All I never needed to know I learned from...

It's Never o'clock in Kansas City, and somewhere Midtown's most enigmatic graffiti artist is leaving his mark on the neighborhood.

His name is Neverino, and no one knows where he comes from. I first saw the name "Neverino" painted on a square of sidewalk near my apartment, and I found it funny enough to invent a backstory. Neverino, I surmised, was a little boy of either Hispanic or Italian descent who was struck and killed by the "Little Bastard" (the same Porsche 550 Spyder James Dean was driving when he died) at the bus stop on 43rd & Main. Now the listless spirit of the boy roams on, unable to communicate with the waking world except through spraypaint and paintmarkers.

I liked this story so much that I began to believe it, even inventing a cutesy, Spanish-sounding voice for Neverino that I often used while talking on the telephone. Soon, however, I began to realize that Neverino was a bigger phenomenon than I had imagined. I started to see variations on the Neverino name on signs and buildings around the neighborhood. A giant "Never" appeared on the back of a Broadway st. billboard. One Sunday, I even noticed that my mailbox had been tagged by a certain "Mr. Neverino." Almost overnight, Never was everywhere.

It was almost scary, the way Never always seemed to be just a few steps behind or ahead of my own urban adventures. In a parking lot down the street from the prostitute-frequented QuikTrip on Troost, I discovered a pair of Toys'R'Us truck trailers, only to see that Neverino had left his mark. Just two days after I took a photo-snapping tour of the Mission Mall ruins, I drove by to see that Never and his associates had written their names on the eastern face of the building. This act in particular demonstrated a boldness that astounded even me. Not only had he canvassed Kansas City, Missouri -- the long arm of Neverino could also reach into Kansas.

I thought and thought about a time that our paths might have crossed, but couldn't seem to come up with one. If I had seen Neverino, I hadn't known it. Still, I can't help but feel like I've gotten to know him at least a little bit through his artwork. A few of the things I've learned about Never:

• He has a playful sense of humor. Next to the giraffe on the aforementioned truck trailer, he wrote: "Neverino: I'm a Toys'R'Us kid."

• He is a night owl. On a giant, bubbly series of purple-and-green tags on the back of the Berbiglia liquor store, he wrote "It's 4 in the morning and it feels like spring."

• He is well-versed in history. Another tag near the liquor store reads "the home of the Nevercaneezer," a reference to Nebuchadnezzar, the ruler of Babylon who built the hanging gardens in 600 B.C. as an ersatz tropical paradise for his homesick wife, Amyitis.

• He is physically daring. Even a phantom would have difficulty scaling the heights Never must reach to complete his tags.

Because these observations shed little light on Neverino's personal life, it may be more worthwhile to take a look at the linguistic impact Neverino's marker has made on the community. Under Neverino's semantic makeover of Midtown, The Kansas City Star becomes The Never, and the Pitch changes from a weekly to a (you guessed it) never. 43rd & Bell becomes 43rd & Never. A nearby sign reads "Do Not Never Enter" and a simple red stop sign becomes a bright octagon of motivation. Local business hours either never end or never begin.

A first-time visitor to this ethnically diverse region of Kansas City might easily look around and declare himself in never-never land. Not surprisingly, the local police force is not amused. One afternoon, while snapping one of the very photographs displayed here, I noticed that I was being observed by a member of the KCPD. Though he eyed me dubiously, I think even he could tell that I was but a documentarian; a humble custodian of Never's legend and not its elusive author.

Just when I was reverting back to my original beliefs that Neverino was a specter invisible to the human eye, I heard a report on my police scanner that two officers had cornered a young male with a spraypaint can at the side of the Seville Best Western, just a block away. I dropped my harmonica and hard lemonade and raced to the scene as fast as my legs could carry me. From behind a dumpster I saw the officers closing in on the shadowy figure (Neverino, I presumed). The officers brandished their nightsticks, and one of them shouted, "Everything will be a lot easier if you just drop that spraypaint!" With a sudden hiss, a great purple cloud engulfed the three of them, causing the officers to lose sight of their suspect and start coughing. When they finally succeeded in waving the cloud away, the culprit had vanished, leaving his one-word response on the wall:


I know it may be a bit hard to believe, and believe me, I wish I was joking. I thought the superstitious phase of my life was over, that my days of peddling ghost stories had ended with my last weeks at summer camp. But I'm afraid Neverino has extended my belief in these matters indefinitely. Should I ever be in danger of losing my faith in the spraypaint-supernatural, I'm sure a fresh tag from Never will be there to make sure I never do.