The Twelfth Card

King Jr., Tina, Tupac, Beyoncé, Chris Rock, Shaq . . . . And dozens of pictures of Jam MasterJay, the brilliant and generous vinyl-spinning rapper with Run-D.M.C., gunned down by some asshole in his Queens recording studio a few years back.
    Jax was hit left and right by memories. He glanced at another corner. Well, lookit that. Now a fast food place, it had been the site of Jax’s first crime, committed when he was fifteen—the crime that had launched him on the path to becoming righteously notorious. Because what he racked wasn’t liquor or cigarettes or guns or cash, but a case of phat Krylon from a hardware store. Which he went on to use up over the next twenty-four hours, compounding the larceny with trespass and criminal property damage by spray-painting the graffitied bubble letters Jax 157 throughout Manhattan and the Bronx.
    Over the next few years Jax bombed that tag of his on thousands of surfaces: overpasses, bridges, viaducts, walls, billboards, stores, city buses, private buses, office buildings—he tagged Rockefeller Center, right beside that gold statue, before getting tackled by two massive security bulls, who laid into him hard with Mace and nightsticks.
    If young Alonzo Jackson found himself with five minutes of privacy and a flat surface, Jax 157 appeared.
    Struggling to get through high school, the son of divorced parents, bored to death with normal jobs, steady in trouble, he found comfort as a writer (graffiti guerrillas were “writers,” not “artists”—what Keith Haring, the Soho galleries and claimer ad agencies told everybody). He ran with some local Blood posses for a time, but he changed his mind one day when he was hanging with his set on 140th, and the Trey-Sevens drove by, and pop, pop, pop,Jimmy Stone, standing right next to him, went down with two holes in the temple, dead ’fore he hit the ground. All on account of a small bag of rock, or on account of no reason at all.
    Fuck that. Jax went out on his own. Less money. But a hell of a lot safer (despite spraying his tag on places like the Verrazano Bridge and a moving A train car—which was one phat story that even brothers in prison had heard of).
    Alonzo Jackson, unofficially but permanently renamed Jax, dove into his craft. He started out simply bombing his tag throughout the city. But, he learned early that if that’s all you do, even if you lay it in every borough of the city, you’re nothing but a lame “toy,” and graffiti kings wouldn’t give you the time of day.
    So, skipping school, working in fast food restaurants during the day to pay for paint, or racking what he could steal, Jax moved on to throw-ups—tags written fast but a lot bigger than bombing. He became a master of the top-to-bottom: doing the entire vertical height of a subway car. The A train, supposedly the longest route through town, was his personal favorite. Thousands of visitors would travel from Kennedy Airport into the city on a train that didn’t say Welcome to the Big Apple; it offered the mysterious message: Jax 157 .
    By the time Jax was twenty-one he’d done two total end-to-ends—covering the entire side of a subway car with his graffiti—and had come close to doing a whole train, every graffiti king’s dream. He did his share of ’pieces too. Jax had tried to describe what a graffiti masterpiece was. But all he could come up with was that a ’piece was something more . Something breathtaking. A work that a cluckhead crack addict sitting in a gutter and a Wall Streettrader on New Jersey Transit could both look at and think, Man, that is so fucking cool.
    Those were the days, Jax reflected. He was a graffiti king, in the middle of the most powerful black cultural movement since the Harlem Renaissance: hip-hop.
    Sure, the Renaissance must’ve been def. But to Jax it was a smart person’s thing. It came from the head. Hip-hop burst from the soul and from the heart. It wasn’t born in colleges and writer’s lofts, it came right from the fucking streets, from the angry and striving and despairing kids who had impossibly hard lives and broken homes, who walked on sidewalks littered with cookie vials discarded by the crackheads and dotted with brown, dried blood. It was the raw shout from people who had to shout to be heard . . . . Hip-hop’s four legs delivered everything: music in DJ’ing, poetry in MC rapping, dance in the b-boy’s breakdancing and art in Jax’s own contribution, graffiti.
    In fact, here on