What follows is a response essay written for a California Ethnic Literature class at Sonoma State University. It's just past halfway through the class. I'm bored with argumentative essays. I just want to write something fun that connects to my own real life. Something like this:

"Angry Chic's Music is Offensive"

My boss was waiting for me when I got to the record store this morning. "I've got a favor to ask you," he said. I looked around quickly, hoping for a clue to what the favor might be, but nothing seemed out of place. Behind the counter, Jonathon's ten-year-old son sat reading a joke book. I gritted my teeth, hoping he wouldn't ask me to baby-sit. "Somebody tagged us last night," Jonathon continued, handing me a can of Goff Off and a towel. "You think you might be able to clean it up?"

"Sure," I replied, relieved that I wouldn't be stuck keeping an eye on the kid. "Where is it?"

"Out front, on the sidewalk, right in front of the door." It struck me that I'd walked right past it without seeing it, but then I noticed that Jonathon had covered the graffiti with the worn mat that typically sat just inside the front door. I cautiously approached the scene of the crime, Goff Off and towel in hand, wondering what sort of offensive word was concealed beneath the dirty carpet.

There were three possibilities that came to my mind. The first was a simple obscenity, a rude shock, some dirty word that some punk kid wanted to share with the world.

The second possibility, the most likely, was someone's gang sign, the sort of graffiti I'd grown up seeing constantly in Southern California. Maybe it would be a cool sounding name like "Ghost" or "Killjoy," hopefully it wasn't the tagger who hits the stop signs of Petaluma with the worst gang name imaginable, "Cow Udder." I thought of the protagonist of Danny Santiago's "The Somebody," making his mark on the world in the only way he could, and of Santiago himself, forced to give back awards and apologizing for the crime of being a Caucasian that had assumed a Hispanic nom de plume and achieved success.

The third possibility was the one I dreaded most. I thought of the last day I'd worked, and of Jonathon's story of an angry customer, one that had been ranting about injustices perpetuated on Palestinians by the Israeli government. "I know I shouldn't have said anything," said Jonathon, a Canadian Jew who had fought in the Israeli army, "But she pissed me off and I gave it to her with both barrels."

With this story in mind, I knew that the third possibility had to be true, that I'd pull back the mat to reveal something horrible, a clumsily scrawled, "Canadians go home," a swastika, or something even worse. Instead, it was something I hadn't even imagined.

"Angry chic's music is offensive," read the top line of the purple spray-painted words. Below that, "were wounded," was written followed by a final word, which was illegible. I looked around and noticed that just up the street, every newspaper machine, from the Press Democrat to the Chronicle to Apartments for Rent had been tagged with the word "lies" in the same purple paint. In addition, each flagpole hole along Main Street had been filled with concrete, presumably in order to interrupt Sebastopol's upcoming Veteran's Day celebrations. The rampant vandalism, coupled with the vandal's awkward grammar all seemed so ridiculous that I had to laugh.

"Angry chic's music is offensive." I considered these words, knowing that they were meant as a reaction to the "Angry Grrl Music" card we'd set up several months ago in the punk section of the store, and had since taken down. This subsection, containing groups like Bikini Kill, Le Tigre, and the Butchies, had been very popular, and the groups represented within typically had a strong, pro-feminist message. Unfortunately, someone missed the message. Someone who thought they might be making a difference against the injustices of the world had decided to strike out at us, and at the rest of the town, rather than directing their energies towards efforts to create any real change. As I sprayed the words with Goff Off, they began to blur and I rubbed them away. I thought of a line from Gerald Haslam's essay "Oil Town Rumble: The Young Men of Taft:" "One sad attribute of the rowdies is that most remain convinced that they are victims." Our vandal, I'm sure, looks in the mirror and sees a victim, but never sees the possibilities that exist for changing their world.