Brief history of who JA is, a east coast writer whos most known for destroying the biggest piece in the world (saber MSK, LA river, pics posted farther down the thread)[/url]. in that pic, the piece might not look big, but it can be seen from space.
anywho, JA basically came out to the west coast and wrote all over it. He's known as a writer with many beefs, alot of run-ins and basically a pretty hardcore life. everyone gives props to gangsters, but forgets the people really in the streets doing shit. read on..
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THE FIRST TIME I meet JA, he skates up to me wearing Rollerblades, his
cap played backward, on a street corner in Manhattan at around midnight.
He's white, 24 years old, with a short, muscular build and
a blond crew cut. He has been writing graffiti off and on in New York for
almost 10 years and is the founder of a loosely affiliated crew called
XTC. His hands, arms, legs and scalp show a variety of scars
from nightsticks, razor wire, fists and sharp, jagged things he has
climbed up, on or over. He has been beaten by the police -- a "wood
shampoo," he calls it -- has been shot at, has fallen off a
highway sign into moving traffic, has run naked through train yards
tagging, has been chased down highways by rival writers wielding golf
clubs and has risked his life innumerable times writing graffiti --
bombing, getting up.
JA lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment. There's graffiti on a
wall-length mirror, a weight bench, a Lava lamp to bug out on, cans of
paint stacked in the corner, a large Metropolitan Transportation
Authority (MTA) sticker on the side of the refrigerator. The buzzer to
his apartment lists a false name; his phone number is unlisted to avoid
law-enforcement representatives as well as conflicts with other writers.
While JA and one of his writing partners, JD, and I are discussing their
apprehension about this story, JD, offering up a maxim from the graffiti
life, tells me matter-of-factly, "You wouldn't fuck us over, we know
where you live."
At JA's apartment we look through photos. There are hundreds of pictures
of writers inside out-of-service subway cars that they've just covered
completely with their tags, pictures of writers wearing orange safety
vests -- to impersonate transit workers -- and walking subway tracks,
pictures of detectives and transit workers inspecting graffiti that JA
and crew put up the previous night, pictures of stylized JA 'throw-ups'
large, bubble-lettered logos written 15 feet up and 50 times across a
highway retaining wall. Picture after picture of JA's on trains, JA's on
trucks, on store gates, bridges, rooftops, billboards -- all labeled,
claimed and recorded on film.
JA comes from a well-to-do family; his parents are divorced; his father
holds a high-profile position in the entertainment industry. JA is aware
that in some people's minds this last fact calls into question his street
legitimacy, and he has put a great deal of effort into resisting the
correlation between privileged and soft. He estimates he has been
arrested 15 times for various crimes. He doesn't have a job, and it's
unclear how he supports himself. Every time we've been together, he's
been high or going to get high. Once he called me from Rikers Island
prison, where he was serving a couple of months for disorderly conduct
and a probation violation. He said some of the inmates saw him tagging in
a notebook and asked him to do tattoos for them.
It sounds right. Wherever he is, JA dominates his surroundings. With his
crew, he picks the spots to hit, the stores to rack from; he controls the
mission. He gives directions in the car, plans the activities, sets the
mood. And he takes everything a step further than the people he's with.
He climbs higher, stays awake longer, sucks deepest on the blunt, writes
the most graffiti. And though he's respected by other writers for testing
the limits -- he has been described to me by other writers as a king and,
by way of
compliment, as "the sickest guy I ever met" -- that same recklessness
sometimes alienates him from the majority who don't have such a huge
appetite for chaos, adrenaline, self-destruction.
When I ask a city detective who specializes in combating graffiti if
there are any particularly well-known writers, he immediately mentions JA
and adds with a bit of pride in his voice, "We know each other." He
calls JA the "biggest graffiti writer of all time" (though the etective
would prefer that I didn't mention that, because it'll only encourage
JA). "He's probably got the most throw-ups in the city, in the country,
in the world," the detective says. "If the average big-time graffiti
vandal has 10,000 tags, JA's got 100,000. He's probably done -- in New
York City alone -- at least $5 million worth of damage."
AT ABOUT 3 A.M., JA AND TWO OTHER WRITERS go out to hit a billboard off
the West Side Highway in Harlem. Tonight there are SET, a 21-year-old
white writer from Queens, N.Y., and JD, a black Latino writer the same
age, also from Queens. They load their backpacks with racked cans of
Rustoleum, fat cap nozzles, heavy 2-foot industrial bolt cutters and
surgical gloves. We pile into a car and start driving, Schooly D blasting
on the radio. First a stop at a deli where JA and SET go in and steal
beer. Then we drive around Harlem trying a number of different dope
spots, keeping an eye out for "berries" -- police cars. JA tosses a
finished 40-ounce out the window in a high arc, and it smashes on the
street.
At different points, JA gets out of the car and casually walks the
streets and into buildings, looking for dealers. A good part of the
graffiti life involves walking anywhere in the city, at any time, and not
being afraid -- or being afraid and doing it anyway.
We arrive at a spot where JA has tagged the dealer's name on a wall in
his territory. The three writers buy a vial of crack and a vial of angel
dust and combine them ("spacebase") in a hollowed-out Phillies
blunt. JD tells me that "certain drugs will enhance your bombing," citing
dust for courage and strength ("bionics"). They've also bombed on
mescaline, Valium, marijuana, crack and malt liquor. SET tells a
story of climbing highway poles with a spray can at 6 a.m., "all Xanaxed
out."
While JD is preparing the blunt, JA walks across the street with a spray
can and throws up all three of their tags in 4-foot-high bubbled,
connected letters. In the corner, he writes my name.
We then drive to a waterfront area at the edge of the city -- a eserted
site with warehouses, railroad tracks and patches of urban wilderness
dotted with high-rise billboards. All three writers are now high,
and we sit on a curb outside the car smoking cigarettes. From a distance
we can see a group of men milling around a parked car near a loading dock
that we have to pass. This provokes 30 minutes of
obsessive speculation, a stoned stakeout with play by play:
"Dude, they're writers," says SET. "Let's go down and check them out,"
says JD. "Wait, let's see what they write," says JA. "Yo -- they're going
into the trunk," says SET. "Cans, dude, they're going for their
cans. Dude, they're writers. "There could be beef, possible beef," says
JA. "Can we confirm cans, do we see cans?" SET wants to know. Yes, they
do have cans," SET answers for himself. "There are cans. They are
writers." It turns out that the men are thieves, part of a group robbing
a nearby truck. In a few moments guards appear with flashlights and at
least one drawn gun. The thieves scatter as guard dogs fan
out around the area, barking crazily.
We wait this out a bit until JA announces, "It's on." Hood pulled up on
his head, he leads us creeping through the woods (which for JA has become
the cinematic jungles of Nam). It's stop and go, JA
crawling on his stomach, unnecessarily close to one of the guards who's
searching nearby. We pass through graffiti-covered tunnels (with the
requisite cinematic drip drip), over crumbling stairs overgrown
with weeds and brush, along dark, heavily littered trails used by
crackheads.
We get near the billboard, and JA uses the bolt cutters to cut holes in
two chain-link fences. We crawl through and walk along the railroad
tracks until we get to the base of the sign. JA, with his backpack on,
climbs about 40 feet on a thin piece of metal pipe attached to the main
pillar. JD, after a few failed attempts, follows with the bolt cutters
shoved down his pants and passes them to JA. Hanging in midair,
his legs wrapped around a small piece of ladder, JA cuts the padlock and
opens up the hatch to the catwalk. He then lowers his arm to JD, who is
wrapped around the pole just below him, struggling. "J,
give me your hand, "I'll pull you up," JA tells him. JD hesitates. He is
reluctant to let go and continues treadmilling on the pole, trying to
make it up. JD, give me your hand." JD doesn't want to refuse, but he's
uncomfortable entrusting his life to JA. He won't let go of the pole. JA
says it again, firmly, calmly, utterly confident: "J give me your hand."
JD's arm reaches up, and JA pulls JD up onto the catwalk. Next, SET, the
frailest of the three, follows unsteadily. They've called down and
offered to put up his tag, but he insists on going up. "Dude, fuck that,
I'm down," he says. I look away while he makes his way up, sure that he's
going to fall (he almost does twice). The three have developed a set
pattern for dividing the labor when they're "blowing up," one writer
outlining, another working behind him, filling in. For 40 minutes I watch
them working furiously, throwing shadows as they cover ads for Parliament
and Amtrak with large multicolored throw-ups SET and JD bickering about
space, JA scolding them, tossing down empty cans.
They risk their lives again climbing down. Parts of their faces are
covered in paint, and their eyes beam as all three stare at the
billboard, asking, "Isn't it beautiful?' And there is something
intoxicating about seeing such an inaccessible, clean object gotten to
and made gaudy. We get in the car and drive the West Side
Highway northbound and then southbound so they can critique their work.
"Damn, I should've used the white," JD says.
The next day both billboards are newly re-covered, all the graffiti gone.
JA tells me the three went back earlier to get pictures and made small
talk with the workers who were cleaning it off.
GRAFFITI HAS BEEN THROUGH A NUMBER OF incarnations since it surfaced in
New York in the early 70s with a Greek teen-ager named Taki 183. It
developed from the straightforward writing of a name to highly tylized,
seemingly illegible tags (a kind of penmanship slang) to wild-style
throw-ups and elaborate (master) "pieces" and character art. There has
been racist graffiti political writing, drug advertising, gang graffiti.
There is an art-graf scene from which Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiac,
LEE, Futura 2000, Lady Pink and others emerged; aerosol advertising;
techno graffiti written into computer programs; anti-billboard graffiti;
stickers; and stencil writing. There are art students doing street work
in San Francisco ("nonpermissional public art"); mural work in
underground tunnels in New York; gallery shows from Colorado to New
Jersey; all-day Graffiti-a-Thons; and there are graffiti artists
lecturing art classes at universities. Graffiti has become part of urban
culture, hip-hop culture and commercial culture, has spread to the
suburbs and can be found in the backwoods of California's national
forests. There are graffiti magazines, graffiti stores, commissioned
walls, walls of fame and a video series available (Out to bomb)
documenting writers going out on graffiti missions, complete with
soundtrack. Graffiti was celebrated as a metaphor in the 70s (Norman
Mailer's "The Faith of Graffiti"); it went Hollywood in the '80s (Beat
Street, Turk 182!, Wild Style); and in the '90s it has been increasingly
used to memorialize the inner-city dead.
But as much as graffiti has found acceptance, it has been vilified a
hundred times more. Writers are now being charged with felonies and given
lengthy jail terms -- a 15-year-old in California was recently
sentenced to eight years in a juvenile detention center. Writers have
been given up to 1000 hours of community service and forced to undergo
years of psychological counseling; their parents have been hit
with civil suits. In California a graffiti writer's driver's license can
be revoked for a year; high-school diplomas and transcripts can also be
withheld until parents make restitution. In some cities property owners
who fail to remove graffiti from their property are subject to fines and
possible jail time. Last spring in St. Louis, Cincinnati, San Antonio and
Sacramento, Calif., politicians proposed legislation to cane graffiti
writers (four to 10 hits with a wooden paddle, administered by parents or
by a bailiff in a public courtroom). Across the nation, legislation has
been passed making it illegal to sell spray paint and wide-tipped markers
to anyone under 18, and often the materials must be kept locked up in the
stores. Several cities have tried to ban the sales altogether, license
sellers of spray paint and require customers to give their name and
address when purchasing paint. In New York some hardware-store owners
will give a surveillance photo of anyone buying a large quantity of spray
cans to the police. In Chicago people have been charged with possession
of paint. In San Jose, Calif., undercover police officers ran a sting
operation -- posing as filmmakers working on a graffiti documentary --
and arrested 31 writers.
Hidden cameras, motion detectors, laser removal, specially developed
chemical coatings, night goggles, razor wire, guard dogs, a National
Graffiti Information Network, graffiti hot lines, bounties paid to
informers -- one estimate is that it costs $4 billion a year nationally
to clean graffiti -- all in an effort to stop those who "visually laugh
in the face of communities," as a Wall Street Journal editorial raged.
The popular perception is that since the late 1980s when New York's
Metropolitan Transit Authority adopted a zero tolerance toward subway
graffiti (the MTA either cleaned or destroyed more than 6,000
graffiti-covered subway cars, immediately pulling a train out of service
if any graffiti appeared on it), graffiti culture had died in the place
of its birth. According to many graffiti writers, however, the MTA, in
its attempt to kill graffiti, only succeeded in bringing it out of the
tunnels and train yards and making it angry. Or as Jeff Ferrell, a
criminologist who has chronicled the Denver graffiti scene, theorizes,
the authorities' crackdown moved graffiti writing from subculture to
counterculture. The work on the trains no longer ran, so writers started
hitting the streets. Out in the open they had to work faster and more
often. The artistry started to matter less and less. Throw-ups, small
cryptic tags done in marker and even the straightforward writing of a
name became the dominant imagery. What mattered was quantity ("making
noise"), whether the writer had heart, was true to the game, was "real."
And the graffiti world started to attract more and more people who
weren't looking for an alternative art canvas but simply wanted to be
connected to an outlaw community, to a venerable street tradition that
allowed the opportunity to advertise their defiance. "It's that I'm doing
it that I get my rush, not by everyone seeing it," says JA. "Yeah, that's
nice, but if that's all that's gonna motivate you to do it, you're gonna
stop writing.
That's what happened to a lot of writers." JD tells me: "We're just
putting it in their faces; it's like 'Yo, you gotta put up with it.'"
Newspapers have now settled on the term "graffiti vandal" rather than
"artist" or "writer." Graffiti writers casually refer to their work as
doing destruction." In recent years graffiti has become more and more
about beefs and wars, about "fucking up the MTA," "fucking up the city."
Writers started taking a jock attitude toward getting up frequently and
tagging in hard-to-reach places, adopting a machismo toward going over
other writers' work and defending their own ("If you can write,
you can fight"). Whereas graffiti writing was once considered an
alternative to the street, now it imports drugs, violence, weapons and
theft from that world -- the romance of the criminal deviant rather than
the artistic deviant. In New York today, one police source estimates
there are approximately 100,000 people involved in a variety of types of
graffiti writing. The police have caught writers as young as 8 and as old
as 42. And there's a small group of hard-core writers who are getting
older who either wrote when graffiti was in its prime or long for the
days when it was, those who write out of compulsion, for each other and
for the authorities who try to combat graffiti, writers who haven't found
anything in their lives substantial or hype enough to replace graffiti
writing.
The writers in their 20s come mostly from working-class families and have
limited prospects and ambitions for the future. SET works in a drugstore
and has taken lithium and Prozac for occasional depression; JD dropped
out of high school and is unemployed, last working as a messenger, where
he met JA. They spend their nights driving 80 miles an hour down city
highways, balancing 40-ounce bottles of Old English 800 between their
legs, smoking blunts and crack-laced cigarettes called coolies, always
playing with the radio. They reminisce endlessly about the past, when
graf was real, when graf ran on the trains, and they swap stories about
who's doing what on the scene. The talk is a combo platter of Spicoli,
homeboy, New Age jock and eighth grade: The dude is a fuckin' total turd.
. . . I definitely would've gotten waxed. . . . It's like some bogus job.
. . . I'm amped, I'm Audi, you buggin . . . You gotta be there fully, go
all out, focus. . . . Dudes have bitten off SET, he's got toys jockin'
him. . . .
They carry beepers, sometimes guns, go upstate or to Long Island to "prey
on the hicks" and to rack cans of spray paint. They talk about upcoming
court cases and probation, about quitting, getting their
lives together, even as they plan new spots to hit, practice their style
by writing on the walls of their apartments, on boxes of food, on any
stray piece of paper (younger writers practice on school
notebooks that teachers have been known to confiscate and turn over to
the police). They call graffiti a "social tool" and "some kind of ill
form of communication," refer to every writer no matter his age as
"kid." Talk in the graffiti life vacillates between banality and
mythology, much like the activity itself: hours of drudgery, hanging out,
waiting, interrupted by brief episodes of exhilaration. JD, echoing a
common refrain, says, "Graffiti writers are like bitches: a lot of lying,
a lot of talking, a lot of gossip." They don't
like tagging with girls ("cuties," or if they use drugs, "zooties")
around because all they say is (in a whiny voice), You're crazy. . . .
Write my name."
WHEN JA TALKS ABOUT GRAFFITI, HE'S reluctant to offer up any of the
media-ready cliches about the culture (and he knows most of them). He's
more inclined to say, "Fuck the graffiti world," and scoff at graf shops,
videos, conventions and 'zines. But he can be sentimental about how he
began -- riding the No. 1, 2 and 3 trains when he was young, bugging out
on the graffiti-covered cars, asking himself, "How did they do that? Who
are they?" And he'll respectfully invoke the names of long-gone writers
he admired when he was just starting out: SKEME, ZEPHYR, REVOLT, MIN.
JA, typical of the new school, primarily bombs, covering wide areas with
throw-ups. He treats graffiti less as an art form than as an athletic
competition, concentrating on getting his tag in difficult-to-reach
places, focusing on quantity and working in defiance of an aesthetic that
demands that public property be kept clean. (Writers almost exclusively
hit public or commercial property.)
And when JA is not being cynical, he can talk for hours about the
technique, the plotting, the logistics of the game like "motion bombing"
by clockwork a carefully scoped subway train that he knows has to stop
for a set time, at a set place, when it gets a certain signal in the
tunnels. He says, "To me, the challenge that graffiti poses, there's
something very invigorating and freeing about it, something almost
spiritual. There's a kind of euphoria, more than any kind of drug or sex
can give you, give me . . . for real."
JA says he wants to quit, and he talks about doing it as if he were in a
12-step program. "How a person in recovery takes it one day a time,
that's how I gotta take it," he says. You get burnt out. There's pretty
much nothing more the city can throw at me; it's all been done." But then
he'll hear about a yard full of clean sanitation trucks, the upcoming
Puerto Rican Day Parade (a reason to bomb Fifth Avenue) or a
billboard in an isolated area; or it'll be 3 a.m., he'll be stoned,
driving around or sitting in the living room, playing NBA Jam, and
someone will say it: "Yo, I got a couple of cans in the trunk. . . ."
REAS, an old-school writer of 12 years who, after a struggle and a number
of relapses, eventually quit the life, says, "Graffiti can become like a
hole you're stuck in; it can just keep on going and going, there's always
another spot to write on."
SAST is in his late 20s and calls himself semiretired after 13 years in
the graf scene. He still carries around a marker with him wherever he
goes and cops little STONE tags (when he's high, he writes,
STONED). He's driving JA and me around the city one night, showing me
different objects they've tagged, returning again and again to drug spots
to buy dust and crack, smoking, with the radio blasting;
he's telling war stories about JA jumping onto moving trains, JA hanging
off the outside of a speeding four-wheel drive. SAST is driving at top
speed, cutting in between cars, tailgating, swerving. A number
of times as we're racing down the highway, I ask him if he could slow
down. He smiles, asks if I'm scared, tells me not to worry, that he's a
more cautious driver when he's dusted. At one point on the FDR, a car
cuts in front of us. JA decides to have some fun.
"Yo, he burnt you, SAST," JA says. We start to pick up speed. Yo, SAST,
he dissed you, he cold dissed you, SAST." SAST is buying it, the look on
his face becoming more determined as we go 70, 80, 90 miles an hour,
hugging the divider, flying between cars. I turn to JA, who's in the back
seat, and I try to get him to stop. JA ignores me, sitting back perfectly
relaxed, smiling, urging SAST to go faster and faster, getting off, my
fear adding to his rush.
At around 4 a.m., SAST drops us off on the middle of the Manhattan Bridge
and leaves. JA wants to show me a throw-up he did the week before. We
climb over the divider from the roadway to the subway tracks. JA explains
that we have to cross the north and the southbound tracks to get to the
outer part of the bridge. In between there are a number of large gaps and
two electrified third rails, and we're
135 feet above the East River. As we're standing on the tracks, we hear
the sound of an oncoming train. JA tells me to hide, to crouch down in
the V where two diagonal braces meet just beside the tracks.
I climb into position, holding on to the metal beams, head down, looking
at the water as the train slams by the side of my body. This happens
twice more. Eventually, I cross over to the outer edge of the
bridge, which is under construction, and JA points out his tag about 40
feet above on what looks like a crow's-nest on a support pillar. After a
few moments of admiring the view, stepping carefully around the
many opportunities to fall, JA hands me his cigarettes and keys. He
starts crawling up one of the braces on the side of the bridge,
disappears within the structure for a moment, emerges and makes his way
to an electrical box on a pillar. Then he snakes his way up the piping
and grabs on to a curved support. Using only his hands he starts to
shimmy up; at one point he's hanging almost completely upside down. If he
falls now, he'll land backward onto one of the tiers and drop into the
river below. He continues to pull himself up, the old paint breaking off
in his hands, and finally he flips his body over a railing to get to the
spot where he tagged. He doesn't have a can or a marker with him, and at
this point graffiti seems incidental. He comes down and tells me that
when he did the original tag he was with two writers; one he half carried
up, the other stopped at a certain point and later told JA that watching
him do that tag made him appreciate life, being alive.
We walk for 10 minutes along a narrow, grooved catwalk on the side of the
tracks; a thin wire cable prevents a fall into the river. A few times,
looking down through the grooves, I have to stop, force myself
to take the next step straight ahead, shake off the vertigo. JA is
practically jogging ahead of me. We exit the bridge into Chinatown as the
sun comes up and go to eat breakfast. JA tells me he's a vegetarian.
IF YOU TALK TO SERIOUS GRAFFITI writers, most of them will echo the same
themes; they decry the commercialization of graf, condemn the toys and
poseurs and alternately hate and feel attached to the authorities who try
to stop them. They say with equal parts bravado and self-deprecation that
a graffiti writer is a bum, a criminal, a vandal, slick, sick, obsessed,
sneaky, street-smart, living on edges figurative
and literal. They show and catalog cuts and scars on their bodies from
razor wire, pieces of metal, knives, box cutters. I once casually asked a
writer named GHOST if he knew another writer whose work I had seen in a
graf'zine. "Yeah, I know him, he stabbed me," GHOST replies
matter-of-factly. "We've still got beef." SET tells me he was caught by
two DTs (detectives) who assaulted him, took his cans of paint and
sprayed his body and face. JA tells similar stories of police beatings
for his making officers run after him, of cops making him empty his spray
cans on his sneakers or on the back of a fellow writer's jacket. JD has
had 48 stitches in his back and 18 in his head over "graffiti-related
beef." JA's best friend and writing partner, SANE SMITH, a legendary
all-city writer who was sued by the city and the MTA for graffiti, was
found dead, floating in Jamaica Bay. There's endless speculation in the
grafworld as to whether he was pushed, fell or jumped off a bridge. SANE
is so respected, there are some writers today who spend time in public
libraries reading and rereading the newspaper microfilm
about his death, his arrests, his career. According to JA, after SANE's
death, his brother, SMiTH, also a respected graffiti artist, found a
piece of paper on which SANE had written his and JA's tag and off to
the side, FLYING HIGH THE XTC WAY. It now hangs on JA's apartment wall.
One morning, JA and I jump off the end of a subway platform and head into
the tunnels. He shows me hidden rooms, emergency hatches that open to the
sidewalk, where to stand when the trains come by. He tells me about the
time SANE lay face down in a shallow drainage ditch on the tracks as an
express train ran inches above him. JA says anytime he was being chased
by the police he would run into a nearby subway station, jump off the
platform and run into the tunnels. The police would never follow. KET, a
veteran graffiti writer, tells me how in the tunnels he would
accidentally step on homeless people sleeping. They'd see him tagging and
would occasionally ask that he "throw them up," write their names on the
wall. He usually would. Walking in the darkness between the electrified
rails as trains race by, JA tells me the story of two writers he had beef
with who came into the tunnels to cross out his tags. Where the
cross-outs stop is where they were killed by an approaching train.
The last time I go out with JA, SET and JD, they pick me up at around 2
am. We drive down to the Lower East Side to hit a yard where about 60
trucks and vans are parked next to one another. Every vehicle is already
covered with throw-ups and tags, but the three start to write anyway, JA
in a near frenzy. They're running in between the rows, crawling under
trucks, jumping from roof to roof, wedged down in between the trailers,
engulfed in nauseating clouds of paint fumes (the writers sometimes blow
multicolored mucous out of their noses), going over some writers' tags,
respecting others, JA throwing up
SANE's name, searching for any little piece of clean space to write on.
JA, who had once again been talking about retirement, is now hungry to
write and wants to hit another spot. But JD doesn't have any paint, SET
needs gas money for his car, and they have to drive upstate the next
morning to appear in court for a paint-theft charge.
During the ride back uptown the car is mostly quiet, the mood depressed.
And even when the three were in the truck yard, even when JA was at his
most intense, it seemed closer to work, routine, habit. There are moments
like this when they seem genuinely worn out by the constant stress, the
danger, the legal problems, the drugging, the fighting, the obligation to
always hit another spot. And it's usually when the day is starting.
About a week later I get a call from another writer whom JA had told I
was writing an article on graffiti. He tells me he has never been king,
never gone all city, but now he is making a comeback, coming out of
retirement with a new tag. He says he could do it easily today because
there is no real competition. He says he was thinking about trying to
make some money off of graffiti -- galleries. canvases, whatever . . .
to get paid.
"I gotta do something," the writer says. "I can't rap, I can't dance, I
got this silly little job." We talk more, and he tells me he appreciates
that I'm writing about writers, trying to get inside the head of a
vandal, telling the real deal. He also tells me that graffiti is dying,
that the city is buffing it, that new writers are all
toys and are letting it die, but it's still worth it to write.
I ask why, and then comes the inevitable justification that every writer
has to believe and take pleasure in, the idea that order will always have
to play catch-up with them. "It takes me seconds to do a quick throw-up;
it takes them like 10 minutes to clean it," he says. "Who's coming out on
top?"
KEVIN HELDMAN lives in New York. This is his first piece for "Rolling
Stone." (ROLLING STONE,FEB 9,1995)
Alright well with that in there I feel like I have given somewhat of a quality journal.
But now back to my journal. Some of you (that read my journal) Might have bin wondering what has bin going on in my life since, July 21st...to put it bluntly Nothing. I think I have gone out and painted once since then. It was really bunk shee-yit. The wall was a paint eater, and I almost got busted....thank god for running like a mother fucker through yards, and a few alleys...The down side to this is I hopped a on fence and didn't watch where/what I jumped into. and *SPlOOSH* I am in the deep end of a pool. Wearing heavey cloths, and carying a bag half full of paint. Well I wasn't too eager to ditch my paint, And I can barly swim...so needles to say that was an expeirience and a half. I managed to get out. and get home. with no fines, and not even wearing cuffs. Yeah it was an adventurious night.
All in all I think that has bin my month since my last journal. Minus getting drunk about two weeks back now. It was pretty fun, though I can't see how people can pain't when they drink...I mean I have a hard time standing....let alone painting.
Well this journal is probabaly long as fuck right now. So I think I am gunna end it right away. Yeah I am. Well good night to you fools who are still awake, and good morning to the poor buggers waking up.
Shout outs...I guess
anywho, JA basically came out to the west coast and wrote all over it. He's known as a writer with many beefs, alot of run-ins and basically a pretty hardcore life. everyone gives props to gangsters, but forgets the people really in the streets doing shit. read on..
------------------------------
THE FIRST TIME I meet JA, he skates up to me wearing Rollerblades, his
cap played backward, on a street corner in Manhattan at around midnight.
He's white, 24 years old, with a short, muscular build and
a blond crew cut. He has been writing graffiti off and on in New York for
almost 10 years and is the founder of a loosely affiliated crew called
XTC. His hands, arms, legs and scalp show a variety of scars
from nightsticks, razor wire, fists and sharp, jagged things he has
climbed up, on or over. He has been beaten by the police -- a "wood
shampoo," he calls it -- has been shot at, has fallen off a
highway sign into moving traffic, has run naked through train yards
tagging, has been chased down highways by rival writers wielding golf
clubs and has risked his life innumerable times writing graffiti --
bombing, getting up.
JA lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment. There's graffiti on a
wall-length mirror, a weight bench, a Lava lamp to bug out on, cans of
paint stacked in the corner, a large Metropolitan Transportation
Authority (MTA) sticker on the side of the refrigerator. The buzzer to
his apartment lists a false name; his phone number is unlisted to avoid
law-enforcement representatives as well as conflicts with other writers.
While JA and one of his writing partners, JD, and I are discussing their
apprehension about this story, JD, offering up a maxim from the graffiti
life, tells me matter-of-factly, "You wouldn't fuck us over, we know
where you live."
At JA's apartment we look through photos. There are hundreds of pictures
of writers inside out-of-service subway cars that they've just covered
completely with their tags, pictures of writers wearing orange safety
vests -- to impersonate transit workers -- and walking subway tracks,
pictures of detectives and transit workers inspecting graffiti that JA
and crew put up the previous night, pictures of stylized JA 'throw-ups'
large, bubble-lettered logos written 15 feet up and 50 times across a
highway retaining wall. Picture after picture of JA's on trains, JA's on
trucks, on store gates, bridges, rooftops, billboards -- all labeled,
claimed and recorded on film.
JA comes from a well-to-do family; his parents are divorced; his father
holds a high-profile position in the entertainment industry. JA is aware
that in some people's minds this last fact calls into question his street
legitimacy, and he has put a great deal of effort into resisting the
correlation between privileged and soft. He estimates he has been
arrested 15 times for various crimes. He doesn't have a job, and it's
unclear how he supports himself. Every time we've been together, he's
been high or going to get high. Once he called me from Rikers Island
prison, where he was serving a couple of months for disorderly conduct
and a probation violation. He said some of the inmates saw him tagging in
a notebook and asked him to do tattoos for them.
It sounds right. Wherever he is, JA dominates his surroundings. With his
crew, he picks the spots to hit, the stores to rack from; he controls the
mission. He gives directions in the car, plans the activities, sets the
mood. And he takes everything a step further than the people he's with.
He climbs higher, stays awake longer, sucks deepest on the blunt, writes
the most graffiti. And though he's respected by other writers for testing
the limits -- he has been described to me by other writers as a king and,
by way of
compliment, as "the sickest guy I ever met" -- that same recklessness
sometimes alienates him from the majority who don't have such a huge
appetite for chaos, adrenaline, self-destruction.
When I ask a city detective who specializes in combating graffiti if
there are any particularly well-known writers, he immediately mentions JA
and adds with a bit of pride in his voice, "We know each other." He
calls JA the "biggest graffiti writer of all time" (though the etective
would prefer that I didn't mention that, because it'll only encourage
JA). "He's probably got the most throw-ups in the city, in the country,
in the world," the detective says. "If the average big-time graffiti
vandal has 10,000 tags, JA's got 100,000. He's probably done -- in New
York City alone -- at least $5 million worth of damage."
AT ABOUT 3 A.M., JA AND TWO OTHER WRITERS go out to hit a billboard off
the West Side Highway in Harlem. Tonight there are SET, a 21-year-old
white writer from Queens, N.Y., and JD, a black Latino writer the same
age, also from Queens. They load their backpacks with racked cans of
Rustoleum, fat cap nozzles, heavy 2-foot industrial bolt cutters and
surgical gloves. We pile into a car and start driving, Schooly D blasting
on the radio. First a stop at a deli where JA and SET go in and steal
beer. Then we drive around Harlem trying a number of different dope
spots, keeping an eye out for "berries" -- police cars. JA tosses a
finished 40-ounce out the window in a high arc, and it smashes on the
street.
At different points, JA gets out of the car and casually walks the
streets and into buildings, looking for dealers. A good part of the
graffiti life involves walking anywhere in the city, at any time, and not
being afraid -- or being afraid and doing it anyway.
We arrive at a spot where JA has tagged the dealer's name on a wall in
his territory. The three writers buy a vial of crack and a vial of angel
dust and combine them ("spacebase") in a hollowed-out Phillies
blunt. JD tells me that "certain drugs will enhance your bombing," citing
dust for courage and strength ("bionics"). They've also bombed on
mescaline, Valium, marijuana, crack and malt liquor. SET tells a
story of climbing highway poles with a spray can at 6 a.m., "all Xanaxed
out."
While JD is preparing the blunt, JA walks across the street with a spray
can and throws up all three of their tags in 4-foot-high bubbled,
connected letters. In the corner, he writes my name.
We then drive to a waterfront area at the edge of the city -- a eserted
site with warehouses, railroad tracks and patches of urban wilderness
dotted with high-rise billboards. All three writers are now high,
and we sit on a curb outside the car smoking cigarettes. From a distance
we can see a group of men milling around a parked car near a loading dock
that we have to pass. This provokes 30 minutes of
obsessive speculation, a stoned stakeout with play by play:
"Dude, they're writers," says SET. "Let's go down and check them out,"
says JD. "Wait, let's see what they write," says JA. "Yo -- they're going
into the trunk," says SET. "Cans, dude, they're going for their
cans. Dude, they're writers. "There could be beef, possible beef," says
JA. "Can we confirm cans, do we see cans?" SET wants to know. Yes, they
do have cans," SET answers for himself. "There are cans. They are
writers." It turns out that the men are thieves, part of a group robbing
a nearby truck. In a few moments guards appear with flashlights and at
least one drawn gun. The thieves scatter as guard dogs fan
out around the area, barking crazily.
We wait this out a bit until JA announces, "It's on." Hood pulled up on
his head, he leads us creeping through the woods (which for JA has become
the cinematic jungles of Nam). It's stop and go, JA
crawling on his stomach, unnecessarily close to one of the guards who's
searching nearby. We pass through graffiti-covered tunnels (with the
requisite cinematic drip drip), over crumbling stairs overgrown
with weeds and brush, along dark, heavily littered trails used by
crackheads.
We get near the billboard, and JA uses the bolt cutters to cut holes in
two chain-link fences. We crawl through and walk along the railroad
tracks until we get to the base of the sign. JA, with his backpack on,
climbs about 40 feet on a thin piece of metal pipe attached to the main
pillar. JD, after a few failed attempts, follows with the bolt cutters
shoved down his pants and passes them to JA. Hanging in midair,
his legs wrapped around a small piece of ladder, JA cuts the padlock and
opens up the hatch to the catwalk. He then lowers his arm to JD, who is
wrapped around the pole just below him, struggling. "J,
give me your hand, "I'll pull you up," JA tells him. JD hesitates. He is
reluctant to let go and continues treadmilling on the pole, trying to
make it up. JD, give me your hand." JD doesn't want to refuse, but he's
uncomfortable entrusting his life to JA. He won't let go of the pole. JA
says it again, firmly, calmly, utterly confident: "J give me your hand."
JD's arm reaches up, and JA pulls JD up onto the catwalk. Next, SET, the
frailest of the three, follows unsteadily. They've called down and
offered to put up his tag, but he insists on going up. "Dude, fuck that,
I'm down," he says. I look away while he makes his way up, sure that he's
going to fall (he almost does twice). The three have developed a set
pattern for dividing the labor when they're "blowing up," one writer
outlining, another working behind him, filling in. For 40 minutes I watch
them working furiously, throwing shadows as they cover ads for Parliament
and Amtrak with large multicolored throw-ups SET and JD bickering about
space, JA scolding them, tossing down empty cans.
They risk their lives again climbing down. Parts of their faces are
covered in paint, and their eyes beam as all three stare at the
billboard, asking, "Isn't it beautiful?' And there is something
intoxicating about seeing such an inaccessible, clean object gotten to
and made gaudy. We get in the car and drive the West Side
Highway northbound and then southbound so they can critique their work.
"Damn, I should've used the white," JD says.
The next day both billboards are newly re-covered, all the graffiti gone.
JA tells me the three went back earlier to get pictures and made small
talk with the workers who were cleaning it off.
GRAFFITI HAS BEEN THROUGH A NUMBER OF incarnations since it surfaced in
New York in the early 70s with a Greek teen-ager named Taki 183. It
developed from the straightforward writing of a name to highly tylized,
seemingly illegible tags (a kind of penmanship slang) to wild-style
throw-ups and elaborate (master) "pieces" and character art. There has
been racist graffiti political writing, drug advertising, gang graffiti.
There is an art-graf scene from which Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiac,
LEE, Futura 2000, Lady Pink and others emerged; aerosol advertising;
techno graffiti written into computer programs; anti-billboard graffiti;
stickers; and stencil writing. There are art students doing street work
in San Francisco ("nonpermissional public art"); mural work in
underground tunnels in New York; gallery shows from Colorado to New
Jersey; all-day Graffiti-a-Thons; and there are graffiti artists
lecturing art classes at universities. Graffiti has become part of urban
culture, hip-hop culture and commercial culture, has spread to the
suburbs and can be found in the backwoods of California's national
forests. There are graffiti magazines, graffiti stores, commissioned
walls, walls of fame and a video series available (Out to bomb)
documenting writers going out on graffiti missions, complete with
soundtrack. Graffiti was celebrated as a metaphor in the 70s (Norman
Mailer's "The Faith of Graffiti"); it went Hollywood in the '80s (Beat
Street, Turk 182!, Wild Style); and in the '90s it has been increasingly
used to memorialize the inner-city dead.
But as much as graffiti has found acceptance, it has been vilified a
hundred times more. Writers are now being charged with felonies and given
lengthy jail terms -- a 15-year-old in California was recently
sentenced to eight years in a juvenile detention center. Writers have
been given up to 1000 hours of community service and forced to undergo
years of psychological counseling; their parents have been hit
with civil suits. In California a graffiti writer's driver's license can
be revoked for a year; high-school diplomas and transcripts can also be
withheld until parents make restitution. In some cities property owners
who fail to remove graffiti from their property are subject to fines and
possible jail time. Last spring in St. Louis, Cincinnati, San Antonio and
Sacramento, Calif., politicians proposed legislation to cane graffiti
writers (four to 10 hits with a wooden paddle, administered by parents or
by a bailiff in a public courtroom). Across the nation, legislation has
been passed making it illegal to sell spray paint and wide-tipped markers
to anyone under 18, and often the materials must be kept locked up in the
stores. Several cities have tried to ban the sales altogether, license
sellers of spray paint and require customers to give their name and
address when purchasing paint. In New York some hardware-store owners
will give a surveillance photo of anyone buying a large quantity of spray
cans to the police. In Chicago people have been charged with possession
of paint. In San Jose, Calif., undercover police officers ran a sting
operation -- posing as filmmakers working on a graffiti documentary --
and arrested 31 writers.
Hidden cameras, motion detectors, laser removal, specially developed
chemical coatings, night goggles, razor wire, guard dogs, a National
Graffiti Information Network, graffiti hot lines, bounties paid to
informers -- one estimate is that it costs $4 billion a year nationally
to clean graffiti -- all in an effort to stop those who "visually laugh
in the face of communities," as a Wall Street Journal editorial raged.
The popular perception is that since the late 1980s when New York's
Metropolitan Transit Authority adopted a zero tolerance toward subway
graffiti (the MTA either cleaned or destroyed more than 6,000
graffiti-covered subway cars, immediately pulling a train out of service
if any graffiti appeared on it), graffiti culture had died in the place
of its birth. According to many graffiti writers, however, the MTA, in
its attempt to kill graffiti, only succeeded in bringing it out of the
tunnels and train yards and making it angry. Or as Jeff Ferrell, a
criminologist who has chronicled the Denver graffiti scene, theorizes,
the authorities' crackdown moved graffiti writing from subculture to
counterculture. The work on the trains no longer ran, so writers started
hitting the streets. Out in the open they had to work faster and more
often. The artistry started to matter less and less. Throw-ups, small
cryptic tags done in marker and even the straightforward writing of a
name became the dominant imagery. What mattered was quantity ("making
noise"), whether the writer had heart, was true to the game, was "real."
And the graffiti world started to attract more and more people who
weren't looking for an alternative art canvas but simply wanted to be
connected to an outlaw community, to a venerable street tradition that
allowed the opportunity to advertise their defiance. "It's that I'm doing
it that I get my rush, not by everyone seeing it," says JA. "Yeah, that's
nice, but if that's all that's gonna motivate you to do it, you're gonna
stop writing.
That's what happened to a lot of writers." JD tells me: "We're just
putting it in their faces; it's like 'Yo, you gotta put up with it.'"
Newspapers have now settled on the term "graffiti vandal" rather than
"artist" or "writer." Graffiti writers casually refer to their work as
doing destruction." In recent years graffiti has become more and more
about beefs and wars, about "fucking up the MTA," "fucking up the city."
Writers started taking a jock attitude toward getting up frequently and
tagging in hard-to-reach places, adopting a machismo toward going over
other writers' work and defending their own ("If you can write,
you can fight"). Whereas graffiti writing was once considered an
alternative to the street, now it imports drugs, violence, weapons and
theft from that world -- the romance of the criminal deviant rather than
the artistic deviant. In New York today, one police source estimates
there are approximately 100,000 people involved in a variety of types of
graffiti writing. The police have caught writers as young as 8 and as old
as 42. And there's a small group of hard-core writers who are getting
older who either wrote when graffiti was in its prime or long for the
days when it was, those who write out of compulsion, for each other and
for the authorities who try to combat graffiti, writers who haven't found
anything in their lives substantial or hype enough to replace graffiti
writing.
The writers in their 20s come mostly from working-class families and have
limited prospects and ambitions for the future. SET works in a drugstore
and has taken lithium and Prozac for occasional depression; JD dropped
out of high school and is unemployed, last working as a messenger, where
he met JA. They spend their nights driving 80 miles an hour down city
highways, balancing 40-ounce bottles of Old English 800 between their
legs, smoking blunts and crack-laced cigarettes called coolies, always
playing with the radio. They reminisce endlessly about the past, when
graf was real, when graf ran on the trains, and they swap stories about
who's doing what on the scene. The talk is a combo platter of Spicoli,
homeboy, New Age jock and eighth grade: The dude is a fuckin' total turd.
. . . I definitely would've gotten waxed. . . . It's like some bogus job.
. . . I'm amped, I'm Audi, you buggin . . . You gotta be there fully, go
all out, focus. . . . Dudes have bitten off SET, he's got toys jockin'
him. . . .
They carry beepers, sometimes guns, go upstate or to Long Island to "prey
on the hicks" and to rack cans of spray paint. They talk about upcoming
court cases and probation, about quitting, getting their
lives together, even as they plan new spots to hit, practice their style
by writing on the walls of their apartments, on boxes of food, on any
stray piece of paper (younger writers practice on school
notebooks that teachers have been known to confiscate and turn over to
the police). They call graffiti a "social tool" and "some kind of ill
form of communication," refer to every writer no matter his age as
"kid." Talk in the graffiti life vacillates between banality and
mythology, much like the activity itself: hours of drudgery, hanging out,
waiting, interrupted by brief episodes of exhilaration. JD, echoing a
common refrain, says, "Graffiti writers are like bitches: a lot of lying,
a lot of talking, a lot of gossip." They don't
like tagging with girls ("cuties," or if they use drugs, "zooties")
around because all they say is (in a whiny voice), You're crazy. . . .
Write my name."
WHEN JA TALKS ABOUT GRAFFITI, HE'S reluctant to offer up any of the
media-ready cliches about the culture (and he knows most of them). He's
more inclined to say, "Fuck the graffiti world," and scoff at graf shops,
videos, conventions and 'zines. But he can be sentimental about how he
began -- riding the No. 1, 2 and 3 trains when he was young, bugging out
on the graffiti-covered cars, asking himself, "How did they do that? Who
are they?" And he'll respectfully invoke the names of long-gone writers
he admired when he was just starting out: SKEME, ZEPHYR, REVOLT, MIN.
JA, typical of the new school, primarily bombs, covering wide areas with
throw-ups. He treats graffiti less as an art form than as an athletic
competition, concentrating on getting his tag in difficult-to-reach
places, focusing on quantity and working in defiance of an aesthetic that
demands that public property be kept clean. (Writers almost exclusively
hit public or commercial property.)
And when JA is not being cynical, he can talk for hours about the
technique, the plotting, the logistics of the game like "motion bombing"
by clockwork a carefully scoped subway train that he knows has to stop
for a set time, at a set place, when it gets a certain signal in the
tunnels. He says, "To me, the challenge that graffiti poses, there's
something very invigorating and freeing about it, something almost
spiritual. There's a kind of euphoria, more than any kind of drug or sex
can give you, give me . . . for real."
JA says he wants to quit, and he talks about doing it as if he were in a
12-step program. "How a person in recovery takes it one day a time,
that's how I gotta take it," he says. You get burnt out. There's pretty
much nothing more the city can throw at me; it's all been done." But then
he'll hear about a yard full of clean sanitation trucks, the upcoming
Puerto Rican Day Parade (a reason to bomb Fifth Avenue) or a
billboard in an isolated area; or it'll be 3 a.m., he'll be stoned,
driving around or sitting in the living room, playing NBA Jam, and
someone will say it: "Yo, I got a couple of cans in the trunk. . . ."
REAS, an old-school writer of 12 years who, after a struggle and a number
of relapses, eventually quit the life, says, "Graffiti can become like a
hole you're stuck in; it can just keep on going and going, there's always
another spot to write on."
SAST is in his late 20s and calls himself semiretired after 13 years in
the graf scene. He still carries around a marker with him wherever he
goes and cops little STONE tags (when he's high, he writes,
STONED). He's driving JA and me around the city one night, showing me
different objects they've tagged, returning again and again to drug spots
to buy dust and crack, smoking, with the radio blasting;
he's telling war stories about JA jumping onto moving trains, JA hanging
off the outside of a speeding four-wheel drive. SAST is driving at top
speed, cutting in between cars, tailgating, swerving. A number
of times as we're racing down the highway, I ask him if he could slow
down. He smiles, asks if I'm scared, tells me not to worry, that he's a
more cautious driver when he's dusted. At one point on the FDR, a car
cuts in front of us. JA decides to have some fun.
"Yo, he burnt you, SAST," JA says. We start to pick up speed. Yo, SAST,
he dissed you, he cold dissed you, SAST." SAST is buying it, the look on
his face becoming more determined as we go 70, 80, 90 miles an hour,
hugging the divider, flying between cars. I turn to JA, who's in the back
seat, and I try to get him to stop. JA ignores me, sitting back perfectly
relaxed, smiling, urging SAST to go faster and faster, getting off, my
fear adding to his rush.
At around 4 a.m., SAST drops us off on the middle of the Manhattan Bridge
and leaves. JA wants to show me a throw-up he did the week before. We
climb over the divider from the roadway to the subway tracks. JA explains
that we have to cross the north and the southbound tracks to get to the
outer part of the bridge. In between there are a number of large gaps and
two electrified third rails, and we're
135 feet above the East River. As we're standing on the tracks, we hear
the sound of an oncoming train. JA tells me to hide, to crouch down in
the V where two diagonal braces meet just beside the tracks.
I climb into position, holding on to the metal beams, head down, looking
at the water as the train slams by the side of my body. This happens
twice more. Eventually, I cross over to the outer edge of the
bridge, which is under construction, and JA points out his tag about 40
feet above on what looks like a crow's-nest on a support pillar. After a
few moments of admiring the view, stepping carefully around the
many opportunities to fall, JA hands me his cigarettes and keys. He
starts crawling up one of the braces on the side of the bridge,
disappears within the structure for a moment, emerges and makes his way
to an electrical box on a pillar. Then he snakes his way up the piping
and grabs on to a curved support. Using only his hands he starts to
shimmy up; at one point he's hanging almost completely upside down. If he
falls now, he'll land backward onto one of the tiers and drop into the
river below. He continues to pull himself up, the old paint breaking off
in his hands, and finally he flips his body over a railing to get to the
spot where he tagged. He doesn't have a can or a marker with him, and at
this point graffiti seems incidental. He comes down and tells me that
when he did the original tag he was with two writers; one he half carried
up, the other stopped at a certain point and later told JA that watching
him do that tag made him appreciate life, being alive.
We walk for 10 minutes along a narrow, grooved catwalk on the side of the
tracks; a thin wire cable prevents a fall into the river. A few times,
looking down through the grooves, I have to stop, force myself
to take the next step straight ahead, shake off the vertigo. JA is
practically jogging ahead of me. We exit the bridge into Chinatown as the
sun comes up and go to eat breakfast. JA tells me he's a vegetarian.
IF YOU TALK TO SERIOUS GRAFFITI writers, most of them will echo the same
themes; they decry the commercialization of graf, condemn the toys and
poseurs and alternately hate and feel attached to the authorities who try
to stop them. They say with equal parts bravado and self-deprecation that
a graffiti writer is a bum, a criminal, a vandal, slick, sick, obsessed,
sneaky, street-smart, living on edges figurative
and literal. They show and catalog cuts and scars on their bodies from
razor wire, pieces of metal, knives, box cutters. I once casually asked a
writer named GHOST if he knew another writer whose work I had seen in a
graf'zine. "Yeah, I know him, he stabbed me," GHOST replies
matter-of-factly. "We've still got beef." SET tells me he was caught by
two DTs (detectives) who assaulted him, took his cans of paint and
sprayed his body and face. JA tells similar stories of police beatings
for his making officers run after him, of cops making him empty his spray
cans on his sneakers or on the back of a fellow writer's jacket. JD has
had 48 stitches in his back and 18 in his head over "graffiti-related
beef." JA's best friend and writing partner, SANE SMITH, a legendary
all-city writer who was sued by the city and the MTA for graffiti, was
found dead, floating in Jamaica Bay. There's endless speculation in the
grafworld as to whether he was pushed, fell or jumped off a bridge. SANE
is so respected, there are some writers today who spend time in public
libraries reading and rereading the newspaper microfilm
about his death, his arrests, his career. According to JA, after SANE's
death, his brother, SMiTH, also a respected graffiti artist, found a
piece of paper on which SANE had written his and JA's tag and off to
the side, FLYING HIGH THE XTC WAY. It now hangs on JA's apartment wall.
One morning, JA and I jump off the end of a subway platform and head into
the tunnels. He shows me hidden rooms, emergency hatches that open to the
sidewalk, where to stand when the trains come by. He tells me about the
time SANE lay face down in a shallow drainage ditch on the tracks as an
express train ran inches above him. JA says anytime he was being chased
by the police he would run into a nearby subway station, jump off the
platform and run into the tunnels. The police would never follow. KET, a
veteran graffiti writer, tells me how in the tunnels he would
accidentally step on homeless people sleeping. They'd see him tagging and
would occasionally ask that he "throw them up," write their names on the
wall. He usually would. Walking in the darkness between the electrified
rails as trains race by, JA tells me the story of two writers he had beef
with who came into the tunnels to cross out his tags. Where the
cross-outs stop is where they were killed by an approaching train.
The last time I go out with JA, SET and JD, they pick me up at around 2
am. We drive down to the Lower East Side to hit a yard where about 60
trucks and vans are parked next to one another. Every vehicle is already
covered with throw-ups and tags, but the three start to write anyway, JA
in a near frenzy. They're running in between the rows, crawling under
trucks, jumping from roof to roof, wedged down in between the trailers,
engulfed in nauseating clouds of paint fumes (the writers sometimes blow
multicolored mucous out of their noses), going over some writers' tags,
respecting others, JA throwing up
SANE's name, searching for any little piece of clean space to write on.
JA, who had once again been talking about retirement, is now hungry to
write and wants to hit another spot. But JD doesn't have any paint, SET
needs gas money for his car, and they have to drive upstate the next
morning to appear in court for a paint-theft charge.
During the ride back uptown the car is mostly quiet, the mood depressed.
And even when the three were in the truck yard, even when JA was at his
most intense, it seemed closer to work, routine, habit. There are moments
like this when they seem genuinely worn out by the constant stress, the
danger, the legal problems, the drugging, the fighting, the obligation to
always hit another spot. And it's usually when the day is starting.
About a week later I get a call from another writer whom JA had told I
was writing an article on graffiti. He tells me he has never been king,
never gone all city, but now he is making a comeback, coming out of
retirement with a new tag. He says he could do it easily today because
there is no real competition. He says he was thinking about trying to
make some money off of graffiti -- galleries. canvases, whatever . . .
to get paid.
"I gotta do something," the writer says. "I can't rap, I can't dance, I
got this silly little job." We talk more, and he tells me he appreciates
that I'm writing about writers, trying to get inside the head of a
vandal, telling the real deal. He also tells me that graffiti is dying,
that the city is buffing it, that new writers are all
toys and are letting it die, but it's still worth it to write.
I ask why, and then comes the inevitable justification that every writer
has to believe and take pleasure in, the idea that order will always have
to play catch-up with them. "It takes me seconds to do a quick throw-up;
it takes them like 10 minutes to clean it," he says. "Who's coming out on
top?"
KEVIN HELDMAN lives in New York. This is his first piece for "Rolling
Stone." (ROLLING STONE,FEB 9,1995)
Alright well with that in there I feel like I have given somewhat of a quality journal.
But now back to my journal. Some of you (that read my journal) Might have bin wondering what has bin going on in my life since, July 21st...to put it bluntly Nothing. I think I have gone out and painted once since then. It was really bunk shee-yit. The wall was a paint eater, and I almost got busted....thank god for running like a mother fucker through yards, and a few alleys...The down side to this is I hopped a on fence and didn't watch where/what I jumped into. and *SPlOOSH* I am in the deep end of a pool. Wearing heavey cloths, and carying a bag half full of paint. Well I wasn't too eager to ditch my paint, And I can barly swim...so needles to say that was an expeirience and a half. I managed to get out. and get home. with no fines, and not even wearing cuffs. Yeah it was an adventurious night.
All in all I think that has bin my month since my last journal. Minus getting drunk about two weeks back now. It was pretty fun, though I can't see how people can pain't when they drink...I mean I have a hard time standing....let alone painting.
Well this journal is probabaly long as fuck right now. So I think I am gunna end it right away. Yeah I am. Well good night to you fools who are still awake, and good morning to the poor buggers waking up.
Shout outs...I guess
