Tag Eat Tag

Title card. TAG EAT TAG in huge white spray-stencil capitals edged in orange, over a night photograph of a graffiti-covered wall under a concrete overpass, wet asphalt catching the light.

I get lost in a maze of urban scrawls, almost lose my mind, and make friends with an alpha graffiti. All in a good days work.

Another long night. Chatting up some urban trolls, drinking with lost souls, looking for leads. Trying to hunt down the whisper-punks. Everybody’s heard of them, no one knows where they live. I’m promised more info tomorrow.

It’s always tomorrow.

Exhausted, I decide to call it a day.

On my way home I lost my focus. Big mistake. Crap.

CRAP.

Urban life sells you the illusion of safety. It’s all a lie. The city is a hungry jungle wearing a hi-vis vest.

A graffiti-lined concrete gully descending under sodium light, every surface tagged, a dark stain of water spreading across the floor.

I get lost in a maze of graffiti. A stray ecosystem of glyphs, toons, insults, and an occasional crude dick. Wannabe gang tags preying on wannabe Banksies. Sharpie poems wedged between neomythic runes. Concrete cave walls, telling stories of warring tribes.

A pedestrian underpass at night lit by one greenish tube, an abandoned shopping cart standing halfway in, wet leaves on the path.

I should keep walking. I can’t. Looked a split second too long at this sprayed phantasmagoria, like a poor tourist lost in the patterns of an islamic temple.

Hooked.

Overwhelmed.

I stand in this visual noise, cartoon characters eyeing me greedily, jostling for attention, eager to implant their messages onto the fertile ground of my shaky psyche.

Black-and-white: a huddle of people at a stickered door under a concrete pillar painted with a tall column of runes.

Fight-or-flight reflexes short-circuit each other, freezing me in place.

There’s beauty in the chaos and the beauty is the bait. I sit down between two brick walls close enough to touch both.

A calm realization dawns on me: maybe this is it. Maybe I will be found in a day or two, drooling, my sanity licked clean by packs of hungry tags and phone numbers no longer in service.

A narrow moss-green alley at night, brick walls dense with tags and painted phone numbers — 555-1234, 555-69876 — around a pale glowing blank rectangle.

Dude, it can happen. I’ve heard stories.

I can see the graffiti circling me now. Growling. Weaving in the bricks, closer and closer…

A narrow cobbled alley at night, both walls dense with tags — the paint smeared into long motion-streaks leaning toward the lit bend ahead, as if the walls were pouring slowly forward.

And then they scatter.

The little sharpie ones bolt for the cracks; the big ones pull back with the wounded dignity of bullies pretending they had somewhere else to be — we wasn’t even botherin’ you, man, we gots bizniz to attend to — and in seconds the wall is scrubbed bare. Gone, all of it. The whole municipal guerrilla army, routed.

A grey-washed brick wall at night, almost clean — except for a tall crack down its face bleeding full-colour graffiti from inside, and a single blue spray can toppled on the pavement beneath it.

The King has arrived.

It slides over the concrete without a hurry, stepping around the damp spots and the moss the way a cat keeps its paws dry. For it is a cat.

Half my height. Orange. Grinning. Three impossible rows of white teeth.

Its whole body is three flexed words carrying the angst of the age:

EAT THE RICH

A spotlit brick wall carrying an orange cat-shaped tag, its body built from the words EAT THE RICH, grinning with three rows of white teeth.

“Hello,” I manage weakly.

It looks at me the way you’d look at a sandwich that’s fallen flat on the floor. No king is that hungry.

Maybe it can smell that the three euros in my pocket is my entire net worth.

The spray-paint apparition watches me lazily, smiling like a morbid Cheshire Cat — and I do the only thing I know how - I pull out the notebook.

The Editors will be pleased.

Its name is Richie. Richie turns out to be sort of chatty. Perhaps it’s lonely – being the apex predator of the block. Kings often are.

People think of graffiti as something static. Just a silly little thing, spitting in the face of landlords and city planners.

Nah.

Tags are information patterns. And any pattern complex enough becomes alive. Starts wanting things.

Mostly it wants to eat.

What is it you eat, I ask Richie.

“Eyeballs, man. The peeps, the views, the look-juice. Attention.
That little sideways glance you gave Kiwie tag back there?

Nom.

The little wince you did at the wrong-shaped dick on the garage door?

Nomnom.

That fed it. It’s got a boner now, thanks to you.

Attention’s the only food there is. You look, we grow.”

SWIPE RIGHT FOR MORE LOOK-JUICE →

I think a bit about the little sharpie scribbles, trying to catch my gaze. Usually no one pays attention to them, squeezed between wall cracks.

A chalk hopscotch grid on wet night pavement, broken glass and a beer bottle at its edge; in square two, a small chalk stick figure with antennae stands very still.

“The biggies keep ‘em there. Can’t let ‘em be seen. Seen means fed, fed means big, big means they get shoved in the cracks instead.

Tag eat tag, man.

Tags don’t have no tag-parents protecting their offspring. Informational evolution doesn’t do tender.”

Can a tag die, I ask Richie.

It chews on it.

“Sorta. Wash us off — gone, structural collapse, lights out. Otherwise we just… thin. Live off a quiet street long enough, your colors go.

You shrink, you slow. Attention deficit. I seen old Soviet tags in the dead factories — faded gits, can barely move. Still there, though. Still awake.”

A derelict factory hall, daylight raking through high windows onto concrete pillars with old faded tags, paint gone chalky and pale.

What if they’re painted over?

The grin fades for the first time.

“Can’t move, can’t feed, can’t die. Put your ear to a freshly painted wall sometime, a squeaky clean one, a nice one — hear that? Yeah, that sad buzz. There’s somebody under there.

Black-and-white: a crowd of hooded mourners gathered at night before a freshly painted grey rectangle on a brick wall, a row of votive candles burning at its base.

I’d take the pressure washer any day, man.

Quick. Clean.

The paint’s the thing that scares us, man. Not powerwasher. The fucking paint.”

A freshly repainted pale wall, blank in the daylight — except for the raised ghost-shapes of letters still pushing through from under the paint.

Richie recovers, the teeth show once again:

“Not that we’re saints. Tag-stack — you seen it?

New tag over old, pin the bastard down so he can’t move and all the looking comes to you.

We do it to each other all day. I’m a biggie. The little ones just leave when they see me. Saves everyone the paperwork.”

Extreme close-up of a wall bearing years of tags layered like strata, paint peeling in flakes thick as bark; under the topmost layer, crushed purple letterforms still legible.

I ask who made it.

The alley goes very quiet. Suddenly, I feel as if I asked something very impolite.

“…Man… I know you mean well but.. but that’s not something you ask a tag, you know? Tag and tagger, that’s — that’s a sacred bond, man. Not for sharing. I’m part of her, she’s part of me.

Leave it.”

Conversation slows down. I’ve stepped on a landmine and can’t figure out how to step off it gracefully. The silence risks getting awkward, but then the rumbling of my stomach saves me.

I ask Richie how attention tastes. Does it have a taste at all?

“Gourmet chat! Now you’re talking. Oh, it’s all different, man.

Appreciation’s sweet — candy, no substance, gone in a second.

Hate, though. Hate’s sour and hate is strong, builds your backbone, keeps you standing through a winter. The pretty-pretty ones get love, all glowy, colors going shiny — bit much for my taste.

A crumbling wall carrying a large tag in pink and black: KORE, the paint glowing against the ruined plaster.

Best of all’s when they resonate. When the idea lands. That’s a double serving. A name-tag with nothing behind it? Starving. But an idea is something people feel.

Goes a long way.”

A bus-stop crowd at night, everyone facing the same way, lit faintly teal by an enormous glowing tag on the wall across the street. Nobody photographs it.

It flexes.

EAT THE RICH ripples all over its body.

I ask it how its message is feeding it.

Richie gives me a laugh like a dog bark.

“This one? This one’s a feast that won’t quit.

Everybody’s angry, man, and angry’s the nutritious kind. At this rate I’m pushing 2D to 3D before the year’s out.”

That’s a thing that can happen?

“Everything’s a thing that can happen. I know guys who ascended.

Pushed the surface, went solid.

Every thing can grab another dimension if it works at it — maybe that’s the whole point of any of us being here. I dunno, I no philosopher kind.

You lot got handed 3D for free, lucky bastards, now you’re meant to push for 4, for 5, how would I know.

Takes discipline, mind, feels. You gotta think about it. Be it.

Bend your own pattern. Watch it give.”

A single freestanding concrete slab in total darkness, lit by one lamp above it, its face covered in tags — the last lit wall anywhere.

I think about it.

Every cross-legged spiritual influencer promising me my fifth-dimensional ascension self suddenly seems less like a dumb grift and more like a very bad translation of something true.

I ask Richie what it’d do, first thing, gone 3D.

Its grin grows into something deadly.

“Don’t laugh. I gots a dream.

Late night, me in the shadows, playing flat as roadkill on the wall, yeh?”

I nod.

“And then a limo pulls up. Out hops a billionaire, Mark, Jeff, Elon, I don’t give a fuck.

And they gotta pee, yeh?

Fucker sees a wall, sees me on it, decides I’m the spot.”

Black-and-white: a graffiti wall with a pale round burst low on the brick, like something splashed and stained into the paint.

Then what?

Richie produces a snarky hiss:

“And then I bite their little dick clean off.”

The laugh detonates — a sudden burst so loud a flock of birds bursts out of a hedge and scatters over the rooftops.

Black-and-white flash shot upward: a flock of birds detonating off a rooftop hedge into the night sky; on the gable below them, a huge sprayed grin — just teeth, no face.

The orange two-dimensional groin-destroyer is rolling on the wall, the eerie cackle ringing up the empty alley.

It’s the wrong amount of sound for something so flat.

And then, the way a laugh does when it’s run all the way out, it goes quiet.

We both do. The alley settles. Richie looks tired suddenly — or I do, leaning my head back against the cold brick, tired, so tired — and for a moment neither of us performs anything.

“You shouldn’t be round here in your state, mate.” Richie says, gently.

It walks me to the corner where the early morning bus stops, sliding along the wall beside me, and squirts a fleck of yellow spray at a sun-bleached flyer for a club that shut years ago.

At the intersection it halts. Walls only go so far.

A long graffiti-covered brick wall at night simply ending at open waste ground, fog beyond; the tags crowd dense to the last brick — LOST, NO EXIT, END CITY — and an orange line runs along the base and stops at the corner.

I cross alone.

A bus shelter glowing pale blue at night beside a wall carpeted edge to edge in tags.

Sitting at the bus stop, I can see Richie swagger away, gliding across the walls with feline grace. It reaches a non-descript apartment building at the end of the street, sits next to a door. Waiting.

After a while a girl exits. Purple hair, a school backpack that sounds suspiciously full of spray cans. Rests her palm on Richie’s flank. Caressing. The eyes of the orange menace squeeze shut.

It’s too far to be sure, but I think I can hear it purr.

I look away, the scene is too intimate, and I feel like an intruder.

Instead I pull out my phone and set a Google alert for a keyword combo:

“billionaire”, “penis accident”, “strange circumstances”

Looking forward to that one chiming.