I’ve been looking for PRAY on New York’s payphones, finding what might be her work on a cluster of upper east side payphones, and on one single phone in the NYU area. It is not quite an obsession, but this pursuit is fueled with a certain urgency. The payphones are coming down to make way for those Godawful LinkNYC kiosks, and with those fallen payphones will go some of the last vestiges of the work one woman did in, as the legend goes, scratching words and phrases like “PRAY”, “LOVE GOD”, and “MERCY” into every single payphone in New York. She was said to have done most if not all of her work in the 1980s. When I first heard of her in 1991 I found myself looking for PRAY and seeming to find her in, as if to confirm the legend, every single payphone enclosure and phone booth in town. It was one of many things that led me to think of payphones and phone booths as focal points of obsession.

But she did not confine her work to payphones. I have always known she was out there on other surfaces but my current focus on finding her on payphones made other possibilities take a back seat. Virtually any surface could have been her canvas, from a fence surrounding a park or cemetery to a seat on the bus. Or… a subway car.

When I just happened to spot this last week on a Brooklyn-bound D train I stopped in my thoughts. I knew this was the real thing. Jagged and chiseled, the word “GOD” is not as visible as the others, and maybe it’s not “GOD” at all. It looks like it might say “YOU”. The “A” in “THANK” has been embellished to where it might look like a KKK hood. I replayed in my mind how PRAY sat on this same exact spot, at work, sending a message still being received decades later. Who was she?

But I am conflicted about PRAY. I have never fully embraced graffiti or vandalism as honorable means of expression. It happens, it’s a big bad world, I don’t cry about it, but defacement of public and private property (my scruples weigh toward the latter) cost people money, time, resources, etc. I am as likely to spray-paint “PANIC” on the side of a privately-owned building as I am to do the same in your living room should you have me over for dinner.

But PRAY had her thing. If, in her ever-churning mind, she had a rational explanation at the ready for anyone who might confront her, maybe she would say that public property was public domain, meaning not that it was not owned by anybody but that it was owned by everybody. Or maybe it was more than that. To her, perhaps, all property was God’s.

It would be interesting to know if payphones containing what can be generally agreed to be PRAY’s scratchiti could be landmarked, and saved from the Smart City LinkNYC stampede, a program I’ve come to see can be shown as being pretty damn stupid.

Here is another possible PRAY handiwork, the word MERCY on an NYU-area payphone.