Artikel om JA

A few voices protested that this substituted cosmetic improvements for the meat and potato work of maintenance, but even with fewer mechanics the reliability of the trains nearly tripled during Gunn's tenure. This was due, primarily, to replacing 70 per- cent of the battered old fleet with new or overhauled cars. The old fleet remained terrible. As part of his emphasis on the appearance of the trains, Gunn appointed A. Richardson Goodlatte as the chief mechanical officer. Goodlatte, despite his title, was mechanically illiterate: once, he tes- tified before the legislature that he was unable to read blueprints. He said that he didn't know which end of a wrench was up-not surprising, since his academic training was in accounting and political science, which gave him little preparation for the upkeep of $6 billion worth of cars and their associated pneumatic, electrical, and mechanical systems. But Goodlatte was meticulously organized. And he was devotedly loyal to Gunn. He launched a Clean Car program with missionary fervor.
Every week, he chaired a graffiti task force at the Transit Authority-with high-ranking executives from every department within the 50,OOO-person bureaucracy. With Gunn's backing, Good- latte worked line by line.

Once a car was declared graffiti-free, it was not allowed to leave a terminal with new writing on it. Instead, the train was removed from service. The edict was enforced with suspensions and penalties for train dispatchers who violated it. It was a profound insight: writers felt greatest pleasure seeing a fresh tag or piece moving through the city, a supreme achievement, equal to a suburban kid's Simonized car. With that thrill gone, so was the drive to write. "The trains are dead, a waste of paint," AUDI had said in 1989.
The Gunn administration was relentless. It accumulated scores of Labor Department violations by operating unsafe car-wash facilities where workers often were drenched in mists of toxic chemicals. When the governor finally applied pressure, Gunn and company instituted a worker safety program. By then, two hundred people had been treated for central nervous system damage brought on by exposure to the harsh chemicals. Acid washes were applied that stripped graffiti-but also ate through the floor boards, corroded electrical parts, and undermined structural elements of the cars. A transit manager who pointed out that the acid also had lethal effects on the workers handling them was banished to bureaucratic Siberia.'

Even during a drought alert in 1988, the subway car washes continued to operate, as if these somehow were exempt from the strictures imposed on every other government agency and business in the , city. Bull strength knocked out graffiti. But it wasn't just a group of transit managers. "For some unexplained reason this summer is proving to be an exception to the historic rule that summer is the worst season for graffiti, " a member of the T A graffiti task force reported in August 1985. "Except for the Number Seven line, which is still hit regularly, hits have been minimal-about one a day per line on the average." The graffiti writer Roger Smith had a theory, "Look at the kids from my block," says SMITH, who grew up in what is acclaimed as the city's toughest drug neighborhood, where a middle-aged United States senator and federal prosecutor arrived in preposterous biker gear and still were able to score crack in a few minutes. "Any kid in Washington Heights, they stole chains, they wrote graffiti-when they were nine. When they were thirteen, they started holding drug money. Now they don't write graffiti, they have incredible cars. Around 1985 was the last burst of creativity. Mass amounts of people were dropping out to gangs, crack. The arrests for graffiti are way down." Hard as it was for adult society to admit, graffiti writers had been basically nonviolent, and creative impulses attended at least the ambitious projects. In 1986, when SONI and SLICK came downtown from Bushwick with AUDI, they'd unlock a gate and sneak into the City Hall lay-up. But the lay-up had been taken over by the Hot Crew, with the Rolling Thunder writers having vanished for more profitable pursuits. The Hot Crew had guns, ran drugs, and used the lay-up as little more than a hideout during police crackdowns on crack trade in the street. The gang, from a Lower East Side housing project, consisted of "the most scheming people. You wouldn't want to write when they were there," said JA. "They cut this one guy from ear to ear with a razor. That's why you wanted to go in bulk-if not for the company and the comradery, then for the protection." "We never let no other people push us around," said AUDI. "We fought for what we believed. In this neighborhood, you were fighting since you were a little kid." U5 was made of tough kids, but they were hardly criminal class. They were interested in splashing a few tags around, and toyed with ideas of becoming graphic artists. Those who stayed with graffiti generally stayed away from drugs. Those who didn't, the "generation of stupid slaves," as SMITH described them, had no patience for the bloodless vandalism of painting a train. Gunn beat them. Galleries took the talent. Crack killed the rest. By late 1989, the kids had just about given up on the subway system: from the peak of eighty a day, the hits were down to four or five, an easily manageable number. And it was this success that brought people from around the world to see David Gunn.

6:25 P.M., Lower Manhattan: SONI and SLICK
A good long ride from Bushwick is The Door, way downtown on the cusp of SoHo and TriBeCa, two old industrial zones that recently went high chic. The L all the way to Eighth Avenue. Then an E train down to Spring Street, and a block south to Broome Street. There. The Door's banner hangs over the entrance, swaying lightly in the breeze. It took a solid forty-five minutes on the train, but AUDI and SLICK and SONI were members in good standing of The Door and made the trip three or four days a week. Most youth centers are built on unkept promises. One night, a forgotten crisis commands the attention of the press and the politicians: a murderous rumble, say, or a wolf pack rampaging through a serene part of town. Let's get them something besides the street. Start some programs. From these traumas is brewed a nostrum of jaded adults reading newspapers, a Ping-Pong table with chewed corners and a sagging net. Cast-off folding tables. A basketball court ruled by ten kids. Another handful who hang out near the Nok Hockey table. If a puck
can be found. If the set still exists. Even with fists full of city dollars, most after-school programs are held in the same barren public buildings that, day behind day, exist only by the power of inert bureaucrats who fill out forms for books that never arrive, semester upon semester, in buildings that were new fifty years ago and haven't seen a roofer in twenty-five. Where teachers with a notion or two about how to engage kids are eaten alive. And where only those with enough political hooks can land a gig in the after-school youth program at $26 an hour , with little chance they will stir themselves or anyone else. And here come the boys from Bushwick, killing an hour on the train to get to The Door . At the very first, The Door surprises with the lavishness "of its physical appointments. Why is so much money spent on these modular furnishings?-these corporate-style office pods where counseling is given, the oak banisters along the splashy mid-room stairways, the subtle but profuse lighting? This was the design vocabulary of a first-rate private school, the sort of place where you might find the children of the city's rich ghettos. But just past the entrance, near the reception desk, a sign an- nounces that this is not an exclusive holding pen for youngsters waiting to assume a position of comfort in life:

TRAIN PASS SCHEDULE: 7:15 P.M. 8:15 P.M. 9:00 P.M. 9:30 P.M. Tues., Wed.
See, the train passes provided by city schools are no good after 7 P.M. The city doesn't want kids riding the trains for free all night long. For The Door, the TA makes an exception, since its activities don't get rolling until two in the afternoon. Then, during the evening, an announcement is made for the Train Pass, an escorted walk to the subway, with a counselor who shows a clerk the proper papers for the students to pass through the gates. Around the city, chartered buses shepherd privileged children to and from home, to avoid the dread subways. Not the kids at The Door. At The Door, a kid can take a class in ceramics. Learn the double somersault. Act in a play. Meet a counselor about a bad situation. Find a job. Or, as Danny Gomez was doing, finish the courses for a graduate equivalency diploma, so he can become the first member of his family to apply for college. The Door, in short, is a department store for the emotional and social lives of New York teenagers. It has a nursery for teenage mothers, and a health clinic, complete with laboratory and pharmacy. Any teen needing a lawyer can find one here-and more to the point, a lawyer who would do more than try to beat a court case, would also help turn kids away from the uncaring arms of the law. The institution reports that six thousand kids a year visit, of their own free will, free of charge.
First stop for AUDI, SONI, and SLICK is the weight room downstairs. Sheets of paper lie along the walls for graffiti tags-authorized writing , with none of the hot outlaw flame of drawing on a train, but The Door is their place, and graffiti-free but for the assigned space in the weight room. "They want to be part of the system," said Elma Denim, The Door's associate director. "They're being held out of it. That's why there's all this rage. They're not breaking down the system." SONI and SLICK have signed the paper on the wall. But they wanted more. They had to have more: SLICK has been humiliated.

"We could kick JA'S ass if we ran into him," says SONI. AUDI grunts and bench presses. Fat chance. JA lived in an elegant apartment house in one of the finest neighborhoods in the city, the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and had gone to a high school where the tuition and fees were over $9,000 a year. That was just about a full year's pay in most Bushwick houses: the mean income there was $10,000, one-third that of the Upper West Side. A baby born in SONI'S neighborhood had a 70 per-cent higher chance of dying before its first birthday than in JA'S. A thousand buildings had been abandoned or torn down since 1970 in Bushwick. On the Upper West Side, condominiums had been pried into every square yard of space.
The murder rate for Bushwick was four times that of the Upper West Side, death by cirrhosis or chronic liver disease 70 percent higher. In short, Bushwick had many of the earmarks of a third-world country. Once, it had been a great center for German immigration and for beer production, with fourteen breweries in an eleven-block area. It also boasted a dozen theaters, including the first in the United States to use electric lights. The Irish followed the Germans into the tenements, then the Russians and the Poles. After the Depression, the Italians arrived. In the 1950s, the area was cleared of middle-class whites in a spectacular housing scam: rampant blockbusting was accomplished by offering easy mortgage credit to scraping-by minor- ities at scandalously high rates. What banker could do this? None, without the help of Uncle Sam, which guaranteed the mortgages to people unable to carry them and thus oversaw the meltdown of the neighborhood.
Whites fled to the newly opened suburbs. Puerto Ricans, without jobs, without education, without English, settled the husk of Bushwick. In this, Bushwick, like virtually all New York neighborhoods, is very much a historical shell through which great churnings of people pass: there are practically no old New York families, practically no New York neighborhoods where familial lines extend more than a single generation or two.

In the late 1970s, Bushwick changed again. Jose Gomez left the tiny village of Denares, near the city of San Francisco in the Domin- ican Republic, and found a home with other Dominicans among the cinders of Bushwick.
In time, the father sent for the rest of the family, his wife, the three boys and a girl, and scraped together the cash to open his own bodega in the East New York section of Brooklyn. (The su- permarket, with sprawling aisles and acres of groceries, could not survive the New York real estate market, leaving thousands of tiny niches for all-purpose grocery stores, known in Hispanic neighbor- hoods as bodegas-crowded but complete Noah's arks of victuals.) Mr. Gomez spent nearly all his waking hours there, accompanied by his son, Ramon. But not Danny. He was SONI, he wanted more. He wanted to catch fame. He had gone part of the way through Bushwick High School, and along the way, made the friends who formed U5.
Maybe to the rest of the world, the graffiti scene was fading in the mid-1980s as SONI and SLICK and AUDI came of age. But U5, their crew, had a purpose. They were a loose grouping of teenagers going through high school in a decaying city, who could see ahead of them long hours in the bodegas with their parents, or car repair shops, or a job in one of the envelope factories still running in Brooklyn. In their generation were kids who could swing knives and bats and rampage through subway trains. Other kids could hang out on comers and wave 9-millimeter guns. The graffiti kids went to make their mark another way.
"There were a lot of crews here in Bushwick. I wanted a central crew, that would be known citywide, that would be powerful," said AUDI. "That's when I made up U5. Instead of two letters and three numbers, I decided to make a letter and a number. It was something new, that nobody ever had, a letter and a number. We caught fame. But we gained it, too."
They would meet on nights in the apartment of Jesus Torres, who could draw cartoonlike figures so well that he was commissioned to paint a line of sneakers for a company in Puerto Rico. There, in Jesus's bedroom, they would plot their strategies. A subway map hung on the wall behind the door, so that routes could be studied. Soon, though, the map in Jesus's room started to look like the ones in the subway: so obliterated with tags that it was impossible to read.

"We used to go hit the trains every week," said AUDI. "We went on a frenzy. We used to go every week. Sometimes, even, like three times a week. We used to hit a lot. We wanted to give U5 a name. We wanted to catch fame among the young people, you know, the writers." "In our school, there was at least fifteen people from U5-they was into graffiti," said Jesus Torres. Sometimes, there was problems with rival groups and things like that. But most of the people in U5, they're strictly into art. They're not into drugs. They're not into the streets. They don't be hanging out, or all that, none of that stuff. Most of them are well-spoken, they're intelligent people. They're striving for their goals. Most of them work, you know, and have decent jobs. I work as a cook. In the Empire State Building, Houlihan's. I cook shrimp- I'm in the mid-fry. Onion soup, clams, whatever.
SONI had his job at Pergament, a big home improvement and house- wares place. But after he started going to The Door, he wanted more. There, he was learning a few other ways of earning self-respect besides scrawling a name on a train. In a month or two, he'd be done with the courses, and could send in the application to Manhattan College. The graffiti scene was kind of dead. But this stuff with JA. Man, he couldn't walk away from that. They walked over to a pool on Carmine Street with one of the staff people from The Door. They'd take a swim and be about their business.

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.

den andra artikeln skulle bli en bra film...skön läsning om inte annat

http://www.KINGSOFNEWYORK.NET/ja.htm

jones: hittade den på ett forum. Lika jobbigt att läsa där.

jones: hittade den på ett forum. Lika jobbigt att läsa där.

fett bra läsning!! värt all den tid det tog

mrwhoo

Jag är olaglig.