Graffiti

About twelve years ago a bunch of my friends lived in a house in the Poconos. They had all roomed together through college and had actually lived in a series of houses in the Poconos since graduation. But this house was a little different: it was in a housing development which had a private lake.

It wasn't much of a lake. A pond, really, a few feet deep at the deepest and maybe a quarter of a mile across. I don't think there were any fish in it. But it had a dock, and if you had a boat you could take it out and just paddle around.

One of my friends bought a boat. It was a small thing, big enough for two people, but it was big enough for his purposes. It was small enough that the folks at the state agency that sells licenses for boats laughed him out of the office when he tried to register it, but big enough that the state agent who checks for unlicensed boats slapped him with a fine when he saw that it was unregistered.

There was a public storage space at the lake where you could leave your boat. Locked up, I guess, so nobody would make off with it. I never really got so involved with the boat as to learn those particulars. My friend kept his boat there, for a while.

The Poconos were different back then. Today you can't throw a rock there without smashing the windshield of a luxury SUV being driven by a transplanted New Yorker, but back then they had more a sort of depressed feel to them, a region that had once been a playground and a honeymoon spot and a vacation retreat but was now a faded relic of its glory days. There were New Yorkers and Philadelphians and other big-city folks who would come there to ski, mostly, or who kept secluded vacation houses there. But most of the time it was just the locals, and not many of them.

So it was probably a local kid who spray-painted graffiti all over my friend's boat while it was stored by the dock.

"Face it," one of his roommates said. "You can't escape shit."

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There are artists out there who create masterpieces with a few spray cans and a few hours of time, usually using a canvas that doesn't belong to them. Sometimes these works are welcomed, even commissioned. Most of the time they are seen as vandalism and are cleaned off at some significant expense - or are left to be covered in additional layers of graffiti.

Most of the time the people who are out there with spray cans are taggers, kids marking their gang's territory or trying to leave their personal mark with a sort of brand symbol. Taggers are looked down on by the graffiti artists - it's like thinking you're saying something significant as a writer when all you do is write your initials, over and over again.

Then there are the ones who just spray-paint crudely-drawn dicks and curse words on walls. Infantile crap.

So why do they do it?

I don't know. I won't pretend to know. But I will make some guesses.

As I said before, I think some of them are engaging in gang-related activity. Gangs marking their territory like dogs pissing on trees.

Maybe some are just kids trying to establish their own identities. Here I am! This is me! Look at meeee!!!

Maybe some are mentally disturbed, externalizing their insanity with pictures of penises and curse words, not seeing anything wrong with their behavior. Or maybe some of them are bad little children doing the same thing.

Perhaps it's a plea for attention. I'm pretty sure these punks feel a thrill whenever their work makes it onto the 6 o'clock news or into the morning paper. Acknowledging them validates their efforts, especially if people get all worked up about it.

Or maybe they just hate seeing anything that isn't all messed up.

Whatever. I don't know what makes people do these things. All we can do is keep cleaning up after them, and try to catch them if we can. Maybe they'll grow up and move on. Maybe they won't. And if one or two of them wind up crumpled in a heap somewhere, that's the risk they took.