Or how my boyfriend and I found ourselves in the middle of a crime ring in New York City.
Everyone feels strapped for cash in this town. For most of us, our salaries can’t afford our lifestyles, and our paychecks can’t pay our rents, nor justify it when we live in a basement-level roach-infested shoebox that makes us think sometimes, late at night, that we are actually the roaches and the roaches are the inhabitants and maybe we should just leave.
But where? Where would we go from here? How does one leave New York?
I found myself in an all-too-familiar financial situation recently. My boyfriend and I had come across an amazing apartment available in Greenpoint, the kind that makes you accelerate your relationship and throw caution to the wind and stop at nothing to make it yours. Security deposits be damned! Skeptics, to hell with you! And proper moving procedures? Who has the time! This place needed to be ours and in order to do so, we had to pool our resources together, which was something that before made me cringe but all of a sudden, given a joint goal, seemed kind of cool, and jump through more than a few hoops to make it happen. After a month of string-pulling and promising-making and budget-stretching, finally eating Chinese takeout on the floor of our nearly-empty apartment by candlelight the night we moved in made it all seem worth it.
Reality soon set in when we realized that all of the moving expenses left us with hardly enough to cover the first month’s rent, let alone the few necessities we’d need for the place. How did I not realize I didn’t actually own a shower curtain, cooking pot, sharp(ish) knife, bath towels, coffee making apparatus, or any sort of table of my own? I guess that’s what shuffling around from apartment to apartment in this city does to you. Not only your body, but your belongings, too, are all vagrant.
Right around the same time, my boyfriend got a call from a friend of his who works in advertising. “Listen,” he said. “We have this project we want to take in-house. It’s kind of crazy, but I think you’d be perfect for it.” What he explained, in so many words, was a way to make a good amount of money, fast. And somewhat illegally. The only real qualifications was that he’d have to be able-bodied and brazen. “Great,” He said. “Liz is in too.”
We went through a night of training before setting off on our own. My partner in crime and me, dressed in black spandex, tennis shoes, and black rubber gloves. I remember asking him on the way to our first location. “Do you think the ponytail makes me more noticeable, or more innocent?”
“Definitely more innocent. Keep it.”
We had a 10-gallon bucket of thick paste in the trunk, atop a drop cloth covering the 2018 interior of this domestic beauty, plus paint rollers, rags, and a stack of 200 posters for an AMC series coming out about deaf people.
Yeah. You heard right. We were setting out to hang 200 posters throughout the city, guerilla marketing at its most relevant, with the goal of exposing this graphic to as many people as possible the next day, which was when the show was debuting.
“Sounds fun,” we had agreed, when the whole process was explained to us. I’ve always been fired up by even a hint of mischief, and in my adult age, somehow the ever-present landscape opportunities to cause trouble in New York had begun to bore me. No one cared if I stayed up until 7am on a Tuesday. No one was concerned that I had a tendency to steal fancy cheeses up my sweatshirt sleeve like the nozzle of a very particular dairy-hungry vacuum. No one seemed to be concerned that my drug use could be as casual as my drinking habits which could be as casual as my social life which could be as approachable as a night in. The thrill factor and shock value still existed in all of this, sure, but I had nothing to show from it and arguably more to lose. But getting involved with some blue-collar petty crime for a $1000 paycheck? This was just what I was looking for. And the prospect of role-playing as Bonnie and Clyde for a night with my lover was an added turn-on. We rented a car on the Westside at 7pm. “Will the vehicle be used for business?” “Um, yes.” my boyfriend responded. I wondered how many cars were rented in this city and used to commit crimes then wiped clean and returned by the end of the night. I expressed this thought aloud as we fired up the engine. “I can’t imagine,” he replied, as we headed into just another night in a city of crime and trust and love and lust and life.
We drove giddily to the aforementioned advertising agency to pick up our materials. We were mixing powder and water with industrial whisks into 10-gallon buckets and in low-light on the 10th floor of the building, going over procedures in unnecessarily-hushed whispers, creating a Watergate-like scene to onlookers in any of the 100 surrounding windows at that time of night and in that area of Chelsea.
We set out. Our mission, to put it plainly, was to find construction sites with plywood barricades, (you know, the ones that are only adorned with bright white, stenciled “POST NO BILLS” upon them) and post a bunch of fucking bills. We were to paste over other posters, to cover locations with 2, 4, 6, or 8 posters, all in a row. We were to make an impact. “Put them in high-visibility areas. The more foot traffic, the bigger the risk and the happier the client will be,” we were told. With a little coordination, we developed a system. Z would drive (this part was obvious); I would choose one of the proposed locations from the maps of supposed construction sites we were given, while we both scanned the streets for unproposed posting sites. Once we found our destination, we’d park the car and leave it running. Z would pop the trunk. Depending on the size of the location and risk involved, we’d decide on the fly how many posters to grab. “Get 4,” he’d say, which meant we could only spend less than a minute posting before retreating to the car.
He’d grab the bucket, I’d get the rollers. We would leave the trunk cracked. After this point, we would only speak when necessary. “Two up, two down, right here.” I’d open the bucket, he’s soak the roller, covering the designated space while I followed up with each poster, smoothing the surface to prevent any trapped air and thus easy tear-down opportunities the next day, while being careful of the always-present rusty nail threatening to pierce our rubber gloves with tetanus and god knows what else. We moved quickly. “Up, ready,” he’d say. I’d layer the posters atop the paste and roll over with another layer. As soon as the last corner was secured, I’d race back to the car at a pace that wasn’t conspicuous enough to be labeled a criminal but swift enough not to get caught, my ponytail bouncing and paste flying off the rollers. Z would take two photos, one close-up and one from across the street to allow for some perspective and consequent risk involved, before running back to the car and immediately leaving the scene of the crime.
One down. Thirty-nine to go. It was 10pm.
Over the next five hours, we committed forty misdemeanors in one night. We ran into other wild posting criminals, all of whom sized us up immediately and threatened us accordingly. We were two thirty-ish-year-olds from North Brooklyn, reasonably clean-cut given the offenses, noticeably thin-skinned and driving around in a 2018 Nissan Altima, with 2 paint rollers and one set of 6×8 posters and a ponytail.
They were a network, we learned. They mostly worked for one man, named Sam, who seemed to be the Godfather of the game. They worked alone. They drove old vans, they had any number of massive, blatantly posters in the back, ranging from high-fashion names to concert announcements, those made for block-long media blitzes and to cover huge areas with white space with one small word to announce an immersive art exhibit by Yoko Ono at the MoMA. They used industrial-sized shop brooms and heavy, soaked mops. Their paste was much more workable and not from a mix provided by the unofficial NYU art supply store. They were paid not only for what they put up, but for confirming what was still remaining the next day. They were our competition, in this Wild West of a landscape we always thought of as our city, and we didn’t know shit.
We were posting along the West Side Highway, somewhere near Hudson Yards, with nothing but traffic to drown out a reasonably silent time of night in a business-centric neighborhood when a guy slowly walked up behind us, coming from around the corner. He was wearing a hoodie and non-factory weathered jeans and work gloves, walking slowly towards us without saying a word. “Z? There’s a guy,” I urgently whispered. “Just keep working babe.” I did.
“He’s coming closer…”
“I get it,” the man said. “Go on, get ‘em up. Take your pictures. Then I’m gonna rip all this shit down,” He said. We paused. “No go on, I get it.” We looked at each other and silently and swiftly decided to keep working. “Who you workin’ for, Sam? Fuck that guy.”
“We’re not working for him,” Z said.
“Well, I used to work for him. Now I’m getting paid twice as much to tear all this shit down. But I get it, I been there. So go on. You get paid, I get paid.” We finished up and took our photos and fired up the Altima and watched while he tore our work down in seconds.
We started making a game of which posters we wanted to cover up. Having too much respect for Depeche Mode and Alexis Bittar, we focused on 30 Seconds To Mars. “Haha yeah, fuck you, Jared Leto! Fall back on your Oscar!” we laughed, spreading over his concert dates, as well as Shaggy and Sting’s album release announcements.
“Shaggy, like Shaggy, Shaggy?”
“Let’s just say it wasn’t us,” we’d laugh, singing while we posted over as many as we found. We were all running the same circuit, it seemed. But sometimes we’d find a spot no one else had hit yet. We’d imagine the commuters walking past our 12-poster blitz the next day, wondering what the graphic meant, having it stick in their mind throughout the workday before they ran into another one of our postings that evening, on the way home. Or so, we hoped? “How do you think they measure the success of all of this?” Z asked. “The only thing I can think of is if they geolocated the Google searches for the title of this series near our posts,” I said. “They’re not going to do that,” he replied. “Nope.” We realized that the higher the risk for the posting, the more exposure and equally insufficient ability to measure response rate. But we were in it now. We wanted it; hard, fast, dangerous.
We went for a high-risk location in the LES, just outside of a bar where people were smoking and passing through. “Let’s do 4,” Z said. “Are you sure?” I asked. “Let’s go,” he confirmed.
We moved fast and fluidly and as we walked away, we saw a guy in the shadows across the street, taking photos. “Hey, we won’t have any fucking problems as long as you aren’t covering up my Sting posters,” he told us.
Fuck.
We put a bold post up in St. Marks, throwing up 4 posters up with ease while people passed behind us. A group of drunk young college kids stopped. “Ooh, cool! Check it out!” they said, approaching.
“We’re just going to watch you guys put these up,” one told us.
Another said, “Spread around, let’s help give them cover.”
“What do you mean, they don’t need to be covered up,” one said.
“Yeah they do, this shit is illegal,” he responded.
“No it isn’t, it’s not illegal,” one said, confidently.
“Yep, it is,” I said, smoothing out my last corner.
They all gasped, somehow feeling guilty that they were witnessing a crime. “It’s illegal?” We moved out and packed up and left the scene without answering the question, knowing it was only illegal if you stuck around too long.
It was on the other side of the river, in Brooklyn, where we ran into the man responsible for most of the ‘wild postings’ in the city. He had a godfather-like demeanor about him, without the suits and cigars. “You need to be careful, you know. Cops are all over the place here. They won’t arrest you at first, but if they catch you a few times, you’re fucked.” He told us. “I work for one guy who’s in charge of all of these brands. They know me. I don’t want y’all bringing no more attention here,” he told us.
We finally parked the car across from our apartment in Greenpoint, not without debating whether to throw a few posters up at the construction site right across the street, just for fun. We couldn’t help somehow but see the city through crosshairs and fully modge-podged in AMC posters, announcing a show for deaf people.
We drove across the river to return the car the next day, the Avis attendant told us plainly, “So with the 320 miles added to the car, your total is … “
We waited, somehow expecting her to add, “with the 320 miles, 40 misdemeanors, 12 near run-ins with the cops, 4 pizza slices, 2 beers and likely onset of tetanus for you both, your total is…”
We knew the answer that she wasn’t going to give us.
The total was $1000, each.
We’d agreed the night before, that this wasn’t for us. That we’d never do it again. And we won’t.
We won’t.
We will not.
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