July 27, 2005

Fatty's Birthday Mural

So one afternoon back in the summer of 2004, Grant and I were walking down Ave. C in the Lower East Side and we noticed a new mural that had been spray painted on one of the walls:

Avenue C is primarily Latino and whenever someone from the neighborhood dies unexpectedly, someone would usually commemorate their life with a mural like this one. As we were passing it, Grant was like "Hey, Fatty's birthday is coming up! We should break into his apartment and paint a huge mural of HIM for his birthday." We laughed and kept riffing on the joke and we ended up with an imagined mural of Fatty wailing on his guitar in front of a huge Puerto Rican flag.

It started out as one of those simple "imagine if" jokes, but almost a year after the idea had been raised, and with Fatty's birthday coming up, Grant and I decided to make our dream, a birthday reality for Fatty!

Sunday, July 24th

vin — We commissioned Vin as our vandal, er, artist...and on Sunday (with seven days left until Fatty's birthday), he came over to my apartment to look at pictures of Fatty and start sketching out some ideas for the mural.

vin — Vin went through a ton of my photos and picked out 4 or 5 pics of Fatty to work from.

fatty — Here's his first sketch! A pretty decent first attempt, no doubt. But I explained that we wanted Fatty to look "more metal" while playing the guitar.

fatty — Well, Vin took my feedback and pretty much nailed it on his second sketch. Hahahahaha. BINGO! I think we have a winner!

Wednesday, July 27th

So on Tuesday night Grant gave me his set of keys to Fatty's apartment (Fatty works a day job and gave Grant his keys so that Grant could use his apartment as a "writing studio" during the day) and bright and early on Wednesday morning, I met up with Vin near Union Square to go "art supply" shopping.

vin — Vin had never really worked with spray paint, but he was pretty confident that he'd be able to pull the mural off.

vin — Supplies in hand, we headed to Fatty's apartment!

I have your keys! I have your keys!

vin — Fatty's apartment has this totally awesome private deck. But pretty much every single apartment in his building has a window that looks out onto his courtyard...so the mural we were about to paint would be visible to his entire BUILDING! (We hoped he'd find the mural hilarious, but we also had a huge bucket of white cover-up paint ready as a contingency plan in case any of the people in his building freaked out).

First order of business: Vin taped up an outline to determine the size of the work.

vin — Here's a view from the door to Fatty's apartment to give you an idea of the size. Clearly, this thing was going to be visible to pretty much everybody.

vin — And before I had a chance to change my mind, Vin busted out his roller and started priming his canvas. DOH! I was literally FREAKING OUT at this point like "Holy shit, holy shit. We're actually doing this! I hope he doesn't flip his shit!" Hahahah. A few minutes later, I got a call from my soon-to-be roommate Niki! We'd gotten the apartment we wanted and she needed to meet up with me so that we could finalize some paper work and submit it. I was only too happy to have an excuse to leave the scene of the crime.

apartment hunting, me, niki — We met up at Kinko's, prepared everything we needed to submit to the building's management company, and faxed it over to them.

apartment hunting, me, niki — New roommates! New roommates! Afterwards, I said goodbye to Niki and headed back to Fatty's to check up on Vin's progress.

vin — Vin was blazing along! In just three hours time, he'd managed to prime the wall with a few coats, sketch out the mural, and finish the Puerto Rican flag background!

vin — Speed was of the essence! Fatty was going to be home from work around 6:30 and we had to have all the supplies cleaned up and the mural hidden away (more on that later) before he came home!

fatty — With that in mind, I got out of Vin's hair and let him get back to work.

vin — After the flag background had dried (which in the 95+ degree heat didn't take too long) Vin used tape to mask out the flesh tones and started on the next layer of the mural.

vin — It was crazy to watch him work! Totally shocking to see how nicely it was shaping up when this was pretty much his first time working with spray paint!

vin — Sah-sah-sweaty! After another hour or so of watching Vin work, I went to meet up with Meredith and Niki to go check out...

apartment hunting — ...our future apartment! The current occupants were nice enough to tolerate our picture taking and measuring. Here's our future living room.

meredith, niki — Our future kitchen.

apartment hunting — Niki's future bedroom.

meredith, niki — Yay!

apartment hunting — My future bedroom! After running a bunch of other errands, I headed back to Fatty's two hours later (around 4pm) and was totally stunned...

vin — ...by Vin's progress! Hahahah. Check that fucking thing out! It was starting to turn out WAAAAAAAAAY better that I'd ever imagined it would.

fatty — It totally looks JUST LIKE FATTY! I got a call from Grant and I was like "You need to come here RIGHT NOW and see this!"

grant, vin — Grant arrived and literally couldn't stop laughing. Not only were we hysterically laughing we were also worrying the whole time like "Oh shit, how's he going to react? How are the neighbors going to react? Are they going to be pissed? Could the co-op board kick Fatty out of the building? WHAT HAVE WE DONE???" Hahahah.

fatty, grant — Should things go awry, my plan was to blame it all on this guy. After all, it was HIS idea, your honor.

vin — Even though the mural wasn't finished yet, it was getting close to 6pm and we decided we'd better clean up for the day, hide all the evidence and clear out before Fatty got home.

vin — Even Vin when he stepped back to look at the mural was like "Oh fuck! What have we done?!?" Hahaha.

fatty, grant — So you're probably wondering how we planned on hiding this from Fatty and surprising him with this, right? Well, here's what we came up with!

grant — We got a huge-ass plastic painting tarp and used the most industrial-strength tape that we could find to cover the mural up. Once that was accomplished, we hid all the art supplies...

...and then put his hammock back up and all the rest of his stuff back in place. Then we cooked up a plausable cover-story: Grant called Fatty on his cell and told him that he had been working in Fatty's apartment earlier in the day when Fatty's building's super showed up with a maintenance crew and told Grant that they needed access to Fatty's deck. They had been working on the building that makes up the back wall of Fatty's deck and needed to put up some plastic to waterproof the plaster work that they'd done. Grant explained to Fatty that the super had apologized for the inconvenience and told him that the men would be back early next week to take the plastic down.

Now here's the kicker: Fatty was having a birthday BBQ party on his deck over the weekend. So our plan was, to wait until the party was in full effect out on the deck and then have one of the party guests ask Fatty, "Hey, what's up with that plastic tarp?" After Fatty had finished explaining the fictitious story we'd fed him, we were going to rip the plastic down and surprise him with a huge mural of HIMSELF playing guitar in front of a Puerto Rican flag that we'd managed to PAINT ON HIS BACK WALL right under his nose in front of all of his party guests!!! Hahahaha. Would've been amazing, right?

Sadly, it didn't work out that way. Later that night, there was a huge storm and it torrentially rained for like 3 hours. Grant and I were hanging out and we had our fingers crossed that the tape would hold. But then at 11pm, my phone rang...I saw that it was Fatty and my heart skipped a beat. Did he know? Was he mad? I answered the phone.

"Dude, so I'm about to go to bed and I go to the bathroom to brush my teeth and on my way to the bathroom I look out onto the deck and I see a giant picture of my head peeking back at me from behind a giant black tarp. Uhhhh, you and Grant wouldn't happen to know anything about that, would you?" Hahahaha. The gig was up. We agreed to meet up for a drink.

fatty — When we showed up, Fatty was laughing (THANK GOD!). We explained the joke and told him about our plans to surprise him with the mural at the party.

Thursday, July 28th

fatty — The next day, Vin and I went back so that Vin could finish the mural.

vin — Neon green guitar strap? Check. Custom "The Fatty" metal t-shirt that I had made for him for last year's birthday? Check.

vin — With the finishing touches complete ("Yo soy el Fatty!" Hahahah) it was time for Vin to...

...sign the badboy!

Here's the final view from across the deck.

fatty — Close up!

Hahahaha.

fatty — Happy birthday, Fatty! I hope you don't mind that we had to break into your place and vandalize it to give you your gift! We love you!