Writerland Chapter 33: The Story That Never Was

Writerland is a newsletter from The Delacorte Review whose mission is to help writers tell the stories they need to tell.

Less than a year after graduating from Columbia Journalism School, I received the opportunity of a lifetime. A former professor reached out to me asking if I had any interest in potentially freelancing for a newspaper. This wasn’t just any newspaper, it was my dream newspaper, the kind of newspaper that I never thought I would have a shot at writing for, especially in that moment. I was young and I barely had any published clips. I didn’t see why the paper would ever have an interest in working with me—a nobody—but of course I told my professor that I was interested.

An editor from the paper soon reached out. He explained that his desk was looking to work with more freelancers and that I came highly recommended. They wanted to expand their New York coverage and were hungry for pitches. If I was interested, he said, I should send him some links to previous works. So I sent four and expected to never hear back.

He responded in less than two hours, saying that he’d love for me to send over some pitches. I am terrible at pitches. Pitches give me anxiety. I always think my idea is dumb and embarrassing and that everyone else’s is better. Sometimes, I feel like I can’t even come up with a single idea. A couple weeks later (not a good look!), I sent the editor a pitch. It went something like this:

In the seventies and eighties, New York City streets and subway cars were drenched in graffiti. The taggers responsible were mostly teens from outer boroughs. There was no better feeling, they claimed, than sitting on a bench and watching a train that they used as a rolling canvas pull into the station. But the city eventually cracked down on graffiti. Barbed wires were put along train yard fences. Tagging public property became a felony. The city moved on and taggers grew up. Today, street art has replaced graffiti and those who made it big in graffiti no longer vandalize. 

But some refused to move on. There’s a group of graffiti taggers from the city, all in their fifties and sixties, who have not been able to stop tagging. They are starkly different—tattoo artists, professional artists, a warden at Riker’s. And yet they will all tell you that their greatest love has been graffiti. Many still go out and tag illegally. Some even break into train yards. They all refuse to give graffiti up. They have all been arrested for graffiti vandalism at some point. When they have been persecuted, people in the courtrooms laugh and judges are shocked because they do not resemble young, reckless graffiti taggers. They are much older. 

I’d like to write a story about older graffiti taggers who can’t seem to let go of their past and their youth, about men, who, no matter what they ended up doing with their lives, just want to write their names all over their city. 

The idea came out of a world I had discovered in grad school. In Michael Shapiro’s reporting class, we were each tasked with picking a Brooklyn neighborhood to report from. I chose Bushwick, and of course, I could not ignore the street art and graffiti. That experience opened up a part of New York that I, as a native New Yorker, was not familiar with. I kept exploring this graffiti theme in other classes, meeting different taggers of all backgrounds and ages, but it was the older ones who stood out to me. I hoped the editor would agree.

He was interested and asked some follow-ups: Was this a graffiti crew? Were they all male? Would they allow me to accompany them as they tagged? We spoke on the phone and he asked me to do some research on different crews from the seventies and eighties. It would be great if I could focus on a crew and see where they were today and how their lives had turned out, he said. I agreed.

At the time, I was going through a depression that I couldn’t shake. It just got worse and worse. I cried constantly and had no motivation to do anything. While I normally would have pulled an all-nighter to get my research to the editor, it took me a month and a week to do so. I apologized profusely, telling him that I had been sick and attaching my research doc in the email. Thankfully, he was still interested in my story. We decided on a graffiti crew to focus on and he asked me to write an outline with an emphasis on who these taggers were. The newspaper sent over a freelancer contract agreement for me to sign. I was elated. I could not believe that I was one step closer to seeing my byline in this paper. It was a surreal moment but it didn’t last long.

One tagger was especially compelling. He had been credited with originating a very famous graffiti style that appeared all over the city decades ago. And then he disappeared. Some mistakenly reported him dead, many did not know how to contact him. If I was able get an interview with this tagger, I would have a story. I spoke to people who knew him, and managed to get a phone number. I called and he answered. It was difficult to hear him over the phone but I was able to understand that he was game for an interview. The editor was excited and so was I.

But staying in touch with the tagger proved difficult. On some days, he would call several times to touch base. But then he would go dark for weeks. I told the editor the tagger was elusive and he understood and encouraged me to keep trying. I did. But I kept feeling more and more uncomfortable. Once on a call, the tagger told me he had looked me up and then proceeded to make comments about my appearance. I tried to laugh them off and remain professional but I felt like a line had been crossed. He often called me from the hospital and I couldn’t ever understand what he was saying or why he was there. He started to call constantly, always late at night, well past midnight. He sent me photos of my name written in graffiti style. I was worried that he wasn’t always sober when he called, and I while I didn’t know anything about the ethics of reporting on someone when they were under the influence, it didn’t feel right to me.

I didn’t know what to tell the editor. I wanted him to think I was a professional. I wanted him to want to work with me again. I was embarrassed that I was making such little progress. I never for a second considered telling him what I had been dealing with. He was a man, and I worried that he wouldn’t understand and would write me off as bad at my job, a disappointment. Eventually I stopped providing the editor with updates and stopped responding to the tagger’s increasingly frequent calls. The depression had come back and my coping mechanism was to avoid everything.

Two months later, the editor wrote to me, wanting to check in. He had an idea for a peg. I told him I was having trouble scheduling an interview with the tagger but that we were in touch. He offered a solution, one that really would have worked and that I could have reported out well. But I just never did it. My last email to the editor was telling him that I would try that approach. But I never tried and I never wrote back to him and he didn’t reach out, rightfully so. I was now the one being elusive.

At the time, I didn’t know who to reach out to for help on the story. Being depressed didn’t help. All of my full-time professors in graduate school had been men. The Me Too movement had just started when I arrived on campus but in classes, we never really talked about what that meant for female journalists. I was concerned about looking weak and dumb, but also I didn’t think that my professors would be able to relate to how I was feeling. My best friend put me in touch with a female journalist to talk to. But I was flaky and she was too and the talking never happened.

If I could go back and give myself advice it would be to talk about my experiences with this editor. He was nothing but kind and considerate, and he was enthusiastic about my story.  

Like I said earlier, this was an opportunity to be published in my dream publication and I squandered it. I have moments when this whole situation pops into my head and I get so, so embarrassed. I always wonder, what if? What if I had been able to write a version of this story? What if people liked it? What if it led to more opportunities at the paper? Where would I be now if I hadn’t messed things up? The stakes are so high when you are young and inexperienced and trying to make it in journalism.

There’s no use in having all this regret inside you, especially when you were dealing with depression. But I did build a bridge to something that I really wanted, and then I burnt it all down because I wasn’t ready to show others that I wasn’t a perfect reporter, that I kept running into bumps in the road, that I was a woman who didn’t feel comfortable. I’m still haunted by this experience. The tagger recently started calling me again at night. I’m surprised he remembers me after all this time. I don’t answer his calls but I’m genuinely glad to know he survived the pandemic.