The MWL had some odd habits. Over the course of twenty years of married life, his wife had put moss over them, and manured and watered them regularly, meaning she had grown used to them.
But, perhaps because they were his own habits, the MWL never felt comfortable with them. They had a foreign and alien feel to them as if they were second hand habits whose original owner had been an immigrant from a planet in a different galaxy. When he looked at any one of them, it was easy to convince himself that it was sensible and served some useful purpose, but taken collectively they made up an indescribable, inexplicable strangeness. They drove him to the conclusion that he was unavoidably and irremediably queer, in a very queer way.
Even when he disowned them and tried to slip away from them, his habits flew in his face and hovered around him like bats that had been disturbed while nesting. For instance, many people liked parks. His wife was very fond of all of Central Park, which was not unreasonable. But he loved parks generically, any park, beyond what even he understood as the heart's reason. And whenever he went to the park, any park, if he could possibly do so, he carried the ladder that he used in his work.
On his day off he would often get up very early in the morning, at five or six, and drag his ladder to his favorite park which was a distance from his home. At two or three in the afternoon he would return home and do whatever chores were waiting. He would take a nap. Then he would hoist his ladder onto his shoulders and set out for the park again and stay until it got dark.
His wife who was all sensibility, never saw this as queer, only not sensible.
She raised the issue with him one day. "Why bother going out twice," she said to him. "If you went out at ten or eleven, you could stay all afternoon and come home earlier, and you wouldn't have to drag that misshapen stump of a tree which is what she called the ladder back and forth." The ladder was one piece of grotesquerie that embarrassed her .
"You're probably right," he told her "but the park has tides and seasons even though they are miniature tides and seasons. Most people don't know about them because they are only morning park people or afternoon park people," adding that the only way to experience these changes was to spend the equivalent of the parks year sitting and watching them come and go, preferably on a ladder. It was true enough, and for a long time it had been nothing but the truth, but it had not been the whole truth for while.
This split shift visiting the park was a habit of his. He seldom asked himself why, not because he wasn't curious, but because he hated to lie to himself about as much as he hated to answer this particular question with the truth; and he never quite knew which he would tell himself until the words came out of his mouth. Then he would feel guilty or he would feel upset, but he would feel bad either way.
The real reason he went to the park so early in the morning and stayed until it got dark was that he was hunting graffiti artists, and he was hunting them in the park. As he knew he would, he always felt upset after he acknowledged this truth.
His favorite spot for hunting in the park was a piece of a wall. It was a normal two sided wall about 12 feet high and ran fifty feet or so in either direction, before it dissolved into fence. One side of the wall belonged to the park, the other side belonged to the neighborhood that surrounded the park.
The park's wall formed a part of the children's playground and Jungle Jims jutted out from it at irregular intervals, relics from a time when creative climbing was the order of the day. At regular intervals at its base, were imaginary beaches and real sand.
From early morning to late afternoon, this part of the park was colonized by a gabble of mothers who watched over their children from benches like lifeguards watching non-swimmers wading in shark infested waters. The were suspicious of anyone over the age of twelve who did not have a youngster on some visual leash. The MWL was not entirely immune to suspicion, but odd as he was, the sense of strangeness and danger had been leached out of him over time. He had been adopted as collective group father, and occasionally was pressed into duty as an emergency lifeguard.
The other side of the wall was owned by the neighborhood surrounding the park, and while the residents of the neighborhood didn't use the park much, they used the wall fully and completely. It was employed as a combination bulletin board, gossip column and art gallery.
One could read the entire premarital history of half a dozen couples on one part. Another section contained all you would want to know about who was putting what, to whom in Russian, Ukrainian and Spanish with footnotes in English. And on a third, one could see an exhibition of the work of three neighborhood graffiti artists. It was the fact that the wall carried graffiti that attracted the MWL to it. It was here that he hunted graffiti artists; common sense led him to hunt them from the park side of the wall.
He was ambivalent about graffiti. He told himself that he appreciated art wherever it appeared. On the other, hand he wished graffiti artists would make a finer distinction between frame and ground. He knew the distinction was being redefined, formally and informally, not only on the wall but in more distinguished surroundings, but he wished it would be redefined quickly, because the transition was driving him crazy.
When the only thing he could see out of the subway window was the backsides of the first two initials of the name of the artist who had redecorated the outside of the car he was riding in; or when he needed to check a subway map and found that the stops on the BMT had been integrated into a bouquet of flowers and he misread the blossoms and missed his stop and ended up somewhere else in Brooklyn that he could not get home from, he was ready to perform intaglio upon the artists bare backs, or acquatint their faces.
Graffiti was as common in the city as the cockroach, but graffiti artists were as rare as griffins. He knew an odd gallery owner on the East Side who knew one or two of the best known graffiti artists, and he had heard of a journalist who had met a few others. And Dareth Heirath the cop, had chased one or two from the wall and actually given him a few cans of spray paint which they had abandoned in flight. But he himself had never seen one.
On his days off, when the air was dry and the day sunny, but not severely so, he would get up early and drag his ladder to the park to hunt graffiti artists.
He hunted them from the park side of the wall, sitting as high up on the wall as he could. If he stood on the top rung of the ladder he could peer over the wall and see them, at least from the top. He felt that seeing and hearing them at work would be enough of a trophy to justify the hunt, although he had fantasies about striking up a conversation with them over the wall, hoping that, separated from him by the anonymity of concrete, they might feel safe enough to talk.
He had been hunting graffiti artists for almost a year before he actually caught one (or two as it happened). It was a dry, warm spring day. The sun had already heaved itself slowly up and he had watched it snake its way between the trees and over statues to splash sloppily on his face.
He had pretty much resigned himself to merely observing the tides and early seasons that day, when he heard something on the other side of the wall that he knew immediately was the sound of the quarry he had been doggedly pursuing.
Listening was one thing the MWL was good at. "If you are good at listening," he told himself, "it doesn't make a difference what you hear." It was a blessing that he was a good listener because, whoever these graffiti artists were, their voices hugged the wall and, at first, what they were saying was dry and dull.
They discussed the placement of their painting and some technical questions. He caught only phrases like, "the wall's dirty there," or "can you reach that far up," or "wipe it off, spray over it, don't disturb that" and similar snatches of what he took to be graffiti artists' technical talk.
After his ear had accustomed itself to the high pitched sound of voices, it was easier to pick out the conversation from the background noises. He still had to struggle to make out the words over the swishing of the paint, but he was sure he heard one of the spray painters say, "Graffiti is three dimensional wisdom on a two dimensional wall."
He thought to himself that this was a sophisticated thing to say so early in the morning, particularly on the neighborhood's side of the wall, but the reply was just as urbane. "I always thought that graffiti is wisdom on a wall that's only wide enough to hold information."
The MWL had not been prepared to hear anything of the sort and he listened with amazement as the two spray painters carried on this dialogue in sing song voices.
"I always thought that wisdom is just intelligence waiting for a situation to happen in," said the first.
"Nah," said the second, "wisdom is just intelligence waiting for a person to happen to."
"Same thing," said the first
"Not at all," retorted the second.
The MWL had always thought of graffiti artists as inarticulate people who only talked with cans of paint, and he was a little disturbed to find them so facile with words that they encroached, unselfconsciously, on what he felt was clearly literary ground. What disturbed him even more was that he was certain that what he was hearing were the voices of children.
The MWL knew that if they caught him looking at them they would run away, but he calculated that if he were very careful and climbed quietly to the very top of the ladder and peered over the top of the wall, he could see them without too much of a risk of being seen. He hesitated a moment because he did not want to be the cause of a loss of a masterpiece. He took his shoes off and tied them together and put them carefully around his neck, as he had seen someone do in a movie, and slithered up to the top of the ladder and peered over the top.
He almost swallowed his shoes. Below him on the other side of the wall were two girls, no more from the top than twelve or thirteen and probably no more than twelve or thirteen from the side or front either, he thought. The one on the right side of the wall was a black adolescent. Her companion looked a little smaller and had pig tails. The black girl was on a skate board.
"Graffiti," she said as if she was making the definitive pronouncement, "is a one person dialogue."
"I always thought of graffiti as a two person monologue," chimed in her pal.
"O.K., O.K.," said skate board, "what shall we paint today"?
"How about a list of the symptoms of herpes," pig tails replied. "Art should do public service."
"No," said the second. "How about,'To recover from an incurable illness tempts fate unnecessarily.'"
"You're getting too intellectual," the first complained laughing. "You might as well write 'A poor person getting a rich mans disease commits a crime punishable by a cure that works only on Wednesday at Cannes'."
"That can only be typed, not sprayed," came back as a reply.
"Skip it," said the white girl.
"How about something short so we can go to McDonalds for breakfast. "Intelligence sucks," was her suggestion.
"And wisdom spits out," came the retort very quickly.
"Nah," said her companion thinking a moment, "if there's one thing people can`t stand it's premenstrual intelligence."
The MWL watched as they flopped down on the ground.
"How about graffiti is wall smarts?" came anonymously from one of the relaxed artists.
The black girl tucked her hand under her head and sprawled on the curb in front of the wall. "You know," she said thinking out loud," I think I know what it is for a person to be wise, but what wisdom would be for an animal, I can't figure out."
"That's easy," came the reply, "as long as you can say what kind of an animal."
"How about an ant," challenged her companion.
There was silence for a little while.
"I think I got it," said the smaller of the two prone figures. "Wisdom for an ant would be not to walk on sidewalks even if the cracks were filled with candy and cookies." And, after a moment, the sound of spraying began.
The MWL sat down abruptly. Suddenly the urge and desire to see and hear graffiti artists had abandoned him. He was filled with a kind of fear of children who could move words around so facilely. He realized that, face to face with an adult, they would revert to adolescents, interested in adolescent things and behaving exactly as they were expected behave. But spying on them in their native habitat and hearing them talk unencumbered with the burden of conforming to adult expectations made him afraid.
He sat quietly for a moment trying to recover his equilibrium. The sun had come up and he was bathed in the full light of the day, and while it calmed him, it took him longer to reclaim his sense of purpose than he thought it would. He sat there until the silence from the other side absolutely convinced him that the two graffiti artists had left. For some reason he couldn't explain, he was trembling as he folded his ladder and shifted it to his shoulder and rushed to see what they had sprayed on the wall.
His first response was disappointment. In the place they had prepared and covered so carefully were two names, Cindy and Jane. He stared at them for a long time before he noticed that, hanging between the names, pinned to each by a leg, was a finely crafted ant, no bigger than his hand and impossible to have been spray painted, he thought, but there none the less.
The MWL went home early that day and by its end he began to cultivate the notion that hardly any of what he thought he had heard had really been said; and that he was such a good listener that he had filled in the noise and blanks in the conversation of twelve year olds with fragments and bits of ideas that had come from his own head. By the day's end, he had raised a doubt in his mind about whether they were children at all. He began to think that they were very old academics doing morning exercises, and that his position on the ladder had distorted their appearance.
A few days after the hunting episode he believed he had found the explanation for what he was certain was a convincing, self induced delusion. He was sure that what had happened was that, after work one day, he had passed the wall and seen two girls names on it and had, out of the worst of his odd habits, constructed a story in his mind about how they got there; and that on the ladder in the park, on his day off, he had let his imagination add enough detail to a prosaic and unexceptional event to remove the stigma that his unconscious associated with the quixotic notion of hunting graffiti artists. When he provided himself this long but well reasoned account, he was pleased and certain he had found the explanation for what was a disturbing memory.
He decided however, to make sure, to make a detour from work one day to confirm his almost gelled conviction that the episode was almost completely a product of his imagination. When he saw the two names on the wall, just as his explanation had placed them, he was relieved. The fact that there was no ant between them calmed him more and he was ready to put the cover on the box of the episode when for some reason he couldn't fathom later an accident, a trick of fate he looked below and off to the side of the names. And there was the ant. It had clearly moved and was heading very slowly, inexorably, undeterably for the sidewalk.