NECK FACE.(The Talk of the Town)

For the past year and a half, a mischievous presence has been asserting itself on the city's street lamps, doorways, traffic-light-control boxes, and any other visible surface that it is in no one's interest to monitor or clean too diligently: drawings of snaggletoothed monsters and hairy limbs with sharpened nails, and oblique yet strangely pointed phrases such as "beat with the ugly stick." These images are often signed "Neck Face," in angular capital letters that look like the work of an angry toddler or of Danny Torrance in "The Shining."

Neck Face is nineteen, little and shy, with black eyes and brows, and fanglike teeth of his own. He wears a parka with two thick paint markers--silver and black, "the Oakland Raiders combo"--zipped into the upper pocket, a pair of black high-tops tightened to "sprint mode," and an air of nonchalant alertness: he is always on the lookout for "neighborhood heroes." He is cagey about his identity: "It's like Batman, you know? No one knew who he was." Marsea Goldberg, who has a gallery in Los Angeles and last month displayed some of Neck Face's drawings--vampires in hot-pink cloaks; devilish people saying "You nasty" to each other--said, "He looks like a cross between Steven Tyler and Mick Jagger. He has this whole following of really cute young girls writing 'I 1/4 Neck Face' throughout the subways." Goldberg said that on the final day of the show the musician Beck came in and bought five Neck Faces.

On a recent Saturday, Neck Face came in to Manhattan from Brooklyn, where he is currently staying on a friend's couch (hence the mushrooming presence of goblins in that borough), to walk around the East Twenties, the neighborhood where he got his start. On Lexington below Twenty-sixth Street, he pointed to a door where he had drawn a bubble head with baggy eyes and a discombobulated mouth. "I like messed-up teeth," he said. "Every other person draws stuff with good teeth. I've got fillings in every single tooth." He opened his mouth and revealed a metal armature. "I eat a lot of candy."

At the corner of Twenty-third and Lex, he saw a scrawl on the side of a deli ...