Don’t Get Caught
Silly rabbit, tricks are for kids is the ethos of this bonus file of the Vicious Penguin files. It’s “bonus” because it’s half audio; we couldn’t get Tracy’s camera to work. Instead you’ll hear Tracy’s jolly voice as he takes you through a whirlwind of stories here that all center on the concept of “how not to get caught,” whereas I am quite literally falling asleep on account of his late night owl hours: at the time it was still COVID lockdown and I have three young children at home wearing me down during daylight. It’s an episode on SURVIVAL, which is what the core message of Vicious Penguin was all about, this animal form metaphor. And so:
How to get away from the angry, drunk Irish father of a girlfriend who knows his daughter has you hiding somewhere in his house.
How to get away from being trailed in a car.
How to escape being chased on foot.
How to get away with bumming a fine-dining meal among politicians.
How to escape from becoming a John Doe (we’ll get back to that one).
How to escape arrest even when handcuffed or in a police station.
“Survival is ingrained in me,” Tracy explains in this interview. He explains this in the context of graffiti life, of harsh family dynamics, and growing up in gang and drug-common NYC.
“I’m all-city,” Tracy asserts. ” I ran New York. You know the King of New York? That’s me.”
I think bravado is a familiar Tracy to folks, but it’s not where he spent most of this time with me. But Tracy’s always going to mark his ground, even in general conversation.
This episode goes through comic-like scenes of feigning heart attacks to escape going to prison and somehow ends with police bringing him a shopping cart full of spray cans to do a wall. It’ll make you pause in documenting police corruption as experienced in his life. All of us are scoundrels to Tracy, including him. But did you practice it with love? That was the distinguishing difference to him.
For me, most jarring in the trick of his medical bracelet. Tracy always wore one after a hospital stay because it was a guaranteed form of Identification on him that you couldn’t mug away. “So they can identify your body?” I asked him. “My LIVING body,” Tracy asserted. Not for death. Tracy always insisted its purpose was not identifying him if he died, a topic he absolutely rejected. He said he was not going nowhere.
So when he had gone missing and I asked for people to start looking for him I said, surely, surely if anything he has his medical bracelet on. From what I know, he didn’t, and likely stayed in the morgue as John Doe (if not one his aliases) for weeks. But see, I can’t say if that’s true; here is where my role of the unlikely biographer fades and I’m left just with muses and the emotions of visualizing his death. Did he have it on and they couldn’t get a sense of whom to contact? Or nobody immediately came? This detail doesn’t matter for this thought: just like Tracy said, the medical bracelet with his name was never meant to be used to identify his lifeless body. Because the only Tracy 168 was the living Tracy 168. Even in death, he took his name with him.
