The Soul of Cape Girardeau

It's Saturday, a rainy night in Cape Girardeau. Main Street, usually crowded with college kids or drunken townies, is empty. No one wants to come downtown tonight.

I'm sitting at the bar in Broussard's, one of the only places with any life at all. I'm nursing a progressively warmer beer and watching the kids in Sweet Tooth. They're playing a good set, and I start thinking back to the last time I'd heard them.

I lived in a tiny, dilapidated room in the basement of a party house on campus. It wasn't the cleanest place, but people were always coming and going, and I would always invite visitors to tag my walls with anything -- art, poetry, whatever came to their minds. Soon the room was covered with everything from a tiny reproduction of "Starry Night" to a dirty joke written in Russian.

Maybe it was there that I first found my love of graffiti. No art is more beautiful than when it's where you don't expect to find it.

All around Cape Girardeau, this work is hidden. Much of it has been covered up, and to find it, I'll have to dig deep, look closely, and venture into areas most respectable people wouldn't be willing to go. I'll have to stare unflinchingly into the soul of Cape Girardeau, a dirty, seedy, unkempt soul -- but one that, every now and then, becomes unexpectedly beautiful.

But first I have to go to the bathroom.

THE WRITING ON THE WALL

I duck into the Broussard's bathroom and close the door, as best I can. It's a test of a true rock 'n roll bar if the men's room door won't shut all the way, and this is the case here. It may maintain a pretty face for out-of-towners looking for great Cajun food, but Broussard's bathrooms are pure dive.

Cape Girardeau was once a great city for bathroom graffiti. I remember the men's room in the Camp, back when it was the Camp and not whatever it is now. Every inch of space was filled, right down to the little bits behind the toilet, with bizarre philosophical nuggets, profanity and bands like Moodminder and the Dirty 30s. It was glorious.

"The Camp was a real rock 'n roll club," former manager Bob Camp tells me. "The bands would advertise themselves on the bathroom walls. They would pick at each other. Graffiti battles between bands would happen, but it was all friendly. That just goes hand in hand with rock 'n roll."

The artwork would even cheer him up when he had to clean the bathroom.

"I'm an old guy, so I didn't write anything myself, but every few days when I'd be cleaning I'd see a new one and say 'That's a good one.' It was some pretty creative stuff. Not just the usual rock bands slammin' frats, and frats slammin' each other."

Bars that do keep their graffiti run a tightrope. Writings on the wall say a lot about a place. The Rude Dog Pub men's room is filled with poorly drawn pot plants, stickers from hippie favorites like Phish and Bob Marley, and a series of statements from various contributors on the status of Justin Denton's vagina. The walls in the men's room in Independence Place, Cape's favorite gay bar, are covered with fraternity logos. (I'm not saying which one.)

No one has cleaned the graffiti in the Broussard's men's room for some time. As I close the stall door in the men's room, it surrounds me from all sides: cryptic one-liners like THE LAMA SHALL SET YOU FREE and PIEDMONT RULES and my personal favorite, GAVE UP TRYI.

They're funny, profane, dumb, occasionally beautiful.

There are historical references: "FAMOUS LAST WORDS: I DRANK WHAT? -- SOCRATES." Philosophical statements: "POETRY IS A WAY OF LIFE ? THROWER."

And then there's this: "WOP A JOO! YE-HA-DO-BEE-BAWS!", accompanied by a few surprisingly well-executed squiggles. I look closer. I think I know the artist.

Charles Burton's habitat is a squalid living space/studio in a boiler room basement. He's made the most of his environment: paintings, drawings and tapestries are stacked in piles all around the room. Jugs full of clay provide sitting material; Charles is also a sculptor. His work is colorful, vivid and impressionistic, but has a cartoonish quality that adds another layer of depth. He sells most of his work fairly cheap, on the principle that art is for everyone.

Yep, he tells me, the writing and artwork in Broussard's is from him, as is an endorsement of a band infamous for appearing in graffiti slogans.

"I wrote that, plus 'SLAYER RULES,' for one of my friends who worked at Broussard's then," he says.

"Later on, my friend saw the graffiti and it made him happy," he says. "So there's an instance of graffiti aimed in a positive direction. The bathroom wall can be used as a message board or as a medium; it's art. It's communication."

The conversation over, he starts blowing a tune into his harmonica.

GHOST TALES

"Mr. Sander. Just the man I wanted to see."

Local poet and musician Jay Sander has walked into the Lewis & Clark cafe. I meet him at the counter.

"I need to ask you a few questions about ..." I glance around to make sure no one is listening. "Stop being a ghost."

He nods knowingly.

"Step into my office," I tell him. "And by my office, I mean that table over there."

Sander joins me at the far table in the back room and starts sipping on a hookah.

"You're diving into the true underbelly of Cape Girardeau," he tells me. "I know the entire history, as much as there is an entire history. It's kind of like the number 23. No one knows where it came from, but everyone claims to have started it."

"I think, in a way, it was started by all of us," he says, philosophically. "It's a state of mind."

Stop being a ghost, as a phrase, appeared for the first time, written in permanent ink, on a bathroom stall door in the bottom floor of the Grauel building on the SEMO campus, sometime in the fall of 2000. Janitors eventually covered it with paint, but used a paint that didn't match; the phrase was still visible and now looked, as Jay describes it, "like a ghost on the stall door."

No one knows who wrote the original, but in the nearly seven years since the phrase debuted, it has spread across Cape Girardeau and beyond.

"It became something larger than anyone could understand," says Jay. "It was something everyone understood without understanding," he adds, which seems to contradict the first thing he said, but also might just be some kind of weird Zen thing.

Nearly every bar in downtown Cape Girardeau sports the tag somewhere -- it's been surprisingly resilient to the best efforts of owners -- and nearly seven years of road trips have spread it throughout America.

"It's almost like a David Lynch movie," says Jay. "It's the severed ear in the middle of the field that started everything."

If the Cape Girardeau poetry scene has a motto, if Cape graffiti has an anthem, if the unknown, only speculated-upon dark side of Cape could be summed up in four words, this is it: Stop being a ghost.

BAR ART

Some bars try to get rid of graffiti. Others make their own, out of whatever they have at hand.

Everyone in the Recovery Room knows everyone else in the Recovery Room. The bar is in one half of a small building on Independence. Here, the jukebox plays old country songs, and the owners, sisters Jan Bierschwald and June Trovillion, trade barbs as the regulars laugh. The tight-knit group is like a family -- a rowdy, occasionally raunchy family who know how to have a really good time.

I've barely walked in the door and haven't even introduced myself when Jan greets me with a smile. "How ya doin'?" she asks.

I tell her I'm great and ask about the dollar bills. She laughs.

Jan and June worked hard to open and maintain their business, and celebrated every step of the way -- starting with their very first dollar.

It's scotch-taped somewhere on the wall behind the bar. It's hard to find now, because in the years since they've opened, it's been joined by hundreds of other dollars, fives and tens and twenties, each with something written on them, running the full length of one wall and continuing throughout the bar.

Some bills are sentimental, notes left from patrons who have since passed away. Others are from couples, she says, "sayin' things they shouldn't."

"Some of them would use the dollar bills to send a message to each other," says Brenda, a woman at the bar.

"Yeah, but most of the couples broke up anyway!" laughs Freddy, another patron.

The dollar bills and their graffiti correspondence keep coming in. If Jan and June took them down, they could probably afford to open another bar. But they love them too much for that. The bills will stay.

"I guess we're gonna have to start on a new wall soon," says Jan.

THE ILLEGAL ART FORM

Some artists, like James Thurman, who last year showed his work in the Viridian gallery in Manhattan, find as much inspiration in graffiti as they do in work hanging in a gallery or a museum.

"I think graffiti is art," he says. "I know there's an argument that says it's vandalism, but you look at an ugly alley or brick wall, and then you see artwork pop up out of nowhere -- it takes something ugly and makes it beautiful."

"I think some of it is wildly creative and hilarious," says SEMO art professor Kathy Smith. "I love the sayings on bathroom walls. I love the idea of being able to see responses and reactions to other people's thoughts in public places, and it's humorous to see how authorities try to deal with that."

"I guess it's hard to draw the line," she says. "What's art? What's not? But there's a relationship between graffiti and art -- it's controversial and in-your-face."

Police, on the other hand, tend not to see it as art. They think of graffiti in terms of vandalism.

~OFF takes a dark trip to find the working man's art, graffiti, and all the forms in which it can be found in Cape.

"When it comes to graffiti," says a Cape Girardeau Police Department officer, "we often don't know who wrote it, we can't decipher it, we can't even figure out the style or the type of writing. But it's still property damage."

Like most officers who work graffiti cases, the policeman still remembers the one who got away.

"There was this one guy, we never caught him," he says. "About three or four years ago, he was tagging everything. He struck a wide area all the way from Broadway out to I-55, hitting dumpsters, buildings, some of our overpasses."

That artist was the elusive Solo. Cape Girardeau's greatest illegal artist, Solo started tagging property when he was 15 -- over 10 years ago. He worked alone or with his partner, an artist who goes by the name Spaz. At one point, at least two buildings on Broadway bore large, visible SOLO tags.

(According to an anonymous source close to the artists, Solo was also responsible for one of the most popular works of vandalism in Cape Girardeau history -- a swastika on Cape native Rush Limbaugh's face on the river wall mural.)

Solo also eluded the local media. When KFVS did a story on "graffiti vandalism in Cape" -- namely, Solo's artwork -- he and his friend and Spaz were there to watch, even with the police scouring the city for them. In their greatest moment, they managed to tag a wall in broad daylight with the KFVS camera crew only a few feet away -- and not get caught.

"It was their crowning achievement," said Solo's anonymous friend.