Tuesday, 22 October 2002 | Painting the school

On Saturday we drove around the disjointed streets of Queens, dead-ending in a chorus of "left!"s and "right!"s, asking directions from disinterested people, passing turns, turning maps sideways and upside-down. But it only took us an hour to find the school by car, which was comparatively brief.

It was an elementary school of long hallways, held together with construction paper and tape that formed the shapes of ghosts, cats, and autumn leaves and showcased the names of school children. On the doors and walls and floors were silhouettes scrawled in black marker; it was our job to color in those spaces with paint. Martin and I took the door to the cafeteria, a squat pink-gutted room filled with tiny chairs and crumbs, evidence of surges of bustling life that made the room seem strikingly vacant.

There was fruit on our door, and vegetables on its twin, where a popular woman named Lisa was steadily working and humming to the R&B being broadcast over the intercom. I started with the bananas and moved on to the star fruit, cleaned up the purple paint fugitives running from the grapes, highlighted the pear. Outside, there was a group working on a mural of the United States, a terribly inaccurate but attractive piece that covered a large slab of courtyard concrete. Later it would decorate the bottoms of little kids' shoes in bright colors, which would in turn spread parts of North Dakota into Colorado, and parts of Colorado into Arizona.

At three our jobs expired. We threw our bleeding brushes into a bucket of paint thinner, collected a certificate, and left the school permanently. Sort of.