Ja Article

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Heres that article someone was asking about

JA ARTICLE (BY REQUEST)
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 detective 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 deserted 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 stylized, 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?"


Christian Toth lives in New York. This is his first piece for "Rolling Stone." (ROLLING STONE,FEB 9,1995)

[expo]

been on the board more then one time

[GeSuS_KRiST]

wasnt this already a thread?

[/*BlItZ*\]

still a good read though

['EMSAK DHR']

<_< yea! it was a good read BLITZ! i think ja is doin' his thing! hope he keeps it up!







DHR

[glue]

is the article trhread still open?>

[seckzoner]

coolthread, good read, but its been done before! just recently too!

[Lazer]

good ol' ja

[Skore_One]

yeah good thread been done about 6 times and ive read it twice every time hahaha

[ò_Ó ^_^.:.H3@5.:.]

maybe the third time i read it....

[twistedsol831]

long fuckin read but interesting

[fatchicks]

http://www.northbankfred.com/canada.html

the take/ other/ flow parts are the best.

[fatchicks]

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/issues/2002...ml/1/index.html (http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/issues/2002-11-14/feature.html/1/index.html)

KAPER NG.

if you havent read this before
and love freights, read it. one
of my favorites.
besides, it took me
awhile to dig it up again. hahahah

yeah its long...whatareya a pussy?

[GeSuS_KRiST]

fat homie those were really good articals i have to give props to flow too
the one quote by other "JUST ANOTHER HOPELESS HIGH SCHOOL DROPOUT WHO DOES NOTHING BUT HANG OUT IN TRAIN YARDS AND PAINT AND PAINT AND FOR WHAT? WELL, JUST CAUSE IT FEELS SO GOOD" that shit beautiful.... i miss trains so much now after reading that *sigh* good times good time

[dcite]

who cares its already been a thread, its worth a re-read , or attempt at least. good article

[Atic]

i read that so many times before i almost know it by heart

[PANIC!FUP_MORE...]

that was like the 193rd time i read that, how many times has it been posted on here? :lol:

[Resk One]

Originally posted by glue@Oct 27 2004, 11:36 PM
is the article trhread still open?>
No it isnt

I looked for it and Flow looked for it but we couldnt find it

[Copy]

If anyone has the Cope article they should post it up, I only posted this again cause I saw someone was looking for it and the artcile thread was closed :blink:

[boo-yaka]

The Flow/Other article is good, but I want to read the end too, the part with Take5. FatChicks, or anybody else, post it if you've got it.

[fatchicks]

i was gonna read it again today ..shitty...ill try
to find the rest...

[nybomber]

good ass article ;)

[RestoNe]

dammn
i love reading graff stories
gotta post more on teh forums

[bruce]

"I don't know why I still do it," FLOW replies. "Maybe I'm just a loser?"

:lol:

[Jean-Steve's pet peeves]

that article made people crazy when it came out. it should also come as an attachement with the dissed saber piece everytime it's posted somewhere to prevent the toys from going into sissy crying mode

[fatchicks]

that article came out years and years before that happened.
http://img99.exs.cx/img99/3289/halloween0003.jpg
more relevant...how motherfuckers cant get next
to fatchicks halloween realness.

[Mute1]

Originally posted by Jean-Steve's pet peeves@Oct 28 2004, 10:22 PM
that article made people crazy when it came out. it should also come as an attachement with the dissed saber piece everytime it's posted somewhere to prevent the toys from going into sissy crying mode
Hahaha ya...so many times I've seen toys see that dissed pic and go"OMFG TAHT JA GUY IS SUCK A LOOOSAR WHY WOOD HE RITE OVER SUCH A BOOTIFUL PEECE OF ARTWORK!?!?!?!!!!!!!!!!!!!111111111111111111111111 11111111111111111111111111""

[Jean-Steve's pet peeves]

Originally posted by fatchicks@Oct 28 2004, 10:40 PM
that article came out years and years before that happened.

no shit jack.





what's your point?

[fatchicks]

http://img80.exs.cx/img80/1044/image123.jpg

[Skore_One]

/\/\/\/\/\//funny shit

[Skore_One]

now im gonna go read those articles

[atxbomber666]

wait......isnt JA hispanic????remember that state your name video and then its like this dude in a mask and hes like i write JA one????

[MBTA]

that accent was a joke dude

[Tony]

sorry, ja is white.

[tronz.]

i enjoyed reading that a lot, i can't believe they printed that in rolling stone magazine.

[CaSoNe]

i love seeing the ja for and sane bombs on the gates to hell bridge when i drive down to the city...its amazing how those guys even get to those spots

[Ravek]

ahh yes when i drove down to NY i saw those those two bombs, it was awesome to think that 2 well know new york writers were bombing that high up spot and know that they were there

[sika_2002]

does JA still write

[xx13]

yeah i think he does he has beef with a writer named SI


check out the beef page @ kingsofnewyork.net

[sika_2002]

shit man, ts threads still going. thanks

[ez-one]

someone needs to write a book full of stories like that, I'd make it my bible.

[Wakestarr]

goood article, ja's crazy

[sika_2002]

yeh, he one crazy fucker, cant wait till i get a car

[Ume]

Really good stuff, made me go out in a snow storm at 3am to go and paint.

[xx13]

didnt ja also do dat and like some guys chased him with golf clubs and tried to bash his head in?

[LOSTxTHExFAITH]

I wonder if that fruit booter was rocking roller blades when he dissed all 250 feet of Saber's land mark..

[STRIFE]

first time i read it hah hah hah, good stuff

[sika_2002]

haha

[bigbomba']

Read all of this b4

[Whoa]

pic of Ja from stateyourname clip

http://img51.exs.cx/img51/9523/ja0tu.jpg

[Havoc411]

damn, hes fuckin jacked

[Whoa]

i know
the guy is fuckin huge

[SALVO]

karate kid 3

[DC Diesel]

I saw the state your name trailer and that shit is crazy. Does anyone have any JA throwups or anyhing of his, I'e never seen any of it, and I didn't see him do anything in the state your name clip, wut woz up with that?

[SALVO]

Yes you did, you just didn't notice it. He was tagging the side of some freeway.

[DK5600]

the part with him running naked is so funny... its a shame about the crack and sjit though. also where can you find a pic of the dissed saber piece?

[Whoa]

i didnt see anyone running naked
i have the clip but the short clip
anyone have the whole thing
if so
hit me with a PM

peace

[DK5600]

i just ment the part in the articale describing him running around naked tagging

[Whoa]

ah ok, i thought you had the video n stuff

for those who didnt see it

State Your Name (http://www.stateyourname.com)

peace

[Tony]

he's been in lots of movies, his dads a director.

Menace
Gone Fishin'
The Karate Kid Part III

and i think he played a crack head in one of the rocky movies if im not mistaken

[Alchohlics_Anonymous]

damn JA holds it down. wow, this thread is old. <_<

[Mute1]

Originally posted by LOSTxTHExFAITH@Jan 13 2005, 12:09 AM
I wonder if that fruit booter was rocking roller blades when he dissed all 250 feet of Saber's land mark..
A little word of advice... using the word "fruitbooter" as an insult isn't cool outside your queer little clique of fag ass skateboarder friends.

[bumsuckfun]

it's true, i havent heard anyone use the term 'fruitbooter' in an attempt to sound cool, tough, or put down rollerblading since the 90's...

anyway, in the JA article he talks about these people who were crossing him out in the tunnels, and where the crossing out stops is where they got hit by a train...

here's an article i found on lounge37's forums and decided to copy/paste here since it's related... its a long read...

SUBWAY LIVES pt1. JA-SONI/SLICK story
I just started playing around with my Scanner's OCR...
heres a few pages that relate to subway graffiti and the JA/Soni
story from the book SUBWAY LIVES


SONI, a.k.a. Danny Gomez, is very nearly the last of the graffiti tag kings. He lives in Bushwick, a rowdy, working-poor section of Brooklyn, the son of an immigrant Dominican, who arrives at work before dawn in the small bodega he runs seventeen hours a day. Tonight, SONI is going to war against JA-John Avildsen, another tag artist, the son of a Hollywood movie director, who lives not in a hardscrabble section of Brooklyn, but in the fashionable Upper West Side of Manhattan. JA has "dissed" SONI by tagging the home of one of SONI'S closest pals with his nom de graffiti. Their battle will be fought in the perpetual night of the tunnels, as trains roar past, the scrawl of the combatants caught in the strobe of speeding headlights. Graffiti is dying, but SONI and JA intend to go out blazing. The mortal enemy of both SONI and JA is David Gunn. A New England preppy who could have stepped from the pages of A Separate Peace, Gunn is president of the Transit Authority-and the man who declared that he would eliminate graffiti from the subway system. For his success, he has been declared "the man who saved the subways"

1:05 A.M., Bushwick, Brooklyn: Danny Gomez
"I feel," announces SONI, "like getting up." "Yo," says SLICK. "Yo, man, let's get up, but we got to take care of ]A, man." "Check it out," says SONI. "We dry." The Bushwick night is howling to Danny Gomez and Rubin Fernandez. SONI and SLICK. Very nearly the last of the great Brooklyn graffiti writers. Tonight, they face a critical problem: no respect and no way to regain it. They have no paint. They can't get up. You need paint to get up-to shoot your name across the blackstars, the subway. A few days ago, ]A had seriously dissed SLICK. He came by car to 320 Empire Boulevard and tagged up the walls of Slick's house.
JAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJA
All over the walls. Come down and fight, ]A had screamed into the hallway. Fair fight, ]A had hollered. Come on, SLICK, you afraid of a fair fight? Bullshit, man. SLICK wasn't afraid of no fair fight. He told his friends later that he stayed upstairs. There were, like, ten guys with JA, SLICK had said. In a car they came. From Manhattan. Fuckin' JA, man, think he rules the city. Man. Ten white boys he brings. Maybe it wasn't ten, but that was the minimum Slick could be outnumbered by and still keep his respect. SLICK and SONI are members of the Bushwick graffiti posse, U5, which had been formed in the winter of 1986, a marshaling of the dwindling graffiti-writing resources of the largely Hispanic neighbor- hood. JA is John Avildsen, the hated ruling king of graffiti in the city, a white guy from the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His father is a big Hollywood movie guy-director of Joe and the original Rocky, he also produced The Karate Kid and Lean on M e, and even got JA a part in one of the Karate Kid sequels. Worse, JA has almost unlimited access to spray paint and is killing everyone's shit. Buffing over their work. In plain language, he was scrawling on top of their scrawls, their tags, the nearly unreadable scribbles that wallpapered every public space in New York. Now he had come to SLICK'S house and tagged it up. The other fellows in U5 agreed that JA would have to be dealt with. But nobody was down for that tonight. People had school, people had work. Yo, maybe the weekend. For SONI and SLICK, that is too long to wait. Tomorrow, after they went to the Door, their high school in Manhattan, they'd take care of JA. They'd go to one of his tunnels on the West Side. "Yo, my cousin, OS, he's got some paint," says SON!. "We'll catch os tomorrow. We'll hang out at the Door, then we'll go by my cousin's house." "Bet," says Slick. "We gotta kill JA's shit."

*****
And the 63rd Street tunnel turned out to be a spectacular place for teenage boys to hold graffiti-writing parties. Young John Avildisen once played softball there with some pals, including a pal named REAS, who remembered a fine graffiti gallery the city had built him. "Excellent," said REAS. "We brought our beers, we had time to work on our pieces. It was warm, modern and safe. Excellent."
*********

11:25 A.M.: The System
The birthplace of Joseph Ramiro Casiano was painted a deep dark red, just a shade lighter than brown. "Deep red. Tuscan red. Well, box car red. It's actually Fox red. Railroad red," says David Gunn. Call it Gunn red. In 1984, when he came to New York to run the subways, Gunn assumed that everything had gone to hell because it all looked as though it had been decorated there- In fact, a year before Gunn set foot on Jay Street, some 200 cars had been completely rebuilt-new engines, air conditioning, new tiles, better lights. And the graffiti had been sandblasted off. What a shame it would be, one of the members of the MTA board had said, if these overhauled trains were just sent out and immediately scrawled on. In a moment of inspiration, she suggested that they be painted white. The notion was so utterly wrong, so contrary to all dictates of common sense, so close to being the definition of preposterous, that the board was enchanted. Yes, they said, paint them white. It will be a challenge to the graffiti writers. By the time Gunn arrived, there was no sign of any of the over- hauled cars. They had been mixed in with the remainder of the fleet and had vanished in the graffiti haze. "Fifty million dollars and you couldn't tell anything had been done to the cars," Gunn said. He convened his top staff. They would pick a color for the rebuilt cars, distinguishing them from the rest of the trains. And they would protect them. "I want a simple color," Gunn announced. "And I don't want lines in the car-they have a fake paint scheme with a painted blue stripe, trying to make it look like a modern stainless steel car. Well, it doesn't work. Also, if you've got a stripe on the car , when you're trying to get rid of graffiti, you've got a masking problem." A few days later the group returned. "The board room was filled with people," Gunn recalled, "with all these buckets of paint. There must have been twenty people there. They had these swatches. ~d people were going, look at this, look at that, how about this. "Everybody was an expert. This was better than that color. This looks dark here, but it'll look better when you get it on." Gunn walked out of the meeting and back to his office. He dialed a number in Philadelphia, where he had been working until just a few weeks before and reached a man named Joe Lough1in, the superintendent of one of the city's trolley lines. "Joe," said Gunn. "Would you get me a gallon of Broad Street red?" "Sure," said Lough1in. "Can you get it to me right away?" "I'll have somebody deliver it to you." Early the next day, a messenger from Philadelphia arrived at Gunn's home with the bucket of paint. "1 brought it in, and we reassembled the group with their swatches. I said, 'Clear the space.' I opened the can of paint. And I said, 'That's the color.' "They're all saying, 'But-but-' "1 said, 'That is the color.' There was a little mumbling, grumbling. 'That's the color,That's it. Paint a train.' That was probably the most obvious decision I made." And that was how Gunn red came to replace the wallpapered madness that had amused, annoyed, and provoked New Yorkers for most of two decades. The day before JA and REAS blew out of Los Angeles, they'd driven to the U-Haul place and rented a container for the car roof.
As he packed up, getting ready to leave town, JA figured he had racked 700 cans of spray paint. Actually, he had 700 left, having gone through 3,000 cans during his eight-month stay in Los Angeles. "I was getting a hundred and fifty cans a day, " JA told REAS. "The paint is beautiful out here. The racks are incredibly easy." Which meant it was no trouble for him to swipe cans, a dozen at a time, from the shelves and racks. In New York, they were locked away by ordinance. Not so in L.A., which in its innocence, had never been invaded by the likes of JA on "racking" binges. Some kids called it "inventing" their paint. The penal code calls it theft. By whatever means, JA and REAS would be returning home with an arsenal of unprecedented proportions by New York graffiti standards, all of it packed in the U-Haul roof container. JA had left his mark behind on the West Coast. Of course, there were no subways out there-it was, after all, L.A., the expressway capital of the world. So JA bombed highway walls. Buses. All through Venice. He warred with KSN-Kings Stop at Nothing-a major graffiti crew on the West Coast. "Within a week or two, I just wiped them out, everything they had, for no real reason," JA said. JA had been in Los Angeles to try an acting career. As the movie director who' d filmed J oe, R ocky , and The K arate K id, his father, John Avildsen, had found JA a part in Karate Kid III as a henchman of the evil guy terrorizing Ralph Macchio. When that wrapped up, the young Avildsen found little work acting, and spent his time picking tag fights with the local graffiti writers. "They were making millions of public threats that I was going to be shot, " said JA, "that they had the Bloods and the Crips looking for me. Which they swore to be true." REAS-Todd JAmes-had arrived in town a week before, to keep him company on the trip back to New York. JA and REAS were part of a small crew of upper-middle-class white boys in Manhattan who had taken to graffiti writing. Most of the kids in graffiti were poor Hispanics and African-Americans. But there were folks like JA, the son of a major movie director; REAS, a gifted artist from Manhattan's SoHo; and the Smith brothers, known as SANE-David Smith-and SMITH-Roger, whose father was a professor at New York University. The Smiths' most famous tag was executed on the Brooklyn
Bridge, the haunting, romantic nineteenth-century engineering poem that straddles lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. One night, they struck near the top of the giant stone parapets of the bridge. The next morning, a few hundred thousand people riding trains on the Manhattan Bridge, just to the north, could see the SANE SMITH tag. " A million writers will tell you that they thought of doing it," said JA admiringly, "but only the Smiths went and did it." The audacity of these boys-and their status as privileged children-made them choice targets of the police and government authorities. Law cases involving white graffiti writers made the papers. And the white boys were prolific. The Smiths andJA were sued by the city-with their parents also named because the vandalism had occurred while they were minors. Then there was the handwriting analysis case brought against Todd James by the Manhattan district attorney, who tried to prove that the REAS tag discovered on a row of trains one night was his. Of course it was; the prosecutors just couldn't establish it as a matter of law. For all these kids, seeing their name on the news was just another way of getting up-writing their tags, their graffiti names. So was getting arrested. One week, Roger Smith was busted. In a rare twin success, the cops nabbed JA the following weekend. He was taken to the transit police vandal squad office in the East New York section of Brooklyn, where he was booked. "I went into the bathroom to wash the fingerprint paint off my hands," JA recalled, "and I looked in the mirror and saw something on the wall behind me. Nah. Couldn't be. I turned around, and sure enough, there was SMITH, in that squiggled hand- writing, above the urinal. He'd tagged the vandal squad's own bath- room. In their own fingerprint paint." As they drove cross the country on the interstates, JA and REAS got up in the California desert, in Oklahoma, in Texas. No hassle. The stakes were bigger, though, because a slow-moving court in the Southwest had the time and appetite to sink its judicial teeth into a juicy graffiti case-unlike the judges in New York, who could barely find time and space to try violent psychopaths, much less a kid with a spray can. Also, REAS'S mom was getting married and he had to get back for the ceremony. So on their road trip, they threw up a few tags here and there, but didn't stop for any major attacks. "That's for the next time," said JA. Back in New York, JA was generous with the L.A. paint, among his friends, anyway. But he kept racking, whenever someone left a shelf unlocked. His goal, he said, was "trying to have seven hundred or so at anyone time-so I could go out and use twenty in a night, if I felt the need."
11:45 A.M., Bushwick, Brooklyn:
SONI You could have a car, maybe, if you lived in Bushwick and you had enough money. SONI'S father had a car .He got up at five in the morning to drive to the bodega he ran, and he stayed there until midnight. This wasn't a nice suburban town where there were arguments about borrowing the car .The old man had the car eighteen, nineteen hours a day, that was it. But New York kids don't need a car to get around. Even when their arms are too short to straphang, long before they can apply for a driver's license, Bushwick kids have the L train-the Canarsie. The L train could take you anywhere. You could ride it all the way into Manhattan, but even on shorter journeys, a new world rose above every local stop: Myrtle, DeKalb, Jefferson, Morgan, Montrose, Grand, Graham, Lorimer, Bedford. Or you could, as SONI did, ride it to the G train, which would take you back and forth to Queens. Around the same time ]A went to work in Hollywood, SONI started a job at Pergament, a discount hardware chain in the Middle Village area of Queens. It was a long commute, but he had to get some money. He was thinking about college. Today, though, SONI was off from work, and with SLICK and AUDIE was heading into the city on the only car they'd ever known, the L. They were going to take care of ]A once and for all. This was it. A few cans of gray spray paint had been procured, and there was more with SONI'S cousin downtown. The truth was, they were all getting a little tired of graffiti, but ]A wouldn't let it lie. The pride of U5-their graffiti posse-was at stake. The beef with him had started a year before, when they had done some big pieces out in the train lay-up at 121st Street in Queens. A very sweet lay-up it was, too, because the trains would be parked on some elevated tracks between rush hours, from ten in the morning until three in the afternoon. You could go there and take off your shirt, catch some sun, and work in the leisure of daylight, rather than in the shadows of the tunnels. The boys from US had hit the yard with green house paint. Using rollers, they had tinctured three cars, from top to bottom, windows included. That was the base; then they launched the colors. They'd started several pieces-masterpieces, or "burners"-when the police arrived. After the members of the Bushwick crowd had either escaped or gotten handcuffed and led away, JA arrived with SMITH, and they proceeded to write all over the cars that the U5 crew had begun. "You use white, yellow, baby blue, pastel aqua, a hot pink, plum, and you blend with the colors to make a vibrant piece against your background," explained JA. "They didn't get halfway through that stage when they were raided. I didn't know what it said, or even who wrote it. If it was done by someone I knew, I would have tried to finish it for them." Instead, he launched a rocket attack of his own tags. This was the start of the hostilities, the Fort Surnter of the late graffiti period. U5, with SONI leading the retaliation, began to write over JA'S tags. He buffed back. And so on, for weeks on end, and no one was running any productive pieces on the train. One day, there was a call to JA from SONI. "We want to squash beef with you," said SONI. Call off the quarrel. "Fuck that. You dissed me, man. That's that. Time for war." "Let's meet up." "Nab." "Yo, why don't you want to squash beef?" "Yo, you set if off, you know. Face the music." "Yo man, c'rnon, let's meet at 121lay-up," said SONI, picking the same train yard where it had all started. JA considered for a moment. "Yeah, I'll meet you there at twelve tonight. Dress warmly. " "Bet." That night, the U5 crew waited for JA. They had brought a bucket of yellow house paint, and began to tag the cars with handprints. SONI and AUDI did burners. As the hours stretched on, no JA. Someone kicked in a few windows on the cars, frustrated by his arrogance. Around 2:30, the last of U5 had left the yard, through the hole in the fence, next to the Long Island Rail Road tracks. A few minutes later, JA and two pals strolled in through the same hole. They pulled out spray cans and slashed the U5 burners with paint, and laid their own tags on top. Then the coup de grace: VICTORY IS MINE-AGAIN! EAT SHIT! Gratified by his labors, JA drove back to Manhattan. The next morning, his phone rang early. "Yo," said SONI. "YOU didn't show up." JA laughed. He could roll out of bed, still half asleep, and spit a rival square in the eye. "I just waited till you guys left so I could stamp all your shit, " said JA. SONI realized then what JA had done, that the train would parade his humiliation across the city. He scrambled for a retaliatory tactic: "Yeah, well, one can is going to dog all that shit you did," said SONI. "Too late," cackled JA. "It already pulled out." . SON! knew the time, knew that JA was right: the train already was in service. "just something to make them feel stupid when they saw the train go by, " JA later explained. This was the last attempt at a truce between 05 and JA, although for a while, the war went into an extended cease-fire-when JA moved to L.A. for his work in Karate Kid /1I. After a couple of months, the guys in 05 were getting restless. Their lives were going on. Married. Kids. Jobs. Graffiti writing was getting old. The trains were beat. The trains were clean. A train with a big piece on it, something you'd worked on all night, wasn't going out of the yard. Hell, a train with a tag wasn't going out. It was getting to be a waste of paint. AUDI called a meeting and made an announcement: "This is the deal. We're going to close down 05 for 'ninety. Before then, we're going to king the city. The streets. Write everywhere we can. After we reach our goals, like a writer wants to, we're going to break up 05, because we don't want 05 to fade away, like a crew that was tough, and the new writers come up and they go over us. We don't want to go out like that. We want ******s to know that when U5 was strong, nobody would take us down. "Even if they buff us after we stop writing, they know that if we was together, they couldn't handle us. That's the point." Later, AUDI explained, "It went beyond trains. Streets, mainly. What we hit now is trucks, the streets, things that still move. Like the train used to be. Garbage trucks." AUDI could talk tough. He could talk about kinging the city. But his boys were growing out of it. Then one day, JA returned, and he seemed to have more paint than God.
5:15 P.M., JAy Street, Brooklyn: David Gunn
David Gunn gives every appearance of being an adult-he is well over six feet tall, has beaten cancer, and has run three major rapid transit systems-but he is possessed of a child's energy. After a big meeting, he'd bounce in and out of his office every five or ten minutes, replaying winning arguments and turns of phrase with Peter Barrett, an aide who was particularly low key. Gunn would sit down in his chair, return a phone call or two, and try to read a memo, but some fugitive thought would come to mind, and he'd spring to his feet and stride across an alcove to Barrett's cigarette-hazed office. Gunn is a bubbler, a kid, people say, explaining why they find it impossible not to like him. Today, when he gets back to the thirteenth floor at Jay Street, the MT A meeting just past is still on his mind. At his office, his secretary, Monica Santanelli, hands him a batch of messages and reminds him of an appointment that would delay any postmortem of the meeting just past. A gang of Parisians awaits him in the office. Gunn is well practiced at the hearty greeting, though his hospitality tends to run no further than coffee and bowls of unsalted and butter-free popcorn. Which means that people frequently get right down to business when they come to see him. "How did you do it?" asks the head of the delegation. The question was kind of funny. Everybody was always wondering why the New York subways couldn't be like the French-or the British, or the Swedish-and yet, all those
"New York," Ed Koch once said, "is where the future comes to audition." An arrogant remark, in some respects; accurate, too. At the end of the 1980s, graffiti was reaching the status of pestilence in many of the world's other major subway systems, just as it was being eradicated from New York's. Gunn wastes no time gloating. He cannot forgive New York's failure to stop graffiti at the very beginning. "You better deal with it now or it will become a massive problem for you," he warns the Paris delegation. "I mean, there was, in my opinion, no excuse for that /, ever getting out of control here the way it did." It began, in a burst of innocence and excitement, around 1970 and captured a certain kind of imagination outside the borders of tbe middle class: for the art crowd, it was the great spirited voice of the If .- ghetto rising. For Europeans, it was as exciting as Jazz. That year a Greek-American kid from Washington Heights named Demetrius went to work as a messenger. He rode the subways from one end of the city to the other, delivering packages and envelopes. Soon, people noticed cryptic words scrawled on the walls of stations, in cars, everywhere, it seemed. TAKI 183. As his name rolled across the city on subway cars, he became an underground mystery. Maybe these were surveyors' marks for the new subway line that was always being built. Or a coded message for terrorists. Then the New York Times discovered that TAKI was a person. It was a diminutive for Demetrius. On the condition that they not reveal his last ' name, he explained why he wrote: "I didn't have a job then, and you pass the time, you know," he \ said. "I just did it everywhere I went. You don't do it for the girls, they don't seem to care. You do it for yourself. You don't go after it to be elected president. ...I don't feel like a celebrity normally. But the guys make me feel like one when they introduce me to someone. 'This is him,' they say. The guys know who the first one was." Demetrius of 183rd Street between Audubon and Amsterdam Avenues, known evermore as TAKI 183, caught fame. For New York kids, the subways always have been a nearly perfect form of mobility: no driver's test required. Not much cost. Available around the clock. No parental hassle. But also, no status-no " way to whitewall the tires, no flashy equalized stereo systems, no five-speed transmissions to gun up and down the avenues.
Graffiti changed all that. Tags, spray-painted on a car that moved past millions of people, evolved before their bleary eyes into a typography of flourishes and stars, clouds and crowns, the ornamentation so thick and rich that the names were recognizable only to other kids. Even the names were code: FLASH. SCENE. CRASH. DAZE. LEE. DONDI. They reigned in a dark empire well known to the authorities of the street world. The kids could find emergency hatches in the sidewalks that led directly into tunnels, or pad along catwalks to areas where trains were laid up. The third rail, carrying 640 volts of elec- tricity, was instant, fried death in the eyes of the adult police officer; young graffiti writers danced over it, knowing where to put their feet. The more juice, the bigger the thrill. Official notice of the graffiti phenomenon came on a summer day in 1973 when Mayor John V. Lindsay went to Brooklyn to cut the ribbon on a new municipal swimming pool. The new pool was a typical Lindsay-era project: an amenity in a poor neighborhood that, symbolically and practically, might cool people off during the deranging heat of New York summers. Lindsay was beyond his hour of hope then, his campaign for the presidency having died a quick and public death, and his energies for running New York City having waned after seven and a half years. The press no longer cared where he went or what he did. Still, the pool was a Lindsay win. It had survived in the city's capital budgeting, a brutal process often dictated by powerful construction interests more concerned with roads and giant edifices. As he walked in, Lindsay looked around. Before a single drop of water had been stirred by swimming kids, graffiti had been splashed over the walls of the pool, on the benches and the walkways. A group of neighborhood boys, outfitted for the ceremony in bathing suits, crowded around the mayor. "You gotta see the locker rooms," one of them said. There, it was the same story: marker scrawls across the new cabinets, on the floor, the walls. "It's stupid," said the boy. "Brand new and its messed up al- ready." Steaming, Lindsay returned to City Hall and walked into the office of his chief of staff, Steve Isenberg. "Get the fucking place cleaned up," Lindsay ordered. "I want you to get on top of the graffiti." Isenberg launched a press war against the manufacturers of spray paint, and pushed shopkeepers to shelve cans and markers out of reach. Laws were passed making it a crime to carry an open spray can. Vandals were sentenced to clean up their own messes. Lindsay sniped at the MT A about its ineffective measures against graffiti. More than half the fleet had to be stored out- side secure areas and there was no stopping the tireless writers. By the end of his final term in 1973, the city was spending $10 million a year on graffiti removal. The announcement raised goose bumps among teenagers around the city. Ten million! And they, the kids, with spray paint they had "invented," grabbed for free in hard- ware stores, were winning: by then, 63 percent of the subway cars were covered with it. The number grew daily. To catch the graffiti writers, transit police spent long nights hunkered down in the weeds of Bronx cemeteries, positioned on tombstones with infrared binoculars that allowed them to peer into the adjacent train yards. The few kids who were caught laughed at the cops. They walked in and out of courts crowded with violent criminals. In the police vandal squad, Roger Smith had tagged the men's room with the paint that had just been used to fingerprint him. And if any mayor had stuck his head out the window of City Hall, he risked having his nose tagged with Day-Glo pink or gringo gold: not 100 yards from City Hall was a major production center for subway graffiti. In the very hole in the earth occupied, a century earlier, by the magical wind subway train tunnel of the inventor Alfred Ely Beach was the perfect studio for graffiti. Behind a locked, unmarked door in the City Hall BMT station is a flight of stairs down to an unused platform and level of tracks. Here in this lay-up area for the N and the R lines were prime spaces for the graffiti writers of the 1970s and 1980s. The city had built two stations on top of each other. The lower one was part of an expansion plan that was dropped. The facility was unused, except for storage of trains between rush hours. The Rolling Thunder Writers- the RTW crew-took over the lower level and executed "burners"- colossal murals-that are still spoken of with awe among graffiti alumni. The simple tags of TAKI 183, once mistaken for the dry musings of an engineer laying out a tunnel, had given way to great dancing murals. Love letters, and political messages, girls with improbable breasts, soared atop the old trains. Cartoons moved across the city eye. The City Hall lay-up, old Beach's tunnel, was perfect for such detailed work "because it has a platform, and (we) could do top to bottom writing. There were lights there," said REAS. "In the yards, a lot of times, you have just a foot and a half to work in, and the trains are way taller than you can reach," said JA. "City Hall was perfect. " It aroused the imagination and the indignation. "The thing that depressed me most about the subway, and everyone else, was the \ graffiti," said Felix Cuervo, a federal worker who grew up in the city ~d did not learn to drive until he was over fifty. (And gave it up when he turned seventy, in favor of the subways. ) "When the city was on the verge of bankruptcy in the early seventies, each time I saw a graffiti-covered subway car , I felt like crying-the graffiti seemed to me a realistic symbol that my hometown, if New York City can be called a hometown, was really going down the drain." No doubt millions felt just like Cuervo. But graffiti chic also arose. "I've always wanted to put a steel band with dancing girls on a flat car down in the subways and send it all over the city. It would slide into a station without your expecting it. It's almost like that now," Claes Oldenberg, pop artist, told New York magazine in 1974. "You're standing there in the station, everything is gray and gloomy, and all of a sudden one of those graffiti trains slides in and brightens the place like a big bouquet from Latin America. At first, it seems anarchical-makes you wonder if the subways are working properly. Then you get used to it. The city is like a newspaper anyway, so it's natural to see writing all over the place." Norman Mailer wrote "The Faith of Graffiti," an extended, meditative essay on subway pictures. " At night, the walls of cars sit there like the mechanical beast of omnibus possessed of soul-you are not just writing your name but trafficking with the iron spirit of the vehicle now resting. What a presence." He was loudly denounced; essentially for thinking the graffiti had any value. The only correct value was to curse graffiti from the pulpit of public office and the editorial page. Not a word of these homilies could reach the ears of the boys and young men who labored in the graffiti world; in fact, Mailer had captured the wild noise of their hearts. Painting on walls was a game for "toys," the apprentices of the graffiti world. Subways were the peak. "The main thing was to hit the trains," said SMITH. "It's more of a rush-you're communicating with the trains," said JA. "Things that move," said AUDI. "Writing is like an addiction, " adds REAS. "You get a Ban deodorant roll-on and take the top off. You buy the ink, put it inside the roll-on bottle, then get a chalkboard eraser and tear a strip. If you had drippy tags, it showed you had a lot of ink and you were taking over the entire space. It was-" "Vandalism," says SMITH, laughing. I' "It was good," says REAS. "You were like, yo, check out my drips. The tirades that greeted Mailer were unlikely to persuade REAS, or, if they did, would only encourage the black spirit that lifted his gifted hand to draw, on a station wall, a startling lifelike pile of steaming turds with a balloon message: EAT IT. Guard dogs were assigned to the yards, briefly, at the behest of Mayor Koch, despite worries that they would cause more trouble by being hit with trains than they would solve . "I would prefer wolves," Koch announced. He had sworn off the subways, but the graffiti issue was a nightly blight on television news-not only because people were talking about it, but because the decline of the subway system had become the number-one problem of average New Yorkers during the 1970s. Every night, break- downs and fires stranded thousands. This demon, graffiti, was the most visible icon of a failing, dying subway system, collapsing from government ineptitude, ignorance, helplessness, not from Magic Markers. If Koch or any other senior public official had been a regular user of the city subway system, they would have known that graffiti were no more than a signature on a plaster cast on a leg: what kept the patient from walking wasn't the cast or the scrawled names on it, but the fractured bone beneath it, unable to carry any weight. The graffiti were a symptom, yet on the lips of scores of politicians and news- casters, they reigned as both substance and style.


PART 2
But graffiti were an empire tottering of it’s own weight. The quality and energy of the writing dwindled in its birthplace with the rise of its cachet. "The top names were pulled into the mainstream art world," notes SMITH. Gallery exhibitions were organized, and tourists, especially Europeans, would come to view subway-style murals. The writers began to earn good money-money unheard of in the scrape-by streets of the Bronx and Brooklyn where the greatest talents had bloomed. Money that lifted the best of the writers and artists out of the subways. "After 1982, that was when you started to see a lot of throw-ups," said SMITH. "A throw-up? That's when you just throw a tag up on a wall. You'd start getting whole trains, just tags, people tag over other tags."
The writers started wars that consisted of little more than illegible scrawls over someone else's throw-up, like dogs waiting to lift a leg at a cherished fire hydrant. The age of graffiti was coming to an end. Not only were the galleries pulling out the most inspired talents, but the arrival of Gunn and his boss, Robert Riley, at the Transit Authority, had signaled a whole new approach to the war with the tottering cast of writers. David Gunn started his first year by hiring hundreds of new car cleaners. To pay for them, he did not replace mechanics as they retired or quit. A few voices protested that this substituted cosmetic improvements for the meat and potato work of maintenance, but even with fewer mechanics the reliability of the trains nearly tripled during Gunn's tenure. This was due, primarily, to replacing 70 per- cent of the battered old fleet with new or overhauled cars. The old fleet remained terrible. As part of his emphasis on the appearance of the trains, Gunn appointed A. Richardson Goodlatte as the chief mechanical officer. Goodlatte, despite his title, was mechanically illiterate: once, he tes- tified before the legislature that he was unable to read blueprints. He said that he didn't know which end of a wrench was up-not surprising, since his academic training was in accounting and political science, which gave him little preparation for the upkeep of $6 billion worth of cars and their associated pneumatic, electrical, and mechanical systems. But Goodlatte was meticulously organized. And he was devotedly loyal to Gunn. He launched a Clean Car program with missionary fervor.
Every week, he chaired a graffiti task force at the Transit Authority-with high-ranking executives from every department within the 50,OOO-person bureaucracy. With Gunn's backing, Good- latte worked line by line.
Once a car was declared graffiti-free, it was not allowed to leave a terminal with new writing on it. Instead, the train was removed from service. The edict was enforced with suspensions and penalties for train dispatchers who violated it. It was a profound insight: writers felt greatest pleasure seeing a fresh tag or piece moving through the city, a supreme achievement, equal to a suburban kid's Simonized car. With that thrill gone, so was the drive to write. "The trains are dead, a waste of paint," AUDI had said in 1989.
The Gunn administration was relentless. It accumulated scores of Labor Department violations by operating unsafe car-wash facilities where workers often were drenched in mists of toxic chemicals. When the governor finally applied pressure, Gunn and company instituted a worker safety program. By then, two hundred people had been treated for central nervous system damage brought on by exposure to the harsh chemicals. Acid washes were applied that stripped graffiti-but also ate through the floor boards, corroded electrical parts, and undermined structural elements of the cars. A transit manager who pointed out that the acid also had lethal effects on the workers handling them was banished to bureaucratic Siberia.'
Even during a drought alert in 1988, the subway car washes continued to operate, as if these somehow were exempt from the strictures imposed on every other government agency and business in the , city. Bull strength knocked out graffiti. But it wasn't just a group of transit managers. "For some unexplained reason this summer is proving to be an exception to the historic rule that summer is the worst season for graffiti, " a member of the T A graffiti task force reported in August 1985. "Except for the Number Seven line, which is still hit regularly, hits have been minimal-about one a day per line on the average." The graffiti writer Roger Smith had a theory, "Look at the kids from my block," says SMITH, who grew up in what is acclaimed as the city's toughest drug neighborhood, where a middle-aged United States senator and federal prosecutor arrived in preposterous biker gear and still were able to score crack in a few minutes. "Any kid in Washington Heights, they stole chains, they wrote graffiti-when they were nine. When they were thirteen, they started holding drug money. Now they don't write graffiti, they have incredible cars. Around 1985 was the last burst of creativity. Mass amounts of people were dropping out to gangs, crack. The arrests for graffiti are way down." Hard as it was for adult society to admit, graffiti writers had been basically nonviolent, and creative impulses attended at least the ambitious projects. In 1986, when SONI and SLICK came downtown from Bushwick with AUDI, they'd unlock a gate and sneak into the City Hall lay-up. But the lay-up had been taken over by the Hot Crew, with the Rolling Thunder writers having vanished for more profitable pursuits. The Hot Crew had guns, ran drugs, and used the lay-up as little more than a hideout during police crackdowns on crack trade in the street. The gang, from a Lower East Side housing project, consisted of "the most scheming people. You wouldn't want to write when they were there," said JA. "They cut this one guy from ear to ear with a razor. That's why you wanted to go in bulk-if not for the company and the comradery, then for the protection." "We never let no other people push us around," said AUDI. "We fought for what we believed. In this neighborhood, you were fighting since you were a little kid." U5 was made of tough kids, but they were hardly criminal class. They were interested in splashing a few tags around, and toyed with ideas of becoming graphic artists. Those who stayed with graffiti generally stayed away from drugs. Those who didn't, the "generation of stupid slaves," as SMITH described them, had no patience for the bloodless vandalism of painting a train. Gunn beat them. Galleries took the talent. Crack killed the rest. By late 1989, the kids had just about given up on the subway system: from the peak of eighty a day, the hits were down to four or five, an easily manageable number. And it was this success that brought people from around the world to see David Gunn.
6:25 P.M., Lower Manhattan: SONI and SLICK
A good long ride from Bushwick is The Door, way downtown on the cusp of SoHo and TriBeCa, two old industrial zones that recently went high chic. The L all the way to Eighth Avenue. Then an E train down to Spring Street, and a block south to Broome Street. There. The Door's banner hangs over the entrance, swaying lightly in the breeze. It took a solid forty-five minutes on the train, but AUDI and SLICK and SONI were members in good standing of The Door and made the trip three or four days a week. Most youth centers are built on unkept promises. One night, a forgotten crisis commands the attention of the press and the politicians: a murderous rumble, say, or a wolf pack rampaging through a serene part of town. Let's get them something besides the street. Start some programs. From these traumas is brewed a nostrum of jaded adults reading newspapers, a Ping-Pong table with chewed corners and a sagging net. Cast-off folding tables. A basketball court ruled by ten kids. Another handful who hang out near the Nok Hockey table. If a puck
can be found. If the set still exists. Even with fists full of city dollars, most after-school programs are held in the same barren public buildings that, day behind day, exist only by the power of inert bureaucrats who fill out forms for books that never arrive, semester upon semester, in buildings that were new fifty years ago and haven't seen a roofer in twenty-five. Where teachers with a notion or two about how to engage kids are eaten alive. And where only those with enough political hooks can land a gig in the after-school youth program at $26 an hour , with little chance they will stir themselves or anyone else. And here come the boys from Bushwick, killing an hour on the train to get to The Door . At the very first, The Door surprises with the lavishness "of its physical appointments. Why is so much money spent on these modular furnishings?-these corporate-style office pods where counseling is given, the oak banisters along the splashy mid-room stairways, the subtle but profuse lighting? This was the design vocabulary of a first-rate private school, the sort of place where you might find the children of the city's rich ghettos. But just past the entrance, near the reception desk, a sign an- nounces that this is not an exclusive holding pen for youngsters waiting to assume a position of comfort in life:
TRAIN PASS SCHEDULE: 7:15 P.M. 8:15 P.M. 9:00 P.M. 9:30 P.M. Tues., Wed.
See, the train passes provided by city schools are no good after 7 P.M. The city doesn't want kids riding the trains for free all night long. For The Door, the TA makes an exception, since its activities don't get rolling until two in the afternoon. Then, during the evening, an announcement is made for the Train Pass, an escorted walk to the subway, with a counselor who shows a clerk the proper papers for the students to pass through the gates. Around the city, chartered buses shepherd privileged children to and from home, to avoid the dread subways. Not the kids at The Door. At The Door, a kid can take a class in ceramics. Learn the double somersault. Act in a play. Meet a counselor about a bad situation. Find a job. Or, as Danny Gomez was doing, finish the courses for a graduate equivalency diploma, so he can become the first member of his family to apply for college. The Door, in short, is a department store for the emotional and social lives of New York teenagers. It has a nursery for teenage mothers, and a health clinic, complete with laboratory and pharmacy. Any teen needing a lawyer can find one here-and more to the point, a lawyer who would do more than try to beat a court case, would also help turn kids away from the uncaring arms of the law. The institution reports that six thousand kids a year visit, of their own free will, free of charge.
First stop for AUDI, SONI, and SLICK is the weight room downstairs. Sheets of paper lie along the walls for graffiti tags-authorized writing , with none of the hot outlaw flame of drawing on a train, but The Door is their place, and graffiti-free but for the assigned space in the weight room. "They want to be part of the system," said Elma Denim, The Door's associate director. "They're being held out of it. That's why there's all this rage. They're not breaking down the system." SONI and SLICK have signed the paper on the wall. But they wanted more. They had to have more: SLICK has been humiliated.
"We could kick JA'S ass if we ran into him," says SONI. AUDI grunts and bench presses. Fat chance. JA lived in an elegant apartment house in one of the finest neighborhoods in the city, the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and had gone to a high school where the tuition and fees were over $9,000 a year. That was just about a full year's pay in most Bushwick houses: the mean income there was $10,000, one-third that of the Upper West Side. A baby born in SONI'S neighborhood had a 70 per-cent higher chance of dying before its first birthday than in JA'S. A thousand buildings had been abandoned or torn down since 1970 in Bushwick. On the Upper West Side, condominiums had been pried into every square yard of space.
The murder rate for Bushwick was four times that of the Upper West Side, death by cirrhosis or chronic liver disease 70 percent higher. In short, Bushwick had many of the earmarks of a third-world country. Once, it had been a great center for German immigration and for beer production, with fourteen breweries in an eleven-block area. It also boasted a dozen theaters, including the first in the United States to use electric lights. The Irish followed the Germans into the tenements, then the Russians and the Poles. After the Depression, the Italians arrived. In the 1950s, the area was cleared of middle-class whites in a spectacular housing scam: rampant blockbusting was accomplished by offering easy mortgage credit to scraping-by minor- ities at scandalously high rates. What banker could do this? None, without the help of Uncle Sam, which guaranteed the mortgages to people unable to carry them and thus oversaw the meltdown of the neighborhood.
Whites fled to the newly opened suburbs. Puerto Ricans, without jobs, without education, without English, settled the husk of Bushwick. In this, Bushwick, like virtually all New York neighborhoods, is very much a historical shell through which great churnings of people pass: there are practically no old New York families, practically no New York neighborhoods where familial lines extend more than a single generation or two.
In the late 1970s, Bushwick changed again. Jose Gomez left the tiny village of Denares, near the city of San Francisco in the Domin- ican Republic, and found a home with other Dominicans among the cinders of Bushwick.
In time, the father sent for the rest of the family, his wife, the three boys and a girl, and scraped together the cash to open his own bodega in the East New York section of Brooklyn. (The su- permarket, with sprawling aisles and acres of groceries, could not survive the New York real estate market, leaving thousands of tiny niches for all-purpose grocery stores, known in Hispanic neighbor- hoods as bodegas-crowded but complete Noah's arks of victuals.) Mr. Gomez spent nearly all his waking hours there, accompanied by his son, Ramon. But not Danny. He was SONI, he wanted more. He wanted to catch fame. He had gone part of the way through Bushwick High School, and along the way, made the friends who formed U5.
Maybe to the rest of the world, the graffiti scene was fading in the mid-1980s as SONI and SLICK and AUDI came of age. But U5, their crew, had a purpose. They were a loose grouping of teenagers going through high school in a decaying city, who could see ahead of them long hours in the bodegas with their parents, or car repair shops, or a job in one of the envelope factories still running in Brooklyn. In their generation were kids who could swing knives and bats and rampage through subway trains. Other kids could hang out on comers and wave 9-millimeter guns. The graffiti kids went to make their mark another way.
"There were a lot of crews here in Bushwick. I wanted a central crew, that would be known citywide, that would be powerful," said AUDI. "That's when I made up U5. Instead of two letters and three numbers, I decided to make a letter and a number. It was something new, that nobody ever had, a letter and a number. We caught fame. But we gained it, too."
They would meet on nights in the apartment of Jesus Torres, who could draw cartoonlike figures so well that he was commissioned to paint a line of sneakers for a company in Puerto Rico. There, in Jesus's bedroom, they would plot their strategies. A subway map hung on the wall behind the door, so that routes could be studied. Soon, though, the map in Jesus's room started to look like the ones in the subway: so obliterated with tags that it was impossible to read.
"We used to go hit the trains every week," said AUDI. "We went on a frenzy. We used to go every week. Sometimes, even, like three times a week. We used to hit a lot. We wanted to give U5 a name. We wanted to catch fame among the young people, you know, the writers." "In our school, there was at least fifteen people from U5-they was into graffiti," said Jesus Torres. Sometimes, there was problems with rival groups and things like that. But most of the people in U5, they're strictly into art. They're not into drugs. They're not into the streets. They don't be hanging out, or all that, none of that stuff. Most of them are well-spoken, they're intelligent people. They're striving for their goals. Most of them work, you know, and have decent jobs. I work as a cook. In the Empire State Building, Houlihan's. I cook shrimp- I'm in the mid-fry. Onion soup, clams, whatever.
SONI had his job at Pergament, a big home improvement and house- wares place. But after he started going to The Door, he wanted more. There, he was learning a few other ways of earning self-respect besides scrawling a name on a train. In a month or two, he'd be done with the courses, and could send in the application to Manhattan College. The graffiti scene was kind of dead. But this stuff with JA. Man, he couldn't walk away from that. They walked over to a pool on Carmine Street with one of the staff people from The Door. They'd take a swim and be about their business.


6:40 PM, Upper West Side: JA
A surprising portion of the thirty thousand licensed liquor establishments in and around Manhattan have stayed afloat on the patronage of generation upon generation of affluent teenage prep school students. Rich kids have boozed away their parent's money in a succession of fashionable dives long before Holden Caulfield binged his way through midtown. Robert Chambers, the preppy murderer, spent the night of the killing in a bar crowded with underage drinkers like himself. Dorrian's Red Hand and the Wicked Wolf were at one time two of the Upper East Side perennials favored by kids from Dalton, Collegiate, Trinity, Horace Mann-the great names in New York high school education, at least among folks with nine or ten thousand dollars a year for tuition. They drank mixed concoctions like Singapore Slings and screwdrivers and Harvey Wallbangers and Kirs, or guzzled imported beers like Corona and Heineken.
Not JA. He curled his lips at the mention of the preppy bar scene. It was definitely out, especially after high school. He and his Pals headed downtown, to the hot club-whichever one it was that Season, for hot clubs had the half-lives of butane lighters.
A week ago, when it all came to a head between JA and the boys from U5, JA had spent a good part of the night at MK's-one of these firefly establishments. The $20 cover charge applied only to saps without a pass or a connection with the bouncer-a fee intended to keep out the "bridge and tunnel crowd," the people who had to come from somewhere else to the island of Manhattan, and who were congenitally unhip by club standards.
JA was drinking heavily. At the bar, he bumped into COCER, who ran around on the periphery of U5.
"You're JA?" said COCER. "Whoa, man. I know these dudes, SLICK and SONI. They been after your ass for the longest time. They say you been ducking them."
"Hey," said JA. "I'll take SONI on. Anytime." "I don't know SONI so well," said COCER. "I hang with SLICK. He says you a pussy, a sucker."
"I'll fight either one of those guys-but where? I can't make them appear."
"SLICK says he's gonna fuck you up."
"Yo, let him name the time." "Yo, let's go to his house, I'll show you where he lives."
Just before dawn, JA and COCER, along with REAS and VEN, two of JA'S pals, drove through the dark streets of Bushwick. JA wondered about this move. But he didn't want COCER to think he was dodging a chance to go face to face with SLICK.
In the vestibule of the apartment building, COCER leaned into the buzzer for several minutes until a groggy voice answered.
"Yeah," said the voice.
JA pushed COCER aside and spoke into the mouthpiece.
"Yo, it's JA."
"Yeah."
"Come downstairs if you want to fight me."
"You got the wrong buzzer."
COCER shook his head. "Yo, SLICK, come on down, man, and fight."
"You got the wrong place." JA turned to COCER.
"What's up with this kid?"
"It's the right buzzer-I been to his house before," said COCER.
JA buzzed again and spoke into the microphone. "Yo, SLICK, you're fronting, talking all this jazz about how you gonna kick my ass and not backing it up. Well, come downstairs and back it up."
"Fuck that," said COCER. "Now he's going to call his boys."
In a bag, JA had a few spare cans of spray paint. He copped a few tags on the outside of the building. REAS and YEN watched. This was JA'S beef, not theirs, and tagging someone's house was heavy. Very heavy.
Fuck SLICK, thought JA. Now it was brightening outside, and a man stuck his head out a third-floor window and hollered something at the kids in front of the building. They decided it was time to leave. Where am I, JA wondered? He looked at a street sign, and saw Empire Boulevard and Rogers Street. SMITH'S name was Roger. The name stayed with him as he slumped into the seat and rode back to Manhattan. Otherwise, he had no idea where he was.
SLICK discovered the infamy scrawled on his house when he came downstairs that morning. Word moved quickly through Bushwick of JA'S attack because COCER had seen the whole thing. "Ten guys, they came in cars from Manhattan," SLICK explained to his friends.

10:19 P.M., Canal Street, Manhattan: SONI and SLICK
They pay your way home from The Door at night after the train pass is no good. They have to. You run a school that doesn't open until two in the afternoon, nobody goes home until eight or nine o'clock, the subway pass has been dead for two hours already.
A man from The Door had escorted them to the subway station. He handed them tokens and watched them pass through the tumstiles. "JA'S got this tunnel on the Number One line between Columbus Circle and 66th Street," says SLICK. "He hangs out there. We go fuck him up." "How we gonna know if he's even there?" asks SONI. "He's got a whole wall of tags there in the tunnel," says SLICK. "The whole thing, man, every piece of it is his. We could buff him good."
"Yo, we don't know that area too good," says AUDI. "I'm not down for that."
"Nah, man," says SLICK. "We got to."
"Yo, he tagged up SLICK'S house, we gotta come back at him," says SONI, who, though dubious, is sensitive to his friend's slight. After all, SLICK has gotten into this thing because of SONI. This has been SONI'S beef with JA, and SLICK sort of got dragged into it. Now he has been dissed, seriously. That's the lowest thing you can do to another writer, paint on his house.
AUDI should know this, man. SONI couldn't say it in front of SLICK. It's bad enough for SLICK.
"See? All right, man, be that way," says SLICK. "Yo, man, I gotta go," says AUDI. He leaves them as they wait for a train uptown, to JA'S turf. "Later," says SONI. "Later," says SLICK. "Let's find JA."

10:30 P.M., Upper West Side, Manhattan: JA
A retarded move, JA tells himself. At least from what he had' been told. Personally, he doesn't remember anything before he woke up on the road, cars screeching to a stop near his head. But SMITH had been there, watched the whole thing. And SMITH said when he saw JA take the leap, he thought about having to call JA'S mother and tell her that he had died. Ridiculous fucking thing to have done. JA had been drunk. Spifflicated drunk. All he knows is that he had been with SMITH, on the ramps approaching the Lincoln Tunnel, scoping out places to tag. There was a very sweet-looking highway sign, directly above the six lanes of traffic leading to the tunnel. To get there, he'd had to jump about four or five feet from a street that overlooked it, then land on the frame of the sign. "You almost made it," SMITH had said. The moment he hit the pavement 15 feet below, trucks careening and cars screeching, marked the end of a forty-eight-hour frenzy of graffiti tagging all over the city. It had started on that predawn morning he'd tagged SLICK'S house. "When you get the momentum going, it's like a fuel-you go on like a crack binge-with graffiti, not crack," JA later explained. That was six days ago. So tonight, he is staying home in the splendid apartment on 86th Street, where a decorator's hand shows in every room. Except his lair .He keeps the mattress on the floor. In his oak roll top desk are spray cans of paint. The oak cabinets built into the wall hold giant cans of spray paint, collector's quality: very hard to purchase, heavy-duty industrial-size cans that you could never find in the store. JA is king.
With a flick of the remote, MTV barrels into the room, through the stereo speakers of the television. He turns the page on a magazine, and wriggles his toes. They're sticking out of the plaster cast they'd put on to keep his knee in one place. Pain in the ass.

11:45 P.M., Broadway, Manhattan: SONI and SLICK
The musicians from Lincoln Center are saying good night. Tonight, the opera was Don Giovanni. At the Vivian Beaumont, Anything Goes was selling out at $50 a ticket. The Mostly Mozart series had begun. Even with all this, it was a quiet time of year for the high-culture scene, in a way, since the ballet company was closed. Once, the choreographer Twyla Tharp put on a ballet with graffiti writers, on-stage, painting the set, while the dancers went through their steps. It was a smashing success nearly twenty years ago, with Manhattan people paying good money to watch these ghetto kids from the Bronx and Harlem. The centerpiece fountain had been turned back on only a week or so earlier; the city had ordered all ornamental water displays shut off because of a drought scare. Even though its water was recycled, the dry fountain was a powerful symbol. A burbling fountain would be a soothing presence in the wicked heat of the city. The pit musicians, the orchestra players, were walking into the warm night, the men in black tie and jacket, the women in long dresses. Even without the instruments, you could tell they were working people, despite the formal gear, because they walked across the plaza of the arts center and down to the Broadway subway station.
There, you could stare into the tunnel and see all the way to the lights of the station at Columbus Circle, 59th Street. When a train approaches, its headlights come together like a rising line drive off the bat of a mighty hitter. It is just seven blocks from the Lincoln Center stop to Columbus Circle, a distance that two quick, strong young men can cover in a few minutes. The way the light falls, the boys in the tunnel are swallowed in shadows. And they have business to do. There are probably fifteen tags on the tunnel wall between the two stations. It is hard to see them all, but they get most of them. Buff them. Stomp on his shit. That was one wall. Three spray cans of gray paint already are beat. Only one left. Now they have to do the other side. Have to. The musicians peer into the darkness. Ah, there's the No.1. Good 0l' No.1. They're lucky to get out of work before midnight. The trains start slowing down after 12:00. This one, the 11:59 'out of South Ferry, was going up to the Bronx and into the 240th Street yard. Yardmaster Darrell Williams is waiting there to get it to the car wash. Now, from the 66th Street platform, the musicians see the train leave the Columbus Circle station, starting up the rise to Lincoln Center.
Later, when he was able to talk about it without weeping, the motorman would say that before the train brakes went into emergency mode, he thought he saw a bundle of clothes on the roadbed. That wouldn't be enough to trigger the automatic brake under the car. Needed something more solid. He climbed down on the roadbed and started looking. He had to go back eight cars before he found the…obstructions.
At Lincoln Center, the waiting riders stare out into the darkness and see the headlights have stopped their approach; they wonder why the train isn't moving.
The police told the newspapers that the writing on the walls was just scribble, that there was nothing to it at all. When JA was off the crutches, he went and saw with a glance. Those tags. SONI and SLICK. Their last ones.

SOME DAYS LATER:
Daniel Gomez, SONI, was waked in an open coffin, wearing a Panama hat and dark glasses to cover the trauma of his death. His father closed the bodega to take the body to Santo Domingo for burial. The remains of Rubin Fernandez, SLICK, also were returned to the Dominican Republic. John Avildsen, ]A, sporadically wrote graffiti in the subway until he returned to Los Angeles to resume his film career. U5, the Bushwick graffiti crew, no longer is active.

[xx13]

i cant believ he had the bloods and crips after him. nice post bumsuckfun

[_____JEKLROKS_____]

Originally posted by Mute1+Jan 23 2005, 05:32 PM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Mute1 @ Jan 23 2005, 05:32 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-LOSTxTHExFAITH@Jan 13 2005, 12:09 AM
I wonder if that fruit booter was rocking roller blades when he dissed all 250 feet of Saber's land mark..
A little word of advice... using the word "fruitbooter" as an insult isn't cool outside your queer little clique of fag ass skateboarder friends. [/b][/quote]
That would have been funny 'cause the fruitbooter would have kept falling down and rolling in his paint, hahaha...

[LOSTxTHExFAITH]

Originally posted by Mute1+Jan 23 2005, 05:32 PM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Mute1 @ Jan 23 2005, 05:32 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-LOSTxTHExFAITH@Jan 13 2005, 12:09 AM
I wonder if that fruit booter was rocking roller blades when he dissed all 250 feet of Saber's land mark..
A little word of advice... using the word "fruitbooter" as an insult isn't cool outside your queer little clique of fag ass skateboarder friends. [/b][/quote]
Awww...
A little word of advice
You're probably one of these roller faggs.. Blowing spots..
Fuck you herb. I doubt your any better at graff either so let me go ahead and stamp you as a "toy" while I'm at it. You fruit botting fucking faggot.. Skateboarding isn't some trend like it is for most you pussies. So there is no click... Now logg off, go to your room, strap on your roller skates and jerk off to the thought of having someone like me even respond to your sorry ass chump..

[LOSTxTHExFAITH]

P.S. Subway lives is a good book in general if you ever should come across it. My homie has a copy but won't give it up.. Won't even let me check it out.. Fuckity fuck.

[_____JEKLROKS_____]

Diggity damn!

[Mute1]

Originally posted by LOSTxTHExFAITH+Jan 25 2005, 02:14 AM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (LOSTxTHExFAITH @ Jan 25 2005, 02:14 AM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> Originally posted by Mute1@Jan 23 2005, 05:32 PM
<!--QuoteBegin-LOSTxTHExFAITH@Jan 13 2005, 12:09 AM
I wonder if that fruit booter was rocking roller blades when he dissed all 250 feet of Saber's land mark..
A little word of advice... using the word "fruitbooter" as an insult isn't cool outside your queer little clique of fag ass skateboarder friends.
Awww...
A little word of advice
You're probably one of these roller faggs.. Blowing spots..
Fuck you herb. I doubt your any better at graff either so let me go ahead and stamp you as a "toy" while I'm at it. You fruit botting fucking faggot.. Skateboarding isn't some trend like it is for most you pussies. So there is no click... Now logg off, go to your room, strap on your roller skates and jerk off to the thought of having someone like me even respond to your sorry ass chump.. [/b][/quote]
Ok...

Im not a fuckin rollerblader or a skater. Welcome to the world outside your middle school you little bitch

[LOSTxTHExFAITH]

Mute is in my offical fan club... Fuck that crum...

[LOSTxTHExFAITH]

Mute is still online. HAHAHAHAHA.. You been sitting there waiting for me to reply while I read that whole article.. You're not even in my fan club. Your more on some stalker type shit herb..

[DK5600]

hey seening that this seems to have articles flowing in, could some people post some more on here that are good reads? thanks

[bumsuckfun]

yah i don't rollerblade either...

i used to BMX but now i don't really have time for it...

[Alio]

Originally posted by Mute1+Jan 23 2005, 05:32 PM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Mute1 @ Jan 23 2005, 05:32 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-LOSTxTHExFAITH@Jan 13 2005, 12:09 AM
I wonder if that fruit booter was rocking roller blades when he dissed all 250 feet of Saber's land mark..
A little word of advice... using the word "fruitbooter" as an insult isn't cool outside your queer little clique of fag ass skateboarder friends. [/b][/quote]
YES YES YES!!!!! you just layed it down thank you...!!

[Alchohlics_Anonymous]

yah i skateboard, and i dont really see fruit booter as an insult. "roller fags" sucks, but its better than fruit booter.

[IM II IK IE]

JA has been at it again of late here in NY hitting up over highway signs and frames of obove ground subway lines... sick bastard

[xx13]

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0043168/

is this him number six says karate kid 3

[Ume]

yeah thats him

[Adamo]

His father was a notable director with such movies karate kid 3 and Rocky 5 so he got small rolls such as playing a druggy. Oh the irony.

[Shrink]

Hahaha...Look at the bottom.
"JAone" was on ER.

[Alchohlics_Anonymous]

and "The District"...

[xx13]

does anyone have picks of him in those movies/shows i wanna how his face looks like

[Ume]

or why dont you just go watch those movies yourself and see him?

[CL3ver1]

damn yoh....i feel bad for Suni an Slick i wonder if they haunt the tracks? you think....is beef really worth dying over?...that story just might keep me outta DC tunnels for a while...might keep away from the tracks in general for a while

[xx13]

Originally posted by Ume@Mar 6 2005, 01:11 AM
or why dont you just go watch those movies yourself and see him?
I GUESS

[xx13]

somebody wanted to see this



http://lounge37.com/bb/viewthread.php?acti...id=20&pid=27181 (http://lounge37.com/bb/viewthread.php?action=attachment&tid=20&pid=27181)

[Shrink]

I think JA is a little too crazy. He will be dead in a few years.

[CL3ver1]

hes prolly already dead....and has clones runnign around NYC.....prolly died in the 90's

[CL3ver1]

Originally posted by Whoa@Jan 19 2005, 05:34 PM
pic of Ja from stateyourname clip

http://img51.exs.cx/img51/9523/ja0tu.jpg
is that bitch bleeding from the mouth? ahahaha

[xx13]

Originally posted by CL3ver1+Mar 6 2005, 12:35 PM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (CL3ver1 @ Mar 6 2005, 12:35 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-Whoa@Jan 19 2005, 05:34 PM
pic of Ja from stateyourname clip

http://img51.exs.cx/img51/9523/ja0tu.jpg
is that bitch bleeding from the mouth? ahahaha [/b][/quote]
i think thats a mask and heres a higher resolution pic of the saber piece dissed by ja



http://paintmyface.puregraffiti.com/la/la-57_x400.jpg

[CL3ver1]

i know its a mask.....its pretty obvious its a mask....but look where his mouth is....theres lke some red shit didnt know if that was blood

[SALVO]

JA got just as much fame as Saber for dissing that piece....

[infer one]

*****s

[xx13]

i was serching on tv guide for the next showing of one of his movies and found rocky v and tv guide says he directed it
does anybody know if this is right?
oh also in the saber pic dissed by ja and foe and skuf etc. there is the word painted biggie smalls. these guys were into that east west coast beef in rap lol



oh wait thats his dad

[NeO.Skunkkr1]

good read, lol i never knew ja dissed that peice, when did that happen? :ph34r:

[xx13]

http://usedmagazines.com/titles/RollingStone/1995/


is that the issue the one with demi?

[MitNGEK]

that was a good ass article

[DC Diesel]

Wow, I haven't reread either articles in awhile. I still don't like going in tunnels and stuff, but you gotta do it.

By the way, Cl3ver, wut tunnels have you gone into?

[DC Diesel]

By the way, does any one hae the artcle that tells about the beef between saber and Ja? I read it awhile back, b4 i was into graff, and i remember, someone from saber's crew stabbed ja, foe, or someone they knew, i can't remember.

[bumsuckfun]

Originally posted by DC Diesel@Mar 19 2005, 12:32 AM
By the way, does any one hae the artcle that tells about the beef between saber and Ja? I read it awhile back, b4 i was into graff, and i remember, someone from saber's crew stabbed ja, foe, or someone they knew, i can't remember.
maybe i'm wrong, but i'm pretty sure JA and FOE one and the same?

don't know anything about anyone stabbing him, but there were gangs n' such out looking for him.

[Mute1]

Originally posted by bumsuckfun+Mar 19 2005, 12:49 PM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (bumsuckfun @ Mar 19 2005, 12:49 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-DC Diesel@Mar 19 2005, 12:32 AM
By the way, does any one hae the artcle that tells about the beef between saber and Ja? I read it awhile back, b4 i was into graff, and i remember, someone from saber's crew stabbed ja, foe, or someone they knew, i can't remember.
maybe i'm wrong, but i'm pretty sure JA and FOE one and the same?

don't know anything about anyone stabbing him, but there were gangs n' such out looking for him. [/b][/quote]
He got his throat slit in broad daylight by msk crew but he survived. At least thats wat i herd...And yeah JA and FOE is the same person

[sika_2002]

has any1 got recent pictures of that saber piece. i just wondered what it must look like now

[DC Diesel]

Damn, i didn't even know they were the same person..., styles are just different... actually, JA's new style looks alot like the regular FOE lettering.



So, does anyone know where the article is about JA and Saber?

There is a link fo the pic a few pages back.

[DC Diesel]

the link for the pic is on page 7. :lol:

[infer one]

this is page 8.

[bigbomba']

wow is this thread still semi active? i havent seen shit in here for like a month

[infer one]

^these threads will die soon, the end is coming to bombingscience forums....watch.

[XYLENE THUG]

V-unit!!!

http://img217.exs.cx/img217/6965/yugo033qd.jpg (http://www.imageshack.us)

[DC Diesel]

Originally posted by infer one@Mar 22 2005, 03:53 PM
this is page 8.
no shit u good for nothing postwhore.

[snore]

i wanna see what ja's face looks like.

[DC Diesel]

Snore, watch karate kid 3, he is this henchman guy named snake. You see him in the first 20 minutes. Don't bother with karate kid 3, you only see his throwups in that one.

[DC Diesel]

sorry, i meant dont see rocky 5. Just a bunch of his throwups.

[snore]

ah i see...for i second there i was thinkin "CRACKHEAD ON THE LOOSE''

[Crack Killz]

JA is so white.

[Nesty]

i just read those articles and saw the state your name clips for the first time and i have to say im pumped!

thanks to everyone who posted those...

RIP

[xx13]

whats with the RIP? i know people have 2 or more names that they write but does anyone think he suffers from mutiple personality disorder?

[bigbomba']

this thread was like 10 days away from dyin so we bring it back to life just for kicks and giggles?

[Krylon bomber]

this was a well writen article.
JA will be the voice of "decoy" a character in the new upcoming graffiti game marc echos getting up.

[THEPOSTWHORE5000]

ja's voice is so nerdy haha

"that was the thriller manilla vanilla killa" or something...

go watch cope2 kings destroy he sounds like a fucking fruitcup
but otherwise
ja is fucking dope he'll always be my number one idol besides the cocaine shit..thats messed up

[Mute1]

Originally posted by THEPOSTWHORE5000@Sep 14 2005, 08:22 PM
ja's voice is so nerdy haha

"that was the thriller manilla vanilla killa" or something...

go watch cope2 kings destroy he sounds like a fucking fruitcup
but otherwise
ja is fucking dope he'll always be my number one idol besides the cocaine shit..thats messed up
Doin coke is messed up? Your fuckin sheltered as hell kiddo.

[Krylon bomber]

coke? hes doin crack and dust or what the two together are called starbase
2 of the strongest drugs on the streets.

pcp makes you violent and stronger
crack gets you high=bad judgment

[the walking std]

that fuckin articles dope as fuck. i think everyone that becomes a BS member should read that shit. thats crazy shit about the drugs though. i wouldnt try half that shit, let alone bomb or even write under the influence of it.

[Krylon bomber]

i have done a my share of drugs including pcp, i did pcp by mistake, i was in my friends car and he left me in the car for like an hour so i went into his glove compartment and got this joint, but the only thing i did not know that it had angle dust in it. i got fucked up, the shit was scary.

i never did crack but i have done weed and xtc and some others like vic. and otc drugs.

[slick dick willy]

anyways, mad fame from the Rollong Stone article..
now thats the "holy grail" of fame , a nationally published mag.

yep,you gotta be hella high to have courage to bomb like the KING of NY....

[Fear And Loathing]

Dust never improved my bombing skills <_<

[blank_flo]

1st time i read any of those articles and theyre both good. Can someone post in somemore??

[DEKOR]

yeh fuk u gota give it up to JA and shit...very few people in the world would do shit like he did...even in other things than graffiti...

[Krylon bomber]

ja will be the voice of decoy in marc echo's getting up.

[_Zombi3]

only pussies n weaklings get abused by drugs. i myself have bombed high and/or trippin on shrooms n bomb perfectly fine or maybe better. it all depends on how u react wen u take the drugs

but yea ja is the best writer of all time, me thinks

[ape2]

first of all ja is a super dope writter....and a great bomber

second its so lame to hear all of you talking about bombing high and all the drugs you do/did or lie about doing and its kind of lame. i mean are you trying to make yourselfs sound hard? or cool?

[MacDreRIP11104]

gotta loveit

[MacDreRIP11104]

Originally posted by Krylon bomber@Oct 25 2005, 07:14 PM
ja will be the voice of decoy in marc echo's getting up.
freal?

[FLA BOMBA]

maybe, or we might be lying.

[Dose_321]

interesting!

[1nOnly Baze]

shut the fuck up post whore.