Democracy in America, Part Four

School was clocks. Ms. Johnson had a huge clock above the blackboard, the kind where the secondhand didn't tick but smoothly whirled around the dial. Mr. Nevins' clock looked like he stole it from his kitchen; tiny numbers, a ticking sound when the kids copied the "Do Now" off the board. Mr. Grant didn't have a clock at all, and Damon had to lean over his desk to peek at Herman's watch. He caught him one time and called him a fucking queer. Five minutes killed before the class got quiet again.

When the last ball rang, Damon met Raymond and Martel by the metal detector and went for pizza. They didn't eat that cafeteria shit, so they got a whole pie and six garlic knots.
They tore one up for a bird on the sidewalk, but when the old man with the crusted beard and red ski cap came stumbling down the block they closed the bag.

-Check out that skid mark on his pants!
-Yo, you wear pants worse than that on picture day.
-Debted!

Damon was on his own for dinner. His dad worked in Jersey and sometimes didn't get home till midnight, sometimes later. Ray's mom had that boy on lockdown, called his cell and you could hear her screaming through the earpiece if he wasn't in the door by four o'clock. Martel never said anything about his parents, and nobody ever asked.

Dinner was fried fish or chicken slid through a bulletproof window. Damon and Martel took it to the median strip on Lenox Ave. and ate facing south, licked their fingers while staring at the Empire State building. Martel said he heard that somebody dropped a penny off the top and it killed someone on the sidewalk.

-Bullshit.
-For real. They took the guy to Sing Sing. He told the cops it slipped out of his hand.
-I hope he don't have the same problem with soap.

At dark they went looking for the next vacant to mark. The trick was to spread it out enough that the cops weren't waiting for you, but have them close enough together that everyone knew who ran these blocks. Damon felt most proud when he walked around the neighborhood and saw his "Day-Lite" tag on vacants from Morris Park to Morningside.

But new targets were getting harder to find. It seemed like every day another construction truck sat double-parked outside an old mark. One time he actually saw a guy in paint-smeared overalls blasting his tag with a hose, the blue letters running onto the drop cloth. The next week a white family moved in. The week after, they put an Obama sign in the window.

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I do not mean that there is any lack of wealthy individuals in the United States; I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men, and where a profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property.