Graffiti

Subways have been my habitat: from age eight on up I was Mole Man, tunneling ninety minutes to school and back. Daylight still seems bizarre, overdone: perhaps even toxic. I sleep through it whenever I can.

Two decades ago subway graffiti were as crass, as brazen as front-men for a ten-buck massage parlor. With mute patience they taught us kids about the human equipment and its dark, un- bargained-for potential. At 157th Street (uptown) you could write bird-and-bee questions on a certain billboard. Next afternoon, sure enough, you’d find comprehensive advice—often with two or three diagrams—left by some conscientious nocturnal Dr. David Reuben. It was a convenience: the kind of service great urban centers are expected to provide. We were grateful. Our parents, I suspect, were grateful, too. A parental account of acts procreative was couched so opaquely in euphemism and throatclearing that it came to sound like Babu-English: like the instruction sheet on Taiwan-made model airplane kits. Sexual intercourse was, for all I could tell, something one assembled.