“We were waiting in line to buy the paint, 10 cans each, Krylon* brand of course, only the best for us. No runs, no drips. I could feel everyone’s stares of contempt piercing into us. My face showed no fear, betrayed no signs of weakness. I hated these people as much as they hated me. My attitude at the time was fuck the world. What did they ever do for me? As far as I know, they all have nice homes in safe neighborhoods with their nuclear families: 2.3 children, their dog Spot, a nice Brady Bunchesque stationwagon in the driveway, and my aunt Consuela coming over every Thursday to clean their toilet.
I live in Watts. Every day is a struggle to stay safe. Their children have parks to play in. We have trains to spray on. They don’t give us malls or theatres or any place to hang out in and waste time. Nothing but urban blight. We have to find our own fun.
I suppose we looked pretty conspicuous, standing there in that hardware store, surrounded by a bunch of middle-aged construction workers, I mean, what are two teenage punk-looking kids gonna do with so much paint. Paint their bikes? Not with 20 different colors. But I didn’t care because my homeboy just turned 18 and that meant we could finally get our supplies nice and legal. I was getting pretty sick of searching the city for crooked hardware stores where they’ll sell paint to minors. A MacArthur Park fake I.D. would cost too much and besides, I don’t like dealing with that class of criminal. Stealing the paint ourselves was becoming increasingly difficult because of stores’ policies of locking up the paint and following anyone wearing anything remotely baggy.
‘You’re killing our city’
While we’re waiting patiently in line, trying not to drop our loads, this guy comes up to me and my friend and starts hassling us. “What are you going to do with that paint? I know what you’re going to do with it. You’re killing our city, you know? You’re making our city unliveable.”
“What the hell do you mean we, eh, cabrón? The city was like this when we found it. We were just born into it.” That’s what I would have told him if I was sober enough to get the words out.
But, at the time, I was just kind of laughing at the guy, because there wasn’t much he could do about it. I mean, what could he do? Become some vigilante and crusade the streets at night looking for “filthy animal taggers” to shoot in the back, spit in their dying faces and collect the $10 reward? Wait… that’s not funny. It’s happened before. Well, maybe they didn’t spit in the kid’s face, but it has happened. My friend got really pissed and started swearing. Then the old man starts yelling “hoodlum” this and “gangster” that. I didn’t really care what he thought. I was in my own world.
“Yo soy el Beto, Barrio 213, Los Angeles Califas, Aztlan.” I had the insane compulsion to write this over and over, everywhere—bus windows, benches, posts, phone booths, billboards, signs, etc. This was my form of ghetto recreation. I didn’t always write out the whole thing, but used the pieces when I felt it was appropriate. To me it said everything about me. It was my story, my life, condensed into a single phrase, its meaning hidden to the outsiders, only understandable to the ones that were coming from the same place that I was. They saw it, they felt it, they understood. But now I look back on it and I think that it all might have just been a big waste. Energy and efforts spent on nothing. The world of graffiti can kill you, swallow you alive. This signature was my way to show the world that I was a Part of it. I’m from the ghetto and this is my life.
My mission, my purpose was not simply to destroy, though I have to admit that at times that was exactly my intention, but I was always striving for self-expression. But with no one to show me how to go about it, I was left to develop on my own. Maybe if I had been born in the ‘burbs then I would not have been so destructive. At times I wish I had been, I wish I didn’t have all these burdens on me. I saw small glimpses of the world and the nicer things in life from images in TV and movies. Then I would be hit by the reality of my world and lash out at it.
School had no influence on me. It seemed like a joke. No one in my neighborhood has a college degree. If they did, they wouldn’t be living in Watts. Who the hell would go to college? El tamalero? The crack heads? The pimps? I had never seen a college diploma in my life. Graffiti gave us something to do, a direction, even if that direction wasn’t forward. It was how all that anger came out.
We all choose how to live our lives. Our choices were limited. Graffiti didn’t seem so bad compared to gang-banging or drug slanging. It was the cure to those inner city blues. I had family and church, but at the time I didn’t want to listen to their speeches and sermons.
I had to rebel against them. I would close my mind to them and pretend to listen, all the while thinking of my next trip to the train lay-up* a block from my house. I loved that lay-up, it was my own place in the world. Whenever I visited it, I would lose myself in the moment and enjoy climbing around the ladders catching tags* and throw-ups* until our cans ran dry or some angry train conductor yelled at us and chased us away. Sometimes I would see tags from kids as far away as Wisconsin or Iowa. That just totally blew me away. I wondered if some farmer in a corn field wasn’t looking at my name and wondering who in the world I was.
The freights were
my playground
Freight yards are just perfect. They’re safe because when you get chased, there are a lot of different ways to run and escape. There’s alleyways, between buildings, over the fence inside of the factory yards, or into my back yard to safety.
I practically lived on these trains, having resided next to the tracks for years. These were the trains that used to wake me at all hours of the night with their deafening whistles and thundering motions. They felt like a playground to me as a kid. I would walk past them every day on my way to and from school and spent many hours climbing their side ladders, enthralled with the mysterious writing on them. When I got old enough, I deciphered that writing, and often carried a can in my bag to contribute my part to their mystical beauty. They were part of my world.
Trains are naturally the best medium for the art, like travelling billboards.Graffiti belongs on trains. They say that once you are up on a freight you are allowed to stay up. I’m not sure because once I’ve hit a train, I rarely see them again. But I have seen pieces dated as old as 1985 and once in a while, I come across an old tag of mine. Freight cars have serial numbers painted on the sides that I think they use to keep track of them, and you are usually allowed to remain on them as long as you don’t go over the numbers.
Freights are nationalizing the names of writers. Once, on my way to Disneyland, I saw a freight by Zephyr, a really famous New York writer who is considered by some to be one of the pioneers of graffiti. It wasn’t that fancy, just black and white, with straight lettering, but the fact that I was just seeing something painted from 3,000 miles away blew me away.
I’ve often wondered what it would be like to have just gotten on one of those box car freights and let it take me far away to a land where I’d be free to live the way I wanted to, not worried about survival, and I could buy all the Krylon I wanted without being carded.
But I lived in a reality, that forced me to live an underground lifestyle where my art was a crime and I was forced to rack the supplies I used to express myself.
The biggest danger to us in our neighborhood is from the gangs. They’re worse than the cops. They compete with us for space on the walls and neighborhood notoriety. Once, three of my friends bumped into some gangsters on the way home. They asked my friends where they were from. My friends answered they were in a graffiti crew. The gangsters made them strip to their underwear and stole their clothes. The humiliation was infinitely worse than the actual theft.
When they told me the story, I tried my hardest to keep from laughing at them right to their faces, but I really did feel sorry for them. If I were in their situation I wouldn’t have told them jack, call me a ranker* or whatever, but at least I would be a ranker with my pants on and dignity. intact.
Gangs sometimes enjoy starting trouble between different writing crews by crossing out their work and writing the name of another crew*. Me and my friends once almost got into a big rumble with another crew because they claimed that we had crossed them out, but we denied it because it was not true. It kept happening almost every day, and they would approach us all the time. It was pretty bad because a few of them went to the same school we went to. On about the 20th time they approached us, we asked them to take them to the place where we had supposedly crossed them out. They led us to the local spot and I was amazed to see our crew name along with my name written there with their’s crossed out. I knew I had never done it. First of all, the style was totally different (and wack), and secondly the damn thing was spelled wrong. We denied it again but they would not believe us.
The only way that we could settle it was with a battle between us, with the winner recieving payment in props and 5 cans of Krylon each. The winner of the Battle would be the crew who gets up* the most and how big and outrageous they were about getting up*. We immediately called a meeting to get together the paint and it was decided that I and three of the more respected writers would be the first to go at it. We filled the designated spot with huge blockbuster size lettering and hypnotic hieroglyphic tags done with fatcaps* that totally destroyed the pathetic little scribbling of that toy* crew. They were never able to gain ground on us. As soon as they did anything there, the next day one of us would get there and re-devastate them. It was clear that we won the battle. We never got the paint, but we got to punk them all the time.
There is an important distinction between the gang and graffiti cultures. They are not the same thing and often conflict with each other though their root causes can be exactly the same.
With all the dangers that we face, what is it that kept me going? I think I was insane, or I was just a being a teenager. It was fun, being with your friends united for the purpose of wrecking walls. Coming up with all these different styles and challenging kids in your neighborhood to see who is the baddest. Getting up* was like getting high on some wild drug. I think the science geeks call them endorphins. Once we had this in our lives, we had meaning, we had a purpose.
We also had some serious mind-altering substances. It was a modern urbanized L.A. version of the ’60s hippie culture. A lot of writers used to put weed leafs, psychedelic mushrooms, or characters dropping acid as part of their pieces. Some claimed the drugs expanded their creativity and helped them develop their wildstyles,* and if you look at the color schemes of some of their pieces,* you could feel the psychedelic influence in them. The colors, man, the colors.
But the thing about graffiti and other ghetto institutions like drugs and gangs, is that no matter how far you advance in your destructive art, the end result is self-destruction.
For me to come to this point of realization, took a shock to my system of thinking and a little help from my friends. During this time, I was using a lot of drugs, mostly marijuana and LSD, but I had also been experimenting with new drugs like speed and coke. Then one of my friends got some dirty speed and was hospitalized. I could not even bear to go visit him, I was just so devastated. I saw myself and looked at my life, and saw that very easily could have been me. That pushed me away from the drugs. I painfully tried to give them up, and I got the vague hope in me to try to change my life.
A teacher helped me
I had a teacher who helped me pick myself up. She gave me books to read, and helped me to understand them, and told me about more constructive ways to express myself. She helped to channel the energy that went into graffiti into more positive and constructive ways like creative writing, legal murals, and newspaper art production, things that don’t break the laws of this land, and bring fear to the hearts of ultra paranoid suburban American society.
But we never meant to strike fear in people. We wanted recognition from the world. Graffiti was the voice we used to try to speak to you, but what the public heard was not what we were trying to say. The message gets lost. Graffiti is like the riots. People want change and are full of anger, so they express that anger by destroying everything around them, expecting everyone to see the troubles of the city. But all that society can see is an ignorant self-destructive people who don’t deserve to be helped.
If you hate graffiti, I can see your point of view. The stuff you see on the street—the scribbling, the gang stuff, I think it’s ugly too. I have to face it every day. But you don’t know the whole story. I don’t understand why normal people like you aren’t mesmerized by the art the way I am. Maybe you’ve never seen the real thing. The same way others can enjoy abstract, Cubist, and surreal art, I enjoy graffiti. The colors, the forms, the hidden meanings, the organized chaos. I love art just like any other bourgeois yuppie, except MOCA and LACMA ain’t in my neighborhood, and I can’t even afford those tacky, velvet, blacklight posters of dogs playing poker, or Elvis singing, they sell at swap-meets. We have walls and trains in our neighborhood, we have our yards, and I guess that’s what formed my aesthetic; that and those early formative years when my mind was corrupted by TV and Warner Bros. cartoons. I love art. And graffiti is the purest art. Why can’t you see where I’m coming from?
What is the real thing? What is that real graffiti that we love and you seem to hate? Once you see it for yourself you don’t need to ask this question. It’s not the unintelligible scratching you see on bus windows, not the tags you see on liquor stores and freeway signs. The point of these is not to create, but to destroy. Maybe that’s all you’ve seen and know about graffiti, and that is what has formed your perception of the whole medium. But don’t let them be the messengers for you. That element does not represent the real artists, those who know and love graffiti. They are the ignorant troubled ones who are closer to gangsters than potential artists. They need help. But they are also the kids who are trying to develop their skills, their self-expression and their voices; possessed with the same yearning for art, filled with the anger of their world, the dogmas ruling their minds, the feeling of helplessness in trying to change their lives and their environment; trying to learn how to work with the spray can to create and escape. They also need help. Not jail sentences.”