PRIVATE LIVES, PUBLIC PLACES : Making One’s Mark on the World

It happened suddenly on the corner of Sepulveda and Manchester. There was a flash of movement; some were running, others backed off to watch. A line of schoolboys was being pushed against a wall; five RTD policemen stood over them, pacing backward and forward with the energy of people on show. What held the eye? Why the compulsion to park and bear witness?

Perhaps it was the police. One, broad and flustered, was being rougher than maybe he meant. Another, slight and concerned, looked uncomfortable with the almost military posture of his colleagues. Mostly, it was the boys: young, 11 to 13 perhaps, one in tears, another trying to hug himself only to have his hands pulled behind him, all shivering in thin sweat shirts, pale in their blackness, breathing as frightened people do, too fast and painfully.

Schoolbooks lay forgotten on the sidewalk. Orville Wright Junior High School, it turned out. Some were retrieved by classmates; two belonging to someone on the line were left. It was hard to accept the contradiction: the harmless, childish life in the notebooks, the air of violence in the space around the police. No one came near the boys; they were pariahs suddenly in the ordinary Westchester afternoon. The world crossed the road and went about its business, probably presuming guilt and grateful for its arrest. But guilt for what?

The officer in charge had no temper for a busybody crossing his imaginary cordon. Another, more community-minded, came forward to answer questions about the crime. A case of graffiti, it turned out. The RTD police had been watching the 105 bus stop that afternoon. Handcuffs? For graffiti? The outsider was taken aback. Did graffiti warrant humiliating young boys with a probing search before the gawping crowd? “Boys,” scoffed the officer not unkindly. “Boys? They’re thugs.” He talked of gangs, of knives, of violence. Well, no, not here, not yet. No weapons present, just one can of paint. Perhaps the wild marks across the bus-stop bench were coded gang messages? “No,” said the officer, “just marks. But let me tell you,” he warned, all-knowing, “today it’s graffiti--tomorrow it’s gang-banging.”

Through the night, questions nagged. Is there no longer space in a quiet suburban afternoon for a warning, a telling-off, rather than sirens and handcuffs? Or for marching the culprits back to school for a showdown? And is it inexorably graffiti today, gang-banging tomorrow?

Orville Wright Junior High School is in the tidiest heart of Westchester: rows of houses with flower beds, green lawns and old-fashioned benches out front. Next morning, the school’s principal, Jacqueline Tucker, gray-haired and sturdy, was gracious to the unexpected caller returning the books. No, the RTD police had not called her. She looked through the school list of a thousand names to see if the owner of the notebooks was “hers.” Smoothly concerned, she glided over the realities of running “a good school” in a “good neighborhood.” No gangs at Orville Wright, she said; a bad egg or two and a fight to keep the bare walls clean.

The school has a resident police officer, Willie Nixon, who offered a tour of the graffiti. Certain impressions of that walk will always remain: that not one student, called and checked, was ever addressed by name. No parents were to be seen, catching up, helping out, softening the day. In the maze of concrete, not a flower seemed to have grown or been planted. Not a smile was returned, not a grim look softened.

Trophies stood in a glass case by the door, but where was the art work--the masks, posters, portraits, offerings of the young and illuminating spirit?

On the bulletin board--no kittens for adoption, tales of whale-watching, plays or marching band, but union news and a health warning marked DO NOT REMOVE about asbestos on the premises.

Trash abounded; picking it up was a punishment detail. But where in this “good school” was the pride that would not willingly litter? Where the sense of belonging or of making a difference?

Officer Nixon wandered onto the playing fields. Flocks of gulls mocked him from a steel fence. He was up at 4 to be here by 7. He has raised three good boys himself, and remembers somewhere in another world a kitchen table where his mother once checked his homework and asked about his day. He looked around at the broken basketball hoops, the wretched emptiness, the overweight PE students panting through laps on junk-food diets--and a great weariness came over his worn and decent face.

Graffiti? Who would not want to make a mark in this impersonal, faceless world? To say, as men have on walls through history: I was here. I AM.