This tag was mine. There’s a big streetlight that flickers steadily in the parking lot of the 7-11 between Liam’s house and the business park. We stopped for snacks after we were done for the day, and while Liam and Miri went in, I decided to start putting our name out a little bit.
Some people had scratched initials and expletives into the thin olive-green paint on the light-post. I used a sharpie, putting “MUCK” in bubble letters. The “K” sloped upward at the end, where an anthropomorphic jackalope gained serious air.
I thought the name was kind of dumb after we agreed on it, but then outside of the 7-11 in the greenish, buzzing light I was starting to like it again. We named the showroom that we had started tagging “The Wishing Well,” and were going to try and cover it in various tags. It was going to eventually be a huge mural across the floor and walls and ceiling. We would have all summer to work on it.
A lot of other kids in Montclair are into tagging, actually. When I went inside the 7-11 to find Miri and Liam, they were talking to this guy we knew named Kenny.
“Holy shit!” he said when he saw me. “Everett’s with you guys too!” Kenny was holding a plastic bag through which I could make out pork rinds and three or four energy drinks.
“Yeah,” Liam said. “We’re all still around.”
“Why don’t you guys come by the gas tanks anymore?” Kenny said. He was talking about the big, industrial kind. There’s a whole complex of them in town that someone figured out how to get into through the fence.
“Too many people getting caught,” Miri said.
“Yeah that’s true,” Kenny said. “You guys know Mike and Tyrone and that one girl they hang out with? I’m pretty sure they got caught there like two weeks ago.”
None of us knew any of those people, but we sort of acted like we did. I made a vague affirmative noise.
“Damn,” Liam said.
We all went outside. Kenny lit a cigarette and Miri bummed one from him. Someone in a jeep yelled at us. “My friend’s been waiting forever,” Kenny said. “I’ll see you guys later. Come to the gas tanks sometime.” He pointed at us with both hands and walked backwards to the jeep as he said it. We had only ever been there twice. I wasn’t really sure why Kenny was so eager to see us.
“Maybe we should go back now that we have a name we can tag,” Miri said.
“No, fuck that,” Liam said. “They’re cracking down on people going in there. Plus our shit would just get tagged over as soon as anyone saw it.”
That was one of my big problems with the gas tanks. Everyone would just cross out everyone else’s stuff. It was too much of a competition all the time.
“I’m glad no one told him about the Wishing Well,” I said. It was so much better to just have our own place to go tag. We found it entirely blank, so it’s entirely ours. It just seemed too good to neglect.
“Yeah,” Miri said. “That’s a secret. Seriously, we’re the only people that can know about it. Otherwise it doesn’t come true.”
“Us and the whole internet,” Liam said.
Miri threw the rest of her cigarette onto the ground. “Well yeah,” she said. “The internet can know.”
