Tagged

On a recent evening stroll, something caught my eye.

What I noticed as I turned a corner shattered my pleasant mood. But the incident also proved to be a satisfying gift, one that deepened my resolve to be a certain sort of man.

What I saw was a tagger in action. A graffiti kid scrawling something on a newspaper box in my San Francisco neighborhood.

He had a friend with him.

Suddenly, I had a lump in my throat. But I had to speak.

"Please don't tag up our neighborhood," I said to them.

"Shut up, dude," said the friend.

The lump was now a bodywide heaviness, a nausea. Would the two of them attack me? It was a still-light 8 p.m., the corner of Valencia Street and 18th Street had cars and other pedestrians, and the Mission Police station was just a block away. But might these two feel they'd need to stop me from running to get the cops?

"I live on this block," I said.

"So do I," said the actual tagger, though I'd never seen him before. A biggish youth in a black hooded sweatshirt.

"Shut up," his pal said to me again. A smaller young man with a baseball cap.

The two weren't who I feared most in a street encounter. They didn't seem like members of the violent Latino street gangs of the Mission--these guys looked white, and appeared more punk or arty. Their sweatshirts were normal-fitting. The smaller one's baseball cap was stiff; I believe it said "New York" in glitter. He also had a bright yellow box that seemed like an arts supply case. The tagger carried what looked to be a small artist's portfolio.

Even if they weren't gang-bangers, there was hostility, and my adrenaline was pumping.

"I've got two kids, and I don't want them to have to see this," I said.

"It's exposing them to some art," the shorter guy said.

"I love art," I said, sensing an opening. "I really do. But this isn't the right venue."

"Shut up, dude," the short one said again.

The tall one had finished or at least stepped away from the newspaper box. "Alright," he said. "We won't tag any more boxes here."

A concession. A resolution to our conflict. "Thanks, guys," I said, and headed up the block.

This encounter, though, left me feeling anything but grateful. I remained angry at them as I walked home. And somewhat fearful that they might come after me. But mostly I was disappointed in myself. Ashamed at having expressed thanks for such a small promise. For not challenging the "shut up." Why didn't I say, "No, you shut up." Or "Make me shut up, punk."

***

The answers to those questions have deep roots. I have a life-long fear of fighting. Apart from some scuffles with pals as a preschooler, I really only have had one fight in my life. A sixth-grade battle on the baseball diamond with Rob Muzzio.

I don’t remember the details of that tussle with “Muzz”—I think I had been teasing him about something and he got mad. He may have used that ultimate guy put-down, “pussy.” In any event, about all that I remember was that he was the aggressor. And that he won. It wasn’t the sort of fight that left me physically hurt, but my pride as a popular boy in a jock-y crowd was wounded. Friends tried to console me by saying Muzz unfairly tied me up in a boxer’s embrace. But I knew I’d been licked.

The incident essentially confirmed a pre-existing anxiety about fist-fighting, which about a year earlier led to a humiliating snow-ball pelting on the way home from school. (You can read about it here: http://frauentimes.blogspot.com/2009/02/copy-of-reparenting-bullied-trombonist.html.)

I carried that aversion to mano-a-mano violence into adulthood. It hasn't paralyzed me altogether: I've chosen to live in some tough urban neighborhoods, and I worked as a high school teacher with troubled, tough New York City teens. But my fear of getting into a conflict with someone that could escalate into fisticuffs or worse has bordered at times on paranoia.

Several years ago, before my wife Rowena and I had kids, I tried to address this problem head on by taking Aikido classes. Aikido is perhaps the most non-violent of the martial arts, with a focus on defense and redirecting an aggressor's force. I only took a few months of classes at a local dojo, but it was powerful stuff. The concept of keeping your enemy so close that they can't strike you struck me as profound.

Practically speaking, this helped me more with feline aggressors than those of the human variety. Instead of banning Rowena’s sometimes-vicious cat Gunter from the room when I went to sleep, I took to taking naps with him cuddled beside me. Our relationship improved immensely.

But I could sense Aikido’s benefits beyond Gunter. By repeatedly repelling attacks in class--even though they were choreographed punches--I gained confidence that I could protect myself.

I have been planning to send my six-year-old son Julius to Aikido to help him develop such skills and confidence. And I intend to return to the classes with him, to reinforce and deepen in myself that attitude of serene self-assurance.

***

I felt neither serene nor self-assured walking from the taggers to my apartment at the other end of 18th Street. Just as I reached my door, I saw them headed my direction about halfway down the block. I was sure they'd continue their graffiti-ing somewhere else in the neighborhood. I thought about calling the cops. But I didn't want the hassle of giving a police report, and I was afraid about potential retaliation should I become a witness against the pair. The fact that I failed to call the police added to the feeling that I'd flunked this test of masculinity.

I got upstairs and told Rowena of the exchange, my anger and--though it was painful to admit--my shame.

"You did the right thing," she said without hesitation.

"What do you mean?" I said. "I didn't even contest the way that guy told me to shut up."

"You spoke up," she said. "You stood your ground."

Suddenly, I began to see the incident in a new, nicer light.

Ok, so I hadn't told the short tagger to try to make me shut up. But I HADN'T shut up. I defied him just by continuing to talk with them.

I thought of something I'd heard about courage: it is not the absence of fear, but rather doing the right thing despite being scared.

Call it emo-guy masculinity. Dignity in different clothes from those of a street fighter. Maybe the robes of Buddha, or Jesus or Mohandas Gandhi.

It is ridiculous on one level to compare my brief exchange with a couple of grafitti kids with the epic trials of those religious figures or the bravery of Gandhi in the face of the British empire. And I was far from perfect in just that limited encounter. I think it would have been better to have called the cops and helped them catch the taggers—to have held those guys accountable.

Still, I feel some pride in having peacefully acted according to my principles. Over the past few years, I've become increasingly annoyed with graffiti. Seen it as a kind of anonymous bullying--especially the common nick-names as opposed to political or social messages. These tags rarely are aesthetically interesting and amount to a rude intrusion on everyone's environment--getting in your face through public defacement.

In the last several months, I've started to take responsibility for my building and the neighboring building, painting over tags on our walls and a flower box on the sidewalk. Now I'm more determined than ever to resist. The day after my exchange with the two taggers, I alerted my landlord, city officials and my neighborhood corner grocery store about graffiti. Since my landlord didn’t immediately fix the tags on our building, I covered over an ugly gold blob of graffiti today.

I later checked out what the tagger wrote that night--"Germs." Enclosed in quotation marks. In my experience with high school taggers in New York City, that’s a sign of the name of a tagger or tagging group, rather than an accusation like "Yuppie scum." Did he and his buddy see themselves as lowlife bugs? Or perhaps, more politically, as a dangerous scourge threatening society?

My friend Colette, in commenting on a draft of this blog entry, helped me recognize that these taggers may be stuck with their own limited vision of maleness. One that feels a desperate need to make a mark in the world. To be heard through vandalism, perhaps clothed in a pseudo-subversive sensibility.

Did my comments to them crack a door on reframing that gaze? Did I prompt them to think about joining the ranks of San Francisco's brilliant, creative artists who make murals—often provocative ones--rather than just litter the public landscape with name "tags"? I'm not sure if I had any impact on them. But I am reminded of the work needed, not just to clean up graffiti, but to guide such would-be artists toward a more-responsible, more-mature masculinity.

The tagger's mark may get painted over at some point. Even if it doesn't, the letters written on that box already fail to make much of an impression. But my protest that night made an indelible mark. If not on the taggers, at least on me.