Our Napoleon in Rags. Kirby GannЧитать онлайн книгу.

      There was nothing suspicious to find in their attachment, in Hay’s point of view. Haycraft gave, so it was only natural that in turn he should attract a trustworthy, giving companion. And Lambret was as different from the other night-boys working the park as the drawing of a tree is different from a real one. They forged a bond partly on Lambret’s love of graffiti – or, more precisely, his knowledge of and intimacy with the usefulness of spray paint and its variety of possible applications. Lambret could sing a rhapsody to the glories of spray paint, the pleasure found in the hiss of aerosol, the rattle of the ball in a quivered can, the comfortable fit to the grip of his hand, the satisfaction of instant surface transformation. Sensing a poetic strain in the boy for the first time, Haycraft encouraged him to describe his passion further; and, listening closely, head angled backward as he scratched softly at the raw flesh of his shaved neck, Hay’s House of Representatives was called to order, wherein a lively debate commenced.

      Because the contrivance of a bus wreck was not enough. Executed perfectly, it achieved nothing more than two newspaper articles detailing the event, and one self-righteous editorial condemning the sick minds of a few obscene souls. (A complete misreading, in Hay’s view.) It turned out the woman he’d heard of had been only grazed by the fender, causing a few scrapes and bruises. The city hauled away the debris that caused the accident, and the event disappeared. The rest of Old Towne still suffered its crisis of uncollected refuse, especially in the forgotten alleyways – those passages Haycraft and Lambret both knew with the familiarity of lovers.

      The city rarely flagged in regular collection of bagged trash; outside of the odd strike here and there by put-upon workers, curbside pickup occurred every Thursday. No, the crisis lay in the larger objects, the materials discarded by bankrupt manufacturers, tobacco rollers, abandoned construction sites, the fled well-to-do: culvert pipes, random iron and metal scrap, ancient air conditioners and ovens, railroad materials left over from the historic Nashville line (which cleaved the district, but not as definitively as the affluent would have preferred). Even distaffed telephone poles remained strewn over the original paving stones, clogging the narrow passages that Haycraft utilized in his canvassing endeavors; passages that Lambret and his pals used as escape routes from the likes of the Chesley Sutherlands out there who were not serving suspension-with-pay. Lambret and his pals were large-scale graphomaniacs, surmised Haycraft. Trick money in hand (or, more commonly, with the discount secured by a jacket of ample pockets), they cleared the hardware stores of acrylic spray paint and permanent markers and then covered storefront security gates and streetlevel power boxes, public telephones, bus stands, concrete viaducts, newspaper dispensers – any workable surface on which a kid could stamp his tag. What was left in the cans and markers flowed through the boys’ nasal passages, a practice Haycraft abhorred instinctively, disgusted by the sight of their soft mouths circled by inflamed haloes, peppered acne, flakes of paint. He went about them thrusting his handkerchief to their faces, often spitting into the cloth first like a mother scrubbing her child on the steps before church. A practice that set off the boys into bursts of embarrassed laughter. A sound Hay liked.

      But first things first: At this time Haycraft was much more concerned with the graffiti the boys practiced than with their health. Before Lambret, he thought the wild looping caricatures and obscure tags an irritant to the urban eye; but once he had met, and watched, and listened to Lambret passing time with his friends, throwing bones or watching the dogs wander through empty lots, he grasped graffiti as possibility. With Lambret in mind, the unintelligible scrawls became not a further junking of civic culture but a legitimate form of underground expression. If nothing else (Hay maintained to Beau and the scattered regulars at the sunken bar, over several wet autumn days), the images brought attention to those objects usually ignored.

      —A power box; the back of a stop sign. It’s as though you’ve never seen them before. Suddenly there they are, singular and credible, worthy of scrutiny.

      Romeo Díaz snorted at what he considered to be another in a long line of Hay’s “inane” campaigns – crusades he believed came only to a man who had the leisure to imagine them and who, he would say, approached reality at the most present angle of convenience. He toasted Haycraft’s new insight with Dewar’s and soda; he asked Hay if the kid had introduced him yet to the aerosol can’s other recreational uses. But the notion of graffiti as environmental enhancement outraged Chesley Sutherland.

      —There’s nothing singular about it! Incredible is the only word I have for the contempt these kids show – it’s arrogance pure and simple, covering our public works like kudzu. They are defacing public property, Hay, doesn’t that bother you?

      Chesley had his ideas, too; Sutherland’s Laws, they called them. He preferred “The Sutherland View.” If you want to hear the Sutherland View on the problem, he might begin, entering a conversation on capital punishment, I say you dust off the chair and plug it back in. His main tenet being that actions against his sense of the public good must be met with an opposite and overwhelming reaction, for example, any kid caught at the bus station with spray can in hand should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

      —We don’t have much to punish them with, he admitted. But watch your pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves. Hit the kids hard for misdemeanors and then it’s easier to nail them later at the felony level. ’Cause trash always comes back. Get them locked away soon and you never have to worry about them again.

      Haycraft rarely digested the opposing thoughts of others. Usually disagreements led only to his further fastening of mind. The work of Lambret’s cronies had raised Hay’s awareness; innocuous objects no longer escaped his attention, and surely he wasn’t alone in such sudden insight. Despite intense efforts he had never succeeded in bringing attention to or engineering the erasure of Old Towne’s alley debris. Therefore, cover said debris in graffiti, and the necessary attention would be drawn.

      Haycraft had the ideas, Lambret the ability. Their projected canvasses rarely consisted of flat surfaces, and Hay could hardly draw a coherent line by hand, much less with a spray can. But in the way a poet tackles a devilish meter to express his thought and finds the restriction inspiring a more luminous work than would the endless freedom of blank