Chapter Forty-eight
“We got him,” I told Chuck Voight when he answered my call.
“How?”
“He made a fatal mistake.”
“I realize that evasion is your middle name, Buddy, but could you please find the point?”
“He never noticed the tail.”
“You mean he was tagging with impunity, not knowing he was being surveilled?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“And where is he now?”
“Cleaning up after himself.”
“Meaning?”
“He’s whitewashing walls.”
“You mean he’s painting over his graffiti?”
“Yes.”
“How’d you get him to do that?”
“I’m very persuasive.”
“Don’t kid around, Buddy. How did you get him to do it?”
“I threatened him.”
“How?”
“I told him I’d petition for a lengthy jail term.”
“And he bought it?”
“Seems like it.”
“Wow. I’m jealous. Can I help?”
“You mean you want to whitewash the walls with him?”
“Must you?”
“Must I what?”
“Be such an asshole.”
“I never gave it much thought.”
“Time’s a wastin’,” he chided.
“At some point his old man is going to enter this fray.”
“And you want me to help with that?”
“I’m guessing that a full-scale outing of the prodigal son down there in bleeding heart L.A. will become a major embarrassment. There’s no business like show business... except when there isn’t.”
“So you want the crimes of the son to impact the father?”
“I do.”
“Because?”
“I want the old man to take this arrest seriously. Pay a price for his son’s miscreance. Robaire’s incarceration in San Remo County needs to be perceived as a big deal. And when the LAPD also brings charges, it needs to become a whole lot bigger deal.”
“To what end?”
“To serve as a message to the so-called street artists that huge fines and meaningful jail time have become the cost of doing business.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“You in?”
“Let me talk to the boss.”
“What do you think he’ll say?”
“Depends on how the political winds are blowing.”
“Meaning?”
“It’ll be the Mayor’s call.”
I stopped by the site of the most ornate of Robaire Noel’s wall defacements, the exterior of a warehouse belonging to a small welding company, located on Highway 65, between Willard’s Crossing and Freedom.
The size of the space appeared to have inspired Robaire to fill it completely. Curlicue designs, massive blotches of mismatched colors, and the largest of his signatures yet to appear in Freedom had seriously desecrated the warehouse facade.
I stepped out of my Wrangler and approached Officer Jason Kurtzer, a newcomer to the Freedom Police Department, who had been charged with today’s care and feeding of prisoner Robaire Noel, aka Robber Xmas, who was currently on his knees in front of his self-proclaimed masterpiece, scrubbing it vigorously.
He was wearing a bright orange jumpsuit with the word Freedom stenciled across the back. His ankles were shackled. When he heard me approach, he wheeled around and glared at me.
Charges had been filed against him, but rather than allowing him to languish in a jail cell, I had tasked him with cleansing his graffiti, removing it from all of the walls in Freedom he had tarnished. He was surrounded by massive amounts of solvents and detergents, including ammonia, powdered bleach, citric acid, and sodium hydroxide—all of them having been charged to his newly opened credit account with the San Remo County penal system.
“How’s he doing?” I asked Officer Kurtzer.
“He’s not what you would call a happy camper.”
I watched for a while. He had already removed much of his despoilment from the warehouse facade. He was agitated and uncomfortable, and in the heat of early afternoon, his forehead was dripping sweat. Despite the fact his head had been shaved upon his admittance into the system, he still managed to exude an aristocratic air. He was a good-looking young man, with intelligent eyes and a wide, full-lipped mouth.
“It looks better already,” I commented.
“That’s your opinion,” he said defiantly.
“Let’s you and I have a little chat, okay, Robaire?”
“What about?”
“About getting to know each other.”
I signaled to Officer Kurtzer, who helped the young man to his feet, then walked him to the shade of a large heritage oak and sat him down beneath it, his back resting against the tree’s massive trunk.
I sat next to him. “You want some water?”
He nodded.
Officer Kurtzer brought us each a bottle. I thanked him.
Robaire drank thirstily. “Why are you making me do this?”
“You mean eradicating your stains?”
“Desecrating my work,” he said spitefully.
“Why do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Insult public property and sensibility.”
“I don’t have to listen to your crap,” he said, attempting to stand but falling sideways instead.
Embarrassed by his clumsiness, he hastily rearranged himself, his back resting once more against the base of the tree.
“Why do you spray paint on property that doesn’t belong to you? What do you think gives you that right?”
“Why do you want to know?”
There was an earnestness in his question. As if he was as curious about my rationale as I was about his. I chose to answer his question respectfully.
“Because this whole graffiti thing is a mystery to me. Maybe you can help me to better understand it.”
“You’re serious.”
“I am.”
“And you’re not going to hurl phrases like ‘scourge’ and ‘blight’ at me.”
“No.”
He thought about that for a while. Then he chose to answer my question equally as respectfully. “There have always been street artists. Since the days people painted on the walls of caves. The form is centuries old.”
He glanced sideways at me and when he realized I was actually listening to him, he continued. “Over time, all kinds of things were painted on public edifices. Slogans. Pictures. Political messages. Whatever. Street art has always been part of the cultural discourse. It’s only been lately that industry has usurped the form by sanctioning commercial signage.
“Look at L.A., for instance,” he went on. “You can’t drive down Sunset Boulevard without being accosted by every imaginable kind of billboard. Some even electrified, throwing off enough wattage to unnaturally illuminate the night sky in such a way as to disturb the surrounding neighborhoods.
“This usurpation of public and private space is far worse and way more destructive than any graffiti artist’s work. You do see that, right?”
“Frankly, I hadn’t thought of it like that.”
“So what you’re saying is you paid no mind to the street artist’s centuries-old right of self-expression. You opted instead to support only the interests of commerce. Of big business. It’s okay for giant corporations to erect monstrous billboards, many of them several stories high, and then rent them to any idiot who can afford to pay the freight, with little or no regard for the messages they might post.
“But great artists like Banksy, or Shepard Fairey, or me, even...if we display our art or our messages on public or private surfaces, we become criminals. We get arrested. Forced to remove our work from the spaces on which we created them. And why? Because someone or something owns those spaces. Would we have been forced to whitewash the cave paintings because some rich asshole owned the cave?
“It’s you who should be ashamed, not me. I submit that my rights to create and display my art are as valid as those of any commercial venture. More valid, even. Just because I don’t pay the exorbitant rates these bloated sign companies charge, doesn’t mean I’m not worthy.
“The people’s right to exhibit its art shouldn’t be the sole domain of big business. Just because we don’t buy or rent our canvases, so to speak, doesn’t mean they’re any less valid.”
I watched Robaire’s enthusiasm for his argument dissipate and fade. “I knew you wouldn’t understand.”
“I never said I didn’t understand.”
“But?”
“The law is the law.”
“I knew you’d say that. You’d have to. You’re a servant of the very interests I’m talking about. You’re their paid stooge. I don’t know why I wasted my time talking to you.”
Despite his shackles, he somehow managed to stand. He looked at me.
“If it’s all right with you, I’ll go back to obliterating my work now. Making everything ship-shape so that some big deal manufacturing company can display its commercial horse shit in the exact same place where I had created a work of art.”