Nightcrawling(36)
“Don’t worry about it, we almost there.”
Maybe this is how he’s gonna tell me he’s got some extra cash for us, even if Shauna’s right and he been doing something he shouldn’t to get it. Street money’s still money. I can hear the cars on the freeway now and we’re still in East, so 880 must be close, but I don’t see it yet. Sometimes you can hear things, feel things, that will never manifest in sight. That is Mama’s voice in my head: an unseen thing.
Under an overpass, Marcus stops abruptly. It is so unexpected that I almost lose control of the pedals and run into him. I skid, brake, hop off. It’s dark under the overpass and entirely empty except for two tents, a mini city. This is where we’ll be soon if Marcus don’t help me; sleeping in tents, my hips leaving me gaping when no zipper can keep me safe. Not even Marcus’s ego could salvage my body from the coldest nights out here in the tents, and nothing could hide us during fire season, when the smoke catches up to us.
“What we doing here?” I ask Marcus, leaning my bike on the wall.
He doesn’t respond. Marcus removes his backpack, crouches down, and unzips it. Inside are cans and cans of spray paint, that expensive kind that sometimes we rack from Home Depot when we’re feeling real invincible. He starts to line them up on the ground: a whole rainbow.
“Where you get these?”
“Don’t worry about it. Look, I got you a lil present and I’ll even be your assistant. You got a whole wall. Go crazy with it. You tell me what to paint and I’ll paint it. This your day, Ki.” Marcus stares up at me, beaming from his crouch.
Part of me wonders if I should object, if I should question him, but instead, I smile back at him, grab the green paint first, and tell Marcus to start with the yellow. I begin the outline, directing him. Marcus never does anything I say, but today he traces my lines and follows me. Today he is my brother.
When I paint, I close my eyes. Marcus and Alé both laugh when I do this. They think you gotta see to paint, but sight is just a distraction from what it really takes to translate image to art. I let it float out my fingers, escape out my breath, and I don’t need to see when my body is an entire vision.
I’ve been tagging since I was thirteen. Back then I wouldn’t have even called it tagging because I just had some Sharpies and a will to have my name on every block. Then, Alé bought me a can of blue spray paint for my fourteenth birthday and I spent a month going wild with it before I shook it one day and it was empty. It became a tradition; a new color for every birthday since.
Marcus was the one who took me on bike rides and told me that there really ain’t no difference between the murals and swirling tags we’d pass, that art is the way we imprint ourselves onto the world so there is no way to erase us. He says that’s what his lyrics are for.
When I was fifteen, in the first months when it was just the two of us, we’d bike to pick up the cheapest groceries, shove them into backpacks, and bring them back to the apartment. I’d always be the one to cook, if we bought anything worth cooking. Marcus would take his Skittles to the couch.
One day, about a month into belonging to Marcus, he decided that we were gonna have to be innovative if we wanted to make enough to afford the Farmer Joe’s type of groceries and not the Grocery Outlet type of groceries. He decided we’d start selling our art. He hadn’t met Cole yet, so he didn’t have a way to record his music, which meant that I would be the one to start us out by painting cardboard with paint we picked up for a dollar per tube at the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse. It’s the only reason we ever bothered riding into Temescal, a neighborhood that boasts its pistachio ice cream like they aren’t settling the land and calling it entrepreneurship.
I started coming home from school and finding Marcus sitting in our spot on the carpet with my cardboard and secondhand paint spread out in front of him, ready to hand me a brush. It was the best thing Marcus could’ve done for me, giving me the colors. Sometimes I even dared to think I could be more than his sister, could be the kind of artist who had a frame for her art.
We started taking my paintings out on the weekends, offering them at twenty bucks each. Marcus said this was the going rate, but nobody was buying them. Weekend after weekend, we stood exposed in the sun, bartering the price down until finally a couple old women took pity on us and bought a few paintings at five dollars each. I apologized to Marcus and he kept saying it was fine even though I knew it wasn’t. He spent a couple nights at Lacy’s and came back with a tight smile. I haven’t really painted since then, not more than a swirling tag on a bus stop or portraits of Alé with my birthday paint.
I raise the green up to the wall, far enough away I can see it spray through the air for that millisecond before it makes contact with the cement. It sounds like the ocean if it was manufactured, if we could control a wave. Holding it, the metal can starting to boil in this early spring heat flash, I have never felt more like I belonged somewhere.
I paint my recurring dream: the one where I’m in the meadow, where everything’s ripe and it’s like every cell in each blade of grass has come alive. I tell Marcus to paint the flowers: yellow, petals on petals on petals until you cannot separate one from the other.
On top of the grass, inside of the grass, really, I start to paint the girl. I shake my can and hold it to the wall, then think again. I switch the can to my other hand, getting closer to the wall, and trace the outline of the girl who is me and isn’t. This girl is younger and her mouth is open, wide open.