Andreis and I had a few classes together, and we both worked on the college literary magazine. I was quickly drawn to him, a gifted graffiti artist and rapper with a towering build, street smarts, and the caring nature of an older brother.
One night we went to a house party. As the gathering wound down, we decided to take the school shuttle to meet up with his friends at a bar. On our way out we lit a joint, split a beer, and stole some leopard-print sunglasses from the host’s bathroom, giggling the whole time. Andreis offered me his blazer, which hung from me like a dress, and put his arm around me to keep me warm. We began freestyling, throwing down rhymes to the rhythm of our footsteps on the way to the shuttle stop.
“Damn, L.J.,” he said, “you can rhyme!”
After we closed down the bar with his crew, one of his friends motioned us over to a side yard with a dumpster. Andreis passed out several cans of spray paint from his backpack, and everyone got to work while I stood in the shadows and watched the tags, amorphous symbols, and cartoonlike figures take shape.
“Have you ever tagged?” Andreis asked me.
When I said no, he pressed a can into my hand. At the dumpster I nervously sprayed the code name I’d used to sign notes passed in high school. Paint dripped from the bottoms of my letters.
“Not bad!” Andreis said, leaning to get a closer look. I was smiling in disbelief when I felt his gaze on my cheek. As I turned, he cupped my face and kissed me. Then he took the can and embellished his own piece before we walked through the shadows back to the shuttle pickup.
Almost a decade ago I learned Andreis had died in his sleep. On his Facebook page his friends shared rap videos, posters from old art shows, and memories like mine. I wonder if any specks of paint from our night out remain.
Lauren Johnson
Hunterdon County, New Jersey
Mr. R. invited me to co-teach a literature course at an alternative high school that served students with emotional, behavioral, and other obstacles to regular classroom learning. Outbursts and socially inappropriate comments were common. Many of the students harbored deep traumas, and their hurt came out in the words they used.
Mr. R.’s course emphasized poetry, often asking students to discuss a poem: What happened? How did the author feel? How do you feel when you hear it? Most joined in, but not Shaye, a young woman in goth attire with pink-and-black-dyed hair. She only doodled or wrote in her journal, head down. Nothing could coax her into speaking.
One day the students were reading Paul Simon’s “A Poem on the Underground Wall,” which describes a “single-worded poem comprised of four letters.” I asked the students what they thought that “poem” might be. They began throwing out all the four-letter words they could think of: love, hate, fuck, hurt, slap, girl, butt, twat, shit. After they’d exhausted their ideas, Shaye raised her head and said quietly, “Hope. Nobody’s said hope.”
Michael Kiella
Allegan, Michigan
At the group of sleepaway camps I worked for in Vermont, the outhouses were called “kybos”—one of those camp-lore terms whose origin is shrouded in mystery. My job entailed going from camp to camp, and as one of the few people there over the age of forty, I was picky about which kybos I’d use. My favorite, cantilevered off the side of a hill and accessible via a short wooden bridge, was at a camp for boys ages nine to fourteen—a demographic known for its poop jokes. But the users of this kybo decorated its walls with haiku:
This is Haikubo
the art of writing haikus
while on the kybo
Haikus are easy
but they don’t always make sense.
Refrigerator.
And, in response to the poem above:
“Haiku” when plural
is still “haiku.” It is
a Japanese word.
Because the camps had a strict no-screens policy, I couldn’t distract myself with my phone while on the toilet. When I used Haikubo, I didn’t miss it at all.
Celia Barbour
Garrison, New York
The barracks in Okinawa, Japan, was my last stop before hitting the war zone in Vietnam. I spent a sleepless night there on an uncomfortable bunk. Wandering into the john at one point, I looked up at the messages written above the urinals: “Please dear God, bring me home safely.” “Don’t forget to write home.” “Keep your ass low.” “What the hell am I doing here?”
I’d seen all the usual salacious jokes that cover men’s room walls, but I wasn’t prepared for this: pleas, advice, last diary entries before all hell broke loose.
Doug Rawlings
Chesterville, Maine
In his picture on the animal shelter’s website, Arnold was the happiest, handsomest rottweiler/shepherd mix I’d ever seen. I wasn’t sure I was ready for a dog, but I was ready for that kind of joy.
The first time I met him, though, he was in bad shape, covered in the grime of street living and unable to make eye contact. He seemed scared as I walked him around the shelter’s block, so I squatted down to his level and told him it was going to be OK: an empty sentiment. I still wasn’t sure I was prepared to take him.
Back at the shelter, I handed Arnold over and said I’d let them know. They released him into a pen. He took four steps, turned around, sprinted at me, and rolled over to show me his belly. That was that.
I had Arnold for eight lovely years, during which I met the woman who became my wife—and Arnold’s mom. I also adopted a bichon named Jean Val Jean, who became Arnold’s best friend. We gave him a good life.
I was driving in Atlanta, Georgia, when my wife called to tell me Arnold had a sizable mass in his liver. He had four months, if he was lucky. (He wasn’t going to be lucky.)
I got off the phone and took a left into a dimly lit tunnel—about a quarter mile of graffiti-covered concrete. Feeling powerless, I started to cry. At the end of the tunnel I stopped at a red light. In big letters was a fresh tag that read, “Fuck Cancer.”
Jason Ensler
Los Angeles, California
My colleague Ellie and I visited the Holy Land at the invitation of our bishop, who wanted the young clergywomen of her conference to understand the plight of the people there. The trip was a confusing swirl: The call to prayer that hundreds of Muslims responded to by bowing in unison. The family whose orchard had been taken over by Israeli settlers. The teen girl with a semiautomatic rifle who boarded our bus to inspect it. We saw rocks launched at watchtowers, and tear gas rained down in response.
Near the end of the trip, exhausted, we decided to look for a mural of the pregnant Virgin Mary, which we’d heard decorated a wall that separates Israel and the West Bank. As we approached the spot, two Israeli soldiers waved us back.
“We want to see an icon,” I said. Did they speak English?
Ellie suggested we turn around, but I said no and continued walking. The soldiers motioned more vehemently for us to go back. “Pilgrimage,” I tried. “We’re on a pilgrimage.”
They made one last effort to halt our progress, then gave up, maybe because we were women.
When we rounded the bend and looked up at the graffiti-covered wall, there she was, shining in the sun: wreathed in a halo, one hand reaching toward her sad eyes, the other resting atop the round belly hidden in the folds of her cloak. Unable to speak, Ellie and I took our fill of her, gold and red and blue. She was known as Our Lady Who Brings Down Walls.
Name Withheld
Where I grew up, landmarks were often tagged with ’61 or ’64 or ’65—the numbers painted on almost every grain elevator, train trestle, boulder, or barn. New ones appeared each June, around graduation. By the time I was a senior, rumor had it that anyone caught with paint cans and brushes wouldn’t be allowed to graduate.
This didn’t affect me. I was focused on my future with John, the catcher on the baseball team and class salutatorian. He was headed to college with the ambition of going on to medical school. My college would be an hour away from his, and we’d been going steady for a year.
After our senior-class picnic, I wasn’t ready for John to take me home. It was still daylight, which meant we’d be seen at all the usual necking spots, so we drove to the top of a butte and parked near a decommissioned missile silo. No one would have any reason to drive up there.
Two hours later I arrived home in time for dinner. My mother took one look at my sunburn and the blush on my face and said, “We know where you’ve been.”
“Did someone see us?” I sputtered.
“No,” she said, “but we’ll know when we see ‘Class of ’66’ painted somewhere!”
How I hoped that someone, somewhere, had immortalized our class and kept me out of real trouble.
Bonnie Cotton
Olympia, Washington
Though he had no major health issues, my father bought a cemetery plot and erected a massive tombstone before he reached the age of sixty. A narcissist, he was fixated on how he wanted to be remembered.
My mom and I first saw it while visiting a family member’s grave. We laughed at how it towered over the other headstones in its vicinity. The stone was engraved with his career successes and family members’ names, including mine.
The longer I looked, the more it unsettled me. Even though he was far away—his yelling, his control, his lies, his hands around my neck, all gone—putting my name on his tombstone felt like one last attempt to claim me as a prop. I found something sharp and scratched “Abuser” into the back, then colored it in with a pen to make it more visible. Everything about it felt stupid. But why should he be remembered as my father when he was never one to me?
M.W.
Boston, Massachusetts
The summer after I graduated from college, I lived with my draft-resister boyfriend and two other guys. One Saturday we had a house party and invited draft resisters from far and wide. Everyone decided I was the best cook, and sexism prevailed, so I made the food while the guys had important discussions about music. The party was rocking, packed, and brightly lit.
At one point a small group of guys stepped out for fresh air and spray-painted “War” on every stop sign in our staid, shady neighborhood, so that they read, “STOP War.” The city didn’t address this for an astonishingly long time, so in a way that party continued long after it was over.
I feel tender toward that youthful period—and toward my lifelong work for peace—but I also remember our principled hubris: our sense that our elders hadn’t tried hard enough, or been smart enough, to crack the code on peace. We didn’t understand structural violence, had no awareness of our privilege, and somehow dismissed the history we’d studied as insufficient evidence that human destruction is unstoppable. We really thought we would do better.
Leah Halper
Santa Rosa, California
Maeshowe—a chambered tomb in Orkney, Scotland—is older than Stonehenge and most of the Egyptian pyramids. Its entrance is a narrow, low-ceilinged, thirty-five-foot-long passageway. I bent over and kept my eyes on the feet of the person in front of me as we followed the guide inside. The air grew cooler the deeper we went.
We emerged into a fifteen-square-foot central chamber built from massive sandstone slabs laid atop one another. In each of the four corners was a large standing stone, and smaller chambers extended into three of the walls—likely where the bones of the deceased were housed.
Around 1100 ce a group of Viking raiders rediscovered and plundered Maeshowe under the assumption that, because they buried their honored dead with gold and other precious items, the people who’d built the tomb had done the same. After failing to find treasure, the Vikings showed their disappointment by leaving one of the largest known troves of Viking graffiti—a reminder of the innate human need to leave our mark.
Our guide translated many of these runes, which resemble trees with branches angling upward in sharp strokes: “Ottarfila carved these runes.” “These runes were carved by the man most skilled in runes in the western ocean.” “Benedikt made this cross.” As one might expect, a number were lewd: “Ingigerth is the most beautiful of all women,” next to the image of a slobbering dog. Our guide refused to translate the most salacious, saying only that it referred to someone “being bedded.” I later looked it up: “Thorni fucked. Helgi carved.”
If I could have brought myself to make a mark at Maeshowe, I might have scrawled, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
Mark Jenkins
Gregory, Michigan
I was twenty-two and desperately in love, but the relationship had entered its beginning-of-the-end stage—a fact I couldn’t admit, even after my soon-to-be-ex moved away. I’d recently acquired a degree in graphic design and worked a minimum-wage job at a bakery. Every morning I looked in the mirror and thought, You have a bachelor’s, and now you’re off to make cookies.
In this dreary state of mind, I decided to inform the world of my misery. No one would care if I spray-painted a brief message on a soon-to-be-demolished bridge. Surely the police in Tempe, Arizona, had bigger crimes to worry about.
Under cover of darkness I rode my bicycle to the dried-up Salt River bed, walked to the old bridge, and, afraid of getting caught, hurriedly spray-painted, “I love you Ronnie,” on one of the supports—a pretty novice bit of graffiti, using only black paint and simple letters.
A few days later I got a friend to assist me in photographing my modest act of vandalism. I set up my tripod and composed the image in the viewfinder, then climbed the bridge support so I’d be in the shot when my friend tripped the shutter.
I’m not sure if I even sent the picture to Ronnie, but maybe she saw my graffito anyway. As it turned out, the bridge wasn’t demolished until many years later, so my message of heartbreak remained up long after I’d left Tempe.
Morgan Tyree
Powell, Wyoming
My tag name was born late on a Friday night while I sprawled across a mattress on the floor beside crates of spray paint stacked like treasure in my dad’s apartment. That’s the thing about having a graffiti artist for a father: Our bond was often fostered in moments just like this, through his lessons about the most powerful messages being the ones left in places no one expects to find them, or late-night drives that weren’t about going anywhere in particular but were scouting missions for suitable walls for throwies and burners—always in pursuit of the perfect message, sealed by the hiss of fresh spray paint on concrete.
It was time, we decided: I needed a name that would live alongside his in the streets. His tag was already everywhere, stretched along alleyways and across trains that sliced through the night like metal ghosts—alive and defiant. I pitched name after name, each one met with a thoughtful head shake or a reluctant maybe.
“Four to six letters, max,” he in-structed. “No, that one’s taken. I’ve seen it before,” he muttered, rejecting another.
I paused for a moment to visualize the feeling I get when I walk through our city sprinkled with his visual poetry. It’s like seeing his soul speak in vibrant, untamed strokes. It wasn’t just for him or even for me—it was for the community, for those who needed to know they’re not alone. I wanted that same impactful, unmistakable set of letters that identified me, that told others I was here, and I was here with him.
And then it hit me. “Morsel!” I blurted out.
He paused, eyes narrowing in contemplation. A beat passed before he looked over at me and grinned. “Now that’s something we can work with.”
We took right to the paper, manipulating the letters into something that felt like mine. We stayed up late, giddy at how dope our tag names were going to look side by side. He beamed with pride—not just in my decision to take graffiti seriously, but in my newfound commitment to the grind, the risk, and, most important, the legacy. He reiterated the importance of our role as graffiti artists in society: While others were taught to obey and follow the paths laid out before them, I was instead encouraged to be a catalyst for change, to defy authority, dismantle archetypes, and push beyond conventional thought. I beamed too, proud to follow in his footsteps and reclaim space—to make our voices not just heard but seen.
We talked about how rare it was for a female graffiti writer to gain real notoriety, and how I was going to be one of them. Even rarer? A father-daughter duo. We were electrified by the thought of making history and high on the energy of our tag names in tandem: an enduring symbol of resistance, nonconformity, and our unbreakable bond.
For weeks I relished the visceral possibility of it all. And then we finally took to our first wall, marveling at the first of many that now read, “Morsel and Zehb.”
Tay Loren
Denver, Colorado
Just before dawn on August 24, 1992, category-five Hurricane Andrew hit our two and a half acres outside Homestead, Florida. The pinhole eye of the storm cut a path right over our house. When we emerged, everything green was gone: blades of grass, the leaves on the trees—the ones that were still standing. Our back-porch roof was down the street. News of looters inspired me to paint a sign on a piece of old plywood and lean it against our mailbox: “Armed and Irritable—Our Shit Ain’t Worth Your Life!”
A week later, when the main roads were clear, I drove into Homestead to view the aftermath. One resident had spray-painted on their house: “Grandma Is Alive OK Call Lee.” On the porch railing, in screaming red paint: “Thanks For Your Help USA.” A house with its roof chewed off was marked, “Condemned.” At the bottom of a splintered wood home was a plea: “Please Don’t Bulldoze Til Tuesday.”
Farther into town, Hector’s shoe store was roofless—and spray-painted with their new address above where the door had been. Visible through the demolished windows was a pile of debris reaching halfway up the wall. A windowless shop beckoned customers with “Barber Open $5 Hair Cut” in white letters on a wood plank. Without electricity, the barber was cutting someone’s hair while another customer waited in a chair. People stood in line outside St. John’s Episcopal Church, which advertised “Food & Supplies” on a sheet of plywood and, alongside that, “Comida y Cosas Para la Casa.” At a house where I stopped to take a photo, several planks of wood were nailed over a broken window. Between two slats, a mounted deer head peered out above a warning: “Looters This Could Be You, Rudolph Is Dead.”
Pat Milone
Redland, Florida
Dartmouth admitted female students for the first time in 1972. Nine years later, when I was a student there, it was clear integration wasn’t going well.
After the Women’s Alliance spoke out against the chauvinistic, often hostile attitudes women faced on campus, members of other communities—Black, Native American, Latino, and gay student groups—added their voices and made it known they felt disrespected and isolated.
I knew their grievances were valid. For two years I’d been twisting myself to fit into the Northeastern, Ivy League, good-old-boy culture that prevailed there. One night I watched a “Take Back the Night” protest from the living room of my fraternity. As the women and their supporters marched down Frat Row chanting, “No more silence, no more violence!” I felt acutely that I was on the wrong side of the window.
As if to throw a hand grenade into the mix, a new student-run newspaper started appearing at everyone’s door. The ultraconservative Dartmouth Review relished offending the sensibilities of liberals and ridiculing their causes, such as Greenpeace’s “Save the Whales” initiative, the anti-apartheid movement, and the “No Nukes” campaign. In one issue they questioned not only whether women should be educated at Dartmouth, but if they should be educated at all. An anti–affirmative action article written by a white author in a caricatured Black dialect insinuated that Black students were illiterate.
On my way to the cafeteria I saw outraged supporters of the Gay Student Alliance. Its members had just been outed by The Dartmouth Review, which had somehow gotten its hands on the organization’s confidential membership list and published it. On the other side of the grass-covered square were the staff of the Review, sipping cocktails and playing croquet. This wasn’t what I’d signed up for.
Passing the student activity center, I looked up to see, scrawled across the side of the redbrick building, “Nuke the Gay Unborn Whales.”
Name Withheld
To stay fresh and engaged as an educator, I moved from the elementary school where I’d been for thirteen years to the junior high, to teach math. Not a great decision, as it turned out. Thanks to a thoughtless comment from my principal about the demanding parents I’d face, I suffered my first-ever panic attack before classes even started.
I had six times as many kids to deal with each day, but luckily only about five were irritating jerks. A handful even stood out as sweethearts. The rest came and left when the bell rang without making much of an impression. Most seemed to be learning something. Eventually I got my act together enough that the fear of failure receded. I wasn’t happy to arrive each morning, but at least I wasn’t thinking about just driving past the school.
With about a month left to go in the year, one of the resource teachers stuck her head into my room after school and told me there was something I should see. As we walked down the hallway, she explained that it was a rite of passage to have your name appear in the girls’ bathroom.
Unsure what to expect, I pushed open the stall door. It didn’t take long to find my name, to the left of the toilet paper holder: “I have the best math teacher, Mrs. Roberts.”
It took a second or third reading for it to sink in. I visited that stall every day until the custodian cleaned it up.
Lisa Roberts
Coralville, Iowa
I started college late, delayed by ulnar neuropathy from weeks of playing violin for eight hours a day at a classical music festival. Even after taking a year off, the burning pain still plagued me, and I fought through it as I attempted to keep up with the demands of the school of music. At the end of my freshman year I didn’t feel I could survive as a music major, but I didn’t know how to do anything else.
I found myself contemplating my situation inside a concrete tunnel leading to the beachfront in Emerald Isle, North Carolina. I was there on a weeklong summer retreat with the conservative Baptist church I’d been a member of for years. Neuropathy wasn’t my only secret. Prior to my college enrollment, my parents and church leaders must’ve sensed something in me that I didn’t yet suspect about myself, because they’d warned me of the evils of the university I’d be attending, noting it was full of lesbians. As they’d feared, I soon realized I was one too.
Mosquito swarms inside the tunnel pushed me out onto the beach, where I joined a game of capture the flag. I hate competitive games but wanted to be a good sport. In a moment of bravery/stupidity I made a dash for the other team’s jail to free some teammates who’d been captured. When the jail keeper tackled me, I went down hard. I knew something bad had happened, but the chaperone—an occupational therapy assistant—cleared me to play because I could bend my wrist like normal.
For the rest of the trip no one seemed particularly concerned that I could hardly move my hand without pain, that I needed help undressing myself, and that a friend had to cut my food. The only person who was concerned was my secret girlfriend, whom I snuck away to call from the privacy of the tunnel.
The walls inside were covered in a maritime mural and, on top of that, lots of graffiti. Frightened and in pain, I leaned against a sea turtle marked with “Fuck Fuck Fuck” and sobbed while my girlfriend tried to help me breathe and regulate. When I looked up, a dolphin yelled, “Dyke!” at me from a spray-painted voice balloon.
A few weeks later an MRI confirmed a fractured bone, which sealed my fate at the music school and gave me the excuse to change majors and reroute my future away from my family’s cultish church and into the arms of a community that would love me for who I am.
R.J.F.
Durham, North Carolina
As parks commissioner of Syracuse, New York, in the 1970s, I was the unofficial curator of a sprawling gallery of graffiti. Every blank surface in the city’s fifty-six parks was a canvas. Even with a full-time crew to remove these nocturnal artworks, it was impossible to keep up. Some of it was crude, offensive, and unattractive. Other pieces showed a sense of design, an appreciation of color. I began to put the better examples at the end of our removal list.
Word got out about my policy, and I realized I’d unintentionally created a competition. The volume of graffiti increased at first, but then it declined—and what remained was better quality. In time, fewer artists defaced the historic buildings, brand-new facilities, or the most-difficult-to-clean surfaces. Respect given for respect shown.
Frank Kelly
Cortland, New York
When I was sixteen, I had a crush on my neighbor Rich, and he and I met in the forest to fool around. I kept our tryst a secret because Rich had a reputation and my friends and family didn’t like him. My brother called him “that uncultured swine from up the street.”
Near the forest was a concrete underpass where kids often hung out to smoke, drink beer, and spray-paint vulgarities. It fascinated me how many boys had the idea to draw penises: large ones, small ones, straight ones, curved ones. My girlfriend Pam and I rolled our eyes whenever we’d find another new work of phallic art.
Pam was the only person I told about Rich. She thought he was cute but a jerk. “You can do so much better!” she often said. She was right, but something compelled me to say yes every time he asked me to meet him after school. And he was a great kisser.
One day Rich and I had an argument, and the following evening, when I walked through the underpass, I saw a new graffito: a girl on her knees in front of a boy with, you guessed it, a large penis exposed. My name was written above the girl. I was so angry all I could do was stare with tears in my eyes. It was a small town; anyone walking through would know me.
At home I called Pam and told her to meet me at the underpass with a can of spray paint. Within thirty minutes she was there. “I hope black’s OK,” she said. “It’s all I could find.” I pointed out the drawing, and she groaned. “Rich again?”
I nodded, took the can, and sprayed until it was empty. Pam wanted to get another and write an insult as revenge, but I said no. No need to keep this going.
My trysts with Rich ended that night, and I thanked Pam for not saying, “I told you so.”
K.S.
Tampa Bay, Florida
In the early 1970s I was a philosophy major. One night I was at a bar with friends and had to use the men’s room. On the wall was “ ‘God is dead’—Nietzsche.” Under that, someone else had written: “ ‘Nietzsche is dead’—God.” I laughed so hard I peed on my shoe.
S.W.
Memphis, Tennessee
Grades one through five in Catholic school conditioned me to speak only when standing. When I went to public school in the sixth grade, it took me a couple of weeks to understand why giggles broke out whenever I stood to respond in class. When the other kids popped out of their seats like a jack-in-the-box behind the teacher’s back, I didn’t know they were making fun of me. I did know no one wanted to be my friend.
I lived within a block of the school, and, after changing clothes at home and tucking a kickball under my arm, I often returned to the playground in the afternoons. Once, I found a can of spray paint under a bench. Next to a stairwell I wrote, “I Hate Martin,” in bright-red paint.
I was a good kid. I didn’t really hate anyone. I chose the principal’s name because she was the most powerful person at the school, and this was the best idea I had to get the other kids’ attention. I had barely a moment to admire my handiwork before a police officer walked around a corner to find me, can in hand.
The principal called me into her office the next day. She told me how much my words had hurt her and asked why I’d written them. I had no response, other than I didn’t know whose name to write.
Jane Glendinning
Oakland, California
When I moved into my college dorm, I met an odd girl who would greet everyone with “Hi, fuckface!” which she found hilarious. My visitors were no exception, and it gave us something to puzzle and laugh about. On occasion we’d greet each other that way—a sort of inside joke.
When I moved into the basement bedroom of my parents’ house for the summer, the guy I was dating helped me paint my new digs. For a joke he painted “Hi, fuckface!” on the wall.
Later, while we were at a friend’s house eating dinner, my mild-mannered, attentive, and somewhat prudish father ambled down his basement stairs to see how the paint job was coming along. Oops. I was sitting outside my friend’s house and chowing down on a hamburger when my dad pulled up and marched over to me. “In my day, we didn’t talk like that,” he said. I’d never seen him so mad.
We of course painted over the message. I’m pretty sure that was the only time my father acknowledged that he knew the word fuck.
Lin Moorman
Seattle, Washington
The ranch where I worked needed to rent some horses for the busy half of the year, and the latest batch of options came off the truck and shuffled around the corral, jostling for position in the herd. Horses that end up on a rental string usually aren’t anything to write home about, but occasionally some poor creature with decent breeding might appear. My boss and I watched closely, hoping.
A big specimen caught my eye. He looked like a Belgian, with his red coat and thick blond mane and tail. “Sierra,” I said, suggesting a name. My boss liked a light-gray gelding with a white coat. “Mescalito,” he said.
A small dun horse stood away from the others, his head low, eyes closed. He had brands on both cheeks, both shoulders, one hip, and both flanks. I’d never seen a horse with so many. Branding is used to indicate ownership of an animal, so he must have had a new owner for almost every year of his life. From the look of him, no one would have wanted to steal him anyway. “Look at poor Graffiti over there,” I said.
My boss laughed, and the name stuck.
Graffiti’s distinctive appearance and mild demeanor made him a popular horse with clients that summer. The owners who’d branded him didn’t seem to know what they had.
Robyn McCallister
Mendocino, California
After my freshman year of college I took a summer job at a local paper mill. The janitor position was unappealing, but it paid a union wage that was almost double what other positions had offered.
The job turned out to be horrible. The mill was unbearably hot and noisy; the paper dust stuck to my sweaty skin and went up my nose; and my duties comprised tasks that were either tedious, like sweeping and mopping, or gross, like scrubbing toilets and cleaning up vomit.
The personal interactions made it even worse. The paper mill employed more than seven hundred people, only about twenty of whom were women. As the only young female, I experienced men calling out to me as I walked by or seeking me out on their breaks to hit me up for a date. Many who asked me out were kind and courteous, but others were definitely not.
While I cleaned the men’s room, men sometimes strolled in despite the “Closed” sign in the doorway. With a leer, they’d undo their pants right in front of me. The first time it happened, I was so embarrassed I didn’t know what to do, but after that, I’d just roll my eyes and walk out, commenting on their obvious lack of reading skills. These days I could respond by filing a complaint with HR, but in 1977 my only options were to quit or find a way to deal with it. I needed the money, so I sucked it up.
One day some graffiti appeared in one of the men’s room stalls: “I want to fuck the cleaning lady” in big black marker. I was livid and immediately began figuring out how to get rid of it. Did I have any chemicals that would work, or would I have to black it out? Then it occurred to me: Whoever had written it must have known I would see it. Which meant, if I removed it, it would be apparent not only that I had seen it, but that it had upset me. I didn’t want to give them that satisfaction.
I could, I thought, add a biting response. For the rest of the day I toyed with what I might write: “Only in your dreams, asshole!” or “The cleaning lady—AKA the janitor—isn’t going to fuck anyone who writes about her on the bathroom wall.” But I realized any response would still show they’d gotten a rise out of me. It seemed the best option would be to ignore it.
Soon after that, I quit to take another job that paid only minimum wage, because by that point those good union wages had gotten me most of the money I needed.
Nancy Nelson
La Mesa, California
In 1967 a few friends and I decided it would be great fun to spray-paint a couple of peace signs and an obscene comment about the school superintendent on the side of the farm-shop building at our high school. I drove to the county seat to buy a can of Day-Glo orange so no one from our town of four hundred people would know about the purchase. On the way back I even pulled over and painted out the P on a “Do Not Pass” sign, chuckling to myself.
That evening, laughing and goading each other on, we went ahead with our vandalism, threw the can away, and went home. When we arrived at school the next day, all the students were herded into the study hall. The superintendent described the punishment that would be meted out to whoever had desecrated the farm-shop building. In the middle of the superintendent’s talk, my friend looked down at his shoes and saw orange paint on the toe. He pulled his feet back, and the superintendent never spotted it.
The thing was, everyone, teachers and students alike, was sure they knew who’d done it. And it wasn’t me, the valedictorian of the senior class, nor any of my friends. No, it was that group of sophomores who were always causing trouble.
Decades later at a class reunion, one of my fellow perpetrators admitted to the crime. Our classmates responded with a chorus of “You did that?” If you have a reputation for being good kids, you can get away with almost anything.
Edward Hudelson
Pontiac, Illinois
“Love Is the Law” was spray-painted in block letters on an underpass we drove through every time we went to a family gathering in Honolulu. I always looked forward to seeing it throughout my childhood, which was filled with news of assassinations and bloody attacks on nonviolent protesters who supported civil rights or opposed the Vietnam War.
As a teenager I noticed love wasn’t always the law in my home either. My mother’s childhood traumas sometimes caused her to be more hurtful than nurturing, and though my relatives loved each other, they didn’t always like each other or handle disagreements well.
I often wondered about the person behind that graffito. What heartbreak, grief, or anger had inspired them?
Throughout my thirty-five years as an Episcopal priest, the words on that underpass have remained seared onto my heart. I’ve never stopped trying—sometimes failing and sometimes succeeding—to share the law of love. It’s a law we humans often break in ways both big and small, quiet and horrific. It’s the only thing worth struggling for.
Lisa Keppeler
Newton, Pennsylvania
