Graffiti — The Dumb and the Dangerous
During my tenure as a graffiti writer, I did some dumb and dangerous shit. One of the things I would do was snatch train conductors’ hats. This was, and I’m sure still is, a felony in New York City. If you were caught with a conductor’s stolen property, that too was felony. Maybe I’m making that part up, but let’s just call it a fact for the sake of the story. Though the rewards of the act were great, the act itself was dumb.
How we executed it was the dangerous shit. The best place to snatch was at an outside station. There were no cameras at the stations in our neighborhood in the Bronx (although most stations didn’t have cameras back then). Another reason why outside stations were good was because the exit to the street was easily accessible. Moving on. Two or more people were usually involved. We would hide or walk innocently along the platform and wait for the conductor to close the doors. This is when the conductor would get a little suspicious. Why would a person not get on a train if it came? Oh, and we were fourteen to fifteen years old with black skin and ink stains on our clothes (it will become apparent why later). We looked fucking suspicious. When the conductor closed the second set of doors, the closest person to his cabin would reach in to snatch his hat. This would often result in the conductor whipping his head back, putting his window up, and flipping us the bird.
But when we were successful, the conductor would do something amazing. Remember, we were in our early teens so we were fast, aerodynamically skinny. After snatching the hat, we would jet down to the exit (which was three feet away), through the one-way revolving gate, and down the steps to the street. There were very few people exiting the station because these were off-peak hours. We had the element of surprise on our side as well. We had already worked out these little obstacles in the planning and pre-production stage of our heist. This meant nothing to the conductor. I don’t know, maybe these dudes prepared for our stunts at conductor training academy school?
Once the hat had been removed from the conductor’s head, the snatcher was already in motion. Again, the exit was only three feet away. The conductor would have to realize that his hat had been snatched, say, “Oh shit!”, press the button to open the outside doors, open the door to the conductor’s booth with his hands, then run out of the train to the exit. It was physically, mathematically, and scientifically impossible for him to be on the snatcher’s ass, but he always was.
Let’s look at the big picture, shall we? If the conductor was outside of the train, the train could not move. Shouldn’t the functioning of the train take higher priority? Apparently there was some secret annual MTA ball and it was considered dishonorable for a conductor to show up without all of his credentials.
The conductor would give chase for no less than two blocks outside of the station (I was once chased down the platform and onto the elevated tracks for the length of a block). In that time, the snatcher’s accomplice would go take whatever items were left by the conductor in his cabin in order to gain future free access to the MTA subway system. Come to think of it, that part was definitely a felony.
Another dangerous thing that we liked to do was go graffiti writing on the “layups.” The layups were trains that the MTA would park in the middle track in certain stations. There were two popular layups near my home. The 1 train layup was the closest to me and it was long. It went from 238th Street to 215th Street. My friend Chris (CM) and I knew a lot of the graffiti writers that would go to these layups. Another layup that was close was at 174th Street on the A line. That layup was in some ways better because those trains went out to Queens, Manhattan, and Brooklyn, not just up and down the west side of Manhattan and the Bronx. The downside was that we didn’t really know many writers at 174th street, which could have been dangerous had we come across a violent territorial crew.
Chris and I lived near each other and our friend Mike (Melster) lived in Harlem. After our stint at Junior High School 141 in the Bronx, we all wound up going to different high schools, so we didn’t hang as much. The layups on 174th Street seemed like the best place to catch up while getting some bombing in. On this particular night, the layup was not busy with writers; in fact, it was empty. There were times when writers would get word — from where, I don’t know — that there would be a police raid. As far as we were concerned, we had free range of the train to do what we came to do: BOMB.
And we did just that. At some point while we were inside the train, a person from the transit authority walked through the cars. We assumed the train was being raided and bolted out of the train. Mike went in between the cars and jumped down to the tracks. We could all hear that a train was entering the station, but from Mike’s position, he couldn’t see where it was coming from. He couldn’t tell because the station had a bend and the only way to tell if the train was coming on his side was to see if it had passed the bend. Actually, another way he could tell was to look at the headlight reflection on the track. But with the threat of a raid, Mike was just trying to escape. So he started to cross the track at the bend to get to the platform.
SIDE BAR: If you ever watch urban movies from the 70s and 80s that have scenes that take place in the New York City transit system, there is always a scene that features the threat of someone being run over by a train. Think Beat Street and The Warriors.
I don’t remember if Mike saw the train at the last minute or if he was able to see us signaling to him, but he was able to jump on top of the third rail as the train pulled into the station. He stayed there, frozen, until the train left. He almost shit his pants. When the train was gone, Mike climbed onto the platform and was done for the night, actually done for good as it would turn out
The three of us went back to Mike’s house on 113th Street and 7th Avenue. His apartment was on the first floor and his grandmother always looked out of the window. Everyone who went to his house called her Granny. Mike lived with Granny and his uncle. This wasn’t the first time I met his uncle. The first time we met was when the three of us were in ninth grade and got into a big fight with some kids from JFK High School. We went to his uncle because Mike said he was a well-known and respected member of the Zulu Nation and could handle this problem for us. When we met his uncle, he didn’t look like what I expected, but he did look exactly like what his name suggested. He was light-skinned and had a red afro. His name was Red Alert.
At some point while we were at the house, Mike turned to Chris and me and told us that he was done with writing, specifically writing on trains. Mike had other creative outlets to fall back on. He had rapped with some of the other kids at our junior high school . . . and Red Alert wasn’t just some guy in the Zulu Nation; he was a Hip Hop pioneer. He was one of the first Hip Hop radio deejays. It was kind of natural that Mike would cultivate his rhyming skills and become a Hip Hop pioneer himself.
To Be Continued…
