Graffiti mission debacles with Self

If anybody read my post about hitching a ride to 42nd street on an out of service train, please go back and read what i added about Self. I left him completely out of the story having been confused with another story that was similar, as it turns out, as he pointed out, he was there BOTH times. I can't imagine what i would be leaving out if i waited another 10 years before writing these down. memory is fleeting...unless there's a soundtrack :)

He got me thinking about some other moments we shared. Like the time we were taking tags on 96th and Broadway one night in the heavy rain. We found that bombing (writing graffiti) in the rain was a great idea. first of all, you could hide under a big umbrella so it just looked like there was somebody standing near the wall, maybe lighting a cigarette. Also, cops back then didn't want to deal with writers, they had murders and violence to quell, and to jump out of the squad car in the rain was doubly unappealing to them.

So there we were, Left-One was doing big bubble letters on the old...ehh i forget what used to be there, it was like a supermarket or something. Self and I were watching out for cops in the middle island in the intersection. Self had bad long distance night vision so it was mostly up to me to watch for incoming. I was usually pretty good at it, and if i saw anything i would yell "WATER!". that was our code for 5-0's rolling. But this time my good eyesight was useless because these motherfucking Detectives suddenly jumped out of a Yellow Cab.

Cabs in NYC were the ULTIMATE undercover vehicle for cops. We actually considered it cheating on their part. You could spot a regular squad car with the lights on top from miles away. You could also get good at spotting unmarked cop cars because they were always dark colored Chevy Caprice Classics and had a very distinctive rounded shape. But there were always ten to twenty Yellow Cabs in sight at any given moment. We just wrote them off as non-entities. In other words, I would walk up to a wall, right in front of a fleet of cabs, even in their headlights, and just start tagging away without a thought to who was watching. Those cabbies probably saw a LOT because nobody ever thought to wait for them to pass. And usually, DT's (Detectives) never bothered us because they were too high level for Vandalism, but these guys felt the urge to do it this time. Before I could even yell, two plain clothes cops had thrown Left hard into the metal gates he was writing on, getting a nice amount of his own fresh paint on his face and chest. Self and I just stood there astonished. we knew..from experience..that it was best for us to stay anonymous just in case somebody had to go to the precinct and bail him out.

What followed is a CLEAR indication of how things used to go down on the upper west side before all the Yuppies moved in. the cops made him hold his large umbrella over THEIR heads so they didn't get wet. then they searched his pockets, found his big bag of danky weed, POCKETED it, and then told him to take a hike. they got back in their sneaky ( and somewhat UNFAIR) unmarked Cab and took off, leaving Peter with all of his unused paint. we continued our bombing mission after that. only now we couldn't get high...


Speaking of smoking while on a tagging mission, another memory I have of writing with Self, besides the time I had to bail him out of the Chinatown Precinct at 4AM, was when we decided to bomb the truck yard near Grand Street and Lafayette. We used to love getting into lots where the big boxy white trucks that deliver around the city are left at night. If there weren't any guard dogs then you were free to go in. The trucks were perfect because they were all white, and they got all over town daily. like rolling advertisements. plus, they were always parked so close to each other that nobody would know you are there and you could wedge your legs between them to reach very high spots.

Self and I planned on doing this one night. we got there very late, like 3AM and decided to roll and smoke a blunt and then do our mission. Only we got some Tabla from 106th street. this stuff was like mystery meat. it was questionably little and dense and definitely wasn't all weed. It also took down quite a few people at one time or another. One friend ended up losing his mind right before graduation and had a convulsive fit RIGHT in front of the dean. others would just panic or start throwing up. the two of us considered ourselves too hearty to be knocked down by one blunt of it. So we sat in the little triangular park where Lafayette and Kenmare come together.
after about 10 minutes we suddenly realized that we were zonked out of our heads and proceeded to get paranoid and freaked out by what we were planning on doing. I always freaked out a little on the inside before going writing. so much could go wrong back then. several times i would be rolling out for a mission and a black cat would cross my path. that was an all too common happenstance for me and it always put butterflies in my gut.

but this time we just plain over smoked ourselves. we sat there staring in fear at the yard and wondered what was going to happen if we went in. we talked ourselves down slowly, until the panic wasn't as total and finally, reluctantly, trudged forward to meet our fate. I believe we just sat there wide eyed and zonked for about a half an hour, like two of the three stooges. nothing ended up happening to us that night. we tagged the shit out of those trucks.