THE PRESIDENT NEEDS AN ATOMIC WEDGIE!

Baby, so what if I'm on the run? Is that what this is? I'm sending you this letter to a place no one other than you will ever find it: my blog.

What's it like to be an "unofficial fugitive"? You'd probably laugh in my face if you could only be near me. Just get a job, get it back together. If you could look into my eyes, if I could feel you kneading the shoulders of my dusty jacket with your warm palms the way you used to do and stare into me, if dreams such as these, dreams that sustain me as I sleep in parks and filch my meals from dumpsters behind fast food restaurants (at least the ones that haven't been locked to keep "my kind" from consuming what is meant to be discarded, wasted), I'm not certain I could tell you fully how empty this "unofficial punishment" in 21st Century America can become. Is this what it's called? I really don't know what the Hell happened. Still, I've thought of you many times. Sometimes, when I'm curled into the contours of a ditch I've found, a low place in the ground that will shield me from the cold night wind and the curious eyes of the happenstance observer, I'll hug my own shoulders, just the way we've seen in so many silly movies. I'll hug my shoulders, imagining I'm back home again.

Sometimes I get so sad. Wouldn't you? I suppose we'd both agree I'd taken liberties with my life, liberties based upon contempt of what I'd seen. I've probably been foolish. A little like an over-curious cat. But how else could I have done what I did without getting punched out while being told what I'd done wasn't really all that bad? Doubtless, my friends think I was an idiot for doing this stuff. A can of spray paint, a sense that I could make something happen and use truly radical tactics, that I thought I could do so much better for the world than the pointless proliferation of "tagging" here in Dallas, and now I've seen my life literally ruptured open--how long has it been? Two months? Please don't tell me it's been longer than that. I feel like a complete idiot, and I probably am. How embarrassed should I be when I walk into the library, as I did only moments ago, limp to the men's room to wash my face and find that tear streaks like little rivers have carved themselves into the grime on my face? Have you ever cried and not known you were crying? How many streets full of downtown workers have I walked, how many faces have peered into mine, how many people have seen those rivulets and found them indecipherable? Love, I'm not mentioning this to upset you. But my hands are shaking.

Remember how it all started out as an ornery joke? We were laughing at the stupid graffiti "tags" some kid had deposited on the doorway to the studio. You told me you'd seen kids in big baggy pants running down the streets before this happened, many times you said, and that it was funny to see these kids holding their crotches as they tried to run away from another "mission" as if they were big heroes. You sarcastically said "Steve McQueen. 'The Great Escape.'" Yet I was still angry about it. I'd already painted a nice stenciled logo of our studio's address on the old steel door. Now it had been obscured by a wild scribble. What on earth was it supposed to mean?

"I think it's supposed to mean, 'Yo! I was here!'"

And here's the part where my contempt entered the scene. "You'd think that if those kids went out and spent--what is it? Three dollars for a can of spray paint? That they'd make it count. Know what I'm saying? You'd think they'd have a real public message or something. As it stands, only a few kids even know what those scribbles mean."

"Oh, you know how kids are," you told me. "They're trying to figure out how they stand in the world. If they mark turf with spray paint, their friends apparently understand something we just don't get."

"Well, why leave this 'turf deal' completely private? Why not let the entire world know how you feel?"

You said: "Maybe keeping that stuff private is one of those gesture-deals. Maybe it's a way of saying, 'This is private. You just don't get it. Because you're not part of this deal. You know? You're not in on it. Private speech right there in public."

"Fo' shizzle," I said. "Yo, gotta take a pizzle, word up, dude." We were both laughing as I closed the restroom door. I guess we could say I marked my territory in the toilet bowl. Nothing surprising about that.

All my life, I'd been interested in graffiti. It had begun, really, I think, long before my junior high buddies wrote GORDON SUCKS in blue paint on the curb facing my house. Yeah, I was in on that one. It was hilarious. Hilarious to stand there and watch my mother discombobulate, burst into spontaneous combustion. GORDON! WHO DID THAT! THAT'S DISGUSTING! TELL ME! WHO DID IT?

What I'm saying is that I understood what you'd said about kids trying to find their place in the world. My friends and I were too. We felt pretty powerless. We didn't have any money, and what we did have we spent on Slurpees and Justice League of America comic books. We always had to ask for permission to do anything. If we wanted to go to Pizza Hut, our seemingly insatable desires were usually subject to the whims of our parents' appetites. We couldn't figure out how to make girls like us. We couldn't even figure out if they liked us. When my buddy, Bobby, wrote that on the curb, he didn't really mean it in a literal way, he was only doing something he knew would anger my parents, and that was part of the joke.

Years later, I remember reading a magazine article about Barbara Krueger, a New York artist who expressed her fascination with public expression with fanciful and often politically-charged messages on billboards and on the posters she posted all over the city. Other graffiti expressions met my attention by serendipity: The time I saw the huge, Spanish language graffiti that spanned nearly a block of cinder block wall in a Chilean city during the Pinochet takeover. In block letters, stark against the white cement, a huge sign proclaimed Salvadore Allende the true leader of the Chilean people. The message, being officially illicit, but also perfectly readable, commanded both attention and a nearly visceral reaction within me. In fact, I remember it: I felt awe. Awe. As in fear of the awesome and mysterious.

Of course, some of the taggings I'd seen bordered on beauty. Most of them didn't. Some were merely silly scribbles, obviously rendered on the run, sprayed onto walls and windows in a hurry, something done in light of the always surprising appearance of the police. What if, I thought, what if I disdained that example--sophisticated in its own political way--and opted for something more public, more welcoming, and more alarming. Yes, secretly, I began to muse over what it would mean to area businesses if someone in Dallas, Texas, a conservative city that is expressly concerned with how its public image plays in the minds of outsiders in particular, if someone here followed the example of Chilean graffiti artists: Broad, block letters proclaiming bold messages that dared unwitting citizens to think for a change.

Speak truth to power, I thought. What an arcane concept in today's mass media. What the saying should say is that we must speak truth to power as long as we don't move that power to anger. Newspapers like to purport a sheen of this democracy-old dictum, but they only speak truth to the powers that aren't advertising within their pages. Some newspapers are so cowardly that their publishers are afraid to speak the truth because Big Business will be offended. Since the federal government doesn't underwrite a newspaper's advertising, the government is a convenient target, especially when the so-called corporate media is looking for scapegoats. Since the implicit upshot of today's neoconservative movement is to reduce the government's power while increasing our dependence upon the business sector, it only stands to reason that a newspaper controlled by and allied with corporate interests is going to attack the only institution that tries to slow the otherwise unimpeded growth of savage capitalism. What if those taggers used their tool to explicit political effect? SCREW ABSTINENCE ADVOCATES...IN THE ASS!!! is one of the examples I facetiously conjured as I sat one morning and drank my coffee. QUIT TEACHING WHITE MAN'S WAYS IF THE WHITE MAN WON'T LET US IN!!! is another. MURDER THE MEN WHO PAY US TO WORK IN GREASE PITS FOR MINIMUM WAGE!!! I thought of dozens of intimidating slogans a 14-year-old tagger could use to push his world into a little controversy.

I thought it was so silly and so self indulgent that kids, under relatively little danger, refused to take real risks when Latin American kids their age more than likely risked their lives scrawling huge messages along walls and on the sides of buildings. That self-indulgence, I think, is one measure of how complacent Americans have become. The old Chinese saying that provided leaders sage advice regarding population control was apt: Empty their minds and fill their bellies. Exactly. Think of some of the garbage the local news feeds us.

As I write this, I'm beginning to notice that the graffiti is indeed becoming a little clearer. Someone in Dallas is scrawling the word "revolt" on newsstands and on bus shelters across the city. Most people are probably too oblivious to even notice. Others are too arrogant to take the sentiment as a serious one. But what if the sentiment was more clear than a hastily written imperative? What if someone asked serious questions?

I remember my first Chilean graffiti: Late at night, I quietly spirited myself on to Highland Park's Drexel Drive, found a shadowy area at street-side and wrote these conspicuous words right on the pavement: DOES DICK CHENEY REALLY NEED TO LIVE IN A HOUSE THIS BIG? The words, huge and ghostly in the darkness, shouted a question a lot of people ask themselves all the time. The newspapers wouldn't touch that question with a frog gig. Reporters are far more afraid of reprisals, imagined or otherwise, than they're even aware of. They always try to report with a manner patently non-offensive. Still, they seem to venerate Thomas Paine, a renegade journalist who wrote seriously offensive things about the imperial regime of his day.

As days went on (and I never told you this until the police came calling, something for which I'm terribly sorry, love), I emboldened. From the wall of a heavily-trafficked street corner's retail shop, politically incendiary graffiti shouted one morning as well-off commuters travelled to work: REFUSE TO WORK UNTIL YOUR BOSS GIVES HALF HIS SALARY TO THE POOR!!!

Another sign--WHY DO THE DALLAS POLICE CARE MORE ABOUT MONEY THAN JUSTICE???--lined the parking garage outside the city's Lew Sterrit Justice Center.

OBEDIENCE IS POTTY-TRAINING FOR SLEEPWALKERS!!! BREAK THE BIGGEST RULES YOU CAN FIND!!!

DON'T BOTHER SMASHING THE STATE!!! IGNORE IT INSTEAD!!!

GET YOUR TAX MONEY BACK!!! VANDALIZE AMERICAN AIRLINES ARENA!!!

In restrooms, along retaining walls, on curb sides, on traffic signs, I began a quiet but effective graffiti campaign. DOES ALL THAT MONEY MAKE YOUR SHIT SMELL ANY BETTER???
appeared in the restrooms of a major Dallas law firm. And this one: WHY'S THE EXECUTIVE BATHROOM GOT A KEY??? AFRAID THE MAIL CLERK WILL SEE HOW LITTLE YOUR DICK IS??? And finally this: THE PROLETARIAT'S GONNA REACH OUT OF THIS TOILET AND PULL YOUR ASS IN!!!

Sure. These were ridiculous little slogans. Part of my intention was to be funny and shocking at the same time. Apparently, it began to work.

First, I noticed that some penny-anny little news columnist expressed public indignation over "some of the offensive messages appearing across the city." Almost all the letters that appeared in the newspaper backed her up. So I called the newspaper. "Did anyone write to support whoever is writing this stuff?"

"Oh, sure. We get crackpots all the time. Some of the letters are really angry," the person in the paper's letters department said. "A couple were quite trenchant, but we couldn't use them."

Translation? Defense of public statement that doesn't support officially sanctioned opinion is to be quashed. Newspaper publishers, I supposed, a little wistfully too, just didn't want anyone getting the idea that anyone--anyone at all--actually agreed with the person the newspaper had described as "a vandal." Agreement with controversial issues tends to spread when people learn they're not the only ones who are thinking the shocking messages are closer to the truth than some of the pablum that passes for opinion in America. Publishers, of course, wouldn't want to have it documented that they supported "illegal expression" by even printing so much as a letter to the editor in favor of it. They don't want it on record that a lot of people, as I learned for myself, agreed with my big words.

Retail owners angrily painted over and had the messages professionally erased. EAT MORE PORK!!! BE SURE TO TAKE THE APPLE OUT OF THE PRESIDENT'S MOUTH BEFORE YOU DIG IN!!! was a sign near my grocery store. I asked a customer what he thought of it. "You know that's right!" he said.

So what I was learning was that there was indeed spirited public sentiment in Dallas that was silent. Why is it silent? Why does the official sentiment deny the people its voice? I could have asked so many questions of so many people. Then the police showed up, broke down the studio door, tore the place up. Totally ridiculous. We weren't home, but the instant I saw the police car lights flashing outside the door whenever it was we got home, I drove by and told you everything.

Crazy isn't it baby? Running from the threat of being silenced, but not directly so, don't you think? With all the hassles the Fed put you through, I don't blame you for wanting me out of your life and out of the house. I've been hiding--if that's what you can call this--for a long time. We know the drill: The police questioned my employer about my political affiliations, asked my boss if I'd ever given anyone an indication that I sympathized with terrorists. What else could my boss do? I was summarily fired. Why should any employer put up with F.B.I. visits when a thousand capable people stand waiting to fill the job left by the termination of a "troublemaker"? Then, when strange things began happening on-line, I learned with the help of a friend of some expertise that my computer postings had been hacked. And read. But why? There wasn't a goddamn thing I'd ever said to anybody that was even halfway incriminating. And you? You were taken to your office's human resources department for questioning that had nothing to do with your job. The F.B.I. agent who visited you right there in front of your supervisors cited Homeland Security as one of the reasons for "the trouble." I don't blame you for being pissed off that your boss wrote you up for the hassles. This isn't supposed to be any big deal. I've only got a felony warrant for my arrest--I know that--but things got way too frightening for me. I start having "credit problems" due to "computer errors" and it's hard as Hell to clear them up. You know the details. I don't have to go into literally everything here. Sure. I know I broke anti-vandalism laws with my graffiti campaign. But not everyone gets a visit from the F.B.I. for allegedly painting graffiti on retail building walls. Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt anybody but the Dallas, Texas branch of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And how on earth did those folks find me in the first place? The only thing I can think of is that the new traffic monitoring cameras might have caught me or that some forensics expert peeled my fingerprints off a wall. Maybe some "alert citizen" watched me hit a wall and then get back in the car. The whole thing sounds like overly exaggerated precautions to me. People write on walls all the time. Most of the time the subject matter is pornographic or scatalogical. It wasn't the act of vandalism that has caused all this trouble, that pushed me out of my relationship, my home, my job and all my chances to just get it back together. No, it was the political content, the inflammatory message, the public disturbance, the waste of time collecting forensic evidence by a law enforcement agency reflecting "a certain touchiness" in regard to public speech deemed either unreasonable or inappropriate. But who was drawing the line? I simply don't know. When we started getting threatening telephone calls, we had to change telephone numbers. But the calls kept coming. It seems so stupid. I was afraid, and I still am afraid, we'd get hurt. You'd think we were living in Bulgaria, and that the winter clouds were as gray as how people in the Soviet republic probably felt, but this was in the broad light of the Texas summer. The attempts to silence us were not nearly as self-indulgent as my attempts at being some kind of tabloid-level hero. That's why I'm sorry. That's why I'm writing you. Please respond.

And maybe I am crazy. All this "coincidental activity" can be so nebulous you don't know if you're paranoid or if something's really going on behind the scenes. It's a little like my anti-war friend who had the City of Dallas anti-gang unit create an uproar at his Mesquite home--Mesquite? That's not part of the City of Dallas--because they suspected, they said, his son in the "deffamation" (their words) of a dumpster with a paint pen. He says he knows it had something to do with his anti-war, anti-Bush Administration activities. All I ever did was test the limits of free speech. All kinds of goons were all over us both. All I ever did was follow the lead of some anonymous Latin American graffiti artist who was angry that the Fascist coup of Augusto Pinochet, with the help of the C.I.A. and Henry Kissinger, had overthrown the threatening Socialist government of Salvadore Allende.