Notes from Amtrak Regional 135

Riding on a train is like being let behind the scenes. You see the backsides of buildings, the undersides of overpasses, the neglected and unkempt parts of the towns along the way. Most of the time, it seems as though the people who live in these towns have no idea that hundreds of people slide daily past their unruly vistas. You get glimpses of these unknowing performers, on motorcycles, coming out of doors into the street, rowing in sculls out toward the sea, mowing their lawns. Mostly, though, what you see are buildings, their backs, in particular. Occasionally, on one of these buildings or on a fence, a banner or a sign will appear, but dirty and tattered, as though someone remembered their audience at some long-distant point, but then, since no business or discernable activity ever seems to come from these announcements to the tracks, forgot they’d put one up, their attention retreating back to the other sides of their fences and their walls.

Not everyone forgets, though. One group of people not only remembers the scores of eyes that glide over their towns as trains pass by, they revel in them. Working at night (they must; I have never seen them by day, but their work is so prolific that I think I’d have seen at least one of them if they were doing it then). These, of course, are the graffitos. The breadth in style and color in the work you see on a trip from Boston to New York is astonishing. Most simply, there are tags in black, a sort of visual claim broadcasting the name of the person who put it there. Many tags are ugly, executed by those who (I presume) don’t have the skill or the passion to learn how to create the larger, more intricate displays that take up whole sides of boxcars and switchboxes. This kind of tag, like the layer of black spots that used to be chewing gum caking the sidewalks of my neighborhood in New York, bothers me. What’s the point, if you’re not striving for some level of beauty?

From time to time, however, the austerity of a simple black tag seems to be more like the rules of one of those poems constrained by the specifics of rhyme and meter: boundaries within which the artist works to create a piece of stunning simplicity. In Providence, for example, we pass through a tunnel as we exit the station there, and a tagger has written his name, over and over, each one beginning with an S whose curves are evidence of his skill at creating a pleasing, elegant form. The line of names continues on, fifty, eighty, one hundred feet (it’s hard to tell from a moving train) before ending in an ellipsis. That ellipsis extends the work—I could go on forever, and I would (I do), but there’s been an interruption, and I have to go now. Maybe it was morning. Maybe it was the police. It might have been boredom, true, but it strikes me that a person who is able to replicate a form so perfectly in such repetition is probably not a person who has deficiencies in attention.

These small artworks are rarely so noticeable, though. For the most part the tags seem like scribbles around the edges of the larger pieces that cover the railbeds and whatever lines them. As the train approaches New York, the pieces grow more complex and colorful, interstitial spaces between each one growing smaller and smaller until finally, just as we pull out of Connecticut, there is no space anymore at all, and the names become an endless stream of curves and angles, lights and shadows, in an array of colors that surprises with its variety. It seems likelier that some of them, closer to mauve and chartreuse than to more common reds or greens, must sell more to the graffitos who create these pieces than to any legitimate do-it-yourselfer refinishing a patio chair.

As we trundle over the Hell’s Gate Bridge for our short jaunt through Queens (I could get off here if they’d let me, actually—I live in this part of town, in Astoria) we run out of surfaces to cover. There aren’t any walls on these raised tracks, and anyway, we’re in a neighborhood that isn’t as able as the tony towns of Connecticut to thrust its graffiti to their edges to be seen only by travelers like me, so there’s less of it here, actually, than there was on the city’s outskirts.