12/20
graffiti posse #3

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Nobody called time. P stepped back from his mural, and threw his can neatly down onto the street, where Amos could just barely make it out as it rolled into the gutter under the sidewalk. Jet took another few minutes. He polished the colors together. Ten, with slow fervor, he stepped bakc to the edge of the building, faced the mural, and rocked lightly on his heels.

Like a G.I. Joe saluting, Zofia's wrist sprung to her face and she looked at her watch, "Three fifty-seven," she said, almost whispered. All of a sudden, the atmosphere to Amos seemed almost holy.

They climbed, higher, to the top floor of the building. Nobody said, per se, who had won, but everyone but Amos seemed to understand. Jet stood up on top of the building, at the apex of this giant Hershe's Kiss of an office building, and his trench coat floated in the wind, and he sprayed twin jets of paint into the beating wind, yelling words of victory in English and French. This must be the victory celebration. By Amos's elbow, P looked as jubilant as the rest of them.

"How can you tell who won?" -- Amos was in the middle of getting out this question when P tugged at his sleeve. Amos saw a thin sanake of light cut across the wall below them.

"Come on," P said. "Police..."

One of their flashlights, from the ground, was trained on the graffiti. Jet gave out a final victory yell, the kind that would bring police running from every part of the city. Then he ran toward the ground.

The police were scouring up one side. They were jumping down the other. The drops, Amos found, were not so bad as they should be. Ten feet was not far to fall, and it went quickly if you just jumped. They made it down to the street in no time, there were no policemen anywhere. Jet was walking down the sidestreet, the Hasbro model of cool. His shoulders were stretched broad and his arms swung with a healthy swagger. Zofia slipped an arm around his waist.

"How late are you out until?" Amos whispered to Raphael, always silent, who was closest to him.

"How late do you stay up?" she said.

*

They hit Georgetown, the bar district for white poeple, and painted real drug-style ghetto tags. Then they took a stark bus filled with men who looked like Tom Waits, they rode to 14th Street and got chili at Ben's Chili Bowl.

Then they went around Shaw. They floated out of the path made by streetlights and traffic lights, not because they were afraid of the midnight police cruisers, but because that was where they liked it best. When Jet pounced form trash-can to trash-can in an empty lot, and Raphael would vanish -- Amos knew she was there, he felt like, if he needed to, he'd be able to see her -- But they ran along U Street, the baptist churches nd the photo developers and just-closing soul-food restaurants, and then into Malcolm X Gardens. They sat there, on a cold marble bench and the purple moon shone. For minutes, forever, they all just looked at the mosaic.

Amos was the first to stand up. He gave his can a few unobtrusive shaskes, a samba rhythm almost. He crossed the street to the McDonald's lot, put his right hand on the wall to steady himself, and shot a stream. The first solid, fast strokes.

P started working from below. Then everyone else did it, except for Raphael, who staked off the dumpster and started a mural. After the McDonald's, they hit a row of mini-mall stores in Logan Circle, a few municipal buildings, and then, that night and again over the course of everynight that week, they gift-wrapped the entire exterior of the Republican National Committee building. Jet would take care of blanketing the wall in single-color backgrounds, windows and all. Zofia skated around it on her board, hodling a can in each fist, tattooing little bracelets around. Edwin painted dragons. He loved to paint dragons. And Raphael painted speech-balloons and gave them voices. And Amos picked up the space left over. He made sure there were no gaps to let in sunlight, that no panel looked too overtly political and none looked too arcane, "after all," said Raphael, out of the space in her teeth in between her scowl and her cigarette, "we can't just let them think it was fucking Ralph Nader."

Just to give it some personal touches, he would use obscure sayings from Beitzah, his favorite book of Talmud. He wrote in English so it wasn't too obvious, so the police wouldn't start sniffing down the doors of Greater Washington Boys' Yeshiva.

Not that they'd find him there anyway.