My name on a wall

by Maxine Eisenberg (United States of America)

Making a local connection Colombia

My guidebook said Cali, Colombia wasn’t worth going to, not much there to see and pretty dangerous. Telling me not to go, of course, piqued my interest and I booked a bus. I had met a guy named Javi in my hostel in Bogotá a few weeks earlier who hailed from Cali. He said if I got a chance to visit his city he would gladly show me around. The first night I arrived I hadn’t gotten in contact with him yet so I stayed in a quiet hostel I located, sweated my way through a free tango class, and ate dinner with a middle-aged Canadian woman who described in great detail her last ayahuasca trip and wrote down the name of her shaman on a slip of paper torn from her journal and pushed into my hand insisting a visit with him would change my life. In the morning I was up early with the business people and school children. I wandered and began to fall in love with the loud and lively city of Cali. The street art was incredible and the city seemed boisterous, it made me feel almost electric. In the afternoon Javi messaged me that he would come and pick me up and sure enough, he showed up in an old little car in the early evening. Javi was young and handsome with short dark black hair and dark eyes. We drove and drove ending up at a park that overlooked the twinkling crowded city below. There were people spread out on blankets eating, smoking, and talking. Being shown a city through the eyes of someone who lives there and clearly loves their city is my favorite way to experience a place. We wound up back at his house which was really a small mansion that used to be owned by one of the Rodríguez brothers (a famous drug cartel family). Javi’s parents had bought it from the government when the Rodriguez brothers went to jail. His parents were out of town and the grand house sat empty behind thick hedges. We parked in the garage. The guard lookout room was now a doghouse. The next day we headed out in his car again to cruise the city some more. He pointed out to me all his street art pieces and finally, I decided to ask him if he would teach me. I wanted to learn how to spray a design myself. We sat in a cafe sipping iced coffees and sketched out my name in bubble letters on little brown napkins. Then we stopped at a hardware store and bought spray paint colors by pointing over a low wooden counter. I chose a green, a silver, and a pale blue. We found a wall that would work just fine in a residential area and Javi outlined my tag and taught me how to carefully fill it in, not too fast and not too slow, just the right distance away. There is now a white brick wall somewhere in Cali, Colombia that says my name. I hope it’s still there but it seems unlikely as new art is always being added. I fell even more in love with street art that morning. I had always loved street art but after trying it myself I had a whole new appreciation for the intricacy of the rough and beautiful art form. In the evening we stopped at a tattoo shop where Javi needed to get a touchup done on one of his tattoos. I sat on a leather sofa with a drooling pit bull on one side of me and another tattoo artist with two full sleeves and gauged ears chatting with me on my other side. He told me I would look good with an eyebrow piercing because he said it would balance out my face as I had a nose piercing on one side. I looked at myself carefully in the mirror agreeing. I had him put a little silver bar in my right eyebrow before we left.