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SUBWAY LIVES pt1. JA-SONI/SLICK story

OMARNYCAKASW1

By OMARNYCAKASW1
in Third Rail

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  • 3 months later...
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Prismacillor

Prismacillor

Posted
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good story, bad outcome, i know i would feel horrible about that shit, part of the game i guess, but its always sad to see lifes lost. the whole rich thing, i really dont know what i think about that right now, cause even though theres rich kids that r better off than us, we're also better off than some other kids in shacks in some countries, so i guess be happy with what you got, we just have a different tour of life, no catholic private schools or stuff handed to us, just makes us who we r..... rip slik......rip soni

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  • 3 months later...
Guest njbomber

Guest njbomber

Posted
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nice article ill be sure to check out that book.i dunno why but i keep finding out info on ja like what his real name is and shyt.this shyt is strange or i mite be dreamin all of this .who knows:eek:

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  • 5 months later...
  • 2 months later...
old*824

old*824

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The documentation of the cultures involved in graffiti at New York in that period is on point with the Los Angeles culture a bit later. Where the East Los culture comes from a warzone and getting up is an escape where the West La kids were just having fun getting up with art and not having the stresses of the ghetto.

Having done no graffiti on the eastcoast, I personally have a hard time focusing my roots there since my earliest influences of graffiti inolve the middle east and the west coast.

Its a shame more documentation was not done on the Los Angeles San Diego graffiti cultures during the early ninetys because the extremity of the graffiti done provoked a govermental backlash that ended up sending kids to prison.

My crew origninates out of San Diego Oceanside and we are talking about skilled peicers maybe 14-16 for the majority that would not only deal with cops but have pieces dissed by rival crews threatining shootings.

So I guess im a bit offended at the way Los Angeles is portrayed in that article, because I feel Los Angeles graffiti paralells NYC graffiti but Los Angeles also has Cholo Latino Chicano writing that has been on the walls since the thirtys.....

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ramble ramble......

 

edit-

actually....i take no offense at the portrayal of the LosAngeles culture cause JA said he had gangs out for his blood which is the truth.

 

But truthfully I think Los Angeles and San Diego in the 80's is one of the better kept secrets on the true rawness our culture encompass's.

 

my mentor taught me to paint in 92 when i was 14 and he was 18 after he got out of cya(youth prison) for shooting up the house of someone who lost a fair fight and came back with a bat....uzi shells across your house bitch....

 

Dont get me wrong I have nothing but respect for New York. However like I said, I came up on the west and regret the severe lack of documentation compared to NYC.

 

Peace, Respect, Honor.

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imported_dowmagik

imported_dowmagik

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Originally posted by boi_o

good articles but how come so much information on JA can be dropped in a book of that calibre without the police or MTA jumping straight in and arresting him? like the karate kid info etc.? what the fuck?!

im sure hes been arrested before by them bro :)

 

anyways, dope read, thanks. rip to anybody thats ever died over bullshit.

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aP@C

aP@C

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"..I looked in the mirror and saw something on the wall behind me. Nah. Couldn't be. I turned around, and sure enough, there was SMITH, in that squiggled hand- writing, above the urinal. He'd tagged the vandal squad's own bath- room. In their own fingerprint paint."

that shit killed me.. great article..

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Super Stock

Super Stock

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its funny how people can claim to be "king this" and "king that" BUT i never knew how much JA killed shit till i went to NYC.your not "king" status till you bomb like JA.there is 2 real kings in this whole graff game...IZ THE WIZ on the trains and JA on the streets...the rest are runners up!take it or leave it! FREIGHTS DONT COUNT!

 

JA rocks HARD!

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  • 8 months later...
  • 3 years later...
Mr.Manhattan

Mr.Manhattan

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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.

 

this last part moved me so much. my best friend died in a train accident on the 1 line last year and reading this, just makes me think.

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