Bad Stacks Story Collection Box Set (18 page)

I know what he is.

###

Unfortunately this story starts with me. Not a very good journalistic practice, but then I wasn’t a very good journalist. I was a freelancer earning my keep as a waitress, living with two roommates in a two-bedroom apartment and looking for that one big story that would excite some movie producer and get me into the studios. So far I’d sold one article on the origins of molé sauce. It had not become the next
Like
Water For Chocolate
.

My interest in El Cazador began with someone else’s article in the paper, a short single column buried in the Valley section of a Tuesday morning
Times
. It noted only that the mutilated body of a gang kid had been discovered not far from one of the tags of “El Cazador”, a notorious graffiti artist who had frustrated police and citizens’ action groups in North Hollywood/Sun Valley for over a year now.

I already knew the name. I remembered seeing it once on an overpass of the 118 Freeway. It was intricate, in red and orange and black, and the three of us in the car at the time had wondered who would have been insane enough to hang from a freeway while traffic sped by below just so they could scrawl their name.

“Scrawl,” though, wasn’t appropriate. Even while the others were laughing about it I remember thinking it was surprisingly fluid, dynamic. It left its imprint on the mind’s eye as if the tagger had personally written it there. When I suggested to my friends that there was no real difference between the work of Keith Haring and that of El Cazador, they’d scoffed, derided me the rest of the day. But I knew the truth about El Cazador’s work.

It was art and it was magnificent.

###

A year later I saw the newspaper article and within hours I was determined to be El Cazador’s definitive chronicler. It was perfect: I would find out what Valley gang he ran with, track him down, get his bio, sell the article, and split the million dollars that Paramount or Columbia would pay us for the film rights.

Of course I was aware of a few little problems with this plan. I was a 26-year-old white female whose grasp of Spanish was—well, not even a fingerhold. I didn’t know anything about Latino gangs or taggers or that part of the Valley. I knew it could be dangerous, certainly, but I had my pepper spray and a 1980 Plymouth Horizon nobody would want to steal.

I decided to start by driving around, finding whatever I could of El Cazador’s work, photographing it and documenting the location. Then I would assemble an album, evidence of my serious interest, and locate him by questioning the locals.

The first part of the plan proved to be easy. El Cazador’s work was plentiful and identifying it was as simple as picking a genuine Van Gogh out of a paint-by-numbers collection.

Commencement was the discovery of a mural on the side of a crumbling apartment complex on the northern end of Vineland. It covered the entire wall of the ramshackle building, three floors high and two apartments wide. It could be seen blocks away, dominating a neighborhood of dented, overflowing garbage cans, ancient bungalows with brown lawns and barred doors, liquor stores with wooden boards over the windows.

The subject was survival, violence: A snake fighting an eagle. The two combatants were locked in a full-on struggle, yet the serpent was clearly winning. Its venomous fangs were buried halfway in the eagle’s carefully-feathered neck, its sinuous length coiled once around the contorting bird. One of the eagle’s wings was nearly torn off and its head was tilted back, beak open, screeching its agony. The snake was grinning.

At the bottom, formed from the shower of avian blood, was the signature “El Cazador.”

It was breathstopping, rendered in colors so extravagant I had to remind myself they had all come from mere spraypaint cans. It bespoke careful planning and long nights of exhaustion. It brought associations to mind, pricked the backbrain with unnameable mythologies...and yet the political statement was clear as well.

In the Mexican flag, the eagle is winning.

The surrounding space was cluttered with simple black graffiti letters, most in the pointed, sharp style that always appeared vaguely extraterrestrial to me. These lesser tags were layered thick on top of each other, spilling haphazardly, something that might have been “Killahs” across “Felipe Z” covering “IMAW,” but no one had touched El Cazador’s. Even the lifeless dirt at the base of its wall was clean of the usual rubbish. It was obviously held in veneration.

I had to walk halfway down the block to get it all in my lens. While I was snapping shots, a boy, maybe 10, walked up to me. He had dark skin, serious eyes, a Tecate beer T-shirt.

“You from County?”

“County?”

“Yeah, you know, clean up or somethin’?”

I looked down at him, trying to seem open and friendly. “No, I like the painting.”

It succeeded. “Oh, tha’s cool. El Caz, he’s the best, man.”

Could it really be this easy? I asked, “You a friend of his?”

The boy frowned, disappointed. “I wish. Ain’t nobody his friend.”

“Somebody must be.” I nodded at the mural. “He couldn’t have done that alone.”

“He did, an’ in one night.”

“One night? No way.”

“Yas, man, I’m tellin’ you, was one night. See how all the streetlights an’ shit is broke out?”

I glanced around. He was right—every light in the immediate area was smashed.

“That’s so he’d be harder to see while he did it.”

I smiled and asked, “Then how’d he see?”

The boy answered, “I dunno. He’s El Caz. Me, I only live in the building.”

Then he got on a skateboard and rode off.

I watched in disbelief. He wasn’t lying—he skated in through the main entrance of the building.

Wait a minute, so maybe he did live there, that didn’t mean he hadn’t lied about the rest. The only way that painting could have been completed in one night would have involved a small army of artists with their own lights and the boy had said El Cazador worked alone. Of course I was still the outsider, the dipshit who could be had for a ridiculous fairy tale. That kid was probably in one of those apartments right now laughing his head off at the stupid
chiquita
who bought that dumb story, man.

Maybe this wouldn’t be so easy after all.

###

I photographed six more El Cazador tags over the next two weeks. I also clipped three newspaper stories about gang slayings that had occurred not far from the tags.

Pedro Lopez, 18, was found a quarter-mile from a Los Angeles river concrete wash on which two gleaming, blocky robots battled it out, red fluid spraying from vents in their silver plating. Pedro’s throat had been ripped open. Fourteen-year-old Eduardo Maneiros was found nearly severed in half beneath a warehouse wall displaying an Aztec priest ripping the heart from a pale, shrieking girl. A depiction of a gang shootout with bullets the size of basketballs, painted in an alley, could have been the last thing 15-year-old Tony Castro saw before he was slashed repeatedly with a sharp object.

Were El Cazador’s paintings inspiring violence? Were these killings morbid homage, sacrifices to the legendary tagger king? Or was it coincidence? There were kids dying everywhere, after all.

The people I talked to in El Cazador’s neighborhood couldn’t offer much. Most didn’t know anything. Some didn’t speak English. Several laughed at me. One twenty-three-year-old gangsta named Cruz told me nobody knew who El Caz was, he was solo, didn’t run with a gang. Then Cruz asked me out. He told me I’d never find El Cazador if I hadn’t experienced how he lived. He followed me all the way to my car, then leaned on the hood until I pulled away. I could see him grinning in the rearview mirror. I’ve had a couple of dreams about Cruz since then. They were bad.

One early morning, a little past eight, I found an old man who spoke only Spanish staring at a fifteen-foot-high scene of robocops battering a crouching boy, painted on the back wall of a building housing a hardware store. When he saw me, the old man gestured at the wall and the broken lights, rattling off an angry string. I could gather only that the painting was recent and he wasn’t too happy about it. When I shook my head apologetically, he walked closer to the wall and tapped at the brownish-red letters spelling out “El Cazador”.

“
Sangre, sangre
,” he shouted.

I knew that word, at least.
Sangre
.

Blood.

Then the old man shook his head angrily, murmured “policia” and hobbled back up to the main street and into the tiny
panaderia
bakery he owned.

I stared at the stylized signature, wondering what he’d meant. Sure, it was the color of dried blood, the implication was there....

What if it wasn’t implication?

I touched the wall, brushing my fingertips over the surface. All I felt was the coarse brick and mortar construction. Other tags covered any surface not taken by El Cazador’s, but they were scribbled by clumsy, insensitive hands and looked old, ignored.

I scraped at the dark side of one of the detailed assailants. The chromium blue felt sealed, like spraypaint. It didn’t come off.

When I scraped at the red lettering in the name it was still slightly damp.

A sticky blob came off on my fingertip. I rubbed it against my thumb and it dissolved into something thick and very dark red.

I backed away, staring at my fingers, a nervous thrill in my stomach. The meaning revealed there was obvious. El Cazador, my elusive quarry, was not just a kid with a talent for creative vandalism. This was something darker, something-

I nearly lost my balance as my right foot caught behind me. I glanced down, expecting to be disgusted by dog shit or old newspapers-

-and saw instead a boy, a dead boy, his torso torn open, red and gray matter spilling out. His face was smeared, the ground all around him black and viscid. There was a gun not far from him, lying useless. The fingers of one hand still seemed to be clawing for it. The flies had already settled on him.

What I did next...usually people say they felt sick, they felt weak, they screamed.

I took a picture.

Then I turned and ran for my car.

###

In the paper the next day was a back-page item about another gang slaying that had evidently taken place less than a block from one of El Cazador’s tags. This time his name was mentioned, but police were uncertain whether a connection “can be absolutely drawn to the graffiti artist.” They were also seeking a possible witness, “a woman, white, blonde hair, early twenties, carrying a camera.”

I would give it up, this story. It should ideally be written in a language I didn’t speak. A language in which “
sangre
” meant a color in the arsenal of a tagger.

I would go back to my life, my world. I would write articles on school kids who get to interview the president, on cats who could mouth the word “hello,” and whether herbal remedies actually helped or not. Eventually, perhaps, I might write a screenplay. A gentle romantic comedy. A coming-of-age drama. Anything without images of boys, ripped apart, dying beneath murals painted in passion and blood.

###

I wish I could say it was a dream or a vision that changed my mind, that I was obsessed, driven, that I had an unquenchable curiosity or thirst for knowledge.