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!
...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.
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...
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
Remember how I talked about all the spay painted murals in my neighborhood that typically honor fallen locals? Well, my new block has a mural of Vanilla Ice (???) giving props to the Clash! NOICE!
