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SUBWAY LIVES pt1. JA-SONI/SLICK story


OMARNYCAKASW1

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OK heres the final sections...

 

 

6:40 PM, Upper West Side: JA

A surprising portion of the thirty thousand licensed liquor establishments in and around Manhattan have stayed afloat on the patronage of generation upon generation of affluent teenage prep school students. Rich kids have boozed away their parent's money in a succession of fashionable dives long before Holden Caulfield binged his way through midtown. Robert Chambers, the preppy murderer, spent the night of the killing in a bar crowded with underage drinkers like himself. Dorrian's Red Hand and the Wicked Wolf were at one time two of the Upper East Side perennials favored by kids from Dalton, Collegiate, Trinity, Horace Mann-the great names in New York high school education, at least among folks with nine or ten thousand dollars a year for tuition. They drank mixed concoctions like Singapore Slings and screwdrivers and Harvey Wallbangers and Kirs, or guzzled imported beers like Corona and Heineken.

Not JA. He curled his lips at the mention of the preppy bar scene. It was definitely out, especially after high school. He and his Pals headed downtown, to the hot club-whichever one it was that Season, for hot clubs had the half-lives of butane lighters.

A week ago, when it all came to a head between JA and the boys from U5, JA had spent a good part of the night at MK's-one of these firefly establishments. The $20 cover charge applied only to saps without a pass or a connection with the bouncer-a fee intended to keep out the "bridge and tunnel crowd," the people who had to come from somewhere else to the island of Manhattan, and who were congenitally unhip by club standards.

JA was drinking heavily. At the bar, he bumped into COCER, who ran around on the periphery of U5.

"You're JA?" said COCER. "Whoa, man. I know these dudes, SLICK and SONI. They been after your ass for the longest time. They say you been ducking them."

"Hey," said JA. "I'll take SONI on. Anytime." "I don't know SONI so well," said COCER. "I hang with SLICK. He says you a pussy, a sucker."

"I'll fight either one of those guys-but where? I can't make them appear."

"SLICK says he's gonna fuck you up."

"Yo, let him name the time." "Yo, let's go to his house, I'll show you where he lives."

Just before dawn, JA and COCER, along with REAS and VEN, two of JA'S pals, drove through the dark streets of Bushwick. JA wondered about this move. But he didn't want COCER to think he was dodging a chance to go face to face with SLICK.

In the vestibule of the apartment building, COCER leaned into the buzzer for several minutes until a groggy voice answered.

"Yeah," said the voice.

JA pushed COCER aside and spoke into the mouthpiece.

"Yo, it's JA."

"Yeah."

"Come downstairs if you want to fight me."

"You got the wrong buzzer."

COCER shook his head. "Yo, SLICK, come on down, man, and fight."

"You got the wrong place." JA turned to COCER.

"What's up with this kid?"

"It's the right buzzer-I been to his house before," said COCER.

JA buzzed again and spoke into the microphone. "Yo, SLICK, you're fronting, talking all this jazz about how you gonna kick my ass and not backing it up. Well, come downstairs and back it up."

"Fuck that," said COCER. "Now he's going to call his boys."

In a bag, JA had a few spare cans of spray paint. He copped a few tags on the outside of the building. REAS and YEN watched. This was JA'S beef, not theirs, and tagging someone's house was heavy. Very heavy.

Fuck SLICK, thought JA. Now it was brightening outside, and a man stuck his head out a third-floor window and hollered something at the kids in front of the building. They decided it was time to leave. Where am I, JA wondered? He looked at a street sign, and saw Empire Boulevard and Rogers Street. SMITH'S name was Roger. The name stayed with him as he slumped into the seat and rode back to Manhattan. Otherwise, he had no idea where he was.

SLICK discovered the infamy scrawled on his house when he came downstairs that morning. Word moved quickly through Bushwick of JA'S attack because COCER had seen the whole thing. "Ten guys, they came in cars from Manhattan," SLICK explained to his friends.

 

10:19 P.M., Canal Street, Manhattan: SONI and SLICK

They pay your way home from The Door at night after the train pass is no good. They have to. You run a school that doesn't open until two in the afternoon, nobody goes home until eight or nine o'clock, the subway pass has been dead for two hours already.

A man from The Door had escorted them to the subway station. He handed them tokens and watched them pass through the tumstiles. "JA'S got this tunnel on the Number One line between Columbus Circle and 66th Street," says SLICK. "He hangs out there. We go fuck him up." "How we gonna know if he's even there?" asks SONI. "He's got a whole wall of tags there in the tunnel," says SLICK. "The whole thing, man, every piece of it is his. We could buff him good."

"Yo, we don't know that area too good," says AUDI. "I'm not down for that."

"Nah, man," says SLICK. "We got to."

"Yo, he tagged up SLICK'S house, we gotta come back at him," says SONI, who, though dubious, is sensitive to his friend's slight. After all, SLICK has gotten into this thing because of SONI. This has been SONI'S beef with JA, and SLICK sort of got dragged into it. Now he has been dissed, seriously. That's the lowest thing you can do to another writer, paint on his house.

AUDI should know this, man. SONI couldn't say it in front of SLICK. It's bad enough for SLICK.

"See? All right, man, be that way," says SLICK. "Yo, man, I gotta go," says AUDI. He leaves them as they wait for a train uptown, to JA'S turf. "Later," says SONI. "Later," says SLICK. "Let's find JA."

 

10:30 P.M., Upper West Side, Manhattan: JA

A retarded move, JA tells himself. At least from what he had' been told. Personally, he doesn't remember anything before he woke up on the road, cars screeching to a stop near his head. But SMITH had been there, watched the whole thing. And SMITH said when he saw JA take the leap, he thought about having to call JA'S mother and tell her that he had died. Ridiculous fucking thing to have done. JA had been drunk. Spifflicated drunk. All he knows is that he had been with SMITH, on the ramps approaching the Lincoln Tunnel, scoping out places to tag. There was a very sweet-looking highway sign, directly above the six lanes of traffic leading to the tunnel. To get there, he'd had to jump about four or five feet from a street that overlooked it, then land on the frame of the sign. "You almost made it," SMITH had said. The moment he hit the pavement 15 feet below, trucks careening and cars screeching, marked the end of a forty-eight-hour frenzy of graffiti tagging all over the city. It had started on that predawn morning he'd tagged SLICK'S house. "When you get the momentum going, it's like a fuel-you go on like a crack binge-with graffiti, not crack," JA later explained. That was six days ago. So tonight, he is staying home in the splendid apartment on 86th Street, where a decorator's hand shows in every room. Except his lair .He keeps the mattress on the floor. In his oak roll top desk are spray cans of paint. The oak cabinets built into the wall hold giant cans of spray paint, collector's quality: very hard to purchase, heavy-duty industrial-size cans that you could never find in the store. JA is king.

With a flick of the remote, MTV barrels into the room, through the stereo speakers of the television. He turns the page on a magazine, and wriggles his toes. They're sticking out of the plaster cast they'd put on to keep his knee in one place. Pain in the ass.

 

11:45 P.M., Broadway, Manhattan: SONI and SLICK

The musicians from Lincoln Center are saying good night. Tonight, the opera was Don Giovanni. At the Vivian Beaumont, Anything Goes was selling out at $50 a ticket. The Mostly Mozart series had begun. Even with all this, it was a quiet time of year for the high-culture scene, in a way, since the ballet company was closed. Once, the choreographer Twyla Tharp put on a ballet with graffiti writers, on-stage, painting the set, while the dancers went through their steps. It was a smashing success nearly twenty years ago, with Manhattan people paying good money to watch these ghetto kids from the Bronx and Harlem. The centerpiece fountain had been turned back on only a week or so earlier; the city had ordered all ornamental water displays shut off because of a drought scare. Even though its water was recycled, the dry fountain was a powerful symbol. A burbling fountain would be a soothing presence in the wicked heat of the city. The pit musicians, the orchestra players, were walking into the warm night, the men in black tie and jacket, the women in long dresses. Even without the instruments, you could tell they were working people, despite the formal gear, because they walked across the plaza of the arts center and down to the Broadway subway station.

There, you could stare into the tunnel and see all the way to the lights of the station at Columbus Circle, 59th Street. When a train approaches, its headlights come together like a rising line drive off the bat of a mighty hitter. It is just seven blocks from the Lincoln Center stop to Columbus Circle, a distance that two quick, strong young men can cover in a few minutes. The way the light falls, the boys in the tunnel are swallowed in shadows. And they have business to do. There are probably fifteen tags on the tunnel wall between the two stations. It is hard to see them all, but they get most of them. Buff them. Stomp on his shit. That was one wall. Three spray cans of gray paint already are beat. Only one left. Now they have to do the other side. Have to. The musicians peer into the darkness. Ah, there's the No.1. Good 0l' No.1. They're lucky to get out of work before midnight. The trains start slowing down after 12:00. This one, the 11:59 'out of South Ferry, was going up to the Bronx and into the 240th Street yard. Yardmaster Darrell Williams is waiting there to get it to the car wash. Now, from the 66th Street platform, the musicians see the train leave the Columbus Circle station, starting up the rise to Lincoln Center.

Later, when he was able to talk about it without weeping, the motorman would say that before the train brakes went into emergency mode, he thought he saw a bundle of clothes on the roadbed. That wouldn't be enough to trigger the automatic brake under the car. Needed something more solid. He climbed down on the roadbed and started looking. He had to go back eight cars before he found the…obstructions.

At Lincoln Center, the waiting riders stare out into the darkness and see the headlights have stopped their approach; they wonder why the train isn't moving.

The police told the newspapers that the writing on the walls was just scribble, that there was nothing to it at all. When JA was off the crutches, he went and saw with a glance. Those tags. SONI and SLICK. Their last ones.

 

SOME DAYS LATER:

Daniel Gomez, SONI, was waked in an open coffin, wearing a Panama hat and dark glasses to cover the trauma of his death. His father closed the bodega to take the body to Santo Domingo for burial. The remains of Rubin Fernandez, SLICK, also were returned to the Dominican Republic. John Avildsen, ]A, sporadically wrote graffiti in the subway until he returned to Los Angeles to resume his film career. U5, the Bushwick graffiti crew, no longer is active.

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Guest -MOE LESTER-

wow that was good....i have a migraine and cant see shit and my head hurts, but that was all worth the pain

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i knew these stories already, but never saw this book...it was nice to read it told fairly eloquently...made me wonder if JA ever feels any sorrow for these kids lives...the author definitely hinted at the class issues involved....try peeping the kids photo at http://graffiti.org/trains/slickrip.jpg and tell me that shit dont break your heart....imagining JA sitting in the upper west side...really sad.

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i scanned the sections of the book dealing with graff exactly as it appeared, my personal opinion is that it does deal with the clash of class,

slick was my boy and so was cocer, the book makes them look bad and

that graduation pic makes him look all young and innocent, slick was kind of deezil and U5/501 was no joke, and ive seen cocer cause many a blackeye in his time...

the late 80's was def party time were lots of ghetto cats had access to

to top spots,,,i met sane at MK also but im ramblin...

anyway SLICK RIP

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thanks OMAR...

 

yo... that shit brought back memories... I grew up in East NY... I hung out with a few of the the U5 guys... ARC, FAMER.. GA.. NASH.. ZEP.. I was out of graff when SLICK and SONI were killed.

 

I never knew SLICk or SONI but that was a sad story... many fights were had at that 121st Layup on the J line... that shit was ill... ran into Ghost there one time in 87 or so... that was a great layup... that shit was a party down there... easy as hell.. U5 and 501 used to go there alot... before them, the guys I used to write with mostly TF, CBK and SIC...

 

big up to OMAR for posting this stuff...

 

respect to U5... where ever the hell yall are these days...

I have a flick of the SONI and SLICK memorial somewhere, I gotta post that... my boy ARC and AUDIE did it on a rooftop on the J line, by the Cypress Hills station.

 

AUDIE is a graphic designer I think, ARC still does big murals and stuff around Cypress Hills and Bushwick... I got into animation for commercials and stuff... when you are that much into graff it doesn't leave much for anything else in retrospect... it is too bad in many ways that SLICk and SONI didn't just call it quits.. I never was that consumed by it, mostly cause trains were finsihing up as I was getting into it..

 

peace..

 

 

<<TEC1

CBK.SIC.TF.U5

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Damn, thats a really sad story, makes me wonder about senseless beef. Sure its part of the game ect, but when people start dieing over it it kinda makes ya wonder.. ne ways i don't know ne thing and i'm kinda blabbering so watevs

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yo wahts up tec,, i never met you

but knew like fogs slick dug remo cine and rad from the downtown

scene...

whats up with the orig remoer

i got a video from rad but we fell out of contact

has some slick and cine playing with a heater and some memorial wall

at the end

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Guest Wilt

Re: .....

 

Originally posted by vynlone

never realised JA was some rich private school boy cunt. Do you reckon he felt bad about those two being squished? I'd be very surprised.

 

thats funny...gkae lived in a gated community and no one can deny he crushed like a madman...i bet you also didn't realize that just because someone is grown up in money doesn't mean that they want to live that lifestyle...ja does his thing...gkae does his thing...who are you to diss cuz they came from a "good" home....

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Guest whoami

Re: Re: .....

 

Originally posted by Wilt

 

thats funny...gkae lived in a gated community and no one can deny he crushed like a madman...i bet you also didn't realize that just because someone is grown up in money doesn't mean that they want to live that lifestyle...ja does his thing...gkae does his thing...who are you to diss cuz they came from a "good" home....

Where did you hear that gated community shit?
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...

 

don't make me laugh mate...I could have gone to private shcool mate. But I was offered a scholarship as in they wanted me for my mind not how much my parents could cough up to fund the tutors faggot peadophile games...did I take it? Fuck no.

not saying just because you got money you can never be a good writer. But in my experience private school kids are cunts....thats it.

Also bump for the story...

omar you got any more?

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sorry thats the complete story which is just a section of the book dealing with differnt people in a 24 hour period in the nyc subway...

 

i went to private school, on a scholarship, it taught me to resent rich people, when i went to public school i learned that public school sucks

education wise....which started my graffiti career

 

quik went to same school told me that he learned pretty much that he was a second class citizen in the usa and now lives in europe where nobody cares that he is black...not an exact quote but u get the gist of it

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Guest -MOE LESTER-

private school kids tend to piss me off...they pay 17 grand a year for tuition, drive around in their mommies BMWs and shit, i hate them....then after private schools its catholic schools, a little less expensive, a little more diverse, but you gotta learn all that religious stuff, then its public schools, which basically suck at teaching you anything or getting you into a decent college, but it can toughen people up for life in a way, you get street smarts from going to school were kids get knifed and raped and shit

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Guest Wilt

in some cities the catholic schools are rougher than the public schools...i went to catholic school...and my family is pretty poor...and i didn't and dont drive daddies anything...you have the choice wether or not you want to fit a cliche'...and i heard the gkae stuff from a very reliable source...they're just schools..not personality manufacturers.

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omarnyc..

 

omar... nah, I never met remo... I met dug a few times I think... he used to bomb with POES.TF.CBK at one point on the bmts...

 

never met Rad either.. but it is funny I have always been a few minutes away from meeting him at a couple of spots in Brooklyn in the late 80's...

 

Hey, you are down with those FLY ID kids right? Did you ever know HUMAN-ID?

He used to live in the BX then moved to my area of EastNY in the early 90's... anyway, he was mad cool.. ILL characters... we did a few pieces together in the early 90s at the queens hall of fame... anyway, if you happen to know that kid.. tell em I said wazup..

 

oh man, I forgot to comment on the H.O.T. (hell on transit) stuff from the start of this thread... man, let me tell you... I knew a few people that was down with HOT crew, but weren't main members... I got rolled on by 3 guys that said they were HOT guys on Canal St.(by the J train tunnel) in like 86 or maybe 87... I don't remember what they wrote but they assumed I was a writer... but they were cool at first... they asked what I wrote etc... I mentioned I was cool with a few people down with them, CS.TFK.TAX and STRES.CBK.TF... and then it looked like they were gonna slice this other kid I was with, cause they asked him if he had a blade on him... needless to say it was time to break out.. HOT crew was no joke.. they were less writers than just pure CRIMINALS... most them cats are in jail.. etc.. I was young... i think 14 or 15... I don't remember who they were though... well those were different times... for better or worse.. hey does FN.GTF post up on this site... that kid knew all them HOT kids from the Lower East Side..

 

<<<TEC1..

CBK.TF.SIC

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