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if you can accept that they see it that way, and that they lack the imagination to see it any other, you can let them off the hook. Except, that argument would exonerate Nazi death camp guards, and also exterminators don’t lie awake visualizing what they’re gonna do to the roaches when they catch them, or circulating lists of the Top Five Most Wanted Insects among themselves so everybody can be on the same page, poised for the stomp-out.
    I was better at letting Billy off the hook—when it wasn’t his eyes widening in moments-to-live recognition instead of Bracken’s, anyway. A one-man judicial system, your boy here. Judge, jury and executioner. Prosecution and defense. All varieties of witness: star, character, hostile, expert, discredited.
    When grandiosity seemed like it would play, I told the court my father had faced the same choice as every hero for millennia, and made the same decision: to lay aside all he held dear and go to war. That it was some epic, Odysseus-type shit to backburner his newborn son and loving common-law wife and take up arms. Except that the wily King of Ithaca, on whom we spent the better part of a semester my sophomore year, pretended to be batshit insane so they’d leave him and Telemachus and Penelope the fuck alone, hitched his plow up to a mule and an ox and sowed his fields with pebbles. And when Agamemnon called his bluff, O got on a ship and waved farewell and sailed off to chuck spears and reap glory. Whereas my father ran his war, if you could call it that, out of our apartment.
    Billy went bombing. That’s what a fiend does, all he knows how to do. The objective was simple: broadcast the truth, bring Bracken down. It’s not as naive as it might sound. When you’re an outlaw to begin with, and your outlaw best friend’s been killed by a cop, all you’ve got is your word. Justice doesn’t come and ring your doorbell. The DA’s not trying to build a case. The police, forget about it. You’d be a fool to even show your face.
    All you’ve got is your word. The word. And paint.
    No more trains for Billy Rage. No more wildstyles, no more festivals of color, no more leaning over a blackbook, souping up his name until it flew, chased its tail, spat flame. No more art, or sleep, or lust for fame. Now it was about size and visibility, placement and relentlessness. Results.
    On July 3, 1987, Billy embarked on what is widely considered the sickest run in planetary history. It would take me pages to catalog the spots he hit, some so implausible that dudes are still trying to divine his modus operandi. The medium wasn’t the message anymore, the message was the message, so sometimes spraypaint was the delivery system and other times he used regular latex house paint and a roller, wore an orange jumpsuit and hid in plain sight, just another schmuck humping it out. Except an hour later he’d be gone and the brick wall or the billboard would be covered in ugly squared-off letters twelve feet tall and visible from a half-mile away:
    7/2/87
    NYPD’S ANASTACIO BRACKEN
    MURDERED ANDREW ‘AMUSE’ STEIN
    IN COLD BLOOD
    Some nights he dressed in rags and sloshed himself with gin, staggered around Soho with a bum-sack full of cans and marked each square of sidewalk with a homemade stencil:
    OFFICER BRACKEN KILLED AMUSE
    DEMAND JUSTICE!
    He rocked every concrete overpass—what writers call heaven spots or hangovers—above the FDR freeway on Manhattan’s east side. He tagged a goddamn polar bear with the BRACKEN KILLED AMUSE stencil, red paint on white fur. I shit you not, a Central Park Zoo polar bear that not only could kill you with one paw-swipe but spends its whole life fantasizing about doing just that.
    Billy got half the other animals up in the piece, too: all the goats and sheep from the petting farm, two monkeys, a penguin. Went up to the Bronx Zoo a month later and wrote an essay in Flat Black Krylon on the