were covered with panel after panel of graffiti. Cartoons, exploding words jumbled up like snakes, a noble painting of Robert Mitchum. The portrait was starting to crack, but nobody had capped it with their mark out of respect for the artist. There was a cute little grinning pillow ghost saying, 'I love you too, Cabbagetown'. There was a tribute to ATEM RIP 1981-2004, there was a salute to Adult Swim, a runaway cable hit proud to be from Atlanta. And there was the usual rivalry between taggers. One would slash through another guy's work, and then that guy would go around dissing the first guy's work, and it was like dogs pissing on a hydrant.

It was a wonderful, colorful place of great sociological import. Public art. She wanted to put something up there herself. But she was just a toy; her abilities were not up to the standard of the Krog Street tunnel; it was like trying to make the New York art scene when she was still practicing folk art. Of course, it's been done, but she lacked all confidence.

So she turned left on Wylie, and paralleling the train tracks to the back of Seaboard, snaked along Walthall, Hardee, Kensington, Holiday. All named for Civil War commanders of the Battle of Atlanta, which happened right there beneath her. Now it was old, rundown houses. Workingclass black folk's houses for the past hundred and fifty some odd years. Old trees. Cracked pavement. Cars on blocks. Most lights were out, some televisions flickered. It was quiet, peaceful, and home.

The boys were there, watching the tube and looking pretty much the same as they had the night before. Suzie wasn't sure if any of them had changed clothes.

'I came through Krog Street,' she started.

The boys exploded. 'Man, the cops almost got us,' Jason yelled.

Demetrius swore. 'I left my gear behind, they was that close to getting me.'

'We didn't hardly get started,' Philip explained.

'I've been thinking,' she said. But they weren't listening.

Demetrius had been using a thin cap to outline his script. They were on the east wall of the tunnel, halfway down, and they were covering Dopez's tag, because Dopez had shorted him on some pot the other week, and Demetrius was still mad about it.

'Fuck, man, I was putting it down smooth. And the fucking cops came out of nowhere and turned their lights on.' He made those rap hand movements, short jabs of stiffened fingers, rather resembling the inlaid knife thing Suzie dreamed about.

'You wouldn't believe how loud a siren sounds in there.' Alex tugged at his ear.

Philip stood up, shaking his head to clear the hair out of his eyes. He towered over the stretched-out figures in front of the tube. 'Hey, man, gotta go. I'm tired of talking about this shit. Gotta fucking two hour bus ride in the morning. I'm going home.'

Alex lobbed an empty at him. 'Hey, man, this work shit's getting bad. When you gonna quit that job and get some rest?'

'I don't know, man. I'm getting pretty sick of this gig. Maybe they'll fire me.'

Demetrius called out, 'Hey, dude, get me a beer on your way out, willya?' Philip tossed him one from the fridge, then went around the backs of the couches and out the door.

Alex turned to Jason. 'Shit, man. Philip should just quit his damn job and get something around here. Target's hiring. And Kroger. And Best Buy. And they're still opening stores in the complex. It's just across the fucking street. What's he taking the fucking bus for?'

'Maybe there's a girl involved,' Jason said, and they all laughed. Philip with a girlfriend. Any of the guys with a girlfriend. Taggers didn't have girlfriends. They were mostly loners, losers; the kind of guys who needed to be off by themselves because they had the social skills of computer geeks with only half the brain power.

Their whole passion was tagging. They were a tight crew of artists and renegades who would go anywhere and take any risk in order to get an illegible scrawl up on some wall or overpass in indelible paint. True immortality, made all the more true by the fact that it got scrubbed right off, and all the more immortal because the act was a felony and they knew guys that had wound up in jail.

The conversation turned to the fucking cops again, which Suzie found rather boring, because they weren't talking about how they were going back out later tonight, but sounded like they were blowing it off permanently. They sounded like a bunch of kids making excuses.

The news was on, so she called dibs as she grabbed the remote, and switched it on.

Whatshername the anchor is on, looking businesslike in her dark suit, just starting to go gray at the temples, bathing-cap-length curly black hair lacquered down tight. She's not smiling as she announces the top story.

A burning building graphic, slightly better drawn, with more details and straighter lines. Suspicious House Fire is written in big slashy black letters. 'Another house fire in Southeast Atlanta,' she begins. 'This one on Haas Avenue in East Atlanta. The cause of fire is under investigation.'

The picture shows a dark street, fire engine lights flashing and people scurrying, the remains of a house glowing in the background. 'Three people were transported to Grady Memorial Hospital tonight after being severely burned in the latest suspicious house fire. A three-year-old child, a fifty-four-year-old woman and a forty-five-year-old man suffered burns on their hands, face, chest, and back areas.'

The camera cuts to Gloria Morales on the scene. The guys leaned in. She's got on a tight-fitting black suit, with flashing long black hair and deep sensual eyes. There's a hot-pink handkerchief in the breast pocket.

She's interviewing the neighbor, a black woman in her forties who is appalled and horrified at what has happened right next door. The neighbor starts crying. 'I don't know what's going on or why all these houses and places are burning down. I don't see why stuff keeps burning down all the time,' she sobs, while Gloria nods uncomfortably and eyes the camera man.

The next graphic is a Delta jet coming in for a landing. 'Airport officials allowed our news cameras onto the anticipated new Fifth Runway today. We join our roving reporter Maurice Black for the story.' The camera shows a shot taken from the chain-link fence around the airport's perimeter. The reporter faces the camera, standing in the sun. He's tall and skinny and black, and his mustache makes him look like Tyrone Power.

'You can't tell any more,' he says, 'but this used to be a neighborhood in Hapeville .' He gestures at the hill behind him running off into the distance. He points at his feet. 'You can still see the streets and curbs of the neighborhood.' The street runs off into the distance where it's buried under a drift of dirt. 'In all, 280 homes and businesses were acquired by the City in order to assemble the space needed to expand the airport.'

There is one tree left in the gently rolling red landscape, and it shades the construction trailer. It's 420 acres of Georgia clay, bulldozers everywhere leveling it out as fast as possible. Visible in the distance are several huge cement plants, with conveyer belts running gravel thousands of feet to the hopper. Cement trucks line up and roll off toward the Fifth Runway, under construction.

The camera comes back to Maurice squinting in the glare. 'One of the major pieces of the airport expansion project is this,' he waves at the barren earth. 'The longest runway bridge in the world. It's costing Atlanta $160 million dollars to build the bridge tunnel, part of an estimated $5.4 billion dollar project, which will take a decade to complete.'

The camera pans over the ex hills and streams that are becoming runway. 'During the past year,' he continues, 'teams of construction engineers have rerouted two major tributaries of the Flint River, and used huge earth movers to move almost 19 million cubic yards of earth. That's enough dirt to fill the Georgia Dome six times over. They're building the runway embankment as tall as a ten-story building in some spots.' He moves to the close. The anchors talk about how big the Georgia Dome is.

A new graphic comes up. It's a fanciful drawing of a computer-age jail, all antennas and dishes, glass and chrome, bars and lasers. 'The City unveiled the latest weapon in its arsenal against crime today. The Straight Path Center For Rehabilitation.'

The scene is a shot of a rambling building, under renovation. The kudzu has been peeled back from the structure and men are up on ladders painting it white. Whatshername continues, 'It's taken two years and thirty two million dollars to renovate the old Atlanta Work Farm. The facility has been equipped with the most advanced, state-of-the-art technology, and will enable corrections officers to efficiently manage the well being and security of up to five hundred homeless people, control their access to resources, and monitor their progress as they work toward becoming productive members of society.'

The camera shows a ruined outbuilding, covered in kudzu, which runs to the horizon and covers the background trees. 'The first task of the formerly homeless clients will be to clean their own house,' she says with a smile in her voice. 'The renovation of the facility is ongoing, and requires the reclamation of a landfill that operated on the site for many years.'

The camera's back on her. She looks up and smiles. 'Now this.'

The ads came on. The guys grabbed for the remote to switch to MTV, but she ended up with it and took it to her room, changed out of her clothes and into the same t-shirt and boxers she wore the night before, and came back. She wanted to watch the news, but she wasn't fond of ads, and liked to save up things to do while they were on, so she could miss them.

However, her timing was off, for she had to sit through one for an on-line university. 'This is a man with a masters degree.' The scene showed a guy in a suit getting into a Lexus. 'This is a man without a masters,' illustrated by an unshaven guy in tennis shoes standing on a street corner, rattling a cup. 'Which one do you want to be?'

Then there was an ad for Papa John's Pizza. The guys loved the pizza ad. They knew people who worked there, and were full of tales of what really goes on the pizza that gets delivered to your door.

Whatshername is back on, this time smiling with confidence and an air of authority. 'Downtown Atlanta was much friendlier the day after a controversial new law went into effect.' The shot panned over the north end of Woodruff Park, where usually there's a bunch of homeless people sitting on the wall and benches in front of a curved block-long cascading fountain. The scene shows empty seats, shady and clean, the water plashing gently beyond, reassuringly. 'The streets are safer for visitors today. Police say that panhandlers are going somewhere else now that it's a crime to be homeless in Atlanta.'

The guys bristled. Like there was any place else to go.

The cute little panda graphic appears over the anchor's shoulder. 'Plans for the renovation of Zoo Atlanta were revealed today in a ceremony on the steps of City Hall.' The camera focuses on a trim, serious-looking little blonde woman, spokesman for the Zoo. She stands in front of a giant map of Grant Park, accepting keys to the park from some gray-suited official. The key is oversized and plastic, and they do some clowning around with it before making speeches.

Fast forward to a uniformed policeman handing the same blonde woman an envelope. The anchor's voiceover resumes. 'In an unprecedented move, the Atlanta Police Department announced that it would lease some of its land in Grant Park to Zoo Atlanta for its expansion. This land, adjacent to the zoo, was the former site of the police horse barracks, and has been unused for some time. Plans call for an update to the Ford African Rain Forest, home of the late Willie B.' The camera shows footage of a pair of gorillas grooming each other, sitting in the sun up on a hill.

Whatshername smiles at the camera again as the little panda graphic appears on her left shoulder. 'The Zoo Atlanta expansion comes on the heels of the new Conservation Action Resource Center, a five million dollar grant by Turner Broadcasting that will use cartoon characters to educate kids about real animals.' It was the previous newsworthy item about the zoo. They'd gotten a lot of mileage out of it.

She turns to her co-anchor, the middle-aged white guy with distinguished graying hair. 'You know, there are a lot of changes going on in Grant Park. New exhibits, new animals, more parking. It's going to be an even better reason to come to Atlanta. I know my kids are really excited about going to see Magilla Gorilla when the zoo reopens.'

The co-anchor nods bashfully. 'Actually, I can't wait to go see Yogi Bear, myself.' They both laugh gently, and the anchor turns to the camera again. 'Stay tuned for a look at tomorrow's weather,' and they cut to another round of ads.

Suzie bounced off the couch to go to the bathroom, leaving the remote. Alex grabbed it and switched to MTV. When she came back into the room, she plopped down on the far end of the middle sofa and swung her feet up on the cushions. 'So, I've been thinking. How hard is it to tag a railroad overpass?' She'd never really done any graffiti. She'd just listened to their tales. But she was considering plans of her own. And the guys made it sound so easy.

They discussed hooking onto the railing with their knees and bending over backwards. With practice, you could paint anything upside down. Jason was all about basic rigging. He had a bag of climbing gear he'd stolen off a construction site. According to him, you could get farther out if you were attached to something, and you could stay upright and mobile.

The other guys made fun of him. As far as they were concerned, the vital factor was the risk, the danger. The native abilities of the human animal. Like the time two of them held Alex by the ankles while he tagged the railroad overpass on North Avenue, behind Ghetto Kroger. They acted like commandos in an old black and white war movie, dedicated to blowing up an enemy outpost.

They inspired Suzie with their tales of peril and glory. If they could do it, she could too. All she needed was a plan and some spray paint. But she didn't just want to leave her name. She wanted to do something wonderful. Suzie was a girl with real aspirations. It didn't matter what situation she found herself in, she got into the job at hand with a religious zeal somewhere to the right of a Methodist . Working on a garbage truck (a temp job, lasted three weeks the cool shit people throw out, you'd be jealous), working for a week solid on her Auntie Mae's falling-down back porch, working on awful jobs, thankless tasks, menial labor: she always did as good a job as she could manage. Where other kids would slack off the moment the teacher's back was turned, Suzie would sit at her desk and doggedly complete her assignment. When the manager had her stacking cans on aisle three, she made sure the labels all faced the front.

Suzie was a hard worker, proud to do a good job, and hoping that her efforts would be noticed and rewarded. Not for one moment did it cross her mind that her willingness to work hard was like carrying a big sign: Abuse Me. Suzie still believed in a world where hard work and ambition were rewarded, where she could draw herself up by her own bootstraps.

The world she actually lived in was one where the lowest common denominator ruled, where mediocre was acceptable and outstanding was suspicious. The cooks at the Club didn't like it that she ran around doing as much as possible. They were of the pace-yourself school, and knew that if Chef saw them doing more, he'd expect more to get done on a consistent basis. They were always cautioning her to go slower, take more time, stop multitasking.

When it came to graffiti, her particular version of the Puritan work ethic ensured that she would not be content to scrawl her signature on a wall. She wanted to do something important. A work of art. A statement. She wasn't in it for comradeship and a sense of belonging, the way Alex and his crew were. She wanted more than just glory. She wanted to bring her message to the world. Missionary zeal.

'Cuz I've been thinking,' she said into a lull in the conversation, which by this point was all about tags they'd done in dangerous circumstances, some of it believable. 'I want to do something special.'

They all looked at her. A tagging virgin, a toy, and she wanted to do something special. It suggested that their stuff was not special, was in fact a waste of time, and that they'd be better off quitting their loser lifestyles and getting real jobs. At least, it suggested these things to them, because they had all internalized their parents' disapproval, and as time passed they began to wonder what exactly they were doing in their twenties riding skateboards and spray-painting walls. So they gave her a bunch of shit for wanting to do something special her first time out. And turned their attention back to the TV.

'But no. I've been thinking,' she insisted. 'I want to do Surrender Dorothy. And I think I've found the place.' The guys all knew the story. They were unimpressed. So they watched some rap guy grabbing his crotch on TV and ignored her.

Years ago, when Suzie was little, she and her dad were coming back from a run to New York and had just reached DC. They did a trip like that every few months. Driving around the Beltway through Bethesda, coming around a bend, there up on a hill above the trees was a brand new, gleaming white fairy castle with gold spires, dominating the landscape. The new Mormon Temple. They'd spared no expense. It was breathtaking, magical, inspirational, and then it disappeared behind the trees as the road shifted its viewpoint.

Suzie was just waking up from a nap when she heard her dad say, 'Well, I'll be damned. Lookit, honey.' And she rose up from her pillow bunched up on the console between them, bAllenced on an unsteady elbow and pulled herself upright by her shoulder belt. There, on an overpass, with the fairy castle looming beyond, someone had spray-painted 'Surrender Dorothy' just the way it looked in the Wizard of Oz, menacing black letters written into the sky above the Emerald City. The sight affected her deeply. It turned the startling beauty of the fairy castle into malevolence, and she loved the thrilling intellectual-emotional disconnect this gave her. It felt funny in her tummy.

So it was now her gold standard for doing something special. Whatever she wrote, it had to have the impact and poignancy of The Wizard Of Oz meets the Mormon Temple, it had to have the import and mystery of skywriting above a Munchkin city. Like a billboard with two ads that switched back and forth, it had to be able to turn into something else. Something more meaningful than a bunch of indecipherable letters spelling out a nickname. Graffiti with a message.

That was her ideal for public art. But when she was out driving, Suzie's impulse to write on things was responsive to her immediate environment. When she was going south on the Connector, she felt like changing the T to a D on the Diet Coke billboard opposite Grady Hospital, for example. She longed to get up there and point out the subliminals on the Jack Daniels sign with a big magic marker whenever she passed the Buford Highway exit northbound on 85. She wanted to lob balloons filled with red paint onto the Hooter's Air billboards wherever she saw them. A Cheerleader Free With Every Meal.

And every time she caught sight of the Atlanta skyline looming out of the trees in the distance, no matter what road she was on, she wanted to find a good spot and painstakingly recreate the Wizard of Oz tag. Because Atlanta was so beautiful. So magical. So shiny. So unexpected in the middle of endless forest. Such a beacon to anyone stuck out in the sticks with no hope of change in their life. You're out of the woods, you're out of the dark, you're out of the night, step into the sun, step into the light.

What more appropriate tribute to the capital of the South than to call it the Emerald City? Maybe millions of Atlantans would see it, sitting stuck in rush hour traffic, and fall in love with the idea, and start a drive to rename the town. Maybe the newspapers and TV stations would make a big deal of it, maybe callers to the Vent would pick it up. But maybe not. Never underestimate the inattentiveness of commuters.

If nothing else, she knew she could count on making converts of the truckers. They'd call it the Emerald City. Even after her efforts were sandblasted off, they'd call it that, and every trucker in the country would come to know it that way. Not The Big A, not Hotlanta, not the Horizon City, not the Phoenix City, not the ATL, or A-Town, or the Big Peach. Not even The 404. From that date it would be known as The Emerald City. Because it was so right.

'I think I know where I want to put it,' she announced when another ad came on. 'The railroad overpass right before Pryor Street, over the northbound Connector.

This generated protests from everybody. 'No way you could do it,' Alex said. 'It's right there on the Connector. You couldn't go up there without being picked up by a dozen traffic cameras.'

'Yeah, the cops'd see you from the road,' added Philip. 'You'd never even get started and they'd be closing in from both sides of the train bridge.'

'Besides,' Demetrius pointed out, 'it's a metal train bridge, and it's rusty and dark. Even if you did manage to get something up there, nobody'd be able to see it.'

'And,' Jason pointed out, rather smugly, Suzie thought, 'you'd never be able to reach it. And you don't know the first thing about rigging.'

They sat and made fun of her for awhile, the idea of a little thing like her trying to scramble around on a complicated tag against height, visibility, cops, and other technical difficulties. She didn't mind their abuse. They all ragged each other to death, like they were family. The idea of her failing her ambition amused them until the show came back on, and they left her alone after that.

It was how she felt about coming up short on her ambition that she minded. She sat there and stewed, and thought, and fumed, and puzzled, and got tired despite the furious activity of her brain. She went off to bed right after Futurama.

* * *

next chapter, suzie spends time at the garage hoping for some attention.