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  • Watermelon Song
  • Dust Wells (bio)

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Uncle Tom’s Watermelon Rebellion “New Sacred Cow.” Acadiana Center for the Arts. © 2013 Pat Phillips and Johnathan Wilson.

[End Page 146]

Ja’ser spent an hour reconstructing the weather-beaten kite he found on the roof with the straws, sandwich wrappers, coffee cups, feathers, and bones from dead pigeons he found up there. Then he drew his notorious Sambo graffiti tag over the faded superhero with black Sharpie and launched the kite into San Francisco’s blustery sky. The kite bandied lopsided. In the turbulent gusts, the ripped plastic sputtered like machinegun fire—brrrrp, brrrrrrrrp, brp. Pieces broke off like shrapnel. The Sambo kite spiraled downwards, banged into a brick wall, nosedived into an alley. A kid from the Chinatown YMCA scooped it up and wildly ran away chased by others.

The Judge had sentenced Ja’ser Bivens to three years in the penitentiary for spray-painting Lil’ Black Sambo caricatures and his tag Shine on hundreds of billboards and buildings. He also tacked on $300,000 for clean-up costs, which was quite the financial predicament for someone without assets who was about to be imprisoned.

Then Isaac Grabel materialized in county lockup while Ja’ser was waiting to be transported to San Quentin. “Shine, I admire what you do,” the tall man in the mirrored sunglasses said. Grabel ate pistachios and threw the shells on the cement floor. He explained how he hired hot young artists to make cutting-edge advertisements. Grabel said if Shine signed an intellectual property agreement with his advertising firm, Standley and Stover, he’d unleash the firm’s lawyers on his case. Grabel tossed his platinum-gray hair away from his mirrored-eyes and pulled a stack of papers from his canvas satchel.

Within hours, lawyers explained that he was free to go while his case was being appealed, and that in good faith S&S had set up a repayment plan for the $300,000 retribution to be deducted from his salary leaving Ja’ser with approximately forty thousand a year. Not bad for a hand-to-mouth graffiti artist. [End Page 147]

Eight floors of cubicles buzzed when he reported to work: Sambo? Where’s Sambo? Ja’ser hid in the stairwells, ducked between dumpsters, retreated to the grimy roof. Two weeks after he was forced to give his opinion on two campaigns—Volvo and Oreos—his cubicle held a tide of undecipherable post-it notes.

A woman in his cubicle block—her face heavy with piercings—explained that the blinking light on his phone meant that he had messages, and all he had to do was punch in his code.

What’s my code, he wondered as the phone rang and went to voicemail.

“Rock star,” another cubicle punk sneered, “needs someone to answer his phone.”

The office assistant popped up with a burlesque hand on her hip. “Your Team Leader is looking for you!” Ponder fulfilled role of the quirky, partially-incompetent office worker, the Zooey Deschanel role of the office movie, but she usually ended up looking miscast in an ill-fitting costume, her gold-lamé disco dress was wrinkled and frayed as if pulled from a pre-school dress-up bin. “Stay!” Ponder scolded like talking to a dog.

Dressed all in black, the cubicle Rasputins sniggered. One woman’s knuckles read SELF MADE. Ja’ser lived in the City long enough to understand that what was proclaimed Street was usually the exact opposite; and so, he asked himself, what the hell was he? How in the hell could Shine work at an advertising agency? How could Shine help generate the very billboards he spent a decade defacing?

His Team Leader jingled around the corner. Bruce Lee Sartre dressed like most in the office, like a greasy bike messenger except that his trademark Buddy Holly glasses were neon-yellow, while others’ trademark Buddy Holly glasses were traditionally black. His Italian bicycle hat askew and brim up, Bruce Lee Sartre leaned in and whispered, “Both your ads are a go.” Satre’s lips brushed his ear as if advertising equaled intimacy. “You did those in...

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