The Rooftop Sniper
The four members of Gray—Jean-Michel Basquiat, Michael Holman, Wayne Clifford, and I—had just exited the subway station at West 92nd Street and Columbus Avenue. As we started walking towards my apartment, a security guard from a building yelled out, "Hey! Don’t you see all the police lights over there? You better get out of here fast, there's a sniper on the roof across the street shooting at pedestrians!" Shocked and stunned, we made straight for the lobby of the building for cover and safety.
The guard at the building angrily said, "You ain’t com'in in here! You don't live here; get the hell away from here!" We frantically looked at each other, trying to calculate which way to run. In the next few seconds, for some odd reason, we leaned against the wall of the building in full view of the sniper whose silhouette could be seen on top of the roof, poised with a rifle. Suddenly the door of the building opened, and, just when we thought the guard might have had a change of heart, we heard him yell again, "Hey you stupid patos (ducks.) Get away from here!”
We ran down 92nd Street with the sounds of gunshots in the distance. As Michael Holman later remembered, "We took off running—just like in the combat movies, where you zigzag back and forth in order to avoid the gunshots."
