The luscious freight yard was laid up with a plethora of rare boxcars. The 30 foot high tunnel oozed blackness against the sun setting on the water. The air was musty as I quickly made it into the darkness of the concrete. The inky interior was juxtaposed with metal rafters gleaming and points of light peeking in. I walked in cautiously at first, my eyes scanning the darkness for a gleaming shield or the glossy red eyes of a bum in the first stages of delirium tremens. About 50 yards in the light peeked in enough for me to see in front of me and I started checking out the pieces and ended up discovering some cool graf as well as a pretty gnarly bum campout complete with a mattress and a box of Newports on the nightstand.









To my surprise there were actually a couple of freights laid up deep in the abyss as well. I kept expecting a bum or worker to pop out on me but there was only absolute silence except for my feet crunching on the ground as I walked past rows of gondolas and trash hopper trains. The trains and walls were pretty much fully saturated with multiple layers of paint. A lot of good pieces had survived the plague of toy writers who had hundreds of tiny tags everywhere. Those little kids are in for big trouble if this graff shit gets a hold of them and they stick with it long enough to get half decent. I had on work shoes and my feet were killing me by the time I made it to the light on the other side. I walked a good mile and as subway trains flew past I tucked against the railroad embankment wall to prevent from being seen. I ended up getting out by going through a construction site and walking out onto the street.





The next day I arrived for work early with a half can of Rusto white. I retraced my steps from the day before and sneaked in through the vacant construction site and headed towards the yard. The sun was blazing that day and I foolishly had on a wool shirt. The sweat poured from every part of my body. I ended up losing the lone Rusto fat cap that I had brought so I was just going to ditch the half can for later. As I approached the exit I saw two silhouettes dart away from me and try to scamper up a rope to a high hole that I had never even noticed before. I ended up following them to try and find out who they were. I looked down the way and saw two little kids fast walking the opposite way from me. I started walking towards them looking mean (I looked like a square, as I was all dressed up for work) and they started to run. They saw me laughing and foolishly decided to come back over to me.









That’s when I noticed that they were two straight little kids. One was chubby with braces and the other, the leader, had a bowl haircut. I started walking away from them back the way I came but they ended up following me into the blackness of the tunnels. The one with the bowl haircut told me that he wrote TAZ and had been busted for tagging in his neighborhood two times already. I laughed because my good friend wrote TAZ when he was his age and was busted for writing TAZ with dry erase markers on an electrical box. He said it was his six grade graduation that day and that he threw a condom onto his principal to celebrate and then they had migrated down to the yard to try to find scrap cans to tag with. His eyes widened as he told me about a place where writers only did one tag and then threw the can away. I explained to him where he was and that it was very dangerous. I showed him where the subway came out of the tunnel and told him never to walk on the tracks. I even pointed out some old school pieces and told him to make sure not to go over anything. He told me his step dad was a cop and I realized I quickly needed to shake them. I gave them my half can and told them to go look on the ground for a tip. Fuck it - leave the graffiti for the little kids, I’m way too old to fuck with it.





It only took a few weeks for me to venture back into the catacombs that I had sworn off only days before. I went back late at night with the homie and crawled through the small hole in the fence. We navigated the steep hill going down into the spot stumbling over rocks and debris. It’s important not to fall when its pitch black because you never know if a used syringe is going to break your fall. We crept thru the utter blackness and out into the moon light. We started lacing tags and fillers in the cut slowly moving toward the trackside. A nice shiny row of freights was tucked deep inside the blackness. We worked our way down both sides of every car getting them open with tags and throwies. We walked through the last of the under ground openings and made it out to the prime real estate, the trackside wall.









As we finished off the last of our paint the subway slowly rolled by, the lights from inside the cars pouring out. Just then someone started yelling at us from the street above. We quickly finished up our fillers as he continued to yell and then took off running and disappeared into the foliage leading towards the empty construction site I discovered a few weeks before. Unfortunately they had fenced off my secret exit with concertina wire and we ended up having to run onto the highway into full traffic. We quickly shook the spot dodging cars whipping by and disappeared into the dilapidated back streets. We even got to see our shit the next day from the scratched up train windows as the sun glowed brightly illuminating the vast abandoned space that had looked so different the night before.


KAI1